|
September 11, 2003
Trevor the Library is now up and running. Your selection from Salome's book on Nietzsche has been archived for public access. This is an accesible online introduction to Nietzsche's philosophy.
Some incidentals. A photo of Lou Solome, Paul Ree & Nietzsche:
Are Ree and Nietzsche pretending to pull a little cart carrying Salome who has a whip and is posing as a plaything? The photo is very posed. Does it gesture to the paragraph in BK. One of Thus Spake Zarathrustra:
"Of little old and young women",
An old woman says:
"You are going to women?
Do not forget the whip!"
I do not have my copy of this text with me at Victor Harbor to check. An online copy of Thus Spake Zarathrustra is here. The relevant section is 18.
I found the photo courtesy of Fikirbaz over at fikirbaz.com. Fikirbaz lives in Instanbul, Turkey and he had been reading similar material around June of this year. I wonder how many others have been exploring similar material?
On a more philosophical note I would like to turn away from the core thesis of Lou Salome's Nietzsche book, that Nietzsche's madness was the inevitable result of his philosophical views, to the sort of philosophy Nietzsche was working with. I do not doubt that it would be fruitful to explore how Nietzsche's philosophy can be seen as a reflection of his psychology, how his philosophical development as driven by a series of illnesses and recoveries, or how his later philosophy is related to, or is mystical.
What I have in mind is the field of Nietzsche and philosophy that has been explored by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski. I want to use this post to my down my own starting point, bias or perspective.
I came across this article by Richard Palmer when writing the post of Gadamer over at philosophy.com Richard Palmer has written a lot of stuff on Hans-Georg Gadamer from within the continental philosophical tradition. The article is from an opening address on postmodern thinking in 2001 and Palmer uses it to briefly outline a tradition of critical thinking about the underside of modernity.
What caught my eye was Palmer's brief remarks on Nietzsche. So I thought that Id'd drop them into our conversation as they offer an interpretation of Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity, its affect on us, and what that situation requires of us.
"Friedrich Nietzsche, another great father of postmodernity, went further back than modernity. He blamed Christianity for the decadence of modern culture. His word for the way beyond the ideology of Christianity is interesting: Verwindung —recovery: We need, he asserts, to “recover” from the debilitating effects of Christianity and the dogmatic claims of science for truth. We will not go into Nietzsche’s thinking here, but it is interesting that he said we do not need a revolution; we need to recover from modernity, as from an illness, this recovery does not mean leaving it totally behind, but recovering from its side-effects. We need to realize the what the undesirable modern structural assumptions are and take steps to outgrow them."
The linkage of 'illness', 'recovery' and 'philosophy' fit very much into the tradition of the classical (Hellenistic) idea of a medical conception of philosophy. This ethical conception of philosophy confronts our most urgent complexities and helps to bring us from misery to some form of flourishing. Rather than philosophy being a detached technique, it addresses the most painful problems of human life as if it were a compassionate physician whose skills could help to ease and heal human suffering.
I understand Nietzsche as having recovered that conception of philosophy from then Greeks, and then deployed it on the underside of modernity. He diagnosed those cultural forms that made us sick---such as the ascetic ideal. This is more interesting that doing a psychonalytic thing of trying to view the persona or person behind the works.
|
An email,
Hi, I just discovered one of your old posts (September 2003) in which you showed a picture of Lou Salome holding a whip, while Nietzsche and another man pull her in a cart. You list the name of the other man as R.A. Rilke. However, the other man is actually Nietzsche's close friend, Paul Ree. Rilke was only 7 years old at the time the photo was taken.