File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1995/nietzsche_Nov3.95, message 1


Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 00:43:34 -0800
From: callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com (Steven E. Callihan)
Subject: Re: Nietzsche as Existentialist (was masks)


I've always thought that Existentialism was traceable back to
Kierkegaard _and_ Nietzsche.  The difference between the two being
that Kierkegaard stressed infusing the real with the ideal, living
one's beliefs, in other words, whereas Nietzsche rather sought to
explode the difference.  Living one's philosophy, as Nietzsche
stressed it, would be something different from living one's beliefs.
It was this twin parentage, irreconcilable lineages, which perhaps
doomed Existentialism as a philosophical movement.

Kaufman points to Section 21 of _Beyond Good and Evil_ for what
Nietzsche's riposte might have been to Sartre's dictum, which I
suppose can be taken as an Existentialist anthem, "Man is nothing else
but that which he makes of himself":

     ...the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility
     for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world,
     ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to
     be precisely this _causa sui_ and, with more than
     Munchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by
     the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

=============================================================================
            Steven E. Callihan -- callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com

  "All things majestic are as difficult as they are rare."--Baruch Spinoza.

=============================================================================


	--- from list nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005