(upbeat music)
- In title opinions coming to you
from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
Our portal to the Allegiant Fields,
where we hold converse with both the living and the dead,
and where you, who tune in, can hear the past,
speak to the future across this threshold
we call entitled opinions.
Today we're going to call up the year 1888,
the Anus Mirabiles, when Frederick Nietzsche
and Vincent van Gogh went into creative overdrive
before plunging into the abyss shortly thereafter.
They both made it through to the other side though,
and the two of them are standing by waiting
to join the conversation.
Luigi Pinandello once drew marked
that life doesn't have to follow the Aristotelian rule
of plausibility the way fiction does,
since it has the privilege of being real, of being true.
Reality at times is way more improbable
than readers would tolerate in a novel.
And when I think about these two figures,
Nietzsche and Van Gogh, who became such superstars
in the 20th century and whose stock today is higher than ever,
it seems quite incredible that they ended their careers
in abject of security, loneliness, and psychological turmoil.
Brian Pines, the guests who joins me today,
has spent a lot of time with both of them.
Brian teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco,
Mount Tamal Pius College on the College of Marin.
He received several fellowships to conduct research
on Nietzsche at the Gerteschiller Archive in Weimar
and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
This research enabled him to write a book
entitled Nietzsche and Van Gogh imaginations of 1888.
It's a dual biography centered on a single year,
which explores the many parallels and coincidences
between these two figures,
one to thinker, the other an artist.
He's here today to discuss the fruits of his research,
which will be published by Cambridge Scholars Press
this coming February.
Brian, welcome to the program.
- Thank you for having me.
- So this dual biography you've recently finished writing
deals with what Nietzsche and Van Gogh both went through
and accomplished in the terminal year of 1888.
I call it terminal because it was terminal for Nietzsche,
who went mad in January of 1889.
And near terminal for Van Gogh who killed himself in 1890.
So two years, let's say, a year and a half after 1888,
what inspired you to write this book
and why did you choose to focus on this year in particular?
- Well, the inspiration initially was just the depth
of synchronicity between these two figures.
The turbulence and chaos of reality,
the fact that you had so many impossible coincidences
between the two of them was inspirational for me,
but I've been working on this many years now
in the method, the scaffolding, the inspiration for that
was Plutarch.
Plutarch, the parallel lives.
Plutarch had a fantastic method of juxtaposing two lives
in order to find meaning and morals and parables,
which went beyond those two lives.
He lived in the great era of parables.
The gospels were composed during his lifetime.
And I found that by juxtaposing these two lives,
there's certain lessons, certain ideas and concepts
that go way beyond the two of them.
- So what are some of the coincidences and parallels it?
You find most striking.
- Well, a lot of them are context-driven.
I mean, just to rattle a few off,
they were reading the same books,
listening to the same music.
Their psychotic breaks happened within days of each other.
The two years for both of them had a kind of unprecedented
parallel productivity, then go painted over 150 paintings,
Nietzsche published six books.
In terms of like the more conceptual lessons,
I really like that quote you began with,
because the problem of a biographer very often
is how to negotiate this realm between reality and fiction,
how to tell the story of the life of somebody.
And in this case, you have this ancient archetype
of the misunderstood genius with Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
But history does not offer us a more emblematic example
of that archetype than the thinker and the artist here.
- Is it an ancient archetype Brian,
or is it more of a modern archetype
of the misunderstood and unrecognized genius?
- That's a good question.
I mean, when I think of predecessors to Nietzsche or Van Gogh,
I think of for Nietzsche, people like Spinoza,
people who are misunderstood or,
but Spinoza still had some recognition,
at least he was persecuted, he wasn't ignored.
With Van Gogh, you have people like El Greco and Vermeer,
who the revaluation of their work posthumously was enormous,
but they were both still capable of selling paintings
during their lifetimes, something that Van Gogh
had not done as of 1888.
- It's amazing that Van Gogh sold one painting
in his entire life, is that right?
- There's some speculation of maybe a self-portrait
in 1886 or 1887, but only one documented case,
the red vineyards, which now hangs in Moscow.
