Nietzsche  

I'd say The Gay Science.

i started with genealogy of morality and i think its as good a place to start as any--pretty good summation of ntz's late thoughts on religion, politics, morality, to some extent 'metaphysics'

i think gay science and zarathustra are great places to start, so im not sure why people are saying not to, but its fair to point out that theyre very 'poetic' and not quite as direct as something like birth of tragedy or genealogy

sometimes i tell people to start with Heidegger's lecture course on nietzsche just to spite them.

what a mean intellectual trick to play on them u bad grad student

you know, come to think of it, that's not a bad place to start!

He does have some valid points, but when he expands on women... I run for cover.

^^^ this is OTM

In many cases, to be sure, "peace of soul" is merely a misunderstanding—something else, which lacks only a more honest name. Without further ado or prejudice, a few examples. "Peace of soul" can be, for one, the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) sphere. Or the beginning of weariness, the first shadow of evening, of any kind of evening. Or a sign that the air is humid, that south winds are approaching. Or unrecognized gratitude for a good digestion (sometimes called "love of man").

^ I still love shit like this tho looool

Read Walter Kauffman's book(s) on him(incl. the _Existentialism from Dosteovsky to..._). Kauffman also did the better translations of the guy.

Kauffman's zinger: "Everything Nietzsche knew about women was second-hand and third-rate."

Somewhat unrelated note, but Kauffman taught the guy whose classes on philosophy/existentialism I took as while still a young dorkling at Michigan.

Definitely the Genealogy of Morality. I teach it in my Intro courses almost every semester. Skip Book II on first reading, though; that's not where the action is.

there is hell of action in book II--

We Germans certainly do not think of ourselves as an especially cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless people who live only in the present. But just take a look at our old penal code in order to understand how much trouble it takes on this earth to breed a “People of Thinkers” (by that I mean the European people among whom today we still find a maximum of trust, seriousness, tastelessness, and practicality, and who, with these characteristics, have a right to breed all sorts of European mandarins). These Germans have used terrible means to make themselves a memory in order to attain mastery over their vulgar basic instincts and their brutal crudity: think of the old German punishments, for example, stoning ( — the legend even lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty person), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of the German genius in the realm of punishment!), impaling on a stake, ripping people apart or stamping them to death with horses (“quartering”), boiling the criminal in oil or wine (still done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the well-loved practice of flaying (“cutting flesh off in strips”), carving flesh out of the chest, and probably covering the offender with honey and leaving him to the flies in the burning sun.

definitely the grossest essay in the book

btw if ur looking for good secondaries i recommend this bad boy highly:

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-New-Nietzsche-David-Allison/dp/0847689794

i like kaufmann a lot, and appreciate what he did for american nietzsche scholarship, but i think he misses a lot of what is totally awesome about nietzsche's thought.

Putting the Bosch back into the Boche up there.

I'm pretty fond of the end of Book I, when he quotes Aquinas and Tertullian to the effect that Christians long to see the wicked tortured eternally in hell, and so they're just as fond of power and cruelty as the "beasts of prey" Nietzsche favors. But in 1.5 hours I will teach the part of Book III on the Assassins to our majors, and that is probably my favorite bit in anything N wrote.

surprised by the lack of BGE love!

thanks max that looks like a good read!

i like BGE. also i have kaufmann's philosopher psychologist antichrist book and it's v. good and made me smarter

yeah but u dont like peter gabriel so is ur opinion really worth anything at all

jk like i said i like kaufmann i just think sticking with kaufmann solo is going to give u a very one-sided reading

btw robert allison who wrote "reading the new nietzsche" is also the editor of this way cool little book:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Nietzsche-Contemporary-Styles-Interpretation/dp/0262510340

which i have never finished

Our publisher just quoted Nietzsche in the monthly letter he sends out announcing who won the cartoon contest.

i agree with u max, no hard feelings about PG

w/ N skip the secondary lit and go for the source; there are decent translations, and he's such a fun read. Though after 7 years of teaching him I still get nervous doing so.

theres absolutely no reason not to actually read the ntz--and yes nietzsche happens to be a great a lucid writer for a german philosopher!--but if youre going for it w/ no background and without reading it in a class it can be v. helpful to have a guide to process whats going on--less so maybe with a text like genealogy but if nothing else reading a secondary can help you place n. in a larger historical context which imho is crucial to getting as much as you can out of it

sure; there are still some issues in N that I'm really confused above, e.g. N says that we are the will to power and nothing more, but how does that square with our seeming to be flesh-and-blood? Is will flesh-and-blood? It's the sort that's probably talked up in the secondary lit but I think it's good to struggle with it myself, in the spirit of being a yes-sayer.

part of the problem with the secondary too is that there is about 1000000000000000000000000 things written about neech and 90% of it, especially in english, is either 'misogynist/fascist, dont read' or ayn rand-style readings or just straight-up batshit... i recommend allison to ppl i know who want to 'do' nietzsche cause its pretty even-handed, straightforward, and clear (you know, all the things that nietzsche himself isnt)

yeah i took stuff in undergrad about him but not an entire class and i feel like i need secondary txts once in a while (also i was a math major, so lol). it makes reading the real thing more fun if you have more context.

and i was gonna say what max just said, with most things written about him being wrong people go in with wrong ideas and go "oh yeah i can see why ppl say he is a proto-nazi" and then read the whole thing wrong

Max, what do you think of dear, departed Robert Solomon?

anyone read karl lowith on nietzsche? thoughts?

I actually really liked michael allen gillespies book "nihilism before Nietzsche" quite a bit. More of an argument about Nietzsche than trying to explain him tho. Gianni vattimo's stuff is great too, tho again it's an idiosyncratic take.

