ask me about Friedrich Nietzsche

[mbillie1]

Not devastating, just interesting. The argument that the motive and principle of altruistic morality are opposed is sort of fascinating, at least with respect to the idealists like Kant who proposed it as the "rational" morality. Essentially the motive for promoting altruistic behavior / golden rule morality is still a selfish motive. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You don't lie because you don't want others to lie to you. This doesn't mean any golden-rule ethics is bad in practice (and Nietzsche doesn't think they are) but it does render the philosophical position that altruism is utterly justifiable/rational/etc pretty untenable. A lot of Nietzsche is a reaction to Kant (who was in turn a pretty significant philosophical figure) and he really takes Kant to task on a huge number of things. For what it's worth, there are still idealists (in the Kantian sense) who either choose not to read or choose to ignore all of the arguments he makes.

Also most of Wittgenstein's linguistic/philosophical stuff has origins in Nietzsche. He really was ahead of his time, as cliche and stupid as that sounds.

I should add one huge reason I find Nietzsche so good though (I forgot to mention this)... having studied philosophy for so long, Nietzsche's the only writer who doesn't suck at writing. I've never found anyone else who can make sense, be insightful, and not be like, stupendously painful to read.

Also, it's fun to bust your chops, I expect it in kind. Do unto others and such.

[Phil153]

There's a question at the end of this.

I consider Nietzche a turd of a man who didn't understand the most basic things about human emotion. So he went on a brave intellectual journey to discover how these mysterious feelings he felt fit within an intellectual framework. He basically reconstructed life from scratch using his intellect, breaking down any intellectual barrier or preconception he had. Extremely brave. Along the way he debunked God, the meaning of life, and lot of other stuff. His final conclusion: You must become an überdude to keep the abyss from swallowing you whole. He thought life was not worth living without being on the edge of a knife, and the only way to stay there was to constantly innovate yourself and never give up.

Is that an accurate portrayal of his philosophy? Do you consider that this is something that a good portion of "normal", positive people understand instinctively? Do you think Nietzche's deepest insights are a product of intellect or courage?

That's all for now.

[Anacardo]

Well -

I really like Kant. And I can't stand Nietzsche OR Wittgenstein. And I cannot discuss any of them intelligently. So, whatever you think that says about me, is probably true.

I can't think of any more qs of the top of my head, so have a nice thread.

[mbillie1]

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what would you say are Nietzsche's best works? I've read Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra. Also, how much of Nietzsche is contradictory?

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I really like Beyond Good and Evil, at least the first few sections. I think The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist are his best works. I do consider aesthetics (they don't suck to read lol) maybe a little more than I should; I find "On the Geneology of Morals" boring and disinteresting but it's sort of significant. Zarathustra is full of fun quotes and is decent, but really only when you read it side-by-side with The Gay Science and then Beyond Good and Evil. It's a bit too aphoristic/vague/whatnot for me.

Lots of Nietzsche is contradictory, but that isn't a contradiction in his thought, if that makes any sense. For Nietzsche truth (and logic, consistency, reason, etc) is not necessarily the prime condition of value. Most of the "big" contradictions in Nietzsche come from "Birth of Tragedy" compared to everything else. If you read his preface to the second edition of Birth of Tragedy he sort of recants everything he said, his entire claim in the book, because he realized it was wrong. It's one of the best self-criticisms I've read by any author. Nietzsche also deliberately plays with contradiction to be funny. Reading Nietzsche as dry is missing a lot of the point. There's a lengthy passage in The Gay Science where he criticizes philosophers and intellectuals for backing up their ideas with quotes from poets. Obviously a nice-sounding quote doesn't make something more true, you know? And at the end of the section, to emphasize his point, he says "For as Homer says, Many lies tell the poets." There's so much more humor than most people give him credit for. Also, most translations of Nietzsche are just atrocious. The Walter Kaufmann translations are the gold standard as far as Nietzsche is concerned, and most other available translations are either deliberately mistranslated or just woefully poor. Until someone does a better job, it's not worth reading other versions except for some point of comparison.

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Also, is this quote: 'God was clever when he decided to learn Greek when he wished to write the Bible - and not to learn it better.' the best Nietschze quote ever? I humbly submit that it is - at least the wittiest.

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That is a very good quote. I'll post some favorites later on.

[mbillie1]

[ QUOTE ]
I consider Nietzche a turd of a man who didn't understand the most basic things about human emotion. So he went on a brave intellectual journey to discover how these mysterious feelings he felt fit within an intellectual framework. He basically reconstructed life from scratch using his intellect, breaking down any intellectual barrier or preconception he had. Extremely brave. Along the way he debunked God, the meaning of life, and lot of other stuff. His final conclusion: You must become an überdude to keep the abyss from swallowing you whole. He thought life was not worth living without being on the edge of a knife, and the only way to stay there was to constantly innovate yourself and never give up.

