VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

7 THEATRUM MUNDI
interpretation stands for assuming of masks. Foucault sustains that the
interpretation moves from what to whom.
Another deviation of evil mask is represented by tehnicism:
„After all, the classic culture is the expression of «aristocracy», of the
strong affirmative wills. Than, becoming a tool, becoming civilization, it
comes to be split from its own origins, tearing apart from life itself. It
becomes a useless mask, a suit that no one wants to wear. Life itself is
completely planed and the man is transformed in a machine.” 5
This critique of tehnicism is taken by Heidegger (from Nietzsche) who
makes of it a theoretical achievement under the form of the victory of
unauthentic seen as result of hyper civilization from the times of machines.
These mutations reflect in Heidegger’s works, especially in the critique of
unauthentic from Being and Time, where the individual takes the way of life
of the man suffocated by his social dimension (das man) 6 .
I see the unauthentic determined by the evolution of technique also like
a mask of culture, a form of evil mask represented by technique. The
tehnicism is above all the victory of thinking, from Socrates, continuing with
Descartes to Nietzsche, which denounced the character of fake solution for
problems appeared due to the exaggerate evolution of civilization.
At Nietzsche the reactive forces are situated in the impossibility to take
the mask of active forces, because the powerful active forces occupy already
the configuration of power. Taking the mask of active forces, these have the
possibility to conserve their existence reacting subversively, from the
shadow 7 . This is the way that it can be reached the domination of reactive
forces (weak forces). The example of Nietzsche for this travestying is the
apparition of the philosopher which came for the first time under a borrowed
mask, the ascetic. Although the risk is an enormous one – ultimately the
philosopher can believe in this mask.
Nietzsche reveals also another aspect of the mask – the respect that
the mask can impose. As I sad earlier respect is gained hiding the vulgarity
and imposing a necessary distance between people. So, the one who wears
the mask is an initiate who hides skillfully his knowledge. The aristocratic
spirit is able to wear the mask in order to defend his noble origins. Nietzsche
considers the distance between things imposed of the mask in the aphorism
270 from Beyond Good and Evil.
The mask is the one that not only protect us from superficiality, but it
also confers an indirect social role to the one that wears it in Greek tragedies
(or better said confers a social responsibility to the one that wears it due to
the models that embodies). The auto suppression of ancient culture that
concerned Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy is marked in the theater
5 Ibidem, p. 155-156 (my translation)
6 Martin Heidegger, Fiinţă şi timp, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2003
7 George Bondor, Op.cit., p. 159 (my translation)