08/16/2024
Nietzsche and van Gogh with Brian Pines
A conversation about the creative peak of Nietzsche and van Gogh in 1888 with Brian Pines, Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Song in this episode: “The Ghost” by Fleetwood Mac.
08/16/2024
Nietzsche and van Gogh with Brian Pines
A conversation about the creative peak of Nietzsche and van Gogh in 1888 with Brian Pines, Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Song in this episode: “The Ghost” by Fleetwood Mac.
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(upbeat music)
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- In title opinions coming to you
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from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
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Our portal to the Allegiant Fields,
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where we hold converse with both the living and the dead,
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and where you, who tune in, can hear the past,
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speak to the future across this threshold
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we call entitled opinions.
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Today we're going to call up the year 1888,
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the Anus Mirabiles, when Frederick Nietzsche
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and Vincent van Gogh went into creative overdrive
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before plunging into the abyss shortly thereafter.
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They both made it through to the other side though,
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and the two of them are standing by waiting
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to join the conversation.
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Luigi Pinandello once drew marked
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that life doesn't have to follow the Aristotelian rule
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of plausibility the way fiction does,
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since it has the privilege of being real, of being true.
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Reality at times is way more improbable
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than readers would tolerate in a novel.
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And when I think about these two figures,
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Nietzsche and Van Gogh, who became such superstars
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in the 20th century and whose stock today is higher than ever,
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it seems quite incredible that they ended their careers
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in abject of security, loneliness, and psychological turmoil.
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Brian Pines, the guests who joins me today,
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has spent a lot of time with both of them.
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Brian teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco,
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Mount Tamal Pius College on the College of Marin.
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He received several fellowships to conduct research
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on Nietzsche at the Gerteschiller Archive in Weimar
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and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
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This research enabled him to write a book
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entitled Nietzsche and Van Gogh imaginations of 1888.
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It's a dual biography centered on a single year,
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which explores the many parallels and coincidences
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between these two figures,
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one to thinker, the other an artist.
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He's here today to discuss the fruits of his research,
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which will be published by Cambridge Scholars Press
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this coming February.
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Brian, welcome to the program.
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- Thank you for having me.
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- So this dual biography you've recently finished writing
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deals with what Nietzsche and Van Gogh both went through
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and accomplished in the terminal year of 1888.
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I call it terminal because it was terminal for Nietzsche,
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who went mad in January of 1889.
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And near terminal for Van Gogh who killed himself in 1890.
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So two years, let's say, a year and a half after 1888,
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what inspired you to write this book
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and why did you choose to focus on this year in particular?
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- Well, the inspiration initially was just the depth
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of synchronicity between these two figures.
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The turbulence and chaos of reality,
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the fact that you had so many impossible coincidences
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between the two of them was inspirational for me,
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but I've been working on this many years now
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in the method, the scaffolding, the inspiration for that
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was Plutarch.
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Plutarch, the parallel lives.
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Plutarch had a fantastic method of juxtaposing two lives
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in order to find meaning and morals and parables,
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which went beyond those two lives.
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He lived in the great era of parables.
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The gospels were composed during his lifetime.
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And I found that by juxtaposing these two lives,
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there's certain lessons, certain ideas and concepts
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that go way beyond the two of them.
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- So what are some of the coincidences and parallels it?
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You find most striking.
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- Well, a lot of them are context-driven.
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I mean, just to rattle a few off,
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they were reading the same books,
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listening to the same music.
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Their psychotic breaks happened within days of each other.
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The two years for both of them had a kind of unprecedented
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parallel productivity, then go painted over 150 paintings,
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Nietzsche published six books.
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In terms of like the more conceptual lessons,
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I really like that quote you began with,
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because the problem of a biographer very often
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is how to negotiate this realm between reality and fiction,
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how to tell the story of the life of somebody.
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And in this case, you have this ancient archetype
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of the misunderstood genius with Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
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But history does not offer us a more emblematic example
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of that archetype than the thinker and the artist here.
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- Is it an ancient archetype Brian,
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or is it more of a modern archetype
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of the misunderstood and unrecognized genius?
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- That's a good question.
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I mean, when I think of predecessors to Nietzsche or Van Gogh,
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I think of for Nietzsche, people like Spinoza,
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people who are misunderstood or,
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but Spinoza still had some recognition,
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at least he was persecuted, he wasn't ignored.
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With Van Gogh, you have people like El Greco and Vermeer,
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who the revaluation of their work posthumously was enormous,
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but they were both still capable of selling paintings
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during their lifetimes, something that Van Gogh
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had not done as of 1888.
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- It's amazing that Van Gogh sold one painting
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in his entire life, is that right?
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- There's some speculation of maybe a self-portrait
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in 1886 or 1887, but only one documented case,
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the red vineyards, which now hangs in Moscow.
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- I wanna add to that, or subsume under that archetype,
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John Batista Vico, we didn't show on Vico,
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who was really a kind of genius that remained dormant
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and completely unknown until he was discovered somehow
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in the 19th century, early 19th century,
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but usually, anyway.
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So these two figures did not know each other,
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but they weren't that far from, you know,
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they were living in the same general vicinity.
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- Yes.
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- They were, I gather equally lonely
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and somehow not properly socialize,
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what we say is that a way of describing it.
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- That's a nice euphemism, yes.
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Neither had ever found love throughout their lives.
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They were both completely living in obscurity Vincent.
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I mean, we have records of his temperament
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that he had like an extraordinary way
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of spitting out sentences and Dutch and French in English
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and shifting his eyes the whole time,
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and they were both very abrasive figures.
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And that's part of what I write on in the book,
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is that the fascination with these two figures
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is also in part a kind of fascination with their suffering.
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So just as there might be some academic interest in Plutarch,
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there's also some kind of obscene interest
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in viewing the suffering of other human beings.
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You know, it was the coliseum that was built
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to during Plutarch's lifetime.
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And there's something about the fascination
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with these two personalities that I think is reminiscent
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of that desire to view other human beings in anguish.
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- Well, personality certainly plays a huge role
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in the kind of superstardom that I referred to
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in the case of Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
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I, I deal on my part that perhaps if their personalities
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were far more within the norm,
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that maybe Van Gogh wouldn't be the,
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you know, the most expensive artist that you can possibly
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buy a painting of, or Nietzsche becoming this,
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you know, the great prophet that he became
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and still is for many people.
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I mean, there's something about this being at the edge
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of a certain kind of madness if you want,
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divine madness in the Greek sense of the Dionysian madness,
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if you want, that being possessed by something
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that's greater than yourself,
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that all this adds a certain authority and credibility
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within the modern psyche of what a genius really is, you know?
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I'm not sure that I would, you know,
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want to hang out and have dinner with Van Gogh
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and spend a week with him in his house
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because I have feeling that his personality
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was much more abrasive in many ways than Nietzsche's.
