“Like all who leap out of the dialectic of enlightenment, Nietzsche undertakes a conspicuous leveling. Modernity loses its singular status; it constitutes only a last epoch in the far-reaching history of a rationalization initiated by the dissolution of archaic life and the collapse of myth. In Europe, Socrates and Christ, the founders of philosophical thought and of ecclesiastical monotheism, mark this turning point: "The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied historical culture, the assembling around one of the countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge-what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home? (87)" (查看原文)
“Together with a sensibility that allows itself to be affected in as many different ways as possible, the power to create meaning constitutes the authentic core of the will to power. This is at the same time a will to illusion, a will to simplification, to masks, to the superficial; art counts as man's genuine metaphysical activity, because life itself is based on illusion, deception, optics, the necessity of the perspectival and of error (95).” (查看原文)
Heidegger picks the objectifying thought of the modern sciences as his point of departure; Bataille, the purposively rational behavior of the capitalist enterprise and of the bureaucratized state apparatus as his. The one, Heidegger, investigates the basic ontological concepts of the philosophy of consciousness in order to lay bare the will to technical control of objectified processes as the underlying impulse governing the train of thought from Descartes to Nietzsche. Subjectivity and reification distort our view of the unmanipulable. The other, Bataille, investigates the imperatives to utility and efficiency, to which work and consumption have been ever more exclusively subordinated, in order to identify within industrial production an inherent tendency toward self-destruction in all mo... (查看原文)