I read Young’s book on Nietzsche’s aesthetics, which is great, but not the bio yet. Young’s books on Heidegger are great too.
I think I know what you mean. Reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer is like getting to know a fascinating ghost.
I’m a huge fan of Emerson, who is more balanced than Nietzsche, but likewise a “glowing total person,” and not a list of theses.
This reminds me of Heidegger, definitely influenced of course by Nietzsche.
It’s interesting, but none of it really makes any sense to me, and I’m half asleep already by the fourth sentence. I wish I liked him. What background do you need to make sense of this guy? It just reads like a lot of attention-seeking noise - which I guess is my issue, not the writing…
I confess that I find most of The Antichrist obnoxious. But the quoted passages, especially moments like this, speak not to me but for me.
How I can I paraphrase this ? It suggests a sense that “the important stuff” is “behind” language. Or at least beyond any final formulation in language. A “visceral sense” of “at-home-ness” in the world and that “attachment to theories” gets in the way. “No word is to be taken literally” because it’s “all just analogy.” What is analogy or metaphor ? Is the world itself metaphorical ? I think so, unless we insist on reality isn’t poetic. Even “literal” is a congealed poem, its wax run cold for most.
This gels with my take on Bakhtin. I choose my signs for you or him or her at a particular moment. The signs are not sacred. We are, in that there is the possibility of “music” between us. The making of a “holy book” that hovers over us is the end of “being there with the other.” The “real stuff” is happening elsewhere.
In Blake’s illustrations for Job, he pictures the family, pre-disaster, gathered around The Book. Around them, hung in the branches of a sheltering tree, are the musical instruments that they have presumably put aside to “seek the word.”
The “holy book” or “formulated faith” is “alienating.” So my own life with friends and spouse and pets is of a secondary reality. I like Kerouac and the gang for taking their own lives “seriously” as “poetry.” Just taking the car down the road, blabbering about anything and everything, sacred or profane. Put “that” in a book. The gesture itself is the message of the message.
Why do we project “God” away from ourselves ? My theory is that we abase ourselves to be exalted. We are bound by our desire to bind, controlled by our desire to control. First the projection (of the “true philosophy” or “golden tablets”) and then a claim of superior proximity to the projected. We might call this “the triangle inequality.”
I take Nietzsche’s Jesus to be beyond this. Note that he uses words. He’s not silent. Nothing “sinful” in words as such but only as alienating idols. A happy man wants other to share in it, so use words where words might work. Silence when that’s the note to play. All of it tentative and uncertain. No ground but this buoyant rejection of alienation.
So yeah that’s my risky jazz paraphrase. I’m curious if you can see how I’d squeeze that from the quoted passage.
Interesting. I don’t think there’s much I can say. I feel this way about some fiction authors like Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, and also the essays of Gore Vidal, which excite me because of their vitality and creativity with language. But I have never gone to philosophy for this experience, it has never affected me the way movies or good novels did. For me, philosophy is like Brussels sprouts: I feel I need to understand it better because it’s good for me. But it’s almost like I have to make myself take an interest.
The idea of god is too incoherent for me to have any kind of fix on the character, except for, perhaps, the mafia thug version of a literalist Old Testament reading.
OK. Well for me I enjoy philosophy as I might enjoy great fiction. It’s different, yes, but it’s something that I “just enjoy.” Part of that is the joy of stringing words together, so it’s creative appropriation. But there’s also the joy of an increased sense of coherence. It’s increases my possession of the world. Or my being “at home” in it.
Me too. Mostly. There are some uses of “God” that feel right to me. Emerson can pull it off.
But in that context, I wanted to generalize God as anything that is “above us” in a way that diminishes the vividness and “validity” of “ordinary” life. Connected to Heidegger’s vague concept of authenticity. But basically I have no choice but to play the hand that was dealt me. Can I “affirm” this singular life ? Not because I “should” but because it feels good. Affirmation “is” enjoying this thrown mortal life, while knowing it as such. Philosophers along with novelists and musicians and so on are sometimes helpful in that project.
Of all the great philosophers, Nietzsche is perhaps the most misunderstood. And that is one reason I am sceptical of anyone who claims to understand him.
Most truly great books can never be “fully understood” and Thus Spake Zarathustra is one of them. And that is one of the reasons I will read it until the day I die.
His writing style is not an issue. It is the lack of clarity regarding the ideas presented that makes Nietzsche difficult to understand.
