Bugs in the belfry

[Bill Stewart]

At 07:49 AM 12/8/2004, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
>So was Nietzsche suffering, as many have argued,
>from incipient paresis when he wrote "Twilight of the Idols," et al?
>If so, then (the argument goes) these late books,
>brilliant as they may appear to be, can't be taken as seriously as his
>earlier, saner writing. Or did the philosopher go mad from
>some other cause all of a sudden, in the space of a
>single day, as others prefer to believe?

If you're a literary-crit type, interested in the evolution of
Nietzsche's thought, that's an interesting kind of question,
and you can go looking for evidence in the changes in
ideas and expression between his earlier and later books.

However, if you're trying to examine the question of
whether his books should be taken seriously
as philosophy, as opposed to whether they're
Significant Art, then that doesn't really matter;
the question is whether the ideas as written
are any good or are crackpot lunacy,
which is independent of whether the author was a crackpot.

I suppose if you're trying to evaluate whether
they're a good philosophy for actual living,
you can look at the effects of Nietzsche's
ideas on his life, but that's a much broader study,
and the direct lesson here is that
unsafe sex isn't a good idea..

Disclaimer - most of what I've read of Nietzsche was
when we had to translate some of it in high school German class.
It's very frustrating to be reading something that
appears to say that the destruction of the human race
would be a good thing and have to figure out if that's
because you got a verb tense wrong or because it's Nietzsche.


----
Bill Stewart  bill.stewart at pobox.com