هذا هو الإنسان..هذا هو نيتشه..!ذلك المجنون/العبقرى..لن أزعم أننى قد فهمت كل ماجاء به نيتشه فى كتابه,خاصةً أن الترجمةالتى بحوزتى ابخست الكتاب حقه من فرط سوءها..ولكن,لنكن واضحين بشأن الكتاب..من استطاع ان يفهم نيتشه كليةً؟هو نفسه قالها فى كتابهان ظننت أنك قد فهمت ما أريد قوله فأنت واهم بلا شكلذا فلألتزم الصمت كى لا أبدو كالبلهاء امام فلسفته ولأتحدث عن الاسلوبــــــــــالغريب فى اسلوب نيتشه والذى تجلّى ظهوره فى الكتاب هى نرجسيته المبالغ فيها, أو بالأحرى غروره!فهو يرى انه الأفضل بين البشر ولا يعنيه رأى البشر فيه او فى كتاباتههكذا كان الأمر فى كتابه,كأنه يقول لى دائماً"انا رائع حقاً وان ظننتِ العكس فهذا يرجع لجهلك ..لذا..يمكنك ببساطة الذهاب الى الجحيم,ولكنى سأظل رائع أيضاً حينها!!"الأمر الذى شكّل تحدى بالنسبة لى ومحاولات عصّية لتفسير الرسائل المخبأة بين طيات الكتاب رغم الترجمة البالغة السوءوليكن الجنون الذى وجدته فى الكتاب مقبولاً ..يجب ان أُعزى هذا للفترة الزمنية التى ألف نيتشه كتابه هذا فيهافهو قد كُتب عام 1888 عندما دخل فى مرحلة الاضطراب العقلى...هو نفسه كان صريحاً بهذا الشأن وأخبرنى ان أعد كتاباته درباً من الجنونالفصول الأولى كانت بحق عسيرة الفهم..لا يمكنك استخلاص مغزى صريح لكل فصل او معرفة هدفه,وبالرغم من ذلك ؛يمكنك اعتبارها بطاقة تعارف بنيتشه الإنسانفهو هذا الرجل الذى يرى المثالية عبث شديد لا يعترف بإمكانية حدوثهوبالرغم من ذلك يعترف بإنه مههوس بالنظافة_ليست بمعناها التقليدى_ ولكن بمعنى انه قد كرس حياته لمحاربة كل القذارة النفسية المحيطة بهولكن..أليس فى هذا نوع من التناقض؟ أعنى ان يحارب قذارات المجتمع فيغدو العالم مكاناً أفضل..مكاناً أقرب للمثالية التى لا يعترف هو بوجودها؟؟يأتى الفصل التالى ليجيب على سؤالى ..فهو يعترف بتناقضه ..كماله وانحطاطهيرى ان كليته كاملة ولكن اجزاءه منحطة وفاسدةبل ويرى ان تناقضه هذا سر روعته فى فصل "لماذا انا بهذه المهارة"..على كلِسواء اتفقت معه او اختلفت تظل مهارته حقيقة لا يمكنك انكارهايستمر جنونه وتستمر بلاهتى فى الخفوت حتى تتضح الوقائعيحدثنى عن الغيرية والأنانية وانه لا فرق بينهمامجرد سطر عابر بين السطورالامر الذى استغرق منى ليلة كاملة ابحث بين شبكات الانترنت عن تعريف مرضى للغيرية وعلاقتها بالانانية وهنا أدين له ببرقية شكر,فانا لم اكن اعرف ماهى الغيرية أصلاًيصدمنى بنظرته للحب والجمالفالنفس الجميلة أصلها كامن فى الاضطرابات الفسيولوجية..والحب اساسه الحرب..الكراهية المميتة بين الجنسينبالحديث عن النفس؛..هل فكر احدنا فى ان يفهم مبررات نيتشه فى الإلحاد والكفر بكل ماهو "ألوهى"؟اعتقد ان تفسيره لهذا أورده فى تفسيره للعلاقة بين الجسد والروحفهو يحتقر السمو الروحى الذى هو نفسه احتقار للجسدبمعنى ان فكرة الحياة الاخرى الذى تتطلع اليها الروح الانسانية ..فى حد ذاتها.. تحقير للجنس البشرى والتكوين الفيزيائى للانسانانتوى الاعتراض وتسجيل اعتراضى هذا فيخرسنى..ان لم يعجبك رأيى لا تقرأى لى اذن!!احببت فصل أفول الأوثان واتفقت معه ان الحقائق جميعها بائدة والحقيقة الوحيدة تكمن فى زوال كل الحقائق الكاذبةاحببت ايضا تناوله للانسانية فى كتاب انسانى,انسانى للغايةحيث ترون الأشياء مثالية أرى الأشياء إنسانية , ويا للأسى ! إنسانية جداًمع اقتراب نهاية الكتاب ينزع نيتشه كل اقنعته الخفية ويتكلم بوضوح شديديصدمك فى كل المفاهيم والقيم التى تكونت لديك طوال حياتكيلقى بك نحو الهاوية..يسعى لتدمير كل ما لديك من قناعات ويكون كل هذا اجابته على سؤاله لماذا انا مميت نيتشه حقاً لا أخلاقى..ليس بالمعنى الذى تصوره هو _اعنى بهذا سموه فوق كل الاخلاقيين بلا اخلاقيته_ ولكن بالمعنى الذى صدمنىاعنى محاولته المميتة لسحق افكارى واقناعى بأفكاره هوتعديه على عقلى وزرعه لأفكاره داخلى.. وفى هذا تكمن لا أخلاقيتهينتهى الكتاب تستمر حيرتىسواء اتفقت مع نيتشه أم لا؛سأفتقد فلسفتهسأفتقد حقاً تلك البلاهة المحببة للنفس!
