Suffering and the Nietzschean affirmation of life in the lyrics of Bad Religion

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippos Kourakis
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Sense Of Purpose ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Affirmation Of Life ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Per Se

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Zarathustra ‘the godless’, whose students ‘remain faithful to the earth, and […] not believe those who speak […] of otherwordly hopes’, was a proponent of a life fulfilled with meaning and creativity, in spite of all the abominable suffering and unavoidable hardships it entails. Ultimately, he wanted to ‘see as beautiful what is necessary in things’ and ‘to be only a Yes-sayer’. This article looks at how the lyrics of one of the most respected and well-known punk rock bands worldwide, Bad Religion, encapsulate the above-mentioned ideas of the German philosopher. Lyrics from several songs of the band’s discography, ranging from 1982 to 2013, are briefly discussed. The themes explored in these songs, examined in parallel with Nietzsche’s ideas, revolve around suffering, nihilism, the afterlife, amor fati, and, finally, affirming life by creating a personal sense of purpose. Whilst Bad Religion’s work is not moralistic (most thoroughly echoed in the line ‘no Bad Religion song can make your life complete’ from the song ‘No Direction’), the lyrics analysed nevertheless demonstrate that the band actively assumes a stance towards life, one which is characterized by creating a sense of purpose through personal expression, emblematized both in the punk attitude per se, as well as in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Point Of Reference

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Between Greenhouse and Icehouse

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz ◽  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Permian ◽  
Late Archaean ◽  
Climate Modes ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Early Palaeozoic ◽  
Pieter Bruegel ◽  
Pieter Bruegel The Elder

There is a celebrated Flemish painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It depicts the age-old battle between Carnival and Lent. Carnival—a time of high spirits, led in this vision by a fat man on a beer-barrel, carousing and brandishing a pig’s head on a spit—is opposed by Lent, deflating the happy excitement and bringing in a time of sobriety and abstinence. Bruegel’s understanding of these opposed rhythms of rural life in the sixteenth-century Netherlands was acute: he was nicknamed ‘Peasant Bruegel’ for his habit of dressing like the local people, to mingle unnoticed with the crowds, all the better to observe their lives and activities. Bruegel’s vision of the age-old rhythm of life, in the form of an eternal oscillation between two opposing modes, may be taken to a wider stage. From the late Archaean to the end of the Proterozoic, the Earth has alternated between two climate modes. Long episodes of what may be regarded as rather dull stability, best exemplified by what some scientists refer to as the ‘boring billion’ of the mid-Proterozoic, are punctuated by the briefer, though more satisfyingly dramatic, glacial events. This alternation of Earth states persisted into the last half-billion years of this planet’s history—that is, into the current eon, the Phanerozoic. If anything, the pattern became more pronounced, as if it had become an integral part of the Earth’s slowly moving clockwork. There were three main Phanerozoic glaciations—or more precisely, there were three intervals of time when the world possessed large amounts of ice—though in each of these, the ice waxed and waned in a rather complex fashion, and none came close to a Snowball-like state. Thus, these intervals often now tend to be called ‘icehouse states’ rather than glaciations per se. Between these, there were rather longer intervals—greenhouse states—in which the world was considerably warmer; though again, this warmth was variable, and at times modest amounts of polar ice could form. Of the Earth’s Phanerozoic icehouse states, two are in the Palaeozoic Era: one, now termed the ‘Early Palaeozoic Icehouse’ centred on the boundary between the Ordovician and Silurian periods, peaking some 440 million years ago; and a later one centred on the Carboniferous and early Permian periods, 325 to 280 million years ago.

scholarly journals The Courage To Be Anxious. Paul Tillich’s Existential Interpretation of Anxiety

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Ștefan Bolea
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Existential Philosophy ◽  
Existential Interpretation ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
History Of ◽  
Emil Cioran ◽  
Lev Shestov ◽  
Protestant Theologian

The similitude between anxiety and death is the starting point of Paul Tillich's analysis from The Courage To Be, his famous theological and philosophical reply to Martin Heidegger's Being And Time. Not only Tillich and Heidegger are concerned with the connection between anxiety and death but also other proponents of both existentialism and nihilism like Friedrich Nietzsche, Emil Cioran and Lev Shestov. Tillich observes that "anxiety puts frightening masks" over things and perhaps this definition is its finest contribution to the spectacular phenomenology of anxiety. Moreover, Tillich has some illuminating insights about the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which are important for the history of the existential philosophy. It is interesting how the protestant theologian tries to answer to Heidegger: while the German philosopher asserted that we must avoid fear and we have to embrace anxiety as a route to personal authenticity, Tillich notes that we should transform anxiety into fear, because courage is more likely to "abolish" fear.

