” It comes to a climax in Nietzsche, who exposed the mythic foundations of Greek rationality and the Enlightenment. Beyond critique, Nietzsche “reinvented polemically the Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo to counter the Socratic scientific rationality that had come to dominate the world after the fifth century.” Like the German Romantics, Nietzsche insisted “only a culture bounded by myths could achieve unity and identity” and concluded “modern culture could be redeemed only if a new mythology could arise” (40-1).

Wer die Luft meiner Schriften zu athmen weiss, weiss, dass es eine Luft der Höhe ist, eine starke Luft. Man muss für sie geschaffen sein, sonst ist die Gefahr keine kleine, sich in ihr zu erkälten. Das Eis ist nahe, die Einsamkeit ist ungeheuer — aber wie ruhig alle Dinge im Lichte liegen! wie frei man athmet! wie Viel man unter sich fühlt! — Philosophie, wie ich sie bisher verstanden und gelebt habe, ist das freiwillige Leben in Eis und Hochgebirge — das Aufsuchen alles Fremden und Fragwürdigen im Dasein, alles dessen, was durch die Moral bisher in Bann gethan war. Aus einer langen Erfahrung, welche eine solche Wanderung im Verbotenen gab, lernte ich die Ursachen, aus denen bisher moralisirt und idealisirt wurde, sehr anders ansehn als es erwünscht sein mag: die verborgene Geschichte der Philosophen, die Psychologie ihrer grossen Namen kam für mich an’s Licht.

It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, notonly that God is dead but that “faith in science, which after all existsundeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must haveoriginated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness ofthe ‘will to truth,’ of ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it constantly.”

The creator, he said, 00:01:17 wanted to look away from himself. That's why he created the world. You could just revert to the proposition and say, okay, since we are so absolved into the world, we tend to look away from ourselves. And it's exactly what we want to revert now. How can we become of this blind spot? 00:01:40 How can we become aware of the blind spot of science? That's my question

Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity, logic and the principle of individuation, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy and unity (hence the omission of the principle of individuation). Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other, formed principles that were fundamental to the Greek culture:[3][4] the Apollonian a dreaming state, full of illusions; and Dionysian a state of intoxication, representing the liberations of instinct and dissolution of boundaries. In this mould, a man appears as the satyr

Socrates is turned into a systematic set of psycho-technologies that you internalise into your metacognition. So, what became crucial for Plato, as we saw, was argumentation. But for Antisthenes the actual confrontation with Socrates was more important. Both Plato and Antisthenes are interested in the transformation that Socrates is affording.Plato sees this happening through argumentation. Antesthenes sees it as happening through confrontation because... And you can see how they're both right, because in Socratic elenchus, Socrates comes up and he argues with you. But of course he's also confronting you. We talked about how he was sort of slamming the Axial revolution into your face! So, Antesthenes has a follower, Diogenes, and Diogenes epitomizes this: This confrontation. And by looking at the kinds of confrontation we can start to see what the followers of Antesthenes are doing. So Diogenes basically does something analogous to provocative performance art. He gets in your face in a way that tries to provoke you to realizations. Those kinds of insights that will challenge you. He tries to basically create aporia in you, that shocked experience that you had when confronting Socrates that challenges you to radically transform your life. But instead of using argumentation and discussion, as Socrates did and Plato picked up on, they were really trying to hone in on how to try to be as provocative as possible.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The superabundant Nietzschean substitute for a non-existent truth was the will to imagine anything and everything that the human spirit needed to survive the dismal and chaotic nature of existence: ‘True falsehoods’ were required, and created

reading of Nietzsche which says that “we provide [the world] with the determinateness its fundamentally indeterminate or poly-determinate structure calls for.

"Let us remember that Wagner was young at the time Hegel and Schelling seduced men’s spirits; that he guessed, that he grasped with his very hands the only thing the Germans take seriously—“the idea,” which is to say, something that is obscure, uncertain, full of intimations; that among Germans clarity is an objection, logic a refutation. Harshly, Schopenhauer accused the epoch of Hegel and Schelling of dishonesty—harshly, also wrongly: he himself, the old pessimistic counterfeiter, was not a whit more “honest” than his more famous contemporaries. Let us keep morals out of this: Hegel is a taste.— And not merely a German but a European taste.—A taste Wagner comprehended—to which he felt equal—which he immortalized.—He merely applied it to music—he invented a style for himself charged with “infinite meaning”—he became the heir of Hegel—Music as “idea.”— And how Wagner was understood!—The same human type that raved about Hegel, today raves about Wagner; in his school they even write Hegelian.

Even so, new inventions have always influenced literary production, as Friedrich Nietzsche, who struggled with a semi-spherical typewriter, once lyrically observed: “The writing ball is a thing like me: made of / iron / yet easily twisted on journeys.”

Friedrich Nietzsche once identified three approaches to the writing of history: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical, the last being history “that judges and condemns.”

“Sibi scribere: The reasonable author writes for no other posterity than his own, for his own old age, in order to take pleasure in himself even then,” Blumenberg quotes Nietzsche (here, 83).

As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz a century later, “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”

et avec ferveur Nietzsche

Je m’interdis les lectures frivoles, les bavardages inutiles, [Page 239]tous les divertissements

It has been over a century now since Nietzsche explored nihilism and its implications for civilization. As he predicted, nihilism's impact on the culture and values of the 20th century has been pervasive, its apocalyptic tenor spawning a mood of gloom and a good deal of anxiety, anger, and terror. Interestingly, Nietzsche himself, a radical skeptic preoccupied with language, knowledge, and truth, anticipated many of the themes of postmodernity. It's helpful to note, then, that he believed we could--at a terrible price--eventually work through nihilism. If we survived the process of destroying all interpretations of the world, we could then perhaps discover the correct course for humankind.

a shift away from the question of truth andrepresentation (What is money and what does it mean?) to questions offorce and power (What can it do

To read it is co learn how the "humanities crisis" started, how the conception oflanguage as value-free and ideally transparent underwrote the modern world.

But there is no such substratum, there is no "being" behind doing, working, becoming; "the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action is everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they make the lightning lighten, that is a "doing-doing"; they make the same phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause.

cast some doubt on doubt

The opposition of meaning ... to its metaphorical signifier ... is sedimented-another metaphor-by the entire history of philosophy."

All language is the language of a community,

fabric of conventions,

When Weaver argues that language is sermonic (the title of hi~ influential 1 963 essay), he means that all instances of language use arc persuasive. rhetorical, and therefore imbued with ethical values.

I mean the doctrine of Usage. The doc-0 trine that there is a right or a good use for every -\+,....+ word and that literary virtue consists in making rtut...;..l. that good use of it

for bona fide communications,

It is Spencer (not Darwin) who coined the phrnse survival of 1l1e fittest,

human need to be in control of the 'YPrld

The same writers who exhaust the resource~ of language to deride the dogma of apostolic sue· cession rigidly enforce that of the male pries!· hood, for which the Bible give.<; them just as little warrant

“It is much more agreeable to offend and later ask forgiveness than to be offended and grant forgiveness,” said the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I think many people today are inclined to agree with him.