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He also, I think unlike Nietzsche,
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but correct me if I'm wrong, that he Van Gogh had,
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he was not as isolated.
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He might have been as equally lonely,
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but he was continuously even in 1888.
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In touch with people, you know, Gogh comes to visit him,
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he goes to the taverns, he was a drinker,
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and he, you know, frequented prostitutes.
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In that sense, Nietzsche was very different
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because Nietzsche stuck to himself.
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He didn't have a lot of friends in his media vicinity,
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but I think they were, as I said, equally lonely,
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existentially speaking.
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- Yes, I believe so.
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Nietzsche had a few friends in attorney at Pascal Day,
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Erkele and Sills, a couple people, Julius Caffton,
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met him on Salas, came to visit him,
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but yeah, he was extraordinarily not lonely.
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Vincent, especially because of his brother, Teo,
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who was a king maker in the art world,
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had lots of people paying homage to him,
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or coming to visit him,
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but he never really managed,
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maybe one friend he made, Joseph Rulon, the postman,
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we painted for other friends of his,
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he had such an abrasive personality,
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he had an inability to let an argument go
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unless he was considered the unequivocal victor.
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Teo tells a story about how him and Vincent
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will be arguing about some kind of abstract painting point,
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and Vincent, he will tell Vincent he needs to go to bed,
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Vincent will pull up a chair next to his bed
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and continue the argument while he tries to sleep.
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- Yeah, so this characterological dimension
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of the two of them, with Vincent Van Gogh,
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we're talking about someone who,
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do we have an attested sort of mental disorder
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kind of diagnosis, he just was not psychologically sound, right?
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- Sure, yeah, I mean, there's certain kinds of diagnosis
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is like bipolar, which are just categorized
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based off of clusters of symptoms.
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The most recent big biography in 2011,
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Knife and Smith, they say that he had syphilis,
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but the issue is that when he,
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the only time he was involuntarily admitted
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to a hospital, the records are gone.
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We don't have a record of them examining him.
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- Nietzsche, and this is an entitled opinions exclusive,
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we are fairly certain had syphilis.
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When I say we, I mean me and my,
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I have an identical twin who works,
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he's a psychiatry resident at Harvard Hospital,
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and we're writing a paper right now.
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There's been a long history of Nietzsche's diagnosis
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or misdiagnosis with syphilis, basically,
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his sister had argued against this diagnosis,
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certain people like Mobius and Hildebrandt
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had argued for the diagnosis.
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More recently, people have argued against the diagnosis,
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but based off of insufficient and misunderstanding
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of the documentation.
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If you want, I can get into that at the moment.
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- Yeah, yeah, I would like to know.
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- Sure.
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- What's exclusive here?
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- Yeah, all right, so I'll get it along with our listeners.
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- Yeah, of course.
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So basically, recently, they have begun to diagnose him
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with like May less syndrome, catacil,
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and these very rare diseases,
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based off of misunderstanding of the evidence
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because when he was first entered into the Jaina asylum,
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we have the medical record.
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They diagnosed him with something called
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Argyle Robinson's pupil,
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which is when the pupils will not react to light,
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they won't constrict or dilate based off of light,
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but they will constrict or dilate based off of movement,
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looking at an object.
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This is one of the symptoms of syphilis.
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A lot of people have mentioned that he had this,
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he was a child, that he had seen a doctor named Shilmock
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and Jaina, and that this doctor had noticed that.
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They don't realize that that was just something
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that Elizabeth made up,
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because she recognized that Argyle Robinson's pupil
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is a symptom of syphilis.
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So the first and only document--
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- Elizabeth being the sister.
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- Elizabeth being the sister.
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And she was arguing against it,
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not only because she felt it would hurt this kind of
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Protestant morality, but also it hurt book sales.
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Shilmock had never seen in each of the first time
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that we have any documentation of that is in 1912
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when she publishes the second form of her biography,
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the Young Nietzsche.
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Furthermore, he had seen four or five ophthalmologists
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throughout his life that we do have records of,
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and they do not mention that.
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And the more conclusive evidence that he probably had syphilis
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is there's an erased section of the Jaina manuscript
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that was not published when Podok published
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his Nichts-Suisamen book translated as Nichts Madness.
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And it's still there in the transcript, you can see it.
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And that's that he had what's called a shanker.
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This is a, when syphilis enters the body,
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where it enters the body, it leaves a scar.
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And he had a scar right next to his friendulum,
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which is where the head and the shaft meet
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on the underside of the male genitals.
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And the fact that he had a scar there--
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I mean, maybe he hurt himself dancing naked or something
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like that, I don't know, but it's very good evidence
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that he did have syphilis.
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Yeah.
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When you say, when he danced naked, it's not just
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a figure of speech, because he actually--
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I think, in Turin, after his mental collapse,
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his landlord would look through the keyhole.
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He would hear all this commotion in the apartment
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that Nichts was living in it and see him dancing naked
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with pre-apic condition and doing his dainesian dances.
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So yeah, so essentially, it's long been assumed
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or suspected that he had syphilis, but you're saying
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that now we have conclusive evidence of it, right?
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Yes, yeah.
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Fairly conclusive.
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So that's conclusive we can handle.
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Does it change anything when it comes to our approach
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to Nichts, are we then to write off all the weird eccentricities
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of his thinking and his personality?
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I mean, when he goes to Basel and becomes
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a professor, youngest professor, full professor,
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and he writes a book on the birth of tragedy,
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some people would say that you had to be pretty crazy.
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It's write a book like that as your first book without footnotes
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and using these really cheap, tacky translations
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from the Greek, we've done a show on entitled opinions
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with Andrew Mitchell on this topic,
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and it's really quite amazing just how dismissive he was
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of the rules of philology and to write a book like that,
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you can't have been a completely sound state of mind,
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I think, thankfully he wasn't.
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I don't know what you think about.
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Well, I think it does change our conception of his last year,
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especially because the question is, is did he know?
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Did he know that he was going insane?
