Nietzsche lived as he preached. After being appointed to the chair of classical philology in Basel, he relinquished his Prussian citizenship and remained stateless for the rest of his life. Retiring from this post at the age of 35, he embarked on a ten-year odyssey, travelling throughout Europe and writing. This homeless free spirit, almost a vagabond, lived for philosophy, and not off it.
If Heraclitus talked about coincidentia oppositorum coincidence of the opposites , Nietzsche lived it. In his writings, the hyperbola of his attacks only matched the sublime tone of his exaltations. Two antithetical forces of his psyche — that of separation and that of the unification of opposites — seemed to have entered a truly gladiatorial agon. He gradually turned into a tragic mythical hero, destined for his own destruction.
As befits a tragic hero, he perished while fully conscious of the danger involved in such undertaking. His Columbus-like adventure into the unchartered territory of the human soul became a journey to the dark bottom of the sea. But he left us this Dionysian message:. Eva Cybulska, formerly a psychiatrist, is an independent scholar and writer. The book offers a conversation with Nietzsche rather than a consideration of the secondary literature, yet it takes to task many prevalent approaches to his work, and contests especially the way we often restrict our encounter with him to conceptual analysis.
All deconstructionist attempts to portray him as solely concerned with the destruction of the subject and the dispersion of the self, rather than its unification, are called into question. Nietzsche's enterprise, it is claimed, was anti-political. His aim was to describe the means of achieving greatness in an age of nihilism. This was primarily a philosophic, aesthetic, even religious project. The goal was to live heroically, and Nietzsche defined modern heroism as the realization of individuality.
Concern for and engagement in political matters was considered unworthy of and detrimental to this prescribed life. Nietzsche is shown to have developed a spiritual politics, a politics within a multipartite self whose agonistic interaction is evoked. Nietzsche's concern was to propagate this strife-filled politics of the soul, and he offered his as a model of such a heroically styled life of continuous self-overcoming.
Nietzsche's higher man is shown to be he who has actualized his underlying potential for a heroic life, which, in the end, is marked by his love of fate and his acceptance of the eternal recurrence. An attempt is made to demonstrate the continuity of his project. The author argues that heroic individualism and its politics of the soul are the predominant themes of Nietzsche's work, accounting for the development of Nietzsche's thought and its paradoxes.
Friedrich Nietzsche in 19th Century Philosophy. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index. Even when he is addressing global issues like the overall development of moral sentiment, or the nature of Greek drama, or how post-Classical music really ought to be, everything is introspection, or his insight is so quirky that his interpretation of otherwise objective facts is really about him.
As I read "The Gay Science" the most painful problem for him in a lot of places seems to be a wavering commitment to being outside the race and desperately wanting to work an effect upon it from within.
The pain is palpable To put it theoretically, there is an issue in his model of what the herd is, as to whether there is any possible continuity upward from the noble alpha leader of the herd to the independent creator free of human baggage. If there is one, Nietzsche is vying for it. And he hates himself for doing so, since he has gone so far as to say the herd-bond is something that must be overcome. If he gets what he wants, he is theoretically wrong. His greatest dangers are in compassion.
He wants a transfiguration of values, but he seeks for such a thing in a natural history: The Genealogy of Morals, and leading forward from there would be choosing to be driven and shaped by social forces so as to be able to capture the intelligence of those around him. What he loves in others are his own hopes. But by his more raw logic a la Beyond Good and Evil, he should more highly value a deeply personal perspective that would uniquely express his distance from those same forces.
To address the issue with the word 'nobility': Nobility has a 'peerage', a standard that allows it to be respected in a social context by others who are similarly noble. This definition of heroism is personal and individual. This kind of hero may very well not be noble. He basically cannot be noble if his remapping of values is entirely unique.
So Nietzsche has the Groucho-Marxism problem in reverse: He himself wants to be noble, whether or not he should be by the standards of any peerage he would choose to validate his nobility. So there is a constant pain of pursuing the greatest calling he can tolerate, knowing there are theoretically greater challenges, which might even be easier to overcome, but those would not answer to his need.
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