Afscheid van Nietzsche en zijn Spinoza [1] - #Spinoza

 

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]

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]