(*) “Martin Heidegger especially insisted upon this; he saw Ecce Homo not as the ‘apotheosis of uninhibited self-presentation and boundless self-mirroring’ nor as ‘the harbinger of erupting madness’, nor even simply as a ‘biography’, but rather in fact as ‘a <destiny>, the destiny not of an individual but of the history of the era of modern times, of the end of the West.’ (Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four, ed. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, 3). Following Heidegger, Rodolphe Gasché interpreted EH as a ‘Gestalt’ in the sense of the form of a being (ιδέα in the Platonic sense, ειδος in the Aristotelian sense), in the sense of the mature form of Nietzsche’s life to be sure, but nonetheless as a Gestalt that, contrary to Heidegger, obliterates ‘the metaphysical duality of being and becoming’ (275) through the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same (Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Autobiography as Gestalt: Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo’, in Daniel O’Hara, ed., Why Nietzsche Now?, Bloomington, 271-290). Nevertheless, even such a keen Nietzsche interpreter as Eric Blondel could see in Ecce Homo only ‘an accumulation of lies, apotheoses, falsifications’, in other words, ‘selfishness’ (293) – to which Nietzsche himself explicitly confessed (EH, Why I Am So Clever 9) (Eric Blondel, ‘Nietzsches Selbstsucht in Ecce Homo’, Perspektiven der Philosophie 20, 1994, 291-300). Peter Sloterdijk confirms Nietzsche’s ‘<selfishness>’ (45) or ‘<megalomania>’ (40), both of which he places in quotation marks: ‘The light values of Nietzsche’s most exposed statements about himself are so excessive that even the most benevolent and freethinking readers, even those who, in their intoxication, are agreeable to him, avert their eyes at these moments’ (40). But Sloterdijk also legitimizes this selfishness in describing ‘the event of Nietzsche as a catastrophe in the history of language’ (8) and his ‘obscene abundance of self-praise’ as the unleashing of the ‘eulogistic power of language’ or of ‘speaking well [Gutreden]’ – of speaking well not for Nietzsche’s own sake, but in order to overcome the ressentiment-laden ‘speaking-poorly-systems [Schlechtredesysteme]’ of metaphysics and morality (28f.). Sloterdijk writes that Nietzsche pursued ‘the revaluation of all embarrassments [Peinlichkeiten]’ with the ‘cynicism’ of a Diogenes of Sinope (46) and offered his readers a new innocence of extravagant speaking well through the ‘gift-giving virtue’ with which he has his Zarathustra speak (51). Of course, in the end Sloterdijk counts Nietzsche only as a ‘trend designer’ of the ‘individualistic wave’, as a ‘life-style-brand’: ‘Only a fool, only a poet, only an ad writer’ (54, 57). And not a philosopher? (Peter Sloterdijk, Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht. Nietzsches fünftes ‘Evangelium’. Rede zum 100te Todestag von Friedrich Nietzsche, gehalten in Weimar am 25. August 2000 (Frankfurt, 2001).”
“No philosopher before Nietzsche spoke in this way; none declared himself the destiny of philosophy and of humanity. We must confront even this unheard-of claim and ask why he spoke in this way.”
JOGO DE ESPELHOS: “But this claim could also be ironic – in the sense of Socrates, whose assertion that he knew nothing could likewise only appear presumptuous in the face of his superior knowledge. Yet only under the protection of this presumption could Socrates question his interlocutors in such a presumptuous way as he did, thereby exposing all their knowledge as groundless.” “He presumed the right to subject a divine oracle to philosophical examination, invoking his own god who spoke only to him and remained unknown and foreign to others, his δαιμόvιov.” “and then the intention was not to elevate his own revaluation into the divine realm, but rather to bring the Socratic and the Christian revaluation, both of which invoked a god, back into the human, all-too-human realm.”
“To will one’s destiny is thus to make yet another paradox of the already paradoxical concept of destiny. It then contains not only the uncontainable, but also both the unwilled and the willed.” Querer o inquerível.
“if one does not want to succumb to destiny, one must be hard and inexorable like destiny – by accepting that which is beyond his control as his own will”
1. I know my fate
“In professing to know a fate, one speaks as a prophet. But prophets (at least those of the Hebrew Bible) do not foretell destinies so much as they primarily ‘see’ – despite the resistance of common foolishness – and then proclaim what has already happened (in the case of the biblical prophets, primarily the turning away of the chosen people from God) and what the consequences must be.”
Eu sei quais serão as conseqüências de meus atos – com bastantes detalhes, no Ocidente. A continuação – ou definhação – da Primeira filosofia.
A transmutação é necessária; a existência da existência garante sua inexorabilidade. A fé no fenômeno e a recusa de outro mundo – obrigatória desde a morte de Deus – avalizam suas conclusões.
2. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous
“Even the name, then, is a destiny that one makes his own. Everything that happens to the ‘bearer’ of a name crystallizes around that name, which becomes the ‘concept’ that one has of him, and it is this concept that outlives him – for as long as someone remembers him.”
A evidenciação de uma compulsão. Mas nada diz sobre o ‘something tremendous’.
(*) “Conway’s pugnacious essay targets the idolatry that he believes Alexander Nehamas and Richard Rorty have committed with Nietzsche and especially with Ecce Homo, which he thoroughly excoriates.”
(*) “Derrida says that Nietzsche was the first philosopher to treat, with such decisiveness, ‘philosophy and life, the science and the philosophy of life with his name and in his name’, and that, in the sign of this name, he bound a ‘logic of the dead’ to the ‘logic of the living’”
3. a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far
“Habermas judges Nietzsche to be just as dangerous as Nietzsche judged himself to be. And yet
Nietzsche had only ‘uncovered’ that the reason of European philosophy was a ‘counterfactual’ justification that did not take the factual as its standard – that it was, in other words, the object of a belief that is now, as Habermas also notes, no longer self-evident.”
(*) “He says that Nietzsche promoted a ‘heightening of the subjective to the point of utter self-oblivion’, that he ‘upset’ ‘the categories of intelligent doing and thinking,’ thus robbing modernity of its ‘emancipatory content’ and ‘shov[ing] it into the realm of metaphysically transfigured irrationality’. On this reading, Nietzsche carried out the ‘destruction of reason’, as Georg Lukács called it. Nietzsche critiqued the metaphysical concept of reason (see primarily Twilight of Idols), but also developed a new, quite differentiated concept of reason, which has yet to be explored in its contexts by Nietzsche researchers. For a critique of Lukács’s Nietzsche-critique, see Henning
Ottmann, ‘Anti-Lukács. Eine Kritik der Nietzsche-Kritik von Georg Lukács,’ Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984), 570-586, and Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche (Berlin/New York 1999), 429-433. For a discussion of Habermas’s Nietzsche-critique, see, most recently, Peter Sedgwick, ‘Nietzsche, Normativity, and Will to Power,’ Nietzsche-Studien 36 (2007), 210-229.”
“the critique of reason had arrived at a crisis and now demanded a reorientation from the ground up, especially in Europe, which had believed so firmly in one, timeless reason. But as Nietzsche noted in his Lenzer Heide note, this reorientation would lead initially to a massive disorientation, to the liberation of forces that can, in their desperation, only destroy and thus also want to destroy; and this ‘crisis’ would erupt in a ‘paroxysm’, a ‘blind raging’ ‘of nihilism and delight in destruction’. The ‘dangerous consequences’ became a prophecy: the world wars, totalitarianisms, genocides and terrorisms that characterized the twentieth century could be understood (at least in part) as the outcomes of the intellectual crisis that had befallen the fundamental convictions of European thought, in particular the conviction in the beneficial effects of a reason that was common to all. From that time on, we can never again be sure of European reason.”
4. I am no man, I am dynamite
“ideas can develop explosive power. When opposed to other ideas, they can explode relationships between ideas – even those relationships in which the firmest belief has been held. Even the idea of the ‘equality of souls before God’ was, as Nietzsche says in The Antichrist 62, an ‘explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society – [was] Christian dynamite’.”
(*) “Nietzsche repeated the metaphor on a number of occasions in his letters. See Nietzsche to Paul Deussen, November 26, 1888, KSB 8, No. 1159, p. 492; to Georg Brandes, early December 1888, KSB 8, No. 1170, p. 500f.; to Helen Zimmern, December 8, 1888, KSB 8, No. 1180, p. 512; and to Heinrich Köselitz, December 9, 1888, KSB 8, No. 1181, p. 513 (‘highest superlative of dynamite’).”
5. Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion
“A revaluation of all values like the one Nietzsche proclaims had to trigger a strong impetus for new religions – an impetus that we are also experiencing today.” “Unlike other critics of religion, Nietzsche does not replace religion with truth; he was also the harshest critic of truth.”
“Philosophers operate in dangerous proximity to founders of religion, only philosophers are less successful.”
(*) “GS 149: ‘Pythagoras and Plato […] had souls and talents that fitted them so obviously for the role of religious founders that one can scarcely marvel enough that they should have failed. Yet all they managed to found were sects.’ (…) : ‘None of the great Greek philosophers was a leader of the people: attempted most consistently by Empedocles (after Pythagoras), but also not with pure philosophy, but instead with a mythicized version of it. Others reject the people from the outset (Heraclitus). Others have a wholly refined circle of educated people as their public (Anaxagoras). Socrates displays the strongest democratic-demagogic tendency: the result is the establishment of sects, in other words, counterevidence. How could lesser philosophers ever be successful where philosophers of this sort were not? It is not possible to base a popular culture on philosophy. Thus, with regard to culture, philosophy never can have primary, but always only secondary, significance. How is it significant?’ Unpublished Writings, p. 119 (…) ‘But first build one’s circle, chase others away.’ Aurora” – Um Clube da Luta avant la lettre. Mas a situação de Zaratustra no Livro I é uma paródia desta época.
