On Nietzsche's Bees

A little self-promotion never hurt anyone...

So for Constitution Day I moderated a panel at Odessa College on voting. The link goes to Facebook, but if you're willing to watch it there, I guarantee it's worth your time. My colleagues talk about the brutal violence used to prevent people from voting as well as the importance of turnout. It's an informative, educated discussion and I want to be on more panels like this.

Also, CCHS Magazine 2024 features me on pages 22-23 (20-21 of the paper issue). I talk there about what I'm doing with writing in general.

The plan is to be on a podcast soon, where I'll talk about my work with Sigma Kappa Delta. I'll link to it at the earliest opportunity.

The knowledge you need for self-knowledge

Two things have been on my mind recently. First, I'm working through how Nietzsche develops his famous "We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves, – so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?" It sounds correct; it does seem that the quest for knowledge can block the opportunity for self-knowledge. There are people who have the lineup and batting averages of the '93 Phillies memorized. They have knowledge, certainly. I don't think I need to comment much on the lack of self-knowledge in their case (in online parlance, they "know some guys").

But I also worry about those who don't really understand what a general knowledge of history is worth. For example, what is at stake in knowing famous phrases from the Declaration of Independence or explaining what the consequences of the space race were? Or on a larger scale, talking about how science, democracy, secularism, and capitalism developed, or that they were developed. I believe a consciousness of history ultimately entails a certain feeling, an unease: you know nothing in our present world has to be this way. (Of course, this is self-evidently a Nietzschean theme.)

Do you need to be conscious of history to know yourself? Initially, most of us would consider that a stretch. Aren't there strong, silent types who love hard work or being outdoors? Don't they excel at self-knowledge? Books are not necessary for them. Knowledge may only be superfluous detail when weighed against a combination of virtue, experience, and happiness. To go further, knowledge seems trivial when contrasted with the depths of genuine affection.

I wonder to what degree Nietzsche's thought holds that gathering knowledge fails to create the conditions for something greater. Shortly after saying "we are unknown to ourselves, we knowers," he compares us to bees, constantly collecting and reporting back to the hive to make honey, but not necessarily enjoying the full fruit of our own efforts:

How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing – to ‘bring something home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’, – who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time?

Our treasure is "where the hives of our knowledge are;" our "heart" is obsessed with "bring[ing] something home;" it isn't clear we have focus or time for experience itself. Practically speaking, someone who tries to know--especially through books or media, not, for example, through other people, or travel, or experiments of one's own–is someone trying to replace what should be an experience with a proposition. Life, presented on this page, with these footnotes and these caveats. No need to go beyond the page. Rather, here, have another page.

If you push this logic too far it is impossible to understand how anyone could write anything of any value for themselves, let alone others. And now that I think about it more, I lean toward believing Nietzsche wants us to do that, wants us to collapse his rhetoric. The categories of "knowledge" and "experience" are the problem. If you're reading a book and beginning to understand something deeply relevant to your own life, isn't that a non-trivial combination of knowledge and experience? What if you can't read because of your eyesight, but you pay careful attention to those around you, reading them like a book?

I also think Nietzsche has a specific target we have to imagine. There are people who believe that gathering knowledge alone results in progress. That if you just accumulate facts, the present generation gains and the future wins. And I have to confess that I myself believe this, because in tough situations I'm looking for better knowledge. I want to assess the situation correctly and I'm waiting because acting immediately might not be in anyone's best interest. To a degree, I rely on the fact of facts to change the world before I engage. Am I a bee, hoarding all the honey, completely unaware of what it is all for?

One of Nietzsche's biggest worries is that we will be too soft and too conformist to be ourselves. "Knowledge" conceived as a series of general propositions or universal truths doesn't just eliminate belief. It strikes hard against people who do connect knowledge to their own lives not just to make things better, but to empower and unleash freedom. There's knowledge as a bunch of answers, and knowledge as building your mind, and these two conceptions are separate. The former is visible in our scholastic regime of unending testing. The latter is visible when people take the time to understand how poverty works and fight it from a position of strength.

Still, you need some knowledge, some basic facts, to get things started. And I guess my worry about a lack of consciousness of history is not ill-founded. In the end, you're going back to something like the Declaration of Independence with your own words because you want to say something about the world you live in. It isn't the worst thing to not have anything to say, but to say that it is always a virtue to be a strong, silent type helps no one. The fact of the matter is that people need to advocate for others and appreciate difference. That is not happening in a world where corporate trainings are treated as exercises in building knowledge and compassion is often a marketing ploy. Someone has to speak the truth.

References

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. 2nd edition: Revised Student Edition. Edited by Keith Ansell-Person, Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.