Friedrich Nietzsche | Richibi's Weblog

August 13, 2018

String Quartet no 15 in A minor, opus 132 – Beethoven

“The Garden of Earthly Delights“ (1510 – 1515)

____________

if I’ve been spending a lot of time on
Beethoven, it’s that, apart from
besides him Napoleon, no one else
dominates in the public imagination
the early 19th Century, there is no
one else of such comparable
importance

let me also point out that when
Nietzsche identified his model for
the Übermensch, Superman, it was
not the French General, the French
Emperor, however formidable,
however illustrious, he named, but
Beethoven

Nietzsche had already understood
that in the future, a future where the
idea of God had been put into question,
an issue which had begun irreversibly
with the splintering of the Catholic
supremacy, when the several
Protestantisms, Lutheran, Calvinist,
Anglican then, presented differing
opinions of each their vehemently
defended deity, the eventual
resolution would be inescapably up
for metaphysical grabs, which set
philosophers, scientists, poets in
search of answers, which by
definition must be as varied as
there are voices

the outcome was the eventual
declaration of human rights before
the court of international opinion
as the ruling moral consideration
above the demands of any one
faith

Nietzsche‘s pronouncement was that
a powerful opinion could therefore
sway very populations towards its
vision, however ultimately
sometimes dire, Nietzsche was
therefore blamed for predicting,
for instance, Hitler, as though
Nietzsche were himself responsible,
rather than prescient

one of his books, indeed, entitled
“Beyond Good and Evil“, illustrates
the breakdown of the traditional,
which is to say Christian, moral
order, powerful people will take us
where they want to, for better or
for worse, he prophesied

therefore, note, the very present

but there is also Beethoven, the
incandescent prophet, Charles
Darwin, the biologist, who
changed the way we understand
ourselves, Sigmund Freud, who
pushed that understanding even
further, Albert Einstein, who gave
us an alternate picture of the
universe, John Lennon, who
called upon us all to “Imagine“,
Princess Diana, who demonstrated
what it was to be good in a world
that was losing its compass, each
shaping by force of personality
our present age, their future

all was not, by their examples,
lost, in other words, some of our
leaders would be benevolent,
verily even inspiring, despite the
prevalence in their midst, the
existential threat of, nefarious,
indeed ruthless, and, too often,
appalling, despots, a category
too long to even begin to list

here’s, however, Beethoven doing
again his stuff to inform the tenor
of his time, his 15th String Quartet,
another forceful and foundational
step towards the world that lay,
before him, ahead, our world, for
better or for worse

R ! chard

August 11, 2016

to Socrates – on monotheism‏

“The Sacrifice of Isaac“ (1598)

