What follows are a couple of replies to questions sent to me by a student this semester about Nietzsche’s views on politics and religion. While not definitive or thoroughly sourced discussions of Nietzsche’s thoughts on politics and religion, I think the sketches of Nietzsche’s positions as I formulated them in these replies have some promise.

I would eagerly welcome replies as to the tenability of the positions spelled out both for their justice to Nietzsche’s texts and for their general philosophical merit. With no further ado, here are the questions I was sent followed by my replies:

Does Nietszche want everyone to embrace the noble mindset? He says the individual must always re-affirm himself, act spontaneously and free, without restrictions of some sort of authority/moral over him. But since humans do co-exist in societies, there needs to be some sort of order/law, no? Does he propose societies without leaders, that each person is his own sovereign? Or does he think the noble people will rise above the inevitable masses that will continue with the slave mentality?

Your questions are superb ones without simple answers. They are exactly the kinds of things I’m still trying to sort out. Firstly, Nietzsche acknowledges in a more fatalistic sort of way that not every one will be of noble mind and he is suspicious of philosophies that try to ignore the ways that people really are. The common person will always be the common person. He does, I think, talk about whole ages where a whole people might be more noble but in general there will be these contrasts in mindset and internal constitution between the herd and the more noble types.

So, to an extent, Nietzsche can be read as making his appeals to those fewer ones who will be receptive to the nobler calling to a nobler way of life that he is making. He can, to a greater extent than most philosophers, admit that there can be different codes of life good for the herd than for the nobles. Herd morality does serve the herd’s interests and so is genuinely valuable for them. Nietzsche does not so much want to upset their stability as free the “nobles” to do the sort of value creation that is possible for them as people with greater internal resources.

At minimum, we can say that these nobler individuals can transform a culture in a way that takes the whole people to another level for its having the influence of their greatness. The importance of great artists is of great significance for Nietzsche as exemplary figures who effect this kind of move within a culture. Now, whether or not the masses will be able to incorporate the profundities of these transformative cultural figures in such a way that makes them embody all his virtues and be as great in themselves is hard to say. It’s likely they won’t, but they will nonetheless be better off for the contributions to their culture.

Now the question of laws and ethical precepts are a couple whole other balls of wax. I think Nietzsche tends to focus on creating the conditions for the excellent to emerge and to be the cultural leaders. He totally mistrusts statism because he thinks that state apparatuses are woeful substitutes for genuine culture when it comes to genuinely uniting a people. Also, while he is not an individualist, he is protective of the values-innovators who state and religion will vilify as evil. The problem that Nietzsche sees the values-innovator as facing is that when (s)he questions the dominant values, he is inevitably going to be deemed evil according to the dominant values because he is a threat to them themselves. How can you question your values when your values are the judge of what’s a good answer? So, Nietzsche’s concern with morality is this conservative dimension to it, by which it shuts off the questioning that goes against it. So, he is concerned to break the hold of laws that would enshrine the values of the present. Whether he wants laws created by the coming values-innovators who will replace the Christian values or whether he wants them only to be cultural influences who don’t get into the business of actually turning their new values into actual laws, is a difficult question that I can’t really definitively answer yet.

I am starting to write my paper and I am a little confused about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

As far as God is concerned, I thought Nietzsche doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife per se, just that you keep living your life over and over again, like reincarnation except its always the same. So in that sense its not really an afterlife(because an after life, in the Christian sense anyway, is some spiritual never ending life after a short period of temporal living), I think it would be more like some never ending circle of temporal life. You would really never die (because death is understood as your spirit separating from your body for another place). It would be sort of like a book with many chapters, each saying the same thing. Does Nietzsche believe that there is some infinite being causing this eternal recurrence? and how exactly does it work, because obviously time goes on, so you couldn’t keep living your successive lives on Earth, they would have to be on some other plane or dimension right? And since people are born and die at different times, how does that work out( say I die today, and start my eternal life, but my brother doesn’t die for another 50 years…how does he end up in my “new” eternal life?)

Also, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in any seperate infinite being or “other”, but rather the unity and oneness of the universe. So how are we all connected? Is there an interconnecting spirit or something?

thanks!

You’re basically on the right track. The only things that I would correct are as follows. There is no reference to a being beyond the universe such as an independently existing God. If he is to speak of a “divine” at all, it would be just the totality of the universe taken as a whole. What I mean by this is as follows: the question of “what is God?” is a question of what is the ultimate, eternal reality upon which all particular being depends for its existence. The metaphysical intuition that leads people to talk about the “divine” is that temporal beings as we know them require outside causes to come into existence—they can’t cause themselves. So, the divine has usually been interpreted by philosophers in some way or another as whatever that thing is that didn’t need a prior existing thing to create it.

Obviously particular material objects don’t seem fit for such an uncaused existence since they require causes outside of themselves. Where the monotheist posits a separate being, a God, who exists by his own power, uncaused by anything else, the atheist or the pantheist usually just posits that the universe itself has some sort of eternal dimension such that even though particular combinations of matter are created through causal interactions, there is some eternal dimension to the universe that itself is not caused to come into being or to go out of being.

