The Formation of the Self. Nietzsche and Complexity

Abstract

Ab stract:The pur pose of this ar ti cle is to ex am ine the re la tion ship be tween the for mation of the self and the worldly ho ri zon within which this self achieves its mean ing. Our in quiry takes place from two per spec tives: the first de rived from the Nietzschean anal y sis of how one be comes what one is; the other from cur rent de vel op ments in com plex ity the ory. This two-angled ap proach opens up dif fer ent, yet re lated di men sions of a non-essentialist un der standing of the self that is none the less nei ther ar bi trary nor de ter min is tic. In deed, at the meet ing point of these two per spec tives on the self lies a con cep tion of a dy namic, worldly self, whose iden tity is bound up with its ap pear ance in a world shared with oth ers. Af ter ex am in ing this ar gu ment from the re spec tive view points of fered by Nietz sche and com plex ity the ory, the ar ti cle concludes with a con sid er ation of some of the po lit i cal and eth i cal im pli ca tions of rep re sent ing our situatedness within a shared hu man do main as a con dition for self-formation. In tro duc tionA short aph o rism from the sec ond vol ume of Hu man, All Too Hu man reads: "In sol itude the sol i tary man con sumes him self, in the mul ti tude the many con sume him. Now choose" (Nietz sche HAH II, 348).2 So as to leave us in no doubt about what is involved in this choice, Nietz sche in scribes his maxim with the ti tle: "From the land of the can ni bals". His point, one could ar gue, is pre cisely that one can not choose. To embark on ei ther course -re treat ing en tirely into sol i tude or be com ing pas sively immersed in communality -is to lose one self. What is at stake here is this prob lem atic re la tion ship be tween the self and the crowd, be tween sol i tude and world li ness. Nietzsche is thus en gaged with the gen eral prob lem of the for ma tion of the self. How does the self come to be so that we can not deny its in de pend ent ex is tence (and con se quently ac knowl edg ing it as a bearer of re spon si bil ity), yet re cog nise its in ev i ta ble so cial embeddedness? In this ar ti cle we are in ter ested in the pos si bil ity that the think ing selfhood lies be tween the two ex tremes of sol i tude or so lip sism on the one hand, and unilinear so cial de ter mi na tion on the other -not as their di a lec ti cal res o lu tion into a higher unity, but as a tight rope walk be tween two kinds of dis so lu tion.1 To whom cor re spon dence should be ad dressed (e-mail: <FPC@sun.ac.za>. This au thor also ac knowledges the fi nan cial as sis tance of the Na tional Re search Foun da tion: So cial Sci ences and Hu man i ties of South Af rica to wards this re search, as well as the sup port of the In sti tute for the Study of Co her ence and Emer gence (ISCE) in Boston, USA. Opin ions ex pressed and con clu sions ar rived at are those of the authors, and are not nec es sar ily to be at trib uted to the Na tional Re search Foun da tion or to ISCE. 2 Nietz sche's works are iden ti fied by their Eng lish...

The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics

“…Otherwise stated, our modelling choices are based on subjective judgements about what mattersboth in terms of our work and in terms of our personal lives. This introduces an unavoidable ethical component into our thinking about complex phenomena (Preiser & Cilliers, 2010;Cilliers, de Villiers & Roodt, 2002;Derrida, 1988). In this regard, ethics should be understood as something that constitutes both our knowledge and us, rather than as a normative system that dictates right action.…”