1. Einladung
Wagt’s mit meiner Kost, ihr Esser!
Morgen schmeckt sie euch schon besser
Und schon übermorgen gut!
Wollt ihr dann noch mehr,—so machen
Meine alten sieben Sachen
Mir zu sieben neuen Muth.

Invitation
Try my food, you eaters!
Tomorrow it will taste better
and the day after tomorrow it’ll taste good!
Want some more? So my old seven things give me
courage to seven new ones.

59. Die Feder kritzelt
Die Feder kritzelt: Hölle das!
Bin ich verdammt zum Kritzeln-Müssen? —
So greif’ ich kühn zum Tintenfass
Und schreib’ mit dicken Tintenflüssen.
Wie läuft das hin, so voll, so breit!
Wie glückt mir Alles, wie ich’s treibe!
Zwar fehlt der Schrift die Deutlichkeit—
Was thut’s? Wer liest denn, was ich schreibe?

The quill scratches
The quill scratches: that is hell!
Am I damned to having to scratch?
So cleverly I grasp the ink bottle
and write with thick ink rivers
How this flows there, so full, so broad!
How everything works, how I am doing this!
No one can read it because it lacks clarity,
So what? It’s not like anyone is reading this!

Anyway, the translations ut supra are really atrocious and quite a bit of meaning is lost, even if they do rhyme and my quicky translations don’t. Christ, who ever said that translated poetry has to rhyme???

Geez.

IANAT, but living in Germany for nigh on 20 years and at one point being ABD in philosophy in Freiburg (phenomenological hermeneutics), here’s my take:

Vastly better would be “seductive distraction of science”. You really don’t need that definite article, as it’s only a German thing to use it that much… :-)

…
///First: “Das ist ja das Merkmal jenes “Bruches,” von dem Jedermann als von dem Urleiden der modernen Cultur zu reden pflegt …” That’s the part about the ‘fracture’. I didn’t really get it about the ‘zu reden pfegt’ and I guessed that Nietzsche is saying ‘lip service’ is being paid.///

Difficult as Nietzsche often is in the original…

That is however the charachtistic of that disjuncture, which Everyman speaks of as the fundamental and primal suffering of modern culture.

//Second: “Zeitalters für den deutschen Geist nur eine Rückkehr zu sich selbst, ein seliges Sichwiederfinden zu bedeuten habe, nachdem für eine lange Zeit ungeheure von aussen her eindringende Mächte den in hülfloser Barbarei der Form dahinlebenden zu einer Knechtschaft unter ihrer Form gezwungen hatten.” I got a bit puzzled about what ‘dahinlebenden’ is supposed to be doing and I just went for “self-abandoned”.//

“Self-abandoned” is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Try:
“Contemporary for the German Spirit is a return to its own origins, a happy and contented return, after having been forced for so long to adapt to external barbarities, monstrously imposed from outside, which led to a slavery to their forms.”

That needs some work, but you can get the general idea: there is no “self-abandoned” there whatsoever, since dahinlebend simply means, speaking colloquially, of going with the flow, so to speak…

But I’m not there with your first paragraph. Philosophers, analytic ones in particular, are in the business of coming up with internally consistent interpretations of things, and Nietzsche is constantly telling us he contradicts himself and is not internally consistent (again, neither is human psychology). Contradiction, fictionalization, and various forms of self-deception are crucial to the possibilities of thought for him. So yeah, maybe he contradicts himself, maybe he’s paradoxical—but does he care? Is he really “caught in a paradox”? Or (drum roll) are you philosophers the ones who are caught up in paradox, and he’s somewhere else entirely?

Nonsense. I wasn’t dismissing N. as merely an irrationalistic vitalist. To the contrary, N.’s work contains arguments and criticisms, however variegated their rhetorical means or forms. Nor was I saying that Nietzsche simply remains within the orbit of Kantian critique. Rather he devolves from it: he is doing a critique of the critique of reason, or, more specifically, a critique of “the metaphysics of morals”. (If you examine that above cited passages in the post, one of the things that stands out is his recurrent appeal to “critical” thinking, which is precisely where he ironically attaches to Kant.) But the problem remains that he is using the means of reason to critique reason: he too is caught in the very self-referential paradox he identifies in Kant. And the specific form that that paradox takes is his usage of the notion of a distinctive aesthetic kind of judgment or validity-claim, which is to be rationally differentiated from other kinds of judgment, while simultaneously collapsing those other types of judgment into aesthetic judgments. But if aesthetic judgments are no different from other judgments,- because all judgments are aesthetic,- aesthetic judgments, however broadly construed or widely distributed, are in danger of losing their force as aesthetic judgments.