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Because having a shanker is not something you can ignore
|
| 00:15:56.020 |
and presumably he knew what that meant.
|
| 00:15:58.700 |
And so then it becomes a question of how do you approach death?
|
| 00:16:01.980 |
How do you approach oncoming insanity?
|
| 00:16:04.860 |
What choices do you make?
|
| 00:16:06.700 |
For example, does this have anything to do with his abandonment
|
| 00:16:09.460 |
of his help fur, his main work, The Wheel to Power,
|
| 00:16:13.300 |
which he begins to cannibalize his notes
|
| 00:16:16.780 |
from The Wheel to Power, which was to be a large four volume,
|
| 00:16:20.940 |
main work magnum opus of his, and uses those notes
|
| 00:16:24.860 |
in part to form Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist,
|
| 00:16:28.540 |
and the Dainish and Dithyrams.
|
| 00:16:30.260 |
All written in 1888.
|
| 00:16:32.900 |
Some of the notes precede that 1886, 1887,
|
| 00:16:36.740 |
but all of those books were written in 1888.
|
| 00:16:41.780 |
So when we talk about his breakdown,
|
| 00:16:45.220 |
so we're on this track, there's also
|
| 00:16:49.820 |
been some question about whether the story that has been
|
| 00:16:55.260 |
circulating for over a century that he was walking
|
| 00:16:59.740 |
in the streets of Turin in Italy and saw a coachman
|
| 00:17:03.740 |
of flogging a horse, and went and embraced the horse
|
| 00:17:07.660 |
and had this mental collapse after which he had a day
|
| 00:17:10.860 |
or two of this kind of weird, mad, lucidity
|
| 00:17:13.900 |
where he wrote off a bunch of letters to friends over back
|
| 00:17:17.860 |
to causing my Wagner, and so that there's
|
| 00:17:22.660 |
been some doubt about whether this horse anecdote is actually
|
| 00:17:27.820 |
true, have you discovered anything on that front?
|
| 00:17:30.340 |
Yes, another entitled opinions exclusive here.
|
| 00:17:33.140 |
Good, yeah.
|
| 00:17:35.580 |
So it's a story that has many people just take us true
|
| 00:17:39.220 |
because it's a good story, but very few people
|
| 00:17:41.300 |
have looked into the primary documentation
|
| 00:17:43.660 |
and the people who have, like Kurt Paul Yans,
|
| 00:17:46.020 |
believe that it probably didn't happen,
|
| 00:17:47.540 |
because the article appears in September of 1900,
|
| 00:17:53.660 |
and there's some inaccuracies about the article,
|
| 00:17:57.140 |
but more so, the article is part of a wave of articles
|
| 00:17:59.940 |
that come out of Italian newspapers
|
| 00:18:02.060 |
with all sorts of stories about how Nietzsche and his wife,
|
| 00:18:05.540 |
Lou Salome, and their servant, Pietro Gastie,
|
| 00:18:09.100 |
will like spend a whole bunch of money gambling in Monaco
|
| 00:18:11.380 |
and a whole bunch of things that are just false.
|
| 00:18:13.900 |
And so for a long time, Nietzsche scholars
|
| 00:18:15.980 |
who have cared about the truth and reality
|
| 00:18:19.740 |
believe that it's probably just part of the Nietzsche
|
| 00:18:21.340 |
mythology.
|
| 00:18:22.780 |
When you look at the primary documentation, though,
|
| 00:18:25.340 |
when this article is published to September 1900,
|
| 00:18:28.100 |
you don't even yet have a collection of Nietzsche's letters
|
| 00:18:31.980 |
available to the public.
|
| 00:18:33.900 |
And there's a few letters which have been published here
|
| 00:18:35.620 |
and there.
|
| 00:18:36.740 |
Maisonburg had published her Phyllis Offoan Adelmentia,
|
| 00:18:39.620 |
memoir of Nietzsche, Lou Salome had published a book of Nietzsche,
|
| 00:18:43.380 |
but even if you were a Nietzsche fanatic who scoured the Swiss
|
| 00:18:47.740 |
and German newspapers trying to find information about Nietzsche,
|
| 00:18:51.220 |
I've counted six factual pieces of information
|
| 00:18:55.660 |
in that article from September 1900,
|
| 00:18:58.900 |
which were not available to the public at the time.
|
| 00:19:01.960 |
I don't want to get too nerdy with it,
|
| 00:19:03.320 |
so I'll just use the one kind of crowning piece of information,
|
| 00:19:05.880 |
which is that the article knows that Nietzsche was seen
|
| 00:19:08.880 |
by a professor of mental health, Dr. Torina.
|
| 00:19:12.840 |
This was something that even Elizabeth didn't know.
|
| 00:19:15.180 |
There's no evidence at the Nietzsche archive for this.
|
| 00:19:17.720 |
Overback went to collect Nietzsche and Turin in 1889,
|
| 00:19:22.280 |
never wrote the name Torina in his own hand.
|
| 00:19:24.680 |
The only evidence we have that Nietzsche was seen by Torina
|
| 00:19:27.880 |
was discovered by intellectual veratia,
|
| 00:19:30.360 |
who contributed to your wonderful volume Nietzsche in Italy.
|
| 00:19:34.760 |
He found in Overback's estate a receipt from Dr. Torina
|
| 00:19:39.560 |
that had Dr. Torina had seen Nietzsche on four occasions.
|
| 00:19:44.120 |
So the only way the author of this article in September 1900
|
| 00:19:48.240 |
would have known that Nietzsche was seen by Dr. Torina
|
| 00:19:51.840 |
would have been if they had gotten Overback's permission
|
| 00:19:55.200 |
to go through his closely guarded papers
|
| 00:19:57.920 |
and were able for the purpose of publication.
|
| 00:20:01.600 |
Overback guarded to secrets very, very closely,
|
| 00:20:03.680 |
and that's extremely unlikely.
|
| 00:20:05.560 |
So this article was probably, and here's a piece of documentation
|
| 00:20:10.360 |
which I actually found myself,
|
| 00:20:12.640 |
the only real piece that other people haven't collected,
|
| 00:20:15.480 |
three days after the publication of that article,
|
| 00:20:17.760 |
it was republished in the Piedmont Gazette
|
| 00:20:20.240 |
with the caveat that all of that information was provided
|
| 00:20:24.680 |
by Nietzsche's landlord, David Fino.
|
| 00:20:28.480 |
And so there's a few other, if we can take that article,
|
| 00:20:32.200 |
is true then, there's a few other pieces of information
|
| 00:20:34.560 |
that, first of all, unlike all the biographers say,
|
| 00:20:37.040 |
it didn't happen beyond the poetry of the university.
|
| 00:20:42.280 |
And furthermore, we aren't even sure that the horse
|
| 00:20:44.600 |
was being beaten.
|
| 00:20:46.040 |
All it says is that he had wrapped his arms
|
| 00:20:48.560 |
around the neck of the horse and refused to let go.
|
| 00:20:52.120 |
Well, it kind of reassures me.
|
| 00:20:54.880 |
There's some element of truth to it
|
| 00:20:59.200 |
because I've always felt that Nietzsche tried so desperately
|
| 00:21:03.000 |
to uphold a non-Christian or even anti-Christian
|
| 00:21:10.320 |
sort of repudiation of pity and compassion.
|
| 00:21:15.520 |
And yet one of his final symbolic gestures
|
| 00:21:20.040 |
is to have this immense uncontrollable compassion
|
| 00:21:26.840 |
for a horse that's suffering.
