nietzsche's life sentence

As he proudly explains, Given this feeling of distance, how could I possibly wish to be read by those “moderns” whom I know! — Philosophy as I have hitherto understood and lived it is a voluntary quest for even the most detested … side of existence … . When Dr. Heinrich von Stein once complained very honestly that he didn’t understand a word of my Zarathustra, I told him that this was perfectly in order: having understood six sentences from it—that is, to have really experienced them—would raise one to a higher level of existence than “modern” men could attain. Although Nietzsche called eternal recurrence his most fundamental idea, most interpreters have found it problematic or needful of redescription in other terms. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Nietzsche‘s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. Although Nietzsche is now (and will continue to be) widely read, his putative “triumph” endures. As the shroud of madness descended, he presented himself as a resolute lawgiver, as sheltering within his elastic soul “every name in history,” and as promising bold political action—including several high-profile assassinations—as favors to his dearest friends. The book offers a readable treatment of most of the core topics in Nietzsche's philosophy, all discussed in the light of the consummating effect of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. ‘s demon asks how one would feel about recurrence, in order to experience the full ’existential force’ of the test, one must ‘suspend disbelief’ and allow the thought to become one’s ‘virtual reality’ (p. 99). 139-40). What is being said, I think, is just that one needs to take the test. (proper name) ? One teaching in particular must survive the tumultuous entr’acte of late modernity: the idea of eternal recurrence. What concerns Nietzsche is the problem of affirming a world ‘that ultimately blocks our natural interest in happiness [and] preservation’ (ibid.). - Alan Schrift, Grinnell College, USA; '[Hatab] possesses a unique talent for introducing non specialists to difficult philosophical issues while honouring the lived sense of urgency from which these issues originally emerged. It is important to begin with an analysis of this idea in order to address critical assessments of eternal recurrence and to fathom how freedom can function in Nietzsche’s thought. He was too keen an observer of his times to bequeath his writings without reservation to the indiscriminate and redemption-minded readers of late European modernity. Nietzsche‘s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence - Kindle edition by HATAB, LAWRENCE.J.. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. In place of the ‘being’ subscribed to by ‘the tradition’, Nietzsche postulates a world of pure ‘becoming’: ‘becoming’, however, that is not simply change but is permeated by the ‘agonistic’ structure of resistance and overcoming — the ‘will to power’. Hatab, of course, agrees with this. In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. Although he claimed among his contemporary readers “nothing but first-rate intellects and proven characters, trained in high positions and duties” (EH III, 2), this boast is difficult to square with his more typical expressions of contempt for his late modern contemporaries. So, if my reading is correct, there is, after all, a kind of theodicy being performed and the bafflement as to how one can ‘desire’ (in a sense) unredeemed evil is removed. Nietzsche occasionally despaired of attracting readers whom he deemed worthy of his books. Doing so will allow us to discern how closely we approach the standard established by those heroic individuals who embrace without revision the eternal recurrence of all that they have been, done, and known. For better or worse, we are the monkish intermediaries who must safeguard his books, preserving his teachings until such time as his intended readers arrive to glean their true, full relevance. This seems a somewhat laboured way of making what is, if I understand it, a relatively straightforward point. The discussion will engage four questions: (1) Does eternal recurrence entail a deterministic denial of freedom? ISBN-13: 978-0520065192. Such readers surely awaited him in the postmoral future that he so vividly imagined. It is up to us to read his books, however poorly, and to recommend them enthusiastically, if ignorantly, to our progeny. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. This focuses attention on the heart of the matter: how does Nietzsche think one can ‘affirm’, while yet ‘disapproving’ of, the horrendous? Though there certainly are problems concerning the nature and possibility of freedom in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the bearing of eternal recurrence on the matter is relatively simple. Rejecting pity is about rejecting palliatives. . On this approach, evil, no matter how horrible in itself, finds instrumental value and justification in its contribution to a greater good. Such excruciating self-interrogations eventually took the measure of Nietzsche’s sanity. …. Alarmed that he might someday be hailed as a “holy man,” even as the “founder of a religion,” he launched a noteworthy preemptive strike: “[I would] sooner even [be] a buffoon.