| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/6/2007 5:26:19 AM | I have not read all of his material yet, and I certainly do not agree with some of his views - such as on the dominance of a master race.
He is a complete ***hole sometimes, but dammit he's honest and dammit he's brave.
There has probably never been a person that honest to speak those words.
His life would be in danger today from the religious right - Imagine his peril in 1899.
When I look at the world, and all of it's suffering, it makes me look back to Zarathustra.
Maybe Nietzsche was right.
Maybe God IS dead. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/6/2007 9:42:20 AM | Love that guy.
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
What does not kill me, makes me stronger. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/7/2007 2:58:11 PM | | As a true skeptic, he was fully human. It seems our nature to doubt, yet paradoxically we mindlessly follow the stream of contrived cultural protocols that leave us deluded and mesmerized into believing the media bombardment of our communication age is credible reality. Do not succumb to the numbing trance of our contrived culture. Embrace healthy skepticism. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/7/2007 3:11:42 PM | "Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. "
Yes, Nietzsche recognized his own rarity .... he was insane. Groups, parties, nations and epochs recognize his rarity, without recognizing his rule. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/7/2007 4:36:04 PM | | Love him. Whenever I feel overwhelmed with the bs of the world and everyone's emotional and faith contrived guilt trips and manipulation, I read a little bit of one of his books and am fully refreshed on logic, and dark optimism, ie: my version of reality. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/9/2007 1:55:34 AM | It's been a while since I studied Nietzsche’s philosophy, but from what I remember, he had a lot to say about Christians being weak, miserable, ignorant creatures. And his interpretation of the Bible was inaccurate as was his depiction of the Christian character.
However, despite my opinion, I do believe history has unfairly maligned him because of Hitler's faulty interpretation of Nietzsche’s work. Hitler succeeded in justifying a single dominant Aryan race founded upon Nietzsche’s superior man concept. Further, despite the fact that Nietzsche was anti-religious, I don’t think he was anti-Semitic as Hitler suggested in propaganda. But even if he was, I doubt he would have wanted his writings to be used as a foundation for Jewish extermination. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/9/2007 10:42:44 AM | Yeah, he was a very insightful dude.
He was an obsessive masturbater and preached living in excess...then they took him to the insanity tower... Hmm that sounds like someone I know... | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/9/2007 6:01:42 PM | He is easy to love, because of his interesting character. People, in general, are more in love with his style than his true philosophy I believe - he is "popular" in this way. His philosophy is rather paradoxical. Ultimately I don't think his philosophy can be applied practically, nor could it work as general public thought.
It is dangerous for his kind of philosophy to be available to the public because its prone to misinterpretation and being used out of context. When studying any philosopher, the context of their time period must be taken into account in order to gain a proper understanding of their thought motivation and how it factored into the paradigm of the time. Looking at a philosopher's ideas and transposing them over a different time period is like trying to fit a round block into a square hole.
Classical Greek philosophy and tragedy had a heavy influence upon Nietzsche. Gaining a proper understanding of these helps in clarifying his thought. In fact, philosophy in general is best studied in a chronological manner. Just as an organism evolves and changes over time, so does the world's thought. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 4/10/2007 4:40:06 PM | the morality of today will become the immorality of tommorow and all morals will be turned upside down in the decadence to come.
Sounds like our world for sure compared to his | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/28/2007 5:35:01 AM | Even if you don't agree with him he's definitely interesting. I'm going by memory, so I know I'll get the wording wrong, but one of his aphorisms can apply to him:
The mistakes of great minds are so much more interesting than the truths of mediocre ones. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/28/2007 7:15:19 AM | | Nietzsche himself had a lot of interesting and important ideas that expanded the horizons of existentialism. Yes, not everything he worked on was useful and productive but I think without his work we'd be short a lot of less contemporary works like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (Fantastic book by the way) | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/28/2007 8:34:28 AM | He was a very clever guy. However, he doesn't seem to have considered his own statement:
<div class="quote">All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.So, what he thought and what he wrote needed to be 2 different things, just like what we think isn't always a good idea to say, because the other person may interpret it according to how they feel and not the the truth.
I've never read him, because of this. Maybe I should, if only so that I can explain what he meant to say to people with a less analytical nature than myself.
