Day 11

Nietzsche.

Usually, while reading the assigned reading material, I write my thoughts. While reading Nietzsche the only thing that I wrote in my notes was “what.” At least for the first round.  

Today’s class discussion was beneficial to my understanding.  In class by using the textbook excerpt as a lens to read the madman and discussing it in the full circle, I was able to understand it better. After class I reread the assigned material and used my understanding of the madman to understand the excerpts (slightly) better.  

It worked both ways.

There is a sculpture inside of Towers University Apartments on the Tempe Campus. It’s huge, yellow, and looks like a bent paper clip. I was standing near it with a friend. She asked, “what is this even supposed to be. It looks like a giant mutilated paper clip.” I told her that after taking a critical theory class, I could tell her what it was. So I did. I made something up about the creative process and how it represents one’s struggle to find the original passion during the fading enthusiasm of an idea near its expiration. She told me that makes a lot of sense, even though she knew I was BSing the whole thing.

It is that easy to turn nothing into everything.  I might be doing it while reading Nietzsche.

What does this mean for me?

It’s easy for me, when writing these reflections, to treat the class material somewhat flippantly.  I’ll try harder to make it personal, I take it personally.

I found Nietzsche’s view that consciousness was born out of the need for communication interesting:  “As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all this he needed ‘consciousness’ first of all, he needed to ‘know’ himself what distressed him, he needed to ‘know’ how he felt, he needed to ‘know’ what he thought.”

I interpreted this to mean that Nietzsche was viewing it at a physical standpoint, probably because he said “endangered.”

But what if peers were not capable of alleviating your (di)stress, but were the cause of it? I believe that is what led me to become overly conscious. I already knew (or thought I knew) what I was. I did not need to prove it or know it in order to communicate it.

It seems to me that when people pass judgment upon someone, and find something about her that she had not noticed. Then she is put at a heightened consciousness and tries to find (or hopefully not find) what they(those who passed judgment) had found. Which ultimately leads her to reevaluate who she was to begin with.  

People have the power to provide anxiety, but they can never really take it away. Those are my thoughts right now.