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Showing posts from December, 2010

The Love of (One's) Fate

Julian Young’s philosophical biography of Nietzsche gives good context for Fritz’s body of thought in 1882, ten years after publishing his first metaphysical affirmation . “ The Gay Science is about everything under the sun. There is, however, a central argument which, in spite of its aphoristic formulation, is remarkably, even rigorously, systematic.” (page 326) “Nietzsche’s first five books, the ‘Bayreuth” works , were written for the (of course literate) world at large, were contributions to the culture wars of the times. And some of them were indeed, wholly or in part, rants…. By Human, All-Too-Human , he had given up writing for ‘the people’ at large, writing now, explicitly, ‘for free spirits’ alone. These remain the target audience in The Gay Science . “ The Gay Science’s central argument can be divided, it seems to me, into three stages. First, it develops a general account of what it is to be a ‘thriving’ or ‘people’, a general theory of cultural ‘health’. This, theory of