Azkedelia
02-14-2009, 03:34 AM
I shall start in good religious tone, as befits this subject, with a confession, and a dramatic one at that. My first reading of Nietzsche, when I was at university, fatally determined the course my life was to take. I was not to take the normal career to be expected of one of my background and education. I voluntarily entered a kind of bohemian pilgrimage for twenty years, and, to coin a phrase apt for this essay, my tragedy was born of the spirit of Nietzsche's music. Reading Nietzsche-first Beyond Good and Evil, later Thus Spoke Zarathustra and then Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo-in the Penguin classic editions, depressed and exhilarated me. In the latter edition I had written in a poor hand, "M Esdaile Walker - Courage, Style aristocratic" which last three words indeed could be used to summarise the most important qualities in Nietzsche's view, of human life.
It seemed impossible to me after reading Nietzsche, to take seriously the course of career, success and well-being in a world teeming with the "last man" predicted in Also sprach Zarathustra and marked by the facile acceptance of the now Godless world as it is. The future should not be separated from the past. Thoughtless careers for money, petty fame and security were ambitions I disdained, as Nietzsche disdained them and inspired me to disdain them. Nietzsche was and is for me and despite his own disdain for the movement to which we give the name, a thorough romantic. To an extent, this magazine has been conceived and continued in Nietzsche's shadow. To be a romantic is to be "half in love with easeful death" and in the spirits of the past.. Now, nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita, it is time for my reckoning with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Summarised, Nietzsche is associated with a number of key radical philosophical positions. These positions are frequently extreme. They provoke and because they provoke, compel the reader to take a stand, to answer Nietzsche with either a yea or nay. God was dead and along with God the metaphysics of good and evil which Christian theology had constructed around the concept "God"- Inequality and hierarchy belonged to the natural order of the cosmos and was ordered through the exercise of the will. The superior human is right to crush the inferior. The justification of life is found in aesthetics, in art. Man is only justified in life in his highest types. The highest level of culture was reached by the Ancient Hellenes and their twin Gods of form and intoxication, Apollo and Dionysus. Evil is necessary to the vitality of life. A new man is coming whom Nietzsche dubbed the Übermensch, (superman, overman, higher man) who will give the earth a new meaning and create new values. Nietzsche, like de Sade, whom in some ways he resembles, poses the reality of radical positions and invites us to accept them if we are not afraid of where the truth will take us. Time is not linear but circular. Life consists in becoming through a striving of the will to conquer, so that conquering and life are indistinguishable. War forges great men. Women are the enemies of human progress because by their nature they make peace with pertaining reality and prefer security to seeking to change an existing order. Style is more important in human life than happiness.
Nietzsche's was a lonely life and it became lonelier as it progressed. He was not a professional philosopher (he survived off the charity of his old employer) yet the focus of his entire life was the production of philosophical works which in his life time few people read but which since his death have been read by millions. He never married and the nearest he came to it was a rejected offer to Lou von Salome, who was later to be the mistress of Freud and Rilke. Nietzsche's writing was placed on the Roman Catholic Index. His collapse into a vegetable state was seen by many pious Christians as evidence of the punishment of God. Nietzsche: the Faust of our times: this is how Thomas Mann portrayed him in Dr. Faustus, where the Nietzschean "overreach" parallels Germany's unsuccessful challenge to the United States as the determining power of the twentieth century.
Nietzsche's writing was admired, albeit selectively, by the young fascist movements of the twenties and thirties. He has frequently been denounced as a forerunner of fascism and a considerable part of the debate around Nietzsche has consisted in his admirers, especially his Jewish admirers, seeking to prove that his views were wilfully misinterpreted by the national socialists. In fact, the highly selective admiration of Nietzsche after the Second World War by liberals easily matches the wilful distortion of any fascists. Part of the evidence that Nietzsche was "misused" is alleged to lie in the fact that his posthumous work, published as Die Wille zur Macht by his sister, Elizabeth, is presented so as to suggest that he was nationalistic and anti-semitic. Her biography of her brother, which is said to distort his character, although frequently referred to, is out of print, but a denunciation of Elizabeth remains standard in post-war Nietzsche studies.
Oh how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings-the Ring of Recurrence?
For I love you, oh Eternity!
(Also sprach Zarathustra).