—Perhaps I am a buffoon” (EH IV, 1). In section 57 of the. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, ISBN 0-297-77636-3 honesty is one of Nietzsche’s core values and in rejecting pity Nietzsche is seeking a more honest encounter with the world. Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (review) Having said this, however, Small's book remains on the whole an outstanding and valuable piece of scholarly work. He also knew, or at least suspected, that his residual religiosity would very likely complicate the dissemination of his more radical teachings. Nietzsche, he convincingly argues, does not require the latter – witness Zarathustra’s disdain of the ‘omnisatisfied’ and his honouring of ‘choosy tongues and stomachs’ which say ‘no’ as well as ‘yes’ (pp. As with Camus’ Sisyphus, the sense of one’s unblinking and unbroken courage in the face of the horror and terror of life — one’s refusal to commit suicide — is what is all-important in the ‘macho’ morality to which Nietzsche seems, here, to subscribe. Sometimes one has the impression of the book as a loose assemblage of essays and lectures rather than an organically conceived whole. "'[Nietzsche's Life Sentence] should find a large audience among students and scholars interested in Nietzsche's works.' Nietzsche’s “revaluation of values” is thus closely linked to his reinterpretation of life in general and of human life in particular. of any instrumental value it may or may not have. See all formats and editions. Nietzsche's Life Sentence. who want to put their courage to the test, require, ‘desire’, such horrors in order to test and prove to themselves their own strength. And, as I say, I find nothing in Hatab’s book to relieve the bafflement. Although Nietzsche called eternal recurrence his most fundamental idea, most interpreters have found it problematic or needful of redescription in other terms. Necessity is counterposed not only to free alternatives but to any sense of mechanism,causality, or law: “Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. Nietzsche’s post-Zarathustran writings thus stage a full-blown psychological drama: Should he trust his supposedly feeble readers to receive his untimely teachings, guard them from vulgar distortion, and deliver them intact to the rightful audiences of a distant posterity? Nietzsche himself confirms this interpretation when he identifies the idea of eternal recurrence as the “highest formula of affirmation [Bejahung] that is at all attainable” (EH III; Z, 1). In light of the drama that filled Nietzsche’s final years of sanity, it would be easy enough to misplace the questions of audience and readership that vexed him. , in the repeated theme of the world’s ‘perfection’. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Alternativeness, of course, is essential to freedom, but it operates in teleology too (“straying” from telic movement—an accident—helps define proper movement), and in scientific causality as well (current causal findings depend on positing future repetitions and alternative results under different causal conditions). Let us then be careful to raise them anew: How should we read Nietzsche, especially if we accept in some version his chilling diagnosis of the late modern epoch? In the sense in which the Method actor ‘becomes Othello’, eternal recurrence must ‘become true’ for one for the duration of the test. For that matter, he need be neither sincere nor forthright in characterizing us in such unflattering terms. ’ (150% healthy) type. You can find the paperback on Amazon  here and the E-book here. Nietzsche on Context and the Individual. ISBN-13: 9780804752992. Were such readers likely to be found in an age that he had expertly diagnosed as irrecuperably decadent? One need not leave one’s armchair to venture an amateur diagnosis of such anxieties. For Nietzsche, the necessity of an event does rule out alternatives, but simply from the standpoint of the “self-evidence” of the immediate event as such, with nothing other or outside it, whether that be a causal chain or a self-originating “will” or “substance.” This is why Nietzsche says that “occurrence (Geschehen) and necessary occurrence is a tautology” (WP639). that the action is unfree — but simply that that free action is one I have performed (freely) many times before. Absolutely correctly, in my view, Hatab emphasises that Nietzsche is, first and foremost, an existential thinker: that his central concern is with the ‘meaning’ — that is, for Hatab, the ‘worthwhile[ness]’ (p. 20) — of life. Nietzsche's