前几天重读《善恶的彼岸》，突然想起了这部纪录片。没想到这么多年了，B站上还是没有熟肉。准备逞个强，做一人字幕组。先把英文听写出来，慢慢慢慢慢慢补齐......
【P1 Nietzche】
I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. When you see ideals, I see what is human. Alas, all too human.
These are the words of the visionary German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.
The crisis he is predicting was the crisis of religious faith that swept through the Europe in the late 19th century.
Nietzsche was the first thinker that realized that the death of god would give birth to something entirely new in human history – the idea of absolute freedom, of man as the sole measurer of the universe. What he is describing was nothing less than the birth pangs of the modern world.
Nietzsche is as important as Marx, Freud and Einstein in the evolution of the way people thinking in the 20th century.” The chief effect of Nietzsche-ologist has been a tremendous loosening out of moral certainties and intellectual certainties. People no longer know for sure what is good and evil, what is right and wrong.
God is dead. God remains being dead because we have killed him. How should we, the murderers of all murderers comfort ourselves? What was the holiest and most powerful of the world was bled to death under our knives? Who will wipe the blood from our hands?
Give it to the church has been the arbiter of morals, the giver of moral truth. The idea of there is no fixed truth, the capital T, seems to us now quite commonplace in the 20th century, but Nietzsche was really a pioneer of this position It seems to us very simple today, because I think with more or less take this on board, the idea of we are not determined by some outside forces, that life is there for the making that you make your own choices, you develop yourself through your own effort.
I think Nietzsche as the first great Punk philosopher. I see in there in the Pantheon with a safety pin stuck through his nose and two fingers thrust up in the general direction of the philosophic pantheon. And that is a positive aspect of him as it were paradoxically in his most apparent nihilism. He seems to me also to be the most apparently positive thinkers, because he is enjoying people doing themselves. And in that way his philosophy is not a guide that you should think like him, is the guide that you should think like yourself.
Although Nietzsche was a great liberator, the kind of freedom that he had helped bringing into being was also a terrible burden. He was all too aware that the death of God had left a void where certainties once existed. In order to fill it he tried to do something that no one before him had ever attempted, and for which he would pay a heavy price.
He wanted to be the moralist of the new post-God society, so he was setting himself tasks that he could possibly fulfil, no one could fulfil that task. And without suggesting crudely or simplistically that he copped out by retreating into madness. I do think that some such escape was inevitable.
It is almost the subject for plays what went on in Nietzsche's mind those last faithful days before he was found in a state of dementia, whether or not those last few days reflected some hideous awakening for re-evaluation of all his own values.
Nietzsche's momentous philosophical journey ended at the age of 44 in insanity. How far the responsibility he took upon himself as a thinker in the end destroyed him as a human being. On his passage into the unknown, did he discover the ultimate truth about what it really means to be human, all-too-human?
By the time one has grown up, one remembers only the truly salient points concerning ones earliest childhood. The sequence of years gets past my gays like a confused dream, nevertheless several things remain vivid and vital in my soul, and of these things combined with what is obscure and gloomy actual paint my picture. I was born in Röcken near Lützen on October the 15th, 1844. I received a Holy Baptism the name Friedrich Wilhelm. My father was the preacher of this village, the perfect picture of a country parson. Gifted in spirit and heart, adorned with all the virtues of a Christian, he lived a tranquil simple, yet happy life.
(德语)
Nietzsche's early childhood was probably the happiest time in his life. A baby sister was born when he was two and a brother followed a year later, but in 1847 catastrophe struck when Nietzsche’s father was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease.
(德语)
Nietzsche was just 5 when he lost his father and brother. He moved with his mother and sister to the nearby town of Naumberg, and was then sent to boarding school at Schulpforta 5 miles away, an establishment with a long tradition in religious education.
By the time we moved to Naumberg, my character began to show itself. I had already experienced considerable sadness and grief in my young life, and was therefore not as carefully and as wild as children usually are. My schoolmates were accustomed teasing me on account of my seriousness. From childhood on, I sought solitude and I felt best whenever I could give myself over to myself undisturbed.
Well, this is his school leaving certificate and it gives us more information than only his marks. It says that he is a diligent pupil that he behaved well. And about his lessons in religious education. It says that he showed a lively interest in the teachings of Christianity, and he learned them very eagerly and easily.
In later life, Nietzsche would declare himself to be the Anti-Christ, but for now he betrayed no such sentient. After leaving school, he went on to study theology at Bonn University, with a view to becoming a priest like his father before him. But on Easter Sunday, 1865, he refused to attend Holy Communion with his family at the local church in Naumberg. Later that year he gave up his religious vocation all together in order to study languages as a classical philologist. In a letter to his sister Elizabeth he explained his reasons: “I write this to you, dear Elizabeth, only in order to counter the most usual proofs of believers - every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth. Here the ways of men divide - if you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.”