This is a very rough way of spelling out Spinoza’s essential position and Spinoza was the thinker most fundamentally in the background of Schopenhauer—-who in turn deeply influenced Nietzsche. Nietzsche also speaks very highly of Spinoza. So, it’s fair to infer some common sympathies with Nietzsche and Spinoza and flesh him out in the Spinozistic terms I like to use. For Spinoza, the universe is “God:” it is the totality of everything that is and it is eternally existing. The particular beings that we are and that we experience are just modes of the universe—forms it takes within the greater unity of itself. For Spinoza, as I think for Nietzsche, the universe is not merely matter, nor merely mind but rather is both in every one of its modes. What I mean by that is that there is both a material and a mental dimension to all of existence. In other words, everything in existence has both a mental side and a material one to it.

God is neither the material nor the mental aspect of existence or things but just the entirety of the whole universe, he is the “substance” in which all the particular beings exist. An analogy I like to use is to take a human being. There is a material and a mental dimension to you. And you can express those yourself in all sorts of ways physically and mentally. You can take on different modes. Your body can be sitting or standing or walking or chewing, etc. and your mind can be thinking and feeling all sorts of thoughts. You are not separate from any of these things but expressed through all of them. You are more fundamental than any particular mode you take. You exist before and after all the particular thoughts you think and body positions you take, etc. But you also don’t exist without any body position or thoughts whatsoever. So, to apply this analogy to the world. “God” is like you in that scenario, he is the totality of everything but he only exists in the particular modes that his attributes (matter and mind) take. You and I are just the modes of God’s attributes. We’re just shapes his material and mental attributes twist themselves into. He doesn’t exist without expressing himself in his attributes, but he is the more fundamental being because we exist in him, rather than him in us. He doesn’t have an independent identity apart from all the modes of the universe. In other words, our thoughts are God thinking, he doesn’t think separately from that as though he were a distinct person from all of us. We are modes of God’s body, he doesn’t have a different body than the material universe itself. So God=the universe.

So, that’s in a nutshell, Spinozistic pantheism. The connection between all of us in such a scenario, as Nietzsche to some extent accepts, would be that we all boil down to the same fundamental being of the universe. Nietzsche never explicitly embraces pantheism and so that’s why I suggest in my review of Julian Young’s book Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion that we shy away from calling him a pantheist as Young does. What he does share with the pantheist though is that the universe itself is what is eternal and so if anything is to be called divine, that would be it. But I think he would reject ultimately reject the idea that the universe is indeed one substance since his major rejection of Schopenhauer is denying that the entire universe is a single will, in favor of interpreting it as made up of innumerable centers of will to power. In this way, Nietzsche is more Leibniz than Spinoza and less inclined to positing a notion of a fundamental unity to all the universe that we could call “God.”

Now, on Nietzsche’s thinking, how the eternal recurrence would happen is a little sketchy. But what he speculates is that with an infinite amount of time and a finite amount of matter following out fixed laws of nature, eventually all the combinations of matter would recur an infinite number of times. Since there are only a finite numbers of combinations among material in the universe and there’s an infinity to keep recombining the same combinations, following the same laws of nature, would recur an infinite number of times. This is roughly how Nietzsche sketched out the recurrence.

So to answer your question of how we can each recur in our own lives when we die while others continue their present lives—-the issue there I think is simply that it’s a matter of the universe recurring and our lives recurring when we are reconstituted in it. So, in other words, you don’t recur immediately but only when the universe gets back to reconstituting history to the point where you come into being again. There are others who think more in terms of dimensions similar to the one you theorized and argue that our infinite recurrences actually all happen simultaneously. I have to admit I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that idea since it’s hard for me to grasp what would distinguish all these infinite versions of the same existence. If they happen sequentially, then I can grasp that. But if they’re all happening simultaneously, how are they distinct?

I think the argument for the simultaneous recurrences is that eternal recurrence does not happen in time in the sort of manner I described earlier where the matter just keeps recombining sequentially in time. Rather than there being eternal recurrences in time, there would be the eternal recurrence of time itself. So, this would require different dimensions in which time and matter recurred separately from their instantiation in each other dimension.

Now, it is possible that none of these physical and metaphysical speculations are correct and it is also possible (though I don’t think likely) that Nietzsche didn’t think it important that they be correct. In such cases, the meaning of the eternal recurrence still stands as a test for affirmation. Is what we want most desperately to be eternal our own temporal lives in this temporal universe, recurring for all eternity? If it is, then we maximally affirm our lives—regardless of whether or not the universe honors our desire. This is at minimum our test. There are those (like Paul Loeb) who stress though that for Nietzsche it must also be that the universe does indeed recur for this to be such a crushing existential question to contend with. They argue that if the eternal recurrence is not real, we can just dismiss the question of its possibility as not at all the kind of thing that would lead us to the sort of turmoil that Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science 341.

Well, I don’t know if I’ll get around to this daily. But as often as I can come across the truly hilarious, I hope to pass it on.

To kick off this new feature on this new blog, I give you one of my all time favorite bits from my favorite current Daily Show correspondent, Larry Wilmore.

The Back Story to Larry Wilmore’s Investigation:

Larry Wilmore’s Investigation:

Mike Monelscachi is Tom Petty’s biggest teenaged fan.  Over on Tom’s messageboard (and in his high school he says) he’s known affectionately as “Petty Kid” (which, incidentally, I think would make an awesome band name for him).  He’s cutting a record and here are three of his songs.  I’m seriously impressed after all this time talking about his band to find out that he’s actually pretty talented!

http://www.myspace.com/mikemonomusic

[written January 4, 2007]

Best film of 2006, in my opinion. Just a stunning film. I was in love with it early on and then it took fascinating turn after fascinating turn and just became deeper and deeper.