- I wanna add to that, or subsume under that archetype,
John Batista Vico, we didn't show on Vico,
who was really a kind of genius that remained dormant
and completely unknown until he was discovered somehow
in the 19th century, early 19th century,
but usually, anyway.
So these two figures did not know each other,
but they weren't that far from, you know,
they were living in the same general vicinity.
- Yes.
- They were, I gather equally lonely
and somehow not properly socialize,
what we say is that a way of describing it.
- That's a nice euphemism, yes.
Neither had ever found love throughout their lives.
They were both completely living in obscurity Vincent.
I mean, we have records of his temperament
that he had like an extraordinary way
of spitting out sentences and Dutch and French in English
and shifting his eyes the whole time,
and they were both very abrasive figures.
And that's part of what I write on in the book,
is that the fascination with these two figures
is also in part a kind of fascination with their suffering.
So just as there might be some academic interest in Plutarch,
there's also some kind of obscene interest
in viewing the suffering of other human beings.
You know, it was the coliseum that was built
to during Plutarch's lifetime.
And there's something about the fascination
with these two personalities that I think is reminiscent
of that desire to view other human beings in anguish.
- Well, personality certainly plays a huge role
in the kind of superstardom that I referred to
in the case of Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
I, I deal on my part that perhaps if their personalities
were far more within the norm,
that maybe Van Gogh wouldn't be the,
you know, the most expensive artist that you can possibly
buy a painting of, or Nietzsche becoming this,
you know, the great prophet that he became
and still is for many people.
I mean, there's something about this being at the edge
of a certain kind of madness if you want,
divine madness in the Greek sense of the Dionysian madness,
if you want, that being possessed by something
that's greater than yourself,
that all this adds a certain authority and credibility
within the modern psyche of what a genius really is, you know?
I'm not sure that I would, you know,
want to hang out and have dinner with Van Gogh
and spend a week with him in his house
because I have feeling that his personality
was much more abrasive in many ways than Nietzsche's.
He also, I think unlike Nietzsche,
but correct me if I'm wrong, that he Van Gogh had,
he was not as isolated.
He might have been as equally lonely,
but he was continuously even in 1888.
In touch with people, you know, Gogh comes to visit him,
he goes to the taverns, he was a drinker,
and he, you know, frequented prostitutes.
In that sense, Nietzsche was very different
because Nietzsche stuck to himself.
He didn't have a lot of friends in his media vicinity,
but I think they were, as I said, equally lonely,
existentially speaking.
- Yes, I believe so.
Nietzsche had a few friends in attorney at Pascal Day,
Erkele and Sills, a couple people, Julius Caffton,
met him on Salas, came to visit him,
but yeah, he was extraordinarily not lonely.
Vincent, especially because of his brother, Teo,
who was a king maker in the art world,
had lots of people paying homage to him,
or coming to visit him,
but he never really managed,
maybe one friend he made, Joseph Rulon, the postman,
we painted for other friends of his,
he had such an abrasive personality,
he had an inability to let an argument go
unless he was considered the unequivocal victor.
Teo tells a story about how him and Vincent
will be arguing about some kind of abstract painting point,
and Vincent, he will tell Vincent he needs to go to bed,
Vincent will pull up a chair next to his bed
and continue the argument while he tries to sleep.
- Yeah, so this characterological dimension
of the two of them, with Vincent Van Gogh,
we're talking about someone who,
do we have an attested sort of mental disorder
kind of diagnosis, he just was not psychologically sound, right?
- Sure, yeah, I mean, there's certain kinds of diagnosis
is like bipolar, which are just categorized
based off of clusters of symptoms.
The most recent big biography in 2011,
Knife and Smith, they say that he had syphilis,
but the issue is that when he,
the only time he was involuntarily admitted
to a hospital, the records are gone.
We don't have a record of them examining him.
- Nietzsche, and this is an entitled opinions exclusive,
we are fairly certain had syphilis.
When I say we, I mean me and my,
I have an identical twin who works,
he's a psychiatry resident at Harvard Hospital,
and we're writing a paper right now.
There's been a long history of Nietzsche's diagnosis
or misdiagnosis with syphilis, basically,
his sister had argued against this diagnosis,
certain people like Mobius and Hildebrandt
had argued for the diagnosis.