|
| 00:21:28.600 |
And it just seemed to belive.
|
| 00:21:33.040 |
All the efforts he makes to distance himself
|
| 00:21:36.000 |
from a kind of ethic of pity, you know?
|
| 00:21:39.040 |
But that's just a speculative question.
|
| 00:21:42.040 |
On the other side, close in time, Vincent Van Gogh
|
| 00:21:48.480 |
has a psychotic break of his own, no?
|
| 00:21:51.880 |
I guess more than one.
|
| 00:21:53.200 |
But the famous one, the most famous one,
|
| 00:21:55.320 |
is that of the ear.
|
| 00:21:57.280 |
And I guess the ear episode in Van Gogh's life
|
| 00:22:00.480 |
is somehow parallel to the horse episode.
|
| 00:22:03.280 |
I don't know if you want to see them as having some kind of--
|
| 00:22:07.120 |
I don't know what you would call it.
|
| 00:22:08.520 |
Symbolic correlations, but what do we know about that episode?
|
| 00:22:15.120 |
Well, due to the research of Bernadette Murphy,
|
| 00:22:17.720 |
we know that he did cut off the entire ear.
|
| 00:22:19.720 |
The entire ear, right?
|
| 00:22:20.760 |
There's a little bit of the low hanging on,
|
| 00:22:23.680 |
but otherwise it was a clean slice like a guillotine.
|
| 00:22:26.880 |
And we know that he had a painting of Madame Rulan,
|
| 00:22:34.360 |
Joseph Rulan's wife, on his easel at the time.
|
| 00:22:38.280 |
We know that he had erased an inscription from his self-portrait,
|
| 00:22:44.040 |
the one of him as Buddhist monk that hangs in the Harvard
|
| 00:22:47.840 |
Gallery, I believe, during that time.
|
| 00:22:50.640 |
And we know that he had given that ear on that evening,
|
| 00:22:54.240 |
not to a prostitute, but to a woman named Gabrielle,
|
| 00:22:58.000 |
who was cleaning the brothel.
|
| 00:23:01.680 |
And it's actually kind of an interesting story,
|
| 00:23:05.200 |
because the year previous had been bitten by a rabid dog
|
| 00:23:09.200 |
and gone to Paris to receive this new cutting-edge medical
|
| 00:23:12.600 |
treatment called the vaccination, Louis Pasteur in 1885
|
| 00:23:16.040 |
had first been able to cure rabies with vaccinations.
|
| 00:23:20.000 |
And so she was attempting to pay for that treatment
|
| 00:23:22.000 |
by cleaning the brothel.
|
| 00:23:23.760 |
So he was giving this ear to the one woman who, I guess,
|
| 00:23:28.080 |
symbolically, you could say, was somehow pure in the brothel.
|
| 00:23:32.960 |
Yeah, because the older story was that he sent it in the mail
|
| 00:23:36.240 |
to go gown, right?
|
| 00:23:37.560 |
Because it was because of dispute with go gown,
|
| 00:23:40.400 |
or it was directed against go gown, right?
|
| 00:23:43.000 |
Or not.
|
| 00:23:44.440 |
Do we know--
|
| 00:23:45.000 |
I haven't heard that he sent it in the mail to--
|
| 00:23:46.960 |
No, no, apparently, he didn't.
|
| 00:23:48.680 |
But that was, for a long time, the rumor.
|
| 00:23:52.560 |
That would be quite a gesture.
|
| 00:23:53.880 |
Yeah.
|
| 00:23:55.400 |
But what provoked it?
|
| 00:23:58.600 |
What provoked it seems to be perhaps two different things.
|
| 00:24:03.400 |
First, he received a letter from Teo that day saying
|
| 00:24:07.480 |
that Teo was going to get married.
|
| 00:24:09.520 |
This was kind of coming out of the blue for Vincent.
|
| 00:24:11.840 |
And Vincent was monetarily dependent on his brother
|
| 00:24:14.240 |
for everything.
|
| 00:24:15.960 |
Earlier in the year, 1888, his brother gets an offer
|
| 00:24:20.720 |
from the art company that he works for,
|
| 00:24:22.960 |
groupals, to go to America.
|
| 00:24:25.120 |
And Vincent's subsidized lifestyle is likewise threatened.
|
| 00:24:30.080 |
And when Vincent hears that his brother receives this offer,
|
| 00:24:33.480 |
Vincent actually threatens suicide to his brother
|
| 00:24:37.320 |
in a long, long letter, basically telling him,
|
| 00:24:40.800 |
if you read between the lines, take me with you,
|
| 00:24:42.840 |
or I'm going to kill myself.
|
| 00:24:45.480 |
So this gesture of cutting off his ear
|
| 00:24:49.600 |
might have been some kind of attempt at suicide.
|
| 00:24:53.000 |
But he was clearly psychotic.
|
| 00:24:54.440 |
At this point, he was hearing hallucinations approaching voices.
|
| 00:24:59.160 |
He was seeing hallucinations.
|
| 00:25:01.240 |
He destroyed the yellow house.
|
| 00:25:03.280 |
The entire yellow house was in a wreck afterwards.
|
| 00:25:06.920 |
It's a famous yellow house where he had a studio and lived.
|
| 00:25:09.840 |
Yes, in the oral.
|
| 00:25:11.240 |
In oral, that's right.
|
| 00:25:12.600 |
And so he actually afterwards, he
|
| 00:25:14.960 |
had to be put in solitary confinement at the local hospital
|
| 00:25:18.880 |
there, because he was uncontrollable.
|
| 00:25:22.920 |
So let's talk about the breakthrough
|
| 00:25:25.680 |
in their aesthetic, as well as writing it.
|
| 00:25:30.480 |
You maintained that had Fanggood died in 1887.
|
| 00:25:35.160 |
None of us would be talking about him.
|
| 00:25:37.720 |
We wouldn't even know of him, right?
|
| 00:25:39.880 |
Do you-- can you explain why you believe that?
|
| 00:25:44.920 |
I mean, was his work up until 1887,
|
| 00:25:48.160 |
something that is just not remarkable enough for him
|
| 00:25:51.200 |
to have made it into the annals of the history of art?
|
| 00:25:54.080 |
And if that's the case, then, what happens in 1888?
|
| 00:25:57.840 |
But the first part first.
|
| 00:26:01.160 |
First, yes.
|
| 00:26:01.760 |
I mean, he composes some really nice self-portraits,
|
| 00:26:04.440 |
things like that in 1887.
|
| 00:26:06.720 |
But he would be a footnote.
|
| 00:26:08.160 |
I mean, he would be much less than Sarah, Monet,
|
| 00:26:10.840 |
or some of those people.
