Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts, which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and unreality.
Nietzsche had been on my program for sometime, but I hesitated to begin reading him because I felt I was insufficiently prepared. At that time he was much discussed, mostly in adverse terms, by allegedly competent philosophy students, from which I was able to deduce the hostility he aroused in the higher echelons. The supreme authority of coarse was Jakob Burckhardt, whose various critical comments on Nietzsche were bandied about. Moreover there were some persons at the university who had known Nietzsche personally and were able to retail all sorts of unflattering tidbits about him. Most of them had not read a word of Nietzsche and therefore dwelt at length on his outward foibles, for example, his putting on airs as a gentleman, his manner of playing the piano, his stylistic exaggerations, idiosyncrasies which got on the nerves of the good people of Basel in those days. Such things would not have caused me to postpone the reading of Nietzsche, on the contrary they acted as the strongest incentive.
Among my friends and acquaintances I knew of only two who openly declared themselves adherents of Nietzsche. Both were homosexuals; one of them ended by committing suicide, the other ran to seed as a misunderstood genius.
-From: Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung
3 comments:
ah! this is too much fun, i hope i dont freak you out with all my comments, but you said you never get comments, so here is an overload and i am most sincerly digging through your archives. but yes, ha, in the last year i have picked up many a copy of Neitzsche, and returned the book to the shelf again, after thinking that I am not prepared for it either...not the right time for my mind. in fact, i picked up Beyond Good and Evil today at camus...and put it back. hmmm.
oh synchronicity!!! love it!!!
I feel that way about James Joyce's Ulysses, I pick it up flip through it, read a line or two, weigh it up in my hand, smell it, then return it to the shelf. I like the idea of allowing our lives to be guided by the principles of synchronicity once in a while. I don't feel freaked out by your comments, should I be?....
yes, Ulysses, ha, thats funny. i work at James Joyce bistro, so, you can imagine. i have been surrounded by james joyce for the past couple of months which has discouraged me to read it even more....you might think it would be the opposite...? well, we have copy of Ulysses laying around there, and on my lagging shifts i flip through it. but dear lord, i have so much stream of conciousness of my own that it it difficult to tune out of mine and tune in to his....i mean, he is REALLY streaming!
and no, you shouldnt be freaked out by my comments, but people tend to be freaked out by my earnestness quite often....i have gotten into the habit of excusing myself.
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