I apologize for the swearing. Actually I take that back. I don’t apologize.
I meant to post this video a few weeks ago when we were covering Nietzsche because when I was first watching True Detective Rust Cohle instantly reminded me of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Cohle’s description of human consciousness reminds me of Nietzsche’s opening in his “Truth and Lies In A Nonmoral Sense,” when he talks about the arrogance of creating intellect. The difference is that Cohle attributes the creation of intellect to nature whereas Nietzsche attributes it to humans themselves.
The importance is not which of them is right because as Nietzsche goes on to say such stories are impotent to truly describe anything because of the sign-signifier problem. So what do we do with a theory that points out the powerless of language to really communicate stuff, while it uses language to say language is powerless?
Also we generally associate Nietzsche with nihilism and it seems there’s great difficulty in writing nihilist characters. As Woody Harrelson’s character asks, what’s the point of them getting out of bed in the morning? I think True Detective does a good job attacking this problem, though it might turn out Cohle isn’t as nihilist as he wants to be.
Yeah, pretty Nietzschean, but even w/o the will to power. Hmmmm.
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