File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0006, message 38


Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 12:20:21 -0700
From: George Sherwood <search-research-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: regarding skepticism ......


At 02:03 PM 6/16/00 +0500, you wrote:
>About Fredrick the Great his son 
>
>" He saw his son lapse into the atheism, the espirit, the pleasure
>seeking frivolity of ingenious Frenchman - he saw in the background the
>the great blood sucker,spider skepticism, he suspected the incurable
>wretchedness of a heart which is no longer hard enough for evil or for
>good, of a broken will which no longer commands, can no longer command"
>
>"but in the meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous and
>harder new species of skepticism ... the skepticism of audacious
>manliness which is most closely related to genious for war and conquest"
>
>Section 209 , We Scholars (Beyond Good and Evil).

You make a valid and interesting point. Let's compare the history since N
states he writes a parable based on German history:

FREDERICK THE GREAT  (1712-86; ruled 1740-86). The boy who was to become a
great military leader and king of Prussia began his career hating the life
of a soldier. Frederick II was born on Jan. 24, 1712, in Berlin. His father
was King Frederick William I. His mother was Princess Sophia Dorothea of
Hanover, sister of George II of England.   
   Frederick's father insisted on a practical, military education for his
son. The boy preferred music, art, and literature. He rebelled against
tobacco, drinking, and hunting, which his father believed were natural
pleasures of royalty. The king forbade the prince's tutors to teach him
Latin, but he studied it and the classics in secret.   
   As Frederick became older, the relationship between father and son grew
worse. Frederick's mother and his sister Wilhelmina sided with him against
his father. This further enraged the stubborn king, who cared for nothing
except the state of Prussia. He was horrified by the thought that this
youth would one day be king and might wreck Prussia by his incompetence. He
became more and more severe with his son, hitting him in public and even
beating him with a cane in front of army troops.   
   When Frederick was 18 years old, he tried to escape the tyranny of his
father by running away. Caught before he crossed the border, he was locked
in solitary confinement for a time. From a window of his cell he was forced
to watch the execution of his closest friend, who had accompanied him in
his flight. For a time the cruel king even thought of putting his son to
death as a military deserter.   
   After this incident young Frederick was changed. He became ruthless,
crafty, and cynical. He now began training to succeed his father. Gradually
the old king gave his son ever greater responsibilities. In 1733, under
orders of his father, Frederick married Princess Elizabeth Christina,
daughter of the duke of Brunswick-Bevern.   

Frederick's Reign 

When he came to the throne at the age of 28, Frederick had a keen mind, a
strong character, and an ambition that soon engulfed Europe in war. He was
to rule for 46 years, from 1740 to 1786. The first 23 years were devoted
chiefly to warfare; the second, to peace and recovery. During the first
half of his reign Frederick proved that as a soldier he had no equal. His
last 23 years of rule showed that he was one of the enlightened despots of
the 1700s.   
   Frederick II worked hard. He acted as his own prime minister and treated
his advisers as clerks. Yet, in his few leisure hours he wrote poetry and
history. Once he invited the French philosopher Voltaire to his Potsdam
palace of Sans Souci. The two soon quarreled, however. (See also Voltaire.)  
   Immediately after he had become king, Frederick acted on his own advice:
"Take what you can; you are never wrong unless you are obliged to give it
back." He seized the rich Austrian province of Silesia, which plunged most
of Europe into war (see Seven Years' War). It was in this series of
struggles, which lasted for more than 20 years, that Frederick's military
genius won him the title "The Great." Later he annexed West Prussia through
the first partition of Poland.   
   During the first half of his rule Frederick truly made war the "national
industry" of his country. His aggressive campaigns transformed Prussia from
a minor state into a major power and nearly doubled the country's size by
conquest and by diplomacy. Once he had satisfied his territorial ambitions
Frederick undertook great public works and encouraged education, industry,
and immigration.   
   Frederick the Great died on Aug. 17, 1786, on the eve of the French
Revolution, an event that shook forever the power of kings. Thus he was the
last great absolute monarch in Western Europe.