Is that an accurate portrayal of his philosophy? Do you consider that this is something that a good portion of "normal", positive people understand instinctively? Do you think Nietzche's deepest insights are a product of intellect or courage?

[/ QUOTE ]

I think that's a partially true but also very one-sided portrayal of Nietzsche. His idea of the "overman" is definitely misunderstood. The overman is not dispassionate, he is closer to the most enlightened than the most powerful. Nietzsche was definitely wrong and jaded about a lot of things; his ideas on women, for example, do him no credit. His writings are very harsh sounding until you really read them all (that sounds pretentious, but it's kind of true), but Nietzsche was not a misanthrope. He did despise the "herd mentality" and "herd morality" of people in his time, but remember this was pre-Nazi Germany, a swelling of paranoid groupthink antisemitism and silly baseless nationalism (both of which he explicitly and harshly criticizes) so his extremism in his writing is a little understandable.

With respect to religion, Nietzsche was not blindly against religion. He was far from egalitarian though. He felt that the sort of "order of spiritual rank" of people was determined by how much of the truth they could endure and he felt that he wrote for the highest order. Nietzsche did not believe in god; he felt the universe operated mechanistically (which is still easily the best explanation possible; any attempt at a different one usually stems from some other argumentative source than the world we live in, such as the desire for there to be a redeemer) and so the idea of god was false. However, he recognized it as both very powerful and very useful. He did not find the idea of the Christian god and Christian morality useful, because he felt it subverted our instincts and forced us to hate what makes us human (loving, hating, lusting, etc) when he felt that we should simply learn to use those parts of us in a productive way (eg sublimate those feelings into art or music).

But to give you some idea of how human he was, this is from a personal letter he wrote in 1880:

"To this day, my whole philosophy totters after an hour's sympathetic conversation with total strangers: it seems so foolish to be to wish to be right at the price of love, and not be able to communicate what one considers most valuable lest one destroy the sympathy."

[mbillie1]

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Well -

I really like Kant. And I can't stand Nietzsche OR Wittgenstein. And I cannot discuss any of them intelligently. So, whatever you think that says about me, is probably true.

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I don't think it says anything about you other than you prefer Kant to Nietzsche. But you can't tell me you prefer him as a writer [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[pepper123]

mbillie -

if i'm going to study a philosopher or painter for a bit i like to take the same drugs as them for a stretch to get into their state of mind.

so. nietzsche... suggestions?

[mbillie1]

And Phil153 to answer the last part, I think his best insights are from not exactly courage but sort of... humanness. His intellectual insights were (and still are) stunning in some cases and his ability to clearly explain why things like solipsism, monism, Cartesian skepticism, etc are absurd is unmatched. But his best insights IMO are combinations of sort of, amateur psychology and masterful philosophy.

I admire Nietzsche greatly, but I don't find him particularly courageous; I just feel that he was a brilliant writer, a brilliant thinker and remains the most misunderstood intellectual ever.

Here's an example of why I think Nietzsche's insights are fantastic (this may or may not make any sense without some background in Kant, but whatever), this has to do with Kant's notion of synthetic a priori judgments (judgments made a priori or purely rationally/mathematically, but based on the world we live in)

"...One had been dreaming, and first and foremost--Old Kant. 'By virtue of a faculty'--he had said, or at least meant. But is that--an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? 'By the virtue of a faculty,' namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,

quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
cujus est natura sensus assoupire

(trans: "because it contains a sleepy faculty whose nature it is to put the senses to sleep")

But such replies belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' by another question, 'Why is belief in such judgments necessary?'--and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that! Or to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgments a priori should not 'be possible' at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, a belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life."

from BGE part 1, section 11

[mbillie1]

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mbillie -

if i'm going to study a philosopher or painter for a bit i like to take the same drugs as them for a stretch to get into their state of mind.

so. nietzsche... suggestions?

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Nietzsche suffered from a variety of stomach illnesses; he didn't even smoke cigarettes (rare for his time/social place). He eventually contracted syphilis (it is believed from a prostitute; he was awful with women and it shows in his venomous writings about them) which led to his mental breakdown.

So I guess get syphilis, don't treat it for years and years and years, then eventually go insane? Although that aspect of his life is greatly exaggerated; his writings got more eccentric as he aged, but the disease didn't affect him until well after he had finished his last works.

Interestingly (and awesomely) it is reportedly the case that this is how he snapped... he was walking down the street in his town and saw a man beating a horse. He just lost it, it was the traumatic event that triggered a full on mental breakdown due to untreated syphilis.

[kioshk]

Did he really have a nervous breakdown as a result of seeing a horse being beaten?