Image © Prospect Publishing
2023 EXHIBIT
‘No trivial matter’: Nietzsche’s Urge for the Truth
An exhibit on Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche is certainly one of the most important and influential modern thinkers. Most of us have heard of famous Nietzschean tropes like the “death of God,” the advent of the “super-man,” the “will to power,” “nihilism” or the “eternal return of the same.” However, his ideas are often associated primarily with European history (and, in that context, with right-wing political movements), and less so with modern, “liberal” American culture. Few people realize that not only was Nietzsche’s single most important “teacher” in fact an American author, Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that Nietzsche himself has had a vast impact on American culture, both popular and academic. This exhibit explores these mutual influences between Nietzsche and America, looking at history but also highlighting some of the “Nietzschean” ideas that still shape our common way of thinking. By doing so we will discover an “American Nietzsche” which gives a surprising new meaning to Nietzsche’s own claim of being a “prophet” of a new world, the harbinger of a “transposition of all values.”
“I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable—a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. […] Mankind can begin to have fresh hopes, only now that I have lived. Thus, I am necessarily a man of Fate. For when Truth enters the lists against the falsehood of ages, shocks are bound to ensue, and a spell of earthquakes, followed by the transposition of hills and valleys, such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept of ‘politics’ then becomes elevated entirely to the sphere of spiritual warfare. All the mighty realms of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on falsehood: there will be wars, the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only from my time and after me will politics on a large scale exist on earth.”
~ From Ecce Homo, 1908
Click below to view low-resolution exhibit panels.