One of the fine Nietzsche there is a crisis and a delayed reaction to it
This is very much the case with his abandonment of religion, as well. So that the Anti-Christ , which is most explicit statement against Christianity and against religion in general, comes over 20 years after he himself has abandoned the faith. He writes about his works as memorials to crises.
Nietzsche's most provocative attack on religion came in the Parable of the Madman, written late in his life and which famously proclaimed the death of God.
Have you not heard of that Madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours ran into the marketplace and cried incessantly – ‘I seek God. I seek God.’ As many of those who do not believe in God was standing around just them, he provoked much laughter. Why? Did he had lost?’ said one.‘Did he loose his way like a child’ said another. Or ‘Is he hiding?’ The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Where is God?’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you we have killed him, you and I, all of us are his murderers.’
The Madman is clearly offering some kind of warning that there's a tremendous cataclysm on his way. I think what is important for Nietzsche is that there is a number of events, let's called them intellectual events in the 19tth century, which put together all work towards undermining the very foundations of Christian moral civilization. If you take Darwin as an example: Darwin was brought up in a very theological religious context and Nietzsche pointed out before releasing, publishing, his whole theory of natural selection he had it for 20 years, he kept it in a covered stacked away. I think on Darwin’s part, he himself realized that it would have precise the tremendous consequences potentially nihilistic ones, that Nietzsche detected in it within the theory, that it would undermine the whole basis of Western morality metaphysics, that it would show that the world functions and operates quite well or quite consistently without the need for any divine intervention.
In 1869, ten years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, Nietzsche was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel University. He liberated himself from the confines of Christianity, but now he was searching for something to replace it with. Without divine sanction or retribution, human suffering was unintelligible. Nietzsche looked to philosophy for an answer and discovered the teachings of the German atheist thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, here he found the consolation he craved to make sense of a godless universe.
Once Nietzsche recognizes that the benevolent Christian God cannot be believed in any longer. It is natural that Schopenhauer's philosophy should appeal to him. Schopenhauer's philosophy is pessimistic at its very core: it recognizes that human experience is not for the most part very pleasant, and that there are certain ways in which we can accommodate ourselves with this truth with what Nietzsche refers to in his first book The Birth of Tragedy, The Truth of Salinas: that the best thing is not to have been born, but the second best thing is to die quickly.
There was, in short nose view, one good way to get out of that mystery, if only momentarily, and that was through art. Art plays very important role. And above all, music. So in the musical experience, you could transcend your misery for a few moments.
For Nietzsche, nowhere was Schopenhauer’s theory better illustrated in the music of Richard Wagner. Nietzsche went to see his Opera Tristan and Isolda three times. He identified with the suffering of the protagonists, and found the ecstatic experience of the performance profoundly moving. Wagner becomes a surrogate father figure for Nietzsche, and he was a frequent visitor at the Wagner's house in Tribschen and Lucerne during the 1870s. In the composer's art, Nietzsche saw the possibility for a renaissance in European culture, based on the classical Greek model of tragedy. Nietzsche's book The Birth of Tragedy was largely inspired by Wagner, and argued that Wagner’s music represented a pre-Christian ideal, symbolized by the Greek god – Dionysus.
The Dionysian culture was wildly energetic, wildly musical. It was associated with Nietzsche always with dance just as it was historically. It was associated with inebriation, intoxication, excess, joy, and an absolute imperviousness to sadness and pain, tragedy.
Nietzsche sought a philosophical answer to the pain of existence, as he became increasingly debilitated by chronic physical ailments. Born with severe myopia, he had always been a sickly child. During the Franco-Prussian war, he contracted dysentery and diphtheria while serving as a medical orderly, and is generally believed to have been infected with syphilis in a brothel while a student. By the age of 30 Nietzsche had become a partial invalid.
Every two or three weeks I spend about 36 hours in bed and real torment. Perhaps I'm gradually improving but this winter is the worst that has been. I keep thinking it is such a strain getting through the day that by evening there is no pleasure left in life. And I really am surprised at how difficult living is.
He refers himself as being ill, however, he never refers to what he is ill with, ever. (实在听不清…) the 1880s, where it would be suicidal, I suppose for some matter that would not hear in the public (不确定…), he write a book with he was something syphilis. But he describes the symptoms so clearly that it's hard to believe that he did not realize that his least mild readers of his book will know what he is describing. But what it affected his life profoundly in as much as he lived in as an invalid for many many days in each year, and so there are a great many things he could not do.