|
| 00:26:12.920 |
In 1887, one of the issues is that he's in Paris.
|
| 00:26:16.520 |
So he's going to the Louvre very frequently
|
| 00:26:18.560 |
and he's surrounded by these masters.
|
| 00:26:21.400 |
And he's continually judging his own work
|
| 00:26:23.560 |
based off of them.
|
| 00:26:25.120 |
When he goes to Arl, Arl's is a Poe-Dunk backwater town,
|
| 00:26:28.920 |
maybe the dirtiest city I've ever seen in France.
|
| 00:26:31.640 |
And so he has this kind of blank canvas
|
| 00:26:35.240 |
that he gets to work on.
|
| 00:26:36.480 |
And in fact, he sees very few other artists,
|
| 00:26:40.240 |
Eugene Bock, Dodge McNite, and then go again.
|
| 00:26:43.840 |
Only their work throughout the whole year.
|
| 00:26:46.840 |
There's a bunch of things he discovers this year.
|
| 00:26:49.800 |
But a lot of it has to do with the climate, I think.
|
| 00:26:53.800 |
Vincent and Nietzsche were extraordinarily sensitive
|
| 00:26:58.320 |
to the climactic changes.
|
| 00:26:59.920 |
And both of them have these lulls throughout the year.
|
| 00:27:03.640 |
Simultaneously, where neither of them
|
| 00:27:05.320 |
are working on anything, and then they
|
| 00:27:07.520 |
have these incredible sprints where they're both working
|
| 00:27:11.480 |
on very similar work at the same time.
|
| 00:27:14.200 |
Vincent, like Nietzsche, they were both searching for redemption.
|
| 00:27:19.160 |
At that point, if you were to look at either of them,
|
| 00:27:22.000 |
all of their friends, especially strangers and family,
|
| 00:27:24.560 |
thought they were failures.
|
| 00:27:26.680 |
And they were both hoping that through their craft,
|
| 00:27:29.360 |
which nobody appreciated, they would redeem their entire lives.
|
| 00:27:34.840 |
And somehow show their lives were not wasted,
|
| 00:27:37.480 |
but that everything that they had worked towards
|
| 00:27:40.640 |
was for something.
|
| 00:27:44.600 |
Do you think they had any doubts about that?
|
| 00:27:47.760 |
Yes, even Nietzsche.
|
| 00:27:49.280 |
I think even Nietzsche, especially in his low moments,
|
| 00:27:51.320 |
Nietzsche is certainly a little bit more self-promoting
|
| 00:27:54.360 |
than Vincent was.
|
| 00:27:55.760 |
But they both had extreme doubts.
|
| 00:27:58.800 |
I mean, Vincent is much more honest with it,
|
| 00:28:01.760 |
and he'll paint some of the--
|
| 00:28:03.640 |
he'll do a series of sunflowers or orchards
|
| 00:28:06.280 |
which today are worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
|
| 00:28:09.120 |
and he won't even sign some of them, because he thinks
|
| 00:28:11.640 |
they're just studies.
|
| 00:28:12.440 |
He thinks they're worthless.
|
| 00:28:14.080 |
He'll have these revaluations of them, where he initially
|
| 00:28:17.520 |
is extremely enthusiastic with them.
|
| 00:28:19.320 |
And then two weeks later, he'll look back at them
|
| 00:28:21.680 |
and think that they are barely worth keeping.
|
| 00:28:24.720 |
So let's talk a little bit about--
|
| 00:28:26.320 |
first of all, and 1888, the breakthroughs.
|
| 00:28:30.680 |
I was reviewing his art in the last decade of his life.
|
| 00:28:35.560 |
And it seems very disjointed in where he put his focus.
|
| 00:28:41.360 |
So he is on record for saying that the portrait,
|
| 00:28:45.280 |
that there's something about the portrait,
|
| 00:28:46.760 |
which for him is like the quintessence of art.
|
| 00:28:49.400 |
And you can have a certain sense of infinity in the portrait.
|
| 00:28:54.360 |
So he seems to prize the portrait above any other genre.
|
| 00:28:58.480 |
And then you've mentioned the sunflowers.
|
| 00:29:01.200 |
And so there are still life that he focuses on.
|
| 00:29:04.840 |
Then there are landscape paintings and orchards.
|
| 00:29:07.600 |
And then he has a cypress trees, but also the courtyards
|
| 00:29:11.960 |
of the asylum.
|
| 00:29:14.520 |
And then we have what I associate with the pinnacle of his genius,
|
| 00:29:19.560 |
which are these open landscapes in the natural world.
|
| 00:29:27.560 |
Many of them have human beings in them,
|
| 00:29:29.320 |
but the human beings are really secondary
|
| 00:29:31.680 |
to the dramatic presence of the earth, the fields,
|
| 00:29:38.200 |
the sky, the weather.
|
| 00:29:40.440 |
And of course, the starry night and that whole style that makes
|
| 00:29:44.680 |
Van Gogh's such a figure of fascination for us still today.
|
| 00:29:52.080 |
So my impression is that he was allowing himself
|
| 00:29:57.080 |
to be influenced a little too easily by everything
|
| 00:29:59.720 |
that he saw and what he read and that he experimented
|
| 00:30:02.600 |
in many genres.
|
| 00:30:03.320 |
But somehow in 1888, I think that's why I think
|
| 00:30:06.640 |
it's so interesting that you choose that year that there's
|
| 00:30:09.400 |
a breakthrough.
|
| 00:30:10.000 |
And he's putting aside all those academic considerations.
|
| 00:30:14.120 |
And all of a sudden, we have the burst of color.
|
| 00:30:17.840 |
We have something that I find very similar in Nietzsche's
|
| 00:30:21.560 |
writing style of he's painting with abandon.
|
| 00:30:25.680 |
And Nietzsche is writing with abandon in 1888
|
| 00:30:29.160 |
at the same time.
|
| 00:30:30.280 |
And the style is also, you know, he
|
| 00:30:31.920 |
have these sentences in Nietzsche and paragraphs,
|
| 00:30:34.800 |
which are like these rapid brush strokes,
|
| 00:30:38.560 |
but totally genius.
|
| 00:30:41.040 |
And with Van Gogh on the other end, you have this--
|
| 00:30:44.400 |
I would say in Van Gogh, there might be something
|
| 00:30:46.680 |
that I don't find so much in Nietzsche,
|
| 00:30:49.600 |
which is that there's this visionary drive
|
| 00:30:52.480 |
that he's seeing something, he's trying to put on his canvas,
|
| 00:30:56.200 |
something that he sees in nature, but which
|
| 00:31:01.840 |
needs distortion in order to come out for what it is,
|
| 00:31:06.480 |
which is a kind of energy behind the world of appearances
|
| 00:31:11.960 |
that suffuses it.
