Quote of the Day: Nietzsche's Reactive and Active drives

[timelets]

“Picasso and Schoenberg earlier, as founders of contemporary art who are fundamentally attuned to Nietzsche. If you look at these paintings or listen to this music, you will see that it too delivers us up to a world that is destructured, chaotic, fragmented, alogical, deprived of the ‘beautiful unity’ which perspective and the rules of harmony conferred upon works of art in the past.”


“Nietzsche was to distinguish between two quite distinct types of force – or, as he was to say, two ‘drives” “or ‘instincts’; on the one hand, ‘reactive’, and, on the other, ‘active’.”


“Reactive forces: those forces which can only deploy themselves in the world and achieve their full effect by repressing, annihilating or distorting other forces. In simpler terms, they succeed only by opposing; they belong to the realm of ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’, of ‘against’ rather than ‘for’. The model here is the classical search for truth, since this always triumphs more or less negatively, by setting itself to refute errors, illusions, false opinions. This applies as much in philosophy as in the positivist sciences.”


“Philosophy and science are only able to function in effect by opposing ‘the intelligible world’ to the ‘physical world’ in such a manner that the second is always devalued in relation to the first. ”


“Contrary to all that is reactive, the active forces take effect in the world and do their work without needing to disfigure or repress other energies. It is in art, and not in philosophy and science, that these forces find their natural home. ”


“Contrary to the ‘theoretical man’ – the philosopher or scientist of whom we have been speaking – the artist is the figure who, above all others, imposes values without discussion, opens up perspectives and invents worlds without needing to demonstrate the legitimacy of his propositions, still less to prove them by a refutation of those works which preceded his own.”


“On the one side sits the Socratic and reactive model, which seeks the truth through debate and dialogue, and in order to get there, takes its stand against the various faces of ignorance, stupidity or bad faith. On the other side sits the model of the Sophists, which makes no attempt to seek the truth, but seeks merely to seduce, to persuade, to effect an audience with almost physical intensity, and win over by the power of words alone. ”


--- Luc Ferry. “A Brief History of Thought.”