| WARNING: | The aim of this page is to give a brief introduction to the career of Sir Winston Churchill, and to reveal the main features of both the public and the private life of the most famous British Prime Minister of the twentieth century. The Child Winston Churchill was born into the privileged world of the British aristocracy on November 30, 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of an American business tycoon, Leonard Jerome. Winston's childhood was not a particularly happy one. Like many Victorian parents, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill were distant. The family Nanny, Mrs Everest, became a surrogate mother to Winston and his younger brother, John S Churchill. The Soldier After passing out of Sandhurst and gaining his commission in the 4th Hussars' in February 1895, Churchill saw his first shots fired in anger during a semi-official expedition to Cuba later that year. He enjoyed the experience which coincided with his 21st birthday. In 1897 Churchill saw more action on the North West Frontier of India, fighting against the Pathans. He rode his grey pony along the skirmish lines in full view of the enemy. "Foolish perhaps," he told his mother, " but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring and too noble." Churchill wrote about his experiences in his first book The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898). He soon became an accomplished war reporter, getting paid large sums for stories he sent to the press – something which did not make him popular with his senior officers. Using his mother's influence, Churchill got himself assigned to Kitchener's army in Egypt. While fighting against the Dervishes he took part in the last great cavalry charge in English history – at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. The Politician Churchill was first elected to parliament in 1900 shortly before the death of Queen Victoria. He took his seat in the House of Commons as the Conservative Member for Oldham in February 1901 and made his maiden speech four days later. But after only four years as a Conservative he crossed the floor and joined the Liberals, making the flamboyant gesture of sitting next to one of the leading radicals, David Lloyd George. Churchill rose swiftly within the Liberal ranks and became a Cabinet Minister in 1908 – President of the Board of Trade. In this capacity and as Home Secretary (1910-11) he helped to lay the foundations of the post-1945 welfare state. His parliamentary career was far from being plain sailing and he made a number of spectacular blunders, so much so that he was often accused of having genius without judgement. The chief setback of his career occurred in 1915 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he sent a naval force to the Dardanelles in an attempt to knock Turkey out of the war and to outflank Germany on a continental scale. The expedition was a disaster and it marked the lowest point in Churchill's fortunes. However, Churchill could not be kept out of power for long and Lloyd George, anxious to draw on his talents and to spike his critical guns, soon re-appointed him to high office. Their relationship was not always a comfortable one, particularly when Churchill tried to involve Britain in a crusade against the Bolsheviks in Russia after the Great War. Between 1922 and 1924 Churchill left the Liberal Party and, after some hesitation, rejoined the Conservatives. Anyone could "rat", he remarked complacently, but it took a certain ingenuity to "re-rat". To his surprise, Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Stanley Baldwin, an office in which he served from 1924 to 1929. He was an ebullient if increasingly anachronistic figure, returning Britain to the Gold Standard and taking an aggressive part in opposing the General Strike of 1926. After the Tories were defeated in 1929, Churchill fell out with Baldwin over the question of giving India further self-government. Churchill became more and more isolated in politics and he found the experience of perpetual opposition deeply frustrating. He also made further blunders, notably by supporting King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. Largely as a consequence of such errors, people did not heed Churchill's dire warnings about the rise of Hitler and the hopelessness of the appeasement policy. After the Munich crisis, however, Churchill's prophecies were seen to be coming true and when war broke out in September 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord of the Admiralty. So, nearly twenty-five years after he had left the post in pain and sorrow, the Navy sent out a signal to the Fleet: "Winston is back". The War Leader For the first nine months of the conflict, Churchill proved that he was, as Admiral Fisher had once said, "a war man". Chamberlain was not. Consequently the failures of the Norwegian Campaign were blamed on the pacific Prime Minister rather than the belligerent First Lord, and, when Chamberlain resigned after criticisms in the House of Commons, Churchill became leader of a coalition government. The date was May 10, 1940: it was Churchill's, as well as Britain's, finest hour. When the German armies conquered France and Britain faced the Blitz, Churchill embodied his country's will to resist. His oratory proved an inspiration. When asked exactly what Churchill did to win the war, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who served in the coalition government, replied: "Talk about it." Churchill talked incessantly, in private as well as in public – to the astonishment of his private secretary, Jock Colville, he once spent an entire luncheon addressing himself