How did writing change Nietzsche’s consciousness?
How did writing change Nietzsche’s consciousness?
By Robert Hassan | Published: 2024-12-28 18:00:00 | Source: The Past – Big Think
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Friedrich Nietzsche has been described – and accused of – many things, some of them strikingly contradictory. Nazi ideologues selectively appropriated elements of his philosophy, such as extreme individualism and his borrowing of Nazi philosophy. Superhumanto suit their agenda. And during The famous Dreyfus case In France, anti-Semites smeared supporters of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus as “Nietzschean.”
He was viewed by others as adept at distilling received ideas about science and its alleged corrupting influence on knowledge, yet he was viewed by many as a dangerous nihilist. Nietzsche is also thought to have had serious concerns about the sustainability of Christianity in the context of the Enlightenment and industrialization, culminating in his provocative declaration “God is dead” in his 1882 book Gay Science. However, his reputation survived and recovered after its incorporation into Nazism, and today his influence, or at least his reading public, is widespread. Nietzsche has been read and commented on by figures as diverse as Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther movement and former US President Richard Nixon, both of whom found something (and undoubtedly something different) in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche’s legacy lives on, evident in global communities, conferences, videos and books.
However, amid all the noise of opinion and research about the man and his ideas, almost no one has commented on, or sought to explain, another aspect of Nietzsche: his character. productivityHow he changed during his career due to his reliance on new writing technology. Consider the following: Nietzsche wrote four books between 1870 and 1881, or roughly one book every three years, which is pretty good. However, after 1881, he managed to deliver 10 manuscripts to his publisher in the seven years until 1888, at which point he became so ill that he could no longer write. That was a book and a half a year, which is truly good. By 1881, Nietzsche had become almost blind, a disability that would certainly have hampered his long writing. How did he improve his work rate? What he did was apparently something out of character, given his views on modernity and science: he bought a typewriter. To be precise, he purchased a Malling-Hansen portable writing ball, which had been sent to him specially from its inventor in Copenhagen.
On the face of it, there’s nothing remarkable about this. An experienced writer can produce a page of text much faster than someone trying to write the same words in longhand. As he became more accustomed to modern technology, this was undoubtedly a factor in Nietzsche’s proficiency with words. But it’s more than efficient. It is more the fact that the efficiency of Gutenberg’s printing press was that it was able to print page after page of the same words much faster than was possible for humans before its invention. It is more than just the fact that the efficiency of the jacquard loom has been coded into software that can replace aspects of the ancient human role in weaving.
These examples represent major discontinuities in how we produce through our interaction with technology. Nietzsche became more competent. But Nietzsche was not an industry. He was a thinker. Writing changed Nietzsche’s point of view Awareness – This affected the way he thinks about the world and expresses it as he understands it. Literary scholar Walter Ong said that writing as a technology was not merely an external aid, but an “internal transformation of consciousness”: it had taken hold of human consciousness for 3,000 years and transformed it, with the written word representing thought itself. The written words were an integral part of the learners’ consciousness, imprinting a kind of rules of thought that reflected the world when they read and wrote about it.
Nietzsche’s productivity and efficiency at the near industrial level came at a cost – or was it a benefit? -How he thought and wrote before. Blindness forced him to stop writing by hand with pen and ink, and instead use his fingertips to recognize the fixed arrangement of letters on the Malling-Hansen writing ball. Inevitably, the rules of the mechanical writing ball outstripped the grammar rules of longhand handwriting and the idea it produced. The sudden mechanical thump of the typewriter contrasts starkly with the ruminative flow of the pen; The typewriter encouraged a binary decision, to press the key or not; Whereas the pen, which had its supply of liquid ink, held by surface tension on the nib, or in a small reservoir in the fountain pen, was a more passive and non-automated technology. The former is an initially digital form of expressing ideas, the latter is more innately analogue; One is the beginning of the formation of what literacy theorist Marianne Wolfe calls the “digital mind,” the other a brain formed in print culture and in romantic ambivalence toward science, the Enlightenment, and machines.
