Thoughts of that sort were in the back of my mind- but the trend they took was most definitely influenced by Nietzsche, in such veritable philosophic battlefields as The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche's own combativeness was in itself enough to make him realize the value of combat so far as he was concerned, in his rest- less ingenious ways of building philosophic perspectives designed to produce a "transvaluation of all values." With his astounding com- bination of madness and profound insight, he dealt with the elements of vengeance, enslavement, and tragically idealized pugnacity that he saw, rightly or wrongly (probably a bit of both) lurking beneath our words for virtues, religion, Socratic reformism. And his very style seemed to me like a constant striking of blows. Indeed, the Nietzschean mode of critique causes us to remind ourselves that even our word "virtue" is related to the Latin word vir, the man of arms-bearing age, as per the arma virumque cano on which the Aeneid begins, in con- trast with the young (puer) and the old (senex), terms that give us re- spectively "puerility" and "senility." And since he himself in his book, The Will to Power, laid such great stress upon what he calls "perspectives," on noting the element of "transvaluation" in his dart-like nomenclature I entitled the middle section of my book "Perspective by Incongruity," having in mind the two-faced or Janus-like aspects of much modern style, due to the ambiguities of the transitions which the rapid transformations of technology are forcing upon us.
From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer
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