It’s a truly sublime, sensual film that manages to communicate the power of scent through its medium’s power of visual imagery, through an incredibly seductive engagement in sensuality.

The film is a wonderful meditation on contingency and the pained desire for eternal possession of what is only contingent and passing and fleeting. It’s a film about the rise of beauty and love out of the muck and filth and violence of the filthiest modes of life.

It is the greatest screen portrayal of a super villain I have ever ever seen. It is a truly great and unconventional seriel killer film that manages not just to explore the narcissism, sociopathy, possessiveness, and desire for consumption that drives the seriel killer’s pathology, but also to make the viewer feel it by making the purity and intensity and aesthetic drive of the villain relatable in a perverse way; making the viewer forget the monstrous detachment from humanity is an abberation—the way the monster himself has let himself let his desire overwhelm any social feeling.

It is a visionary portrait of evil, of demagoguery, of genius, of beauty, of power, and of love.

It is a legend that plays like 18th Century science fiction.

And in a few scenes, it gives a fascinating portrait of what Nietzsche characterized as the Dionysian/Apollinian dynamic but I shall not elaborate here out of spoiler concerns. Perhaps in another post for those who’ve seen the film already.

I just loved it. I couldn’t get over it when I got out of it, my head was swimming.

[written October 24, 2007]

One of the reasons that great art means so much to us is because we find ourselves reflected and expressed in it, even when it is other people’s creations. For a long while now, I have figured out the formula to really understanding my mind and my heart for anyone interested. If you can understand Friedrich Nietzsche, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the New York Mets, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you’ll have as good a window into my soul as any I myself could create. I have already resolved that if I ever find a woman whose heart beats to these things the way mine does, I’d might as well just go ahead and propose right off.

And so, it was a big, huge deal for me to see the most important and comprehensive documentary of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ unbelievable career. So, obviously, what follows will be the review from a total fan. Dismiss it on that basis if you will, but I honestly think you’ll be missing out on an important recommendation for film and music lovers alike.

Review upcoming in a series of short posts.

The Music, Not “Behind” It
The first thing worth praising about this amazing documentary is that it’s about the men and the music. It’s not about lurid details, it’s not a manipulation of material to tell an artificial story of rise to glory, burn out, redemption, and new beginnings. Tom’s story is filled with highs and lows that could be generically forced into this boilerplate, formulaic mythos in terms of which VH1 manages to characterize every freaking rock band. But refreshingly, Bogdanovich doesn’t reduce these great artists’ story into a childish and convenient morality tale. These are real lives. There are ups and downs, periods of euphoria and those of despair, friends made and friends lost, and that’s it. No overplaying sentiment or drawing morals needed.

While I liked Walk The Line, for example, very much, I didn’t like the way it told such an incomplete story of such a great artist’s life. I know that he liked to see his life as a Christian redemption story like was made in the film. But it did a disservice to the richness of a great man’s life to skip those 30 years after he married June and overcame his addictions. I found it degrading in a way to say the only thing worth really focusing on was his addicted period. Many, many people get addicted. The tiniest handful get to be Johnny Cash. Show some more of what it was to be Johnny Cash.

And along these lines, this documentary of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers covers the private addictions of the band, even when they lead to death, and the infamous conflicts that led Stan Lynch to leave the band, without sensationalizing anything. As Benmont Tench, the amazing keys man of The Heartbreakers mentions in the documentary (and I paraphrase), it used to be that you were interested in learning an artist’s take on the world, now it’s who they’re sleeping with.

This film is about the artists’ takes on the world and about the most important thing about them, the incredible music they have ceaselessly produced for 30 years of rarely paralleled commitment to musical integrity and consistent production.

A Whole Life and Career on Film

It’s been reported that Bogdanovich went through over 300 hours of footage in putting together this film, and that was after countless more hours of available footage were whittled down for him by archivists who categorized the material.

I have numerous dvds and videos of live Tom Petty concerts, documentaries, collections of Tom’s videos and those of the Travelling Wilburys. I pretty much have everything released and many things that only appeared on TV. And I’ve seen my fair share of what’s on youtube, etc. And I have to say that there is a remarkable representation of the available footage. A truly judicious and admirable sampling of what’s there. A couple really sweet moments were when they found little moments that were favorites of mine and included them. It’s not exhaustive of course by any means at all. There are of course many omissions. But overall, this is an incredible 4 hour distillation of what one finds through amassing a larger collection.

There’s Ron Blair’s prescient 1993 joke about being scheduled to rejoin the band in 2001 long before Howie Epstein’s tragic death in 2002 led to his actual return. There’s wonderful footage of The Travelling Wilburys writing rehearsing, recording. Any fan of the Beatles, Roy Orbison, or Bob Dylan just can’t miss this stuff. (At least youtube it people!!) There’s Stan’s last performance with the band in a living room, playing Mary Jane’s Last Dance, the last song he recorded before leaving the band for good. And, as they say “much much more.”

But, beyond just reproducing previously released footage from prior documentaries and live concerts, Bogdanovich was able to incorporate an incredible amount of home video footage and stills of numerous moments along their way to the top, including plenty of material Tom and the band reportedly didn’t really know about before this project. It’s as thorough a capturing of every phase of an artist’s entire life on film as you could manage.