Once he mastered the skill of touch typing, Nietzsche’s ideas must have already flown onto the pages of the typewriter, enabling him to regularly produce new manuscript in less than a year. However, like the old saying “For the one with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail,” Nietzsche’s machine-made words, and thus his thought, embraced a new form of technological determinism. The typewriter, with its capabilities and limitations, its opportunities and limits, restructured his consciousness and thus reorganized his philosophical and creative expression. What could have been thought and written, for example, in The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, when Nietzsche’s sight was still steadfast and his long hand was his written form, was no longer possible after his eyes had failed him and Malling-Hansen’s successor. A completely different writing technique helped define another way of thinking and expressing these ideas through writing. The power and control inherent in the use of a pen, although this has shaped and shaped ideas for thousands of years, was transformed when it was exploited from a set of rigidly placed mechanical keys. How was this difference expressed?
German philosopher of technology Friedrich Kittler He claimed The analogue typewriter in general was useful for certain forms of thinking: concise, concise forms, relying on brevity and speed. Kittler looks at the case of Nietzsche and says that “Nietzsche’s reasons for purchasing a typewriter were very different from those of his colleagues who wrote for entertainment purposes, such as Twain, Lindau, Amitor, Hart, Nansen, etc. They all depended on increased speed and mass production of texts; by contrast, the half-blind turned from philosophy to literature, from rereading to pure reading.” The blind and necessary act of writing.
What in the mid-twentieth century came to be called the “culture industry” would flourish thanks to such modern technology and the productivity enabled commercial culture as literature, film, and television. But it constituted an existential problem for philosophy and philosophical thought. The transformation in Nietzsche’s writings is due to him Automatic writing It was already very noticeable, even noticed at the time. In 1882, Berliner Tagblatt He commented on the onset of Nietzsche’s “complete blindness” and wrote that “with the aid of the typewriter (he) resumed his writing activities.” However, the article noted: “It is widely recognized that his new work (“The Gay Science”) stands in marked contrast to his important earlier writings.” For Kittler, the contradiction was already clear. He points out that the nature of Nietzsche’s writings, and thus his thought processes, were largely reworked through the mediation of the typewriter. As Kittler saw it, the famous Nietzschean style of sustained reasoning, long sentences, and complex reasoning had changed “from arguments to aphorisms, from ideas to puns, from oratory to telegraphic style.” Nietzsche was an early adopter of this technology. He took it into the reckless realms of continental philosophy and, given his enormous influence, began to change it through a creative mind reshaped by the keys that had replaced the pen.
Nietzsche may not have appreciated this assessment, but he seems to have recognized in his now visionless world that something important had happened in his thought processes. As Kittler tells us again, in one of the few letters Nietzsche typed, anticipating Marshall McLuhan, Nietzsche said: “Our writing instruments also work on our thoughts.” He was undoubtedly aware of his increasing productivity, but regarding the quality and substance of the content, as its creator, he was perhaps not in the best position to judge. Kittler, for his part, is clear about what is happening with this technology at the general level of philosophical thought.
Philosophy, or the elements of it that can be thought and expressed through mediation, changed fundamentally with the gradual and widespread adoption of “automatic writing” and with it the culture that would produce it through most of the twentieth century. Kittler marked a turning point for Nietzsche in his 1887 book, The Genealogy of Morals. Kittler regards this book, a hugely influential volume on moral concepts, as a symptom of evolutionary change in human thought, not only in Nietzsche but in Western philosophy itself. genealogyIn other words, this was a precursor to the technological development of machine memory in computing, played out in emergent form through the work of Nietzsche whose philosophy was exploited through a fixed set of letter keys. Kittler writes: “In the second essay of The Genea of Morals, knowledge, speech, and virtuous action are no longer innate features of man. Like the animal that will soon acquire a different name, man derives from forgetfulness and random noise, the background of all media. Which suggests that…during the foundational era of automated storage technologies, human evolution also aimed to create automatic memory.”
The typewriter that changed Nietzsche has had a long time to cast its spell on humanity. From that time until recently, what Marianne Wolfe called the “writing mind,” the “mechanical” brain formed as a result of the influences of Gutenberg’s press, would serve to “industrialize” not only the mind but also the economies, cultures, and societies that humans would establish. This mechanical mentality will be the foundation of the modern analog world in all its forms, especially its twentieth century expressions with its successes and failures.
Robert Hassan Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of many books, including “The age of distraction“(Routledge) and”Analogue“, from which this article is adapted.
this condition appeared on JSTOR DailyWhere news meets its scientific counterpart.
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