To make it more complicated, let's add some Kaufmann: "It is essential for
understanding Nietzsche to realize that he is not "for" or "against"
skepticism, but that he analyzes one type of skepticism with destain
(section 208) before describing another with which he clearly identifies
himself. It is equally characteristic that when he joins his countrymen in
admiration of  Frederick the Great, he pays tribute to him not for his
exploits and conquests but rather for his skepticism, and that his praise
of "tough virility" is aimed at the sublimated, spiritual version found,
for example, in philologist and historians." And then Kaufmann invites a
comparison to The Gay Science, 370.

Now, to thicken the plot even further, suppose N is saying Frederick the
Great acted out of revenge ("who knows *how much* it owed precisely to the
hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to
solitude?") -- what then? In the second to last paragraph, N writes: "a
*new* concept of the German spirit crystallized gradually in spite of all
romanticism in music and philosophy..." Ah, but this leads us back to where
we started:

ROMANTICISM.   If one term can be used to describe the forces that have
shaped the modern world, it is Romanticism. So potent has Romanticism been
since the late 18th century that one author has called it "the profoundest
cultural transformation in human history since the invention of the city."
Romanticism was not a movement; it was a series of movements that had
dynamic impacts on art, literature, science, religion, economics, politics,
and the individual's understanding of self. Not all streams of Romanticism
were the same. Some, in fact, were almost completely the opposite in their
results from others. Nor was the impact the same at all times. Romanticism
progressed in stages, each of which had its own emphasis.   

Attempting a Definition 

There is no single commonly accepted definition of Romanticism, but it has
some features upon which there is general agreement. First of all, it was a
rejection of the Enlightenment and the emphasis upon human reason. The
Enlightenment thinkers asserted that the world of nature is rationally
ordered and that human reason, therefore, can analyze, understand, and use
it. On the basis of this understanding a rational society can be
constructed (see Enlightenment).  
   Romanticism exalted intuition, feeling, inspiration, and the genius of
human creativity. It took delight in the exotic--the sights, sounds, and
stories of foreign lands, other cultures, and the fantasy world of the
imagination. It looked on nature not as a world of objects to be
manipulated and dissected but as something to be experienced. Romantics
regarded nature, in an almost mystical way, as the opposite of the drabness
of industrial civilization. One early Romantic, William Wordsworth,
expressed this disenchantment with reason in his poem, 'The Tables Turned'
(1798):   

One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good 
Than all the sages can.   

Sweet is the lore which 
Nature brings; 
Our meddling intellect 
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things-- 
We murder to dissect.   

Enough of Science and of Art; 
Close up those barren leaves; 
Come forth, and bring with you a heart 
That watches and receives.   
   
In exalting feelings and emotions over reason, Romanticism also exalted the
self. Reason, if there is such a thing, deals in truths that are
independent of private judgment--truths that can be understood and shared.
Feelings, on the other hand, tend to be personal and to isolate the self
from other selves.   
   The pushing aside of reason also challenged centuries-old accepted
values and standards. It suggested that there are no objective values that
need be accepted by everyone. The individual, in tune with his feelings,
becomes the determiner of values and thus can attempt to reorder the
environment according to a personal understanding. The mind, some Romantics
urged, cannot know reality as such. It can only interpret it according to
its own interests--but it is not always sure of what these are. Moral
responsibility, too, is relegated to the decisions of the individual.   
   The supremacy of the individual is not the whole of Romanticism, but it
is pivotal. Its centrality was given special force by the ferocity of the
French Revolution, with its demand for individual rights. The Revolution
was the first unfolding of the dynamism of Romanticism in Western
civilization. The events of 1789 crystallized the hopes and fears of a
whole nation. In so doing they threatened the existence of the old order.
Europe's political, religious, and social foundations were shaken. That
dynamism soon spread throughout the world as the revolution in human
expectations became a permanent state of affairs.   

