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Wednesday 26 November 2008

On Nietzsche.



I found I couldn't really concentrate yesterday evening, so I did a drawing of Friedrich Nietzsche, which I've been wanting to do for a while. He was a great character; the sort of philosopher who seemed to go from great leaps of inspiration to total despair in a heartbeat. His writings really reflect that. Synonymous nowadays with misery, I find most things he wrote strangely uplifting, and magnificently visual. That's not just schadenfreude either, although it is nice to know in arty-angsty moments that Nietzsche was, at any given time, twice as miserable as you are! XD

A lot of people have been recommending me Sartre lately, but having read "Existentialism and Humanism", I found him to be a little...well, existential...unsurprisingly. I'm not in any position or possessing of enough brainpower to compare philosophers here, I'm just talking about my preference on writing. And wow, does Nietzsche write like a madman! Every other sentence seems to be a grandiose statement of sudden truth or some instant commandment, bookended by exclamation points. Perhaps i've just been reading some very over-the-top translations, but it makes my tiny mind jump up and go shit! Yes! Whatever you say mr.philosopher, sir!
He's also highly visual, or conjures some fantastic images in my mind at least. I want to do a Nietzsche manga..

"The ice is near, the solitude tremendous—but how calmly all things lie in the light!
How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself!— Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality."

~John~
(also, I've decided that i'm a terrible digital painter and shall not be trying it again for a while.)

2 comments:

nana said...

Far out man... Never read anything by this guy but it sounds very... moving. XD

aqws said...

Well, he did eventually isolate himself from everyone who liked or even knew him, went mad, died at the age of 40 something, and had his writings horribly re-edited by his insane nationalist sister in order to make it look like he was the philisophical founder of Nazism. So yeah...far out man! XD