Continental
Nietzsche, born in 1844-1900.
Seems to have had a neurological disorder, which he suffered heavily from. He had migraines, and he so he had to resign his position as professor of philology, which he attained at the age of 24. Studied in Bonn, born in Prussia.
He got a position in Basel in Switzerland. He was treated as the new talented German philologist.
Nietzsches writings ”flow like butter”, but behind what he says there are difficult ideas, what he is saying is inherently very complicated.
Furthermore, Nietzsche can be interpreted in almost infinitely different ways, leading to him being claimed by a lot of people. Nietzsche is more or less all over the place. Because his philosophy is pluralistic, and offers many entry points.
So, is there one Nietzsche? This is a big part of his own philosophy generally.
His philosophy, however, offers the tools to theorize this kind of heterogenous plurality.
His philosophy contains a lot of different contradictory viewpoints.
He uses aphorisms, metaphors and allegories commonly, something most philosophers avoid.
So, is Nietzsche still a philosopher?
In the US, he is for example only taught in the literary department.
He is striving inherently for a kind of artistic expression, and wants to express art and aesthetics through his own philosophy. He wants to renew philosophy from a different field than what has been done before. He wants to see the world of philosophy through the eyes of an artist, or understand the role of the philosopher as if the philosopher was a genius artist.
The persona Nietzsche, who pushes past all and cares little for the consequences, is important in order to understand his oeuvre in its parts. The whole cannot be deattached from the parts.
As if philosophy is something that doesn’t need a personal history, it cannot be treated as a merely objective field of study. Ultimately philosophy is a way through which a thinker can disguise themselves so that they can achieve something. Ultimately realising the will to power.
Reading him is difficult because we have to abstract from what is immediately written there.
Personal reading of professor: triggered by the history of philosophy, in his insights and critiques of the history of philosophy, how he overthrows established terminologies and systems of thought, and is able to unmask hidden tendencies. Most people read Nietzsche as a metaphysician, as a sharp one at that. He was trained in literature, but develops a very exact gaze which brings forth ideas which had never been discovered before.
Nietzsche’s overt claims: Conservativ, depressing, essimisitc, chauvinistic, machistic, antisemtiic, misogynistic, aggressive, anti-democratic and racist.
Nietzsche is a hateful guy.
His sister’s husband went to Paraguay and killed himself.
His sister who was an Anti-Semite, took over the heritage and made out herself to look better. Selling the Will to Power as Nietzsche’s last book.
We should perhaps focus on the philosophical parts of Nietzsche rather than those of him which were sad and evil.
The Birth of Tragedy 1872: This work was meant to show off his skill, and it was condemned as being complete nonsense and unscientific. He does something with the historical fact of the tragedy, and goes beyond it, to bring forth the cultural implications and reasons for its fact.
In 1871, Franco-Prussian war, Germany becomes an empire.
Nietzsche wants to talk about the Germans, to understand what the Germans should do in order to become itself and reveal its greatness and powers.
Nietzsche sees in the aim of the book an attempt to reach an answer to the question: How can culture be understood, and how can it after that be improved. (though he certainly did it for the sake of the Germans, even though he writes about cultures generally).
This way of thinking is inspired by his friend and guru Richard Wagner.
Wagner also wanted to renew European society through the invention of a new artform, the Gesamtkunstwerk, the reborn tragedy, under Germanic heading; implementing theatre, tragedy and opera all in one artform. Wagner wanted to educate European society through his art, his art is based on a heavy political program. The return to Greek culture was already an idea in Wagner (fuck Heidegger).
Met Wagner in Leipzig.
The book is essentially a defense of Wagner’s Project. The Greek tragedy uncovers the hidden origins of Western culture (all culture). We have to return to that culture in order to overcome cultural decline.
So what is cultural decline?
In the middle of the 19 century, cultural pessimism was everywhere, Kulturpessimismus. To put an end to the Enlightenment’s idea of cultural progress to an always better future, in conjunction with the treaty of Vienna after Napoleon.
[An example of this, coming later, is Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
All civilisation has to go through different periods, and after a certain cycle of periods is over, it dies and is substituted by a new civilisation].