Perspectivism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, ISBN 0-252-02535-0; Hatab, Lawrence J., Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. If so, then how light (or strong) a touch should he apply in his repeated efforts to instruct his readers in the art of appreciating his Dionysian wisdom? Hatab has taken to heart Nietzsche’s observation that we late moderns need above all else to cultivateandretaina“philosophicalsenseofhumor”(BGE 25).Hencetheirreverenttitleofhisbook:Theideaofeternal recurrence is both the generative source of existential meaningand alifesentenceforthosewhoare“obsessed” Nietzsche died in 1900. — Philosophy as I have hitherto understood and lived it is a voluntary quest for even the most detested … side of existence … . 6    Calling Witnesses: A Review of the Literature Error is, — every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity towards oneself, of cleanliness towards oneself — Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibility of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. The reason he denies both a free and an unfree will is that each is a false attribution of causality: freedom as self-causation and unfreedom as external causation (BGE 21). Anthony K. Jensen - 2006 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44 (4):671-672. Author: Publisher: ISBN: STANFORD:36105121676758. The Dance. 84-5): My new path to a ‘Yes’. Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. Or to be read well by so few that his chances of surviving the long entr’acte of late modernity are virtually nil? The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence — my formula for this is amor fati. What makes such a quasi-religious approach plausible is the Dionysian pantheism (I suspect Hatab would agree with this attribution) that appears, inter alia, in the repeated theme of the world’s ‘perfection’. It is, however, not particularly clear how this discussion is intended to fit into the overall structure of the book, nor why we have leapt from The Birth straight to the Genealogy. Nietzsche had, therefore, good reason for leaving this experimenting with a ‘new path to a ’Yes’’ unpublished. Hatab emphasises that a proper study of Nietzsche must always begin here, since the whole of his philosophy is a ‘variation or direct culmination of themes established in Nietzsche’s first published book’ (p. 23). “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche. Chapter 2 is devoted to The Birth of Tragedy. While it is easy enough to imagine oneself belonging to those intrepid hermeneuts of “the day after tomorrow”—and who amongst Nietzsche’s readers has not surrendered to this all-too-human conceit?—the trickier task is to take seriously his prediction that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, despite hosting a noisy era of “great politics,” would amount to little more than a Zwischenspiel in “the Dionysian drama of ‘The Destiny of the Soul’” (GM P, 7). It was also his fate to toil in an epoch that was stunningly unprepared to receive his effluent wisdom. (2000), A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (1995) and Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (1990). Create a website or blog at WordPress.com. Even, that is, if one cannot yet see the future good that justifies present evil, the ‘positive thinking’ which is a mark of Dionysian health makes one utterly confident that it will arrive. Although he refuses to affirm us, he has no choice but to rely on us to transmit his precious teachings of affirmation. On the face of things, this indeed seems to support Hatab’s rejection of theodicy. The final section of the book is an ‘Epilogue’ which argues, interestingly and convincingly, that the oft-despised part 4 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra ought to be understood as a humorous satyr play, placed where the Greeks would have placed such a play, after a trilogy of tragedies. Paper, $22.95. Moreover theodicy is what Nietzsche clearly performs in several places. Nietzsche's Life Sentence by Lawrence Hatab, 9780415967594, available at Book Depository with free delivery worldwide. attribute instrumental value to Auschwitz, namely as a test for the strong to prove their strength. But it also seems to demand that we value Auschwitz not as, say, the final lancing of the boil of anti-Semitism or the beginnings of the state of Israel, but that we find it ‘desirable’ in and of itself, and would so find it even if it had no positive instrumental value whatever. In the sense in which the Method actor ‘becomes Othello’, eternal recurrence must ‘become true’ for one for the duration of the test. Early in 1889, following an explosively productive year of writing and plotting, he fell without return into madness—the result, as legend has it, of inserting himself between a besieged horse and its whip-wielding master. 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