Nietzsche on Inconsistency.

Why would he say this?

Stupid shed ...

[godeater]

More ramblings on the coolest dude ever: I believe Nietzsche at the very end of his life was signing the letters he sent to Wagner’s widow with ‘Dionysus’. That seems fitting enough since Dionysus was a figure of limits and thresholds, the beyond of our normally ‘ordered’ world.  A lot could be said about the style of Nietzsche and especially with respect to contradiction and plurality. Nietzsche seems to be interested in more then just contradiction or opposition but instead with an affirmation of the play of the multiple. In some sense the multiple is the abyss which Nietzsche frequently invokes as the ‘object’ of his gaze—but this is not really an ‘object’, which is precisely the point. 

In contrast to the enlightenment or Christian philosophers desire for control, Nietzsche wanted to get close enough so as to create the distance for the cacophony of perspectives normally held back by the usual oppositions of philosophy, reality and appearance, man and his philosophy. For Nietzsche the point was Becoming and not Being. The writing of this Becoming entailed a certain discipline or a kind of skilled balancing act; it was not a product of laziness or the haphazardous. Nietzsche as has been frequently said, ‘heralded the death of the author’ but only by merging the author with writing such that the distinction becomes blurred through tears, blood and sweat. One should not underestimate how much Derrida took this insight to the bank.

The idea of two forms of sickness is worth noting here. Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Great Health’ was born from the alternating moments of health and sickness and the distance which allowed for the plurality of voices that such movements avail. The bad kind of sickness was the weakness that would reactively kill such plurality based on the inability to control the instincts and the need to ‘know’ a pathological sort of ‘knowing’ which would take flight in another world so as to stabilize and castrate the madness of ‘this’ world. In lacanese this is very similar to the psychic constitution of the consistent ‘big other’ as a defense against and detour from our own finite and inconsistent being. Such a sickness tries to stabilize truth in the interest of controlling the contamination of madness whereas Nietzsche wanted to seduce truth by giving truth her distance-- like one courts a woman. This Truth was both in and beyond language for Nietzsche—it was the attempt to find that limit which has no obvious other side.

“A philosopher who has passed through many kinds of health, and keeps passing through them again and again, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot butt translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance—this art of transfiguration just is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to separate soul from body as the common people do; we are even less free to separate soul from spirit (…) we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate and disaster. Life—to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other.” –The Gay Science.

On my view, it was by Nietzsche's proximity to 'life' that he opened up the perspectival distance that would allow voice to the many just beneath the lights--but only as a way to fight fire with fire, all is fire. He was not merely the tragic 'Beautiful soul' who unable to identify with anything, reduces everyone and all heroism to a base common denominator as found in certain schizo-typical pathology. 

[charlescole]

Nietzsche was an expert on contradictions.

[MysticOfTheSands]

Doubtless this is not untrue, but one is fruitful only if those contradictions are welded together in the forge of a mind unwilling to yield too easily. Else we may only speak of wealth quickly squandered.