Over van onze kennis het belangrijkste affect maken

Nietzsche herkende in zijn enthousiaste kaart aan zijn vriend Franz Overbeck in juli 1881 dat hij in Spinoza in de in de kop geuite opzet een voorloper had.

Twee jaar geleden, op 13 september 2015, had ik een blog “Weer boek over Spinoza & Nietzsche op komst.” Dat ging om

Stuart Pethick, Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche. Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 -  |  251 pagina’s  cf. book.google

Dat boek wil verkennen of en hoe die twee filosofen overeenstemmen in deze door Nietzsche geuite overtuiging.

Inmiddels kan ik melden dat het boek op 25 maart 2017 op issuu is geplaats, waar het in z’n geheel te lezen is en voor degenen die een account op issuu hebben, kan worden gedownload.

Uit de Inleiding
´This marks a decisive break from the classical image of philosophy as precisely the pursuit of the rational, objective or even subjective conditions of possibility that ground experience. ‘Experience’ here is not considered a thing that grounds or is grounded in any way, but rather a term that is used to cover an ineluctable aspect of what it is to live – not the intellectual ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Descartes, but as Spinoza points out with typical economy, simply that we ‘feel that a certain body is affected in many ways’. This is something that we cannot escape from, however sophisticated our theories and concepts might become. Affectivity – and the body as the site of this affectivity – thus plays the pivotal role in every moment of our lives and all the activities in which we are engaged. More sophisticated questions thus build on perhaps the most basic question of all and one that we start to pose before we can even properly express it; namely, in what ways can this body affect and be affected – what can this body do? And from this, how do bodies affect each other? Such questions do not arise through mere intellectual curiosity, however, but through problems that emerge immanently in the affective relations of the body – relations that are always-already felt in multiplicities of ‘joy’ or ‘sadness’; not merely in the psychological sense of happy or miserable, but rather in the sense of transient euphoria or dysphoria – literally experience ‘carried well’ or ‘carried badly’. As Spinoza points out, we do not desire something because it is good, but rather call something good because we desire it. Affectivity is inseparably involved in the formation of our language, ideas, values and judgements, meaning that it is not something that masks knowledge or is just a superficial phenomenon, and nor is it something that can be eliminated or even controlled in any fundamental sense. The question of knowledge is thus the question of the composition of our affective relations – in its simplest form, how to cope with ‘sadness’ and enable the repetition of ‘joy’. This is the core of the Spinoza–Nietzsche project of making knowledge the most powerful affect. (p.4)

“The discussion of Spinoza will then proceed by showing how he turns way from the Cartesian cogito and dualistic system by drawing attention to the imagination and bodily affective experience and how these relate to what he terms as adequate and inadequate ideas. In order to understand precisely what Spinoza means by this, an analysis of an important recent interpretation of Spinoza as an early 'anomalous monist' will be made to show why it is mistaken, which will in turn draw out the significance of adequation for Spinoza and how affectivity plays the crucial role. The chapter will end with a discussion of his concept of conatus and how it shifts the focus of philosophy away from the essence of things according to 'what' they are towards 'how' they are instead; that is, the sense in which something affects and is affected, whether this 'something' is a body, belief or idea.” [p. 8]

Books.google en issuu hebben de blauwe softcover reprint van de oorspronkelijke hardcover 1^e editie die er zo uitzag: