Monday, November 7, 2016

HOW TO BE A MALCOLM X MARTIN LUTHER KING SUPERMAN IN ORDER TO DESTROY THE WHITE CAPITALIST RACE

PART 1 THE BODY





DEAR FRIENDS: Check out my keto diet of 1600 calories and 59% fats.  This diet has in total 1600 calories.  But it has the option to add 1, 2 or 3 snacks of 200 calories each.  If you need to add more calories:

Total calories of the whole diet:  1600 calories
Total grams of fats: 104
Total calories from fats: 936
Percentage of fat calories: 59% fat calories
Total grams of Protein:  125 grams of protein. 
Calories from protein: 500 calories
Percentage of calories from protein: 31%

MEAL # 1: 12 NOON (PROTEIN PANCAKE)
3 eggs (15 grams of protein, 15 grams of fat, 200 calories)
1 scoop of whey protein powder (20 grams of protein, 100 calories)
3 tablespoon of butter (30 grams of fats, 300 calories)
1/2 a cup of egg whites (10 grams of protein, 50 calories)

Nutrition info of meal 1
Calories: 650 calories.
Grams of fats: 45
Grams of protein: 45

MEAL 2: 11 PM (PROTEIN PANCAKE AND 5 OZ OF CHICKEN)

3 eggs (15 grams of protein, 15 grams of fat, 200 calories)
1 scoop of whey protein powder (20 grams of protein, 100 calories)
3 tablespoon of butter (30 grams of fats, 300 calories)
1/2 a cup of egg whites (10 grams of protein, 50 calories)
5 oz. of chicken (300 calories, 14 grams of fats, 35 grams of protein) 

Nutrition info of meal 2
Calories: 950 calories.
Grams of fats: 59
Grams of protein: 80

OPTIONS OF SNACK, IF YOU FEEL REAL HUNGRY BETWEEN MEALS, OR IF NEEDED EXTRA CALORIES:

4 ounces of cooked dark chicken:  200 calories (30 grams of protein, 10 fat gr)
3 scrambled eggs: 200 calories (15 grams of protein, 15 grams of fats)
4 ounces of Regular deli ham (200 calories, 10 grams of fats, 25 protein grs)
3 oz White mexican queso fresco (200 calories, 18 grams of fat, 18 grams of fats)
2 oz of Cheddar cheese (200 calories,



Full body workout for weight training (Monday and Thursdays)

Bench Press 12-10-5-2-2-2 (The sets of 2 reps are real heavy sets to failure)


Incline Press 2-2-2 

Back pulldowns behind neck for back 15-15-15-15-15-15-15-15

Press behind neck for shoulders 5-4-4-4

Squats for legs 15-10-8

Leg extensions 8-8-8

Leg Curls 8-8-8

Standing calves 15-15-15

Aerobic exercise (Monday, Tuesday, Thursdays, Friday and Saturday), on the days of weight-training do it after the weight-training:

Fast walking 1 hour  



PART 2 THE MIND





Buy these books from http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sd_allcat_bo?ie=UTF8&node=283155

1-The Will to Power by Fredrich Nietzsche  

2-  Beyond Good and Evil by Fredrich Nietzsche  

3- Napoleon Bonaparte by Emil Ludwig.  

4- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Fredrich Nietzsche

5- Crime and Punishment by Fiodor Dostoevsky.  

6-  Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman

7-  Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman

8- King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger 

Lancelyn Green

9- Faust by Goethe



10- Xenophon's Anabasis by Michael A. Flower



11-  Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome by John Man


12-  Superman and Philosophy by William Irwin


13-  Che Guevara a Biography by Richard L. Harris

14-  Hannibal Enemy of Rome by Ben Kane

15-  The Republic by Plato 

16-  The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

17-  The Antichrist by Fredrich Nietzsche

18-  Complete Works by Arthur Rimbaud

19-  Know Your Enemy: The Story of Rage Against the Machine by Joel McIver 

20 -The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

21-  The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

22-  The Politics of Aristotle

23-  Homer by The Odyssey

24-  The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer

25-  The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

26-  Human all too human by Fredrich Nietzsche

27-  The Genealogy of Morals by Fredrich Nietzsche

28-  Untimely Meditations by Fredrich Nietzsche

29- The Birth of Tragedy by Fredrich Nietzsche

30-  Twilight Of The Idols by Fredrich Nietzsche

31-  The Gay Science by Fredrich Nietzsche

Sunday, July 17, 2016

18 TIPS ON HOW TO INCREASE YOUR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL POWER IN ORDER TO EVOLVE INTO A SUPERMAN