Major Ingredients 

Romanticism did not erupt suddenly. If a date were to be assigned, however,
1774 would be a useful one. It was the publication year of Johann von
Goethe's 'Sorrows of Werther', a novel about a young man who is so
disappointed in love that he kills himself. This fictional suicide brought
on many real ones as the novel's vogue swept across Europe.   
   Beneath the love interest is hidden a subtler message about the failure
to find absolutes on which to base one's life. (This type of fiction did
not die with the character Werther. Goethe dealt with similar themes at
greater length in his 'Faust', and there are excellent examples in the 20th
century in Hermann Hesse's novel 'Steppenwolf' and J.D. Salinger's 'Catcher
in the Rye'.)  
   The demand for absolutes was nowhere better illustrated than in the life
and writings of a young man who was almost a living counterpart of Werther.
Novalis was the pen name of poet-philosopher Friedrich Leopold, Baron von
Hardenberg (1772-1801). His first love affair ended in 1797 with his
fiancee's death from tuberculosis. Novalis himself died of the disease in
1801. His poetry had a powerful impact on his fellow Romantics, but his
religious views were more interesting. He longed for a return to the
stability of the Middle Ages, before Europe's cultural and religious unity
had been fragmented by the Reformation.   
   This nostalgia for the past provides a clue to another permanent
component of Romanticism--the search for a world that this is not.
Sometimes this search was directed toward the past, but more frequently it
looked ahead. Along with this search was the conviction that it was
possible to make the world over and even to change human nature for the
better--by force if necessary.   
   This optimism frequently focused on the role of the great man or the
hero. Napoleon was for a time the model of the hero who could shape history
by his will. In the generation after Napoleon the English writer Thomas
Carlyle promoted the great-man theory of history in his 'On Heroes,
Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History' (1841). The supreme statement of
this view came toward the end of the century in Friedrich Nietzsche's
writings on the superman (Ubermensch), whose role it is to rid society of
conventional Christian morality and to create his own values. George
Bernard Shaw carried the theme further in his play 'Man and Superman'
(1903).   
   No one saw more clearly than Nietzsche where Romanticism could lead. His
perception of the loss of all traditional values--summed up in the
statement "God is dead"--inspired him to call for a transformation of old
values into new ones. But he could not envision what the new ones might be.
He feared, correctly, that the final result might be an assertion of no
values at all--a position called nihilism, the belief in nothing.   
   Nihilism, derived from the Latin word for "nothing," originated in
Russia as an intellectual movement. The term was popularized by the writer
Ivan Turgenev in his novel 'Fathers and Sons' (1862). It was a philosophy
that rejected the social order of the time and its traditions. The
anarchist Peter Kropotkin described nihilism as the struggle for individual
freedom and against all authority, hypocrisy, and artificiality. (See also
Anarchism.)  
   At its extreme, nihilism rejected church, state, and family and embraced
science as the cure-all for society's problems. Rebellion against the
family resulted in a generation gap, the problem in Turgenev's novel and a
persistent issue for all modern Romantics. The logical outcome of nihilism
is the conviction that nothing matters but the self and its desires. In
modern rock music the sentiment has been well represented by such songs as
'It's My Life' (The Animals) and 'My Generation' (The Who).   
   The response to nihilism was equally a facet of Romanticism. It was the
insistence that the old values of family, church, and state could be
revived and somehow imposed on a society that found little use for them.
Those who saw the authority of religion slipping tried to turn the tide. In
Great Britain and the United States revivalism sought to establish the
norms of 1st-century Christianity.   
   In Germany the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher tried to save
Christianity by reinterpreting it as a religion of feeling and intuition
or, as he put it, "the sense of the Infinite in the finite." In the 20th
century religious fundamentalism--in Christianity, Islam, Judaism,
Hinduism, and other religions--has sought forcibly to re-create societies
in terms of the values of the past.   