exclusively to the marmalade cat. Churchill devoted much of his energy to trying to persuade President Roosevelt to support him in the war. He wrote the President copious letters and established a strong personal relationship with him. And he managed to get American help in the Atlantic, where until 1943 Britain's lifeline to the New World was always under severe threat from German U-Boats. Despite Churchill's championship of Edward VIII, and despite his habit of arriving late for meetings with the neurotically punctual King at Buckingham Palace, he achieved good relations with George VI and his family. Clementine once said that Winston was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings. As Churchill tried to forge an alliance with the United States, Hitler made him the gift of another powerful ally – the Soviet Union. Despite his intense hatred of the Communists, Churchill had no hesitation in sending aid to Russia and defending Stalin in public. "If Hitler invaded Hell," he once remarked, "I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." In December 1941, six months after Hitler had invaded Russia, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The war had now become a global one. But with the might of America on the Allied side there could be no doubt about its outcome. Churchill was jubilant, remarking when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor: "So we have won after all!" However, America's entry into the war also caused Churchill problems; as he said, the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting a war without them. At first, despite disasters such as the Japanese capture of Singapore early in 1942, Churchill was able to influence the Americans. He persuaded Roosevelt to fight Germany before Japan, and to follow the British strategy of trying to slit open the "soft underbelly" of Europe. This involved the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy – the last of which proved to have a very well armoured belly. It soon became apparent that Churchill was the littlest of the "Big Three". At the Teheran Conference in November, 1943, he said, the "poor little English donkey" was squeezed between the great Russian bear and the mighty American buffalo, yet only he knew the way home. In June 1944 the Allies invaded Normandy and the Americans were clearly in command. General Eisenhower pushed across Northern Europe on a broad front. Germany was crushed between this advance and the Russian steamroller. On May 8, 1945 Britain accepted Germany's surrender and celebrated Victory in Europe Day. Churchill told a huge crowd in Whitehall: "This is your victory." The people shouted: "No, it is yours", and Churchill conducted them in the singing of Land of Hope and Glory. That evening he broadcast to the nation urging the defeat of Japan and paying fulsome homage to the Crown. From all over the world Churchill received telegrams of congratulations, and he himself was generous with plaudits, writing warmly to General de Gaulle whom he regarded as an awkward ally but a bastion against French Communism. But although victory was widely celebrated throughout Britain, the war in the Far East had a further three months to run. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally brought the global conflict to a conclusion. But at the pinnacle of military victory, Churchill tasted the bitterness of political defeat. The Elder Statesman Churchill expected to win the election of 1945. Everything pointed to his victory, from the primitive opinion polls to the cartoons in newspapers and the adulation Churchill received during the campaign, but he did not conduct it well. From the start he accused the Labour leaders – his former colleagues – of putting party before country and he later said that Socialists could not rule without a political police, a Gestapo. As it happened, such gaffes probably made no difference. The political tide was running against the Tories and towards the party which wholeheartedly favoured a welfare state – the reward for war-time sacrifices. But Churchill was shocked by the scale of his defeat. When Clementine, who wanted him to retire from politics, said that it was perhaps a blessing in disguise, Churchill replied that the blessing was certainly very effectively disguised. For a time he lapsed into depression, which sympathetic letters from friends did little to dispel. Soon, however, Churchill re-entered the political arena, taking an active part in political life from the opposition benches and broadcasting again to the nation after the victory over Japan. In defeat Churchill had always been defiant, but in victory he favoured magnanimity. Within a couple of years he was calling for a partnership between a "spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany" as the basis for the re-creation of "the European family". He was more equivocal about Britain's role in his proposed "United States of Europe", and, while the embers of the World War II were still warm, he announced the start of the Cold War. At Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, he pointed to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union and declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Only by keeping the alliance between the English-speaking peoples strong, he maintained, could Communist tyranny be resisted. After losing another election in 1950, Churchill gained victory at the polls the following year. Publicly he called for "several years of quiet steady administration". Privately he declared that his policy was "houses, red meat and not getting scuppered". This he achieved. But after suffering a stroke and the failure