Schopehauer and Nietzsche

Week 8

Part 1: Some Preliminaries

1. Introduction: The Death of God (Nietzsche 1844-1900)

GS 125 (see handout)

2. Nietzsche and Romanticism

a) The Problem of Culture and Unity

b) The Greeks as a model

3. Nietzsche Periodization

a) Early Period 72-76 (The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations)

Influence of Wagner and Schopehauer

Kantian Inheritance

b) Middle Period 77-82 (Human, All too Human, Daybreak, Gay Scienc,)

The “positivistic” stage

c) Late Period 83–88 (Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The

Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The
Antichrist, Ecce Homo)

The war on morality

4. The Nachlass & The Will to Power

The Nachlass Rule: The Nachlass should only be used to back-up

interpretive claims that can be established on the
basis of the published work

5. Nietzsche as Cultural Physician not as Metaphysician

P.T.O
 Part II: The Birth Of Tragedy

Apollonian

Calm, Form Giving

Illusion, dreams, the world as representation

Principle of Individuation

Architecture, Painting, Literature

Dionysian

Terrifying, intense, ecstatic

Sexual impulse, intoxication, fecundity

Collapse of the Principe of Individuation

Song, Dance, Music

The existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon

Problem: How to accede to Schopehauer’s recognition of the ubiquity

of suffering without accepting “the wisdom of Silenus”?

Attic Tragedy

The marriage of the Apollonian (the story of the individual hero) and the
Dionysian (the song of the unindividuated chorus)