Friday, August 14, 2009

Announcing "Nietzsche Grid"

Carlos Ruiz (who uses the pen name Narziss), a student at Berkeley, has put together "Nietzsche Grid", which is potentially a very useful resource, but it also needs input from other Nietzsche students. The idea is to collect references to sections of the corpus that address various themes in his work. Narziss is also maintaining a blog for discussion and suggestions. I corresponded with Narziss about some possible thematic categories, but I am sure he would welcome input from readers of this blog about categories and ultimately about texts that belong under each category.

1 comment:

Tim Themi said...

I would suggest "Platonism" as a useful thematic category to consider. Nietzsche indicates Plato to have paved the way for the tendency in the West to use particular kinds of false beliefs to ground moral values in ways which are ultimately harmful.

Although the frequent object of Nietzsche’s polemic is Christianity, he names it a “Platonism for the masses”(BGE: P). This is also indicated in an 1884 note where he states: “Without Platonism or Aristotelianism no Christian philosophy”(KSA 11, 25[257], 79). Whereas in a 1887 letter to Overbeck he writes: “And it’s all Plato’s fault; Plato is the greatest malheur [misfortune] of Europe"(KSB 8, 9)

See also (TI: 'Ancients', 2), (WP: 202), and the following 'google books' link for some secondary literature, http://books.google.com.au/books?id=vn3GBIA7wUYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false