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.

After Darwin

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Jeff O’Connell ◽  
Michael Ruse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Well Being ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Secular World ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Moral Respect

Abstract In the second half of the nineteenth century, many people lost their faith in the Christian God. Nevertheless, they were eager to show that this move towards a secular world picture did not mean the end of morality and that it could continue as much before. In a Darwinian age this was not possible and the Christian cherishing of the virtue of meekness was replaced by a moral respect for vigor and effort directed both towards self-realization and to the well-being of society. We compare the British moves to those promoted by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. There are significant similarities but also differences that reflect the British industrialized notion of progress versus the German idealistic notion of progress.

The Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-223
Author(s):  
Andreas Dorschel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Complex Thought ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
Giacomo Leopardi ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

Music seems to touch human beings more immediately than any other art form; yet it can be an elaborate medium steeped in complex thought. The paradox of this “immediate medium” was pursued in nineteenth-century philosophy’s significant encounters with music. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) addressed music’s immediacy through sound, suggesting that if music is a sonic bodily practice, sensualism is an adequate philosophy of listening. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) dismantled that recommendation, paving the way to account for the intellectual dimensions of music, including the key issue of its temporality. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) moved from considering psychological time to historical time: music creates meaning by absorbing the complementary elements of word and gesture over time. Of course, intriguing philosophies of music may not be all there is to the nineteenth century. Did music in that era acquire a capacity to articulate philosophical insight, as some have said? That argument is still open.

Voyages Across the Web of Time: Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal Colonization

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-337
Author(s):  
Marc Weeks ◽  
Frédéric Maurel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The Web

To compare the twentieth-century Thai writer Angkarn Kalayanaphong and the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche may seem absurd. Yet both reveal a particular concern with time, responding to the unprecedented acceleration of their respective cultures. Their numerous points of similarity and divergence raise broader questions concerning global capitalism's domination of time, and efforts to resist that domination.

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.

Two Theorists of Action: Ihering and Weber

1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen P. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
Rational Choice Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Material Interests ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Historical Role

AbstractRudolf von Ihering was the leading German philosopher of law of the nineteenth century. He was also a major source of Weber’s more famous sociological definitions of action. Characteristically, Weber transformed material he found: in this case Ihering attempt to reconcile the causaland teleological aspects of action. In Ihering’s hands these become, respectively, the external and internal moments of action, or intentional thought and the factual consequences of action. For Weber they are made into epistemic aspects of action, the causal and the meaningful, each of which is essential to an account of action, but which are logically and epistemically distinct. Ihering thought purposes were the products of underlying interests, but included ‘ideal’ interests in this category. Weber radicalized this by expanding the category and making it historically central. This radicalization bears on rational choice theory: if ideal interests have a large historical role independent of material interests, and are not fully explicable on such grounds as ‘sour grapes’, the methods appropriate to the study of the transformation of ideas, meaning genealogies in the Nietzschean sense, are central to the explanation of action.

The Portrait's Subject

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Blackwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Thomas Eakins

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait’s Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S DIET

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Ludwig Feuerbach ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Friedrich Engels

The objective of this articleis to connect Matthew Arnold, that statesman of culture, with a tin of Tate and Lyle's Golden Syrup, a by-product of industrial sugar refining that has been named Britain's “oldest brand.” Bringing the lofty to the low, the sage to the sweetener, is an exercise in willful materialism. Reading Arnold's “sweetness and light” literally, as comestibles, and “culture” as a term that engages the culinary, puts Arnold into conversation with revolutionary nineteenth-century materialist theorists, in particular the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Although not commonly read now, Feuerbach's work was translated by George Eliot and influential on that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: it is his materialism and his atheism that we see, modified, in their work. In his own time, he was also known for theories about diet and this article will, in part, show how these theories are inseparable from both his materialism and his atheism. True to its viscous, tacky nature, Golden Syrup arrives slowly and emerges late in my argument, but it will adhere Arnold to Feuerbach, and to an intellectual tradition that holds that what we eat, and whether and how we can eat, is as world-making as what we read. Sitting Feuerbach's self-avowed extreme materialism down at the table with Arnold's self-avowed extreme anti-materialism, I will show that they grapple with the same gods – the gods of Christianity, capitalism, and cultural immortality – and that they both conclude that we make and remake our world by digesting it.

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.

scholarly journals Friedrich Nietzsche, Antichrist, Superman, and Pragmatist

1909 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Warbeke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the most striking and pathetic figures of the nineteenth century was Friedrich Nietzsche. A radical aristocrat, a radical enemy of religion, a prophet, he shared the fate of the prophet and the radical man. He was a poet rather than a philosopher, not one calmly to weigh the issues of his mind. He was a zealot with a mission, a fiery genius, whose torch, unsteady at times, flared into madness in his latter years. So great was the strain of thought that his mind was literally consumed by his zeal for a vast, a revolutionary cause.

"Who's Afraid of Arthur Schopenhauer?": A New Context for Conrad's Heart of Darkness

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Contextual Influences ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Dead Man

Conrad's relationship to Schopenhauer and the nineteenth-century traditions of pessimism sponsored by the German philosopher has long been a contentious critical issue. This paper discovers a new shaping context for Kurtz, the Promethean outlaw-philosopher and ubiquitous "voice" of Heart of Darkness, not in Schopenhauer's own writings but in the secondary myths, legends, and icons that endowed the great philosopher with a potent cultural afterlife during the period from 1870 to 1900. The numerous consonances between this body of later Schopenhauriana and Heart of Darkness point to ways in which powerful fin du globe anxieties and dark ancestral obsessions covertly inform both the tale's construction of Kurtz and its narrative practices-notably, its fashioning of a mythical narrative drawing upon established parallels between Schopenhauer and a monistic heart of darkness, its preoccupation with the problems of hearing and transmitting a ubiquitous legacy, and its climactic issue in the experiences of a disciple haunted by the spectral ghost of a dead ancestor. When placed against three varied examples from the period's Schopenhaueriana-Maupassant's short story "Beside a Dead Man" (1883), William Wallace's biography of the philosopher (1890), and Nietzsche's celebratory "Schopenhauer as Educator" from his Thoughts Out of Season (1874)-Heart of Darkness emerges as a work embroiled in an anxiety of influence whose invasive voices are both welcomed and resisted: its welcome most evident in cryptographic play with elements of the Schopenhauer legend, its resistance most marked in the skeptical rewriting of the celebratory mode employed by Nietzsche to welcome the heroic educator. A final coda views the tale's rhetorical excesses in the light of these contextual influences and suggests ways in which the substantially "Schopenhauerian world" of the story bears upon its concerns as a historically situated colonial fiction.

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