| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/15/2008 4:14:27 PM | He died in 1900 by which time he had succumbed to insanity mistakenly diagnosed as the tertiary stages of siphylis 10 years previous. So he would have known nothing of the Nazi movement as it came to prominence in the 1920s, and would never have enjoyed the success his work began to enjoy during his final years.
His ill health was chronic though and his prodigious intellectual exertions exacerbated what is now thought to have been a rate neurological disorder. He could not even enjoy a glass of wine or cigar and suffered from crippling headaches and digestive problems. As for the writing of Zarathustra, he famously claimed to have come to the great insights 1000s of feet up in the air in the hills of Sils Maria. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/15/2008 4:35:41 PM | | Regarding Nietzsche, maybe his philosophy and life's work was great for the time it was discovered in, but this is 2008 and we could use someone up to speed with science and reality. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/15/2008 4:51:17 PM | I dislike Nietzsche because he wasn't a very good philosopher. More of a poet than a philosopher, if you ask me.
Although I suppose my hatred for him only grows deeper when I realize that the bulk of extreme postmodernism (of the "knowledge is impossible and only socially constructed" type) treats him as a father figure. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/15/2008 5:08:34 PM | | His critique of Western metaphysics is not trivial. It is a serious rejoinder. It was Lyotard who coined the term "postmodernism" in the 60s in his findings in The Postmodernism Condition. Nietzsche was and is a world genius whose work lays down serious challenges to the unquestioning assumptions that were masquerading as self-evidence in Western metaphysics and morality for that matter. It's not only second rate continental figures who revere Nietzsche. Heidegger devoted one of his most extensive intellectual periods to the study of Nietzsche, the encounter was extraordinary. Nietzsche is an extremely serious thinker who took the tradition seriously and was one of the first to see real problems in the fabric of that tradition. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/15/2008 5:28:28 PM | The only thing the extreme postmodernists have right is that the socially constructed language that transposes into knowledge is actually socially constructed, but that doesn't lead anywhere.
Modern philosophers would get the farthest believing that we are akin to robots and that everything inside a being is dictated through electrical and neural pulses in the body. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/15/2008 6:47:00 PM | | What you're crudely trying to express is a form of eliminative materialism...which is not an unproblematic position in the philosophy of mind. And it's actually been around quite a while. Furthermore, its uses and scope are extremely narrow, the vast domains of existence that we are required to deal with as socially, politically involved creatures in a shared existence cannot suddenly be made obsolete. Chemistry is only one lnagauge among many that we use to describe the world after all. Furthermore, since when was or is Nietzsche an extreme post-modernist? Are you familiar with his work? | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 4:36:52 AM | Nietzsche was a seer to me and Zarathustra is pure poetry and immense wisdom,
I must have read so many times now but I remember the first work I read by him was the Antichrist at the age of 14. You can imagine I was handling dynamite but to me it was a complete inner revolution and evolution from a jude0-christian worldview to a more pre-christian one....remember revalutation of all values in fact I strongly believe that our philosopher was an active nihilist...you must destroy in order to create. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 4:54:47 AM | | Actually, one of the greatest threats that Nietzsche foresaw was the eventual triumph of nihilism in Western European cultural life. His repeated polemics in Will to Power for example are quite explicit about this. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 5:02:27 AM | Nietzsche offers an analysis which complements the metaphorical development concerning the “most abysmal thought” in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The original difficulty faced by anyone, including Zarathustra, is how to resist becoming a life-denier given the truth of becoming and the concomitant notion of eternal recurrence. Those usually faced with this dilemma typically acquiesce in the engendering of nihilism. The mistake involved for those who fall prey to nihilism is that they were expecting more, the truth of becoming and the lack of telos disappoints extravagant expectations for something more out of life:
"What all these notions have in common is that something is to be achieved through the process - and now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.- Thus, disappointment regarding an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism" (Will To Power, number 12 in his notebooks dating from November 1887 to March 1888)