Nietzsche participated in this movement, yet is heavily against pessimism, and wants to spread optimism and activism.
Nietzsche anticipates the discussion about European culture’s decadence. If the German culture continues as it was at the time, it will stop being able to create. So we have to do something in order to be able to connect ourselves to our creative potential inherent in the culture, somewhere, though lost.
Nietzsche accuses Germany of excessive cultural codification and pervasive moral rules. The social code was so tight that no one could really live out their desires. There was huge personal repression at the time.
For Nietzsche, culture is the outcome of two antagonist forces, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, accorded to these respective two deities.
When Nietzsche accuses the rigid codification of society, what he wants us to do, is to reconnect with the dionysian, which is about culture’s potential of violence and possession. We have to reveal in ourselves a certain egoism and brutality, put the nice cultural mask aside, and only in this way can we truly create.
”We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have come to realise, not just through logical insight ut also with the certainty of something directly apprehended, that the continuus evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the apolline and the dionysiac in much the same way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which coexist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted onlo occasionally by periods of reconciliation.”
It is, to an extent, a kind of dialectic. Nietzsche is a post-hegelian author, and so has to cope with him, but it is anti-hegelian. Nietzsche has a kind of dialectics, but it does not allow for a synthesis. The tension is eternal, only suspended momentarily in certain periods, but will return to a moment of fight. If there was a synthesis, a harmony, than the culture would implode and lose its own dynamics.
Dionysos and Apollon are about each other, in the ”Other”. It is about the idea of enhancing one’s potential through the opposition of the Other. The Other must necessarily be bound up in an eternal battle of force.
Difference and essence:
they stand for two artistic forms; the musical dionysios; and the apollonian sculpture
in the same way two forms of life, two drives, they are natural forces that monitor and dominate the human will, but even the natural will generally. Culture is one emanation of these cosmological forces.
Apollo: God of the image-maker or sculptor; rationality.
Dionysios: God of the image-less art of music; passion.
”In order to gain a closer understand of thse two drives, let us think of them in the first place as the separate art-worlds of dream and intoxication”.
Before producing art, men are entangled in 2 worlds, 2 ways of making experience.
Apollo stands also for dreams; overall coherent, ordered, comfortable, enjoyable and consistent. Nietzsche’s view of dreams is fundamentally pre-freudian, rather he bases them on Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer uses a concept from Kant, Vorstellung, föreställning.
Schopenhauer uses the opposition between the things in themselves and their representations. Kant.
He thinks that we lack access to the world in itself, but if we would see the things-themselves, we would be horrified, because we would find the Will. The one and only substance of which everything is a substance. The illusory element of our reality is that we see ourselves from being detached from each other, as having our own ontological principle, but we are really all the same. But the Will only wants to survive, and it sacrifices us inviduals for its own survivial, and if we understand this, we would all kill ourselves. So we don’t even want access to the things in themselves.
Instead, we can only find a happy life if we detach ourselves from all worldly strivings, like in buddhism. We have to neutralise in ourselves the Will, and only then can we find true happiness.
For Nietzsche this is completely nuts, this is pessmism and passivity. For Nietzsche, we need to claim our own power, he claims the necessity to go into action to grab unto whatever we can in order to be happy.
Representation (principium individuationis). Schopenhauer calls representation the veil of Maya; meaning the illusory character of our conscious life. The most illusory part of our life is our independence from other beings; our individuality.
Dreams: recurrent philosophical example since modernity (Our life, a dream? By pedro calderon; or Descartes.
Modernity is the philosophical moment at which we become aware of the impact of psychology. Of the subject.
The question about what reality is becomes obsessively difficult to get at from that point on. The fundamental part of modern philosophy entails this kind of thought.
For Schopenhauer, the problem of dreams, is that once we are in a dream, there are no tests we can conduct which tells us that we are in a dream, much like in ”reality”.
”The vedas and puranas know no better simile for the knowledge of the actual world, called by the m the web of maya, than the dream, and they use none more frequently.” Schopenhauer as quoted by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche however, believes that there is a difference between dreams and reality.
