NIETZSCHE'S MADMAN PARABLE: A CYNICAL READING (original) (raw)
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WordPress, 2022
Nietzsche on his deathbed Ancient Cynicism was an eccentric model for practising a philosophical life. Diogenes of Sinope (c404-323 BCE) and his followers claimed independence from conventional material desires and the normal turmoil of emotional life. They were notoriously without shame-pissing and satisfying their sexual needs in public, like the dogs (kynes) from which their name partly derived. Diogenes himself was said to have slept in a tub or a shack in the Athenian marketplace. Seeing a youth scoop up water in the hollow of his hand, he threw away the wooden cup he had been using, pleased to see that he did not need it. When Alexander the Great announced himself: 'I am Alexander the great king,' Diogenes replied: 'I am Diogenes the dog.'
This paper approaches the twisted philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche considering the interpretation of Peter Sloterdijk, who asserts in his Critique of Cynical Reason that the philosopher from Basel is in fact a Neo-„Cynical” thinker. For instance, the „Eternal Recurrence of the Same” is one of Nietzsche’s most subversive thoughts that reflects a description of a resurgence of „kynical” motives. Though often overlooked, we must say that Nietzsche himself occasionally practiced Cynicism as a strategy of survival. We know that he lived modestly and had no fixed abode, wandering from city to city with all his notes and just a few books. Because Nietzsche rejected not only the Academic style, but the citizenship in any one country just as much as Diogenes had protested against Plato’s philosophy and had declared himself a „citizen of the world”, we can affirm that he was a true cosmopolitan, namely a modern Cynical philosopher. That is why, before his mental breakdown, he ostentatiously stylized his fight against Western metaphysics, Christianity and Christian morality into Cynicism. Thus, I emphasize that „the transvaluation of all values” is an unfinished project about the virtues of Neo-cynical wisdom. Besides, his basic concepts – „the Overman”, „the Eternal Recurrence of the Same”, „the Will to Power” – are nothing more than metaphors for „the love of fate” or for the acceptance of the idea of Becoming.
Continental Philosophy Review, 2011
This essay focuses on and attempts to uncover the truly radical character of Nietzsche's early "philological" work, specifically asking after the benefit he claims the study of classical culture should have for our present, late-modern historical moment. Taking up his study of the Pre-Platonic thinkers in 1873's Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, the first section analyzes Nietzsche's statement that history's principle task is the uncovering of Persönlichkeiten. I argue that it is not at all the subjective character of a psychologized individual that Nietzsche has in mind, but rather the moment of persönliche Stimmung or 'being attuned' to the world, which grounds and gives rise to thinking. In the second section, I show that the phusis or 'nature' to which the thinker is exposed in this attunement is comparable to the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces in tragic poetry, as Nietzsche understands it. This dynamic conception of phusis does not provide a metaphysical substrate or an objectively real ground to which we might return via that Greeks, but is rather essentially phenomenal, i.e. it is nothing other than the movement into and out of appearance, which always entails and requires its reception by the human being to whom it appears. In the final section of the essay, this origin proves for Nietzsche not to be located in a distant past moment. Rather, it is the abyssal origin of the tradition that is always already effective in our present moment, informing our contemporary conceptions of our world and ourselves.
Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity
Chapters on Nietzsche's Philological Beginnings (J. Latacz); Nietzsche's Radical Philology (J. Porter); The Sources of Nietzsche's Rhetoric (G. Most and Th. Fries); Apollo and the Problem of Unity in Nietzsche (D. Burnham); N's Valediction and First Article (A. Jensen); N and Diogenes Laertius (J. Barnes); N's Influence on Homeric Scholarship (A. Zhavoronkov); N's Lectures on Ancient Literature (C. Santini); Greek Audiences (V. Vivarelli); The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry (M. Meyer); N's Genealogy of Early Greek Philosophy (H. Heit); N's Philology and the Science of Antiquity (B. Babich); Religion of the 'Older Greeks' (H. Cancik and H. Cancik-Lindemaier)