More recently, people have argued against the diagnosis,
but based off of insufficient and misunderstanding
of the documentation.
If you want, I can get into that at the moment.
- Yeah, yeah, I would like to know.
- Sure.
- What's exclusive here?
- Yeah, all right, so I'll get it along with our listeners.
- Yeah, of course.
So basically, recently, they have begun to diagnose him
with like May less syndrome, catacil,
and these very rare diseases,
based off of misunderstanding of the evidence
because when he was first entered into the Jaina asylum,
we have the medical record.
They diagnosed him with something called
Argyle Robinson's pupil,
which is when the pupils will not react to light,
they won't constrict or dilate based off of light,
but they will constrict or dilate based off of movement,
looking at an object.
This is one of the symptoms of syphilis.
A lot of people have mentioned that he had this,
he was a child, that he had seen a doctor named Shilmock
and Jaina, and that this doctor had noticed that.
They don't realize that that was just something
that Elizabeth made up,
because she recognized that Argyle Robinson's pupil
is a symptom of syphilis.
So the first and only document--
- Elizabeth being the sister.
And she was arguing against it,
not only because she felt it would hurt this kind of
Protestant morality, but also it hurt book sales.
Shilmock had never seen in each of the first time
that we have any documentation of that is in 1912
when she publishes the second form of her biography,
the Young Nietzsche.
Furthermore, he had seen four or five ophthalmologists
throughout his life that we do have records of,
and they do not mention that.
And the more conclusive evidence that he probably had syphilis
is there's an erased section of the Jaina manuscript
that was not published when Podok published
his Nichts-Suisamen book translated as Nichts Madness.
And it's still there in the transcript, you can see it.
And that's that he had what's called a shanker.
This is a, when syphilis enters the body,
where it enters the body, it leaves a scar.
And he had a scar right next to his friendulum,
which is where the head and the shaft meet
on the underside of the male genitals.
And the fact that he had a scar there--
I mean, maybe he hurt himself dancing naked or something
like that, I don't know, but it's very good evidence
that he did have syphilis.
Yeah.
When you say, when he danced naked, it's not just
a figure of speech, because he actually--
I think, in Turin, after his mental collapse,
his landlord would look through the keyhole.
He would hear all this commotion in the apartment
that Nichts was living in it and see him dancing naked
with pre-apic condition and doing his dainesian dances.
So yeah, so essentially, it's long been assumed
or suspected that he had syphilis, but you're saying
that now we have conclusive evidence of it, right?
Yes, yeah.
Fairly conclusive.
So that's conclusive we can handle.
Does it change anything when it comes to our approach
to Nichts, are we then to write off all the weird eccentricities
of his thinking and his personality?
I mean, when he goes to Basel and becomes
a professor, youngest professor, full professor,
and he writes a book on the birth of tragedy,
some people would say that you had to be pretty crazy.
It's write a book like that as your first book without footnotes
and using these really cheap, tacky translations
from the Greek, we've done a show on entitled opinions
with Andrew Mitchell on this topic,
and it's really quite amazing just how dismissive he was
of the rules of philology and to write a book like that,
you can't have been a completely sound state of mind,
I think, thankfully he wasn't.
I don't know what you think about.
Well, I think it does change our conception of his last year,
especially because the question is, is did he know?
Did he know that he was going insane?
Because having a shanker is not something you can ignore
and presumably he knew what that meant.
And so then it becomes a question of how do you approach death?
How do you approach oncoming insanity?
What choices do you make?
For example, does this have anything to do with his abandonment
of his help fur, his main work, The Wheel to Power,
which he begins to cannibalize his notes
from The Wheel to Power, which was to be a large four volume,
main work magnum opus of his, and uses those notes
in part to form Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist,
and the Dainish and Dithyrams.
All written in 1888.
Some of the notes precede that 1886, 1887,
but all of those books were written in 1888.
