Dr. Ess - Drury University
Overview of central concepts, important contexts
Nietzsche's Illness: Goethe and Heidegger on Reading
Notes from: Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life
Notes from Section 5 of N's "Preface" to The Birth of Tragedy
Related Web Materials:
Introductory comments on The Gay Science, the relationship between Nietzschean "perspectivism," critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment, and developments in the natural sciences pointing to the limits of reason and science as modes of knowing.
More extensive notes on The Gay Science, beginning with Kaufmann's introduction
Overview of central concepts, important contexts
An overview of Nietzsche's philosophy would include such primary concepts as:
life as a problem of suffering, with tragedy and religion as alternative responses to the problem of suffering
morality and religion as genealogical - i.e., as arising out of given material and psychological conditions (in particular, ressentiment), and thus relative to those conditions
perspectivism and "artist's metaphysics"
language and morality as fictive creations
the innocence of existence
the eternal return
will to power
N's critique of the Western tradition as dualistic, as "the metaphysics of the hangman"
N's critique of democratic culture
the death of God
In developing this overview, you should attend to Nietzsche's philosophy as it implicates:
N's personal psychology (loss of minister father at early age, "sadomasochistic personality," addiction to work, severe illness, etc.);
N's "location" in response to such culturally significant events as the advent of Darwinianism, Wagner's music, etc.;
N's significance for the 20th century - in particular, for the "crisis of Enlightenment reason" (Critical Theory, neoconservativism, postmodernism, etc.) and the parallel developments of psychologism (Freud), nihilism, etc.
In refering to Nietzsche's works, I will use the following abbreviations:
The Birth of Tragedy (1872, BT)
Schopenhauer as Educator (SE, 1874, in Untimely Meditations)
The Gay Science (1882, GS)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885, Z)
The Antichrist (1888, published 1895, AC)
Ecce Homo (1888, published 1908, EH)
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Hints for reading Nietzsche --
Karl Jaspers has written that you have not read Nietzsche completely unless you find somewhere else in his work the contradiction to the sentence or thought currently before you. There are many sources of this apparent contradiction - some trivial (e.g., typesetting and translation errors), most important - namely, Nietzsche's own conceptions of the nature of writing and philosophical thought. (Notice that this means you have to understand something of Nietzsche - his understanding of language and thought - before you can understand Nietzsche. More on this "hermeneutical circle" as we progress.)
As an introduction to Nietzsche, then, I offer the following introduction to Nietzsche's thought on writing and philosophy.
It is "a noble art to hold silence at the right time in such things [namely, religion and philosophy]. "The word" is dangerous - and it is rarely the right word when we speak of religion or philosophy. There are many things which one may not say, and precisely fundamental religious and philosophical viewpoints belong to the pudendis. They are the roots of our thinking and willing: for that reason they are not to be dragged out into the harsh light." (letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 18. September 1871)
In contrast with the essentially Enlightenment, democratic notion that we want the whole truth and nothing but the truth expressed fully and explicitly, N. holds to the classical (Platonic/Renaissance) attitude that not everything - most particularly the most central or important things - needs to be said "out loud" or explicitly. Indeed, on this view, one says more by saying less - by leaving somethings unsaid, but hinted at, in order to allow the reader to uncover a hidden meaning or secret teaching.
Specifically, Nietzsche does not say everything he means for the following reasons:
Nietzsche does not trust, much less write for "the masses";
his teaching is most radical and most dangerous;
N. wants to move beyond simple "either/or" thinking - the kind of thought that focuses on contradiction;
N. has strong, philosophically-grounded views (related to his conception of reality as the creation of an "artist's metaphysics) on the importance of style in writing (see below);
N. is strongly opposed - again for philosophical reasons - to systematic philosophy, and thus to the demand for simple consistency; at the same time, his severe illness forced him to learn to think in a non-systematic - but nonetheless coherent - fashion (see below);
Ultimately, N insists that his readers learn to think their own way, rather than simply absorb and mimic his thought.
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GS 290 (232) begins:
One thing is needful. To "give style" to one's character - a great and rare art!" This focus on style goes back to the nine-year old Nietzsche who began writing plays, oratorios, and poetry - and poetry on a daily basis when he was 13.
The 22-year-old Nietzsche wrote to Gersdorrf:
The categorical imperative "You should and you must write" has woken me up. I tried to write well, and suddenly the pen froze in my hand. I couldn't do it..." But in keeping with his musical, improvisatory side, in writing he must "learn to play [through his style] like on a piano, as free as possible, but always with logic and beauty."