Scoring a Story in Songs

It’s greatly satisfying how close to completely Bogdanovich represents the scope and power of Petty’s music without ever deviating from the primary task of telling the story of his life. Few songs recur as Bogdanovich shows 1:30 minute clips of most songs almost always linking closely the music and live performances of a given time to the images of that time. And often, there are extremely happy coordinations between song lyric and the storyline. So the pauses to watch Tom and the gang perform at a given period of life don’t interrupt the storyline so much as often comment on it artistically, through lyrics. There are just beautiful and ingenious combinations of emotions and musical expressions of them that all follow a great chronological progression.

And while the full breadth and depth of Tom’s incredible catalogue is inexhaustible in under 4 hours, so many songs that really deserved representation got it.

The only sad snub (though an expected one) was any incorporation of the wonderful music Tom put on the soundtrack of She’s the One. I love that album and was sad to see it omitted entirely. Long After Dark got an odd sort of snubbing too. As has been chronicled before, Jimmy Iovine’s insistence that Tom not include the wonderful songs “Keeping Me Alive” and “Trailer” on the album was the symbolic creative difference that represents the rift between Tom and Jimmy that had grown by the time they finished that record, which had been their third together. Tom bashes the album often as one where he had gotten stagnant. I really love the album but understand his thought process. Anyway, ironically, the song here to represent the album is the song omitted from the album, “Keeping Me Alive” and then an explanation from both Tom and Jimmy about how such a great song didn’t make the cut. As wonderful as “Keeping Me Alive” was and as big a treat as it was to see the band perform it, the songs “Deliver Me,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “Change of Heart,” and “Magnolia” are too special to me to see them all snubbed.

Echo gets limited exposure too but they do a wonderful job of demonstrating Howie’s contribution to the band with that album and Benmont has a wonderful moment reflecting on Howie and what he meant to the band and his contribution even during his most heroin ruined time with the band. Bogdanovich here and elsewhere does a marvelous job of highlighting a piece of the music to say something about what makes it work in a way that makes it completely obvious to the listening viewer.

There are also subtle touches like the way that after the opening performance from 2006, you never see Scott Thurston until he is introduced in the story. Watching, I perked up and thought, “Hey, there’s Scott” unassumingly in just a third of the screen when the camera pulls back. And then, sure enough, he’s introduced. It’s a suble but welcome touch the way Bogdanovich keeps the story so basically chronological, capturing the sense of how things unfold through time rather than lumping the images and music of a life together in a deceptive whole.

A Story About Integrity

I always wanted the documentary to be named I Won’t Back Down but can respect the choice to frame it as Runnin’ Down A Dream, a less combative and more upbeat, classic American framing for a band that Bogdanovich has claimed epitomizes the American Dream.

Nonetheless, Tom’s integrity is as defining a feature as anything. Through reading and seeing tons of stuff about Tom’s various legal battles with corrupt music companies, the story had never been articulated so clearly in its details as here. Tom isn’t heroized out of proportion but the facts speak for themselves. He fought for the rights to his own music against unjust record contracts and then he fought for fair prices for his fans when he refused to let them raise the price of records by starting with his own. Later on we see an incredible piece of candid footage in which Tom stands up for his musical influence and long time friend The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn by insisting that the execs and producers trying to get him to record commercialistic crap go to hell. He insists that McGuinn is a great artist deserving better and goes to the mat when McGuinn himself was willing not to fight for his own integrity.

These sorts of moments are consistent throughout Tom’s entire career. The next evidence of selling out I see from the man will be the first.

The Interview Subjects

They could have interviewed more people, that’s for sure. But I doubt it would have made the documentary much better. What’s important is that they have plenty of interview footage with the people who matter most, the band members themselves who tell the story themselves. It was an elegant and appreciated choice to forego narration. In addition to the band though there are some wonderful commentators on the bands history including the five most important producers of their career, Denny Cordell, Jimmy Iovine, Dave Stewart, Jeff Lynne, and Rick Rubin. You get a wonderful sense from the narrative of the significance that each producer brought to Tom’s career. Each producer represents extremely specific developments in his music and his career and it’s nice to see their views sufficiently represented.

And a special touch for me was to see Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, replete with great footage of their respective famous performances with the band. In 1994, no non-Christian bands besides Metallica and “Weird Al” meant any more to me than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. So it was really sweet to me to hear Grohl and Vedder express what Tom means to them.

Also a neat little treat is to see Johnny Depp who famously was in Petty’s Into The Great Wide Open video in 1991. Tim Burton’s my favorite director, his and my favorite living actor is obviously Mr. Depp. It’s nice to also tightly connect that dot over to Tom Petty. It reinforces the sense to me that there is a consistency to my sensibility that even the artists I admire share among themselves. I really dig that. Though of course I can’t take that too far—-Petty loves westerns immensely and I hate them. But Petty encapsulates everything great about westerns and old school country music. That is country music before it became what Petty characterizes its present form as—-bad rock bands with a fiddle.

The biggest surprise though was the wonderful, passionate, insightful commentary from, of all people, an MTV executive. He reappears periodically throughout the documentary and some of his thoughts were just great.

I laughed, I cried

Tom’s trademark droll sense of humor that conistently comprises a good bit of what makes his lyrics so remarkable also comes through in interviews. And Bogdanovich’s droll editing gives the whole film Tom’s sense of humor. Comedy is about timing and so is editing and Bogdanovich edits some good laughs into the proceedings.

You probably won’t cry because Tom and his songs probably don’t mean to you what they mean to me. But three or four times, I really teared up. And not at the moments you’d guess even. Just certain songs and certain moments in their story that struck me as especially special. The presentation of the great song “The Waiting” was just so celebratory that it made me surprisingly emotional, for example. Again, as I said before, this film does so much tribute to the music.

