From: "Mark Watson" <chtulu21-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Freddy My Love
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 17:47:32 GMT


Interesting thoughts, Chand...



>From: "Chand B. Rangwani" <orpheus-AT-india.crosswinds.net>
>Reply-To: nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Freddy My Love
>Date: 19 Jul 100 10:00:17 +0500
>
>Have been wondering about old Freddy's attitude towards love. I know he 
>would have liked to be in love, because he wrote lyrically of ice cream in 
>his letters! And he loved the love poesy of Rilke and Hoelderin so much.
>
>I think he had a simplistic notion which saw eros, agape and philia as the 
>same. For Zarathustra I think love was inculcating self-improvement in the 
>other. "For what does he know of love who has not been obliged to despise 
>just what he loved."
>
>This is quite the same as the early aesthetic Kierkegaard for whom the 
>purpose of love was to make the other more interesting, more like oneself, 
>more for oneself, because as K said, he was too intelligent, too 
>existentially bored (anomie) by the common love of women.
>
>In this I feel, both were short-sighted. In their lives, both would react 
>to a person's shortcomings and walk away instead of accepting them as 
>equals and then working towards mutual support. To free oneself from chains 
>is one thing, but to free oneself from freedom is quite another! Nz warned 
>us about the vanity of the liberated, but I think he succumbed to the same 
>in his own life. No one was good enough!
>
>The basic premise of eros is to start with the notion that the other is 
>equal, worthy. Romanticism worked in the 12th c because the socially 
>oppressed women were treated as equals by their lovers. But look at Freddy. 
>He writes: "You have not the remotest conception of what it means to be 
>closely related to the man and to the destiny in whom the question of 
>millenia has been decided -  I hold, quite literally, the future of mankind 
>in my hand."
>
>Love entails the strength to accept and then love something which is not 
>part of us and can probably never be. Like de Beauvoir puts it: "It is only 
>as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is 
>revealed as an other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his 
>otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. empathy at its best 
>preserves, yet seeks to know the `strangeness', respects the boundary 
>between self and the other that the `forbiddenness affirms, does not seek 
>to assimilate or obliterate the freedom."
>
>On that count, which sounds pretty good to me, I think the entire edifice 
>of Nz's thought would collapse. For what would loving oneself - truly, 
>deeply (and not egoistically as Nz'eans are wont to do) imply then? That if 
>you have Nz'ean strength, you would love everyone, apply Nz's perspectivism 
>to other people's way of living. So why do Nz and his disciples always seem 
>so full of hatred, of judgmentality? And could anyone clarify (with a 
>little creativity) how a typical Nietzschean romance would go!
>
>
>
>
>
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