Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Nietzsche on Writing: only when you forget, can you move forward

I mentioned in an earlier post that I've been reading Nietzsche.  Reading Nietzsche is very helpful for one of the main questions in my blog: how are writing and doctrine/theology and communication and doctrine in general, related?

I like this long quote from an essay by Nietzsche on history, and in this instance specifically on the danger of not being able to "forget" when one writes:
Forgetting belongs to all action, just as not only light but also darkness belong in the life of all organic things. A person who wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who had been forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination. Moreover, it is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is completely and utterly impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.

I have a tendency towards a kind of perfectionism, when I write or teach, in which I imagine all the ways that what I'm saying could be nuanced or wrong.  This tendency is especially dangerous in teaching Freshmen, as they get confused or bored really fast if I bring in all the standard academic nuance and profusion of disclaimers that accompanies theology at the graduate level.

When I teach I find I just have to "go on" with an interpretation that seems it makes the most sense to my students.  But I've been happy to discover that these interpretations usually end up being faithful to the original text in ways I didn't foresee.  In this way, I think Nietzsche finds something important for writing and teaching. Writing and teaching are all about a strategic forgetting.

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