Questions SEP 15

 Midterm report presentations begin

Kaag

1. Any thoughts on Leopold and Loeb? (see separate post)
2. Kieran Setiya says "You don't need to like Nietzsche to love this book... It is an attempt to reclaim his philosophy for the middle-aged..." Do you think different philosophies are suitable for different ages and stages of life? (And see #7 below...)
3. Per the Herman Hesse epigraph: Do you think it possible to philosophize deeply if you've never "tasted solitude"? Can you philosophize humanely if you've tasted too much?
4. Per the Nietzsche prologue epigraph:Is it noble to "perish in pursuit of" your goals?
5. What does literally going higher by scaling mountains have to do with becoming a better person? What does it mean to you to be better? Is confrontation with adversity for its own sake a good thing to pursue? In what sense do you aspire to be "above" other people? Is mediocrity the true spirit of democracy? (5)
6. What is your current reply to the demon's eternal recurrence proposition (below **)? Is that something you'd hope to change?
7. Any thoughts on "Breaking up with Zarathustra/Falling out with Superman" (below*)?
8. What does it mean for a final destination in life not to exist? 11  Given our mortal condition, how can aging also lack a final destination? 6
9. What was Silenus's problem!? 14
10. Was "the little pastor" a stoic? 19  Did he ever cease to be one?
11. Do you prefer beer, or pastries? 20
12. Do you agree that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? 23  Did Emerson think so?
13. Do you also find walking "among the most life-affirming of human activities"? 26-7 (See "Gymnasiums of the Mind" (#below)
14. "I am no man. I am Dynamite." 33  Is there anything troubling about someone who says things like that? (Also, see the new Nietzsche bio of that title.)
15. Is there really anything "respectable" about suicide? Or self-starvation? 34
16. What does it mean to follow someone because you wish to follow yourself? 36  (Compare to Monty Python's Life of Brian scene: "You don't need to follow me, you don't need to follow anybody. You're all individuals." --"I'm not," responds the lone non-conformist.)

...

John Kaag, in search of “Nietzschean transcendence”

A tale of two pilgrimages-

https://youtu.be/eEVMAGLe73I?is=Uc-lTMIR_ISMaPPe

Yalom

1. Another epigraph question: Are you "ready to burn yourself in your own flame"? What would that entail, for you?
2. Who, according to some, is the "true father of modern psychotherapy"? Do you think philosophy can also be a "talking cure"?
3. In light of our discussion about the nonverbal "glimmer and twinkle" of experience that is not merely textual, do you have thoughts about Josef's self-berating inner monologue ("Stop thinking! Open your eyes! Let the world in!")? 2
4. What is a "posthumous philosopher"? 7 Aren't most philosophers in our culture (as opposed, say, to French) posthumous in Nietzsche's sense? Is that a deficiency in the philosopher, or the culture?
5. Is there really "no medicine for despair, no doctor for the soul"? 8  Do you think that's what eternal recurrence is, for Nietzsche? How about for you?
6. Could there ever be a functional and flourishing society in which the only acknowledged duty was "to perpetuate my freedom"? 12  Would that not degenerate to a power struggle? Mustn't freedom also acknowledge limits based on mutual respect?
7. Is Agonis or competitive "contest" the only or best way to develop one's natural gifts? 17  What about cooperative mutual support and reciprocity?
8. Any thoughts on Nietzsche's apparently-semi-asexual menage a trois with Lou and Paul? 19 (below***)
9. Are "free-thinking individualists" right to "reject socially imposed restrictions" and "create our own moral structure"? 20  What would Kant say?
10. Add your questions and comments...

 

From The Joyful Wisdom (aka The Gay Science)-

**341. The Heaviest Burden.—
What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear aught more divine!" If that thought acquired power over thee, as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?—

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*Breaking up with Zarathustra

Falling Out With Superman 

by Gary Kamiya

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God. 

I was sold. Like those German soldiers in World War I who were found dead with copies of ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'' in their pockets, I hauled my tattered purple-covered copy of the Viking Portable Nietzsche with me everywhere. It was with me when I dropped out of college after a semester to go work in a shipyard, with me years later when, sitting on a knoll on a tiny island off Vancouver, I decided to wake up from my dream of total escape and go back to school. I read him to elevate myself, to punish myself, to remind myself of the promises I had broken. He was the closest thing I had to a church. 

Eventually, I stopped going to church. There were various reasons for this, some of them good and some of them not; I couldn't sort out which was which then, and can't now. Maybe it was just satiation. The philosopher John Searle once told me that reading Nietzsche was like drinking cognac -- a sip was good, but you didn't want to drink the whole bottle. I'd been pounding Nietzsche by the case. 

So I left Nietzsche alone on his mountaintop. But as every lapsed believer knows, you never wholly escape the church. Nietzsche had come to stand for something absolute and pure, like gilded Byzantium or Ahab's whale; he represented what I imagined I might have been. He had become a permanent horizon. 

Oddly, during this long, strange love affair, I avoided learning much about Nietzsche's life. Maybe this was because I had turned him into a shrine -- after all, totems have no history. I knew only the superficials: that he was a desperately lonely man, poor and largely unread, plagued by bad health, who went mad at the age of 44. 