1- take 3 showers a day (Alexander the Great used to take many baths a day)

2- Do not drink alcohol

3- drink some coffee only in moderation, before reading

4- Do not work in excess as trying to earn more money, this will burn you an excess of calories=energies

5- Do not socialize in excess, try to stay away from the crowds.  Crowds are mind-controlled slaves, and have slave mentality.  Even the French philosopher La Bruyere claimed that all the problems of mankind are caused by humans not being able to be alone most of their time

6- This tip is very important in order to evolve into a more powerful person, into the superman.  Try as much as you can to be friendly, loving, cooperative, positive, with every one you meet, even with strangers.  In United States and in many other countries people are taught and have this idea, that they should only worry about their own selves and families, and despise everybody else, and reject any social contact, eye contact with members of outside of their families and groups.  That worldview is wrong, anti-scientific, irrational, counter-productive and leads to negative consequences. Because of the fact that we live in a social world, and there is no literally no way to hider our selves in a cave, in a coocoon and hide from people. We must accept the reality that we are close to people, and that we should work with people, so in order to win the hearts and minds of the crowds, do not try to fight against the crowds and do not try to hate people and crowds.  Try instead to love everybody like if they were your own family.  That leads to wealth, power happiness and progress.  Take a look at the personal behaviour patterns of the winners, the great leaders in USA like Obama, Mitt Romney, Bill Gates and Donald Trump you never see them despising people, hating people, being angry at people the average joes and janes in the streets are.  In order to be a winner like Obama and Donald Trump, we must imitate the personal lives of the winners.  So be friendly, loving, smile with everybody you see.  At first it will be hard because in USA people are not educated by schools, parents and institutions to be loving, outgoing and friendly with strangers. But if you want to be a superman, a winner, an achiever, a leader, you must imitate the behaviour of the winners, which is being full of generosity, friendliness, cooperativeness, solidarity and sympathy with friends, strangers and even with enemies.  And you will see how you will rule the world 

7- Poverty and living on a very limited low income is a destroyer of dreams toward being a better person.  You'll need a decent amount of money in order to evolve into a superman, you'll need money for the supplements, the diet, the books and to prevent stress. Stressful situations like the permanent stress felt by the great majority of low-income people is an impediment for anybody who would like to evolve into a perfect great human being

8 -If you are overweight, try to see a Professional weight loss doctor. Overweight problems causes physical ugliness, and physical ugliness, kills and decreases the will to meaning, the will to power, happiness and motivation.  What ever the media says about obesity not being a problem.  And that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that is not true at all. Being ugly and fat is wrong, evil and counterproductive. If you are overweight, you can follow the exercise routine and the diet written in part # 1 of this pamphlet and just trim the calories to suit your needs. The basic keto diet is a diet of 1600 calories diet so that diet can work to lose weight

9- If you have a physical problem, try to fix it with diets, plastic-surgery and over-training, get a home-gym equipment, get into bodybuilding, join a gym or get an aesthetic doctor, doctor, a healthy and awesome physicality is the first ingredient to become a superman. Remember you need to have a great physical appearance like the movie celebrities, like Jennifer Lopez, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale in order to stand above the shy and ugly crowds.  Most great leaders, great women of history and today are handsome, beautiful.  Physically attractive.  What ever the preachers of morality tell you, that physical attractiness is not necessary.  That is not true at all. A great beauty, a great body, a perfect body is a must in order to evolve into the superman

10- Do not tell others about your plans of evolving into a superman

11- This is very important: When you shop at any Wal Mart, any supermarket, any store and you are close to the sheeple, to the brainwashed grunge slaves, wear dark sunglasses. Don't let the slaves get into your soul, don't let them be curious about what you are thinking.

12- Feel good around politicians and priests, church-pastors, brahmans, muslim priests, or rabbis, because these type of men have faith in historical events.  As opposed to the mind-controlled slaves, to the average joes and janes, that despise history, hate history and think that history is irrelevant.  Napoleon Bonaparte who was a superman said that people who don't know history, will not make history.  So remember, knowledge of history is a must.  That's why in the part # 2 devoted to the mind and soul, there are many books about world history, the ancient Greeks, ancient Romans etc.