Nietzsche is most famous, I think, for the statement "God is dead". It originally comes from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Joyous Science- FW) repeated in another context in Zarathustra's Prologue in Also Sprach Zarathustra (AsZ). The expression struck me when I first heard it (years before I met it, accompanied by an almost sickening feeling of anticipation, when reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as not the utterance of an atheist, when by "atheist" we mean one who denies the possibility of the existence of the divinity. "God is dead" means that God died, and to die one must first live. God was but is no more. This is what Nietzsche meant and it is the pronouncement of a religious writer. In the words of the woman in whom Nietzsche had placed his highest hopes, that proud aristocratic twin-star of his to be who never was, Lou Salome, "in the shocks to his spirit, when he fancies he is following his own sacrifice and commitment, he is releasing his own religious passion" (Nietzsche in seinen Werken Insel Taschenbuch p. 61) Yes, the man was religious who in Zarathustra's words of comfort to the dying tight-rope walker said of divine punishment and the Devil, "All you have spoken of does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: therefore fear nothing any more!" (Zarathustra's Prologue).
Nietzsche believed he had a mission to relieve higher men of doubt, the doubt that comes from a guilty conscience, especially when that guilt and that conscience has been induced by others, and he argued that all bad conscience ultimately originates "somewhere else", not in the natural self. Either one accepts that one belongs to another's spirit and will, which means for Nietzsche to be a slave, or one expresses the will to impose oneself on others. The acceptance of morality without questioning its roots constitutes in Nietzsche's view the acceptance of Sklavenmoral, slave morality. When I behave as others expect me to, out of fear of what others think rather than out of what is within me, in my blood, then I am, so Nietzsche, a slave. This does not mean that slaves are not necessary. On the contrary. In Menschlichliches, Allzumenschliches, he states that slaves are necessary.
Who was Nietzsche? What was Nietzsche? In his own words in his biographical sketch Ecce Homo (EH), he was not a man but dynamite, "the crucified one", as he signed his last letters from Turin. He was, he said, destined to pronounce unpalatable truths. Nietzsche has something inevitable about him. He strikes us as more a fate than a man and yet for all that very much a human being, a sufferer. His life span, which corresponded almost exactly to the years that Queen Victoria was Queen of England, covered the years of Europe's greatest triumph and greatest defeat: triumph in that everywhere across the globe Western (and that meant white) values provided the template of civilization. Western man seemed to be lord by providence of the future of human kind and for the first time in human history he was beginning to make headway in conquering the diseases which had hitherto tormented and decimated Homo sapiens. To survive in the Western, that is to say white man's world, non whites could go to school with the white man, like the Japanese, all but perish like the American Indians, or become his servants and subjects, like the Negroes.
Here is another link to a breakdown of Nietzsche's work:
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/nietzsche2.html
Note the difference to other philosophies, but still similar in the shape of ideals.
It seemed impossible to me after reading Nietzsche, to take seriously the course of career, success and well-being in a world teeming with the "last man" predicted in Also sprach Zarathustra and marked by the facile acceptance of the now Godless world as it is. The future should not be separated from the past. Thoughtless careers for money, petty fame and security were ambitions I disdained, as Nietzsche disdained them and inspired me to disdain them. Nietzsche was and is for me and despite his own disdain for the movement to which we give the name, a thorough romantic. To an extent, this magazine has been conceived and continued in Nietzsche's shadow. To be a romantic is to be "half in love with easeful death" and in the spirits of the past.. Now, nel mezzo cammin di nostra vita, it is time for my reckoning with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Summarised, Nietzsche is associated with a number of key radical philosophical positions. These positions are frequently extreme. They provoke and because they provoke, compel the reader to take a stand, to answer Nietzsche with either a yea or nay. God was dead and along with God the metaphysics of good and evil which Christian theology had constructed around the concept "God"- Inequality and hierarchy belonged to the natural order of the cosmos and was ordered through the exercise of the will. The superior human is right to crush the inferior. The justification of life is found in aesthetics, in art. Man is only justified in life in his highest types. The highest level of culture was reached by the Ancient Hellenes and their twin Gods of form and intoxication, Apollo and Dionysus. Evil is necessary to the vitality of life. A new man is coming whom Nietzsche dubbed the Übermensch, (superman, overman, higher man) who will give the earth a new meaning and create new values. Nietzsche, like de Sade, whom in some ways he resembles, poses the reality of radical positions and invites us to accept them if we are not afraid of where the truth will take us. Time is not linear but circular. Life consists in becoming through a striving of the will to conquer, so that conquering and life are indistinguishable. War forges great men. Women are the enemies of human progress because by their nature they make peace with pertaining reality and prefer security to seeking to change an existing order. Style is more important in human life than happiness.
