Nietzsche and Paradox
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0791468909
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Translated from the French, this book analyzes the paradoxes that fundamentally characterize Nietzsche’s philosophy and texts.
Newly translated into English, this book analyzes the paradoxical discourse that flows through and fundamentally characterizes Nietzsche’s writings. Examining Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Human, All Too Human; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; and The Antichrist; Rogério Miranda de Almeida patiently opens these texts to the multiplicity of truths that unfold through the process of continuous reinterpretation and reevaluation. Never formally defining the contradictions within Nietzsche’s conception of metaphysics, religion, art, science, and philosophy, Miranda de Almeida acknowledges instead that the history of thought, and the development of Nietzsche’s writings in particular, is an interplay of forces and drives, encroachment and surrender, construction and destruction, overcoming and transformation, lack and fulfillment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, pleasure and displeasure, pain and delight. This book reveals the endless perspectives and truths that Nietzsche creates and transforms.
“Drawing on the broad tradition of the ‘French Nietzsche,’ this book offers a rich tapestry of reflections on the multiplicities still to be mined in Nietzsche’s thought, including the aesthetics of art and appearance, on woman and dissimulation, as well as morality, religion, and, of course, paradox.” — Babette E. Babich, author of Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger
“From texts prior to The Birth of Tragedy through the final works of 1888, Miranda de Almeida dramatically draws out the tensions, torsions, and the dynamics of Nietzsche’s theoretical development. In remarkably clear terms, he explains how, for Nietzsche, the whole subsoil of concepts and values are orchestrated by drives and needs—whether they be fictive or real—and shows how this results in the unique character of his ever-changing appreciation of the cultural symbolic.” — David B. Allison, author of Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and On the Genealogy of Morals
“will to decline”—at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless.107 Then the question: “What wills The
conclusive and decisive about man and the world without the toil and rigorousness required by science.33 If this is now Nietzsche’s conception vis-à-vis the genius, and if he considers “ideas” as being the most solid and durable among humanity’s artistic production, one will be no less surprised to see him deploring an eventual renunciation of metaphysical perspectives; a renunciation that will involve limiting the horizon of the individual and depriving him of the impulse to build lasting
science will not eliminate these errors without disclosing some moral intention? Could they at least be eliminated? Rigorous science is capable of detaching us from this ideational world only to a limited extent—and more is certainly not to be desired—inasmuch as it is incapable of making any esstential inroad into the power of habits of feeling acquired in primeval times; but it can, quite gradually and step by step, illuminate the history of the genesis (Entstehung) of this world as an
reasons, to be loners, and even to wear masks:—we will thus be unaccustomed to seek out those who are our fellow-creatures. We live alone and undoubtedly know the martyr of all seven solitudes.”75 Sickness and health are two states that Nietzsche analyses from the perspective of those who are typically healthy (im Grunde gesund ) and those who, inversely, are fundamentally sick, that is, exhausted, weak, decadent. A typically morbid being cannot become healthy, much less make itself healthy. For
unity of fervor, spirit and honesty the first of all Christians—and consider what had to be united here!”85 Now, remember that entirely different terms and tones were used to chartacterize Pascal in paragraph 68 of the very same work: “Christianity would long since have ceased to exist: for these pages of the Jewish Pascal (Saint Paul) expose the origin of Christianity as thoroughly as the pages of the French Pascal expose the destiny and that by which it will perish.”86 The idea of a Pascal