#nietzsche

#nietzsche

I was suspicious, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to the life of my unborn child. I was partly sceptical because so much of the advice I was getting was contradictory. But I was also suspicious because I'd spent most of my 20s reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not, perhaps, a natural choice for a young mother. But he helps to fuel certain questions about values, and purpose, that are central to questions of care.

If whinging was an Olympic sport, we Gaels would be unbeatable Often in the hostelries around Thurles before big Munster championship games you'll hear it observed that Nietzsche's oeuvre is a latticework of recurring ideas and radical rejections. And yet it is Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence that best illustrates his GAA-ness. The notion that time is a squared circle, that everything repeats ad nauseam. But most especially the GAA news cycle.

Who was Nietzsche? Philosopher, psychologist, poet, madman, provocateur-these names orbit around him but never settle. He is the "strange German," dismissed by some as the father of nihilism and amorality, revered by others as the prophet of self-becoming. No thinker has hovered so closely to the abyss or beckoned so many to peer into its depths. Fewer still have so haunted the origins of the psychoanalytic revolution, both as inspiration and as fateful warning.