I like my philosophy incomplete, like life we leave before the whole story is told.The sense of life as passage even as a long strange trip (quoting the Grateful Dead) works with my conception of reality as a less than tidy narrative. We sometimes wish we had more time but it's chance what rules this little world, It should be noted that Nietzsche loved Heraclitus the pre-Socratic philosopher who first celebrated the flux of life as life.When I first read Nietzsche (in 1967 in grad school in California)I was floored, it was exciting and it was a way to go, a path where poetry and music were more important than war. The Vietnam war was forever, conscription became ever more insidious, and as we've learned we keep fighting these endless wars, wars that lead to more wars.After Nietzsche left the University at Basel he spent the rest of his life in southern Europe on a small pension. His life was modest and quiet but his writings are thunder and lightening. He opened the issue of existence as the primary concern of philosophy.And he brought us an ethics minus G-d. For me as a visual artist I found the way to make more philosophical art by confronting the dying culture I was born into, let feelings rule . Reason alone can't give us the answers to our wonder about existence. It's not just why am I here but rather why is their a here?It's not just that G-d is dead it's that he never existed, our fantasies need a critique. Nietzsche is good for you, he can make you strong he can show you a way to the mountains in your soul.
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