13- Do not feel bored, boredom kills the will, motivation, goal-oriented behaviour and doparminergic drive.  Do not be iddle, iddleness, doing nothing destroys goal-oriented behaviour, kills motivation. 

14- Have a daily schedule, do every thing by schedule and routine.

15- Practice the art of simulation, and lying. Try too appear very sympathetic, friendly, loving, helpful, cooperative, willing to help others, humble just like most politicians Mitt Romney and President Obama, look how loving and friendly they look on the outside even though their actions, like the neoliberalism privatization of public services (Austerity measures) are negative for the majority of americans.   In order to be a great man you have to appear to the eyes of others like a Jesus Christ, a real nice person. Never get mad and angry with others.  Simulate your actions.  The world out there is a stage and we are supposed to be great simulators, great actors. Act good in front of others, try to deceieve others as much as you can ;->

16- This tip is very important, according to Nietzsche in the book "Use and Abuse of history for Life" there are many people in the world who are very negative rude, mean, stupid, negative and barbaric.  This might sound elitist, but we must be realists, truth-tellers, and not negators of what we see with our own eyes.  Having said all this, the tip is not to hang around with very negative people, with corrupt, immoral, toxic individuals, specially people who are so negative, so pessimists who suffer from self-deating personality disorder (Self-destructive).  This might sound elitist, but this is just the way it is.  This tip is related to a video of church pastor Joel Osteen below urging people to get away from toxic individuals and to try as much as you can to be happy all the time, with friends, strangers and even with enemies. This tip is also related to the philosophy of Jesus Christ of loving enemies.  And to one of the main laws of the book "48 Laws of Power" written by Dr. Robert Greene.  Robert Greene claims that losers, negative and very pessismist people can infect others with their negativity.  And according to the theory of emotional contagion, the mental states of the people close to us, wether those mental states and emotions are positive or negative, happiness or sadness can infect us in a powerful way.  So remember reject and stay away from negative, pessimist toxic individuals.

17-  From a physiological point of view, it is at rest that we become more mentally and physically powerful.   In USA people are educated and mind-manipulated into thinking that the more people work, the more active people are, the better they will be.  That's totally wrong.  In fact the aristocratic upper classes do not really work at all, they let the oppressed workng classes, create wealth and do their physical domestic labor for them.  Smart powerful great men of history and today embrace resting and despise any activity like cooking, lawn mowing, domestic chores.  Because any of those activities destroy nobility and aristocratic values.  So take 1 or 2 days of the week to sit and rest as much as you can. A whole day sitting and laying in bed will make you feel, lethargic, sluggins and heavy but next day you'll feel stronger.  Don't emulate the stupid self-destructive pro-labor behaviour of the great majority of slaves

18- This is a very important tip, try to be happy and positive all the time. And do not hang around negative sad losers.  Negative people can't be helped.  It is impossible to rescue somebody from their low-life behaviour and life.  

Saturday, July 11, 2015

GUIDELINES AND TIPS ON HOW CAN PALESTINE MEN EVOLVE INTO SUPERMEN IN ORDER TO DESTROY THE EVIL JEWS

PART 1 THE BODY



DIET of 1150 CALORIES FOR PEOPLE WITH VERY SLOW METABOLISMS


Breakfast 3 eggs, 4 egg whites, (250 calories).  15 fat grams

Lunch (0 calories).  

Dinner # at 8PM 1:  11 ounces of cooked chicken, 12 ounces of iceberg-lettuce (650 calories).  30 fat grams

Dinner 2: 11 PM: 3 eggs, 4 egg whites, (250 calories).  15 fat grams

Total calories:  1150 calories
Percentage of fat calories: 47% fat calories

DIET of 1500 CALORIES FOR PEOPLE WITH SLOW METABOLISMS


Breakfast 3 eggs, 4 egg whites, 1 tablespoon of butter (350 calories).  25 fat grams

Lunch (0 calories).  