6. religions are affairs of the rabble
O PROBLEMA DO LUMPEN
“In philosophy too there is the rabble, people who follow the prevailing truths and valuations in order to find approval and acclamation.”
7. I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people
8. I want no “believers” (…) I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses.”
Quem acredite inteiramente no que diz se torna logo uma referência popular.
Mesmo que eu fosse uma unanimidade, eu não seria (por mim mesmo).
9. I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy
“To be ‘holy’ is to be inviolable and therefore also inviolably certain.” “With his Antichrist, Nietzsche wanted to enlighten and thus to overcome the values of Christianity. So he had to be apprehensive that, if he were successful, he himself would be pronounced holy by those who can only abandon an old belief for a new one”
Sandro Barbera, Paolo D’Iorio and Justus H. Ulbricht (eds.), Friedrich Nietzsche. Rezeption und Kultus (Pisa 2004);
Michael Hertl, Der Mythos Friedrich Nietzsche und seine Totenmasken. Optische Manifeste seines Kults und Bildzitate in der Kunst (Würzburg 2007).
(*) “And countless half-moral, half-religious ‘movements’ have invoked Nietzsche, including vegetarianism, [?!] feminism [?!?] and Zionism. [?!?!] Indeed, this kind of thing has happened to no other philosopher to date.”
10. I do not want to be a holy man; sooner even a buffoon… Perhaps I am a buffoon…
“the holy man where thought becomes inviolable and passes over into belief; the buffoon where it passes over into unbelief, where it becomes unbelievable and absurd and loses all seriousness. One must either believe the holy man or deny his holiness; the holy man constrains one to an either-or. But one is free before the buffoon; one can believe him one time and then laugh at him another time. This is the freedom that is important to Nietzsche, given the seriousness of the ‘destiny’ of the ‘task’ that he has taken on as his destiny.”
11. Yet in spite of that – or rather not in spite of it, because so far nobody has been more mendacious than holy men – the truth speaks out of me.
“The tension of this text – the loftiest in Nietzsche’s oeuvre – is now heightened to the extreme, evincing the agitation, passion and anger of a great prophet and thereby calling into question all objectivity. Nietzsche is now writing, speaking, breathlessly: with ellipses (‘…’), as if there were not enough time to utter the words; with insertions (parentheses), as if interrupting himself; with breaks marked by dashes (‘—’), as if there were no space for logical conjunctions.” “instinctively the reader himself takes responsibility for filling in the ellipses and the missing conjunctions. Without wanting to, the reader reads himself into the text, reads himself as well as the author.”
Rudolf Fietz, Medienphilosophie. Musik, Sprache und Schrift bei Friedrich Nietzsche (Würzburg 1992), 380-382;
Werner Stegmaier, ‘Nietzsches schriftstellerische Methoden’ in Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft (Berlin/Boston 2012).
(*) “Heinz Schlaffer interprets this as a fascistic temptation: ‘He [the reader] waits longingly for the Führer, who can read the signs correctly because he himself has laid them out.’ According to Schlaffer, a literary scholar, Nietzsche’s style is responsible for the unfettering of German prose and, consequently, of German history (…) What must the condition of an intelligence and a politics have been, that they were so confused by a literary style?”
12. for so far one has called lies truth
O século XX não pôde prescindir de Nietzsche, encarando-o como mentiroso, hipócrita, errado ou… verdadeiro. Girando a mesma moeda sobre a mão. O que quer que ainda tenhamos a coragem de chamar de verdade parte do confronto com Nietzsche.
13. formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity
Vale a pena seguir o projeto iluminista?, etc.
“truth has become self-evident, and because it has become self-evident it is difficult to break open. Whoever has the freedom to do that, Nietzsche says, must have faced the exceptional hardships in life that make such freedom possible”
“A genius is simply someone who, in his own hardship, rather randomly finds new and far reaching possibilities for others (see HH I 231)”
14. in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia
“Millennia are Nietzsche’s philosophical measure of time: he has in mind primarily the two millennia that have passed since the founding of philosophy and Christianity, but also the fact that Europe must ‘cast its goals millennia hence’, that it stands under the ‘compulsion to great politics’ (BGE 208). This is the measure of time that measures up to his revaluation.”