It also strikes me that what I have heard of his philosophy was based on his views of psychology, which seemed to be that the oppressed and the oppressor were static mentalities and were unable to be changed. From what I have read of self-esteem and introspection, this seems to be more of a self-fulfilling prophesy. If one chooses to believe that one always has options, then one finds them. If one chooses to believe that one does not have options, then one doesn't even look for them, and if one finds them, one rejects it as being invalid. The minds seems to abhor inconsistency, and to find something that you don't believe can exist is a major inconsistency.
But there is merit in them, if only that it allows people the ability to believe that war and oppression is a good thing, and therefore causes overpopulation to be eliminated by various horrific means.
I would prefer that we find more peaceful means of population control, but it seems that others favour this method, and it does seem to be that those people who regard themselves as better than everyone else, who quote him.
That's my $0.02 | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/29/2007 8:50:19 PM | My first impression of Nietzche was that he was a bitter, frustrated old man.
However, that did not stop me from looking for something worth my while in the reading. I eventually decided that he might actually be an inspiration to some, and I wondered if George Carlin was one of those so inspired?
I laugh with George too. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/29/2007 9:47:50 PM |
You can't posit an opinion on Nietzsche if you haven't read him.
Hell, most can't have an opinion on Nietzsche if they HAVE read him. The man is very inscrutable, and I think a great majority of people misunderstand his philosophy.
He seemed to have ludicrous ideas involving evolution and "eternal recurrences," and he isn't known for his metaphysics. He should be read for his moral writings, as that is where he had the most influence. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/30/2007 11:17:35 AM | Don't like him. Dark and bla he needs a sunny day and a percocet.
Here is why his is wrong- His entire miserable outlook on life is based on the lie he believes God is dead.
Here is a little thing to think about.
In the ocean you have millions of smelt swimming in schools you see birds flying in flocks in the blue sky and if a predator came in they all move in unison not bumping into each other and as if using telepathy. What holds the form? What design decided to use this form?
In an anthill or a beehive does the queen tell the others to get food or guard? No, the queen just makes babies the plans are followed with no real communication.
The plan that is followed is one of nature or one of God enter your own religion...
Satan is dead(unless your into that)
jmo
He is just some guy chatting on a couch, and on that couch everyone that was beautiful moved away from him. So why quote him? | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/30/2007 1:34:26 PM | In the ocean you have millions of smelt swimming in schools you see birds flying in flocks in the blue sky and if a predator came in they all move in unison not bumping into each other and as if using telepathy. What holds the form?
Are you trying to imply that God controls the flight of birds?!
So whenever a bird flies into my window, that's God? He must have pretty crappy flying skills.
In an anthill or a beehive does the queen tell the others to get food or guard? No, the queen just makes babies the plans are followed with no real communication.
Ants DO communicate, my friend, but your mistake is in thinking of the anthill as a monarchy. The label "queen" is very misleading, because the queen of an anthill is not really a director or leader, just another specialized "worker" whose work happens to be producing young. In reality, an anthill is more like a communist society, not composed of individuals but comprising instead a superorganism. Like the neurons in your brain, which are incapable of thought alone but when combined together can create passionate emotions and brilliant insights, so to can the tiny-brained ants, when gathered in groups, create higher order intelligence of sorts.
They communicate by releasing chemical signals. If they come across food, they will release a chemical, and more ants will come. If they come across a plentiful food supply that will not run out soon, more and more ants will follow the signal, and make the chemical signal by releasing their own message, and this is why you see ants walking single file down the forest, as if they know where they are going--it's all worked out by group chemical signals.
You should read Douglas Hofstader's "Ant Fugue" if you really want to get a better idea of this. But needless to say, there is no reason to posit a God for all this. | |
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svj
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Joined: 9/15/2007
Msg: 20 | |
| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/30/2007 7:51:43 PM | You can't posit an opinion on Nietzsche if you haven't read him.
I don't think that's true. Uninformed opinions are just as, if not more important than informed ones.... there's a lot more of them.
Democratic elections are exactly that, the search for the prevailing interpretation.
And since most voters are uninformed..... which interpretation is really more relevant?
(Yeah, that's really splitting hairs... but it's an interesting thought, no?) | |
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svj
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Joined: 9/15/2007
Msg: 21 | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/30/2007 8:29:56 PM | | Aye, you couldn't posit an INFORMED opinion, but then again, this is the internet, where informed opinions are like the dodo, first ridiculed and then hunted to extinction. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 9/30/2007 11:36:03 PM | Nietzsche is one of the most important philosophers of the modern age. While most philosophers are content to try and place themselves within, and at, the service of the dominant power structures of their time… a few rare thinkers place themselves 'outside' of the currents of common opinion, and try to think through to new and fresh thoughts; and Nietzsche was one of those few rare thinkers.
