NIETZSCHE AND DECONSTRUCTION

1. A Vision: Entering The Existential Atmosphere
2. The Nietzschean
3. Of Nietzschean Birth: Deconstruction
4. A Vision: One Step From The Void

Caspar David Friedrich's landscape painting titled "Abbey in the Oakwood" (plate #1) exudes melancholy and is illustrative of Friedrich's mental climate, which he admitted tended to focus too much on the subject of death:

Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience and the grave as subjects for my paintings? One must submit oneself many times to death in order some day to attain life everlasting.3

All man's alibis are unacceptable: no gods are responsible for his condition; no original sin; no heredity and no environment; no race, no caste, no father, and no mother; no wrong-headed education, no governess, no teacher; not even an impulse or a disposition, a complex or a childhood trauma. Man is free; but his freedom does not look like the glorious liberty of the Enlightenment; it is no longer the gift of God. Once again, man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.5

...the path as the path of life, the foliage as the life-force, the withered branch as mortality, the pine-tree as the symbol of Christ, the rock as a symbol of faith, the water signifying death, and the bridge as the triumph of Christianity over death.6

That Friedrich put such elaborate symbolism into landscape painting was unique for his time since landscape painting generally tended, in Tieck's words, to "evoke a feeling of meditation, well-being, or joy at the imitation of reality."8 Dresden landscape painter Ludwig Richter (1803-84) was critical of Friedrich's use of symbolism:

Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, making use of the forms of Nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs -- they are made to mean this and that. In Nature, however, every thing expresses itself; her spirit, her language lies in every shape and colour.9

What is meant by "truth" in this context? The Christian claim has been that truth is absolute, based on divine authority. Where is that divine authority found? Outside the system of language. Truth-claims formulated within language refer to a "transcendental signified" (God) outside language for authority. This is the Christian version of Platonistic idealism, one of the three models the human being has created for the location of meaning which will be addressed in this paper. According to the model of the Platonistic ideal, the locus of meaning is found in a realm of ideal forms, the physical world being only a shadowy reflection of the Real. The second model under consideration here is the rhetorical method, wherein the locus of meaning is found within the persuasiveness of the language itself. The third model is mythology, wherein the locus of meaning is found within the traditional stories handed down from generation to generation.

Myth as the living belief system of a culture (as within still surviving tribal groups) should not be confused with the study of myth as a text by a culture external to it (the focus of Joseph Campbell's work). Such a study is generally an exercise in structuralism, wherein the goal is to create, after Aristotle, a sort of "Poetics" of mythology. Once the general "structure" of myth is discovered it is applied ad infinitum to explain specific myths. Structuralism relies on the Platonistic model for the location of meaning -- the objective structure is assumed to exist and it is simply a matter of discovering it. It is worth noting that mythology in its primary sense (as a living belief system within a tribal group) is accepted on the basis of respect for the tradition and for the wisdom of tribal elders and seerers; the Western preoccupation with logical "proofs" and competing claims of truth by one system over another is nonexistent in native cultures, as can be seen in Chief Joseph's response to the question of why the Nez Perce banned missionaries from their lands:

They will teach us to quarrel about God, as Catholics and Protestants do on the Nez Perce Reservation (in Idaho) and other places. We do not want to do that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that.11

The conclusion that language has no correspondence to an external truth and, therefore, all language is necessarily metaphorical, supports the second model for the locus of meaning -- that of the rhetorical method. Any meaning is to be created by humankind out of the system of language itself. This also supports the existential view that man is responsible for creating his own meaning. Of course, man is not always very successful in creating his own meaning, and for this reason Nietzsche, with nostalgia for a lost culture, pointed to the mythology of the Greeks.

