by Jeff Martin
“A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.”
I wonder what Friedrich Nietzsche would have said had he read the paper today in Independence, where an 80-year old man, walking innocently toward his back porch beneath the banner of a clear Missouri sky, was attacked by a younger man, who slashed repeatedly at his back with a knife before running off.
I suppose he would have quoted himself. He would have restated what I quoted above, a quip he launched into the world over a century ago in his book Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
“Mr. Martin, a criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it,” he would say. “Now, please, turn out the lights when you leave.”
Clearly this young man was possessed of a violent act which had both a life of its own and a startling need to reveal itself to the world. What can be said of this? We all have violence, carry it close to us, but most of us manage to keep it under control. Why could this young man not do this?
I suppose it would be easy to say that it was drugs, but let’s suppose for a moment that it had nothing to do with drugs. Say the young man was lucid. Say the young man had just finished a bowl of cereal. Say the young man felt the cold milk warm his stomach, the way everyone remembers how cold milk warms a warm stomach.
Say he went outside with a knife in his hand, a knife he could not remember picking up. Or a knife he could remember picking up. At what point, standing on that longitude and latitude, did he decide that he would cross the street and slash at an old man’s back several times before running off?
I suppose Nietzsche was wrong, then, in this regard --- or if not wrong in his theory, then short. I think a deed becomes small, becomes susceptible to his and everyone else’s scrutiny, only when it is witnessed and, inevitably, explained.
This unknown man committing an unexplained act simply did what God did: he created a world without an explanation.
2 comments:
I think a deed becomes small, becomes susceptible to his and everyone else’s scrutiny, only when it is witnessed and, inevitably, explained.
I will posit that the deed becomes either big or small, depending on the explanation--is the explanation isolated and obscure? Or is it a clear symptom of a larger, universal (I hesitate to use that word) problem?
Seems like there's a lot of directions to go with this.
-Kriscinda
Kriscinda,
You certainly can go many ways with this, yes. Such is the insanity of philosophy.
There is tremendous power in keeping an experience and thoughts to oneself. Certainly that power is not all positive, to be sure, but powerful in how the act and revelation is one's own, not to be poisoned by another.
Enjoying your input; wish more readers would inject...
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