Some Consequences 

Throughout more than two centuries since its emergence, Romanticism has
taken a number of twists and turns. Some of its phases were complete
contradictions of others. Yet its dynamism has not diminished.   
   Nationalism is an extension of the exaltation of the self. It is a type
of tribalism that pits "us against them. In the 18th century the idea of
cultural nationalism came to the fore in Europe. It held that from their
earliest foundations the nations had each created a distinctive culture in
language and the arts. It was a small step from this to the emergence of
true nationalism as expressed in the patriotism that burst forth from the
people of France after the Revolution. Citizens were attached to their
native soil and had an understanding of what it means to be French. The
same sentiment emerged in Italy and Germany as those nations were unified.   
   Ethnicity has its focus on the cohesiveness of a people with common
tribal roots. During the 19th century there was a strong cultural movement
called Slavophilism among the peoples of Eastern Europe. It promoted the
cultural unity of Slavic peoples. In Nazi Germany during the 1930s the
slogan was "One nation, one people, one leader." Later in the 20th century
the United States had a civil rights movement that bred such slogans as
"black power," "black is beautiful," "brown power," "red power," and--as a
reaction--"white power."  
   In politics the dynamism of Romanticism has had results that were in
part highly beneficial and in other ways enormously destructive. The slogan
of the French Revolution could well have been "Power to the people,"
because the goal was full participation of the population in running their
government. In the United States the scope of democracy broadened rather
quickly after the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 (see Suffrage). In
Europe this did not prove true. A conservative reaction set in that tried
to restore the powers of kings, nobility, and church (see Vienna, Congress
of).  
   Two writers whose views influenced the course of events were Edmund
Burke in Britain and Joseph de Maistre in France. Burke wrote 'Reflections
on the Revolution in France', calling for a conservative movement that
allowed for the rights of man. De Maistre represented the reactionary
conservative tradition, calling for a rigidly ordered society with the pope
ruling in the religious realm and the emperor in the political.   
   The forces of liberalism attempted to reverse the conservative trend
without success. The Revolution of 1848 in France failed, in spite of the
demands of socialists, anarchists, Communists, and others. The aftermath of
1848 was terrible disillusionment for liberal Romantics, but it was a time
of renewed hope for their conservative and reactionary counterparts.   
   As it turned out, the battle was indecisive. Liberal democracy made
gains in Italy and Switzerland, but it was set back in Germany, Austria,
and France. In Britain the demand for wider voting power was stifled only
temporarily.   
   Europe moved into an era of uneasy peace that was broken only briefly by
the Franco-Prussian War. Then, in August 1914, the battle was engaged once
more in a war of unprecedented ferocity. American leaders, not grasping the
total import of the conflict, declared that it was a "war to end all wars"
and a "war to make the world safe for democracy." Both notions were equally
Romantic and equally naive. Meanwhile other conflicts were brewing that
would shape the geopolitical map of the 20th century. These conflicts,
though political, were rooted in another aspect of Romanticism--the utopian
search for a better world.   
   Utopianism appeared long before the 19th century, but in the period
after 1830 it made its greatest gains (see Utopian Literature). New
programs for the complete reconstruction of society emerged from
anarchists, socialists, Communists, and liberals in both Europe and North
America. Most of the programs had an optimistic appeal. But it was their
willingness to use force to gain their goals that ultimately made them so
destructive. The year 1848 dampened utopian plans for decades. But in
Russia they took hold and erupted into revolution briefly in 1905. The
final revolution occurred in 1917 and created the Soviet Union (see Russian
Revolution). This emphasis on achieving the desired end at any cost has
marked totalitarian regimes of both the extreme right--the fascists that
held sway in Germany and Italy during World War II--and the extreme
left--Communist dictatorships under such leaders as Joseph Stalin and Fidel
Castro.   
   The arts were completely encompassed by Romanticism, beginning in the
late 18th century. The English poets William Blake, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and William Wordsworth typified the Romantic preoccupation with
individualism, with nature, and with the supernatural (see English
Literature, "The Romantic Movement in England"). Another emphasis was
realism--the attempt to portray the past or present as faithfully as
possible. Such writers as Sir Walter Scott in his 'Waverley' novels were
careful to present detailed factual information about their settings.
Charles Dickens was one of the most successful writers to do this,
beginning with 'Hard Times' (1854). The best of the realistic novels was
'Madame Bovary' (1857) by Gustave Flaubert (see Realism; Novel,
"Romanticism"). French Romantic writers, including Denis Diderot and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were also noted for the emotionalism of their
writing.   
   The new freedom seen in the other arts also prevailed in music--a new
individualism, relaxation of the restraints of the classical age, and a
marked tendency toward nationalism (see Music, Classical). The same themes
are also found in the work of painters, sculptors, and other artists from
the late 18th century to the present. Although the impressionists,
postimpressionists, cubists, and other stylists in the arts reacted against
the earlier realism, their connection with Romanticism is apparent in the
intensely individualistic nature of their work. 

So, what does all this mean? I'm too skeptical to venture a guess :)

George 

---------------------------------------------------------
>From Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1999 The Learning Company, Inc.
"Having resentment is like taking poison and waiting 
for the other person to die" -- Malachy McCourt.


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