They are:
Unreal, or rather Superreal: they are more consistent and enjoyable than reality itself. They show us a world which is somehow only for me. In dreams, we experience the world, in the form as an extreme subjectivisation, we are the protagonist of the dream. This element, saying that the world is there and everything confers to the same plot that I am experiencing from beginning to end, is how they refer to the principium individuationis. But it shows how dreams are not reality. Reality is brutish, one has to struggle and fight. They show us the very building principle of reality.
In this sense, Apollo is also the god of individuation. Because the visual sense is the sense of the boundaries.
Dionysos, however, makes us enter things, lose the boundaries and lose the surfaces.
Something about highlighting beauty as good or some shiii.
Nietzsche highlights the uglier aspects of Greek culture and civilisation, the warrior, the kind of people that enslaved all their neighbours, that fought in wars and had genius strategies. Those who conquered almost the entire sphere of the mediterranean sea. We have to take the violent side into the picture in order to have the full picture of the Greeks. The Greeks could excel in arts and morality because of their brutishness. They needed an antidote for their militray excess. They were excellent warriors. Because they had the great culture, but they only had the great culture because they were great warriors. So there is an inherent interdependency between dionysos and apollo. BUT, we need apollo, because otherwise we would not be good at fighting in life, and survive it generally. The dionysiac is the escape from the daily and scheduled, from war and away-from-homeness. It renews culture.
”Here for the first time te jubilation of nature achieves expression as art, here for the first time the tearing-apart of the pincipium individuationis bcomes an artistic phenomenon.”
In the tragedy, there is a hero who fights against a destiny. Against which the hero is impotent from the outset. From the outset, the hero must die. But it is not a pointless battle, it is a battle against a titan which has one soul sense, which is the affirmation of individuality in its most desperate moment. The greak hero is the prototype of individuality because he faces his own destruction. And it is in this moment that the hero makes himself.
He wants us to have a kind of heroic thinking, urging us to keep the battle up even at its darkest moments.
It is both the affirmation and destruction of individuality at once.
Beyond culture, life and nature themselves are governed by this dialectical interplay. Nature itself is an artist. Nature creates forms and individuals, just like the artist creates their forms.
Each time in Nature is an individual that tries to affirm themselves against the forces of destruction attempting to force them away. Schopenhauer says to withdraw, Nietzsche to stay and fight.
Did art become a leading model for philosophy then?
Is it inventing forms of life and styles of experience?
And is the philosopher now an artistic genius?
For Nietzsche, someone like Andy Warhol is not an artist. The artist is the genius, it is a kind of romantic understanding of the genius. In this sense, Nietzsche is still driven by romanticism, valuing the emotional, effective, nature and so on. Nature for Nietzsche is an artist so it uses both potentials just like humans.
The core of the tragedy is the chorus. In Aeschylus, the chorus always comes up in important turning points, and they sing in order to represent the fate and destiny of the hero, the artist. The Greeks already then combined the visual with the non-visual, music.
Critique of science, consciousness and truth.
”An attempt of self-criticsm: ’What I had got old of at that time was something fearsome and dangerous, a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull, but ayt any rate a new problem; today I would say that it was the problem of science itself, science grasped for the first time as something problematic and questionable.”
Apollo so on is the representative of science against nusic as the kind of dynamic production of intertwined sound. Later in his works, he loses the idea of apollon and dionysiac. As well as replacing Schopenhauer’s general Will to the Will to Power. Apollon stands then also for philosophy and truth generally. It shows rather how Power disguises itself. It becomes a mask that we put on ourselves in order to hide our most inner desires and aims. Which are not always conscious.
We are mostly conscious of the good side of ourselves. Of our scientistic endeavour, for knowledge and morality.
Knowledge and morality, however, become masks which we put on.
Philosophy and science is borne out of the apollonian drive.
”The problem of science cannot be recognised within the teritory of science”.
With science here, Nietzsche is talking about philosophy itself. Philosophy so on is unable to answer this question. Because it is not a question of knowing, but rather a question of willing, which accounts irrational moments of fervour or some such.