Nietzche’s illness was to become a major turning point in his life, both physically and philosophically.In 1876, at the opening of Wagner’s great Opera house at Bayreuth, Nietzsche left after the first act of the Ring, suffering from a mysterious illness. His relationship with Wagner was already under serious strain, due to Nietzsche’s objection to the composer's growing nationalism. Walking out on the Ring was the last straw.
At Bayreuth, Nietzsche felt literally nauseated and that nausea was both turning point and a symbol, and it was clearly a physical symptom, which was expressive of psychological state - he could not stomach the experience of the enthusiasm, the kind of reverence that Wagner was commanding and reveling. It sickened him literally, he had to leave. The break with Wagner had become inevitable. You cannot say, ‘Terribly sorry, my strain was not feeling well’. Wagner was not someone who would forgive something like that.
His health really was deteriorating. And I think he needed philosophy , his own philosophy，to cope with his life, to cope with his problems. The Schopenhauer and the Wagner way, the momentary way out in music that was not enough for him anymore.
It was during the years of my lowest vitality, that I cease to be a pessimist, the instinct of self-restoration for bad me, a philosophy of poverty and discouragement. This in fact is how that long period of sickness appears to me now. As it were, I discovered life a new including myself, I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy, into the will to power.
He says, somewhere that you, yourself, are this will to power. And I think Nietzsche thought that ultimately the task is one of self-mastery, that is of acquiring a certain kind of self-knowledge. That would not be merely intellectual abstract, because to Nietzsche, all knowledge is ultimately rooted in the body. So for him, self-mastery involves acquiring as much knowledge as possible about the human body, about your body, about his physiology, about his psychology.
He felt that one of the great influences of Christianity was to banish the body from culture. He suggested that perhaps the whole of Western philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. And his view was that our physical nature and our psychological nature has ultimate bearing on the way we think. And the phrase The Will to Power (der Wille zur Macht in German), I think can be read in terms of this idea of self-making and what we might see as part of his legacy in the 20th century is the institutionalizing or self-making as therapy. And I think that that is so a pioneering aspect of his work. It leads on to Freud I mean arguably without Nietzsche there would not be Freud.
Nietzsche's new philosophy resulted in the publication of Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Began in the solitude of the Swiss countryside, it was as much a work of psychology as philosophy. It was Nietzsche's first great statement of individualism and challenge mankind to think for itself. He wrote it in short aphoristic bursts while out walking, the method of working he would continue for the rest of his life.
And so onwards, along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence. However you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent of material nature. Forgive yourself, your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through: false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes into your goal, with nothing left over.
He had freed himself from the fetters of ancient traditions and of opinions which were not his. And Free Spirits to him means to be willing and to be able and to dare to have a fresh look out to question one's own opinions of the time and to be open-minded enough to find one's own way.
From Human, All Too Human onwards, Nietzsche is effectively sending himself out into the wilderness. He is very aware that the book is a very controversial one. He is very aware that by publishing it in 1878, He's going to cut himself off from a lot of the friends that he has had so far. Wagner himself saw the book as evidence already of Nietzsche's mental instability. And Nietzsche, therefore, found himself increasingly isolated. He is conceiving of himself as a sort of heroic wanderer figure heading out up mountains and into new territory. A year after the publication of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche resigned his professorship at Basel due to ill health, and moved to the Engadin region of the Swiss Alps. Living off a small pension, he found himself a room in this boarding house in the village of Sils Maria. For the next ten years he would spend the summers here, and the winters either on the French or Italian Riviera moving as the climate change to suit his health. He loved the clean rarefied air and the coolness of summer. This seemed to be his kind of climate. He felt that he could think clearer. He found what he was looking for in his prose really the kind of, he used imagery (to describe it), he was looking for something very hard and not susceptible to emotion, to human emotion. So what he found in the mountains was a picture of a world where human emotion was trivial.
Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains, seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence. Everything so far placed under a ban by morality. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous. But how serenely all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels lies beneath oneself!
In 1882 while traveling in Italy, the old hermit of Sils Maria, as Nietzsche call himself, met the one and only love of his life – Lou Andreas-Salome, a brilliant young student that was only 20 years old. Nietzsche described her as being as shrewd as an eagle and as brave as a lion, and considered her to be his philosophical prodigy. They were introduced by his friend, the psychologist Paul Rée, and throughout the course of that year, the three of them were inseparable. They travelled around Italy together, living as free spirits.
He was trying to live out his philosophy with companions and he during that vacation year in Italy, he always discussed the idea of founding an almost religious philosophical community in an old monastery or something like that is as a fantasy of his. I think he did not only see Lou as the ideal companion of that community of scholars, but he was very attracted to her as a woman.
