HERE'S AN UPDATE ON WHO KNEW WHO:
It is certainly interesting to find a professor who has studied
Nietzsche more than Hannah Arendt did and is able to demonstrate that
Arendt underestimated Nietzsche's knowledge of his times when she
asserted in BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE that Marx, Nietzsche, and
Kierkegaard lived unaware of each other. In the Introduction of
COMPOSING THE SOUL / REACHES OF NIETZSCHE'S PSYCHOLOGY (1994) by
Graham Parkes, the development of psychology is tied to three writers
Nietzsche discovered late in life: Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and
Kierkegaard. In a paragraph:

Nietzsche did not discover Dostoevsky until 1887, six years after the
novelist's death, and the impact occasioned a flurry of letters to
friends to express his enthusiasm. In TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS (1888),
which originally bore the title, MUSSIGGANG EINES PSYCHOLOGEN
(LEISURE HOURS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST), he writes of Dostoevsky as "the
only psychologist from whom I have learned anything: he belongs to
the most beautiful strokes of luck of my life, even more so than my
discovery of Stendhal" (TI 9.45). Had Nietzsche been able to study
Kierkegaard, as he intended, he would surely have found that great
psychologist to be another beautiful incursion into his life. (p. 7).

I have my own doubts about how great K. might be, but a note on this
paragraph provides some substantiation of Nietzsche's interest:

12. In a letter to Georg Brandes of 19 February 1888, Nietzsche
wrote from his pension in Nice: "On my next trip to Germany I plan
to engage the psychological problem of Kierkegaard" (emphasis
added). The parallels between Kierkegaard's psychology and
Nietzsche's are as striking as they are numerous, and deserve
thorough investigation. The subtitle of Kierkegaard's REPETITION
(1843), for instance, is ... (p. 385).

The cover of COMPOSING THE SOUL features a score by Nietzsche, with
various sketches in which Goethe might be recognized by his hat,
Freud by his beard, but Frau Lou Solomé has an ear on one side of her
head about three notes lower than the ear on the other side, unless
she only had a curl there and no ear. Sketching is hard, and I am
expecting the book to be much better than the pictures, which only
appear on the cover.
unarmedwit

--- In arendt@yahoogroups.com, "unarmedwit" <nukerplunker@h...> wrote:
> I was reading a book by Hannah Arendt at the beginning of July,
when
> I went to a Bo Diddley concert in which his song "Shut Up, Woman"
> ended with "You know I love you, and I would love you twice as much
> if you put that razor away." I was primarily interested in what
> Arendt could say about Nietzsche, but her observations also
included
> Marx and Kierkegaard. Arendt was a member of the last generation
> that was well-read. Since then reading has become an individual
> hobby for some, but books are no longer a context within which
> meaning advances, and her observations shaved off the B.C. comic
> suggestion for males proving their superiority over females by
> scratching them with our beards.
>
> Do we all remember this comic?
> We're going to catch the women and prove the innate superiority of
> men over women.
> Curls: How do you plan to do that?
> Peter: We'll scratch them with our beards.
>
> Hannah Arendt might be a good example of how modern exercises in
> political thought think very much like Nietzsche, but use Nietzsche
> as the philosopher most responsible for ending the authority which
> thought itself, as a superfluous product of human mental
aspiration,
> assumes in her book, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE. Its index of names
> does not include George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80, dead now
> these 125 years), an English author that Nietzsche heard about from
> his friend, Helene Druscowicz, and mentioned in section 5 of
> the "Expeditions of an Untimely Man" in Nietzsche's book TWILIGHT
OF
> THE IDOLS with the disavowal, "let us not blame it on little
> bluestockings a la Eliot. In England, in response to every little
> emancipation from theology one has to reassert one's position in a
> fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic." People being what they
> are, morals ought to assume an awe-inspiring place in the
expression
> of anyone's individuality. For Nietzsche to assume that "it
> possesses truth only if God is truth - it stands or falls with the
> belief in God" applies religious presumptions to a matter that
holds
> no water, "For the Englishman morality is not yet a problem . . ."
I
> tried to find something about Marx in Nietzsche's books, and
instead
> I found an English novelist who might be familiar to anyone who
reads.
>
> To let Hannah Arendt state the matter in her own way:
>
> "Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche remained Hegelians insofar as
they
> saw the history of past philosophy as one dialectically developed
> whole; their great merit was that they radicalized this new
approach
> toward the past in the only way it could still be further
developed,
> namely, in questioning the conceptual hierarchy which had ruled
> Western philosophy since Plato and which Hegel had still taken for
> granted."
>
> George Eliot did not get mentioned when Hannah Arendt considered
the
> way in which modern society functions:
>
> "Values are social commodities that have no significance of their
own
> but, like other commodities, exist only in the ever-changing
> relativity of social linkages and commerce. Through this
> relativization both the things which man produces for his use and
the
> standards according to which he lives undergo a decisive change:
> they become entities of exchange, and the bearer of their `value'
is
> society and not man, who produces and uses and judges."
>
> Considering the common element of self-defeat in Nietzsche, Marx,
and
> Kierkegaard, Arendt suggests, "In complete independence of one
> another--none of them ever knew of the others' existence--they
arrive
> at the conclusion that this enterprise in terms of the tradition
can
> be achieved only through a mental operation best described in the
> images and similes of leaps, inversions, and turning concepts
upside
> down: Kierkegaard speaks of his leap from doubt into belief; Marx
> turns Hegel, or rather `Plato and the whole Platonic tradition'
> (Sidney Hook), `right side up again,' leaping `from the realm of
> necessity into the realm of freedom'; and Nietzsche understands his
> philosophy as `inverted Platonism' and `transformation of all
> values.'"
>
> Freedom is a neat theme because it allows everyone to participate
as
> liberators. Even the CIA is still looking for a slam dunk way to
> make it happen, but the future is never a cakewalk. Education has
> been trying to produce people who can reach some consensus on
things
> that have to be done, but the methods which lead in that direction
> are incredibly boring to anyone who has access to the feelings of
> those who produce and perform art. As Bo Diddley would say, "Sit
> down and shut up."