of his last hope of arranging a Summit with the Russians, he resigned from the premiership in April 1955. "I am ready to meet my Maker," Churchill had said on his seventy-fifth birthday; "whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter". Churchill remained a member of parliament, though an inactive one, and announced his retirement from politics in 1963. This took effect at the general election the following year. Churchill died on 24 January 1965 – seventy years to the day after the death of his father. He received the greatest state funeral given to a commoner since that of the Duke of Wellington. He was buried in Bladon churchyard beside his parents and within sight of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. The Family Man In the autumn of 1908 Churchill, then a rising Liberal politician, married Clementine Hozier, granddaughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie. Their marriage was to prove a long and happy one, though there were often quarrels – Clementine once threw a dish of spinach at Winston (it missed). Clementine was high principled and highly strung; Winston was stubborn and ambitious. His work invariably came first, though, partly as a reaction against his own upbringing, he was devoted to his children. Winston and Clementine's first child, Diana, was born in 1909. Diana was a naughty little girl and continued to cause her parents great distress as an adult. In 1932 she married John Bailey, but the marriage was unsuccessful and they divorced in 1935. In that year she married the Conservative politician, Duncan Sandys, and they had three children. That marriage also proved a failure. Diana had several nervous breakdowns and in 1963 she committed suicide. The Churchills' second child and only son, Randolph, was born in 1911. He was exceptionally handsome and rumbustious, and his father was very ambitious for him. During the 1930s Randolph stood for parliament several times but he failed to get in, being regarded as a political maverick. He did serve as Conservative Member of Parliament for Preston between 1940 and 1945, and ultimately became an extremely successful journalist and began the official biography of his father during the 1960s. Randolph was married twice, first in 1939 to Pamela Digby (later Harriman) by whom he had a son, Winston, and secondly in 1948 to June Osborne by whom he had a daughter, Arabella. Neither marriage was a success. The life of Sarah, the Churchills' third child, born in 1914, was no happier than that of her elder siblings. Amateur dramatics at Chartwell led her to take up a career on the stage which flourished for a time. Sarah's charm and vitality were also apparent in her private life, but her first two marriages proved unsuccessful and she was widowed soon after her third. Her first husband was a music hall artist called Vic Oliver whom she married against her parents' wishes. Her second was Anthony Beauchamp but this marriage did not last and after their separation he committed suicide. In 1918 Clementine Churchill gave birth to a third girl, Marigold. But in 1921, shortly after the deaths of both Clementine's brother and Winston's mother, Marigold contracted septicaemia whilst on a seaside holiday with the childrens' governess. When she died Winston was grief-stricken and, as his last private secretary recently disclosed in an autobiography, Clementine screamed like an animal undergoing torture. The following September the Churchills' fifth and last child, Mary, was born. Unlike her brother and older sisters, Mary was to cause her parents no major worries. Indeed she was a constant source of support, especially to her mother. In 1947 she married Christopher Soames; who was then Assistant Military Attachรฉ in Paris and later had a successful parliamentary and diplomatic career. Theirs was to be a long and happy marriage. Over the years Christopher became a valued confidant and counsellor to his father-in-law. They had five children, the eldest of whom (Nicholas) became a prominent member of the Conservative party. Christopher Soames died in 1987. The Private Man Churchill's enormous reserves of energy and his legendary ability to exist on very little sleep gave him time to pursue a wide variety of interests outside the world of politics. Churchill loved gambling and lost what was, for him, a small fortune in the great crash of the American stock market in October 1929, causing a severe setback to the family finances. But he continued to write as a means of maintaining the style of life to which he had always been accustomed. Apart from his major works, notably his multi-volume histories of the First and Second World Wars and the Life of his illustrious ancestor John, first Duke of Marlborough, he poured forth speeches and articles for newspapers and magazines. His last big book was the History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he had begun in 1938 and which was eventually published in the 1950s. In 1953 Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill took up painting as an antidote to the anguish he felt over the Dardanelles disaster. Painting became a constant solace and preoccupation and he rarely spent a few days away from home without taking his canvas and brushes. Even during his tour of France's Maginot Line in the middle of August 1939 Churchill managed to snatch a painting holiday with friends near Dreux. In the summer of 1922, while on the lookout for a suitable country house, Churchill caught sight of a property near Westerham in Kent, and fell instantly in love with it. Despite Clementine's initial lack of enthusiasm for the dilapidated and neglected house, with its overgrown