Montaigne and Nietzsche: Ancient and Future Wisdom (original) (raw)
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Nietzsche and Montaigne: Dionysian Pessimism (Aigne Journal)
Friedrich Nietzsche's writings are replete with attacks on past philosophers-Socrates, Plato, Kant and Hegel: all these are subject to his censure. Even Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy is of fundamental importance to Nietzsche and whom he greatly admired, is not immune from criticism: Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism is persistently mocked in Nietzsche's later work. With this in mind, Nietzsche's unswerving reverence for Michel de Montaigne appears all the more remarkable. Whenever Nietzsche mentions Montaigne in his writing, his comments reveal a profound admiration. Considering Nietzsche's esteem for Montaigne, one would expect to find discussions of Montaigne's Essays pervading his work; yet Nietzsche's explicit engagement with Montaigne amounts to no more than a few remarks scattered throughout his corpus. As a consequence, the impact of Montaigne's thought on Nietzsche has, hitherto, received scant scholarly attention. But the Essays exerted a profound effect on Nietzsche and the paucity of direct reference to Montaigne in his work belies a substantial implicit influence. The aim of my paper is to address this lacuna in the literature by making evident the importance of the Essays to the development of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche's embrace of Montaigne in "Schopenhauer as Educator", the third of his Untimely Meditations, marks a fundamental turning point in his thought and is essential to understanding his mature philosophy. I argue that Montaigne is a key inspiration for Nietzsche as he begins to conceive of a counter ideal to Schopenhauerian pessimism-what he calls Dionysian pessimism.
Azja-Pacyfik, 2018
, Trier ... and I will leave. But the birds will stay, singing: and my garden will stay, with its green tree, with its water well. Many afternoons the skies will be blue and placid, and the bells in the belfry will chime, as they are chiming this very afternoon. The people who have loved me will pass away, and the town will burst anew every year. But my spirit will always wander nostalgic in the same recondite corner of my flowery garden. Juan Ramon Jimenez: "The Definitive Journey" Montaigne remarks in his essay on death (the name of which is quoted in my own essay's title): "All days travel towards death, the last one reaches it." (p. 67 1) Seen from this perspective, death is not simply an essential part of our life, but life is our "definitive journey" towards death. How shall we travel this "definitive journey"-to quote the title of a poem by Jimenez-, how can we reconcile our love of life with the knowledge of the definitiveness of our destination? For we will have to leave, if we like it or not, some sooner, some later, "but the birds will stay, singing," as Jimenez says in his poem. The world will continue in its natural course, hardly taking notice. As we know too well, such questions about life and death have largely disappeared from the common perspective. Sure enough, today there is a frightening prevalence of death all around us, particularly in the media: There is virtually no news coverage without being confronted with visual impressions of death, be it fighting in Afghanistan, Palestine, India or from natural catastrophes that happen in regular intervals all around the globe; just as many deaths occur in the Hollywood made "sex and crime" version of reality that is showing at the nearby cinema. 1 The quotes from Montaigne are from Donald M. Frame (transl.) The Complete Works of Montaigne, Stanford 1958.
In Sickness and In Health: Nietzsche, Améry, and "the Moral Difference"
"The politics of Nihilism: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel", 2014
This essay shows that at the core of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is a differentiation, which I term "the more difference", between two dimensions of value, namely, between values themselves and the value of these values. Unless this difference is maintained, values stand to lose their value (nihilism). Although establishing the moral difference was quintessential to Nietzsche’s work, I argue that he contradicted it by reducing the value of values with the value of life. Against this, I present the work of philosopher Jean Améry, who, in polemic against Nietzsche, called the value of the value of life into question, thus affirming the moral difference in a way that is more consistent, perhaps even more “Nietzschean”, than Nietzsche himself.
