Great Ideas of Philosophy

III. Nietzsche was an admirer and one-time friend of Wagner, whose operatic characterization of the natural thoughgodlike man surely shaped Nietzsche’s conception of that Oberman who would come to replace the weak anddegraded contemporary man.A. Both Nietzsche and Wagner were influenced by Schopenhauer.B. Both were drawn to the world of the classical Greeks.C. Both sought to restore to art what was lost to convention and reasonableness.D. Wagner’s operas were northern myth, rather than Apollonian, and they abandoned Christianity for thesecular and cultural.E. Nietzsche broke with Wagner over Wagner’s vulgar anti-Semitism and Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, withits open recovery of the Christian mythos.IV. Society must tame the destructive Dionysian passions and the uncontrolled will to power by taming persons.A. Nietzsche understands that much of what we do during our conscious daily lives is actually a sublimationof the very basic instinctual impulses that we refuse to face. He is the first to use the term sublimation in away that it will come to figure in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.B. The man capable of living an authentic life in the face of society’s bribes and corruptions embodies theOberman.1. Nietzsche surely does not regard himself as the Oberman.2. His candidate is Goethe, whom Nietzsche believed lived his life authentically, faithful to his vocation.V. The Enlightenment and even the Darwinian picture is one of progress: constant improvement and refinement.But this is not what the record of human history reveals.A. Even less does it reveal that divine progression in which the “absolute” realizes itself.B. What history reveals are cycles of brutality interrupted by seasons of creative energy. Every act of creationis a destruction, as every lived moment is a movement closer to death.C. The Judeo-Christian teaching, with its emphasis on guilt, redemption, sacrifice, and turning the othercheek, is what keeps us from feeling this summons to creation and destruction.1. The teaching of Jesus (an ineffectual, unworldly innocent) weakens those who believe it; it makesthem more servile and tractable.2. Christian teaching is devoid of the impulse to power.VI. It is a maxim in Nietzsche’s philosophy that suffering, mistrust, self-loathing, and rejection of all comfortingsuperstitions are the staples of a defensible conception of life. Suffering has to be almost a goal.A. The lived life must be defeated once we recognize that our lives have been inauthentic, our natures corruptand corrupting.B. We will suffer, knowing there is no light at the end of the tunnel, but our suffering confers a certain kind ofdignity that makes us worthy of ourselves.C. Not long before his death at the age of 56, Nietzsche caused a stir by collapsing in a public street in Turin,Italy. He had been embracing and comforting a cart horse that had just been abused by the coachman.Perhaps he had seen in its condition all that human beings deny in their own natures and, in their denial,inflict suffering on innocent beings.Recommended Reading:Hollingdale, R. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. Louisiana State University Press, 1965.Kaufmann, W. The Portable Nietzsche. Viking Press, 1961.Questions to Consider:1. Identify in what senses Nietzsche might be classified as both “classical” and “Romantic.”2. Summarize how Aristotle might have judged a theory of authenticity based on the need for self-assertion andthe will to power.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 13