Alle boeken
van en over Spinoza heb ik mee kunnen nemen naar mijn nieuwe onderkomen in een
woonzorg-appartement; die vullen daarin drie met deurtjes afgesloten kasten. Bijna
alle rest van mijn boeken heb ik moeten achterlaten: de Plato-boeken, de Kant-boeken,
de vele Habermas- boeken (een oude ‘hobby’ van me) en noem maar op (veel literatuur niet te vergeten). Ook de bibliotheek
van en over Nietzsche (die ik compleet had) heb ik achtergelaten en - vanuit
het besef dat ik het echt niet allemaal nog eens kan (her)lezen - laten ophalen
door een kringloopwinkel. Ik hoop maar dat al die boeken in goede handen zijn
terechtgekomen of nog zullen komen.
Vele malen
heb ik over hoe Nietzsche over Spinoza dacht, geblogd (misschien kom ik aan het
eind nog met een overzicht). Hier ga ik afscheid nemen van dat thema door de vele
links aan te geven naar PDF’s van artikelen, hoofdstukken uit boeken en
(master)scripties die op internet te vinden zijn – wat bij elkaar best wel wat
is. Die volgen alle in een volgend blog. Iemand die een studie van het onderwerp wil maken zou bij dit en het volgend blog kunnen beginnen.
Om de vergelijking te beginnen neem ik hier nu het eerste stuk van de inleiding over van Stuart Pethick, Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche. Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect [zie volgend blog]
Om de vergelijking te beginnen neem ik hier nu het eerste stuk van de inleiding over van Stuart Pethick, Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche. Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect [zie volgend blog]
It is
perhaps hard to imagine two more disparate figures in the entire history of
philosophy than that of the 'blessed' Benedict de Spinoza, who sees divinity in
everything as an almost serene arch-rationalist, and the 'Anti-Christ' Friedrich
Nietzsche, who revels in the 'death of God' while mocking any attempt to spin
the world into some-thing 'rational'. The manner in which they construct their
work also seems completely incompatible, with Spinoza's methodical and
mathematical construction on the one hand and Nietzsche's highly stylised
aphoristic prose on the other. Spinoza's major work, the Ethics, appears as a great monolith of a philosophical system with
geometric stages and interweaving propositions, while a great deal of
Nietzsche's effort is directed at breaking down such structures and exposing
the futility of all system building. Spinoza is also the great advocate of
democracy as a political form of organisation, whereas Nietzsche's elliptical
aphorisms seem to favour the aristocratic 'pathos of distance'. They were
furthermore separated by two centuries and came from very different
backgrounds: seventeenth century Spinoza, a lens-grinder and the descendent of
a Sephardic Jewish family expelled from Portugal, was himself famously excommunicated
from the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the tender age of twenty-three, while
Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor with a protestant upbringing in
nineteenth century Prussia, was made chair of classical philology at the
University of Basel when he was only twenty-four. They thus came from very
different times and shared neither a common language nor social background.
Nonetheless,
on further inspection it is striking how quickly a list of uncanny similarities
can be drawn up between them. Neither of them were ever anything like
professional philosophers in the institutional sense; Spinoza having turned
down a chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg due to concerns that
it might restrict his intellectual freedom, and Nietzsche having prematurely
retired from his chair of philology at the University of Basel after a short
and uneasy career of just ten years. Both fell silent at the early age of
forty-four: Spinoza through a consumptive death and Nietzsche through a
catatonic state (although he lived for another eleven years). The receptions of
both philosophers' works have been torrid to say the least. Spinoza's books
quickly became infamous and were variously banned, vilified and denounced as
being atheistic and immoral, while Nietzsche's were gratuitously doctored,
edited and appropriated for right-wing propaganda in Nazi Germany, thus
condemning them to disparagement for most of the twentieth century. The very
names 'Spinoza' and 'Nietzsche' have thus been tainted by a resistance that has
sought to defuse their works by pigeonholing them as curiosities within the
history of philosophy at best, or dangerous enough to warrant censure at worst.
However, such retrospectively drawn coincidences obviously do not constitute a
shared purpose, much less a genuine philosophical connection. Nonetheless, even
though it has largely gone unrecognised in the subsequent literature, Spinoza
and Nietzsche do connect philosophically in very important ways, as Nietzsche
recognised himself in an enlightening piece of correspondence with his friend
Franz Overbeck in July 1881 — a date that is note-worthy as it rests
pertinently at the cusp of Nietzsche's mature period, just before he went on to
write what many consider to be his most important works, such as The Joyful Science (1882; 1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (1888). Indeed, it
is precisely during this period that Nietzsche makes his most sustained attempt
to grapple with the experience of immanence, affectivity and the problems of
modernity: the death of God, eternal recurrence, will-to-power and the
genealogical investigations into morality are all undertaken in these important
texts.
____________________Vervolg
Afscheid van Nietzsche en zijn Spinoza [2]
Afscheid van Nietzsche en zijn Spinoza [3]
Afscheid van Nietzsche en zijn Spinoza [4 en slot]
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