Hand in hand with such hopes goes the false hope and belief in underlying unity, the refusal to recognize the truth of alterity, difference, radical diversity. The search for monism and unity at the heart of existence, like the beliefs prevalent before Copernicus’ controversial heliocentric model of the universe, is something which we yearn for due to an inflated sense of our own importance. To be disabused of this illusion also lends a hand in the development of nihilism. The last escape hatch available, as Nietzsche sees it, is one that many philosophers have availed of, namely that this whole world of becoming is an illusion, almost an epiphenomenon which dances before us throwing up images which can be abandoned (or seen as illusory) in favour of an underlying true or real world. One might add to this insight the notion that the world of becoming can be understood as an approximation of the true or real world which, with enough unpacking, can come to be known – if only through a glass darkly. Variations on this kind of prejudice can be located in many of the great figures from the tradition. Nihilism once again rears its ugly, nay – serpent’s head once the myth of a true/stable/static real world has been debunked. These three categories then “ ‘aim’, ‘unity’, ‘being’ which we used to project some value onto the world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.” But why should we devalue the universe simply because these three categories have been devalued? Nietzsche concludes that the fact that we devalue the whole universe simply because these categories turned out to be of no use shows that at bottom they can be understood as the cause of nihilism. That is, our faith in these three categories is so inveterate as to lead to massive disillusion and reactionary nihilism when they are shown to refer to an entirely fictitious world. There is an inability to recognize that it is only these obsolete categories which are valueless, not the world itself.
Nonetheless, we can still begin to draw some of our threads together on the basis of Nietzsche’s analysis here insofar as we can now see that he was sensitive to the type of motivations and prejudices which led thinkers from Aristotle to Kant to endeavour repeatedly to try and deny, in his opinion, the truth of becoming. The faith in the real world, unity and the refusal to confront the reality of becoming prompted extraordinary intellectual efforts to ground this faith in ideas like “substance” and “being” as opposed to becoming and all of this with a telos at bottom as though meaning or value cannot be derived without these. Of course if the true character of existence or life does not accord with these categories, as Nietzsche makes clear, then it is absurd to adopt a life-negating attitude which will eventually find itself at home in nihilism. If to ‘be’ is to ‘become’ and that is what we truly are, then why not embrace this condition which we can no more alter than we can our mortality? The greatest danger which exists is the threat posed by nihilism which would have us tranquillized against the dangerous character of life which leaves everything raw and fragile at every given moment and allows for no guarantees. There is no possibility of rest, stability and being in that sense, there is no home or sanctum, we are forever plagued by a sense of unheimlichkeit and the inability to be satisfied at any given moment. Our very comportment at bottom is that of an unsatisfiable desire, like “arrows of longing” which never find their shore. But we should ‘attune’ ourselves to and cultivate this fundamental feature of our constitution and disposition rather than attempt to repress or deny it – to resist it is calumny against life of the highest order and leads to a hideous distortion of what it means to be human, to be alive. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 1:24:18 PM | Its not rocket science and it doesn't take Nietzsche to see the world pre-christian..
My view of religion is such that we've imposed a set of morality through a combination of fear, guilt, and pride used to brainwash people.
Imagine how devastating crime could be to a remote society. Many mouths to feed, no government to back you up, protect you, or make everything pretty for you. Rough, wild living... Crime was more devastating in life-threatening ways then than it is now. It was much easier to convince people of fantastic tales then than it is now because they had no sense of the world beyond. There was hardly any communication outside of your remote vacinity. Humans are insubordinate, stubborn, shy, and yet wanting by nature. I believe that the christian religion is the medium between a good leader's folly to connect people and the need for that connection. In the absence of good leadership, they've commanded a set of morality to be communicated and instilled into the minds of all who wish to survive in harmony with one another. Poetry does not equivocate to sense. I don't think Nietzsche was a powerful philosopher. In short, religion is brainwashed schizophrenia. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 1:56:07 PM | I'm sorry aknightrmor. But have you really read Nietzsche at all? I'm not having a go here but you seem to be criticizing and responding to straw men. None of your comments really apply to Nietzsche at all. His major target is really the history of Western Platonic Idealism, i.e. Western metaphysics, of which Christianity is but one variety. His own attacks on Christian morality are an offshoot of a much larger technical project while his genealogies and attacks of various moral codes are rather more sophisticated and powerful than what you dismiss. So again, have you actually read any Nietzsche? You might find him far more compelling than the unusual, erroneous caricature you have been attacking.