And that is no accident. He wants us to interpret what he is saying and he knows we will not arrive at the same interpretation. And that is one of the reasons Nietzsche will be widely read for hundreds if not thousands of years to come.
To clarify, I am neither sceptical of Nietzsche nor what I get from him. Instead, I am sceptical for several reasons when someone claims to understand him:
the people who do understand Nietzsche are the first to admit he is difficult to understand. And of all the heavy-weight philosophers, he is truly the most misunderstood. So statistically, those who truly understand the most misunderstood philosopher ought to be few and far between and yet I seem to run into them on a regular and ongoing basis;
many of the people who claim to understand Nietzsche but do not understand Nietzsche quickly transform into intellectual bullies upon being challenged. On the legacy site I had to deal with a man who was so upset that I dare question him that he virtually screamed “NIETZSCHE LIVES THROUGH ME!”; and
Perhaps most important of all, Nietzsche essentially said he wrote for the few and the many while only expecting the few to understand him and even they would have to summon significant intellectual “will” to do so.
I appreciate Nietzsche’s ability to:
turn ideas inside-out and upside-down, e.g. ressentiment;
creatively overlay ideas from antiquity upon the then contemporary philosophical ideas, e.g. Dionysus and Apollo as Schopenhauer’s will and representation (The Birth of Tragedy);
to stick to a single idea. Will is to Nietzsche what being is to Heidegger; and
doggedly cling to his commitment to philosophy as a way of life no matter the personal deprivation.
Fair point. And I wish it worked that way for me. I guess I do have a greater sense of coherence but there may also a loss of enchantment (with apologies to Weber) in such a result. I also have the intuition that what we feel most at home in the things we enjoy.
Not that you intend this, but it feels a little bit AA to me. I canto do the higher power model and even saying things are “over us” feels too old-school hierarchical for me, but I know it doesn’t need to be apprehended that way.
Are you saying here that philosophy (literature and music) helps you to enjoy life? And that sounds perfectly good and is probably how it is meant to work, if I can say such a thing without committing myself to normative standards. I am fundamentally a “lazy” person and self-contained, so I tend to like to wing things and see what happens.
What do you think Nietzsche would make of your understanding of him?
I think he would appreciate that I make no such claims but that I continue to read him nonetheless. And I think that he would appreciate that if I ever believe that I have become one of the few who truly understands him, you will never hear it from me.
When I wrote “your understanding” I didn’t mean that you understood him. I meant simply, what would he make of your use or appreciation of his ideas. Would he think you were one of the unwashed buffoons or making a valiant effort, or something different?
Sorry about that, I was actually editing my comment for that very purpose. I think he would appreciate my efforts.
Would you recommend a particular book off his for those who haven’t yet appreciated him?
The Birth of Tragedy Through the Spirit of Music. I read it 3 times in 4 days.
The Gay Science is the place to start, in my opinion. I’d skip the “Prelude in Rhymes”, but not the preface, in which he writes that philosophy is (often) “the unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloak of the objective, the ideal, the purely intellectual”.
Note: the translation I can recommend opts for the doubtful title The Joyous Science, but is otherwise good.
For me philosophy is a strange kind of poetry. There’s a “sense of existence” “behind” all the cobwebs. This I take to be part of Nietzsche’s own sense of existence.
Disenchantment. All is vanity. Is this the end of the dream of an end ?
So what I meant is that I see every X that is put “above and beyond us in this moment now” as a kind of alienation. Nietzsche’s Jesus is beyond all this. No doctrine. No “substance.” Just a “feeling.” An “idiotic faith” that here and now is real and good. But the words “real” and “good” are just “music.”
Weirdly this is very close to disenchantment. There’s no “grand narrative” to ground it all. If the feeling shifts, then it’s maybe back to a world of absurd horror.
Does it suggest that there is no right or wrong interpretation on Nietzsche?
No. There will always be wrong interpretations. The deeper issue is a matter of reasonable or unreasonable interpretation. And even with reasonable interpretations, some may be more reasonable than others.
Nietzsche worked hard to condense multiple significant ideas into fewer and fewer words and expected and wanted an unpacking of the ideas therein to be an intellectual challenge. He wanted us to read it, talk about it, think about it, write about it and then reread it, talk more about it, think more about it, and write more about it. He lived philosophy and hoped that truly understanding him would require one to do the same.