Some background on the antagonism between Plato and the Sophists will help us to understand Nietzsche's criticism of Platonistic idealism and dialectic. This antagonism has often been written about and Plato is usually awarded the victor's crown. The Sophists are generally understood to have promoted "ethical relativism" and Plato to have promoted the ideal of "truth." The Sophists were rhetoricians who relied on the persuasiveness of language to make their claims, while Plato used the dialectical method of debate by question and answer in his search for "truth." Plato was "a very great event in the history of the human spirit," says Schopenhauer, because of Plato's

discriminating distinction between the phenomenon and the idea, between the empiric and the intellectual, between the world of truth and the world of appearance, between the temporal and the eternal.13

Robert Pirsig questions Plato's denigration of the Sophists, claiming that in Plato's Gorgias dialogue, Socrates used dialectic to destroy rhetoric rather than to understand it. Socrates' questions were "not real questions at all -- they [were] just word-traps which Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians [fell] into." Pirsig claims that the Sophists were not teaching "ethical relativism" as is commonly claimed, but were teaching quality, virtue, excellence (and courage?) -- the Greek "arete":

Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.15

Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had simply encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made arete the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all.... Once the Good [had] been contained as a dialectical idea it [was] no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that arete, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a "true" order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.16

Arete is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."17

Nietzsche was more in line with Pirsig's view, both being critical of Plato, the dialectical method, and the university: "what an atmosphere prevails among their scholars, what desolate spirituality -- and how contented and lukewarm it has become!"20 In The Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche described the dialectician as follows:

As a dialectician, one holds a merciless tool in one's hand; one can become a tyrant by means of it; one compromises those one conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless. Indeed? Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates?21

Reason-virtue-happiness, that means merely that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight -- the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward.23

In spite of his attack on Christianity, Nietzsche was not outrightly against the concept of God; it was the Christian God he was not too pleased with, whom he described as follows:

God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God -- the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond"!26

When the Christian condemns, slanders, and besmirches "the world," his instinct is the same as that which prompts the socialist worker to condemn, slander, and besmirch society. The "last judgement" is the sweet comfort of revenge -- the revolution, which the socialist worker also awaits, but conceived as a little farther off. The "beyond" -- why a beyond, if not as a means for besmirching this world?27

Finally some advice for our dear pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake -- for in some cases it is a mistake. When one does away with oneself, one almost earns the right to live.... Pessimism, pur, vert, is proved only by the self-refutation of our dear pessimists: one must advance a step further in its logic and not only negate life with "will and representation," as Schopenhauer did -- one must first of all negate Schopenhauer.28

In every word he contradicts, this most Yes-saying of all spirits; in him all opposites are blended into a new unity. The highest and the lowest energies of human nature, what is sweetest, most frivolous, and most terrible wells forth from one fount with immortal assurance.30

was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself.... Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.31

My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgement beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts.33

every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases....37

Nietzsche was not concerned that an assumption be true, but that it be life-preserving, that it instill the "will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility" and the "eternal joy of becoming."39 Nietzsche wrote:

The criterion of truth lies in the enhancement of the feeling of power. The falseness of a judgement is for us no objection against a judgement.... The question is, how far it furthers life, preserves life, preserves the species, perhaps even breeds the species.40

...every culture that has lost myth has lost its natural, healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unity a culture.... Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?41

Of the many cultural forms myth has taken, Nietzsche praised the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides for providing a sense of metaphysical solace, "without which it is impossible to imagine our taking pleasure in tragedy."43 Nietzsche wrote that "by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will," the Dionysian and the Apollonian were coupled and eventually generated the art-product, Greek tragedy.44 Of the Dionysian, Nietzsche wrote:

I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism of the Dionysian festivals. Here the most profound instinct of life, that directed toward the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously -- and the way to life, procreation, as the holy way. It was Christianity, with its resentment against life at the bottom of its heart, which first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the presupposition of our life.45

Such a spirit [as Goethe] who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole -- he does not negate any more. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.46

