F I S H I N G

….

Nietzsche taught at the university of Basel,  a  serious Protestant city which every spring explodes in a carneval of incredible noise, music, beauty and nonsense.

.

So Nietzsche called the  industrious city of Basel “The Colourful Cow”. This was in the second half of the 19th century.  Van Gogh and Monet and Mark Twain were his famous contemporaries :

.

.

..

Nietzsche would not have known them, but he must have read Marx, and he would have seen the same world as Marx where children had to work and industry was messy:

.

…

.

…

.

.

The photo of the miners with their pit pony and of the beer horses is from http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

.

Nietzsche was the son of a pastor at Röcken in Germany, and he started out as a philologist studying and teaching about the Greeks.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Nietzsche became controversial later on, when he preached that reason is not an important attribute.

He taught that reason is some sort of biochemical accident that can’t last, because it is at odds with the forces of nature. It tries to overcome them and by stifling them brings about its own destruction.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Nietzsche lived from 1844 to 1900. Nobody read his last works until some time after his death, when the Nazis set him up as their thinker. After WWII his reputation had to be repaired. And then, in the sixties, he and Sartre were all the coffee table talk. He remains more readable than any of the great philosophers :

” In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. Es war die hochmüthigste und verlogenste Minute der “Weltgeschichte”: aber doch nur eine Minute.”

“In some remote corner of one of the innumerable solar systems of the universe there was once a star where some clever animals invented Knowledge. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of history, but even so only a minute….”

“You’d have to write a fable to illustrate how [....] aimless our reason appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it disappears nothing will have happened.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

.

……………………………

Aged 45 Nietzsche collapsed mentally and did not recover. However,  he has always been loved best precisely for his later, pigheaded writings.

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/

.
.
.