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“... Nietzsche​ found Anaximander troubling. In Basel in the 1870s, struggling to balance his duties as a lecturer in classics with his philosophical writing, Nietzsche described Anaximander as a ‘true pessimist’ with a guilt-ridden, punitive view of the universe. But he was also envious ...”

“... three – the central figures at the Muses’ Court – were joined in 1787 by the young Swabian Friedrich Schiller. Together they turned Weimar into Athens on the Ilm, a nickname that pointed to their re-evaluation of the classical legacy. Wieland was a poet who translated Horace and Lucian and edited Germany’s leading literary journal, Der teutsche ...”

“... counter modern disenchantment by undermining all rationalistic assumptions about human society. Nietzsche rebelled against Romantic idealisations and took issue with the historicist approach that had been incubating in German philology departments since the days of Friedrich August Wolf half a century earlier. As a ...”

“... Wieland’s revolutionary emphasis on ‘psychodrama’, then the Ring productions of Götz Friedrich and Joachim Herz might be thought more substantially challenging than Chéreau’s. The contrasts between Chéreau’s Ring and Syberberg’s new film, and between Syberberg’s view of Parsifal and Lucy Beckett’s, are most illuminating. Beckett’s ...”

“... which had too often been absent from more sophisticated forms of culture. In their own ways both Nietzsche and Wagner later paid tribute to this intuitive tradition in the myth-dominated narratives of their works.’ Did they? If Dr Vaughan had not – like Israel – relied on hearsay Wagner, he would have realised how Wagner-dominated the myths of his ...”

“... Ellerkamp’) and the Cosmologist (a Strangelove figure set in a Caspar David Friedrich icescape) add to the richness of the texture while reinforcing the central ideal that what we are seeing is no more than a film about a film. Hitler, muses Ellerkamp, was ‘the greatest film-maker of all time’. Two principal narrators, Harry Baer and ...”

“... individual. (In this he resembles Otto Dix – maybe it’s all German solitudinarianism, out of Nietzsche or Caspar David Friedrich.) His boldly outlined conical or tubular forms, unconventional colour balances and bright, acidic palettes stand out anywhere. He painted social milieus of pleasure, soirées and ...”

“... a kind of anti-philosopher, forging a whole new style of philosophical writing as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had done before them. The only valid form of reasoning seems to be one which tries to reckon into itself the limits and contradictions against which it is bound to run up, and without which it is perhaps doomed to silence. One must speak while ...”

“... its pieces in partial and passionate fashion. Gaddis derives some of his own pieces from Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Norbert Weiner, Benjamin and Huizinga (the last two take part in a hilarious dialogue in Agapē Agape), but others not cited also come to mind: Sigfried Giedion in Mechanisation Takes Command, Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilisation, and ...”

“... effect, in controversies over his interpretations of philosophers – with Stanley Corngold on Nietzsche’s conception of error, and with Raymond Geuss on Hegel’s understanding of art. De Man had translated Nietzsche’s remark that the world is a place where a mistake can happen and made it say instead that the world ...”

“... to turn one’s back on the fairground. Early in the 20th century it really mattered to oppose Nietzsche and Lenin, and to do so in terms other than those of diehard conservatism or philistinism. Presumably it will go on mattering as we move into the 21st century, accompanied by another bunch of mournful palm-readers and sermonising snake-oil reps. What ...”

“... mental world of end-of-the-century Western politics. It is alongside Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek that Michael Oakeshott is most appropriately seen. The relations between these four figures await documentation from future biographers. But whatever the circumstantial contacts or conflicts – some more visible than others – the lattice of ...”

“... the Individual, while critics of the liberal tradition in the West – including Marx, Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt – are almost completely ignored. Ryan and Fawcett offer a more capacious account of liberalism, but are just as indifferent to mankind’s many other conversations with itself, especially those held outside the West. ‘Political ...”

“... of having been born’ are reproduced almost verbatim in Beckett’s early essay on Proust) and Nietzsche (in the fable at the beginning of the Birth of Tragedy, according to which the ‘best’ is ‘never to have been born’; the second best to die quickly). Beckett gives a novel twist to this venerable tradition by extending the curse from birth to ...”

“... troublesome) the irrationality of devotion. The object itself is almost irrelevant. As Nietzsche observes, such an attitude necessitates for this ‘atheist who makes it a point of honour not to be one’ a ‘constant and passionate dishonesty towards himself’. Though vividly and surgically detailed, perfect in the tones of prophecy, and stiff ...”