At 9:38 PM +1000 13/8/02, maria fletcher wrote:
> he was nuts - then perhaps he suffered - and, for the sake of common
>humanity, would hope he was then deserving of compassion. I never read
>Nietzsche to place him in time - for me, such writing transcends
>politics.
My favourite book of Nietzsche's is The Gay Science. I think he's
very funny, and very sad, and very mistaken, and very infuriating,
and very contradictory, and very accurate about many things, and most
of all provoking of thought. But he seems to me most certainly of
his time: in Ecco Homo, perhaps, it seems most clear, that only the
trivial and stifling conventionalities of his time could have driven
him to such extremes.
The Nazism is an uncomfortable coda. It's not irrelevant to what he
wrote, although what the Nazis did to his writing is of course a
severe distortion. Somewhere in The Gay Science is a prescient and
precise indictment of the characteristics of the German nation which
resulted in the adulation of Hitler. The rise of Nazism would have
disgusted him, though perhaps not for the right reasons; he would
have hated the way its acolytes subsumed their individual will in the
hysteria of the Reich.
At 2:19 PM +0200 13/8/02, Anny Ballardini wrote:
>I wish to underline that I am not a feminist
Why?
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
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