How else could this people, so sensitive, so vehement in its desires, so singularly constituted for suffering, how could they have endured existence, if it had not been revealed to them in their gods, surrounded by a higher glory?... Thus do the gods justify the life of man, in that they themselves live it -- the only satisfactory Theodicy!48

puts in place of a metaphysical comfort a terrestrial consonance and a special deus ex machina -- the god of engines and crucibles: forces of nature put in the service of a higher form of egotism. It believes that the world can be corrected through knowledge and that life should be guided by science; that it is in a position to confine man within the narrow circle of soluble tasks, where he can say cheerfully to life: "I want you. You are worth knowing."49

It was the secularizing Ionian nature-philosophers, in fact abjuring animism in their search for a material substrate of nature, who finally made the world too big and too impersonal for anthropomorphic gods to live in.51

Deconstruction, following as it does in the Nietzschean tradition, questions the premises (or claims to truth) upon which the structures of structuralist criticism rest. The critical blindness that Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man have tried to point out through deconstructive theory is the critic's claim for a true (or objective) reading of a text. Such a reading (an objective one) is impossible since any particular reading (or interpretation) of a text produces an abstraction of the original text (which itself is an abstraction of any pure "thing in itself" outside language). In his essay "The Rhetoric of Blindness," Paul de Man wrote that "Criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, and this act is itself inexhaustible." The critic can never have a final knowledge of the text, because both text and critic are caught in time and claims for truth will always be superseded.54

This would seem to put us firmly into the rhetorical model for the location of meaning -- into the system of language itself -- the Platonistic model having been thoroughly deconstructed, first by Nietzsche, and then by Derrida and Paul de Man. But if this is the rhetorical model reasserting itself, it is a refined model; and that refinement comes in the term "intersubjective." In his essay, "Subjectivity/Objectivity and Meaningful Human Behavior," Robert Armstrong defines language ability as intersubjective: "subjective insofar as it is traditionally considered an inner capacity of the mind and objective insofar as the same rules must be followed by everyone."55 Although the locus of meaning is still the persuasiveness of language (can anyone claim that their writing is fully detached from any motive to persuade the reader?), that persuasiveness now relies a great deal more on the precise application of a canon of morphologic, syntactic, and semantic rules. Armstrong points out that for Jacques Derrida, intersubjectivity "implies respect and ethical imperatives of human freedom."56 And this is exactly what Nietzsche was striving for in his rejection of Platonistic idealism, which was easily appropriated in support of authoritarian ideologies.

In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" Jacques Derrida discounts Levi Straus' attempt to step outside the Western tradition toward a "transcendental signified."57 And in "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy" he makes a thorough deconstruction of Western metaphysics based on the pervasiveness of metaphor. Derrida begins the essay with an interesting passage:

From philosophy, rhetoric. That is, here, to make a volume, approximately, more or less, a flower, to extract a flower, to mount it, or rather to have it mount itself, bring itself to light -- and turning away, as if from itself, come round again, such a flower engraves -- learning to cultivate, by means of a lapidary's reckoning, patience....58

In this opening passage the flower represents metaphor (or rhetoric, or a figure of speech -- a trope) which grows out of the soil of meaning (a proper ground, the unexpressed volume of philosophy -- thought). The sun represents the "proper name,..the non-metaphorical prime mover of metaphor" within the system of language. Without these defined propers metaphor would be impossible, since it is the proper that allows the play of metaphor in language:

The multiplicity of metaphors is regulated with one's sights set on "one and the same image," whose diffraction is but a projective system. Here, the unity and continuity of meaning dominates the play of syntax.... It is a phenomenon of usage (or abuse) rather than...a phenomenon of code.60

Metaphor, therefore, is determined by philosophy as a provisional loss of meaning, an economy of the proper without irreparable damage, a certainly inevitable detour, but also a history with its sights set on, and within the horizon of, the circular re-appropriation of literal, proper meaning.62