In fact, Nietzsche appraises his Zarathustra this way:
I flatter myself with thinking that in Zarathustra the German language has been brought to its completion. After Luther [i.e., Luther's translation of the Bible] and Goethe, there was still a third step to take...
which he believes to have accomplished. At least one Nietzsche scholar, Pierre Bertaux, agrees with Nietzsche's self-assessment. (This letter is quoted and commented on in: Bertaux, "Friedrich Nietzsche: Hat das Ungeheuer von Kraft sich selbst vergiftet?" Die Zeit. Hamburg. Nr. 18: 27. April 1979, 35.)
Bertaux further writes of Nietzsche:
...not every proposition should be taken as a final assertion. When Nietzsche writes down a sentence, this does not necessarily mean that he thinks that this is the only way of understanding things. His thought is a constant searching and attempting - an experimental effort that is still to be tested. The written sentence is to be regarded only as an experimental piece, which, on closer consideration or in another connection, may be critically handled or rejected. (ibid.)
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Nietzsche's Illness: Goethe and Heidegger on Reading
Nietzsche began suffering from severe headaches early in life: they became severe enough to keep him home from school starting at age 9. The situation was complicated by his myopia and the resulting eye-strain from reading - which began showing up around age 12. (See Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, p. 24) His working "style" sometimes involved recuperating in bed for several days from a migraine attack. He would then walk for up to eight hours for a day or two, and upon returning, scribble notes of his thoughts. This would often send him back to bed for a day or two. When recovered, he would work at writing out his notes into manuscript. But because of his eye trouble, he could never work for more than 15 minutes at a time without getting headaches.
Nietzsche turns this condition of his work into a condition for a new kind of thought. He writes in GS 366:
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful. Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?
Bertaux points out a comment by the 80-year-old Goethe: "The good little people haven't the slightest suspicion of how much it costs in time and effort to learn to learn to read and read with understanding: I have spent 80 years on it." Heidegger told his students not to read Nietzsche until they'd spent ten years on reading Aristotle first. This will not be easy....
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Notes from: Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life
Hayman emphasizes Nietzsche's own insistence on the biographical background of philosophy - and Nietzsche's illness in particular - to make the case that Nietzsche's biography is especially critical in understanding his philosophy. So he quotes (1) Nietzsche's belief that "the best writers - Spinoza, Pascal and Goethe, for instance, were men whose 'thinking constitutes the involuntary biography of a soul.'"
He also notes here that "In Nietzsche's mature philosophy, as in his schoolboy essays, his main weapon was self-observation. Malaise is conducive to introspection, and it was Freud's opinion that Nietzsche achieved a degree of introspection never achieved by anyone else and never likely to be achieved again.[ftn. 1 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalystic Society, vol. 2, 1908-10 (New York 1967)] Nor has anyone possessed a greater talent for working analogically outwards from self-observation. The historical insights which so impressed Jacob Burckhardt (see page 252) were based less on research than on guesswork. Nietzsche was ingenious at applying self-knowledge to social movements, cantilevering out into the remote past from / analysis of his own needs for self-assertion, reassurance, revenge, destruction, hero-worship." (1-2)
Alertness to human illogicality was rare in the nineteenth century, and it was this, above all, that enabled him to exert such an enormous influence on the twentieth, in which almost every major writer in the German language has been profoundly indebted to him - Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Musil, Benn, Heidegger and Freud, for instance. Freudian psychology is prefigured in his analysis of forgetting; in his recognition that only a small part of the mind's functioning is conscious, and that consciousness is pathological; in his discovery of abreaction and repression, and in his understanding of the sexual and sadistic instincts, and of the retreat into illness. (2)
It has been said that all the major modes of twentieth-century thought were anticipated in Nietzsche's work. Outside Germany the oceanic influence shifted Gide, Valery, Montherlant, Shaw and D. H. Lawrence. He was the first philosopher to recognize what Camus was later to characterize as absurdity, the disconnection between human nature and an external nature which cannot be explained by reasoning. And, as Camus said, "In him nihilism became conscious for the first time....He wrote, in his way, the Discours de la méthode of his time, without the freedom and precision of the French seventeenth century, which he so admired, but with the mad lucidity characteristic of the twentieth century." [ftn. 2 Albert Camus, L'Homme révolté (Paris 1951)] (2)
Even the world of Samuel Beckett, the lonely world in which consciousness can communicate only with itself, is anticipated in Nietzsche's work. In "A Fragment from the History of Posterity" he imagined the fearful loneliness of the last philosopher, trapped inside his own self-consciousness. "Nature gapes numbly around him, vultures hover above him. He cries out to Nature: "Grant oblivion. Oblivion." [ftn. 3 'Fragment from the History of Posterity', notes 1872-5] (2)
Hayman comments on Nietzsche's importance for the postmodern rejection of any claim to objective knowledge, noting especially Nietzsche's originating the notion of "geneology," a notion developed (?) by Foucault:
Nietzsche saw that we can have no objective knowledge about the facts which determine our condition, that all our perception and / cerebration can only be speculative, interpretative. His insistence that there is no fundamental connection between the name and the thing, between signifier and signified, prepared the ground for linguistic philosophy and for Structuralism, while what he called the genealogical method of historical criticism was seminal: the originality of Foucault, who followed Nietzsche in this direction, is still being overrated. (2-3)
