Baudelaire and Nietzsche.

Essay by SelphieCollege, Undergraduate May 2014

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Baudelaire and Nietzsche.

The connection between Nietzsche and Baudelaire does not seem obvious at first. Nietzsche had a big interest in French cultures. Throughout his work, there is a constant preoccupation with French philosophy, history and mainly literature and art. In fact, Nietzsche mentions Baudelaire two times in some of his published work. Here is a description of the two of them.

Baudelaire was born in 1821. He studied law, a popular course for those who do not yet decided on any particular career. Began to frequent prostitutes and living the mundane life. His family sent him to India, which in this period he thought of his life as in "pause", he analyzed the way that we behave and dress as an important thing; he had debts mostly in clothes. In his metaphysical phase of dandyism defined the dandy as one who elevates aesthetics to a living religion. "These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.

Dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind the Painter of Modern Life". In 1845 his first published work was his art review "Salon of 1845," which attracted immediate attention for its boldness. He had some influence of the Romanticism, he is in the end of this period but his ideas of love, death were influence by it. He decides to become a poet which his mother rejects. The childhood marked by the loss of the father, the mother's love and his rejection of the stepfather, source of a depressive tendency he called "Spleen", anguish, emptiness that can only...