LS 610 - The Existential Imagination

(3.00 cr.)

Nietzsche, that enigmatic nineteenth-century German thinker, spoke of doing philosophy "with a hammer." Often times this image is taken as indicative of the brutal, destructive power of Nietzsche's thought, the wielding of a philosophical sledge hammer. But the metaphor might be better grasped in terms of the cautious, skillful tapping of a sounding hammer, probing and testing the shiny veneer of ideas and values beneath which might lie a hollowness of spirit, a soft and frightful emptiness of purpose. This sounding hammer has been put to practice by a variety of artists, authors, and thinkers during the past century or so, in many guises and forms, one of which might be termed the "existential imagination."