Friday, February 4, 2011

Notes from a Lecture on Nietzsche

Miscellaneous notes from a lecture by Professor Robinson, on Nietzsche.

Not sweetness and light, but of opposing polarities.
Is there really something which inclines us to Greek? Which Greek?

What was it that corrupted the youth of Athens?

How did the ancient Greek world understand eros?
Will to power

Birth of Tragedy … contrasts the Apollonian and Dionysian

Dionysian sects…. Liberation from strictures of the polis
Yielded to the gods for transcendental release
To be possessed by something you have to abandon yourself….
Stand outside oneself, … ecstasies ecstasy, a form of death

To have the most fulfilling life experience one must die

To the extent the soul is trapped in the body we are restrained from total liberation

Wagner & Nietzsche
On again off again friendship
Abandonment of Christianity and taken up with Germanic ancestral mythology

Wagner’s anti-semitism disturbed Nietzsche

Nietzsche… probes the depths of the unconscious… pre-Freudian thinking about inner drives

The Ubermann… masses trapped in sewer of life. Uberman
Did not call himself that.
Goethe, the life of the artist, the artistic integrity

Nietzsche’s dialectic of destruction to bring the new…. In what way is this a Marxian concept?

N’s view of Judeo/Christian foundations in Western culture… a demeaning servitude
Religion of guilt, sin, God that punishes….

Nietzsche at odds with everything….

Dignity is something we “win” … brutal conquest, impulse to power

Suffering is the path

Self knowledge, not progress….
Divided self, corrupted self… dignity of the struggle….

The goal is resolution with one’s own self

Great wit…

What is Dr. Robinson’s picture of Nietzsche?
Picture of Nietzsche: a man caressing an innocent animal that has been the subject of abuse.
Collapsed in Turin, weeping over a horse that was being beaten.

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