Monday, January 25, 2010

Frederick Nietszche

Meanwhile a few more thoughts in preparation for the lecture itself. We have mentione the impact of FN several times, but we thought we needed a session specifically on him in the context of the way in which the HCJ programme in unfolding. It means we are a bit out of chronological order. We should have done FN in more detail at the same time as we did Freud. But Freud was enough. Obviously the Freudian divide between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is a similar frame of analysis to that of NFN re: Apollo and Dyonisus. AnywayDIONYSUS and APOLLO The modern Dionysus and modern dance - the myth of orepheus. The modern apollo - Carl Sagan and the cult of space exploration. Our culture as a conflict between the apollo principle (as masculine principle, objective, scientific) and the dionysian principle (also feminine, subjective, religious). Also - Zarathustra - the reviled prophet who brings the news of the death of all the gods, and the extinction of humanity. Fn simply dismisses Christianity as unsupportable in the light of scientific fact (though he admires Jesus Christ as an Apollonian hero) - he then turns back to the the pre-Christian gods, armed with recent research at that time (this is the great age of archeology and discobery of lots of new information about the ancient greeks - far more than was known in the original 16th/17th century renaissance. So FN had read and translated all these ancient greek books about tragedy and the arts which nobody had read, and found this divide between enlightenment and tragedy. What is interesting to me is the re-reading of European history in the light of the apollonian and dionysian categories - with the Enlightenment being a cult of apollo and romanticism and religion being diyonsian. The conflict between these two things is (further) in hegelian terms a motor for the evolution and development of culture which otherwise might be static. Anyway the impact of this on writing and thinking about the arts and music has been immense - 'God is dead' being 'the second most influential phrase ever uttered in European culture (says tom Wolfe - see elsewhere). The most import of course is The Cogito - 'I think therefore I am'. Anyway more in the lecture - it should be a good one - and in the following webcast.