For philosophy to recognise what it is itself, it has to adopt a position outside itself of non-logic, of the artistic creator.
The artistic creator is a kind of egoistic individual whom produces their artworks irrespective of what others think, they do not lack the others. For the artist however, if one removes their art, they will die. There is a necessity to express their art inherently.
The artistic is not dependent on any kind of measurement or true scale that is objective or that precedes him, he is the ultimate feels > reals.
Nietzsche identifies this general drive in humans as the Will to Power.
”Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of questions as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic and irrationality and so on.” Ecce homo.
”How could anything originate out of its opposite? Truth from error, for instance? Or the will to truth from the will to deception? Or selfless action from self-interest?” Beyond Good and Evil.
Everything is actually it contrary. It always hides its contrary tendency of what it tries to be.
This is what he calls the geneaology, it is a philosophy of the simulacrum (Deleuze). It is a philosophy of masks.
In Nietzsche’s last letters, he signed off as Dionysos.
Nietzsche does not simply champion the irrational over the rational.
Rather he wants to show the interdependence between both sides. It’s too simplistic to say that one can just be irrational. Instead, he is trying to make a rational philosophy which can enlighten us about our actually irrational basis for doing much of what we do as we are. The new rationality is to believe in what we really think of ourselves. We need to be aware that everything one does, is for the Will to Power.
Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking: liquidation and dissolution of inherited traditional concepts.
Nietzsche on morality and power:
Consciousness is structurally inescapable. It is driven by self betrayal. This anticipates Freud already of course. Consciousness is nothing but a mask that we put on ourselves to dissimilate and disguise ourselves. Which for Nietzsche means that their true essence is that they are related to self-interest. The altruistic ideas are egoistic.
The ideological ideas we believe in in a historical epoche, comes from the ruling ”race”!!.
Some Nietzscheans think that he is not really talking about race, but rather just any group of people that is not necessarily biologically related. Though this is dubious.
The most important relation between the races, are about domination and enslavement. Domination and slavery is about how we realise our will to power. Someone who is actually in power, can be a true slave. It is about the domination of culture.
”Consequently, I do not believe that a drive for knowledge is the father of philosophy, but rather that another, here as elsewhere, used knoweledge merely as a tool. Because every drive craves mastery, and this leads it to try philosophising.”
This is not a drive that wants to keep itself alive like Schopenhauer’s drive. The Will to Power needs its contrary, it is depdendent on an other. Otherwise it cannot realise itself.
There is an interwining between what we are as substance, and that to which we relate. There is an intertwining between the different wills to power.
Socrates invented philosophy to seduce the young. Not to free the people, but rather to see people love him and praise him, and own them, and so on.
”what Nietzsche hates more than the jews are the pessmistic catholics”.
Nietzsche’s theories seem heavily related to his own mangled body.
Being at its most basic layer is the Will to Power, it is not historically depdendent. It is everywhere, in anything that happens.
Geneaology uncovers any hidden ”Will to Power”.
”Only where life is, is there also will; but not will to life, instead – thus I teach – will to power!” Zarathustra.
Will is a metaphysical principle; everything is a variation of this will.
On the problem of morality: it does not recognise its own origin, just like philosophy cannot do it on its own.
Morality preaches ongoing self-denial.
Moral codes requires from us to deny what we really want.
It is the ”self-division of men: ”A soldier wishes he could fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland; for his supreme desire is victor in the victory of his fatherland.” ”THIS IS NONSENSE”
”In morality, Nietzsche says, ”man treats himself not as individuum but dividuum.” Human, All too human.
The purely altruistic motivation is a negation of the Will to Power, and so a contradiction. Altruistic behaviour is preached in order to have dominance. Insofar as the moral preaching strives for dominance it is true to itself. But the problem is that what is preached is that one should give up domination and power. And thus, there is a conflict. Morality must be overthrown.
Now, what is good, is that which is affirmative to the Will to Power, and what is bad is that which is trying to say the contrary of what they are really doing. Bad is any discourse that alienates oneself from the will to power.
Geneaology is discovering Will to Power.
”YES I WANT TO DESTROY YOU”