Individual psychology and Nietzsche / F.G. Crookshank.

  • Crookshank, F. G. (Francis Graham), 1873-1933.
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Individual psychology and Nietzsche / F.G. Crookshank. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sponsible for the War? He wrote the Hymn of Hate, didn’t he? And died mad, in an asylum, surely! After all, he was really a poet and not a philosopher at all!” And so, as a rule, the conversation flags. But the attention of the Englishman-in-the-street may well be directed to some words that have recently fallen from the pen of M. Charensol. This writer, who takes as his text a passage from the French version of Ecce Homo (“Un jour viendra ou le souvenir d’un evenement formidable s’attachera a mon nom; le souvenir d’une crise unique dans l’histoire de la terre. Je ne suis pas un homme, je suis une dynamite”), goes on to say that “a l’epoque ou Nietzsche . . . ecrivait ces lignes, elles pouvaient etre interpretees comme un phenomene de megalomanie, comme un signe de cette folie qui, bientot, allait s’emparer de lui. Pour- tant, le jour qu’il annon^ait est venu: la philosophie de Nietzsche est peut-etre, dans le domaine des idees, Pevenement le plus important du xixe siecle, et le role qu’a joue dans revolution des esprits contemporains, un livre comme Par dela le bien et le mal ne peut guere etre mesure” (Le Matin, 8.1.1933). If it be asked: What has this to do with Individual Psychology? I reply: Everything. For I would state it as beyond dispute that, as Prinzhorn has seen (and McDougall too), the great psychological movement of the last thirty or forty years has had its source in the Nietzschean revolt against the whole artificial structure of categories, classes, causes, and concepts, set up in the nineteenth century on a basis of mediasvalism. The nineteenth century marks a stage in the corruption of humanity signalised by the neglect, on the one hand, of indi¬ vidual differences and, on the other, of Society as a whole, and by an appalling lust for class-differentiation between man and woman, sheep and goats, good and bad, right and wrong, species and species, shared alike by modern Christianity and that Darwinian