The very opposition of appearing and disappearing, the entire lexicon of the phainesthai, of aletheia, etc., of day and night, of the visible and the invisible, of the present and the absent -- all this is possible only under the sun. Insofar as it structures the metaphorical space of philosophy, the sun represents what is natural in philosophical language.63

the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.64

The metaphysician presumes to talk of "truth," but Derrida gives Nietzsche's denial of this:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymics, anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage, seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses, coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal."66

...there is, in effect, no "point," no origin, no end, no place outside discourse from which to fix, make determinate, and establish metaphysical boundaries for the play of linguistic signifiers.... the interpretation of any signifying chain is necessarily only another chain of signs.67

When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence.69

Derrida defines "differance" as "the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted 'historically' as a weave of differences." Differance is the origin of language categories. Derrida writes:

In the delineation of differance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field.71

And this brings us to the problem of contemporary criticism: with no "firm and ultimate ground" outside language to refer to, whatever system a critic constructs in explanation of a text opens itself up to deconstruction since, in his explanation, the critic invariably makes truth-claims concerning the text. The critic can only resolve this paradox by attempting to produce a commentary which "undermines his declared philosophical allegiances."73 Literature is an admitted fiction and, so, avoids deconstruction. The legacy of deconstruction is that the literariness of criticism is being recognized. Paul de Man cited Rousseau's "Essai sur l'origine des langues" as a text which "...knows and asserts that it will be misunderstood. It tells the story, the allegory of its misunderstanding:..of metaphor into literal meaning."74 Another example of a text undermining its own declared philosophical allegiances is found in Roland Bathes' S/Z. His dedication to the book reads as follows:

This book is the trace of work done during a two-year seminar...at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes. I hope that the students, auditors, and friends who took part in this seminar will accept this dedication of a text which was written according to their attention to it.75

Roland Barthes worked in both structuralism and deconstruction during his career. His S/Z is a deconstruction of interpretation, the means we use to read, rather than a deconstruction of the story itself. Barthes attempted to bring to light mental processes that we take for granted. We tend to be unconscious of the codes that come into play in literature (intersubjective, socially defined codes), an exhaustiveness that opens up possibilities rather than closing them off. Barthes enjoyed artistic play within the system of language -- the love of paradox and ambiguity; flashy words; a dizziness of language; "the pleasure of the text."76 Barthes pointed out that a "writerly" text, wherein a reader creates his own meaning from a plurality of possible meanings, is far superior to a "readerly" text which gives a central (singular) meaning. The writerly text admits it is a fiction by its very refusal to settle on a single meaning. The readerly text, however, gives the illusion of truth by offering a single meaning. Barthes wrote: "Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text."77

Frank Lentricchia argues in his book, Criticism and Social Change, that deconstructive theory fosters a sense of powerlessness to effect social change because for Barthes, de Man, Derrida, Nietzsche and others it is impossible to have a final knowledge of a text -- claims for truth will always be superseded. This deconstruction of truth-claims could cause a sense of detachment since a hierarchy of value would seem to require a number one totem by which to judge other claims. Once it is adopted that all claims to truth can be deconstructed, on what ground does the true believer (or anyone) stand? In a deconstructed universe, Eric Hoffer's "true believer" has no ammunition in his fight to effect change; he has no infallible symbols on which to anchor his devotion -- Hoffer: "The hammer and sickle and the swastika are in a class with the cross."78 This is an excessive example, of course, since Lentricchia's desire for social change stems from a concern to examine society's "ideological apparatus [which] is so deeply set in place, so well buried, so unexamined a basis of our judgement and feeling that it is taken for truth with a capital letter."79 The hegemonic society -- the unexamined (and undeconstructed) society is ripe for producing the true believer in many forms: the racist, the sexist, the martyr, the Nazi. Practice of Paul de Man's deconstructive theory would hopefully be a check against fanaticism, but perhaps it is fanaticism's opposite -- endless deconstruction of truth-claims on the one side and fanatical devotion to such (God, Science, Truth) on the other.