Nietzsche's was a lonely life and it became lonelier as it progressed. He was not a professional philosopher (he survived off the charity of his old employer) yet the focus of his entire life was the production of philosophical works which in his life time few people read but which since his death have been read by millions. He never married and the nearest he came to it was a rejected offer to Lou von Salome, who was later to be the mistress of Freud and Rilke. Nietzsche's writing was placed on the Roman Catholic Index. His collapse into a vegetable state was seen by many pious Christians as evidence of the punishment of God. Nietzsche: the Faust of our times: this is how Thomas Mann portrayed him in Dr. Faustus, where the Nietzschean "overreach" parallels Germany's unsuccessful challenge to the United States as the determining power of the twentieth century.
Nietzsche's writing was admired, albeit selectively, by the young fascist movements of the twenties and thirties. He has frequently been denounced as a forerunner of fascism and a considerable part of the debate around Nietzsche has consisted in his admirers, especially his Jewish admirers, seeking to prove that his views were wilfully misinterpreted by the national socialists. In fact, the highly selective admiration of Nietzsche after the Second World War by liberals easily matches the wilful distortion of any fascists. Part of the evidence that Nietzsche was "misused" is alleged to lie in the fact that his posthumous work, published as Die Wille zur Macht by his sister, Elizabeth, is presented so as to suggest that he was nationalistic and anti-semitic. Her biography of her brother, which is said to distort his character, although frequently referred to, is out of print, but a denunciation of Elizabeth remains standard in post-war Nietzsche studies.
Oh how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings-the Ring of Recurrence?
For I love you, oh Eternity!
(Also sprach Zarathustra).
Nietzsche is most famous, I think, for the statement "God is dead". It originally comes from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Joyous Science- FW) repeated in another context in Zarathustra's Prologue in Also Sprach Zarathustra (AsZ). The expression struck me when I first heard it (years before I met it, accompanied by an almost sickening feeling of anticipation, when reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as not the utterance of an atheist, when by "atheist" we mean one who denies the possibility of the existence of the divinity. "God is dead" means that God died, and to die one must first live. God was but is no more. This is what Nietzsche meant and it is the pronouncement of a religious writer. In the words of the woman in whom Nietzsche had placed his highest hopes, that proud aristocratic twin-star of his to be who never was, Lou Salome, "in the shocks to his spirit, when he fancies he is following his own sacrifice and commitment, he is releasing his own religious passion" (Nietzsche in seinen Werken Insel Taschenbuch p. 61) Yes, the man was religious who in Zarathustra's words of comfort to the dying tight-rope walker said of divine punishment and the Devil, "All you have spoken of does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: therefore fear nothing any more!" (Zarathustra's Prologue).
Nietzsche believed he had a mission to relieve higher men of doubt, the doubt that comes from a guilty conscience, especially when that guilt and that conscience has been induced by others, and he argued that all bad conscience ultimately originates "somewhere else", not in the natural self. Either one accepts that one belongs to another's spirit and will, which means for Nietzsche to be a slave, or one expresses the will to impose oneself on others. The acceptance of morality without questioning its roots constitutes in Nietzsche's view the acceptance of Sklavenmoral, slave morality. When I behave as others expect me to, out of fear of what others think rather than out of what is within me, in my blood, then I am, so Nietzsche, a slave. This does not mean that slaves are not necessary. On the contrary. In Menschlichliches, Allzumenschliches, he states that slaves are necessary.
Who was Nietzsche? What was Nietzsche? In his own words in his biographical sketch Ecce Homo (EH), he was not a man but dynamite, "the crucified one", as he signed his last letters from Turin. He was, he said, destined to pronounce unpalatable truths. Nietzsche has something inevitable about him. He strikes us as more a fate than a man and yet for all that very much a human being, a sufferer. His life span, which corresponded almost exactly to the years that Queen Victoria was Queen of England, covered the years of Europe's greatest triumph and greatest defeat: triumph in that everywhere across the globe Western (and that meant white) values provided the template of civilization. Western man seemed to be lord by providence of the future of human kind and for the first time in human history he was beginning to make headway in conquering the diseases which had hitherto tormented and decimated Homo sapiens. To survive in the Western, that is to say white man's world, non whites could go to school with the white man, like the Japanese, all but perish like the American Indians, or become his servants and subjects, like the Negroes.
Here is another link to a breakdown of Nietzsche's work:
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/nietzsche2.html
Note the difference to other philosophies, but still similar in the shape of ideals.