So when we talk about his breakdown,
so we're on this track, there's also
been some question about whether the story that has been
circulating for over a century that he was walking
in the streets of Turin in Italy and saw a coachman
of flogging a horse, and went and embraced the horse
and had this mental collapse after which he had a day
or two of this kind of weird, mad, lucidity
where he wrote off a bunch of letters to friends over back
to causing my Wagner, and so that there's
been some doubt about whether this horse anecdote is actually
true, have you discovered anything on that front?
Yes, another entitled opinions exclusive here.
Good, yeah.
So it's a story that has many people just take us true
because it's a good story, but very few people
have looked into the primary documentation
and the people who have, like Kurt Paul Yans,
believe that it probably didn't happen,
because the article appears in September of 1900,
and there's some inaccuracies about the article,
but more so, the article is part of a wave of articles
that come out of Italian newspapers
with all sorts of stories about how Nietzsche and his wife,
Lou Salome, and their servant, Pietro Gastie,
will like spend a whole bunch of money gambling in Monaco
and a whole bunch of things that are just false.
And so for a long time, Nietzsche scholars
who have cared about the truth and reality
believe that it's probably just part of the Nietzsche
mythology.
When you look at the primary documentation, though,
when this article is published to September 1900,
you don't even yet have a collection of Nietzsche's letters
available to the public.
And there's a few letters which have been published here
and there.
Maisonburg had published her Phyllis Offoan Adelmentia,
memoir of Nietzsche, Lou Salome had published a book of Nietzsche,
but even if you were a Nietzsche fanatic who scoured the Swiss
and German newspapers trying to find information about Nietzsche,
I've counted six factual pieces of information
in that article from September 1900,
which were not available to the public at the time.
I don't want to get too nerdy with it,
so I'll just use the one kind of crowning piece of information,
which is that the article knows that Nietzsche was seen
by a professor of mental health, Dr. Torina.
This was something that even Elizabeth didn't know.
There's no evidence at the Nietzsche archive for this.
Overback went to collect Nietzsche and Turin in 1889,
never wrote the name Torina in his own hand.
The only evidence we have that Nietzsche was seen by Torina
was discovered by intellectual veratia,
who contributed to your wonderful volume Nietzsche in Italy.
He found in Overback's estate a receipt from Dr. Torina
that had Dr. Torina had seen Nietzsche on four occasions.
So the only way the author of this article in September 1900
would have known that Nietzsche was seen by Dr. Torina
would have been if they had gotten Overback's permission
to go through his closely guarded papers
and were able for the purpose of publication.
Overback guarded to secrets very, very closely,
and that's extremely unlikely.
So this article was probably, and here's a piece of documentation
which I actually found myself,
the only real piece that other people haven't collected,
three days after the publication of that article,
it was republished in the Piedmont Gazette
with the caveat that all of that information was provided
by Nietzsche's landlord, David Fino.
And so there's a few other, if we can take that article,
is true then, there's a few other pieces of information
that, first of all, unlike all the biographers say,
it didn't happen beyond the poetry of the university.
And furthermore, we aren't even sure that the horse
was being beaten.
All it says is that he had wrapped his arms
around the neck of the horse and refused to let go.
Well, it kind of reassures me.
There's some element of truth to it
because I've always felt that Nietzsche tried so desperately
to uphold a non-Christian or even anti-Christian
sort of repudiation of pity and compassion.
And yet one of his final symbolic gestures
is to have this immense uncontrollable compassion
for a horse that's suffering.
And it just seemed to belive.
All the efforts he makes to distance himself
from a kind of ethic of pity, you know?
But that's just a speculative question.
On the other side, close in time, Vincent Van Gogh
has a psychotic break of his own, no?
I guess more than one.
But the famous one, the most famous one,
is that of the ear.
And I guess the ear episode in Van Gogh's life
is somehow parallel to the horse episode.
I don't know if you want to see them as having some kind of--
I don't know what you would call it.
Symbolic correlations, but what do we know about that episode?
Well, due to the research of Bernadette Murphy,
we know that he did cut off the entire ear.
The entire ear, right?
There's a little bit of the low hanging on,
but otherwise it was a clean slice like a guillotine.
And we know that he had a painting of Madame Rulan,
Joseph Rulan's wife, on his easel at the time.