Dinner # at 8PM 1:  14 ounces of cooked chicken, 12 ounces of iceberg-lettuce (800 calories).  40 fat grams

Dinner 2: 11 PM: 3 eggs, 4 egg whites, 1 tablespoon of butter (350 calories).  25 fat grams

Total calories:  1500 calories
Percentage of fat calories: 54% fat calories

DIET of 1700 CALORIES FOR PEOPLE WITH MODERATE-SLOW METABOLISMS


Breakfast 3 eggs, 4 egg whites, 2 tablespoon of butter (450 calories).  35 fat grams

Lunch (0 calories).  

Dinner # at 8PM 1:  14 ounces of cooked chicken, 12 ounces of iceberg-lettuce (800 calories).  40 fat grams

Dinner 2: 11 PM: 3 eggs, 4 egg whites, 2 tablespoon of butter (450 calories).  35 fat grams


Total calories:  1550 calories
Percentage of fat calories: 58% fat calories

DIET of 1900 CALORIES FOR PEOPLE WITH NORMAL TO HIGH METABOLISMS

Breakfast 4 eggs, 4 egg whites, 2 tablespoon of butter (550 calories).  40 fat grams

Lunch (0 calories).  

Dinner # at 8PM 1:  14 ounces of cooked chicken, 12 ounces of iceberg-lettuce (800 calories).  40 fat grams

Dinner 2: 11 PM:  4 eggs, 4 egg whites, 2 tablespoon of butter (550 calories).  40 fat grams

Snack between meals:  5 ounces of cooked chicken (300 calories, 13 grams of fat)

Total calories:  1900 calories
Percentage of fat calories: 57% fat calories

Exercise routine

Full body workout for weight training (Monday and Thursdays)

Bench Press 12-10-5-2-2-2 (The sets of 2 reps are real heavy sets to failure)

Incline Press 2-2-2 

Back pulldowns behind neck for back 15-15-15-15-15-15-15-15

Press behind neck for shoulders 5-4-4-4

Squats for legs 15-10-8

Leg extensions 8-8-8

Leg Curls 8-8-8

Standing calves 15-15-15

Aerobic exercise (Monday, Tuesday, Thursdays, Friday and Saturday), on the days of weight-training do it after the weight-training:

Fast walking 1 hour  
Stationary Bike on level 7: 30 minutes


PART 2 THE MIND



Buy these books from http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sd_allcat_bo?ie=UTF8&node=283155

1-The Will to Power by Fredrich Nietzsche  

2-  Beyond Good and Evil by Fredrich Nietzsche  

3- Napoleon Bonaparte by Emil Ludwig.  

4- Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Fredrich Nietzsche

5- Crime and Punishment by Fiodor Dostoevsky.  

6-  Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman

7-  Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman

8- King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger 
Lancelyn Green

9- Faust by Goethe


10- Xenophon's Anabasis by Michael A. Flower


11-  Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome by John Man

12-  Superman and Philosophy by William Irwin

13-  Che Guevara a Biography by Richard L. Harris

14-  Hannibal Enemy of Rome by Ben Kane

15-  The Republic by Plato 

16-  The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

17-  The Antichrist by Fredrich Nietzsche

18-  Complete Works by Arthur Rimbaud

19-  Know Your Enemy: The Story of Rage Against the Machine by Joel McIver 

20 -The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

21-  The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

22-  The Politics of Aristotle

23-  Homer by The Odyssey

24-  The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer

25-  The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

26-  Human all too human by Fredrich Nietzsche

27-  The Genealogy of Morals by Fredrich Nietzsche

28-  Untimely Meditations by Fredrich Nietzsche

29- The Birth of Tragedy by Fredrich Nietzsche

30-  Twilight Of The Idols by Fredrich Nietzsche

31-  The Gay Science by Fredrich Nietzsche


Friday, February 20, 2015

NIETZSCHE ON LANGUAGE, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BODY

  • Download PDF FileYou may download the entire book review as Adobe PDF format clicking PDF icon on the left. If you need some clarifications about copyright or usage rights, please contact us at nceditors@ietzschecircle.com.