and seemingly unmanageable grounds, Chartwell was to become a much-loved family home. Clementine, however, never quite overcame her resentment of the fact that Winston had been less than frank with her over the buying of Chartwell, and from time to time her feelings surfaced. With typical enthusiasm, Churchill personally undertook many major works of construction at Chartwell such as a dam, a swimming pool, the building (largely with his own hands) of a red brick wall to surround the vegetable garden, and the re-tiling of a cottage at the bottom of the garden. In 1946 Churchill bought a farm adjoining Chartwell and subsequently derived much pleasure, though little profit, from farming. Churchill was born into the world of hunting, shooting and fishing and throughout his life they were to prove spasmodic distractions. But it was hunting and polo, first learned as a young cavalry officer in India, that he enjoyed most of all. In the summer of 1949, Churchill embarked on a new venture – he bought a racehorse. On the advice of Christopher Soames, he purchased a grey three-year-old colt, Colonist II. It was to be the first of several thoroughbreds in his small stud. They were registered in Lord Randolph's colours – pink with chocolate sleeves and cap. (These have been adopted as the colours of Churchill College.) Churchill was made a member of the Jockey Club in 1950, and greatly relished the distinction. Among Winston's closest friends were Professor Lindemann and the "the three B's" (none popular with Clementine), Birkenhead, Beaverbook, Bracken. The Churchills entertained widely, including among their guests Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Lawrence of Arabia. Churchill regularly holidayed with rich friends in the Mediterranean, spending several cruises in the late 1950s as the guest of Greek millionaire shipowner, Aristotle Onassis. Editorial note Much of the information presented here was originally compiled by Josephine Sykes, Monica Halpin and Victor Brown. It was edited by Allen Packwood. | [Do NOT Buy a Single Stock Until You See This] | Dear Reader, We're witnessing history in the making… - Cost of living, groceries, and housing has spiked 7% — the highest in 40 years…
- 7 in 10 Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck…
- And top hedge fund managers say the stock market is a 'Super Bubble' waiting to pop…
| 6.3 The Eternal Recurrence of the Same Nietzsche himself suggests that the eternal recurrence was his most important thought, but that has not made it any easier for commentators to understand. Nietzsche's articulations of the doctrine all involve hypothesizing—(or inducing the reader to imagine, or depicting a character considering)—the idea that all events in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through an eternal series of cycles. But the texts are difficult to interpret. All Nietzsche's official presentations of the thought in published work are either presented in hypothetical terms (GS 341), or extremely elliptical and allusive (e.g., GS 109), or highly metaphorical and quasi-hermetic (Z III, 2, 13), or all three together. Most allusions to the idea, in fact, assume that one already knows what it means—even the claims in Ecce Homo that it is the "fundamental conception" or "basic idea" of Zarathustra have this character. In the early reception, most readers took Nietzsche to be offering a cosmological hypothesis about the structure of time or of fate (see Simmel [1907] 1920; Heidegger 1961; Lรถwith [1935] 1997; Jaspers [1936] 1965), and various problems have been posed for the thesis, so understood (Simmel [1907] 1920: 250–1n; Soll 1973; Anderson 2005: 217 n28). Many later commentators have focused instead on the existential or practical significance of the thought (Magnus 1978; Nehamas 1980, 1985), or its "mythological" import (Hatab 2005). In the aftermath of Nehamas (1985), an influential line of readings has argued that the thought to which Nietzsche attributed such "fundamental" significance was never a cosmological or theoretical claim at all—whether about time, or fate, or the world, or the self—but instead a practical thought experiment designed to test whether one's life has been good. The broad idea is that one imagines the endless return of life, and one's emotional reaction to the prospect reveals something about how valuable one's life has been, much as (quoting Maudemarie Clark's memorable analogy) a spouse's question about whether one would marry again evokes—and indeed, fairly demands—an assessment of the state of the marriage (see Clark 1990: 245–86; Wicks 1993; Ridley 1997; Williams 2001; Reginster 2006: 201–27; Anderson 2005, 2009; Risse 2009; Huddleston, forthcoming a). Naturally, the threat of emerging scholarly consensus around this line of interpretation has prompted pushback, and Paul Loeb (2006, 2013, 2021) has recently offered vigorous defense of a cosmological interpretation of Nietzsche's idea, building on earlier work by Alistair Moles (1989, 1990). Skeptics like Loeb are correct to insist that, if recurrence is to be understood as a practical thought experiment, commentators owe us an account of how the particular features of the relevant thoughts are supposed to make any difference (Soll 1973 already posed a stark form of this challenge). Three features seem especially salient: we are supposed to imagine 1) that the past recurs, so that what has happened in the past will be re-experienced in the future; 2) that what recurs is the same in every detail; and 3) that the recurrence happens not just once more, or even many times more, but eternally. The supposed recurrence (1) plausibly matters as a device