I was a very serious student during the last two years at Grinnell College. Senior year had a pattern of working in the library all day, going to the work-study job at its Pub Club at night, heading back to the Vegetarian Coop after cleaning up the bar to study in until too weary to continue. It was then that I seriously read Goethe's Faust, most of Nietzsche and, of course, a lot of C.G. Jung, particularly his alchemical writings.Until the very end of senior year I had no girlfriend. Indeed, I hadn't had a girlfriend for a while, but I'd gotten over obsessing about it by the end of the second year. I was no longer a virgin, no longer worried that I was ever to be alone. Study was pretty much all-absorbing. Social life was taken care of by bartending and by living in a commune. I didn't have to seek it.Then, one night at work I was introduced to Mindy by a mutual friend. What was special about her was that she was going to study that summer at the Jung Institut in Zurich, the center of world analytical psychology. I was still deeply immersed in the field and quite impressed. This news and some conversation with her about it got me very interested in Mindy, now transformed into desire's ideal.Of course, this was crazy and I knew it. I was obsessed with her after one meeting, in a group, lasting no more than a couple of hours. Furthermore, she'd given no indication of being attracted to me. Consequently, I resolved to let the infatuation have free reign, but tell no one of it. Instead, I'd use the power towards the purposes of self-transformation, making of myself the alchemical krater, hoping to change common sexuality into something more. As a part of this discipline I refrained from masturbation.Of course I saw Mindy and spoke to her at every opportunity. There weren't that many, so deep was my cover, but the few occasions for further conversation stoked the fires of passion quite excruciatingly. I thought of Mindy all the time, always reminding myself that the object of desire was not this college girl but what she represented:"All things on earth, but as symbols are sent."Then, one night when everyone in Vegie House had gone to some campus concert and I'd gone to bed early, I awakened feeling odd, like there was something in my room. I got up, turned on the miserable fluorescent on the desk, sat down. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw things, dark things scuttle in the corners, out from the radiator, under the bed. "It's happening!" I thought, afraid and excited, as the dark forms began to take to the air, gain form, swoop about. I could feel the rush from their wings--like bats. Indeed, as they gained form and became more clearly visible, now in the center of vision, they looked like crosses between bats and owls, more the size of the latter, fat with humanoid faces. This was rather too much. I was fully awake now and, for the first time in a "normal" state of consciousness, having vivid hallucinations. The beings, and there were lots of them, moving very quickly, did not seem benign. Indeed, they seemed the opposite. Scared, I turned on the overhead light, using the switch beside the door, and headed out into the hallway, shutting my room, turning on all the lights. Then, realizing they weren't following (though I could hear them back there, in the room), I settled down in the brightest of all the rooms in the house, the kitchen, and sat there, slowly calming, until my coop-mates started filtering back from the concert.Nietzsche, who had his own issues with love and his own ambitions that went beyond the merely human, wrote Ecce Homo shortly before his psychotic break. Although Kaufmann and others have entertained the speculation that he may have gone mad through some physical agency, such as tertiary syphilis, my little experience suggests that one may actually be able to think oneself to psychosis.In any case, my dream of reason having led to nightmare, I retreated from the fulness of ambition, stopped seeking chance encounters with Mindy, started masturbating again and shared this story with a friend or two. The weirdness ended, not to be repeated. By year's end I even had entered into a romantic relationship with a woman.