Nietzsche's Friends and Enemies

2000 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-364
Author(s):  
Joshua Foa Dienstag
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Computer Search ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
University Presses ◽  
Impossible Task

Just thirty years ago, R. J. Hollingdale began the introductio to one of his translations with the defensive question: “Why read a book by Nietzsche?” Now these same books are being simultaneously retranslated in several competing editions, so eager are university presses to capitalize on the academic bonanza that Friedrich Nietzsche has become. Many of Nietzsche's works were first published in print runs of some two hundred copies. We have now reached the point where there are many more books about Nietzsche than there were once copies of the original titles themselves. In the past decade alone, as a quick computer search will inform anyone, nearly three hundred volumes have been written concerning Nietzsche's work, his relation to other philosophers and cultural figures, and his effect on every aspect of our contemporary existence. Even for those seriously concerned with Nietzsche's philosophy, keeping up with this literature is a nearly impossible task. If forty days and forty nights were enough to cover the earth with water, then the flood of Nietzsche literature is perhaps nearing the thirty-eighth day. Once is almost tempted simply to wait until the waters have receded and then to see what, if anything, remains.

Cold Sun • Hot Planet

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Amanda Boetzkes
Keyword(s):  
Solar Energy ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Energy Exchange ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Restricted Economy

This article considers how Georges Bataille’s account of solarity informs a planetary perspective. Bataille is credited with formulating a critical analysis of “solar societies” whose economies are shaped by the exchange of solar energy. However, a sometimes understated facet of Bataille’s reading of solarity is the way he positions living beings at the axis of the sun and the earth, and in the midst of elemental forces such as cold, heat, light, and darkness. Bataille deploys these elemental forces in his writing in order to disfigure the restricted economy of capitalism and its bourgeois subjects. Rather than considering it as a social or subjective predilection, this article emphasizes solarity as a critical form and disorganizing force. This article addresses Bataille’s elemental aesthetics and his positioning of the subject as both a capitalist predator that accumulates solar energy, and a speculative subject, a being who is preyed upon by its own accumulation of energy and that is ultimately disfigured and expended by it. I argue that solarity arises in Bataille’s writing as an aesthetic operation per se. He invokes a mythological language to dismantle the scientific and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment. Solarity is therefore the antithesis of Enlightenment thinking and values: it entails the invocation of mythic force in order to dramatize earthly elements and their anarchical energy exchange. I connect Bataille’s mythic language to recent theorizations of planetarity and political ecology, from Gayatri Spivak, to Isabel Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway. I emphasize how his aesthetic maneuvers disfigure the restricted economy of concepts that accompanies the resourcing of the earth.

scholarly journals Mente, consciencia y cuerpo en la obra de Friedrich Nietzsche / Mind, Consciousness and the Body in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Opus

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-82
Author(s):  
Mario Colon
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Causal Determinism ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The Mind

ABSTRACTThe study of consciousness possess considerable relevance in contemporary philosophy of mind. However, the “scientistic” approach that dominates the aforementioned discipline, although of undisputed usefulness, contributes to the rejection of other approaches whose explanatory value has proven to be illuminating in the study of mind, consciousness and the body. One of these approaches can be found in the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The causal determinism of the mind-body relation proposed by the german philosopher has been posited through similar proposals for renowned neuroscientists and philosophers. Nevertheless, the historical and theoretical importance of Nietzsche’s contributions hasn’t been recognized as such. The purpose of this article is to show the subtleties of the causal determination in the mind-body relation and its implications in the actual discussions about the nature of consciousness.RESUMENEl estudio de la conciencia es de considerable relevancia en la filosofía de la mente contemporánea. Sin embargo, el enfoque “cientificista” imperante en esta disciplina, aunque de indiscutible utilidad, ha contribuido al rechazo de perspectivas cuyo valor explicativo resulta revelador en la investigación sobre la mente, la consciencia y el cuerpo. Una de estas perspectivas la podemos encontrar en la obra filosófica de Friedrich Nietzsche. El determinismo causal de la relación mente-cuerpo que propuso el filósofo alemán ha sido defendido por medio de propuestas similares de neurocientíficos y filósofos de probada pericia. No obstante, la relevancia de la aportación nietzscheana no ha sido reconocida en su importancia histórica y teórica. El propósito de este artículo es señalar las particularidades sobre la determinación causal de la relación mente/cuerpo y sus implicaciones en los debates actuales sobre la naturaleza de la consciencia.

