Though Nietzsche never developed a theory of history, his comments on time yield a radical approach to historical interpretation. Central to this philosophy is the concept of eternal recurrence. Time, with neither boundary nor purpose, returns from the past to repeat itself in its same form. This generates a psychological and moral problem for men, as it fails to provide the elements of meaning which Nietzsche considered essential to the human psyche. Men survive the aimlessness of history by living in (...) the unhistorical consciousness of the immediate present. Nietzsche's ideal is the suprahistorical man, whose awareness of history, and his disgust with it, lead him to find meaning in the structure of time-a structure of meaninglessness. The value system of history is this will to power and precludes the extension of historical judgment to situations beyond the sphere of inquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 130-131 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on 'The Birth of Tragedy.' James I. Porter. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 449. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95. James I. Porter. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on 'The Birth of (...) Tragedy.' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 224. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $16.95. Every year an astonishing number of books are published on Nietzsche. Here are two more from a single author. James I. Porter's thesis--in both of them--is that "The Birth of Tragedy does not mark a break in Nietzsche's thinking, whether away from his philological understanding of antiquity or toward... emancipation from metaphysics" (Philology of the Future, 2). Perhaps to lend drama to his case, he assumes an unwarranted degree of unanimity among those who see a break between the philological writings of the young Nietzsche and the philosophical ones written later. But Porter's elaboration of his own thesis is quite persuasive nonetheless. He shows that essential tenets of Nietzsche's later philosophy can be found in his early philological writings, and that Nietzsche's interpretations of the ancient Greeks were as ambiguous, "mythological," and self-critical as his later books. In this way, Porter extensively reinterprets Nietzsche's early writing.The Invention of Dionysus is the shorter and more closely argued of the two books. Here Porter attempts to show that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche both began his exposé of the fictional nature of all metaphysics and recognized that metaphysics would forever haunt the human mind. Porter asserts--more forcefully than earlier authors--that Nietzsche was decisively influenced by Friedrich Albert Lange in this; indeed he ascribes much of what is thought most characteristic of Nietzsche's philosophy to Lange! But what Porter takes away from Nietzsche and awards to Lange in originality, he returns to Nietzsche in subtlety.Porter contends that throughout his career Nietzsche defended an "embattled position" (18), attempting to preserve both appearance and metaphysics as necessary dimensions of human consciousness. This is perhaps Porter's contribution: to assert that Nietzsche never thought he had abolished metaphysics in favor of appearance, as so many writers have claimed. According to Porter, Nietzsche understood in The Birth of Tragedy and throughout his career that metaphysics could never be abolished; that the act of trying to abolish metaphysics is itself inevitably metaphysical, and that any philosophy of appearances including his own must also be metaphysical. Porter characterizes Nietzsche's rhetorical stance as "mythological."Porter quotes a passage from The Birth of Tragedy to show that Nietzsche was both eager to reveal the mythological status of Greek metaphysics, and fully aware that his own efforts to reveal it were mythological as well: "It is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims"(45). So if readers take Nietzsche's arguments at face value, that is understandable; but it does not make them any less mythological. According to Porter, this stance gives the lie to claims that The Birth of Tragedy was "still" metaphysical. And it should establish that from the first Nietzsche had a more subtle view of his project than previously acknowledged.Porter makes this enduring mythological stance the central issue for interpreting Nietzsche's oeuvre. Interesting as this is, it makes Nietzsche out to be impossibly consistent and prescient about his later writing. And it leaves him an oddly disembodied thinker--quite contrary to his own understanding of the philosophical career. The obvious contortions [End Page 130] in Nietzsche's early writing--rooted in his attempt to be true to his own best insights while maintaining a strenuous discipleship to Richard Wagner--are entirely glossed over. While this might be... (shrink)

Provocative and...persuasive...{Pletsch} has illuminated the process by which a gifted but awkward philology student became one of the modern world's most original thinkers... Deserves to be read...by anyone interested in the dynamics of creative influence and achievement.

This book is a collection of introspective essays bringing together the experience of the biographical process of biographers. It illustrates which type of psychoanalytic response is likely to catalyze a process that will increase the biographer's self-awareness as it pertains to his creativity.