Hayman also makes the connection between Nietzsche's success in most radically questioning fundamental assumptions and presuppositions (i.e., his success as a philosopher in the Western tradition - while he simultaneously casts so much accepted by the Western tradition into severe, perhaps irreparable doubt) - and Nietzsche's madness:
Is it possible to reject as much of our moral and linguistic tradition as Nietzsche did without following him down the road to insanity? One of the reasons biography is relevant to the answer is that his drift towards madness cannot be separated from the lifelong history of malaise. Fighting against headaches, pain in and around the eyes, stomach pains, vomiting, debility, he was simultaneously cultivating his potential for madness. His friend Franz Overbeck thought he had been 'living his way towards' the final breakdown....(3)
There was nothing sudden about his movement into madness. He was only twenty-four when he wrote: 'What frightens me is not the fearful shape behind the chair but its voice; also not the words but the terrifyingly unarticulated, inhuman tone of that shape. Yes, if only it would speak in a human way.' By 1880 he was able to prescribe methods of going mad. In Morgenröte (Sunrise) he makes the point that madness - or at least the semblance of it - had been the sine qua non of moral evolution. The men driven to reject tradition and propose new norms had had either to feign madness or to induce it by means of fasting, sexual abstinence, solitude, and 'concentrating resolutely on nothing except what provokes ecstasy and derangment.' He appears to have been thinking of himself, St Paul and Plato, who said that 'from madness Greece derived its greatest benefits.'"(4)
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Notes from Section 5 of N's "Preface" to The Birth of Tragedy
"...art, and not morality, is presented as the truly metaphysical activity of man. In the book itself the suggestive sentence is repeated several times, that the existence [Dasein] of the world is justified [gerechtfertigt] only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the whole book knows only an artistic meaning and crypto-meaning behind all events - a 'god,' if you please, but certainly only an entirely reckless and amoral artist-god who wants to experience, whether he is building or destroying, in the good and in the bad, his own joy and glory - one who, creating worlds, frees himself from the distress [Not] of fullness and overfullness [Überfülle] and from the affliction [Leiden] of the contradictions compressed in his soul. The world - at every moment the attained salvation of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the most deeply afflicted [Leidensten], discordant [Gegensätzlichsten], and contradictory [Widerspruchreichsten] being who can find salvation only in appearance: you can call this whole artists' metaphysics arbitrary, idle, fantastic; what matters is that it betrays a spirit who will one day fight at any risk whatever [against] the moral interpretation [Ausdeutung] and significance [Bedeutsamkeit] of existence. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism 'beyond good and evil' is suggested. {22/I 14}
He is further clear here that his philosophy is one that demotes morality to appearance - both in the Kantian sense and, more perjoratively, "...among 'deceptions,' as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, contrivance, art." {23/I 14}
"...Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected. In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art."
"Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life [Lebensfeindliche] - a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in 'another' or 'better' life. Hatred of 'the world,' condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for 'the sabbath of sabbaths' - all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a 'will to decline' - at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral - and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. Morality itself - how now? might not morality be 'a will to negate life,' a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander - the beginning of the end? Hence, the danger of dangers? {23/I 15}
"It was against morality that my instinct turned with this questionable book long ago; it was an instinct that aligned itself with life and that discovered for itself [erfand - invent/discover] a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life [Gegenlehre und Gegenwertung des Lebens] - purely artistic and anti-Christian."
[Romanticism, by the way, is subsequently dismissed in section 7 as equally against life and this world.]
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How much a spirit needs for its nourishment, for this there is no formula; but if its taste is for independence, for quick coming and going, for roaming, perhaps for adventures for which only the swiftest are a match, it is better for such a spirit to live in freedom with little to eat than unfree and stuffed. It is not fat but the greatest possible suppleness and strength that a good dancer desires from his nourishment - and I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety, his "service of God." (381, The Gay Science, 345f.)
I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall. (Zarathustra, "On Reading and Writing," PN 153)
Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things.... (Zarathustra, "The Tomb Song," PN 224)
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!
(...)
Zarathustra, the dancer; Zarathustra, the light one who beckons with his wings, preparing for a flight, beckoning to all birds, ready and heady, blissfully lightheaded;
(...)
You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance - dancing away over yourselves! ...learn to laugh away over yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high, higher! And do not forget good laughter. This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh! (Zarathustra, "On the Higher Man," 17, 20, PN 407f.; quoted in the second preface to Birth of Tragedy, BWN 26f.)
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