Caravaggio

________

by very definition, the inevitable

result of monotheism, Socrates,

is war, if there is one authority it

will eventually be opposed by a

contrary, however picayune,

however trivial, opinion, see the

Protestant Reformation, see Islam,

for instance, now

after which there is disintegration

before Christianity, there were gods,

a pantheon of them symbolically

alive among the rivers, the trees,

the mountains, read Ovid for an

exhilarating description, wars were

waged for territory, not conscience

Judaism, the religion of the Jews,

evolved for their own existence a

deity, Yahweh, who was their one

god, disdainful of foreign others,

an uncharacteristic attitude among

other religions then, becoming one

of the very first monotheistic, and

consequently existentially

compromised faiths, if not the

first

the intent was to rally ideological

support among its adherents so

that they could protect the lands

of Israel and Judah, their ancestral

homes, as they would have it, a

sanctification of the territorial

principle

their Bible, the Torah, a vengeful

work, and the basis for the

Christian Old Testament,

demanded of its followers

unblinking and cruel allegiance,

the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance,

a father required to sacrifice his

own son, however might it ‘ve

been at the last minute averted by

the intercession of an angel sent

by that very Lord

Christ came along to turn the other

cheek

which didn’t last long

indeed Montesquieu, an early

philosopher of the French

Enlightenment, tells of the

King’s librarian of Chinese

texts, who had been converted

to Catholicism in China, but

who was nonplussed upon his

arrival in Christian France to find

that the French did not do onto

others as they would have them

do unto themselves, nor did they,

more catastrophically, turn the

other cheek

for that matter see what Christian

Europe did to the Americans

Christ’s own followers, once they’d

achieved political prominence, after,

admittedly, 300 years of persecution

by the prevailing Roman authorities,

set their own deity, God, on high,

indeed beyond the rivers, the

mountains, the trees into the very

ineffable, the inscrutable abstract,

and squelched any opposition for

the next thousand and some years,

the philosophical underpinnings of

which was the work of your

contemporary, Plato, Socrates, his

ideal of the Ideal

Augustine signed those recalibrated

papers with his “City of God“, it took

the Renaissance to make a dent in its

armour, and another several centuries

to declare the Christian God dead,

Time magazine in the ’60s, on the

heels of Nietzsche‘s nihilistic

pronouncement some 70 years earlier,

that God had exited history

what we are left with, Socrates, is every

wo/man for hirself, therefore the Age of

Human Rights, for better or for worse,

otherwise many of us would’ve been

guillotined, burnt at the stake, stoned

to death, by now

what do you think

I’ll bet I can tell, you think that every

wo/man owes allegiance to what s/he

believes in, even to inexorable death,

however impractical, unfortunate, or

fateful, if your exemplary life has

anything to say about it

cheers

Richard

September 30, 2014

Pablo Picasso/Gertrude Stein

“Untitled“ (1923)

Pablo Picasso

________

Gertrude Stein was a friend of Pablo Picasso,
you can see it in her prose, a disordering of
traditional practices, perspectives and
proportions

in “loving repeating“ she writes

“As I was saying loving repeating being is in a way earthly being. In some it is repeating that gives to them always a solid feeling of being. In some children there is more feeling and in repeating eating and playing, in some in story-telling and their feeling. More and more in living as growing young men and women and grown men and women and men and women in their middle living, more and more there comes to be in them differences in loving repeating in different kinds of men and women, there comes to be in some more and in some less loving repeating. Loving repeating in some is a going on always in them of earthly being, in some it is the way to completed understanding. Loving repeating then in some is their natural way of complete being. This is now some description of one.”

Gertrude Stein

_________________

in my poetry course the Modernists keep on
coming, quite a few I’ve found impenetrable
and obtuse, I can see their points, but find
them pedantic and trivial

similar sentiments greeted the Impressionists
when they came out, so I’m watching myself

it’s easy to digest Picasso‘s painting now,
but even when I was a boy he was
controversial, now everyone admires him

Gertrude Stein not so much, writing is not
painting

they are both, I believe, returning to the
language of innocence, putting together
their world as children do, getting their
information in overlapping concepts,
trying to make their way through the
muddle

a five-year-old would talk like that, a
five-year-old would paint like that,
both are sorting out their new world,
the world that had been so profoundly
disturbed, disjointed

they were returning to the disarray,
and consequent irregular grammar,
of children, making their own kind
of common sense, trying to get their
bearings, after all, even God had
died, see Nietzsche on that

and, for better or worse, finally,
they’ll leave you behind, the children,
whose world, then, is it worth attending

Richard

psst: as a boy I asked my dad, while
interminably, I thought, fishing,
how long it would take the
minnow to grow into the
required fish, how’s that for
not illogical observation

February 11, 2012

“Man at the Window” – Gustave Caillebotte‏

“Man at the Window” (1875)

Gustave Caillebotte

__________

it’s hard not to think of Caspar David Friedrich (1818) or

Norman Rockwell (1962) upon viewing now this painting,

which came up today in a lecture I was viewing on the

Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, 1848-1894, halfway

between both

they are, all three of course, all about contemplation,

but all explore a different aspect of that phenomenon

let me suggest that Friedrich‘s concerns are patently

metaphysical, he casts his eyes, which we do not see,

incidentally, upon a horizon that looks like destiny,

ours by extension, murky yet imbued with possibility,

even the improbable

or maybe this is just what I see

Rockwell‘s perspective is instead aesthetic, a view

of the world as expressed by others, the capacity to

understand and relate to other voices, opinions, within

our social construct, allegorized here by the exhibition

room

it is a closed speculation, circumscribed by the limited

dimensions, physical or conceptual, of any other

counterpart, contained therefore metaphorically, and

concisely, within a frame

that frame represents the physical limits imposed on

a painter, but also the conceptual limitations of the

viewer him- or herself, it works both ways, for some

this will be a man merely looking out a window, for

others an opening on an epoch

Caillebotte, 1848-1894, looks inward to his isolation,

alienation, from his luxurious interior, black as a cave,

upon a confined avenue where nothing but an impossible

communication, with the lone woman crossing the

street, surely a furtive eye, gives way necessarily to

resignation, and a kind of existential yield to ineluctable

fate, a sensibility beginning to burgeon at the time, see

Nietzsche, 1844-1900, and nihilism

then again this is only my impression, this is what I got

and a picture is worth, we say, a thousand words