Literary Philosophy #1: Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy is written and thought in many ways: as logical argumentation, dialogue, fragment, diary, novel, manifesto, poetry, letters, and fables. What potential lies in different literary forms, and what makes them philosophical? Are there questions, situations, or ideas that require particular literary forms to be expressed at all?

The lecture series "Literary Philosophy" focuses over four evenings on four existentialist thinkers - Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, and Simone Weil - who each approach philosophy in a literary way. Each lecture is followed by a shared discussion about the thinker in question and literature's philosophical potential.

This first evening is titled "The Time and Body of Poetry" and is held by Ph.D. Jon Auring Grimm. He takes as his starting point the young Nietzsche (1844-1900) and his distinction - following Schopenhauer - between the Apollonian and Dionysian artistic drives. The Apollonian artistic drive is tied to the art world of dreams, the visual arts, and epic poetry, while the Dionysian is the dark drive of intoxication, music, and dissolution, corresponding to lyric poetry. The lecture unfolds how language and poetry relate to temporality, embodiment, and materiality, and points forward to how these early traces can be found again in the mature Nietzsche's work.

Jon Auring Grimm holds a master's degree and Ph.D. in philosophy. He has written, among other things, the book FLUX: a movement toward a Heraclitean Nietzscheanism and a Ph.D. dissertation on Nietzsche's Dionysian heir Georges Bataille.

Venue: Store sal