for overcoming the natural bias toward the future in practical reasoning. Since we cannot change the past but think of ourselves as still able to do something about the future, our practical attention is understandably future directed. But if the question is about the value of our life overall, events in the past matter just as much as those in the future, and disregarding them is a mistake, at best, and a case of motivated reasoning or dishonesty, if we are exploiting future-bias to ignore aspects of ourselves we would rather not own up to (General form: "Whew! At least I'll never have to go through that again…"). By imaginatively locating our entire life once again in the future, the thought experiment can mobilize the resources of our practical self-concern to direct an evaluative judgment onto our life as a whole. Similar considerations motivate the constraint of sameness (2). If my assessment of myself simply elided any events or features of my self, life, or world with which I was discontent, it would hardly count as an honest, thorough self-examination. The constraint that the life I imagine to recur must be the same in every detail is designed to block any such elisions. As Reginster (2006: 222–7) observes, it is more difficult to explain the role of the third constraint, eternity. It is nevertheless clear that it does make a practical difference: to put a sharp point on it, return to Clark's marriage analogy; one might well be very happy to live one's marriage again (once, or twice, or even several times), but still prefer some variation in spousal arrangements over the course of eternity—indeed, Milan Kundera (1991) seems to be putting his character Agnes in something like that situation in his use of the Nietzschean thought experiment early on in Immortality. Reginster proposes that the eternity constraint is meant to reinforce the idea that the thought experiment calls for an especially wholehearted form of affirmation—joy—whose strength is measured by the involvement of a wish that our essentially finite lives could be eternal. More modestly, one might think that Nietzsche considered it important to rule out as insufficient a particular kind of conditional affirmation, suggested by the Christian eschatological context, which would leave in place the judgment that earthly human life carries intrinsically negative value. After all, the devout Christian might affirm her earthly life as a test of faith, which is to be redeemed by an eternal heavenly reward should one pass that test—all the while retaining her commitment that, considered by itself, earthly life is a sinful condition to be rejected. Imagining that my finite life recurs eternally blocks this avenue (and returns the focus of assessment to the finite features of real life) by supposing that there will never be a point at which one could pretend that finite life is once and for all "over and done with" (Anderson 2005: 198, 203; 2009: 237–8). Bibliography Primary Literature: Works by Nietzsche Nietzsche's Works in German Nietzsche's works have now been published in an outstanding critical edition (the Kritische Gesamtausgabe) under the general editorship of Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari. It is held in many university libraries and is typically cited by volume and page number using the abbreviation KGA. This entry cites published works in the English translations listed below, and for the unpublished writing, it cites the useful abridged version of the critical edition, prepared for students and scholars (the Kritische Studienausgabe, KSA). Those references follow standard scholarly practice, providing volume and page numbers of the KSA, preceded by the notebook and fragment numbers established for the overall critical edition. English translations have now appeared containing selections from the unpublished writing included in KSA, and those volumes (WEN, WLN) are listed among the translations in the next section. The full bibliographical information for the German editions is KGA Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1967 ff. KSA Sรคmtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1980 ff. Nietzsche's Works in English Nietzsche's published works are cited by his original section numbers (or larger part plus section numbers together), which are the same in all editions. Citations follow the North American Nietzsche Society system of abbreviations for reference to English translations. For each work, the primary translation quoted in the entry is listed first, followed by other translations that were consulted. (N.B.: the entry occasionally departs from the quoted translation, usually in the direction of greater literalness, without separate notice.) Original date of German publication is given in parentheses at the end of each entry. | | | | | | 5. Difficulties of Nietzsche's Philosophical Writing For all the novelty of Nietzsche's doctrines and the apparent extremity of his criticisms of traditional morality, religion, and philosophy, perhaps nothing about his work seems more out of step with the ordinary procedures of philosophy than the way he writes. The point is sufficiently obvious that it has by now become an entirely conventional trope to begin commentaries with remarks about the unconventional character of Nietzsche's style. Despite the attention it gets, however, we continue to lack anything like a comprehensive account of Nietzsche's strategies as a writer and rhetorician. Most of us (this entry included) are defeated by the bewildering richness of the subject matter and content ourselves with a few observations of special relevance to our other purposes. Perhaps Alexander Nehamas (1985: 13–41) comes closest to meeting the explanatory challenge by highlighting the key underlying fact that defeats our interpretive efforts—the seemingly endless variety of stylistic effects that Nietzsche deploys. In doing so, he follows the lead of Nietzsche's own retrospective assessment from Ecce Homo: "I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man" (EH III, 4). This entry will focus on a few points useful for readers making their early approaches to Nietzsche's texts. Nietzsche's most obvious departure from conventional philosophical writing is the basic plan and construction of his books. Most philosophers write treatises or scholarly articles, governed by a carefully articulated thesis for which they present a sustained argument. Nietzsche's books are nothing like that. Many are divided into short, numbered sections, which only sometimes have obvious connections to nearby sections. While the sections within a part are often thematically related (see, e.g., GS Book II or BGE Parts I, V, VI), even then they do not typically fit together into a single overall argument. Nietzsche himself notes the briskness with which he treats his concerns, insisting that "I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again" (GS 381). To the natural complaint that such telegraphic treatment courts misunderstanding, he replies that One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. … [Some authors] did not wish to be understood by "just anybody". (GS 381) Some of Nietzsche's books (notably The Birth of Tragedy, the Genealogy, and the Antichrist) offer greater continuity of argumentation, but even there, he will often take advantage of section breaks to drop one thread of reasoning and move on to apparently unrelated points, leaving the reader to piece together how the various aspects of his case are supposed to fit together (GM II is a notoriously challenging case in point; see Reginster 2018b, 2021). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is unified by following the career of a central character, but the unity is loose and picaresque-like—a sequence of episodes which arrives at a somewhat equivocal (or at a minimum, at a controversial) conclusion that imposes only weak narrative unity on the whole. This mode of writing is often classified as "aphoristic", and Nietzsche is rightly granted an honored place within the distinguished lineage of that form in German philosophy, which goes back at least to Georg Lichtenberg's Waste Books. Lichtenberg wrote his fragments for himself rather than the public, but the strategies he developed nevertheless made a serious impact. His aphorisms revealed how the form could be extended from its essentially pedagogical origins (providing compressed, memorable form for some principle or observation) into a sustained, exploratory mode of reasoning with oneself. Schopenhauer was a particular admirer, and his pursuit of the form (especially in Parerga and Paralipomena) clearly influenced Nietzsche's use of the technique to frame his psychological observations—(the French moralistes were also an important influence; see Pippin 2010). Some of Nietzsche's efforts consist in straightforward psychological analysis, like this—"Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves further away size and weight decrease" (GS 162)—while others encapsulate a point Nietzsche has been developing through the section (see, e.g., "We are always only in our own company"; GS 166). More distinctively, however, many Nietzschean aphorisms rely on a "twist" effect—the first part sets up a certain expectation, which is then controverted or deepened by a thought-provoking reversal in the second part. Occasionally, these aphorisms are even set up as mini-dialogues: A: "One is praised only by one's peers." B: "Yes, and whoever praises you says: I am your peer". (GS 190) Many aphorisms exhibiting this sort of "twist" trade on the type of cynicism typical in moralistes like La Rochefoucauld, but however much he learned from the French, Nietzsche brought larger ambitions to the form; he is equally willing to leave cynicism behind and deploy the twist form simply to provoke active reflection in the reader, as he does here: "Every habit lends our hand more wit but makes our wit less handy" (GS 247). Kaufmann ([1950] 1974: 72–95) famously suggested that Nietzsche coined his aphorisms in the service of an "experimentalist" mode of philosophizing, and there is something to the idea. But the reader should take care, for not every Nietzschean aphorism is an experiment, and not every short section is an aphorism. Indeed, many multi-sentence sections build up to an aphorism, which enters only as a proper part included within the section, perhaps serving as its culmination or a kind of summative conclusion (rather than an experiment). A particularly important case in point is the "aphorism placed before this [Third] treatise" of the Genealogy, which Nietzsche's Preface (GM Pref., 8) offers to the reader as an especially good example of the densely summative power of the form—the entire Third Treatise is supposed to be just an interpretation of that aphorism. Maudemarie Clark (1997), John Wilcox (1997), and Christopher Janaway (1997) showed convincingly that the aphorism in question appears in section 1 of the Third Treatise, and is not the Treatise's epigram. But the first section itself is not simply one long aphorism. Instead, the aphorism that requires so much interpretation is the compressed, high-impact arrival point of GM III, 1; the section begins by noting a series of different things that the ascetic ideal has meant, listed one after another and serving as a kind of