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Philologists use the phrase “Homerum ex Homero” (“Homer out of Homer”) to mean that a writer’s language should be interpreted through other writings by the same author. Thus, one would try to understand a text in Homer by consulting parallel passages in Homer, but not by adducing works by Hesiod or later poets.(1) Until recently, this seemed to be the reigning principle of Nietzsche studies. When attempting to understand a passage in Beyond Good and Evil one might bring to bear other passages from that book or related sections from works published by Nietzsche, but references even to theNachlaβ were considered suspect and books on Nietzsche and Emerson, Lange, Burckhardt and others tended to be viewed as specialized. There are sound theoretical reasons for observing such strictures. Nonetheless, in recent years a plethora of studies have emerged, indicating how views of Nietzsche can be supplemented and enlarged by judicious reference to the books he studied and the assumptions of his time. InNietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body, Christian J. Emden has made an interesting, if not always convincing, contribution to this literature.
His title at first seems misleading. For the first two-thirds of the book, Nietzsche’s theory of language is his paramount topic, and while he often brings in issues having to do with consciousness and the body (the secondary elements in his title), these almost always have immediate bearing on Nietzsche’s ideas on language and are rarely explored for their own sake.  Only rather late—in the fourth of five chapters—does the book open into another dimension of thought. There, as will be shown, Emden proposes that Nietzsche extends certain tropes associated with language well beyond the properly linguistic sphere to encompass the neurophysiological and psychological processes of sensation and apprehension. Even in this neurophysiological treatment, however, Emden’s departure point is Nietzsche’s theory of language. As the author makes clear, the topic of language is central to Nietzsche’s vision and involves not only consciousness and the body but issues of logic (concept formation and theories of truth), hermeneutics (interpretation, perspectivism), and psychology (the ways human beings construct a self). By the time Emden has shown the implications for the will to power andÜbermensch, it is clear that Nietzsche’s theory of language is intrinsic to almost all his key views, the signal exception being the eternal recurrence, a topic Emden never mentions.
It is the more regrettable, then, that Nietzsche’s single extended text on language (“Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”) leans so heavily on Gustav Gerber’s Die Sprache als Kunst. While this dependence needs to be acknowledged, Emden believes that Gerber’s influence has been exaggerated. Gerber, in his view, stressed the aesthetic dimensions of language, whereas Nietzsche’s approach emerged from his historical studies. Indeed, for Emden, interpretations of Nietzsche have in general overstressed the aesthetic aspects of his work to the detriment of its scientific and historicist underpinnings, and its study can be much enriched by consideration of the intellectual and scientific approaches of his time.
Accordingly, the author announces in his introduction that he is less interested in the validity of Nietzsche’s ideas than in how they emerged in the context of contemporary intellectual concerns. It is, indeed, Nietzsche’s “timeliness” which most engages him, for, as he observes, “ . . . philosophical ideas and arguments do not develop in a historically indeterminate space of pure thought.”(2) He also acknowledges that he hopes to use Nietzsche’s indebtedness to contemporary studies as a model through which to explore certain sociological views of Foucault, Bourdieu, and others. These men argued that the various intellectual fields at play during a given historical period intersect in ways that affect the paths of those disciplines’ research. Emden finds in Nietzsche’s work a seismograph of the shifts among the dominant intellectual approaches of his time.
Emden begins this project with an account of Nietzsche’s early views on rhetoric, a field of study out of fashion in Nietzsche’s youth and moribund for decades. In preparing his lecture courses on verbal strategies of the Greeks and Romans, Nietzsche came to believe that the development of philosophic modes of speech were intertwined with those of rhetoric and that (as Emden puts it) “reason begins with rhetoric, and rhetoric itself is largely responsible for the structure, constitution, and development of knowledge . . . .”(3) The pivotal figures here were Plato, who affected to mistrust rhetoric but who deployed it with cunning effectiveness, and Aristotle who attempted to codify its processes and thereby to establish canons of reasoning. Yet Nietzsche was particularly struck by the Sophists, who exposed the difficulty of distinguishing between philosophizing and persuasive speech. As Emden explains, “Nietzsche’s fervent philosophical interest in the problem of language . . . seems to have emerged, at least initially, in the context of an attempt to account historically for the tense relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in Greek antiquity.”(4)
Nietzsche was going against the contemporary grain by studying rhetoric at all, but Emden contends that it at least provided him with a prophylaxis against the “myth of the given,” that is, “any philosophical discourse that relies on the objectivity and universality of knowledge without realizing its own historicity and indebtedness to language.”(5) Locke’s linguistic theories provide an example of the sort of view of language that Nietzsche sought to discredit, and Emden demonstrates its deficiencies and how Nietzsche sought to remedy these.
Emden also toils mightily with Nietzsche’s characterization of language as intrinsically metaphorical, a task in which he has much valuable to say, even if he is eventually forced to concede,“ . . . attempts to limit the meaning of metaphor are always flawed and often tautological.“(6) This rather dispiriting conclusion does not stop him from continuing to use the term as though it were unproblematic. Thus, he repeatedly makes reference to “metaphor as an explanatory model,”(7) although one would think a term that is intrinsically indefinable would have no explanatory power whatever. To be fair, Emden was earlier speaking of metaphor in its linguistic usage, whereas he eventually proposes that Nietzsche extended the term to include physiological transformations as well: “ . . . what [Nietzsche] seems to mean, . . . is metaphor as an explanatory model that can comprise the complexity of nervous processes, mental representation, and language, and this model rests on the most basic understanding of metaphor as a form of transferring or transmitting some kind of information, content, or impulse from one level to another . . . ”(8)

