We are happy to announce that Jordan Rodgers, Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy here at Notre Dame will be giving a workshop entitled “Disinterestedness in Art and Knowledge in the Early Nietzsche”. The workshop will be at 3 pm on Wednesday, April 10th in 131 Decio, discussion to follow. Refreshments will be available. Here is an abstract of the talk:
This paper is an attempt to follow up a bit on Gabriel Richardson-Lear’s suggestion that we can understand aesthetic disinterestedness in Plato not as mere abstraction from all personal interests but as an openness to the transformation of one’s personal interests. I will try to show that similar ideas are operative not just in Nietzsche’s thoughts concerning beauty but also in his account of more straightforwardly cognitive disciplines like philosophy and the historical sciences. In particular, despite Nietzsche’s attack on the Kantian/Schopenhauerian doctrine of aesthetic disinterestedness, and his constant refrain that we should look for the “value for life” (and so for our personal interests) not only of artistic endeavors but of work in more straightforwardly cognitive activities like philosophy and history, we can understand these claims not in accordance with a crude instrumentalism about these disciplines — as the will-to-power theorist Nietzsche is all too often read — but as a call to be open to the possibility that taking part in them might transform us in fundamental and thus unpredictable ways. In turn, the appeal to disinterestedness in the contemplation of aesthetic objects and the pursuit knowledge can be understood not as the maintaining of the nobility of these pursuits but as a sign of a kind of complacent unwillingness to be open to such transformation. This is the point of Nietzsche’s critique.