outline for the Treatise, before culminating in the taut aphorism: That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal,—and it would rather will nothingness than not will. (GM III, 1) (It is to this compressed formulation, not the entirety of the section, that Nietzsche returns when he wraps up his interpretation in GM III, 28.) Nietzsche's proclivity for aphorisms is responsible for some of the difficulty of his writing; these formulations stand out from their background context, making it harder to integrate Nietzsche's discourse from one section to the next. But the aphoristic form is only one challenge among many. As has been widely noted (by every reader, I suppose, but see Blondel [1971] 1977; Derrida 1978; de Man 1979; Kofman [1983] 1993; Nehamas 1985; Higgins 1987, 2000; Thomas 1999), Nietzsche's writing is full of figures of speech and literary tropes, and decoding these modes of indirection demands active engagement and subtlety from the reader. Indeed, some of Nietzsche's most favored and widespread figures (e.g., hyperbole, litotes, irony) involve purposely saying something more, or less, or other than one means, and so forcing the reader to adjust. What is more, Nietzsche makes heavy use of allusions to both contemporary and historical writing, and without that context one is very likely to miss his meaning—BGE 11–15 offers a particularly dense set of examples; see Clark and Dudrick (2012: 87–112) for one reading to which Hussain (2004), Anderson (2002), and Riccardi (2011) propose alternatives. Almost as often, Nietzsche invents a persona so as to work out some view that he will go on to qualify or reject (BGE 2 is a clear example), so it can be a steep challenge just to keep track of the various voices in action within the text. Nehamas (1988: 46–51) offers perhaps the best description of the complexities of the resulting reading experience: our attention is fixated by certain brilliant, striking passages, or even whole sections, but because their connections to nearby sections are not specified, and because the text seems to switch from one voice to another, the reader simply moves on, taking each new section on its own terms; in short order, one forgets the details, the points, the cautions, or even the subject matter of passages several sections back—except, perhaps, for a few, especially memorable highlights, which we then call "aphorisms". In this way, it is all too easy to fail to read Nietzsche's books as books at all. Nevertheless, such comprehensive readings are there to be had. Clark and Dudrick (2012) offer a a sustained, albeit controversial, close reading exploring the unity of Part I of Beyond Good and Evil; their efforts reveal the scope of the difficulty—they needed an entire book to explain the allusions and connections involved in just twenty-three sections of Nietzsche, covering some couple-dozen pages! Attacking the same problem in a different spirit, Nehamas (1988) calls attention to the loose, "train of thought"-type connections that connect one section to another through large swaths of works like Beyond Good and Evil or The Gay Science. Following such connections, he proposes, allows us to understand the books as monologues presented by a narrator. For Nehamas, the creation of such a narrative persona is central to Nietzsche's larger project of authorial self-fashioning. By contrast, in the forthcoming book mentioned above, Millgram counter-proposes that Nietzsche deploys different "voices", different narrators, in his different books (see Millgram 2007; Millgram 2020; and Millgram m.s. [Other Internet Resources]; and related papers available in the Other Internet Resources). On this less unified picture, the sort of "persona-inhabiting" effect noted above for the obvious case of BGE 2 is a much more widespread and destabilizing feature of Nietzsche's writing. It becomes a precondition for adequately understanding each particular book that we first work out in what voice Nietzsche means to be speaking—and what attitude he, and we, are supposed to have toward that character—before we can assess the work's first-order claims and effects. While Millgram's view is extreme in the demands it takes Nietzsche's writing to place on the reader, demands of the broad sort he indicates—a demand, for example, to hear Nietzsche's interventions in the right tone, or "spirit", if they are to be understood—do seem to be imposed by some rather straightforward features of the texts. Consider, for instance, what the point could be of that most obvious feature of Nietzsche's rhetoric—the heat and vitriol with which his condemnations of traditional values are presented. The Genealogy of Morality advertises itself as "a Polemic", but even in that genre, it is an outlier for rhetorical intensity; Nietzsche passes up no opportunity for emotionally charged attacks, he repeatedly blasphemes what is held most sacred in the culture, he freely deploys offensive anti-Semitic tropes (turned back, ironically, against anti-Semitic Christians themselves), he fairly shouts, he sneers between scare quotes, he repeatedly charges bad faith and dishonesty on the part of his opponents, and on and on. It is impossible to conclude that the work is not deliberately designed to be as offensive as possible to any earnest Christian believer. Why? Given Nietzsche's expressed conviction that many Christians ought to remain ensconced within their ideology because it is the best they can do for themselves (that "the sense [Sinn] of the herd should rule in the herd"; KSA 7[6], 12: 280), perhaps the right way to understand this much rhetorical overkill is that it operates as a strategy for audience partition. In