40. TEXTURED EXPERIENCES

     In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche showed that human experiences are today textured by languages generated by literary traditions.  In this text, Nietzsche presented himself as the prophet who proclaims the imminent arrival of supermen who will live beyond good and evil.  As the god-term in an evolutionary process which would inevitably produce these supermen, he offered a reading of the western literary tradition designed to show the workings of an all-pervasive will to power.  To transform this thesis into a narrative, he populated this primordial state of nature with individual human beings who are endowed with a greater or lesser quantum of this will to power.  And for the structure of the unfolding narrative, he appropriated the dialectical structure popularized by Hegel.

    Thus, in the primordial state of nature, individuals with a greater quantum of the will to power simply assumed that, "Might makes right."  However, since these life-affirming "nobles" lacked a developed language of human interiority and of scientific inquiry, they expressed their desires crudely and were unable to master nature effectively.

    For the transvaluation of values that functioned as an anti-thesis, he characterized Christianity as a life-denying religion which, paradoxically, generated a rich language of human interiority.  Since this was his concern, he developed his reading of the moral discourse generated by Christianity from the insistence of Israel's great prophets that morality was voiced by the cries of the oppressed, the abused, the cripples, and the silenced.  But to account for the triumph of a life-denying discourse over a life-affirming "Might makes right," he asserted that priests had quanta of the will to power equal to that of the nobles, but willed the void.

    The transvaluation of values which functioned as the synthesis followed directly.  The evolutionary process was about to produce supermen who would live beyond good and evil, yet be able to use the language of interiority generated by Christianity to texture their passions exquisitely and gratify their desires effectively.

    

    Centuries earlier, Hume had set forth a far less contentious framework for the fact that everyday languages carve up reality differently.  As the champion of experimentalism, he pointed out that, in any detached observation, we learn only how that entity interacts with carefully controlled conditions.  In the twentieth century, Operationalism reduced this insight to two pregnant formulations.  (1)  Every entity in the universe interacts with every other entity.  (Otherwise, it would not be a universe.)  (2)  Consequently, to know everything there is to know about any entity, we would have to know how it interacts with every other entity.  Consequently, even theory-laden words do not present entities transparently or sort out interactions exhaustively.

        (Addendum:   Kant had anticipated the insights of Operationalism in his response to Hume's empirical critique of rationalism.  To eliminate consideration of unknowable consequences from moral issues, he granted Hume's theses that human beings are detectors bombarded by innumerable stimuli, that a usable language enables us to identify and respond to some of these stimuli, but that no language will ever be able to identify and control all the factors involved.  And he used this insight to locate morality exclusively in the intention to do one's duty.

       In the twentieth century, Logical Positivists began with the assumption that experiments produced hard data which they referred to as bare facts.  But the collapse of the movement from within revealed that facts are theory-laden and gathered with difficulty.)

     In recent decades, adherents of the postmodernist movement use the hermeneutics of suspicion (1) to expose the formative power of everyday languages on passion, desire, perception, imagination, thought-patterns, motives, intentions and aspirations and (2) to reject the supposition that reason provides a detached, god-like perspective on the interplay among language, experience and reality and the myth of pure beginnings promised by Descartes's methodical doubt.  In effect, they view language as a repository of violence and as an inescapable original sin.  But their deconstructive readings of texts, linguistic formulations, and everyday experiences are highly literary and often exquisitely textured.

    In popular culture, their subversion of authority offers no solution to the inability of students to read complex texts, to probe moral issues in depth and detail, and to texture their experiences with one another in ways conducive to deepening intimacy.

    In this regard, Nietzsche might well suggest that we are undergoing another transvaluation of values in which the cultural relativity of values is replaced by a relativity of values defined by individuality.  And he would undoubtedly approve, since it would allow the new Sophists to use textured languages to justify the way that they prey on the unsuspecting masses.