As for your historical account of the origins of organized Christianity...I don't think it is very well informed either...Nietzsche again would offer an awful lot more substance here than you! | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 5:33:00 PM | | I've just gone through an elaborate list of favorite Nietzsche quotes... He seems more like a shock jock of philosophy than a powerful philosopher. I wouldn't rate him as being very original, but if you were to scale his importance according to the mass effect he had on people, then I suppose he is important. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 6:00:08 PM | | You honestly think you understand someone by reading a few quotes out of context? What has happened to us I wonder? Next you'll tell me you know the inner logic (and futility of) William Blake's poetry on the basis of some of his more shocking lines (involving driving your cart and plow over the bones of the dead for instance) being printed out of context. You will not get to the bottom of Plato's Dialogues, Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, or Metaphysics, British empiricism, Continental Rationalism, Kant, German Idealism etc etc simply by doing google serches or having a quick read of that online encyclopedia thing. As for Nietzsche being a "shock jock"...well of course he's a bloody shock jock...he was trying to turn 2500 years or so of Western metaphysics on its head...it's bound to be a bloody bit of a shock. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/16/2008 7:27:35 PM | Some questions;
a. how would Nietzsche treat fashion, glamor and the adultation of the body image.?Is there a resistance to nilhism in fashion and beauty, aesthetics in a more comprehensive sense? In other words, given we are becoming, can we not become artists with our own lives and create meaning using color, sound, scents and physical sensations, not a hedonism, but aesthetics as a near metaphysical occupation...as a way of discovering who we are and expanding or transforming who we are into something we choose to become? What would Nietzsche say about Yves St Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, or for that matter, contemporary art?
I know he was a great friend of Wagners and he was at essence a philologist, was he not? An artisan?
I suppose this is my perhaps misguided reading of the Will to Power, that this will was in fact, Darwins evolutionary drive. But not a dry, microbial Darwinism, but more a vibrant Darwinism, in which organisms continuously mutate into new and previously unimagined examples of their species. A form of neo Darwinism. Let my cite something from evolutionary biology that may fill in the gaps between the concept of the Overman, and Darwin.
There is a specific evolutionary phenomenon called the Baldwin effect. This describes neurological /behavioral evolution. Imagine a colony of bugs who can only move forward. A mutant offspring is born with the ability to navigate around raised mounds of soil. This mutant might suddenly have access to new foods and a better ecological set, due to the fact that through a neurological mutation, they have advanced in their behavioral repetoire. Now, multiply the complexity of a simple bug, with the human brain. The nervous system, according to this way of thinking, is capable of more rapid evolution than the organism, which might take 20 thousand years to advance. Changes in thinking, in choices, in logic, can change our repetoire of behavior and experience.
I hope you see a logical coherence in this line of reasoning, that simply being alive is really a process of becoming, becoming with no goal in mind, simply a process of developing new ways of experiencing the world.
Thoughts? | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/17/2008 2:31:08 AM | Let's see. It's hard to know what Nietzsche would think of modern aesthetics. I think he would probably be more interested in the work on aesthetics in Continental Philosophy than the post-modernist nightmare and sham superficiality of modern culture, including fashion design and music. (And don't get me wrong, saying that certain genres are dominated by trash does not mean that the genre is trashy per se). I think Nietzsche diagnosed the symptoms of extreme post-modernism as the term was coined by Lyotard and the advancement of nihilism in decadent European culture and was alarmed by it. The dominant trends in fashion or music for Nietzsche would reflect the highpoint of nihilism I would suspect. I mean look at mainstream music, project runway, the amount of paper that is filled each day with pictures and prices of the "latest" fashion trends.