scholarly journals The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche: Nikolai Berdyaev’s reception and interpretation

2021 ◽  
pp. 166-178
Author(s):  
Andrey V. Shumskoy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
Will To Power ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
The World ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The Will ◽  
The One

The article deals with the problem of Nikolai Berdyaev’s reception and interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. We attempt to reconstruct Berdyaev’s attitude to the creative heritage of the great German philosopher. The phenomenon of Nietzsche was mainly perceived by the Russian philosophy of the early 20th century in a religious context. For Berdyaev himself, the personality of Nietzsche became one of the starting points for comprehending the existential dialectic of human destiny in the world historical process. In Nietzsche’s works, Berdyaev was first of all captivated by the eschatological theme the philosopher addressed, his striving for the end and the limit. Berdyaev called Nietzsche the greatest phenomenon of modern history, dialectically completing the humanistic anthropology of the West. The Russian philosopher viewed Nietzsche as the forerunner of a new religious anthropology, a religious prophet of the West, making a return to the old European humanism no longer possible. Berdyaev was convinced of the need to overcome and internalize the spiritual experience of Nietzsche. The latter opens up the prospect of transition to a new anthropological era, in which human existence must be justified by creativity. Berdyaev viewed creativity as a new religious revelation of Christianity, not manifested in patristic tradition and historical Christianity. In creative acts, man overcomes objectification as a fallen state of the world. The article examines the key ideas of Nietzsche’s philosophy through the prism of religious existentialism and personalism of Berdyaev. Berdyaev’s attitude to Nietzsche was ambivalent: on the one hand, he highly appreciated how radically the German philosopher formulated the problem of a person’s creativity; on the other hand, he viewed the anti-Christian concept of the superman, leading to human godhood, as absolutely unacceptable for Russian religious philosophy and Christianity. Berdyaev assessed the new revelation of Nietzsche about the superman and the will to power as false and demonic, radically contradicting the foundations of Christian anthropology about man and the religious ethics of creativity.

scholarly journals The acoustic typology of landscape

Geografie ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-194
Author(s):  
Tomáš Hendrych ◽  
Alois Hynek
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Pollution ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Landscape Character

Landscape acoustics is nothing new for zoologists - their research is well known. However, other landscape specialists, including geographers, prefer to visualize landscape both in material and spiritual concepts. At the same time, landscape is a source and a consumer of sound and environmentalists emphasize the role of noise in it from the point of environmental pollution. Landscape acoustics could be intended on diffraction, refraction, reflection, interference and absorption of sound in landscape produced by various agents, e.g. animals, humans, water, electricity etc. Landscape acts as modulator, music body in the style of hard/art/punk rock bands of geo/bio physical anthropogenous origin from a quiet landscape via natural beauty echo to silence in landscape. Maybe silence is the target of many urban residents searching it in rural landscape. The Czech debate on landscape character could include the issue of landscape acoustics. Cultural geographers are welcome.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Costea ◽  
Kostas Amiridis
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
German Philosopher

Martin Heidegger was a revered German philosopher and teacher, but also a controversial figure due to his political affiliations with the Nazi movement. He was associated with phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics as well as process philosophy. This chapter examines the relevance of Heidegger’s work to process philosophy in organization studies, by discussing his views on the movement of history and the movement of nihilism. It considers the concept of ‘movement’ in Heidegger’s understanding of the modern age and in his reception of Friedrich Nietzsche through the idea of a ‘movement of nihilism’.

The dithyrambic dramatist: A Nietzschean musical-performative conception

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
German Philosopher

The concept of the dithyrambic dramatist ‐ introduced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations of 1873‐76 ‐ is one of the most performance-oriented concepts to emerge out of the nineteenth century in which theatre was often associated with dramatic literature. This article investigates the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist by tracing, in the first instance, the underlying musical perspectives ‐ already evident in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 ‐ which led Nietzsche to develop the concept. In the second instance, the author articulates what may be considered as its key conditions, namely the visible‐audible and individual‐collective relationalities. In view of the arguments brought forward, the concept of the dithyrambic dramatist is located as an interdisciplinary element that emerged out of an art form ‐ music ‐ to which Nietzsche was intimately associated in his youth as a composer. The author further proposes that, rather than a metaphor to philological tropes, the dithyrambic dramatist is a concrete manifestation of interdisciplinary and performative foundations that inform Nietzsche’s analytic perspectives.

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