What do You think about Ecce Homo (1992)?
Because he was mad, because he was brilliant, because he was on the very brink of complete collapse, because he was Nietzsche–grand and provocative–it is difficult, if even possible, to know what the author was up to in this book. Many things probably. Supposedly an autobiography, Ecce Homo is certainly a rich and incomplete psychological portrait. Perhaps just as Michael Tanner says of the subtitle, ‘How One Becomes What One Is’, in the introduction: “one needs to read the whole book to see what it means and then read Nietzsche’s other books to see what it really means.”On full display: tHe has his ego: “…I was uninterruptedly creating nothing but things of the first rank which no man will be able to do again or has done before, bearing a responsibility for all the coming millennia,”tHe has his hang-ups: “God is a crude answer, a piece of indelicacy against us thinkers–fundamentally even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!”tHe has his moments: “I do not refute ideals, I merely draw on gloves in their presence.”tAnd then he has all three in one: “It is not doubt, it is certainty that makes me mad… But to feel this way one must be profound, abyss, philosopher… We all fear the truth…”Even if one or the other makes you queasy, it may be worth your while to harden your stomach.t“And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and redeemer of chance!” –Zarathustra
—Michael
" أنا أطالبكم بأن تضيعوني و أن تجدوا أنفسكم , و إني لن أعود إليكم إلا عندما تكونوا قد أنكرتموني جميعـًا " نيتشه المَبشَّر و المُبشِّر للجنّة والجحيم في آن بهذه النبوءة يعمّد مقدّمته .. في كتابه هذا يفكّ مئزر روحه و يتعامل معك كصديق حميم ..يتحدّث عن كتبه ويلوّح بكرنفالٍ مجيييد لزرادشته ,يتحدّث أيضًا عن مولدالتراجيديا / مدائحيّات لروحه المباركة و مرثيات وجلدًا للذات في المقابل / كرهه الملفت و المبالغ فيه وربّما المضحك أيضًا لألمانيا والألمان حدّ أن يتداعى بأصول بولنديّة تكفل له فحولته / علاقاته مع الآخرين و المحظوظ من دعت لهُ " هيرا " ليكون من غير المغضوبِ عليهم , و إن مدح في أحد الألمانيين أحاله إلى أصول فرنسية ..! رفيقنا نيتشه الإلحاد بالنسبة إليه أمرٌ بديهي منذ الولادة وليس قدرًا ولا شيء مكتسب أو نتيجة حاصلة و الكنيسة أرجوزًا للمساكين و خبّازًا لمن يطلبون الرّغيف ؛ المناخ يؤثّر و العافية لا بدّ أن نطلبها على الدّوام , القرابة ترّاهات فيسولوجيّة و العزلة ذكاء غريزي و المعرفة لا تأتي إلّا بقوّة التحمّل والشجاعة , أمّا الفلسفة كما عاشها وفهمها نيتشه هي البحث عن كل ما هو غريب و إشكالي في الوجود و عن كل ما ظلّ منبوذًا من قبل الأخلاق ؛ صاحبنا هذا بيعملّك " خرخشة " في مخيخك لكي تقرأ باقي كتبه وبينحب حقيقة لولا الجينوفوبيا تبعه الّتي أعتقد أنّها نشأت من علاقته البائسة مع أمّه و أخته .