We know that he had erased an inscription from his self-portrait,
the one of him as Buddhist monk that hangs in the Harvard
Gallery, I believe, during that time.
And we know that he had given that ear on that evening,
not to a prostitute, but to a woman named Gabrielle,
who was cleaning the brothel.
And it's actually kind of an interesting story,
because the year previous had been bitten by a rabid dog
and gone to Paris to receive this new cutting-edge medical
treatment called the vaccination, Louis Pasteur in 1885
had first been able to cure rabies with vaccinations.
And so she was attempting to pay for that treatment
by cleaning the brothel.
So he was giving this ear to the one woman who, I guess,
symbolically, you could say, was somehow pure in the brothel.
Yeah, because the older story was that he sent it in the mail
to go gown, right?
Because it was because of dispute with go gown,
or it was directed against go gown, right?
Or not.
Do we know--
I haven't heard that he sent it in the mail to--
No, no, apparently, he didn't.
But that was, for a long time, the rumor.
That would be quite a gesture.
Yeah.
But what provoked it?
What provoked it seems to be perhaps two different things.
First, he received a letter from Teo that day saying
that Teo was going to get married.
This was kind of coming out of the blue for Vincent.
And Vincent was monetarily dependent on his brother
for everything.
Earlier in the year, 1888, his brother gets an offer
from the art company that he works for,
groupals, to go to America.
And Vincent's subsidized lifestyle is likewise threatened.
And when Vincent hears that his brother receives this offer,
Vincent actually threatens suicide to his brother
in a long, long letter, basically telling him,
if you read between the lines, take me with you,
or I'm going to kill myself.
So this gesture of cutting off his ear
might have been some kind of attempt at suicide.
But he was clearly psychotic.
At this point, he was hearing hallucinations approaching voices.
He was seeing hallucinations.
He destroyed the yellow house.
The entire yellow house was in a wreck afterwards.
It's a famous yellow house where he had a studio and lived.
Yes, in the oral.
In oral, that's right.
And so he actually afterwards, he
had to be put in solitary confinement at the local hospital
there, because he was uncontrollable.
So let's talk about the breakthrough
in their aesthetic, as well as writing it.
You maintained that had Fanggood died in 1887.
None of us would be talking about him.
We wouldn't even know of him, right?
Do you-- can you explain why you believe that?
I mean, was his work up until 1887,
something that is just not remarkable enough for him
to have made it into the annals of the history of art?
And if that's the case, then, what happens in 1888?
But the first part first.
First, yes.
I mean, he composes some really nice self-portraits,
things like that in 1887.
But he would be a footnote.
I mean, he would be much less than Sarah, Monet,
or some of those people.
In 1887, one of the issues is that he's in Paris.
So he's going to the Louvre very frequently
and he's surrounded by these masters.
And he's continually judging his own work
based off of them.
When he goes to Arl, Arl's is a Poe-Dunk backwater town,
maybe the dirtiest city I've ever seen in France.
And so he has this kind of blank canvas
that he gets to work on.
And in fact, he sees very few other artists,
Eugene Bock, Dodge McNite, and then go again.
Only their work throughout the whole year.
There's a bunch of things he discovers this year.
But a lot of it has to do with the climate, I think.
Vincent and Nietzsche were extraordinarily sensitive
to the climactic changes.
And both of them have these lulls throughout the year.
Simultaneously, where neither of them
are working on anything, and then they
have these incredible sprints where they're both working
on very similar work at the same time.
Vincent, like Nietzsche, they were both searching for redemption.
At that point, if you were to look at either of them,
all of their friends, especially strangers and family,
thought they were failures.
And they were both hoping that through their craft,
which nobody appreciated, they would redeem their entire lives.
And somehow show their lives were not wasted,
but that everything that they had worked towards
was for something.
Do you think they had any doubts about that?
Yes, even Nietzsche.
I think even Nietzsche, especially in his low moments,
Nietzsche is certainly a little bit more self-promoting
than Vincent was.
But they both had extreme doubts.
I mean, Vincent is much more honest with it,
and he'll paint some of the--
he'll do a series of sunflowers or orchards
which today are worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
and he won't even sign some of them, because he thinks
they're just studies.
