Nietzsche

Comments

Dinesh ^club

Nietzsche looks for happiness beyond the integrated civilization and traditional communities of the past. The encounters with an unknown woman of doubtful virtue in the crowded city didn’t quite work for him. Nietzsche’s modernity was not metropolitan, but individual and cosmic. His conception of eternal return suggests a way of overcoming the very premise of nostalgia, the irreversibility of time and unrepeatability of experience. Promising an escape from modern transience, it challenges the opposition between chaos and control, linear and circular time.

This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not extend itself, but only transforms itself. . . a household without expenses or losses, bit likewise without income. . . a sea of forces flowing and flushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back with tremendous years of recurrence, with ebb and a flow of its forms.

Nietzsche’s poetic fragments about eternal return evoke Greek philosophy; however, like the word ‘nostalgia,’ this kind of eternal return is only nostalgically Greek. Moreover, it has a distinct modern aspect: self-creating modern subjectivity characterized by the “will of power.” Nietzsche scholars continue to argue over the contradictory notion of eternal return and whether it is primarily subjective or cosmological.” Nietzsche returned many times to the idea of eternal return but always with a difference, always recreating a new aspect of it, remaining at the end tantalizing modern ironist, nor a systematic or scientific philosopher.

Yet nostalgia creeps into Nietzschean images, haunting the scenes of ultimate oblivion when the hero hopes to move beyond memory and forgetting into cosmos and wilderness. Nietzsche did not succeed in being at home in a household ‘without expenses and without losses.’ Homesickness overcomes him. Only his icon of modern nostalgia is not a statuesque unknown woman but a well known superman, Zarathustra, at home only in his own soul: “One should live upon mountains. With happy nostrils I breathe again mountain freedom. At last my nose is delivered from the odour of all humankind. The soul tickled by sharp breezes as with sparkling wine, sneezes -- sneezes and cries to itself: Bless you!” thus the refuge of the modern philosopher is not so modern. Rather, this is an Alphine landscape of the romantic sublime and Swiss souvenir postcards. Nietzsche plays a drama of social theatrically -- of sneezing and saying “bless you” in the theater of his soul.. . . . The Nietzschean “perfect moment” is not an urban epiphany, but a soulful recollection on a mountain top. ~ Page 25/26

5 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

5 years ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.

		Page color
		Comments Panel
		Screen Margins
▼▲
		Widescreen

← Among Dinesh's photos

See also...

Excerpts from the Books that I read - II Excerpts from the Books that I read - II

Filters / photo making Filters / photo making

Keywords

Authorizations, license

Nietzsche

Ξ	Frame Options
3 - +