|
| 00:31:13.160 |
And therefore, it's almost as if he's painting the energy
|
| 00:31:17.760 |
fields within which these landscapes exist.
|
| 00:31:20.880 |
And they all of a sudden, they become--
|
| 00:31:23.920 |
how can I say they become dynamic and almost liquid?
|
| 00:31:30.040 |
That's very beautiful.
|
| 00:31:31.840 |
I agree completely, aesthetically,
|
| 00:31:33.880 |
I am on the same page as you.
|
| 00:31:35.480 |
Van Gogh's landscapes are the peak of his artwork,
|
| 00:31:40.480 |
because I think they represent the potential inherent
|
| 00:31:45.320 |
in reality so much.
|
| 00:31:47.200 |
When you encounter reality, it's always a temporal encounter.
|
| 00:31:51.720 |
It's always moments that you have to attempt to represent.
|
| 00:31:56.040 |
And he manages to get the most ephemeral phenomenon,
|
| 00:32:00.600 |
the twinkling of stars, the mistroal over the field,
|
| 00:32:03.920 |
in the brushstroke.
|
| 00:32:05.440 |
And somehow, it's this movement, and inherent in this movement
|
| 00:32:08.920 |
is an openness, a potential, that he is able to represent
|
| 00:32:13.600 |
into a still canvas, which has not been done properly,
|
| 00:32:18.800 |
I think, in the history of art.
|
| 00:32:19.920 |
I mean, impressionism was there, but the kind of energy
|
| 00:32:23.640 |
which he puts into it had not been seen.
|
| 00:32:26.360 |
His theories, though, tended to focus on the human face.
|
| 00:32:31.840 |
He thought all of the potential, especially 1889,
|
| 00:32:36.240 |
is the year before the centennial of the French Revolution.
|
| 00:32:39.080 |
And he thought that there was a new revolution
|
| 00:32:41.400 |
on the brink, on the edge, just there.
|
| 00:32:43.680 |
And you just needed a match to light it.
|
| 00:32:45.920 |
And he felt portraits were the way to do it.
|
| 00:32:47.840 |
But why it's so weird to me, I mean, I don't understand it
|
| 00:32:51.240 |
because it seems so anthropocentric,
|
| 00:32:53.560 |
whereas what he was doing in the landscape painting
|
| 00:32:56.160 |
seems so far beyond the anthropocentric.
|
| 00:33:00.720 |
I think it's because he was attempting
|
| 00:33:03.480 |
to do something that was extremely difficult for him.
|
| 00:33:06.480 |
Ever since he was a child, he never
|
| 00:33:08.200 |
liked hanging out with other people.
|
| 00:33:10.200 |
He went off into the fields to go collect bugs and be in nature.
|
| 00:33:14.280 |
And that's where he felt most at home, most relaxed.
|
| 00:33:17.480 |
When there was another human being in front of him,
|
| 00:33:19.600 |
there was an incredible anxiety he felt.
|
| 00:33:23.080 |
He was also a big believer in phrenology.
|
| 00:33:26.560 |
He had read a lot of books about these structures of the face
|
| 00:33:30.080 |
and the way in which facial structures were inherited.
|
| 00:33:34.160 |
And he was a big believer that this phrenology
|
| 00:33:38.080 |
was not only something you inherited biologically,
|
| 00:33:42.640 |
but also through a kind of education,
|
| 00:33:45.120 |
through other people that you encountered,
|
| 00:33:47.440 |
that the face would change and morph
|
| 00:33:50.200 |
based off of intents interactions with other human beings.
|
| 00:33:54.840 |
What do you think of his portraits?
|
| 00:33:56.640 |
Some of his best ones.
|
| 00:33:57.880 |
Do you think there is that element of transcendence in them?
|
| 00:34:00.880 |
His self-portraits definitely.
|
| 00:34:03.880 |
But aesthetically, his portraits are not the top of his game.
|
| 00:34:09.240 |
There are certain elements of them
|
| 00:34:10.680 |
that I find really intriguing.
|
| 00:34:11.880 |
For example, right before his first psychotic break,
|
| 00:34:16.120 |
at December 23rd, 1888, he paints five portraits
|
| 00:34:21.400 |
of Joseph Rulon's new baby, Marcel.
|
| 00:34:24.880 |
And in these portraits, he paints the eyes,
|
| 00:34:29.480 |
where he said in a baby's eyes, you can see the infinite.
|
| 00:34:33.200 |
And the eyes, he paints such a beautiful blue,
|
| 00:34:36.000 |
such a beautiful color of blue juxtaposed next to the green
|
| 00:34:38.800 |
and the red of the flesh, that if you look just at--
|
| 00:34:42.560 |
the portraits themselves are not great.
|
| 00:34:43.960 |
But if you look just at the color of the eyes,
|
| 00:34:46.200 |
it's actually quite gorgeous, the kind of colors
|
| 00:34:49.440 |
that he uses, just in the eyes of the baby.
|
| 00:34:54.240 |
Blue, if I can continue, is there was a book called--
|
| 00:34:58.720 |
it was by Berlin and K. It was called Basic Color Terms.
|
| 00:35:01.640 |
And it kind of was a big splash in the field of linguistics,
|
| 00:35:05.400 |
because they demonstrated, maybe you've heard of this,
|
| 00:35:08.080 |
that the color blue is the word for blue
|
| 00:35:11.720 |
is something that is only really developed
|
| 00:35:13.800 |
at extremely advanced stages of civilization.
|
| 00:35:17.240 |
I mean, it's kind of mind boggling, but the entire Odyssey
|
| 00:35:21.440 |
is written without reference to the color blue.
|
| 00:35:24.240 |
And this is a little bit of a mystery for everybody,
|
| 00:35:27.800 |
because why is it then that such a basic perception
|
| 00:35:31.800 |
was not already encoded in language?
|
| 00:35:34.640 |
And I think speculatively, you could say
|
| 00:35:38.400 |
that this goes back to Heider, that language
|
| 00:35:40.280 |
is the house of being, that somehow, of course,
|
| 00:35:43.040 |
they could perceive blue, but that somehow there
|
| 00:35:45.560 |
was some concept of blue that had yet been discovered
|
| 00:35:49.720 |
in reality.
|
| 00:35:51.360 |
And then go as a painter of reality.
|
| 00:35:53.200 |
He did his best painting when the reality was there
|
| 00:35:56.640 |
in front of him.
|
| 00:35:57.200 |
Exactly, yeah.
|
| 00:35:58.480 |
So the blue, we need to resolve that intrigue,
|
| 00:36:01.040 |
because I know of that article,
|
| 00:36:02.920 |
and I don't have it present to mine now,
|
| 00:36:05.720 |
but there seems to be some explanation
|
| 00:36:07.840 |
for why the word is so late in coming into our vocabulary.
