I Am Dynamite Flashcards
How did N get to meet Wagner?
He was mates with w’s sister
How was N’s childhood?
Overshadowed by fathers early death. Adored by mum and sister. Serious young man, lover of nature and music. Thought himself a good composer. Wagner later on did not think so.
Where was his first job?
Basel as Prof of Philology. Youngest ever in his 20’s and before he had finished as an undergrad in Leipzig.
Who were his first intellectual influences?
Schopenhauer and Wagner. Later while living in Basel he met Burkhardt. Eventually moved on from Wagner after the latter moved to Bayereuth and set up his Opera house and became even more obviously a money man. Intense relationship gradually slackened.
What was his first book about?
Birth of Tragedy from Spirit of Music. Looking at how Greek tragedy combined rationalist and non-rational elements (Apollo and Dionysus) - esp in the Greek chorus. And how this was lost in post Socratic thought.
One his first aphorisms
‘Absolute freedom of will would make man into a god; the fatalistic principle would make him into an automaton.’
What theme runs throughout Nietzsche’s writing?
The theme of nascent godhood and god-touched insanity as a passport to godhood runs through the lives and thinking of Nietzsche, Hölderlin and Empedocles.
What troubles N’s generation?
Along with his whole generation he was negotiating the shaky ground between science and faith, a problem in need of a solution. It seemed to be moving towards transferring blind faith in God to equally blind faith in scientists,
Schopenhauers philosophy in a nutshell?
When Nietzsche had settled into Basle to take up the professorship, Wagner was living in Lucerne at the Villa Tribschen on the shores of the lake. Lucerne was a short train ride from Basle and Nietzsche was eager to take up his invitation to continue the conversation about Schopenhauer and to hear more of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian opera, Tristan und Isolde. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is chiefly set out in the huge book The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1818) in which he develops earlier thinking by Kant and Plato. We live in the physical world. What we see, touch, perceive or experience is the representation (Vorstellung) but behind the representation lies the true essence of the object, the will (Wille). We are aware of ourselves, both in the perceptual fashion by which we know external things and, quite differently, from within as ‘will’.
How did he see himself when he first got to Basel?
Impersonating teacher, professor etc. Utterly fragmented, he knew himself in the Schopenhauerian state of striving and suffering: a man far from understanding his true will let alone realising
How did Burkhardt differ from previous classicists
Goethe, Schiller and Winckelmann had achieved such neo-classical weaving by presenting Greece as the ideal otherworld–calm, serene, perfectly proportioned and essentially imitable as long as you knew the classics–Burckhardt wrote a series of books revising this rose-coloured, flattened, idealising of the classical world and of its first imitator, the Renaissance. The bloodthirstiness of decadent Rome was already well known but Burckhardt, in his succession of books and lectures on the ancient world and on the Renaissance, demonstrated that extreme barbarity was no cultural hiccup occurring only when a civilisation was on the slide into decadence; rather it was a necessary part of the fabric of creativity.
How does Burkhardt compare to his folllwers?
Burckhardt is often called the father of art history, with Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark cited among his distinguished children, but unlike his followers, who depicted Renaissance Italy as an idealised intellectual Arcadia, Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy includes hair-raising tales of the little Italian city-state courts, tales of torture and barbarity that would not disgrace Caligula, or the daughters of King Lear.
How does N identify Apollonian v Dionysian in Birth of Tragedy
He identifies the Apollonian with the plastic arts, particularly sculpture but also painting, architecture and dreams, which, at that pre-Freudian time, did not represent the messy eruption of guilty subconscious effluvia, but still held their ancient significance as prophecy, enlightenment and revelation. The qualities of Apollo can be summed up more or less as the apparent, the describable.in Schopenhauerian terms corresponding roughly to ‘representation’.The arts belonging to Dionysus are music and tragedy. Dionysus the twice-born son of Zeus was perceived in ancient Greece as both man and animal.He represented an enchanted world of extraordinary experience transcending existential boundaries. Thehe is the god whose arts subvert the normal or individual identity of his followers
What did N identify as the Socratic delusion
People are held fast by the Socratic delusion that pleasure in understanding can heal the eternal wound of existence. ‘Anyone who has experienced the intense pleasure of a Socratic insight, and felt it spread out in ever-widening circles as it attempted to encompass the entire world of appearances, will forever feel there can be no sharper goad to life.’
What would occupy N’s thoughts for the rest of his life?
The concept of human nature’s duality, expressed in The Birth of Tragedy by the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the crucial need to confront the illusion of certainty provided by science would occupy his thoughts for the rest of his active life.