He thinks they're worthless.
He'll have these revaluations of them, where he initially
is extremely enthusiastic with them.
And then two weeks later, he'll look back at them
and think that they are barely worth keeping.
So let's talk a little bit about--
first of all, and 1888, the breakthroughs.
I was reviewing his art in the last decade of his life.
And it seems very disjointed in where he put his focus.
So he is on record for saying that the portrait,
that there's something about the portrait,
which for him is like the quintessence of art.
And you can have a certain sense of infinity in the portrait.
So he seems to prize the portrait above any other genre.
And then you've mentioned the sunflowers.
And so there are still life that he focuses on.
Then there are landscape paintings and orchards.
And then he has a cypress trees, but also the courtyards
of the asylum.
And then we have what I associate with the pinnacle of his genius,
which are these open landscapes in the natural world.
Many of them have human beings in them,
but the human beings are really secondary
to the dramatic presence of the earth, the fields,
the sky, the weather.
And of course, the starry night and that whole style that makes
Van Gogh's such a figure of fascination for us still today.
So my impression is that he was allowing himself
to be influenced a little too easily by everything
that he saw and what he read and that he experimented
in many genres.
But somehow in 1888, I think that's why I think
it's so interesting that you choose that year that there's
a breakthrough.
And he's putting aside all those academic considerations.
And all of a sudden, we have the burst of color.
We have something that I find very similar in Nietzsche's
writing style of he's painting with abandon.
And Nietzsche is writing with abandon in 1888
at the same time.
And the style is also, you know, he
have these sentences in Nietzsche and paragraphs,
which are like these rapid brush strokes,
but totally genius.
And with Van Gogh on the other end, you have this--
I would say in Van Gogh, there might be something
that I don't find so much in Nietzsche,
which is that there's this visionary drive
that he's seeing something, he's trying to put on his canvas,
something that he sees in nature, but which
needs distortion in order to come out for what it is,
which is a kind of energy behind the world of appearances
that suffuses it.
And therefore, it's almost as if he's painting the energy
fields within which these landscapes exist.
And they all of a sudden, they become--
how can I say they become dynamic and almost liquid?
That's very beautiful.
I agree completely, aesthetically,
I am on the same page as you.
Van Gogh's landscapes are the peak of his artwork,
because I think they represent the potential inherent
in reality so much.
When you encounter reality, it's always a temporal encounter.
It's always moments that you have to attempt to represent.
And he manages to get the most ephemeral phenomenon,
the twinkling of stars, the mistroal over the field,
in the brushstroke.
And somehow, it's this movement, and inherent in this movement
is an openness, a potential, that he is able to represent
into a still canvas, which has not been done properly,
I think, in the history of art.
I mean, impressionism was there, but the kind of energy
which he puts into it had not been seen.
His theories, though, tended to focus on the human face.
He thought all of the potential, especially 1889,
is the year before the centennial of the French Revolution.
And he thought that there was a new revolution
on the brink, on the edge, just there.
And you just needed a match to light it.
And he felt portraits were the way to do it.
But why it's so weird to me, I mean, I don't understand it
because it seems so anthropocentric,
whereas what he was doing in the landscape painting
seems so far beyond the anthropocentric.
I think it's because he was attempting
to do something that was extremely difficult for him.
Ever since he was a child, he never
liked hanging out with other people.
He went off into the fields to go collect bugs and be in nature.
And that's where he felt most at home, most relaxed.
When there was another human being in front of him,
there was an incredible anxiety he felt.
He was also a big believer in phrenology.
He had read a lot of books about these structures of the face
and the way in which facial structures were inherited.
And he was a big believer that this phrenology
was not only something you inherited biologically,
but also through a kind of education,
through other people that you encountered,
that the face would change and morph
based off of intents interactions with other human beings.
What do you think of his portraits?
Some of his best ones.
Do you think there is that element of transcendence in them?
His self-portraits definitely.
But aesthetically, his portraits are not the top of his game.
There are certain elements of them
that I find really intriguing.
For example, right before his first psychotic break,
at December 23rd, 1888, he paints five portraits
of Joseph Rulon's new baby, Marcel.
