Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2003 12:44:55 +0100
From: Rene de Bakker <rene.de.bakker-AT-uba.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: Alt-Europa


>And did you (or Rumsfeld) know that the word 'Old-Europe' is ... Nietzsche's?

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/n/n67a/part82.html :

"Unless it be,- unless it be-, do forgive an old recollection! Forgive me
an old after-dinner song, which I once composed amongst  daughters of the
desert: For with them was there equally good, clear, Oriental air; there
was I furthest from cloudy, damp, melancholy  Old-Europe!

Then did I love such Oriental maidens and other blue kingdoms of heaven,
over which hang no clouds and no thoughts.

Ye would not believe how charmingly they sat there, when they did not
dance, profound, but without thoughts, like little secrets, like beribboned
riddles, like dessert-nuts. Many-hued and foreign, forsooth! but without
clouds: riddles which can be guessed: to please such maidens I then
composed an after-dinner psalm."

Thus spake the wanderer who called himself Zarathustra's shadow; and before
any one answered him, he had seized the harp of the old magician, crossed
his legs, and looked calmly and sagely around him:- with his nostrils,
however, he inhaled the air slowly and questioningly, like one who in new
countries tasteth new foreign air. Afterward he began to sing with a kind
of roaring.


The deserts grow: woe him who doth them hide!"


In "Was heisst Denken", pt. 1, section 5, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche's
Old-Europe word, and remarks that it is part of the introducion to a song,
of which the title is: Die Wueste waechst, weh dem der Wuesten birgt. We
agreed (nobody protested) hat Heidegger in "What is called thinking"
relates the fact that we're still not thinking with this word of the
growing desert. And the going-over, the crossing done by the Uebermensch,
with the Uebergang, the crossover, as which Heidegger understands his own
thinking:

"To the thinking of Nietzsche, which is a crossover, can only correspond a
dialogue (Zwiesprache), of which the own way prepares a crossover."
Certainly a different crossover from Nietzsche's, but one that cannot leave
Nietzsche's out. Once Nietzsche is found, which is the easiest thing now
more than a century after Georg Brandes, the trouble is how to get rid of
him. 

H also refers to oases, that might spring in these deserts of Nietzsche. An
oasis preupposes a desert. To will oases (new orders) WITHOUT the desert
(old Europe) might mean: falling into the trap of Widerwille, which cannot
be left out.
There exists an excellent commentary to this Nietzsche song by
Volkmann-Schluck. Probably not in translation. Unlike those mountains of junk.

yo-urs

Rene






-----------------------------------
drs. Rene de Bakker
Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
Afdeling Catalogisering 
tel. 020-5252368              


     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---