To the best of my knowledge, Nietzsche was never an Aryan supremacist in any way, shape, or form: indeed, he referred in print to his fellow countrymen as "blond apes". However, his sister took control of his life's work upon his death - all of his notes and writings - and she at one point was involved in setting up a 'pure Aryan colony' in South America (and this, in the 1800's). So, any tinges of what would later be recognized as Nazism that crept into his writings are generally seen to be a product of her heavy-handed editing, and to have been introduced AFTER his death.
Above all else, Nietzsche was an observer and a commentator - a fact that most people seem to miss. He wasn't trying to dictate how he thought the world should be - he was describing how he saw what was in front of him. For instance, it is quite common to hear people take offense to "Nietzsche's claim that god is dead". Well, Nietzsche didn't say that... what he said was, that man had killed god. By this he meant that, whereas from time immemorial it had been generally assumed that there were objective morals and ethics against which humans needed to measure and value their actions... by his time, this was no longer so. It had, by the mid 1800's, become apparent that such values, morals, and ethics were NOT objective but were really a legislative prerogative of (wo)man. The problem which Nietzsche pointed out was that the loss of 'objective morality' had not yet been superseded by a generalized tendency of people to take responsibility for these matters themselves: the 'destruction' of "objective" values had not yet been followed by a creation of individual and communal values; and this situation he described as 'nihilism'.
The 'superman' that he described was not an evolutionary advance, as Nazi propaganda would have liked to see believed: rather, it was just a (wo)man who had superseded the nihilism which had followed 'the destruction of objective value'; and, who was thus capable of taking responsibility for creating their own values and ethics. If you look at, for instance, how widespread the environmental movement has become today then you will see a good example of what Nietzsche was saying would be necessary: for people to take responsibility over their own actions, and for the effects that those actions have upon this world. Similarly, anti-war protestors could be seen as very Nietzschean, in that they do not follow what they have been told to believe but think for themselves about what they ethically should be doing.
Nietzsche’s principle of “the eternal return” was not some type of religious cosmology: it was a guide for action, advanced in the face of nihilism. Here, Nietzsche simply asked: what is it that makes your life joyful? What do you include in your life, by your own choice? Of the things in your life which you control the occurrence of, can you say of them: I would have them happen over and over, again and again, forever? If not, then, you are not taking responsibility for your own life. So, the ‘eternal recurrence’ which Nietzsche spoke of was above all else a ‘personal sorting mechanism’ through which individuals could realize what it is that is most important to them in the joyfulness of their own lives.
Far from being ‘dark’ and ‘bitter’ and ‘hateful’, Nietzsche was encouraging people to have the strength and the awareness and the honesty to make for themselves workable systems: of ethical and moral responsibility, and of action. Ironically, although many religious viewpoints would have us all believe the opposite of Nietzsche, we are all - in fact even now - becoming just exactly the people whom he foresaw ‘overcoming’ human nature as it was commonly perceived to be in his time.
It has to be so: the alternative is a nihilism so deep that nothing will escape it to survive into any sort of human future. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 10/1/2007 1:42:24 AM | God maybe is dead lol haha I never really accepted that thought or the reality of it.
Who really ****ing knows.
To us, 6,000 lightyears is unsurmountable. To God, 6,000 lightyears would be like microscopic. Time is relative. I doubt that God is really dead. For all we know, the whole existance of the universe, however many billion trillion years, could be the equivalent of a day to God. | |
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| Regarding Nietzsche - what is your opinion of him?
Posted: 10/1/2007 2:29:05 AM | After running the gamut in chronological order of historical philosophy, I concluded that the entire world is mentally ill. No single person is an exception to this truth. Including Nietzsche and anyone you deem honorable and great even. If Nietzsche meant anything by "God is dead", then I'm stumped. To me, that statement is too ambiguous considering the term God is interpreted in a number of ways and can't even be truly classified as something in the realm of reality.
So basically, I wanted to say that a lot of people have a lot of great ideas. I think Nietzsche had a lot of bad ones as well. Either I need to read his writings because you guys are summarizing everything or I think Nietzsche is dull. | |
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