One of the exceptionally attractive qualities of Nietzsche’s brilliantly original style of philosophical writing, for better or worse, is that it’s the Rorschach blot of philosophy: everyone who takes it seriously finds their own philosophical obsessions written there. And this is true, with a bang!, of the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols: “How To Philosophize With A Hammer.” Nevertheless, bracketting the obsessional component for a moment, it seems true that by using that subtitle, Nietzsche intended to convey not only the radical destruction of the classical philosophical distinction between theory and practice, as well as the radical destruction of the classical metaphilosophical distinction between philosophy and the arts, especially poetry—for example, Wallace Stevens’s truly amazing modernist philosophico-poetic masterpiece, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”—but also radically to blur any sharp metaphilosophical distinction between philosophy and politics. Yet whatever Nietzsche actually intended, the Nazis certainly found their philosophical obsessions written in Nietzsche’s work; and notoriously, Heidegger was not only deeply interested in Nietzsche but also, for a time, in the 1930s, threw all the weight of his heavy philosophical reputation behind the Nazis. In “How to Philosophize with a Hammer and a Blue Guitar: Quietism, Activism, and The Mind-Body Politic,” Robert Hanna focuses on the larger question that’s raised by Nietzsche’s subtitle and also by what Hans Sluga not inaccurately calls “Heidegger’s crisis,” i.e., Heidegger’s philosophical collaborationism with the Nazis: “what should be the relationship between philosophy and politics?” Hanna is also equally deeply interested in what a philosophy of the future could look like, if we radically break down the dichotomous distinctions between theory and practice, philosophy and the arts, and philosophy and politics. He calls that philosophizing with a hammer and a blue guitar. More specifically, Hanna distinguishes and describes seven different kinds of philosophical quietism and nine different kinds of philosophical activism; then he criticizes and rejects all seven kinds of quietism and also eight of the nine kinds of activism; and then finally, he describes and defends the ninth kind of philosophical activism, based on what Michelle Maiese and Hanna have called the mind-body politic (Maiese and Hanna, 2019).
REFERENCE
(Maiese and Hanna, 2019). Maiese, M. and Hanna, R., The Mind-Body Politic. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Also available online in preview HERE.
You can find an accessible but also fully detailed podcast on Hanna’s “How to Philosophize with a Hammer and a Blue Guitar: Quietism, Activism, and The Mind-Body Politic,” created by Scott Heftler and other friends of Philosophy Without Borders, HERE.
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