“Clearly, ‘opposition’ is in this case not a conceptual opposition like truth and lie, but rather an existential opposition precisely to such supposedly self-evident conceptual oppositions. One does not bother to contradict them anymore, but rather stumbles into opposition to them by living differently, experiencing differently, thinking differently”
15. My genius is in my nostrils…
“Nostrils are the olfactory organs of horses: Nietzsche is likely alluding to Plato’s famous myth of the soul as a chariot (Phaedrus, 246 a-b), in which reason directs the horses but is also dragged along by them.”
16. I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a No-saying spirit.
O ANTI-SCHOPENHAUER
Todos disseram “não” antes, veladamente ou não.
17. I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me
Zaratustra como o Quinto Evangelho
18. when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of.
“In this crisis Christian morality, as dogmatized by the Greeks, will manifest its deep rootedness in the thought of Europeans and will thus determine the politics whose most extreme means is war”
“They are, [the ideological wars] as the twentieth century sufficiently demonstrated, the most dangerous dynamite, further and literally employed by terrorism in the twenty-first century, as well.”
(*) “The word ‘ideology’ does appear in Nietzsche, though he seldom uses it.”
(*) “Nietzsche wrote to the Paris journalist Jean Bourdeau, to whom he sent his ‘proclamation’ against the Hohenzollern dynasty: ‘I honestly think it possible to bring order to the whole absurd situation of Europe by means of a kind of world-historical laughter, without even a drop of blood having to flow. In other words: the Journal des Débats is enough…’ (Nietzsche to Jean Bourdeau, presumably January 1, 1889, KSB 8, No. 1232, p. 570). (…) According to Balke, Nietzsche is only drawing the consequences from that which Michel Foucault would call ‘biopolitics’, and which had been immanent in European politics for ages, as Peter Sloterdijk then pointed out.”
“Nietzsche used the phrase ‘great politics’ early on, at first (and ironically) for the new German Empire. In his later work ‘great’ means not that which towers over other things, but rather that which is not negated by its opposition, does not perish by it, but rather can make it fruitful for himself and grow from it. In this way the ‘great reason of the body’ makes the ‘little reason’, pure reason, its ‘instrument and toy (Z 1)’; a ‘great health’ can ‘give itself up’ to grave sickness and thus become more robust (GS 382); ‘the great life’ itself lives off of war (TI, Morality as Anti-Nature 3); ‘great tolerance’ can, with ‘magnanimous self-mastery’, tolerate intolerance and grow from it (AC 38); and ‘great style’ can unite the highest pathos with sobriety and cheer (EH, Why I Write Such Good Books 4).”
(*) “The National Socialists, with their nationalism, socialism and anti-Semitism, would have been an abomination to Nietzsche, whose writings they found ‘too anti-nationalistic, too anti-German, too anti-philistine, too anti-revanchist, too anti-collectivist, too anti-militaristic, too anti-anti-rational, too anti-anti-Semitic, […] too irreconcilable with all politics of ressentiment’ (Sloterdijk, Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht, 59), so that they could not have invoked those writings without falsifying them. It was the National Socialists who first used the concepts of the degenerate and the parasitic in this manner. And Nietzsche did not publish these notes, which he composed at the same time as the drafts for the introductory aphorism of ‘Why I Am a Destiny’. In the notes to EH, Why I Am a Destiny 1, there follows another paragraph which he likewise did not publish:¹ ‘I know nothing that would be more opposed to the noble meaning of my task than this execrable incitement to the egoism of a nation [Volk] or a race that now lays claim to the name <great politics>; I have no words to express my contempt for the intellectual standard that now, in the form of the German Reich Chancellor and with the Prussian officer-attitudes of the Hohenzollern house, believes itself called to be the ruler of the history of humanity […]. There is more dynamite between heaven and earth than is dreamt of by these bloodstained idiots…’ (Nachlass 1888/89, 25[6]2, KSA 13, 640f.).”
¹ O que significa? Que a versão que temos ainda é forjada? Realmente não lembro de nada parecido no pacato Aurora, mas cabe bem como parágrafo do próprio EH.
“In Nietzsche’s time, the absolute (i.e., detached from life and its fortunes) value of an absolute truth – which was supposed to recognize adequately, and moreover give meaning to, all of life’s sufferings – had plainly become unbelievable. Since, in the European tradition, all other values were based on this value, a ‘revaluation of all values’ was inevitably called for. According to Nietzsche, it was his ‘lot’ and ‘calamity’ to have to see that unmistakably, to have to articulate it with incorruptible decency, and thus to have to become the ‘destiny’ of European humanity and, to the extent that all the world falls under European influence, the destiny of all humanity”
“Thus can one take even this unheard-of aphorism philosophically seriously and at its word.”
Seclusão Anagógica 