
Christmas Beyond Good and Evil - Now, although we can identify in Nietzsche a decisive challenge to the past, from one perspective there should be nothing too remarkably new about what Nietzsche is doing in Christmas Beyond Good and Evil (although, as I hope we have time to mention, his style of doing so is quite unique). For he is taking to the limit a method of analysis and criticism which we should be quite familiar with from the texts we have read last semester: history as critique. And he is proposing as a new possibility for our lives a program that has strong and obvious roots in certain forms of Romanticism. Thus, for the rest of this lecture I wish to explore these two points, so that I can help to illustrate how Nietzsche, the great destroyer of tradition, is himself deeply connected to certain aspects of that tradition.
- Now, although we can identify in Nietzsche a decisive challenge to the past, from one perspective there should be nothing too remarkably new about what Nietzsche is doing in Beyond Good and Evil .
- For he is taking to the limit a method of analysis and criticism which we should be quite familiar with from the texts we have read last semester: history as critique.
- And he is proposing as a new possibility for our lives a program that has strong and obvious roots in certain forms of Romanticism.
- Thus, for the rest of this lecture I wish to explore these two points, so that I can help to illustrate how Nietzsche, the great destroyer of tradition, is himself deeply connected to certain aspects of that tradition.
- By way of introducing Beyond Good and Evil, I want to point out a few salient points which establish Nietzsche as the great critic of that tradition and then suggest why this critique is potentially so powerful and disturbing.
- Next week, on Tuesday, I will be speaking again on Nietzsche, this time calling attention to some aspects of his very strong continuing influence on intellectual life, especially in the universities.
