As I was reading for my comprehensive exams this week, I came across this passage just after writing my last post about my bodily askesis and goals:
“Philosophy is not, in spite of its self-representation, a rational, intellectual system of inquiry and knowledge acquisition, based purely on truth considerations and the requirements of conceptual coherence. It is practice…a practice that does things, legitimizing and challenging other practices, enabling things to happen or preventing them from occurring…Far from contemplative reflection, philosophy is a consequence of the drive to live, to conquer, a will to power that is primarily corporeal.”
“The will to power animates, moves, energizes and strives to proliferate. This may explain why Nietzsche insisted on a new type of philosophy or knowledge, one which, instead of remaining sedentary, ponderous, stolid, was allied with the arts of movement: theater, dance, and music. Philosophy itself was to be written walking–or, preferably, dancing. This is because philosophy is a bodily activity and is…capable of dynamizing and enhancing life. Philosophy and truth are capable of affirming active power when they, in their turn, return power and force to the body from which they derive.”
-Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Volatile Bodies’ (1994), pp.126-128
P.S. Thanks to my family for being wonderful and amazing.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuPCZU2iC74&fs=1&hl=en_US]