Nietzsche by Robert Wicks

Author:Robert Wicks [Wicks, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780741703
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

One can interpret the beautiful Helen as representative of a nourishing and protecting mother-wife force – one that is positively supportive in a psychological sense, insofar as Helen is comparable to a benevolent and safeguarding “mother nature.” To construct the polar opposite of this positive female force, one can replace the terrifying Dionysian force with a correspondingly feminized image, namely, that of the Medusa – the being who turns her beholders into stone.117 In Nietzsche’s writings, Medusa does not play a consistently highlighted role, and sometimes Nietzsche offers in the terrifying Medusa’s place, the related and perhaps more revealing image of Baubo – a primitive and reputedly obscene female demon which was originally a personification of the female genitals.118 In his 1886 preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote the following:

“Is it true, that the Good Lord is present everywhere?,” a little girl asked her mother: “But I think that’s indecent” – a tip for philosophers! One should have more respect for the shame with which nature has hidden itself behind riddles and brightly dressed uncertainties. Maybe the truth is a woman, who has reasons for not letting her reasons be seen. Maybe her name is – to speak Greek – Baubo?

Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live: for that, it is necessary to come to a brave standstill at the surface, at the drapery, at the skin, to worship the appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! These Greeks were superficial – out of profundity! And are we not exactly returning to this, we daredevils of the spirit, we, who have scaled the highest and most dangerous peak of contemporary thought, and looked around from there, we, who have looked down from there? Are we not exactly in that sense – Greeks? Worshippers of forms, of tones of words? And because of that – artists?119

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