|
| 00:36:12.840 |
- They gave some explanations.
|
| 00:36:16.000 |
I didn't find them totally convincing.
|
| 00:36:17.840 |
I mean, blue is also the most high frequency color.
|
| 00:36:20.520 |
Red is the most low frequency.
|
| 00:36:22.320 |
And the colors do develop in language in that order.
|
| 00:36:25.400 |
Red is the first color to develop yellow and then blue,
|
| 00:36:28.880 |
in terms of the primary colors.
|
| 00:36:31.160 |
And there's also, of course, the feeling that you have
|
| 00:36:33.760 |
with blue and a feeling that you have with red.
|
| 00:36:36.640 |
And I think it has something to do with the articulation
|
| 00:36:39.080 |
of those moods, of those feelings,
|
| 00:36:41.600 |
that has to do with that development of that word.
|
| 00:36:45.760 |
- So when it comes to bango, and I want to get back
|
| 00:36:48.000 |
to Nietzsche in a moment, but yellow was a central color
|
| 00:36:52.880 |
for bango, right?
|
| 00:36:54.360 |
More than blue, I think, in that red.
|
| 00:36:57.200 |
And this sort of, again, abandoned into color,
|
| 00:37:02.200 |
which his brother Thio had told him a few years earlier
|
| 00:37:06.440 |
that his paintings were too dark,
|
| 00:37:07.960 |
that he needed to add color because it's more modern,
|
| 00:37:10.280 |
and he had to put it.
|
| 00:37:11.720 |
And it takes him a while to get on that bandwagon book.
|
| 00:37:15.560 |
So the question I want to ask about his aesthetic is
|
| 00:37:19.320 |
that would you say that there's something even
|
| 00:37:21.440 |
a little bit childlike about the works in 1888?
|
| 00:37:25.960 |
Namely, paintings that can be readily felt and appreciated
|
| 00:37:30.960 |
by the completely uninstracted,
|
| 00:37:33.640 |
those who don't have an educated aesthetic eye,
|
| 00:37:37.560 |
as well as, obviously, the masters of art historians
|
| 00:37:41.160 |
and so forth.
|
| 00:37:42.360 |
And this sort of exuberance, almost,
|
| 00:37:46.640 |
I don't want to say childlike,
|
| 00:37:47.920 |
but let's call it juvenile, that that helps.
|
| 00:37:52.360 |
Do you personally believe that as an artist,
|
| 00:37:56.200 |
he somehow deserves a higher quota,
|
| 00:38:01.200 |
than some of his contemporaries, like, you know,
|
| 00:38:04.640 |
Sizan, Gogan, Suha, and those others that were operating,
|
| 00:38:09.640 |
if not exactly the right same time,
|
| 00:38:14.020 |
within a decade or two of him?
|
| 00:38:17.320 |
Yes, personally, I think Signyak
|
| 00:38:18.880 |
is the only one who can hold a candle to him.
|
| 00:38:21.240 |
- Really?
|
| 00:38:22.400 |
- But that's my own aesthetic taste.
|
| 00:38:24.200 |
I would say that childlike is a great or juvenile,
|
| 00:38:26.560 |
and is a wonderful way of putting it,
|
| 00:38:28.320 |
because both Van Gogh and Nietzsche,
|
| 00:38:32.040 |
one of the reasons that young people love them,
|
| 00:38:34.880 |
is because they speak to a kind of people
|
| 00:38:38.680 |
who are living with extraordinarily extraordinary enthusiasm
|
| 00:38:42.440 |
in a declining age, people who--
|
| 00:38:46.040 |
- Also on age, I would say increasingly inhibited age.
|
| 00:38:49.320 |
- Yes, and both of them refound you,
|
| 00:38:53.680 |
refound potential, where they had felt
|
| 00:38:56.840 |
that the world was already very ossified.
|
| 00:38:59.840 |
I think that even today,
|
| 00:39:02.760 |
I mean, the most amazing thing,
|
| 00:39:04.360 |
one of the main things that I try and pursue in my book
|
| 00:39:06.720 |
is that today children run up to Van Gogh's and museums.
|
| 00:39:10.320 |
I've seen them do it, he would love that.
|
| 00:39:12.680 |
But during 1888, there's at least four or five different
|
| 00:39:17.320 |
artists who come to see his paintings in the yellow house.
|
| 00:39:20.280 |
You have Eugene Bock, Dodge McNite, Gauguin.
|
| 00:39:24.360 |
These people, they see the paintings,
|
| 00:39:26.680 |
and Vincent will say, especially of Bock and McNite,
|
| 00:39:30.560 |
that they held an icy silence.
|
| 00:39:32.960 |
They did not even comment on it.
|
| 00:39:34.800 |
Gauguin writes to nobody about later,
|
| 00:39:39.000 |
he'll want to exchange something for the sunflowers,
|
| 00:39:42.480 |
but at the time, no one seems to have,
|
| 00:39:45.120 |
and he was not like a traditionalist conservative artist.
|
| 00:39:47.640 |
No one seems to have recognized that Vincent had achieved
|
| 00:39:50.320 |
something really remarkable in that--
|
| 00:39:51.920 |
- But how can that be when you were talking about artists
|
| 00:39:54.720 |
who themselves were geniuses and were anything but conventional?
|
| 00:39:59.280 |
- This is one of the things that I'm trying to pursue,
|
| 00:40:01.880 |
because even Signac, he went to the yellow house in 1889
|
| 00:40:05.600 |
and he wrote to Teo, very typically.
|
| 00:40:09.040 |
He said something along the lines of,
|
| 00:40:10.880 |
"I saw your brother's paintings,
|
| 00:40:12.040 |
"some of them are pretty interesting."
|
| 00:40:14.080 |
And this was after he had done the sunflowers,
|
| 00:40:16.120 |
Van Gogh's bedroom, Van Gogh's chair,
|
| 00:40:18.200 |
the orchards, all of these things,
|
| 00:40:19.920 |
starring the first starry night.
|
| 00:40:21.760 |
- Yeah, that's so deflating.
|
| 00:40:24.040 |
It's like someone saying,
|
| 00:40:25.200 |
"Yeah, I listened to an episode of entitled opinions.
|
| 00:40:27.400 |
"It was okay."
|
| 00:40:28.320 |
- Exactly, yeah, you know, we talked about it.
|
| 00:40:31.360 |
- Nietzsche, now, we're talking about 1888
|
| 00:40:35.080 |
where he's writing really, like a madman
|
| 00:40:38.400 |
in both the literal and figurative sense of that.