This characterization is a bit unclear and highly questionable. Surely Nietzsche’s point in the “Truth and Lie” essay is not that metaphor functions as “a form of transferring or transmitting some kind of information, content, or impulse from one level to another,” but rather that it provides an illusory cover for the fact that no such transfer could take place. It is here, by the way, that Emden’s anti-aesthetic bias becomes rather questionable, for Nietzsche increasingly came to view concept formation as a creative and artistic act, a view that is carefully and insightfully explored by Johann Figl in his Dialektik der Gewalt.(9) If Emden’s formulation is questionable, however, he does follow it up by suggesting that discussion of Nietzsche’s positions, here and elsewhere, can benefit from consideration of the biological sciences of his time. In this instance he finds nineteenth century physiology and such topics as the transfer of electrical energy through neurons to be a propos.(10)  
As the above suggests, Nietzsche did not conceive language as merely a system of incorporeal signs. Lange, Hartmann, and Schopenhauer had taught him to view it as conditioned by its production by the body, and the philosopher was supported in this belief by the general scientific views of his era. Emden reminds the reader that mid-nineteenth-century biologists engineered a multitude of experiments designed to explore the relationship of neurophysiology and mental phenomena. The best-known example, Broca’s work on aphasia, had demonstrated a linkage between the use of language and a specific area of the brain. Nietzsche kept abreast of such research, although he was reluctant to indulge in the facile reductionism common at the time. As Emden frequently points out, he struggled to account for the intertwining of language and body without collapsing either into the other.
For most of his book Emden views Nietzsche in the light of two kinds of resources: the ancients, whose work he taught for nearly a decade, and the natural scientists who made such important discoveries during his own era. Only in the final chapter is a move made from these two sources to address a third. If Nietzsche indeed refused to reduce language to a function of physiology, he was nonetheless forced to account for their interaction over time and the capacity of humanity to change. In order to preserve both aspects (language as a product of the body and language as a mode of creative interpretation) and at the same time to acknowledge their interplay under various conditions, Nietzsche turned to such proto-anthropologists as Blumenbach, Herder, and Humboldt, and to their successors, who were devoting so much energy and thought to the peoples outside the European mainstream. Emden proposes that “. . . Nietzsche thus sought to found his philosophical critique on an essentially anthropological insight— namely, the overlap of nature and culture as exemplified by the physiological background of human knowledge.”(11) Memory provided a key to this overlap, Emden argues, for it clearly had an organic basis (as experiments on aphasia had disclosed) yet was also aligned with language and its role in the transmission of social institutions. “Like Herder before him, then, Nietzsche suggests that the history of culture must take account of natural history, and memory is the place where the evolution of organic life meets the development of mental existence.”(12) Emden closes his book with a treatment of Nietzsche’s views on truth and morality.
The above summary presents the barest outline of Emden’s findings and in the interests of space omits qualifying discussions that are essential to his argument. Also absent are discussions of the scientific and linguistic researches of Nietzsche’s time as well as the philosopher’s own views on such topics as interpretation, truth, and construction of the self. It must also be acknowledged that the above may be deficient for quite another reason. This reviewer has often found Emden’s presentation so fluid and provisional, that it is often difficult to grasp either his meaning or what his final position might be. That a discerning and industrious intelligence is at work throughout cannot be doubted. That it has worked through and distilled its insights into a form worthy of their own importance is more open to query.
It must be said that Emden has set himself a task of forbidding difficulty. On the one hand he seeks to exposit Nietzsche's theories of language, consciousness, and the body, any one of which would prove formidable to accomplish and which as a triple ambition verges on the impossible. Yet he has tried to do even more, describing—often in detail—shifts in scholarly and scientific practices in the middle to late nineteenth century. To cap it all, he attempts to show how Nietzsche's ideas either arose in response to or were colored by these changes. To do all this in a single book—and to add as subtext an attempt to work through certain approaches associated with Bourdieu and Foucault— would demand prodigious learning, which Emden has, and a mastery of literary and intellectual structure, which in this text, at least, is less evident.