And in these portraits, he paints the eyes,
where he said in a baby's eyes, you can see the infinite.
And the eyes, he paints such a beautiful blue,
such a beautiful color of blue juxtaposed next to the green
and the red of the flesh, that if you look just at--
the portraits themselves are not great.
But if you look just at the color of the eyes,
it's actually quite gorgeous, the kind of colors
that he uses, just in the eyes of the baby.
Blue, if I can continue, is there was a book called--
it was by Berlin and K. It was called Basic Color Terms.
And it kind of was a big splash in the field of linguistics,
because they demonstrated, maybe you've heard of this,
that the color blue is the word for blue
is something that is only really developed
at extremely advanced stages of civilization.
I mean, it's kind of mind boggling, but the entire Odyssey
is written without reference to the color blue.
And this is a little bit of a mystery for everybody,
because why is it then that such a basic perception
was not already encoded in language?
And I think speculatively, you could say
that this goes back to Heider, that language
is the house of being, that somehow, of course,
they could perceive blue, but that somehow there
was some concept of blue that had yet been discovered
in reality.
And then go as a painter of reality.
He did his best painting when the reality was there
in front of him.
Exactly, yeah.
So the blue, we need to resolve that intrigue,
because I know of that article,
and I don't have it present to mine now,
but there seems to be some explanation
for why the word is so late in coming into our vocabulary.
- They gave some explanations.
I didn't find them totally convincing.
I mean, blue is also the most high frequency color.
Red is the most low frequency.
And the colors do develop in language in that order.
Red is the first color to develop yellow and then blue,
in terms of the primary colors.
And there's also, of course, the feeling that you have
with blue and a feeling that you have with red.
And I think it has something to do with the articulation
of those moods, of those feelings,
that has to do with that development of that word.
- So when it comes to bango, and I want to get back
to Nietzsche in a moment, but yellow was a central color
for bango, right?
More than blue, I think, in that red.
And this sort of, again, abandoned into color,
which his brother Thio had told him a few years earlier
that his paintings were too dark,
that he needed to add color because it's more modern,
and he had to put it.
And it takes him a while to get on that bandwagon book.
So the question I want to ask about his aesthetic is
that would you say that there's something even
a little bit childlike about the works in 1888?
Namely, paintings that can be readily felt and appreciated
by the completely uninstracted,
those who don't have an educated aesthetic eye,
as well as, obviously, the masters of art historians
and so forth.
And this sort of exuberance, almost,
I don't want to say childlike,
but let's call it juvenile, that that helps.
Do you personally believe that as an artist,
he somehow deserves a higher quota,
than some of his contemporaries, like, you know,
Sizan, Gogan, Suha, and those others that were operating,
if not exactly the right same time,
within a decade or two of him?
Yes, personally, I think Signyak
is the only one who can hold a candle to him.
- Really?
- But that's my own aesthetic taste.
I would say that childlike is a great or juvenile,
and is a wonderful way of putting it,
because both Van Gogh and Nietzsche,
one of the reasons that young people love them,
is because they speak to a kind of people
who are living with extraordinarily extraordinary enthusiasm
in a declining age, people who--
- Also on age, I would say increasingly inhibited age.
- Yes, and both of them refound you,
refound potential, where they had felt
that the world was already very ossified.
I think that even today,
I mean, the most amazing thing,
one of the main things that I try and pursue in my book
is that today children run up to Van Gogh's and museums.
I've seen them do it, he would love that.
But during 1888, there's at least four or five different
artists who come to see his paintings in the yellow house.
You have Eugene Bock, Dodge McNite, Gauguin.
These people, they see the paintings,
and Vincent will say, especially of Bock and McNite,
that they held an icy silence.
They did not even comment on it.
Gauguin writes to nobody about later,
he'll want to exchange something for the sunflowers,
but at the time, no one seems to have,
and he was not like a traditionalist conservative artist.
No one seems to have recognized that Vincent had achieved
something really remarkable in that--
- But how can that be when you were talking about artists
who themselves were geniuses and were anything but conventional?
- This is one of the things that I'm trying to pursue,
because even Signac, he went to the yellow house in 1889
and he wrote to Teo, very typically.
