Nietzsche, Lucian, and the Blissful Islands

Mathematics

We are not used to reading Nietzsche on mathematics — although one of his earliest readers and admirers or should one say imitators, was indeed a topologist, Felix Hausdorff who wrote very intriguingly on Nietzsche’s landscapes and his Zarathustra.^[1]  

Beyond what today’s (analytic) philosophers call ‘naturalism,” Nietzsche’s critical project of re-naturing the human precisely as all-too-human or in and from the humanly portioned or perspective is re-framed or reprised from the articulation in The Gay Science in Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche again emphasizes that his own goal remains the same transcriptive undertaking as that first advocated as the gay or musician’s science:

to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura; to confront man henceforth with man in the way in which hardened by the discipline of science, man today  confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical birdcatchers who have all too long been piping to him >you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin! (BGE §230)

It is rare that a commentator pauses to note that Oedipus eyes would be a miracle of nature, almost like Lyncaeus-eyes, very much like the kind of focus on sight and unseeing, on the sun and its blinding light that captivates philosophers after Plato.  Bataille will write on this in his own voice, as will Lacan and with respect to Nietzsche, Bernard Pautrat and Henri Birault. 

And Odysseus ears present an even greater challenge for Horkheimer and Adorno.

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[1] Felix Hausdorff importantly also echoes Nietzsche’s anthropocentric critique of science as of mathematics, writing under the pseudonym of Paul Mongré, and highlighting the very radical point Nietzsche makes at this locus: “We lack a self-critique of science; judgements of art, of religion, of feelings about science are as many in number as they are useless. Maybe this is the last destiny of mathematics!” Mongré, Sant’ Ilario § 401.  Thus the last section of Mongré’s/Hausdorf’s collection of aphorisms is entitled “Towards a Critique of Knowing.”  

(For a discussion of Hausdorff and Nietzsche, see Schulz, “Felix Hausdorff and the Hausdorff Edition” as well as Stegmaier, “Ein Mathematiker in der Landschaft Zarathustras.”)