Gary and I were talking about what kind of conversation we might have to set the ball rolling, as it were. We remembered vaguely having some kind of disagreement over Nietzsche years ago, although when we talked about it we couldn't discover what it was that we disagreed over. Lou Salomé's book on Nietzsche was lying nearby. Gary picked it up and started browsing - or was he grazing? - as we talked. To cut a long story short, we soon decided that perhaps something out of the section of Salomé's book on Nietzsche's system might provide a good place to start. So here goes....

Nietzsche's system is not deductive but, in Salomé's words, 'an overall mood'. She identifies three stages in Nietzsche's philosophical development:

1. the influence of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of aesthetics;
2. an approach of reasoned 'free spiritedness' and negative criticism;
3. a return to an aesthetic conception.

She notes that the aphoristic characteristics of his last works reflect a deliberate lack of form that reflects Nietzsche moving beyond the conception of critical reason. In contrast, in his early writings aphorisms merely indicate an idiosyncratic preference. If the first period is typified by the predominance of the will, then in the last period it is not so much a matter of 'beyond good and evil' as 'beyond will and representation'.

This then is the issue for discussion. I won't go into it any further at this point but conclude by briefly describing the philosophical background to Nietzsche's writings.

The historical period prior to Kant was typified by Feudal Aristotelianism coupled with a subterranean strand of neo-Platonic mysticism. In the centuries just prior to the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was an increase in the rational elements of these pre-Kantian worldviews, while in particular Christianised elements entered the neo-Platonic perspectives - Paracelsus is a good example. Kant subjected dogmatic metaphysics to a rational critique, replacing it with dogmatic epistemology. This gave idealism a unique slant. It became the assertion that we come to know the world as it progressively conforms to our idea, what Hans Blumenburg regards as the last great myth of the radically myth-free modern era. The idealism of Kant, Hegel, et cetera, boils down to the idea that, asymptotically at least, freedom and necessity may be reconciled. Hegel resurrected metaphysics, while his unhappy consciousness and the spirit of negation came to indelibly characterise the modern sensibility. As Salomé points out, Schopenhauer's answer to Kant is that the ultimate questions of philosophy are not found in reason but in the will. It is at this cultural point that Nietzsche made his contribution.