—Zahra Ali
For whom am I writing this review? If Nietzsche were by my side I suspect he would want me to start with the following quote from Ecce Homo: "To you, the bold venturers and adventurers, and whoever has embarked with cunning sails upon dreadful seas, to you who are intoxicated with riddles, who take pleasure in twilight, whose soul is lured with flutes to every treacherous abyss." If you are, in fact, intoxicated with riddles, take pleasure in twilight, and your soul is lured with flutes to every treacherous abyss (note - Nietzsche says `every' treacherous abyss not `some' or `most'), then this book is for you.We all know there is a time of transition hovering about age nineteen when the emotions of sensitive souls are heightened and experience is intensified, intensified to such a point that even thoughts and concepts have a highly-charged emotional tone; one's life deepens, exaggerates, strengthens, amplifies, ignites and one borders on becoming an inflamed madman, even if the madness is only known internally. This time of disequilibrium and hormonal topsy-turvy ordinarily settles down into the next phase of life: early adulthood, where the soul pursues a more specialized field of study and then earnestly begins a profession or career, But for Nietzsche this transitional phase didn't stop; quite the contrary, rather than settling into any conventional groove, the gap of spiritual and artistic disequilibrium grew progressively wider over the years and was eons away from any semblance of `civilized' balance. Additionally, to add fuel to the emotional and philosophical fire, Nietzsche was not only sensitive but hyper-sensitive to music and the arts and had extraordinary linguistic and literary abilities. Thus, we are well to remember all of this when we read in Ecce Homo: "Philosophy as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains - a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality."After an impassioned forward and two intoxicatingly stunning chapters, `Why I Am So Wise' and `Why I Am So Clever', (each line of these chapters deserve an underline and is worthy of committing to memory) we come to the chapter, `Why I Write Such Good Books', and read: "Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for." So, how can one `understand' Nietzsche when living a conventional life, since living according to convention is itself a life of compromise, that is, not living with full, passion-soaked intensity but life as humdrum routine? This is a question any aspiring reader of Nietzsche must ask.A self-portrait of Egon Schiele appears on the cover of this Penguin edition, which is most appropriate since this artist courageously and without compromise created a deeply personal expressive style of art causing much controversy in his brief life (he died at 28). Here are a few of the artist's quotes: "I am so rich I must give myself away." -- "To restrict the artist is a crime. It is to restrict germinating life." -- "Art is not modern. Art is primordially eternal." By his commitment to living with intense zeal in his art and his life, Egon Schiele climbed the Nietzschean high mountains cleanly and fully. This is what it takes. What commitment are you making to live with passion and intensity in your life? If you have not been deeply moved by art and music and have not transformed yourself again and again, what chance do you think you stand in understanding Nietzsche? Perhaps it would be better for you to go on the academic head trip: read Kant and Quine and Rorty and then write papers with all the properly formatted footnotes.Nietzsche devotes a short chapter to each of his books and then ends with a chapter entitled `Why I Am A Destiny'. Since this review is of Nietzsche's autobiography, Nietzsche gets the last word, but being Nietzsche, the last word is three quotes. Here they are::--From the chapter `The Birth of Tragedy': "`Rationality' at any price as dangerous, as a force undermining life!"-- From the chapter `Twilight of the Idols': "If you want to get a quick idea of how everything was upsidedown before me, make a start with this writing. That which is called idol on the titlepage is quite simply that which has hitherto been called truth."--From the chapter `Why I am a Destiny': "The concept `sin' invented together with the instrument of torture which goes with it, the concept of `free will', so as to confuse the instincts, so as to make mistrust of the instincts into second nature."
—Glenn Russell