It demands yet another element, and that is a clear and consistently observed methodology. The book’s deficiency in this regard can be illustrated in a single statement, which moreover enunciates a central ambition of the book: ““If we wish to better understand how Nietzsche sought to formulate the relationships among language, consciousness, and the body, we must map the ambiguities of his writings onto the epistemic constellations that shaped the cultural consciousness and intellectual outlook of the later nineteenth century.”(13) This rather exciting if nebulous statement exposes the nub of Emden’s problem. Nietzsche’s theory of language (not to mention consciousness and body) is already vague and difficult to define. Emden proposes further to compare it with a field designated by “epistemic constellation,” a resonant and intellectually inviting term, which is, however, every bit as vague as the Nietzschean writings that he hopes to illuminate. As a result he finds himself in the position of trying to “map” one ill-defined homologue onto another that is equally diffuse. We must not ask for degrees of precision inappropriate to the material. We can, however, request that if Emden wishes to compare two bodies of work, he define the terms of comparison and show that he has met them.
As a point of contrast, one might mention a similar claim made in Claudia Crawford’s The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language,(14) a work Emden does not mention. Crawford too believed that Nietzsche’s work was heavily indebted to works by contemporaries, notably Lange, Fischer, Hartmann, and Gerber, with strong contributions by Schopenhauer and Kant. In her case, she directly linked individual statements by Nietzsche to specific texts by these authors. This was an act of genuine mapping in the sense of establishing that the items to be compared were homologues and that there existed some one-to-one correspondence between them. It is connections of this specificity that Emden seems unable to provide.
One might also compare Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body with its successor, Emden’s Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. In that work also, the author is at pains to show how Nietzsche’s ideas and writings fit into the ideological battles of his time. In the latter case, however, the subject matters at issue were history and politics, disciplines that lay at the heart of Nietzsche’s project virtually from the beginning. The reader can see quite directly how Nietzsche struggled with historicist issues, and thanks to Emden’s illuminating contextual framing, which is far more fluid and assured than that presented in the earlier work, the reader can see that politics too was on his mind at least from The Birth of Tragedy onward. One does not need to speak of mapping when one can see the author immediately grappling with the issues at hand.
Physiology and the biological sciences, by contrast, entered Nietzsche’s published work obliquely and with little explicit acknowledgement. Indeed, virtually all the citations Emden quotes are from the Nachlaβ and would not have been available to the public during Nietzsche’s own time or in the immediate aftermath. As a result, the influence of biology, while unquestionably pervasive in Nietzsche’s work, is so little self-evident, at least in the canonic texts, that decades elapsed before most scholars recognized their presence at all. The process of showing that they influenced the philosopher not just in the better known passages (in the first parts of Beyond Good and Evil, for example) but throughout his writings calls for far more sustained and explicit exposition than Emden provides.
Ultimately, it must be said that Emden has a plausible thesis, has done an enormous amount of spadework, and has given his subject matter careful and insightful attention. Anyone interested in Nietzsche’s theory of language or the ways he sought to incorporate physiology into his work will find this text obligatory reading. Nonetheless, the volume as completed does not do justice to its own achievements. As has already been indicated, Emden’s later book, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, displays none of the aforementioned failings. One therefore awaits the day when he will return to the insights of this study and refashion them in a way that gives them their due. Until that time readers will find in Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body a suggestive and frequently informative book, which promises much, delivers much, yet leaves the reader wondering at the gap between.