The following paper will appear in Foucault and Nietzsche: A Critical Encounter, Edited
Friedrich Nietzsche's compelling diagnosis of the cultural crisis of the modern epoch, signaled by the " death of God, " of the metaphysical certitude that, in several forms, had shaped the West for nearly two millennia, together with his commitment to genealogy, and perspectivism, which opened up the prospect of new modes for an art of living, present enormous interpretive challenges. To these must be added the difficulties presented by the very way in which Nietzsche writes his texts, which we believe are closely linked to the modes of thinking, feeling, and acting that Nietzsche sought to induce in his readers, and which are integral to what we see as a project of self-fashioning linked to an art of living. While the two are conjoined, there are distinctions between them as well. And the bases for such a distinction can best be illuminated by turning to Michel Foucault, whose own thinking ripened under the warm Nietzschean sun. Foucault's concern with Nietzsche begins early, and continues until his death. We can clearly see the beginning of that concern in his The Order of Things [Les Mots et les Choses] (1966), where Foucault links Nietzsche's death of God to what he sees as the " end of man, " the end of an historically specific understanding of human being and with it the whole of " … the entire modern episteme –-that which formed towards the end of the eighteenth century and still serves as the positive ground of our knowledge, that which constituted man's particular mode of being and the possibility of knowing him empirically …. " 1 For Foucault, then, Nietzsche initiated the end of that vision of " man, " that " invention " of human being, that had its inception at the end of the eighteenth century, and now was about to " … be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. " 2 For both these thinkers, then, the death of God entailed the death of man as a transcendental subject, demanding for both a new concept of man, of human being: for Nietzsche, the notion of the " overman " (the Ubermensch); for Foucault, the idea that we have to create a new mode of subjectivity. Indeed, we believe that Foucault can provide a framework on the bases of which Nietzsche's own concern with an art of living can come into sharper focus. Foucault
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Verbum, 2014
This essay argues that the main instrument Montaigne, 16th-century French thinker and writer, used for creating a "new ontology, " as Nicola Panichi calls it (2004, 278), was language and a special style of writing. He, first of all, created-or revived from the Antiquity-a new genre most suitable for a new discourse, and christened it essai. Then he applied a method known in humanist schools of the Renaissance as ultraquem partem to relativise all previous thought. Finally, he employed a thorough, frank examination of his own behaviour, habits and preferences, adorned with Latin sentences, to promote self-analysis as a path to personal contentment. This article applies the theory of Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and sociolinguist, especially his essay "Discourse in the Novel" ("Слово в романе"), in the analysis of the peculiarity of Montaigne's composition and its purposefulness in expressing at that time dangerous, but already prevalent worldview. Since battling medieval Christian thought was the paramount assignment of his endeavour, the quotes are mostly taken from Montaigne's only essay-and by far the longest in the three-volume collection-entirely dedicated to religion, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond. "
Nietzsche’s view of suicide is a topic which in the last years has been the focus of works such as Julian Young’s and Paul S. Loeb’s. Within this context, this paper seeks to add new elements to the discussion. To this purpose, Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide will be explored from two different points of view. The first part of the paper focuses on the distinction between voluntary (free) and involuntary (natural) death. Nietzsche’s appraisal of both will be scrutinized. In particular, through the comparison with the Classical and, especially, Stoic philosophy and through the critique of the religious (particularly Christian) conception of death, it will be shown, among other things, that Nietzsche defends the rationality of suicide, presents a view of voluntary death as emptied of morality and fights against the Christian denaturalization of suicide. In the second part of the paper, suicide will be considered from a philosophical-existentialist viewpoint, that is, as a possible consequence of the meaninglessness of human existence. The problem is to judge whether life is or is not worth living in a world devoid of meaning and purpose. Nietzsche’s attitude to suicide will be analyzed in a chronological way (early, middle and late Nietzsche). Special attention will be given to the role played by art. The relevant conclusion is that, although in different ways, Nietzsche gives an affirmative answer to the question whether life is worth living in a world devoid of meaning and purpose.
The Rigmaroles of Life and Death: A Study on the Politics of Death in Select Literary works
The paper attempts to study the role of death in determining ones existence. The existence of man is on the belief that he centres the universe and the enter universe conspires to make his life easy. He limits his life to his self and forgets the role of death-the universal leveller. Much study has gone into understanding the concept of death which still remains a mystery. The paper draws its strength from the writing of Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe and Gayathri Spivak. Death is an act performed by an individual in the times of his insecurity either as a protest against the norms or voluntary as a resistance to life. The question of whether a man has the right to tale one's life and for that matter other debatable. The paper extends its study on the role of nation or state in matters dealing with capital punishments and suicides.