Nietzsche was no mere sensualist, nor an advocate of “good health”,- (cf. “the herd instinct”, “the last man”). His invocations of “health” are laden with irony. (He was an invalid, after all). More to the point, “health” for him is something to be willed through a transmutation of “instincts”. But perhaps the key to understanding his “vitalism”, however much he appropriates jargon from 19th century biologism, is the etymology of the Greek word “bios”, which means not “life”, but “way of life”, an etymology that N. was well aware of. That’s the point at which the existential critique of philosophical system-making takes hold.

The “Uebermensch” means that “man must be overcome”. Kant’s project of epistemological critique grounded “transcendentally” the possibility of objective truth/knowledge in the self-transcending will, the “pure rational will” as “the will which always wills itself”. Nietzsche at once repeats and parodies this move. In the process, he uncovers the intimate connection of reason not just with repression, but with domination, with the all-but-inevitable will to domination, in its various guises. The will-to-power, though primarily an aesthetic conception, is not merely aesthetic. Nietzsche is not merely an amoral aesthete. That is why he styles himself an “immoralist”; his aestheticism has an ethical import.

So these matters stand a good deal more complicated than you will allow. Whatever else “rationality” might be, it is a giving of accounts. And Nietzsche’s works are full of accounts.

One of the main grounds Nietzsche returns to is some variant of psychological or physical health, what you sniffily call “vitalism”. It’s aesthetic in that health is pleasing to the senses in various ways. There’s no reason to say that the evidence of health is not immediately present to the senses. Yeah, you can’t prove or disprove it, can’t get all Platonic with it, but of course one of N’s main points is that in the end and at bottom you can’t prove or disprove the important things via rationality anyway.

Provocative! Though since will to power is will to (mis)interpretation, I wonder if that means Kant did fudge the Deduction …

it is no longer possible to distinguish between good and bad taste or justify a distinction between them, other than perhaps by vitalistic appeal to the play of “forces”.

This is a problem in N., all right. You can’t say that whatever wins out is “stronger,” b/c N. is quite afraid that the herd will win out. (Strange convergence w/ Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity?) N. is left with a “vitalistic” appeal to whatever “promotes life,” etc., but I guess you know it when you see it.

I do suspect that N. thinks that anyone really healthy isn’t stopping to wonder whether his taste is good or bad.

By the way, the people vs. the philosophers citation about Kant is missing the punch-line, unless I’m remembering a similar parallel quote. My recollection, to paraphrase, is that N. wrote that Kant wrote to say that the people were basically right vis-a-vis the philosophers, but that he wrote in such a way that only the philosophers could understand him. Therefore,- punch-line,- he earned the hatred of both.

I have nothing meaningful to say, so I will say something meaningless: Is “Little Miss Sunshine” the only mainstream movie in Hollywood history to have a Nietzsche joke in it?

“… the magic of the Platonic method consisted precisely in its resistance to sensuality, for this was an aristocratic method, practised by people who may have enjoyed senses even stronger and more clamorous than those of our contemporaries, but who sought a higher triumph by mastering them, by tossing over this colourful confusion of the senses (the rabble of the senses, as Plato called it) the pale, cold, grey nets of concepts. There was a kind of enjoyment in Plato’s manner of overpowering and interpreting the world ….”

What a fascinating passage: the rejection of “the sensual world” not as a slave’s rejection of suffering, but as an aristocrat’s exercise of power over himself. And yet, in becoming “Platonism for the people,” this grand misinterpretation was itself misinterpreted … a great passage for discussing what “will to power” means in Nietzsche, I would think.

The rest of the sentence is interesting too:

“… different from the one [i.e., the manner] currently offered us by physicists, including those Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the philosophical workers with their principle of the ‘least possible energy’ and the greatest possible stupidity.”