Deconstruction taken to the extreme of ceaseless deconstruction of truth-claims is comparable to what Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) termed "levelling" in his book The Present Age:

The levelling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual.... The abstract principle of levelling,..like the biting east mind, has no personal relation to any individual but has only an abstract relationship which is the same for every one.80

Lentricchia suggests that we find such a position instead of sliding down the mountain of deconstructed claims and falling into the crevasse of inaction. Unless we make such a toe-hold, we will never have the stability from which to work toward positive social change. Lentricchia suggests that the literary intellectual approach texts in the way in which Gramsci approached critical consciousness; that is, as "the act of knowing yourself as the product of a historical process that has deposited its traces in you." The extension of this definition directly addressing a critical consciousness of texts is as follows:

The act of "knowing" the text as a product of struggle, a way of "interrogating" the text so as to reproduce it as a social text in the teeth of the usual critical lyricism that would deny the social text power and social specificity in the name of "literature."82

must situate itself firmly on the terrain of its capitalist [or otherwise] antagonist, must not attempt a dramatic leap beyond capitalism in one explosive, rupturing moment of release, must work its way through capitalism's language of domination by working cunningly within it, using, appropriating, even speaking through its key mechanisms of repression.83

Toward this end, Burke proposed that the Marxist image of "the worker" be replaced by the more universal and attractive image of "the people":

Your representations of workers are being received as representations of "the other." You must...attend to the machinery of representation;..you must...rethink your representations of workers. You must somehow bring them within, make sure that their fate and ours are bound up with each other.84

Minimalist artist Donald Judd, unlike Caspar David Friedrich, makes every effort to minimize symbolism in his art, to the extent even that he does not title his pieces. Judd's three-dimensional objects fill real space as opposed to the illusion of space (perspective) seen in traditional European painting. Judd writes that "Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface."88 With his sculpture, Judd tries to create "a definite 'whole' and maybe no parts, or very few."89 He avoids anthropomorphic imagery, stating that the image he tries to produce is

essentially new and surprising; an image has never before been the whole work, been so large, been so explicit and aggressive. The abatised orifice is like a strange and dangerous object.90

All that art [European] is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world's like.

Judd pioneered the artistic use of industrial materials such as aluminum, plexiglass, cold-rolled steel, formica, and brass; and he has had most of his pieces manufactured to his specifications.92 Judd's combinations of materials enhance spatial qualities enormously; for example, the blue plexiglass liner on the inside of the open-ended aluminum box provides a vivid contrast which makes the inner area seem larger than the exterior (plate #2).93 In his essay, "Minimal Art," Richard Wollheim questions the process of designing an object, having it manufactured, and then calling it fine art: "[Minimal art] objects fail to evince what we have over the centuries come to regard as an essential ingredient in art; work, or manifest effort." Wollheim also questions whether fine art can be mass-produced.94 Although Judd's pieces are generally one-of-a-kind, Judd does speculate that with the techniques he has developed art could be mass-produced.95 Concerning this, Wollheim writes:

Works of fine art are not types, of which there could be an indefinite number of tokens;... There could not be more than one work of fine art that was a token of a given type.96

The deconstruction of Platonistic idealism by Nietzsche, Derrida and de Man has, in a sense, taken human semiology to within one step of the void of non-construction. With practice, perhaps, the human being will learn to construct systems of signs and patterns of belief based on the inherent quality of those structures, without relying on an external authority (God, ideal forms, Truth) to support them. In light of this, whatever trace (according to Derrida's usage) the human leaves on the world, whether it is written, painted, drawn, chiseled, or bulldozed, it is made from the existentialist conviction that humanity is responsible for the creation of meaning. For any other animal species, existence is enough; meaning is the special prerogative of the human brain. This is not necessarily to deny the existence of God; this is only, like Kierkegaard, to suggest that God cannot be reached by the mind {or He is not fully comprehensible by the mind}. And this is to liberate God from the countless humans who have raised havoc -- from Inquisitional torturers to Ku Klux Klansmen to the Ayatollah Khomeini -- while pointing their index fingers at the sky and saying "For your glory, Father."