|
| 00:40:40.880 |
And the inhibition, I think that what appeals so greatly
|
| 00:40:45.880 |
to young people, especially adolescents,
|
| 00:40:48.280 |
is that here, you know, they're reading someone
|
| 00:40:51.480 |
who was writing without any inhibitions whatsoever.
|
| 00:40:54.800 |
And it's like the super ego had just been thrown away
|
| 00:40:58.600 |
for a year or two there in Nietzsche's right?
|
| 00:41:01.400 |
And he will just, you know, really let it all hang out.
|
| 00:41:05.640 |
But not in a sloppy way, but very much like Van Gogh,
|
| 00:41:09.200 |
who is on the artistic level, you know,
|
| 00:41:12.320 |
very much in command of his medium,
|
| 00:41:14.720 |
and is writing this kind of brilliant prose,
|
| 00:41:18.160 |
which is half mad for sure,
|
| 00:41:19.840 |
but all the more compelling and energetic
|
| 00:41:23.800 |
and appealing because of that, no?
|
| 00:41:26.160 |
- Absolutely, and it's so clear in the documentation.
|
| 00:41:29.200 |
For example, Der Antichrist, the rough draft
|
| 00:41:33.640 |
is also the printing manuscript.
|
| 00:41:35.600 |
He says in E.K. Homo that at each word,
|
| 00:41:37.680 |
he was engraving each syllable,
|
| 00:41:39.840 |
like carving into a stone assured of his immortality,
|
| 00:41:42.560 |
and he writes like that,
|
| 00:41:44.360 |
that he just writes the entire manuscript,
|
| 00:41:47.120 |
but almost without corrections,
|
| 00:41:48.480 |
there's a few things crossed out.
|
| 00:41:50.560 |
E.K. Homo is a little different.
|
| 00:41:51.720 |
There's like five different versions,
|
| 00:41:53.160 |
where he's progressively getting more insane.
|
| 00:41:55.200 |
Some of them are written almost assuredly
|
| 00:41:57.000 |
after he hugged the horse parts of E.K.
|
| 00:41:59.160 |
- Oh, really?
|
| 00:42:00.000 |
- Yeah.
|
| 00:42:01.000 |
For example, why I am so wise three,
|
| 00:42:04.280 |
where he starts trashing his mother and sister,
|
| 00:42:07.240 |
and then talks about his divinity
|
| 00:42:09.520 |
and how he's the reincarnation of Alexander the Great,
|
| 00:42:12.640 |
that was written after January 1st, 1889.
|
| 00:42:15.960 |
- Is that right?
|
| 00:42:18.360 |
And when does France overbeck come to true
|
| 00:42:20.040 |
and take him back to true?
|
| 00:42:22.080 |
- He arrives in January eighth,
|
| 00:42:24.720 |
I believe it might have been the seven in January.
|
| 00:42:27.240 |
- Within that week, he's also being very productive.
|
| 00:42:29.840 |
- That week, he wasn't so productive.
|
| 00:42:33.080 |
Well, we don't know, actually,
|
| 00:42:33.920 |
because I think Elizabeth--
|
| 00:42:34.760 |
- He wrote parts of E.K. Homo.
|
| 00:42:36.760 |
- That was the last thing, why I am so wise three,
|
| 00:42:40.280 |
was probably the last thing we have.
|
| 00:42:42.240 |
He might have had some other manuscripts
|
| 00:42:44.200 |
that Elizabeth talks about that she destroyed,
|
| 00:42:46.520 |
but we never know,
|
| 00:42:47.200 |
because Elizabeth is kind of a pathological liar.
|
| 00:42:49.720 |
- Yeah.
|
| 00:42:50.560 |
When I think of Nietzsche and Van Gogh philosophically,
|
| 00:42:55.760 |
then I try to find a common ground in their attempt
|
| 00:43:00.760 |
to what Nietzsche said early
|
| 00:43:05.600 |
in the birth of tragedy that the world in life
|
| 00:43:09.560 |
is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.
|
| 00:43:12.480 |
And this idea that Van Gogh was painting
|
| 00:43:18.480 |
the visible world,
|
| 00:43:21.240 |
and Nietzsche at the same time is writing,
|
| 00:43:25.880 |
you know, Nietzsche comes to my Wagner,
|
| 00:43:27.680 |
the last paragraph, which is a repress
|
| 00:43:29.880 |
of the preface of the gay science,
|
| 00:43:32.040 |
is saying, are we not like coming back to the wisdom
|
| 00:43:36.880 |
of the Greeks in their super-fishality
|
| 00:43:39.000 |
that they had a depth in their super-fishality?
|
| 00:43:41.320 |
They were adores of forms, colors and surfaces,
|
| 00:43:46.320 |
and all these things that Van Gogh is painting,
|
| 00:43:50.840 |
namely the world of appearance in the visible world
|
| 00:43:53.000 |
is what Nietzsche is also exalting in his philosophy.
|
| 00:43:56.480 |
So would you say that they had a kind of shared elite
|
| 00:44:02.040 |
audience to the phenomenal world? Absolutely. One of the books that Nietzsche wanted to write during 1888,
|
| 00:44:09.560 |
and we have notes towards it, but it's discarded, is the physiology of art.
|
| 00:44:14.280 |
So the health of the human being, the health of the body,
|
| 00:44:18.920 |
upon which all other concepts depend,
|
| 00:44:21.720 |
all other abstractions depend, is determined by aesthetic phenomenon.
|
| 00:44:29.560 |
As I mentioned, both of them were extremely sensitive to the wind and the quality of water
|
| 00:44:36.040 |
that they were drinking from, and this allegiance they have
|
| 00:44:41.400 |
to these most basic foundational fundamental phenomena,
|
| 00:44:45.320 |
the purity of the water, the speed of the wind,
|
| 00:44:49.320 |
the quality of the earth upon which they walk,
|
| 00:44:51.480 |
their daily exercises, both from huge walkers,
|
| 00:44:56.920 |
they thought that attunement to these nuances was what led people to great things.
|
| 00:45:03.560 |
All fascinating stuff, Brian. I think we all have to read
|
| 00:45:07.720 |
that book of yours that's coming out in February called Nietzsche and Van Gogh,
|
| 00:45:11.160 |
Imaginations of 1888. So very much looking forward to that,
|
| 00:45:16.280 |
and I'm sure a lot of the people who are tuned into this show are too.
|
| 00:45:20.600 |
So thanks for coming on, Brian.
|
| 00:45:22.680 |
Remind our listeners, we've been speaking with philosopher Brian Pines,
|
| 00:45:26.040 |
author of this book I just mentioned on Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
|
| 00:45:29.400 |
Thanks again for coming in.
|
| 00:45:30.600 |
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
|
| 00:45:32.200 |
Bye-bye.
|
| 00:45:52.680 |
[Music]
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