I Failed Horticulturalsim

I faintly remember being assigned Nietzsche some years ago, for another course. I'm not sure which course it was, most likely one of a political science nature, but I know that I didn't do the reading. Such was the nature of my undergraduate years, especially before I started taking literature courses again.

What I remember about Nietzsche, I'm afraid, didn't work in his favor, because all that I could recall before today was that he said something about God being dead. Well, my indoctrinated, unquestioning self of a few years back, was clearly abhorred and never sought Nietzsche as an acquaintance since then.

Alas, things are quite different now. I'm reading through these selections, from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, and I find myself wanting to underline and comment on nearly everything! Basically, Freddie's like, Truth and labels are arbitrary, nothing is absolute, everything has been socially and culturally constructed. In a modern sense, these claims may not be particularly relevatory to you. But take it from me, someone who's been wading through the icky, uppity, structured, and absolutist 19th century rhetors, that Nietzsche is on to some cool shit. Here's one of my favorites. I just want to eat these words all day:

Truths are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

While these words are certainly scathing, especially to the ears of the moral poiltical right (and dare I say Christian activists?), I think we should take a step back and contextualize. Nietzsche develops his argument, basically, by using language as a metaphor for how culture relies on signs, on agreed upon symbols, on arbitrary meaning. The only problem is, we've begun to treat morality and truth as absoloutes; we no longer question them, interrogate their meanings, their histories, their own contexts.

Paradoxically, I am a firm believer in not being too dedicated to a cause because complete immersion oftentimes leads to blindness and neglect. So, I'm rolling right along with Nietzsche when he questions these "truths." Meaning has to come from somewhere, right? Some find it in the stars, some in religion. What I think Nietzsche was trying to get it, is that we all need to think for ourselves, we need to stop relying prepackaged labels to explain the world around us. Take, for instance, this one example, he points out:

We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments!

He goes on to explain how these "arbitrary assignments" are also dependent on power, (though in this particular sample, he does not discuss power in the same realm as maybe Foucalt and Bakhtin do), in that differences are often labeled or designated as weaknesses, as in an inability to conform, to perform. Yep, that certainly sounds familiar. I feel like Judith Butler is sitting beside me and tapping her insistent finger along the margins of Nietzsche's rhetoric. I'm looking, Judy! I get it!