Stanley Rosen > Quotes

“Postmodernism is the Enlightenment gone mad.”
― Stanley Rosen

“In the broadest sense of the term, Nietzsche is not an ontologist or metaphysician but indeed a political thinker. His most comprehensive intention is to transform the collective circumstances of human existence in order to breed a new race of mankind. It is in this radical and comprehensive sense that Nietzsche is a prophet or lawgiver.”
― Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra

“Nietzsche's response to this situation is not to seek narcotics in a return to the past or a flight to the supersensible, but instead to assert, and in a deeper form to accept, even to accelerate, the approach of nihilism on a European, if not global, scale. A rejuvenation of the human spirit is possible only through a complete destruction of the decadent present. Like very few before him, Nietzsche sees the necessary link between radical creativity, on the one hand, and war, courage, and brutality, on the other. The great creators abominate everything that interferes with the full expression of their will to power; they are not egalitarians, democrats, or refined and tolerant appreciators of the poems of their competitors. The bestiality of the blonde beast may be understood not simply as an expression of the need to destroy in order to create but as a consequence of Nietzsche's fundamental identification of Being and history History is the dissolution of Being into chaos, as reorganized by the shifting perspectives of man, the highest incarnation of the will to power. As we have seen, a reliance upon courage led Nietzsche to invoke the unleashing of the blonde beasts and wars of universal destruction as the negative prelude to the advent of positive nihilism.”
― Stanley Rosen

“My earlier argument that postmodernism is a deteriorated version of the Enlightenment is entirely compatible with the present assertion that postmodernism explicitly rejects the Enlightenment because of theoretical extremism.
Postmodernism is the Enlightenment gone mad. In human affairs, madness takes the role of contradiction in logic; anything follows. One consequence of the madness of theoretical extremism is that an ostensible repudiation of Platonism is itself a version of Platonism, that is, of Platonism as it is, not as it is imagined to be.”
― Stanley Rosen, Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity

“All dramas, and more comprehensively, all works of art, necessarily contain a surface, namely, the explicit action, poetical discourse, or symbolic representation of spiritual states, and a deeper interior consisting equally of the artist’s fuller intentions as well as the responses of the audience. It is intrinsic to the nature of things that the surface conceals the depths, not because of the insincerity or duplicitousness of the artist, but because depths reveal themselves only through the specificities of surfaces.”
― Stanley Rosen

“Analytical philosophy ...objectifies the subject, or overlooks the presence of the subject in the structure of the proposition ... This tendency is illustrated in the attempt by Kreisel and others to mathematize Brouwer’s conception of the creative subject as expressing the force of mathematics, a force that cannot itself be expressed in mathematical terms.”
― Stanley Rosen, Limits Of Analysis

“Marxism is Hegel for the masses, and we live in an age of mass ideologies. After all, what could be more liberal, more progressive, and more egalitarian, than science plus Marxism?”
― Stanley Rosen, Limits Of Analysis

“It is certainly true that in his later writings, published and unpublished, Nietzsche speculates on what look like metaphysical or ontological questions. At the risk of some (but not much) oversimplification, we could say that his main thesis with respect to these questions is as follows: Heraclitus was correct and Parmenides incorrect: Being is Becoming, everything is in motion, stability is a ratio of changes, ratios are changing perspectives, changes emerge from chaos and not in accord with a plan or fundamental order. Note what follows from this “ontological” thesis: there is no ego, no subject, and hence no will. The will to power is in fact an infinite regression of points of force. This is what Nietzsche means when he refers to the will as an exoteric concept. No apparent cohesions, or what one might call fields of force, have a unifying identity. Hence personal identity is an illusion. It follows further that there can be no explanation of illusion itself, of why we experience ourselves as finite personalities, why we perceive things or objects, why our experience is organized as if it were a coherent whole. This is what Nietzsche means by his acceptance of Heraclitus’s reference to Zeus as a “playing boy” (pais paizon). The cosmos, or what we take to be order, is just the purposeless play of chaos. Nietzsche’s enthusiastic adoption of Spinoza’s amor fati comes to the same thing. Nietzsche is not a genuine Spinozist except for one point: he denies teleology, or divine purpose.”
― Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra

“The most that could be said, within a formalist ontology, is that sets exist. The great debate over the truth, or even the sense, of this assertion is enough to establish the ambiguity surrounding the concept of existence in analytical philosophy. However, let us assume that sets do exist. What then? Sets are not objects of perception, validated as genuine by empirical science. Either they are intellectual objects or human inventions. In the former case, we have “Platonism,” or the distinction between two senses of “exists.” The first sense refers to perceived individuals and has no analytical or ontological status. The second sense is that of essence or being in the language of the philosophical tradition. In the latter case (that sets are human inventions) we have Idealism, and the consequence that we ourselves produce ourselves, presumably as agents of the transcendental ego. Or else we arrive at Nietzschean perspectivism and the subsequent indistinguishability of existence from chaos. In sum: ontology is either Platonism or a consequence of how we talk. But if the latter, what is how we talk a consequence of?”
― Stanley Rosen

“There's a kind of Gödel's Theorem in human affairs: Every attempt to systemize life or to govern it by a set of axioms rich enough to encompass the totality of experience leads to a contradiction.”
― Stanley Rosen, Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity

“[Nietzsche’s political thinking] consists in the attempt to make use of the ontological doctrine, the ostensible truth about the illusory nature of our experience or order and stability, but hence too of belief in the stability of values, to clear the path of history for a return to the fructifying origin, to chaos itself, understood as the source of all new forms and hence rejuvenation. Nietzsche wishes to remove the tattered mask of late modern European civilization from the face of chaos in order to replace it with a new and vital one. This requires of Nietzsche that he enlighten his own contemporaries by accelerating their dissolution; remember that clarification is destruction. The return to chaos as origin will make possible the birth of a new race of mortals and so another cycle of the eternal return. The preliminary step is to obliterate the coming of the last man but all of Zarathustra’s bombastic rhetoric fails to conceal from the sober reader the disconcerting fact that the last men share with the Nietzschean philosopher the modern spirit of the scientific Enlightenment.”
― Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra