And, as I say, I find nothing in Hatab’s book to relieve the bafflement. One teaching in particular must survive the tumultuous entr’acte of late modernity: the idea of eternal recurrence. Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil But perhaps what Nietzsche is saying is something like the following. The link between the humorous and tragic is that laughter, like tragedy, represents a Dionysian transcendence of the Apollonian conventions which govern life as an individual. What is being said, I think, is just that one needs to take the test. Even, that is, if one cannot yet see the future good that justifies present evil, the ‘positive thinking’ which is a mark of Dionysian health makes one utterly confident that it will arrive. He also knew, or at least suspected, that his residual religiosity would very likely complicate the dissemination of his more radical teachings. (Slightly problematic, here, perhaps, is the fact that, whatever may have been the case in 1978, no one now, I think, would wish to contest this thesis. In place of the ‘being’ subscribed to by ‘the tradition’, Nietzsche postulates a world of pure ‘becoming’: ‘becoming’, however, that is not simply change but is permeated by the ‘agonistic’ structure of resistance and overcoming — the ‘will to power’. Nietzsche’s “revaluation of values” is thus closely linked to his reinterpretation of life in general and of human life in particular. ‘s demon asks how one would feel about recurrence, in order to experience the full ’existential force’ of the test, one must ‘suspend disbelief’ and allow the thought to become one’s ‘virtual reality’ (p. 99). What, above all, makes The Birth the essential starting point is the fact that the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy is an attempt to recover the tragic, yet ecstatically life-affirming, vision expressed in Greek tragedy. Moreover theodicy is what Nietzsche clearly performs in several places. This focuses attention on the heart of the matter: how does Nietzsche think one can ‘affirm’, while yet ‘disapproving’ of, the horrendous? Nietzsche died in 1900. Now I want to return to the objection that Nietzsche’s existential test requires us to affirm the ‘morally repugnant’ — and, is therefore, itself a ‘morally repugnant’ conception of psychic health. 139-40). Were we the readers he claims to deserve, we would have elevated ourselves by now “to a higher level of existence” (EH III, 1) and, presumably, taken up permanent residence beyond good and evil. , in the repeated theme of the world’s ‘perfection’. It wants rather to cross over to the opposite of this — to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection – it wants the eternal circulation: — the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The rest of my philosophical articles. Unless I have missed something, there is no very clear answer to this question in Hatab’s book. New York: Routledge, 2005. xix + 208 pp. Doing so will allow us to discern how closely we approach the standard established by those heroic individuals who embrace without revision the eternal recurrence of all that they have been, done, and known. As we have seen, Nietzsche specifically associates eternal recurrence with necessity, and the repetition scheme seems to imply a rigid determinism, because any event that happens, has happened, or will happen cannot admit of any alternatives. ISBN-13: 978-0415967594. Though there certainly are problems concerning the nature and possibility of freedom in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the bearing of eternal recurrence on the matter is relatively simple. Nietzsche, he convincingly argues, does not require the latter – witness Zarathustra’s disdain of the ‘omnisatisfied’ and his honouring of ‘choosy tongues and stomachs’ which say ‘no’ as well as ‘yes’ (pp. As with Camus’ Sisyphus, the sense of one’s unblinking and unbroken courage in the face of the horror and terror of life — one’s refusal to commit suicide — is what is all-important in the ‘macho’ morality to which Nietzsche seems, here, to subscribe. In other words, we all long for significance. But now the question becomes acute: how could anyone affirm an event that one finds morally repulsive (or just repulsive). Alarmed that he might someday be hailed as a “holy man,” even as the “founder of a religion,” he launched a noteworthy preemptive strike: “[I would] sooner even [be] a buffoon.—Perhaps I am a buffoon” (EH IV, 1). overcoming of the idealism of his youth. This seems a somewhat laboured way of making what is, if I understand it, a relatively straightforward point. Such excruciating self-interrogations eventually took the measure of Nietzsche’s sanity. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. In that event, in fact, he would have been obliged to revisit, and perhaps even to retract, the sweeping jeremiad that he had pronounced on the whole of late modernity. He is, as Zarathustra later confesses, one of the ‘afterworldly’. 100 Malloy Hall Nietzsche's writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. As interpreters, therefore, we should consign the note to the oblivion Nietzsche desired for it and stick to the ‘old path’ of theodicy as his considered answer to the ‘problem of evil’. Or to be read well by so few that his chances of surviving the long entr’acte of late modernity are virtually nil? (2) Does eternal recurrence subvert Nietzsche’s promotion of creativity? Sometimes one has the impression of the book as a loose assemblage of essays and lectures rather than an organically conceived whole. Lawrence Hatab’s book is a rewriting of a work that first appeared in 1978. itself Nietzsche is at one with the idealism — and pessimism — of Schopenhauer and of his patron, Richard Wagner. It is, however, not particularly clear how this discussion is intended to fit into the overall structure of the book, nor why we have leapt from The Birth straight to the Genealogy. 139-40). 84-5): My new path to a ‘Yes’. which Hatab rightly regards as equivalent to it) require us to affirm — ecstatically to affirm — Auschwitz? 6    Calling Witnesses: A Review of the Literature In light of the drama that filled Nietzsche’s final years of sanity, it would be easy enough to misplace the questions of audience and readership that vexed him. In his estimation, his first generation of readers was as ridiculous as his books were sublime. Rejecting pity is about rejecting palliatives. Early in 1889, following an explosively productive year of writing and plotting, he fell without return into madness—the result, as legend has it, of inserting himself between a besieged horse and its whip-wielding master. So long as we late moderns remain mired in our desuetude, Nietzsche (or someone on his behalf) may maintain his assertion of superiority over us. Routledge, 2005. Individuals … Nussbaum argues that Nietzsche’s pseudo-hardness is a subtle form of otherworldliness – a betrayal of this earth. we are to discover a ‘personal providence’ in our lives according to which ‘everything that befalls us’, even the loss of a friend or bodily injury, ‘continually turns out for the best’. The book offers a readable treatment of most of the core topics in Nietzsche's philosophy, all discussed in the light of the consummating effect of eternal recurrence. It is important to begin with an analysis of this idea in order to address critical assessments of eternal recurrence and to fathom how freedom can function in Nietzsche’s thought. The reason he denies both a free and an unfree will is that each is a false attribution of causality: freedom as self-causation and unfreedom as external causation (BGE 21). So let me try to provide a reading of the passage other than that suggested by Hatab. Error is, — every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity towards oneself, of cleanliness towards oneself — Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibility of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. (4) How can eternal recurrence admit of truth in any worthy sense? Chapters 4, 5 and 6 form the centre of the book since these contain the discussion of eternal recurrence. 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