Don’t Do Me Like That

There are a few problems worth noting. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live are a whole different, equally special thing to what they are on records. The film shows ample live footage but doesn’t really show enough of the musical innovation that they bring to live interpretations of their songs. Also, there’s not an adequate demonstration of how much their live shows incorporate an unbelievable range of covers that express their bottomless knowledge of their forerunners from rock and roll artists to bluegrass artists to country artists to surf rock artists to psychedelics, etc. Even a ten minute montage of this would have sufficed to highlight more explicitly their range. And additionally, their classic live reinterpretation of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” that was a huge highlight of their late ’80s/early ’90s shows deserved some attention.

The film relied in the end (literally, at the end of the film) too heavily on the 2006 Gainesville homecoming concert. That tour is extremely special to me as it was the first tour I saw the band live and the tour that sparked an all-consuming obsession with collecting every live performance, video, studio release, etc. that I could get my hands on. But even as important as it is to me, it’s too much attention on one concert here at the end when some more time could have been spent on some other aspects of their concerts from along the way.

What makes this choice especially unfortunate is that the movie is sold with that full Gainesville concert as another disc in the boxset. So, it’s redundant to include so much of it in the film at the expense of other vital pieces of that 300+ hours worth of material that was available.

Ultimately it’s not a big deal to me as I own more than I could have ever ask by way of live recordings and videos from the band anyway. But it would have been nice for the official record to give a more representative look at what the band offers by way of transformation of their own songs and by way of infectious tribute to their forerunners live.

The Bonus CD!

Okay, finally getting around to checking out the bonus CD. I stress again, I have somewhere over 90 discs of live music. But I don’t have any of this. They did a bang up job of finding neat rare live recordings. Two that are particularly special are a cover an awesomely old school country song “Lost Highway” which they perform in a rehearsal in the film but which I have never heard them do live otherwise and “Honey Bee” from the Saturday Night Live with Dave Grohl playing a mean set of drums.

I love the intros to the versions of “Breakdown” and “Fooled Again” here as they are unique (and again, I’ve heard plenty of versions)

The sound quality on all these live recordings is just spectacular, something one is not quite used to when trading in bootlegs The “Keeping Me Alive” here is especially sweet as previously I’d only heard the studio version on Playback, the collection of greatest hits and rarities, and the one really rough bootleg available of it. I love that bootleg to death but this is a super-sweet, high quality version of it. And I might have never heard so good a live take of “Shadow of a Doubt.” These are really great recordings.

Another neat aspect for the pettyphile and the pettynewbie alike

Yeah, it was embarrassing. The eyes got all leaky a few times. Had to get my sleeve up to try to get rid of the evidence and get my composure.

Lars and the Real Girl ends a streak of frustrations for me at the theater [this was written October 28,2007] and was the first film to deeply move me in a theater since the early spring. It was such a beautiful film, filled with indeterminate cartharses. What I found most fascinating and moving about the film is that everything revolves around central metaphors with several different kinds of meaning there for different viewers (or the same viewer) to find resonant.

As is well known the film revolves around a lonely man named Lars (Ryan Gosling) and the sex doll that he is deluded into believing is his actual girlfriend, Bianca. Rather than trying to talk some sense into Lars, his sister-in-law and his brother [played by very sweet Emily Mortimor (Match Point) and Paul Schneider (All The Real Girls)] take the advice of Patricia Clarkson’s doctor character (The Station Agent, All The Real Girls) to play along with Lars’s delusion because he has created this relationship as a means of working through something emotionally. Soon more members of the community are encouraged to play along as part of helping Lars.

Without giving any more specifics away, the result is a moving, understated comedy that explores the role that projections and fictions play in our psychological lives. Lars’s delusion is narratively specific and so on one level is about mental illness and a fable about the healing powers of patience and thoughtful person-specific care. It’s about how helping people involves understanding them and opening yourself up to their reality and how each person’s journey and needs are radically different and inscrutable. There’s a bit of fantasy and idealism in this story, which is why I call it a fable, but there’s nonetheless an admirable hope and suggestion in it too. The film is about the ways that in an ideal world people would work with each other to address their unique needs, even when this involves going way out of their normal way and involves opening themselves up to seeing the world through each other’s unique eyes. It’s a wonderful, optimistic story of openheartedness towards a lonely, confused and conflicted man and his inanimate girlfriend.

But the film goes beyond this surface level at which we can distance ourselves from Lars as just a delusional man. His inanimate girlfriend upon which he projects a whole personality is a symbol for anything any of us might idealize and project our desires or fears into. At least in my case, I totally resonated with this theme of idealization and projection. I know I’ve treated a real live, moving, thinking woman the way that Lars treats an inanimate one—-namely, as a projection of my hopes, dreams, and fears seperate from who she might have herself been. And this isn’t just about women, this is about anyone or anything we turn into an imaginary ideal of goodness or threat or whatever, so that we can find ourselves through that.

Healthiness comes not from alienated relationships to realities in which we only encounter them through the idealizations we create of them. The film doesn’t simply condemn such projections and false idealizations but instead opens us up to their possible therapeutic value. It rather explores how the use of projections and idealizations can be a stepping stone to coming to terms with reality. This is a humane, non-judgmental, and yet nonetheless growth oriented view of psychological projections in which I found a good deal of helpful wisdom and emotional catharsis.

