I have been reading The Gay Science over breakfast and sometimes over dinner. I like to read when I have to eat alone, as it makes me feel like I have company. I like the The Gay Science best of all Nietzsche's books, I have decided. I think Nietzsche always has a sense of humor, but in his other books it is too easy to take him over-seriously, or take him seriously in the wrong way. The Gay Science, all in pieces and parts, doesn't lend itself all that well to sustained interpretation, so in order to get anything out of it, you have to let each little section sink into you and understand it patiently, bit by bit.
There are many bits I have found meaningful and could quote here, but I couldn't resist this little one, which I read this morning.
I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer. I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish--as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is "appearance" for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown x or remove from it! (#54, trans. Kaufmann p.116)
I like very much the breaking down of the appearance/essence dichotomy, and I like very much the idea of the whole human and animal past crowding about within us and making us peculiar, and other than the rational beings we believe we could be.
And although it is cliche, the passage has an immediate and irresistible correspondence with this:
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. (trans. Watson, here)
Ancient commentators fretted about the line that there must be some distinction. For example, one writes that there is not in fact a distinction in any important sense:
At an earlier time he dreamed he was a butterfly, and had such an extremely happy time. Now he becomes Zhuang Zhou, and also says it suits his wishes. This suggests that waking from the dream does not make a difference. Between Zhuang and the butterfly, how can one argue that one is true and the other empty?!
But Zhuangzi does actually say that there is a distinction. The commentators generally go on to interpret the distinction as one between life and death, and that one should not love life or fear death, a common theme in Zhuangzi. (Also Nietzsche: We should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—-blessing it rather than in love with it.--another of my favorites.)
The modern commentator Chen Guying says, "It means that the border between things and me dissolves, and the ten thousand things are mixed and transformed into one."
Is that what it means, or should we take him at his word when he says "there must be some distinction"? Whatever the distinction is, I think Zhuangzi has a similar problem with the very idea of essence.
Nietzsche (continuing):
Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o'-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more--that among all these dreamers, I, too, who "know," am dancing my dance; that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistency and inter-relatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preservethe universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.
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