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