One level on which this metaphor works is in helping us to relate to the meaning of art and fiction for helping us work through things. Lars’s use of narrative and fiction for coming to terms with emotions and problems he can’t articulate is really fascinating and illuminating with respect to the media of art. I found it fascinating throughout the film to think about the fine line between Bianca and the “real people” in the film. They’re all fake. Through our empathetic imaginative engagement with these fake people, into whom we project so much reality, including so many reflections of ourselves—our own fears, hopes, ideals, etc.—-we can therapeutically work through emotions and ideas we might not have prior been able to, or still be able to, articulate verbally and cognitively. Through art we empathetically connect to others and traverse emotional journeys, through projecting ourselves and our experiences into constructed narrative characters. Lars relates to Bianca like we relate to Lars and all the other fictional characters who help us escape reality a little while with the ideal result of coming back to it in the end, now more ready to deal with it.

I’m not even sure these are the only three levels to interpret the film, but I loved the experience of watching the film simultaneously from three such rich and personally meaningful angles.

Beyond the themes, let’s talk aesthetics. Ryan Gosling is a masterful actor. Between The Believer, Half Nelson, and now this film, I could not be any more impressed at his transformative powers and his communicative powers. He’s unbelievable and if he doesn’t get a nomination for an Oscar, there should be a riot.

The movie is also very funny. It’s not frequently funny but there’s not a forced joke. Going in I was a little wary of the premise and not up to seeing forced, obvious humor of an ongoing single joke stretched to 90 minutes. And wisely that’s not what they did. The film focuses on the characters and emotional truth and never pushes Bianca into ludicrous situations only for the sake of gags. The humor comes out of the charm of the situation. A line here and there, a scenario just naturally preposterous. Often a single scene would be on one level hilarious and silly and on the other moving at the same time, with the same aspects. It can all be taken as comedy and all be taken as moving and meaningful. It’s a perfect balance guided by an incredibly nuanced and careful script and perfectly real performances and direction.

A

Quite simply the very best film of 2007 that I’ve seen and I saw a heck of a lot of them.

An article from the Desert Sun reports that Tom Petty bashed his album Echo, one of my favorites of his, with the following comment,

He’s less enamored with 1999’s “Echo,” which opens with the grim “Room at the Top,” “one of the most depressing songs in rock history,” Petty says, grinning. “If anything will make you want to kill yourself …” He trails off, then adds glumly, “I was in a rough place when I did that record.”

Now, in talking with other Tom Petty fans, I have learned that I’m not alone in being puzzled that Tom would describe the song “Room At The Top” as one of the most depressing songs in rock history because it can easily be interpreted as a rousing song of affirmation in the face of adversity that takes stock of what is good at a time that is otherwise bleak. And even if one does not see it that way, Tom flatters himself with his hyperbole in calling his song one of the most depressing songs in rock history. He wishes! I don’t think he has any song that really vies anywhere near that distinction. He is irrepressibly hopeful even in his darkest songs, even against his own intention or awareness. Room At The Top couldn’t be interpreted as a song of affirmation like it is if it was really so depressing.

But more important than Tom’s ability to assess the degree of depressiveness of his song is the question of what difference a different title might make. Before I advance my theory of why Tom sees as so depressing a song that others find so affirmative, you must hear the song or know its lyrics, so either watch the video or read the lyrics below before reading my theory as to what makes the difference between the song being affirmative or bleak.

Room At The Top (by Tom Petty)
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I can see everything tonight
I got a room where everyone
Can have a drink and forget those things
That went wrong in their life

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down, I ain’t comin’ down

I got someone who loves me tonight
I got over a thousand dollars in the bank
And I’m all right
Look deep in the eyes of love
Look deep in the eyes of love
And find out what you were looking for

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down,
no I ain’t comin’ down

I wish I could feel you tonight,
little one You’re so far away
I wanna reach out and touch your heart
Yeah like they do in those things on TV,
I love you Please love me, I’m not so bad
And I love you so

I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down,
no I ain’t comin’ down I ain’t comin’ down

Now, Tom introduces the song during his 1999 VH1 Storytellers episode around the time of its release as a song about “Escapism.” He also introduces the song only after a very humorous bit where he, tongue in cheek, marvels at the apparently unanimous popularity of Titanic and explains that since Titanic was so popular he figured he would write a song about it. He then sings a goofy, funny song that ends with the punchline that Celine Dion should have been on the Titanic. And it’s at this point that he introduces the song whose lyrics I just reproduced as “Room At The Top” (pause) “of the Titanic.” The audience laughs and then he claims in a tone that is hard to decipher, that the song was originally called “Room At The Top of the Titanic” but that he decided to shorten the title to “Room At The Top.” It’s hard to tell if he was serious about the original title of the song or whether he was just keeping his jokes about the Titanic running. If he’s not joking, then the title, combined with his description of the song as being about “escapism” makes an enormous difference to the meaning of the song.

If you reread the song with the Titanic title, this is a song not about “polishing the brass on the Titanic” but rather throwing a party on it. Not trying to get things in order on an already sinking ship but a different kind of denial—throwing a party. All the affirmation of the song becomes not the escapism of some one retreating from his troubles to affirm his life via a party with friends, but rather it becomes a song about the escapism of throwing a party on the eve of disaster, wherein all your affirmation is really a vain attempt to spin an irredemiably disastrous situation as one that’s going to be okay after all. And as the mockery of affirmation, this becomes, while still not the most depressing song in rock history, a distinctly cynical one, comparable to the harsh juxtaposition of bitter, disillusioned verse lyrics and rousing patriotic chorus lyrics in Springsteen’s “Born In The USA.”

