Nietzsche  

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.

in a career full of vivid, powerful, and unsettling things.

aw, thought this would be a joey barton revive

Been wrestling with this guy's ideas and their implications for nearly 10 years now and I think that ultimately although I see the force in a lot of/perhaps all of what he says, I can never bring myself to feel wholeheartedly 'on his side'. I can't help but still hope for refutations of at least parts of his worldview even though I doubt that this is possible (and is certainly not something I'm capable of myself).

he wasn't even totally on his side. that's his secret. his final advantage.

For the sake of full disclosure I'm not and never have been a Christian, and don't believe in any kind of God, so that's not the direction I'm coming at it from.

Perhaps I can draw it out a bit like... I can't help but suspect that those who avowedly consider themselves progressive/liberal/left-leaning while also proclaiming themselves as Nietzscheans must either be cherry-picking in their readings or else just comfortable living with a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance.

Or to try and be more precise (and yeah I'm aware it might sound challopsy and also the sort of 'old chestnut' dilemma that most people will have gotten over/laughed off years ago) I find it very hard to see how someone can be committed to reducing or removing inequality whilst also accepting central Nietzchean concepts. That's sort of where I'm at - viz a viz my framing of it above I'm not sure I'd even consider myself as progressive or liberal (probably not liberal?) but I do believe in equality. But I'm not sure you can square off commitment to equality with a conception of human beings as naturally divided into the strong and the weak.

I'll acknowledge (in case it wasn't bloody obvious anyway) that the rise of the alt-right has reawakened my concern about these issues, because I do feel there's a strongly Nietzchean flavour to a lot of alt-right discourse (albeit that yes, before anyone jumps in and points this out, it's complicated because alt-right discourse also contains significant elements of ressentiment that Nietzche would have identified and criticised).

For example, the backlash against the discourse of privilege which is strong on the alt-right seems to me to be very similar to Nietzche's framing of and attack on slave-morality.

See also the uncomfortable resemblance between Nietzche's framing of his works as handbooks for the strong to recover and avow their strength and our contemporary culture of PUA and ~alpha male~ self-help guides.

Gorilla Mindset: A Book For Free Spirits

There's probably some dumb psychological test you could do where you get people to read On The Genealogy Of Morals and then ask if they come away from it seeing themsleves as a master or seeing themselves as a slave.

I will probably come to regret all of the above posts very shortly - but sometimes it feels helpful to put my thoughts into writing in this way.

there are tactics for overcoming racism that don't involve using guilt to impose a slave morality on the oppressor class. left wing nietzscheans would probably frame the issue that way.

Freedom of will and isolation of facts. – Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. Now, belief in freedom of will is incompatible precisely with the idea of a continuous, homogeneous, undivided, indivisible flowing: it presupposes that every individual action is isolate and indivisible; it is an atomism in the domain of willing and knowing. – Just as we understand characters only imprecisely, so do we also facts: we speak of identical characters, identical facts: neither exists. Now, we praise and censure, however, only under this false presupposition that there are identical facts, that there exists a graduated order of classes of facts which corresponds to a graduated world-order: thus we isolate, not only the individual fact, but also again groups of supposedly identical facts (good, evil, sympathetic, envious actions, etc.) – in both cases erroneously. – The word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this isolation of groups of actions: we do not only designate things with them, we think originally that through them we grasp the true in things. Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise. Belief in freedom of will – that is to say in identical facts and in isolated facts – has in language its constant evangelist and advocate.

Human, All Too Human, book 3, paragraph 11

http://nietzsche-explains-nlp.org/encyclopedia/fact/

Right on.

he has some good stuff about lol numbers too

does anyone stand behind this guy enough that they want to take some pretty damning [GM] quotes and try to explain why they're not just apologetics for psychopathy? cause i've compiled quite a list and at this pt i suspect ppl who claim nazis or alt-righters misunderstand him are at the v least being disingenuous.