Nietzsche's mind, those who cannot do without Christianity and its morality would only be harmed by understanding how destructive and self-defeating it is; Nietzsche wants to explain those terrible effects, but he also wants to protect Christianity-dependent readers from harm. He achieves both at once by ensuring that exactly those readers will be so offended by his tone that their anger will impair understanding and they will fail to follow his argument. If this is right, the very vitriol of the Genealogy arises from an aim to be heard only by the right audience—the one it can potentially aid rather than harm—thereby overcoming the problem that There are books that have opposite values for soul and health, depending on whether the lower soul… or the higher and more vigorous ones turn to them. (BGE 30; compare BGE 26–7, 40 and GS 381) That such an interpretation of Nietzsche's intentions is even possible shows how great a challenge these explosive, carefully crafted texts pose to their readers. 6. Key Doctrines This entry has focused on broad themes pursued throughout Nietzsche's writing, but most philosophically sophisticated commentary on his work has been devoted to the explication of certain core doctrinal commitments, which Nietzsche seems to rely upon throughout, but which he does not develop systematically in his published works in the way typical for philosophers. Some of these doctrines, like the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, are described as "fundamental" by Nietzsche himself (EH III, Z, 1), but are formulated in surprisingly cryptic or metaphorical ways—and discussed, or even mentioned at all, much more rarely than one would expect given the importance Nietzsche placed on them. Others are alluded to more frequently, but raise theoretical questions that would normally call for careful philosophical development that is largely absent in Nietzsche's books. Commentators have therefore expended considerable effort working out rational reconstructions of these doctrines. This section offers brief explanations of three of the most important: the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism. 6.1 The Will to Power The will to power doctrine seems to claim that everything that exists rests fundamentally on an underlying basis of "power-centers", whose activity and interactions are explained by a principle that they pursue the expansion of their power. But it is far from obvious what these "power-centers" are supposed to be, and much scholarly controversy concerns what kind of doctrine Nietzsche intended to advance in the first place. Some readers take it as Nietzsche's version of a foundational metaphysics (see Heidegger 1961, Jaspers [1936] 1965, and for a sophisticated recent approach in the same broad vein, Richardson 1996; see also alternative accounts by Doyle 2019 and Remhof 2017). Others receive it as an anti-essentialist rejection of traditional metaphysical theorizing in which abstract and shifting power-centers replace stable entities (Nehamas 1985: 74–105, Poellner 1995: 137–98), or else as a psychological hypothesis (Kaufmann [1950] 1974, Soll 2015; Clark and Dudrick 2015), or a (quasi-)scientific conjecture (Schacht 1983; Abel 1984; Anderson 1994, 2012b). Opposing all such readings of the will to power as a doctrine in theoretical philosophy, Maudemarie Clark (2000, see also 1990: 205–44) reads the will to power as a strand of thought that makes no claim about the world, but instead expresses Nietzsche's values. As we saw (3.B.i.), the idea that the expansion of power is good does have a better claim than other principles to systematize Nietzsche's various value commitments, and different evaluative interpretations have been developed by Reginster (2006), Katsafanas (2013), Hussain (2011), and Richardson (2020: 53–80). But there are also a large number of other texts suggesting that Nietzsche's main agenda was to argue that the psychological world—or the world as a whole—is fundamentally composed of centers of power exerting force against one another (see GS 13; BGE 23, 36, 259; GM II, 16–17; III, 13–15; as well as many passages from the notebooks). Nietzsche's description of such "power centers" is sometimes fairly abstract, evoking mathematically characterized "force-centers" like those sometimes postulated in nineteenth century physics, but at other times, concrete psychological or biological entities (people, drives, organisms) are the things exerting will to power. | Regards, | | | | Jeff Clark
Editor, Jeff Clark Trader | | |
|
|
At Polaris Advertising, we highly appreciate your feedback and encourage you to ask any questions you may have. Nonetheless, we must adhere to legal guidelines that prohibit us from offering personalized advice. |
|
|
In order to ensure uninterrupted delivery of our emails to you, kindly add our email address to your contact list. Polaris Advertising's content may not be redistributed, copied, or reproduced, either wholly or partially, without obtaining written authorization. Should you wish to get in touch with us, you can call our toll-free number for both Domestic and International inquiries: +1 (302) 499-2858 during our business hours of 9 am to 5 pm ET, Monday to Friday. Alternatively, you may send an email to support@polarisadvertising.com. Our address is 24 Broadkill Rd, 4 Milton, DE 19968. © 2023 Polaris Advertising. All rights reserved. This editorial email contains advertisements and has been sent to indra21poetra@gmail.com based on your subscription to this service. If you wish to stop receiving such emails, please click the unsubscribe button: |
|
|
|
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar