Happy Birthday Nietzsche!

I couldn't think of what to get Nietzsche for his birthday today, so I thought I'd let him hammer away at Freud's ego instead...

As for how Nietzsche may have actually celebrated his birthday, I believe this excerpt from a letter of his from October 24th, 1864 to his mother and sister may give us a hint:

I received the box and am greatly pleased over it, especially the nice linen things and the beautiful music literature. Yesterday we enjoyed a most jolly afternoon. I danced fabulously.

In a letter to Georg Brandes on April 10, 1888, Nietzsche provides us with an idea of how he viewed his life, from the day he was born on:

Vita. I was born the 15th of October 1844, on the battlefield of Lützen. The first name I heard was that of Gustav Adolf. My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Niëzky). It seems the type is well preserved despite three German 'mothers.' In foreign countries I usually am considered a Pole; even this winter the roster of foreign visitors in Nice entered me comme Polonais. They tell me that my head may be found in the paintings of Matejko's. My grandmother belonged to the Schiller-Goethe circle in Weimar. Her brother became the successor of Herder in the office of Commissary-general of Weimar. I had the good fortune of having been a pupil at the venerable Schulpforta from where so many have gone forth who are of account in German literature (such as Klopstock, Fichte, Schlegel, Ranke and so on and so forth). [...] I was forced to give up my German citizenship since, as commissioned officer (mounted artillery) I would have been called up too often and disturbed in my academic activities. Nevertheless, I am familiar with two weapons, sabre and cannon, and, perhaps, even with a third one... Then, too, I am according to my instincts a brave animal, yes, a military one. The long resistance has somewhat exasperated my pride.—Am I a philosopher?—But what of it!...

Happy Birthday Heidegger!

Happy Birthday Freud!

Freud loved creating "portraits" of people, so why not return the favor?

If Freud's letters to his friends are to be taken at face value—which, of course, was something Freud would never have done—then he was clearly not a big fan of either birthdays or growing older...

To Thomas Mann, for Mann's 60th birthday: 

I could wish you a very long and happy life, as is the custom on such occasions. But I shall refrain from doing so; the bestowal of wishes is trivial and seems to me a regression into the era when mankind believed in the magic omnipotence of thought. My most personal experience, moreover, tends to make me consider it a good thing when merciful fate puts a timely end to our span of life.

To Stefan Zweig, on Freud's 80th birthday:

...although I have been exceptionally happy in my home, with my wife and children in particular with one daughter who to a rare extent satisfies all the expectations of a father, I nevertheless cannot reconcile myself to the wretchedness and helplessness of old age, and look forward with a kind of longing to the transition into nonexistence. 

To Lou Andreas-Salomé, on Freud's 80th birthday:

What an amount of good nature and humor it takes to endure the gruesome business of growing old! The garden outside and the flowers in the room are beautiful, but the spring is a Fopperei [trans: mockery], as we say in Vienna.

To Albrecht Schaeffer, on September 19 (my birthday), three days before he died on September 22, 1939:

I am more than eighty-three years old, thus actually overdue, and there is really nothing left for me but to follow your poem's advice: Wait, wait.

Happy Birthday Hobbes

The only birthday present Thomas Hobbes ever wanted...

Thomas Hobbes (born April 5, 1588) is of course most well-known for his work Leviathan, and is still regarded today as one of the giants in the history of philosophy. Indeed as Edwin Curley suggests at the opening of his "Introduction" to Leviathan, Hobbes could certainly be seen as a man who would fit right in to today's world:

Hobbes has suffered a fate shared by many classic authors. His greatest work is more often quoted than fully carefully and thoroughly read. There are reasons for this. Hobbes took pains to be quotable, sometimes at the cost of obscuring his message.

Hobbes is indeed most remembered for his description of life in the "state of nature" as "nasty, poor, brutish, and short." It is thus not surprising perhaps that Hobbes—whose prose has burrowed its way into our collective unconscious—would liken himself to a "worm" in describing his own birthday:

In Fifteen Hundred Eighty Eight, Old Style,
When that armada did invade our isle,
Called the invincible, whose freight was then,
Nothing but murd'ring steel, and murd'ring men,
Most of which navy was disperst, or lost,
And had the fate to perish on our coast,
April the fifth (though now with age outworn)
I'th'early spring, I, a poor worm, was born.

As such, I think it fitting to celebrate Hobbes' birthday by celebrating some of his works that have spent their lives further below ground...

"A drawing of the connection of the eye and the brain, part of Thomas Hobbes's treatise on optics: London, British Library"

From Thomas Hobbes on Optics Online:

The manuscript of Thomas Hobbes's tract, A Minute or first Draught of the Optiques, is now available online on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts site. Harley MS 3360 was made in Paris in 1646, as a presentation copy for William Cavendish, marquis of Newcastle (d. 1676), to whom the work is dedicated. This manuscript contains the title-page (f. 1r), dedication to Cavendish (ff. 2r-4r), list of contents (f. 5r-v), and the treatise itself in two parts (ff. 6r-71r, 72v-193r). It entered the Harley library on 7 August 1724, which collection was sold to the nation in 1753 for £10,000 under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum.

Translating Homer as a way to get back into intellectual circles, not the worst idea in the world...

From Translating Homer: From Papyri to Alexander Pope:

Hobbes's masterpiece Leviathan, or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Common-wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651) caused him trouble with the loyalists during the Cromwell's era because they thought the book endorsed the change of  political allegiances if a monarch was cruel. At the age of eighty-five, when his philosophical works had been banned, Hobbes returned to the classical studies of his youth, as his extrardinary translation of Thucydides well attested, and began to write his English version of the Homeric poems. First published in 1676, his translaton of the Odyssey was so successful that he was encouraged to undertake the translation of the Iliad as well. His literary style was concise and direct as one can easily observe in his version of the first four verses of the Iliad: 

O goddess sing what woe the discontent
Of Thetis' son brought to the Greeks: what souls
Of heroes down to Erebus it sent,
Leaving their bodies unto dogs ad fowls.