Then, last summer, I planned a trip to Switzerland. As a highlight, I decided to visit Sils-Maria -- the small village near St. Moritz where Nietzsche spent seven summers and wrote many of his masterpieces. The tourist soon won out over the iconoclast: now that I was going to stand where the Master stood, I couldn't pretend I didn't care about how he lived, what people he liked, what he wore. So I immersed myself in various biographical accounts: ''Nietzsche in Turin,'' Lesley Chamberlain's psychologically penetrating book about the philosopher's final year; Ronald Hayman's challenging ''Nietzsche: A Critical Life''; and a book that only a Nietzsche cultist would consume, ''The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image.'' 

It wasn't the grand narrative of his life but the details that stayed with me. The joke photograph in which he and his friend Paul Ree posed in a cart over which Lou Salome, the 21-year-old woman with whom he was timidly, desperately in love, held a whip. Nietzsche in the Caligari-shadowed last days of his sanity, once again turning himself into a character in an unhappy novel, lamenting that a journey was ''perhaps the most unfortunate I have made'' simply because he had climbed aboard the wrong train. The fact that he liked ''Tom Sawyer.'' The solicitude of an old female friend who tried to buck him up but was unable to teach him not to let everything wound him. The visitor who simply reported how much he liked Herr Nietzsche, the lonely, earnest professor with the bad eyes. 

This wasn't the Nietzsche I remembered. The philosopher I had worshiped was an uncanny hybrid, simultaneously a terrifying Old Testament prophet and a 19th-century free spirit. To be sure, much of Nietzsche -- maybe the best of him -- was as lucid, critical and quick-footed as Stendhal. Yet it was the monstrous doctrines at the heart of his thought -- the Overman, the Eternal Recurrence -- that had drawn me; they hypnotized me because I couldn't figure out whether they were coming from man or some frightening gospel. Now that I understood how much of Nietzsche's work was an attempt to turn his personal torment into something lasting, I realized that perhaps those enigmatic pronouncements were best seen not as antitruths handed down from on high, but as words he whispered to himself, beacons he lighted in the darkness to cheer himself up. What was great in Nietzsche was not, I began to see, his holiness, maybe not even his wisdom. It was his courage. 

Then I went to Sils. 

Sils-Maria is a bland one-horse resort village under spectacular mountains between two crystalline lakes. Terminally respectable Swiss burghers polish their vacation homes; tourists (''They climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating,'' Nietzsche wrote) fill the hotels. The Nietzsche-Haus stands near the center. In his day it was a tea and spice shop whose owner rented an upstairs room to Nietzsche; now it is a museum. In front of the tidy white-and-green building stands a sculpture of a large black eagle -- one of the companions that consoled Zarathustra in his last loneliness. On a gray afternoon I pulled open the door and climbed the stairs to his room. 

No one was there. I looked in. A small, low-ceilinged room, walls of knotty pine. A lumpy-looking bed. A small table with a green silk cover. A washbasin. A single window, looking out onto a patch of the forest. 

We go to literary shrines to touch things. We run our fingers along the writing table, we furtively step over the red velvet rope and finger the water jug by the edge of the bed. Yet to feel the pedestal is to call the very idea of the pedestal into question. Which is why there is something comic in all pilgrimages: while Don Quixote holds loftily forth, Sancho Panza steals the ashtray. 

But as I ran my fingertips along the knotty pine, it all rose up: the indelible words that had been created here; the misery of the man who had shivered out his life in this room; and all the years I had spent charting my course by a dream. Standing outside in the hallway, I was surprised to find myself beginning to weep, like the most breast-heaving pilgrim. A familiar voice, very old and once sacred to me, protested. I could not pity Nietzsche. It was a betrayal of everything he had believed. He had railed against pity. Compassion was for the hearth-huddlers, the followers, those who lacked the strength to turn themselves into ''dancing stars.'' The last temptation of the higher man, Nietzsche had taught, was pity; on its far side was a roaring, Dionysian, inhuman laughter. I could recite this chapter and verse, but I had never been able to live it. It was the most alien and terrifying of Nietzsche's teachings. Still, long reverence pulled me up short. Here, of all places, I must feel no pity. 

But my heart won the war. Maybe it was resignation -- the final acceptance that I was not going to forge myself into a new shape. Maybe it was weariness with a doctrine, with all doctrines, that sounded delirious but that couldn't be used. Whatever it was, I stopped fighting. Yes, part of Nietzsche would always stand far above the tree line, and I would treasure that iciness. But I had to walk on the paths where I could go. 

Still confused, I stood in the doorway. And then, as a gift, the following words came into my head, words spoken by Zarathustra to his disciples, disciples that Nietzsche himself never had. ''You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.'' 

I took a last look at the room. Then I walked out the door. 

Gary Kamiya is executive editor of the online magazine Salon.com. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/23/bookend/bookend.html

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***

 

“One of the strangest yet most intriguing aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas is his repeated enthusiasm for a concept that he called amor fati (translated from Latin as ‘a love of one’s fate’, or as we might put it, a resolute, enthusiastic acceptance of everything that has happened in one’s life). The person of amor fati doesn’t seek to erase anything of their past, but rather accepts what has occurred, the good and the bad, the mistaken and the wise, with strength and an all-embracing gratitude that borders on a kind of enthusiastic affection…” 

You can read more on this and other subjects here: https://goo.gl/cDu7st 

MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Watch more films on CURRICULUM in our playlist: http://bit.ly/2bVcNyy

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# Gymnasiums of the Mind (excerpt)

"Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb: “It is solved by walking.” Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind...” --Christopher Orlet, Philosophy Now