He said something along the lines of,
"I saw your brother's paintings,
"some of them are pretty interesting."
And this was after he had done the sunflowers,
Van Gogh's bedroom, Van Gogh's chair,
the orchards, all of these things,
starring the first starry night.
- Yeah, that's so deflating.
It's like someone saying,
"Yeah, I listened to an episode of entitled opinions.
"It was okay."
- Exactly, yeah, you know, we talked about it.
- Nietzsche, now, we're talking about 1888
where he's writing really, like a madman
in both the literal and figurative sense of that.
And the inhibition, I think that what appeals so greatly
to young people, especially adolescents,
is that here, you know, they're reading someone
who was writing without any inhibitions whatsoever.
And it's like the super ego had just been thrown away
for a year or two there in Nietzsche's right?
And he will just, you know, really let it all hang out.
But not in a sloppy way, but very much like Van Gogh,
who is on the artistic level, you know,
very much in command of his medium,
and is writing this kind of brilliant prose,
which is half mad for sure,
but all the more compelling and energetic
and appealing because of that, no?
- Absolutely, and it's so clear in the documentation.
For example, Der Antichrist, the rough draft
is also the printing manuscript.
He says in E.K. Homo that at each word,
he was engraving each syllable,
like carving into a stone assured of his immortality,
and he writes like that,
that he just writes the entire manuscript,
but almost without corrections,
there's a few things crossed out.
E.K. Homo is a little different.
There's like five different versions,
where he's progressively getting more insane.
Some of them are written almost assuredly
after he hugged the horse parts of E.K.
- Oh, really?
- Yeah.
For example, why I am so wise three,
where he starts trashing his mother and sister,
and then talks about his divinity
and how he's the reincarnation of Alexander the Great,
that was written after January 1st, 1889.
- Is that right?
And when does France overbeck come to true
and take him back to true?
- He arrives in January eighth,
I believe it might have been the seven in January.
- Within that week, he's also being very productive.
- That week, he wasn't so productive.
Well, we don't know, actually,
because I think Elizabeth--
- He wrote parts of E.K. Homo.
- That was the last thing, why I am so wise three,
was probably the last thing we have.
He might have had some other manuscripts
that Elizabeth talks about that she destroyed,
but we never know,
because Elizabeth is kind of a pathological liar.
- Yeah.
When I think of Nietzsche and Van Gogh philosophically,
then I try to find a common ground in their attempt
to what Nietzsche said early
in the birth of tragedy that the world in life
is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.
And this idea that Van Gogh was painting
the visible world,
and Nietzsche at the same time is writing,
you know, Nietzsche comes to my Wagner,
the last paragraph, which is a repress
of the preface of the gay science,
is saying, are we not like coming back to the wisdom
of the Greeks in their super-fishality
that they had a depth in their super-fishality?
They were adores of forms, colors and surfaces,
and all these things that Van Gogh is painting,
namely the world of appearance in the visible world
is what Nietzsche is also exalting in his philosophy.
So would you say that they had a kind of shared elite
audience to the phenomenal world? Absolutely. One of the books that Nietzsche wanted to write during 1888,
and we have notes towards it, but it's discarded, is the physiology of art.
So the health of the human being, the health of the body,
upon which all other concepts depend,
all other abstractions depend, is determined by aesthetic phenomenon.
As I mentioned, both of them were extremely sensitive to the wind and the quality of water
that they were drinking from, and this allegiance they have
to these most basic foundational fundamental phenomena,
the purity of the water, the speed of the wind,
the quality of the earth upon which they walk,
their daily exercises, both from huge walkers,
they thought that attunement to these nuances was what led people to great things.
All fascinating stuff, Brian. I think we all have to read
that book of yours that's coming out in February called Nietzsche and Van Gogh,
Imaginations of 1888. So very much looking forward to that,
and I'm sure a lot of the people who are tuned into this show are too.
So thanks for coming on, Brian.
Remind our listeners, we've been speaking with philosopher Brian Pines,
author of this book I just mentioned on Nietzsche and Van Gogh.
Thanks again for coming in.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Bye-bye.
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