On to Wagner and philology, Nietzsche famously fell out with and publicly disassociated himself from Wagner. He began his career as a philologist. On the recommendation of one of his professors and without ever having written a thesis he was awarded the chair of philology at Basel university at the tender young age of 24. He was an extraordinary genius. His first major work was Birth and Tragedy and received a mixed reception from an understandably curious intellectual community. It certainly was not conventional philological scholarship and already contained some of his fledgling philosophical ideas. Nietzsche's rapidly diminishing health meant he had to retire from his university post and did most of his work travelling around Europe on his university pension as a relatively young man. Did philology continue to play an influence in his writings? Of course! Was he an artisan? Well he was a writer and a gifted stylist but they were in the service of a rather committed philosophical outlook.
Now on the conflation of his discussion of will-to-power with his sporadic musings on evolution. Well I don't think you can really make that move at all. The will-to-power hangs together with eternal recurrence and the overman as a triumvirate of metaphysical, mutually symbiotic notions. Nietzsche is not really interested in biology or Darwin's theory of evolution. He had the same fascinaiton with origins which began to grip everyone in the 19th century but there the overlap with Darwin ends. The overman is not a genetic "breed" that he hopes will be the outcome of certain mutations. It is part of a metaphysical picture that undercuts what he sees as the erroneous Platonic backdrop where being is static as opposed to in motion. Being is becoming for Nietzsche, constantly in motion, continually transcending itself at any given moment. One can never aspire to actually be an overman, since one would overcome oneself as soon as one got there so to speak. One is constantly overcoming oneself. we are not static, we are historical in the Heideggerian sense. The narrative stability we give to ourselves, where we are stable "I's" over time is illusory for Nietzsche, we are constantly shattering against the fact of becoming and this is what he means by eternal recurrence. This is a metaphysical story! | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/17/2008 10:48:50 AM | Actually, that's a slander and totally unfounded as it turns out. There are a number of articles in medical journals available now that discuss his illness. In any case, he didn't really write anything more once he fell ill.
If he had had siphylis, then he should have died a lot sooner from the time he had his complete mental breakdown. As it happens, he lived on for over a decade more. Anyways, it wouldn't be a thread on here without a few irrelevant ad hominem scuds! | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/17/2008 4:10:02 PM | I've only read Ecce Homo, and can't remember much about it. I've read some of the more informed comments here though, and wonder who, out of today's important world figures stand out as the Neitzchean "Supermen"? Is it Nation leading oil millionaires like George Bush who have the power to send thousands of young men to their deaths in the service of their own Oedipal power complexes, or is it idiots like Robert Mugabe who will do anything to hang on to power, even if it means grinding the faces of their fellow countrymen into the dirt.
Aren't beings like this, deeply unlovely but loftily indifferent to the desires and needs of the common herd, the ultimate "Supermen"? | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/17/2008 5:27:17 PM | Ecce Homo is a parody of a biography... ecce homo - latin translation of "behold the man" as Pilate delivers Jesus to the mob..."Thus Spake Zarathustra" being his bible...it's all metaphor people!!!!
read back through some of my posts on the notion of "ubermensch" clarence...what you wrote is really way way way off...George Bush would not be the kind of person that Nietzsche would advocate...that should be rather obvious I would have thought.
This guy is attacking a tradition of thinking not trying to set up a political party! Why is that so hard to see? READ HIM! Otherwise what's the point of this...I mean if I were to say that Beethoven was a misogynist but I've only heard a bit of the 9th symphony and I can't really remember it but I know he hated women...oh and he ate babies and was a fascist...I wonder what kind of response I would get. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/18/2008 5:28:43 AM | | I'm not sure what you mean! Who said that we cannot laugh? They both have a lot of tragi-somedy pertaining to their personal lives. I don't know that anyone would deny that. Nietzsche for one is one of the funniest guys I've ever read. He's a riot! His continual slights of Kant are absolutely brilliant. Not all Kantian's agree with Nietzsche's estimation of course, but few of them can resist some of the more flamboyant descriptions of the "sage of Konigsberg"! | |
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