School me on this eternal return business. Isn't it just another afterlife we're being offered?

not really, just a lot more of THIS life.

milo i havent read anything solomon's written except for an essay on nietzsche and postmodernism which (imo) is quite a good reading of nietzsche and quite a bad reading of 'postmodernism.'

i highly recommend this website for the pictures running down the right hand margin: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Universeglass.JPG/144px-Universeglass.JPG

The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Einstein_ring_SDSS_J120540.43_491029.3.jpg/144px-Einstein_ring_SDSS_J120540.43_491029.3.jpg

Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Yggdrasil_axis_mundi_1.PNG/144px-Yggdrasil_axis_mundi_1.PNG

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Wushu_dao.jpg/144px-Wushu_dao.jpg

We have no dreams at all or interesting ones. We should learn to be awake the same way — not at all or in an interesting manner.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/BlackHole.jpg/144px-BlackHole.jpg

Only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/Blue_star.jpg/144px-Blue_star.jpg

Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation...

You have called,
Lord, I rush
With circumspection
To the steps of your throne.
Glowing with love,
Your glance shines into
My heart so dearly,
So painfully:
Lord, I come

I was lost,
lurching drunken,
Sunken,
Tossed to hell and torment -
You stood from afar:
Your glance met me often
So ineffably,
So movingly: now I come gladly.

I feel a shudder
From the sin, the
Abyss of night
And dare not look backward.
I cannot leave you -
In the terrible nights
I look at you sadly
And must hold you.

You are so gentle,
Faithful and sincere,
Genuinely earnest,
Dear saviour image for sinners!
Quell my desire -
My feelings and thinking -
To immerse myself, to devote myself
To your love.

-- Nietzsche, 1861

19th Century German wrote religious poem whilst schoolkid shocker.

19th c. German whose Vater was a priest.

Old Nietszche the preacher.

Oh fuck typo.

Have a bone: spot the difference with another 'religious poem' from a 19th Century German youth -

Ah! that life of all the dead,
Hallelujahs that I hear,
Make my hair stand on my head,
And my soul is sick with fear.

For, when everything is severed
And the play of forces done,
When our sufferings fade for ever.
And the final goal is won,

God Eternal we must praise,
Endless hallelujahs whine,
Endless hymns of glory raise,
Know no more delight or pain.

Ha! I shudder on the stair
Leading to perfection's goal,
And I shudder when I hear,
Urging me, that death-bed call.

There can only be one Heaven,
That one's fully occupied,
We must share it with old women
Whom the teeth of Time have gnawed.

While their flesh lies underground
With decay and stones o'ershovelled,
Brightly hued, their souls hop round
In a spider-dance enravelled.

All so skinny, all so thin,
So aethereal, so chaste,
Never were their forms so lean,
Even when most tightly laced.

But I ruin the proceedings
As my hymns of praise I holler.
And the Lord God hears my screamings,
And gets hot under the collar;

Calls the highest Angel out,
Gabriel, the tall and skinny,
Who expels the noisy lout
Without further ceremony.

I just dreamed it all, you see,
Thought I faced the Court Supreme.
Good folk, don't be cross with me,
It was never sin to dream.

-- Marx, sometime pre-1837

The moment you've been waiting for!

lawl

karl lagerfeld is an intersting guy.

actual unintentional typo.

can't wait 2 read http://www.aliviastoys.com/popples/puffballt2.gif in its entirety

...and this finally fulfills my prediction of Nietzsche as the favourite philosopher of haidressers and tailors of the new millennium. :)

rereading him now I wonder whether The Birth of Tragedy is really the most vivid, powerful, and unsettling thing he ever wrote.

sorry i started writing that before j posted so i have to read back what he said too

neh i ain't got much to say, certainly nothing mordy wants to hear ('read slower!')

i'm not sure my reading comprehension is the problem! if anything maybe i need to read quicker to see more contradictions or complications.

make him sound less like a goon, you mean

of GM in Ecce Homo N writes:

"Every time a beginning that is calculated to mislead: cool, scientific, even ironic, deliberately foreground, deliberately holding off. Gradually more unrest; sporadic lightning; very disagreeable truths are heard grumbling in the distance---until eventually a tempo feroce is attained in which everything rushes ahead in a tremendous tension. In the end, in the midst of perfectly gruesome detonations, a new truth becomes visible every time among thick clouds."

and then what is the "new truth" of Book I (the subject of your quotes, Mordy)? In Section 13 of Book I, N writes:

"For just as common people separate the lightning from its flash and take the latter as a doing, as an effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength as if there were behind the strong an indifferent substratum that is free to express strength—or not to. But there is no such substratum: there is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything."

This is the will to power: a wholesale replacement of the traditional metaphysics of actor and action into a new metaphysics wherein there is only action, only motion; or maybe not such a new metaphysics, for maybe we are back to Heraclitus. But what N highlights here is the consequence of this new metaphysics for attributions of responsibility, on which traditional morality rests: there is no responsibility, the actor cannot be held responsible for his actions, the actor is his actions.

And yet. In the preface to GM (so important, and so neglected) and in Book III N indicates how there is no perspective-independent knowledge. So all the claims of the book, all claims whatsoever, including this one, are only glimpses of something wider, something perhaps ungraspable as a whole by agents like us. In the end a shrug, this is just my opinion, man; and the reader is left to assemble more and more such opinions, and if she has the power, to make herself into more and more of these opinions, of these perspectives, to have one's pro and contra in one's power.

"Admittedly, to practice reading as an art in this way one thing above all is necessary, something which these days has been unlearned better than anything else—and it will therefore be a while before my writings are "readable"—something for which one must almost be a cow and in any case not a "modern man": ruminating..."

Mordy did you ever read BGE?