Philosophy as an art of living/writing

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Notes

1. Rorty contrasts the ‘edifying philosophy’ he finds in Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Dewey against what he calls ‘systematic philosophy’, which is centred on epistemology.

2. Here, one may also think of the recent work on the ‘linguistic’ and ‘conceptual turn’ by Williamson (2007) in analytic philosophy.

3. At the very outset of this book, Talay-Turner explicitly refers to Michel Foucault’s work on ‘care of the self’ (p. 9), which is itself strongly influenced by Hadot (1995).

4. With this notion of ‘the romantic self’, one may again think of A Secular Age, in which Taylor (2007, p. 609) highlights ‘the reaction against the disciplined, buffered self in the Romantic period’ and his critique of the disengaged buffered selves by drawing on Romantic philosophers like Hamann, Herder and Humboldt (Taylor 1985; cf. Taylor 2007, pp. 313–317).

5. Although Talay-Turner relies heavily on Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) at the outset of her introduction, Taylor’s later A Secular Age (2007) is not cited in her book despite her similar threefold accounts of the self.

6. Talay-Turner emphasises here that she maintains a distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘self’.

7. Nehamas’ influential Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1987) is not referenced in this book, but Talay-Turner does come to conclusions which are very similar to Nehamas in her formulation of essayism as ‘life lived as literature’ (p. 152).

8. But then again one could critically ask why Talay-Turner should engage in her sharp binary conceptual distinctions between philosophy/literature, being/becoming and subject/self in the first place.

9. Talay-Turner states: ‘In Difference and Repetition Deleuze refers to Musil as a distinctive figure who achieved Nietzsche’s project through his literary work’ (p. 160, fn. 547). Although I am unable to locate this precise reference to Musil in Difference and Repetition, some of Deleuze’s explicit discussions of Musil could be found in his Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze 1998, pp. 74, 82–83, 154).

10. For Nietzsche, see Deleuze (2006); for Bergson, see Deleuze (1988a); for Spinoza, see Deleuze (1988b) and (1992); for Kant, see Deleuze (2008). As for Carroll, see Deleuze (2004); for Kafka, see Deleuze and Guattari (1986); and for Proust, see Deleuze (2003).

11. Here, one may also think of how Talay-Turner’s philosophical exposition of Musil and Atay, through analysing the characters in their novels, parallels Deleuze’s notion of ‘conceptual personae’ which philosophers use to express their philosophical concepts (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994, pp. 61–83).

12. Furthermore, one may find Talay-Turner’s affirmation of ‘the dissolution of the subject’ not dissimilar to the ‘death of man’ or ‘deconstruction’ of subjectivity by Deleuze’s fellow ‘postmodern’ thinkers such as Foucault (1970, pp. 303–343) and Derrida (1991).

13. For an in-depth study of Nietzsche’s art of reading and its influence on his philosophy, see Brobjer (1997).

14. Translation based on Thomas Pangle (1980); see also Laws, 817b: ‘our whole political regime/system (politeia) is constructed as the imitation (mimesis) of the most beautiful and best way of life’. See also Plato’s Gorgias, 464b.

15. This is not dissimilar to Leslie Paul Thiele’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a political thinker whose philosophy may first appear apolitical, but is in fact at heart deeply political as ‘politics of the soul’: ‘For Nietzsche, a successful politics of the soul excluded political engagement in the social realm’ (Thiele 1990, p. 224). On this point, Nietzsche echoes Plato’s understanding of politics as care for the soul – indeed, as Thiele (1990, p. 222) states: ‘No less than Plato does the politics of the soul remain [Nietzsche’s] primary concern’.

16. Here, we may remind ourselves what engagement in ‘politics’ would have meant in the very context of 1930s Berlin in which Musil was writing.