Showing changes from revision #2 to #3: Added | Removed | Changed

Nietzsche gives sensitive artists an excuse to say they’re better than everyone else, 1885

• Degeneration: Nietzsche versus Nordau
  • Nietzsche: degeneration is the 99% of the population, the rabble
  • Nordau: degeneration is the 1% of the population, the artists
  • Both agree on the way of dividing the population (decadent artists v everyone else), but each calls “degenerate” a different group
  • reversal! transvaluation!

• Zarathustra: the wandering prophet who sometimes comes down from the mountain, preaching a new way of life: overcome petty human morality

Ideas

• Higher health
  • You must suffer through intense sickness to attain philosophy
• Individualist pessimism
  • You must move yourself out of the common rabble, beyond mere humanity
• Genealogy
  • History of word use
  • Shows that words don’t reflect truth simply
  • Concepts change: transvaluation of values
• Millenarian
  • He looks forward to the last human
• Eternal Recurrence
  • Repetition with difference
  • You must affirm it
  • By accepting what happens from your actions, even if you didn’t have all the knowledge you needed to guess outcome or the power to control the outcome, you essentially take control after the fact
    • You must act as if you meant to do whatever happens to happen: that’s the will to power
    • Self-overcoming: you need to become dissatisfied with yourself and make yourself better, despite lack of traditional supports
  • A method to take control over chaos
• Overman emphasis in early part of book replaced by Eternal Return
• Anti-nihilism: he’s against the “preachers of death”
  • He understands that some people will react to crisis through nihilism, and he tries to cut off that possibility
  • You can still live nobly
• World is NOT a pale copy of something better (ie, not Plato)

Modernity

• Will to Power as a way to reconcile oneself to chaos, things being out of your control
• Critique of Reason
  • It isn’t universal, but human and contingent
• Disenchantment with humanity
  • We create our good and evil
• Mixture of pessimism and optimism
  • Humans mostly gross
  • We are ruined by culture, but we can climb out of it if we try
  • But you can create a new world just be evaluating and judging
• Robert Pippin
  • Nietzsche’s system here is a very Romantic attempt (cf Wagner, Blake)
  • The story of Zarathustra (his illness, his recovery, and his preaching) supposed to give “an archetypal picture of the dilemma of modernity itself,” that is, the struggle towards higher existence
  • The elliptical, personae-filled other works of Nietzsche also suggest that you have to know philosophy as literary and living
  • Humans’ failure is mostly a failure of desire: they don’t want more than “bovine contentment”

What Seems to Recur In Modernist Texts from Nietzsche

• You must obey yourself, nothing else (egotism!)
• You must struggle against nihilism
• You must have zeal and enthusiasm
• You must always continue to change, overthrow whatever you are at the moment

Style

• Aphoristic
• Biblical language and Biblical allusions (mythic method?)
• Parataxis: discrete, unconnected sections without causal relation among them
• Often muddy, turgid, boring
• Pippin: Wanted to avoid being seen as a typical philosophical treatise
• Strange genre: both philosophy and literature
• Unsettled air of failure and dissatisfaction
• Constant chapter changes and abrupt beginnings and ends emphasize the constant recreation of the self.