NOTES

1 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 782.
2 Helmut Borsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1974), plate 8.
3 Ibid., 7.
4 Thomas H. Greer, A Brief History of the Western World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), 536.
5 Walter Kaufmann, ed.& trans., Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: New American Library, 1975), 17.
6 Helmut Borsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1974), 15.
7 Ibid., 84-85.
8 Ibid., 8.
9 Ibid., 7.
10 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed. The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 45.
11 Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973), 205.
12 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 298.
13 Will Durant, ed., The Works of Schopenhauer, abridged edition (New York: Frederick Unger Pub. Co., 1955), iv.
14 Walter Kaufmann, ed., Philosophical Classics, Vol. 1: Thales to Ockham (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), 222, 236, 238.
15 Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1974), 377.
16 Ibid., 378, 380.
17 Ibid., 380.
18 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 28.
19 Ibid., 3.
20 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 508.
21 Ibid., 475-476.
22 Ibid., 558.
23 Ibid., 478.
24 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 589.
25 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 485-486, 575.
26 Ibid., 585.
27 Ibid., 535.
28 Ibid., 537.
29 Ibid., 586.
30 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), 760-761.
31 Ibid., 783-784.
32 Ibid., 784.
33 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 501.
34 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 43.
35 Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology, from Kerygma and Myth." Philosophy of Religion: A Book of Readings, ed. Abernethy & Langford (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1968), 345.
36 Peter Heller, Dialectics and Nihilism: Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann and Kafka (Massachusetts: U. of Mass Press, 1966), 127.
37 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 45-46.
38 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 18.
39 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 562-563.
40 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. A. Tille (New York: E.P. Duton & Company, 1958), xiii.
41 Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Pub., 1971), 641.
42 Peter Heller, Dialectics and Nihilism: Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann and Kafka (Massachusetts: U. of Mass Press, 1966), 126-127.
43 Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Pub., 1971), 640-641.
44 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In The Philosophy of Nietzsche, ed. The Modern Library (New York: Random House, Inc., 1954), 951.
45 Walter Kaufmann, trans.& ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 562.
46 Ibid., 554.
47 Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Pub., 1971), 637.
48 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In The Philosophy of Nietzsche, ed. The Modern Library (New York: Random House, Inc., 1954), 962-963.
49 Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Pub., 1971), 640-641.
50 Rex Warner, The Greek Philosophers (New York: New American Library, 1958), 9.
51 Weston LaBarre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970), 439.
52 David Lodge, Working With Structuralism (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986), ix.
53 Lane Cooper, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1913), 22.
54 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 106-107.
55 Robert Armstrong, "Subjectivity/Objectivity And Meaningful Human Behavior" (Pensacola: UWF, 1984), 4.
56 Ibid., 14.
57 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 280-281.
58 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 209.
59 Ibid., 242.
60 Ibid., 243, 256,
61 Ibid., 233, 237.
62 Ibid., 270.
63 Ibid., 251.
64 Ibid., 213.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 217.
67 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 160-161.
68 Ibid., 173.
69 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 9.
70 Ibid., 221, 224.
71 Ibid., 7, 12.
72 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), 280.
73 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 123.
74 Ibid., 136.
75 Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), dedication.
76 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: The Noonday Press, 1975), 51-52.
77 Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), 4.
78 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 18.
79 Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 76.
80 Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1940), 28, 34.
81 Ibid., 31.
82 Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 11.
83 Ibid., 24.
84 Ibid., 27-28, 33.
85 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 140.
86 Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 6, 25.
87 John Coplans, Don Judd (California: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), plate 30.
88 Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 184.
89 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 154.
90 Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 188.
91 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 151.
92 Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 187.
93 John Coplans, Don Judd (California: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971), 12.
94 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 395.
95 Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 187.
96 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 393.
97 Ibid., 398.

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