He proposed marriage to Lou Salomé who didn't want to marry him or anybody and suggested a ‘menage a trois’ with him and Rée. And then a little while later, they had another meeting together Rée and Lou Salomé went off. And started on, Nietzsche realized that he'd been ditched, and he was in a fury of self-loathing. His letters are quite, at this time, are quite compulsive. He says:“I feel contempted（后面几个词听不清）.
This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew, and it is still possible that I shall choke on it. I have suffered from the humiliating and tormenting memories of this summer, as from a bout of madness. I'm exerting every ounce of my self-mastery… unless I discovered the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.
He wrote, 'if I would return all this muck to gold, I am finished by muck in the state of mind and emotion.' Well he did with that by writing this in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And Zarathustra is a fictional character, but it borrows most his characteristics in Nietzsche.
When Zarathustra was 30 years old, he left his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude and for 10 years did not tire of it. But at last the change came over his heart. And one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the Sun and spoke to it, thus. Behold, I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands outstretched to receive it.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the book is the work of an isolated man. It is clear from the figure of Zarathustra in the book itself, who has such problems finding disciples in the first book he preaches to the town's folk in the town that he descends to from his lonely mountain, and finds that they don't have ears to hear him.
Zarathustra is then an isolated figure. He does not immediately find the right audience. The book is in a sense a quest for the right audience and request on Zarathustra’s part to realize what his task is.
When Zarathustra came into the next town which lies on the edge of the forest, he found many people gather together in the marketplace. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people, “Behold, I will teach you about the Overman (Übermensch). Mankind itself is something that must be overcome.”
Nietzsche proposes an ideal of self-overcoming, an ideal he calls the Overman, not by having recourse to a metaphysical realm outside of the human, but within the possibilities of the human. It is a paradoxical notion, but it is one that Nietzsche is asking us to consider: How can we as humans transcend ourselves?
The idea of the Overman came from Nietzsche's own battle for self-mastery. Human beings in general, he argued, had a duty to rise above the limitations of their own condition. But the original German term he created Übermensch can be interpreted in many ways: It is still often translated as Superman. This is a legacy of the Nazi era, when long after his death, Nietzsche was turned into a hero of the Third Reich. Nietzsche’s Superman was able to be co-opted into Fascist ideology - because of the activities of his sister Elizabeth, who re-edited some of her brother's writings to promote the Aryan ideal.
（德语）
If you translate Superman as the Overman, which some people do, as the Übermensch, the mountains were in a sense the ‘Over World’, they represented for Nietzsche a place of self-transcendence, and their opposite was the ‘Land Down Below’, ordinary life, common life that which had to be transcended.
“I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber,” Zarathustra said to his heart.
What returns, what finally comes home to me is my home self. Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk. But whoever is of my kind, cannot escape such an hour, the hour which says to him, “Only now are you going your way to greatness. Peak and abyss, they are now joined together, for all things are baptized in a well of eternity, and lie beyond good and evil.”
In conceiving of a world beyond good and evil, beyond the fleeting preoccupations of the human condition, Nietzsche had transcended the “muck”, as he called it his own life experience, and turned it into philosophical gold.
But now living virtually in total isolation in Sils Maria, he had all but sacrificed human contact for the world of his own imagination. Philosophy had become his consolation for a life of disappointment and deep-rooted loneliness.
My principal article of faith is that one can only flourish among people who share the identical ideas and the identical will. I have no one. That is my sickness. If adopting a popular manner, I recommend Schopenhauer or Wagner to the Germans or conjure up Zarathustras. These are my remedies. Above all else, they are hiding places where I can lose myself for a time.
But even for Nietzsche, such extremes of isolation eventually took their toll. In 1888, he moved down from the Alps to the Italian city of Turin, echoing Zarathustra's descent from his solitaire mountain. Heaven, as he saw it liberated humanity from its past, Nietzsche now set about redefining its future. He began formulating a new system of values for a society in which God was no more, a new morality beyond Christian virtues such as self-denial and pity. He called this project, which he hoped would be his crowning achievement, the Transvaluation of All Values.
What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is more harmful than any advice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak. That is Christianity. Christianity is the religion of pity. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity.
He had his great plans to transvalue all values. That was his project. And the books he wrote The Antichrist and The Twilight of the Idols were part of that project. But I do think he had a sense of time running out. I have found certain evidence that suggests to me he was aware of his growing in capacity of the nature, of his illness, and he had some thoughts about his own mortality.
This was a man who died young and spent most of his life dying. So it's entirely understandable that he would have been infused by pessimism and that he would have a tendency to weirdly align himself with the death of the culture that he was describing, that the two became one for him in a in a bizarre way. And this is why you find him nodding out over the revaluation of all values, claiming to have written it in his last book Ecce Homo. This projected title plan for five-volume-work and of course that was never achieved.
....待续....