The myths of three famous Glauci - (1) Glaucus of Anthedon, (2) Glaucus of Potniae, and (3) Glaucus the son of Minos - whose story patterns mirror one another in some remarkable details have long suggested a common origin as the likely solution to their points of coincidence. In particular, scholars have focused on such similarities as the presence of a magic plant, death/initiation, and acquisition of prophetic powers. However, the elements common to each of these myths are not (...) functional equivalents and, perhaps more importantly, there is no evidence to suggest that the three Glauci were conflated in antiquity. The attempts by modern scholars to reconcile the thematic similarities as conflations of a single source myth are conjectural and depend upon misinterpretations of the ancient evidence. On the other hand, an analysis of the contexts in which the myths of each of the Glauci appear in ancient literature conclusively demonstrates the independent conception and purpose of each of the myths. (shrink)

When the modern artist is seen as moving about in a nebulous area between two opposing worlds, that of life or immediate experience and that of art or established truth, I think it is appropriate to discuss this activity in terms of metaphor. Indeed the present concern for metaphor in the academic and artistic communities is but one of many reflections of our sense that life is a process of the gradual attainment of knowledge through experience, whether sensuous or intellectual. (...) Like our artists, we strive to create a picture of our world, yet that picture is never complete; for we continually pass on to new experiences and new images of reality. Not only do we grow and change but our world seems to change with us. Although the truths revealed through our art are founded in our experience, they seem more permanent and public than the acts of discovery leading to them. A principle once established and integrated with a body of other established truths enters into recorded history perhaps to be revered, disputed, or reinterpreted, but nevertheless to remain. The individual experience or discovery, however, passes; with the individual, only the sense of the continuing search yields personal identity. In a changing world, metaphor renders the truth of experience as the truth of knowledge, for it is the means of passing from individual immediacy to an established public world; the new must be linked to the old, and the experience of any individual must be connected with that of his society. Excluding the possibility of the creation of entirely new worlds and the resultant transformation of all personal identities, acts of genius or dramatic breakthroughs in fields of study can affect our present world order only if they are joined to it by means of a powerful metaphor. Indeed establishing the metaphoric bridge itself may be considered the act of genius, and the entry into new areas of knowledge is its consequence. Richard Shiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Seeing Cézanne" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)

Philosophers have recently paid increasing attention to the aesthetic and artistic worth of food (Korsmeyer 2005, 1999; Kuhen 2005; Monroe 2007; Myhrvold 2011.

In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In 1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of Morazé. While (...) both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information, cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems. Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character" of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation. · 1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, pp. 22-55. Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue. "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

In his essay “Painting Memories” , Michael Fried identifies memory as the privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic by focusing on the representation of “past” art, to the exclusion of the recollection of “past” experience. Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire’s priorities but deflects his pointed comments on (...) modernity and naiveté, which in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried’s exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned Fried’s approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master artist’s “signs” would appear more symbolic than allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic “experience,” we aggravate that perennial problem of origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial bondage, as it compounds the effect of the “original” in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue of the artistic source. Since memories of past art make possible the very creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over memory. And the matter of primordial memory, like the matter of an absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this matter ; but the question necessarily implies that both representations and memories, in constituting the “past,” must always be distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and likewise constitute, but from those “original” experiential moments they purport to present. Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art and is currently working on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Seeing Cézanne” , “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship” , and, with Carl Pletsch, “History and Innovation”. (shrink)

While different groups of viewers may have sought different values in Cézanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete" artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities of his materialistic, industrialized society.1 He was (...) seen as an isolated man who lived apart from other painters and found human relationship and communication difficult. Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which made Cézanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Fénéon found it appropriate to refer to "the Cézanne tradition," a designation which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the artist promulgated by Gauguin and his associates.2 Gauguin had painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of 1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial, and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described Cézanne as embodying the mysticism of the Orient.3 Such a characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the experience of the mystical, the transcendental, the intensely real. For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic understanding of their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal principles. They were Christians who could not see the truth of Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany; they were refined painters of nature who could not see the expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by a broad outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cézanne, living in isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Provence, qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a primitive artist. · 1. For Cézanne as "incomplete," see, e.g. Thadée Natanson, "Paul Cézanne." Revue blanche 9 , p. 496; and Gustave Geoffrey, "Paul Cézanne" , in La Vie artistique , p. 218. For Cézanne as "primitive," see, e.g., Georges Lecomte, L'Arte impressionniste , pp. 30-31; and Maurice Denis, "Cézanne" , in Théories, 1890-1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 2d ed. , p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the earlier stages of development of various Western styles , provincial or uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. , pp. 483-88; and Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle méthode de critique" , "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" , and "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" , in Oeuvres posthumes , pp. 202, 216, 262-63.· 2. Félix Fénéon, "Paul Gauguin" , in Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. , 1:192.· 3. Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue , p. 45. Félix Fénéon, André Mellerio, and Emile Bernard also associated Cézanne's style with mysticism. Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written a related article, "The End of Impressionism: A Study of Theories of Artistic Expression". His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation". (shrink)

The reader of Juvenal's fifth satire, making his way through the new Oxford text edited by W. V. Clausen, finds the sweep of the poet's indignant rhetoric interrupted by the obeli of 104. Reference to Clausen's paper which he quotes in support of his proposed reading glaucis sparsus reveals that he proceeds from the assumption that the line is corrupt, and evidence that this is the case must be sought elsewhere.