But the question is: can a song’s title, especially one that is not explicitly mentioned in the song itself (and in this case is not even retained in tact) actually play such a pivotal role in its interpretation? This is an interesting question. In written media and in films, we (or at least I) regularly allow the title, while often not a material aspect of the work, to be an integral hermeneutical guide to understanding the work itself. Yet, with a song, it feels so counterintuitive to allow the title to affect the meaning as we very often hear and learn songs without ever seeing their titles and a great majority of the time the title is simply a key line, usually straight from the chorus. It’s a fascinating question to me what would happen if a musician consciously titled his or her songs in a way that drastically altered the meanings of the songs when heard in ignorance of the title. Maybe to call some completely earnest sounding love song about eternal commitment, “The Lie I Tell My Wife” or some earnest sounding song about the pain of heartbreak, “What I Bet You’d Like To Imagine I’m Feeling Right Now” where such songs give no indication of irony in their lyrics or musical arrangement. I’m far from a music expert but I doubt it’s ever been done in music history, or at least in the history of rock and roll. And maybe in that way Tom came really, really close to making a landmark rock and roll song after all—before he changed its name.

My dad just sent me a link to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education for my thoughts. After writing him, I thought I’d share some of my response to him here as well. I’m not an expert on education or educational theory but I do have 12 years of higher education schooling between time as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and 5 and a half years as a full college instructor and adjunct professor at the university level. I also have a teaching award already if that helps with my credibility at all!

Here is the article to which I will respond: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i34/34b01701.htm

First, I agree that not everyone is cut out for college. Most universities are not as small or as selective as the two which I have attended, and at which I’ve only ever taken or taught 3 classes that were so large as to be detrimental to all hopes of individual attention from professors to students. So, I have to concede that while my own experience has been that college can be focused on personal formation; at a lot of schools, there is not the personal attention and commitment to students that backs up the claim that generally, for most students, college is about personal formation and not just about career training. I personally think colleges should be, as mine have been, far more focused on personal formation than they presently are. But part of that means colleges being even less immediately economically efficient than Nemko is promoting here.

As far as I’m concerned, outside of a couple orienting theory courses: teachers should be learning to teach through apprenticeships with teachers and business people should be learning how to do business by working at businesses. Same for numerous other skill-based careers. Those people should be using college for intellectual and personal formation primarily. You can study the basic background theoretics and information needed for your particular field, but you should spend the majority of your time in the liberal arts learning those things that are “irrelevant” to your future job but crucial to your being a well rounded human being who understands culture, history, science, art, literature, philosophy, economics, a foreign language, psychology, politics, religion, etc.

I think it’s frankly insulting and short-sighted when Nemko asserts that those who are college educated would outpace those who aren’t college educated even without college since they are brighter, more talented, and “have more family connections.” The more family connections comment is just a passivity to de facto class structures that is really bothersome. The idea that just being bright or talented means you don’t need an education is really dismissive of the value of what education offers. I agree that if all you’re interested in is making money that you can do that reasonably well on your natural intelligence and other talents. I agree that the average entrepreneur can likely learn more about starting a business by hanging around businesses for four years than by attending a university. And I agree that if you’re going to wind up a cab driver or a bar tender that you don’t need a $100,000 degree to do so.

But the question is not just about how to make money but how to be a critical thinker more broadly. How to use your mind as more than simply a tool for production but as a means to itself and a measn to the broader goods of self-cultivation and critical citizenship. And in that case, I don’t think there are too many better things in life than an education. People’s minds don’t open on their own. Critical thinking, lively writing, literary appreciation, historical insight, psychological awareness, scientific sensitivity, artistic creativity, logical rigor, mathematical formality, spiritual nuance, cosmopolitan familiarity, and on and on are skills that are as important to be apprenticed in as making money or performing surgeries. I have had incredibly bright students but I’ve yet to have one whose natural talent made them a better critical thinker than I was as their teacher. I have had students who have the potential to be better thinkers than I am but without the right tutelage in how to ask the right questions, and without their getting up to speed with what’s already known, it likely won’t happen.

And that’s what this is all about. If you only use your mind in certain ways you don’t know how to think in other ways. That’s why it’s embarrassing to sometimes read scientists expose their ignorance outside of science when they start pronouncing on philosophical matters. They’re frequently infelicitous with philosophical categories because that’s not how they’ve trained their minds and it’s not where their knowledge base has been built up and so they don’t even understand what the questions are or what the complexities of the best currently available answers are.

The economic benefits of being able to think in the multiplicity of ways that a well rounded liberal education teaches are intangible. Nemko himself has allowed his thinking to be shaped nearly entirely in terms of what his own career, as a career counselor to undergraduates, involves—-cost/benefit analysis of his charges’ economic prospects related to their college and career courses. So, to him the political consequences of having more citizens who are less well rounded, less historically, philosophically, psychologically, economically, theologically, scientifically, linguistically aware don’t matter as long as those same citizens don’t waste $100,000 on a degree that “their job doesn’t require.”

Now, again, not everyone is fit for college. Not everyone is going to succeed and not everyone will learn best there. Some people will get different, comparably good benefits of personal formation through unusual routes specific to them and for those exceptional, idiosyncratic folks, I would not block the door as they exited the university. Some rare people might just be too smart for college or learn in a different way. And definitely many careers that are skill based would find better preparation in apprenticeships. And some people just cannot hack it intellectually and drag down the standards across the universities by crowding the classrooms and lowering the lowest common denominator bar to which some professors may teach.

But, what worries me is whether accepting this as a fact of life perpetuates de facto class inequalities. The norms that (1) let many more students accept their lack of fitness to even the exposure to university education, (2) turn a college degree into just a technical training, and (3) tell people not to bother with college if it won’t increase their personal earning potential, are each norms that lead to citizens who are more ignorant and less capable of informed, critical evaluation. This hardly seems like a wise thing to encourage in a democracy. They are also norms that lead to less educated parents who are in turn less equipped to rear reflective, informed children with strong habits of learning. From very early childhood, parental emphasis on education and training in thinking skills seems to be extremely influential on later mental skills from everything I’ve ever heard or read. Maybe the first kid to go to college from a given family doesn’t advance the previous generation the way the family might dream he would. But by striving to raise the family’s bar a bit in terms of overall education, maybe in the next generation the room for growth increases further as the kid still has an economically downscale parent but now one that is that little bit more trained in the ways of the mind. And of course, the case can always be made that the benefits of an education make life intrinsically richer, regardless of concerns for earning power, responsible citizenship, or effective child-rearing.

This is all very frustrating to me because our capitalist society only values what it can correlate directly to a profit. Articles like Nemko’s assume the dogma that the mind is only valuable insofar as it can be made into an immediate tool for specific wealth production. Both the long term benefits and the intrinsic benefits of minds developed for their own sakes just makes no sense on that short term cost-benefit analysis rooted in that particular value-priority scheme.

And, by the way, it is that same overly capitalistic thought process that threatens to reduce academia to a research production machine instead of primarily the home of educators. And this results in someone like me, who is most talented and successful as a teacher, feeling deeply underappreciated, barely successful, and fearful for my future prospects until I can prove myself as a publishing writer. And that just seems to me counter-productive to the academy.

In Nietzsche’s  Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, section 4 (Parkes translation, Oxford 2006)), we read:

Zealously and with much shouting they drove their herd over their bridge: as if to the future there were but one bridge! Verily, these herdsmen thesmelves still belonged among the sheep!

Little minds and capacious souls these shepherds had: but, my brothers, what little domains have even the most capacious souls been up to now!

Blood-signs they wrote on the way that they walked, and their folly taught that one proves the truth with blood.

But blood is the worst witness of truth; blood poisions the purest teaching, turning it into hearts’ delusion and hate.

And if one goes through the fire for one’s teaching—what does that prove! It is more, verily, if one’s own teaching comes out of one’s own blaze!

Sultry heart and cold head: where these come together there arises the roaring wind, the ‘Redeemer’.

Here Zarathustra challenges what Nietzsche in The Antichrist calls the “seduction” of the martyr, the false logic that if some one is willing to die for a belief that it therefore has some credibility. People can hold beliefs and be willing to die for them for all sorts of psychological and social reasons that have nothing to do with the love of truth first and foremost. A herdish, follower of a person can march off to the stake out of blind obedience, as can the suicidal, the delusional, or the foolish and easily persuaded.

In contrast, the ideal here, is not someone willing to die for a “teaching” but someone willing to make the pursuit of her perspective into a matter of fire and passion and intense internal struggle and experiment and risk. It’s the willingness to embrace Zarathustra’s insight earlier when he declares that ”one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star.” The embrace of this sort of passionate approach to life and personally developed knowledge as summed up by Nietzsche in these lines sum up the priorities and the spirit that motivate me.  It’s all about the sultry heart and the cold head.

This blog will not be written by Friedrich Nietzsche. I, a student of Nietzsche’s writings, will write this blog. I have been deeply enough influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas to refer to many (though not all) of my ideas as at least broadly Nietzschean. Nonetheless, the ideas posted on this blog will be mine and not necessarily his.

This leaves a question to address right up front—-if this blog is actually about my ideas and not always necessarily Nietzsche’s, why not just refer to this blog as a place to find my “Finckean” ideas? Why call it at all a place to find primarily “NIetzschean” ideas? The reasons for this are that (1) at this stage in my philosophical development, my ideas are so related to his that they’re often better understood as his ideas than mine and (2) I also want to encourage wherever possible the increased discussion of ideas within broadly Nietzschean paradigms. I want to signal to the site’s visitors that if they’re interested in exploring what contemporary or “universally” philosophical issues look like through broadly Nietzschean paradigms, this is a place where they can do that. I want to encourage other Nietzscheans to contribute their perspectives here as well through comments and blog posts. I want to create a place where people of this particular basic likemindedness can compare their interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy and their competing views on its correctness and its applications to contemporary issues and other subjects of thought he never addressed.

So, this is not a site for Nietzsche’s ideas but a place for Nietzschean ideas.

But it’s not a place for the dogmatic preaching of Nietzschean ideas. It is not a place where everyone will necessarily agree with Nietzschean ideas. It is a place where Nietzschean ideas will seduce us to many a new venture of thought and promise nothing more definitive than that.

This is also a place where sometimes, maybe even frequently, the connections between Nietzschean ideas and our own will seem (and maybe even be) tenuous at best. Maybe I will prove not much of a purveyor of Nietzschean ideas after all. Maybe I will prove myself so distinctly different a thinker from Nietzsche as to be not really much of a “Nietzschean” at all. In that case? Alle zu besser.