Duck and cover

[chickenfeet]

Yes, I've been thinking again which is always a dangerous thing. Now, as many of the learned people who read this journal know, I basically know very little about philosophy but i had this idea earlier today which i wanted to cast upon the waters and see what happened.

Could one consider Nietzsche to be the first post-modernist? Clearly his work isn't meant to be taken at face value and it is at least possible that much of it is a joke at the reader's expense.

Corollary: Look what happens when people take pomo seriously! I won't use the H or the N word because i can never remember who's law I would be invoking if I did.

Comments

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about firsts, but he was certainly influential, I think, in the thought that led to postmodernism. Particularly his ideas about Greek Tragedy, I think. The "Dionysian Chorus" in his formulation acted as the principally affected in a drama (rather than the audience), in the style of MST3K or music in a film, causing, I think, a much more intellegent understanding of story than the immersive one more common today.

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

Godwin's, I expect you know that though.

Must read a little Nietzsche. Either that, or work him into a limerick.

[cassandre.livejournal.com]

This is not a limerick, but is at least a Silly Line that I remember from undergrad days:

Nietzsche is peachy, but Sartre is smartre.

[ironed_orchid]

He's definately offering an early critique of modernity. Nietzsche often gets labeled the first this of that, e.g the first existentialist. I don't know how useful it is to apply labels to a back catalog of works that happen to not be in a box already.

Interestingly, there's a school of thought that marks the beginning of modernism, as in the art and literary movement, with Brandes lectures on Nietzsche delivered in 1888. (See a book called Modernism, edited by Malcolm Bradbury for more details.)

[woundedtiger.livejournal.com]

It's hard to call anybody the first person to do anything. The roots of "post-modernism" probably go all the way back to Aristophanes in ancient Greece. Most of Aristophanes' plays pre-supposed a fairly extensive knowledge of Homer and the major playwrights, blurred the distinction between audience and players, and had other "non-traditional" narrative structures.

Nietzsche's a tough one to peg into any hole. Most of his writing styles were borrowed from earlier writers, but I think he enjoyed writing so that his words would have a "right" interpretation (easy to see if you know the proper cultural references) and a "wrong" one (which may seem right if you're not a man of letters or not paying attention). This is why they seem to be a big joke on the readers.

Of course, another point to consider is that Nietzsche was one of the first writers to criticize the practise of dumping writers into categories like "existentialism", "feminism", or, um, "modernism" and "postmodernism". The purpose of artistic movements seems to be to allow casual readers to talk about many writers without reading their books. For obvious reasons, Nietsche was opposed to this.

His theory on art has I think been described as both modernist and postmodernist, I think because The Birth of Tragedy traces the history of Greek drama as it passed through both similar phases.

[cassandre.livejournal.com]

Don't know Nietzsche well enough to attempt a response (and am very wary of applying the label of the First You-Fill-in-the-Blank to any historical figure).

But Beyond Good and Evil - the title alone kinda says it all, doesn't it?