Nietzsche  

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.

i was reading him yesterday! so was my kid. FN makes my head hurt. or maybe deep voodoo causality talk just makes my head hurt. but he's always good for a laugh or two.

I’m a weirdo who thinks he was pushing toward a new Christianity à la Kierkegaard but you may judge that psychopathy. I don’t “Stan” for him (this is philosophy not fandom) but I think he’s one of the most interesting thinkers there’s been.

His concept of the will to power is where I think he went completely off the rails and utterly fails to understand the nature of the world.

'will to power' is a phrase that he uses a lot I find but the actual book 'Will To Power' was a collection of unpublished notes that his nationalist sister put out to support her national socialism. I dont know if it was written before he went insane though, mark s to thread!

here are a few quotes from GM:

"The Celts, incidentally, were definitely a blond race; we do them an injustice when we associate those traits of an essentially dark-haired population, that are noticeable on the more careful ethnographic maps of Germany, with any kind of Celtic descent and mixed blood, as is still done by Virchow: rather it is the pre-Aryan population of Germany that shows up in these places. (The same is true for nearly all of Europe: essentially the subjugated race in the end regained the upper hand there, in color, shortness of the skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: indeed, who is to say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism, and specifically that penchant for the "commune," for the most primitive form of society that is common to all socialists of Europe today, does not signify a tremendous retaliation on the whole -- and that the conqueror- and master-race, that of the Aryans, has not succumbed physiologically as well?...)"

"Everything that has been done on earth again "the noble," "the mighty," "the masters," "the power-holders" is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people who in the end were only able to achieve satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical revaluation of their values, hence through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This way alone was suitable for a priestly people, the people of the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness."

"'only the miserable are the good, the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good, the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious ones, the only ones blessed by God, there is blessedness for them only -- whereas you, you noble and mighty, you are in all eternity the evil, cruel, lustful, insatiable, godless, you will also eternally be the unblessed, accursed and damned!'"

"That however is how it came about: from the trunk of that tree of revenge and hatred, of Jewish hatred -- of the deepest and most sublime hatred moreover, capable of creating ideals and re-creating values, whose like never before existed on earth -- grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love: --- from what other trunk could it have grown? [...] that in front of the whole world Israel itself had to repudiate as its mortal enemy and nail to the cross the actual instrument of its revenge, so that the 'whole world,' namely all opponents of Israel could unhesitatingly bite into this very bait?""

"Seeing suffering feels good, making someone suffer even more so -- it is a harsh proposition, but an ancient, powerful human, all-too-human principle that, by the way, even the apes would probably endorse: for it is said that in thinking up bizarre cruelties they richly foreshadow and as it were play 'prelude' to humans. Without cruelty, no festival: thus the most ancient, longest period of human history teaches -- and also in punishment there is so much that is festive! [...] back when humankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than now, where we have pessimists. The darkening of the sky above humanity has always increased in proportion to how humans' shame at humans has grown. The weary pessimistic gaze, the mistrust of the enigma of life, the icy No of disgust at life -- these are not the indicators of the most evil ages of the human race: rather they first come to light as the swamp plants they are, when the swamp to which they belong itself appears, -- I mean the pathological tenderization and moralization by virtue of which the creature 'human being' ultimately learns to be ashamed of all its instincts."

"On their path to becoming 'angels' (not to use a harsher words here) humans have bred themselves that ruined stomach and that coated tongue through which not only the joy and innocence of the animal have become repugnant to them, but even life itself has become distasteful."

"Perhaps back then -- and I say this to console the sissies -- pain did not yet hurt as much as today; in any case a physician could draw this conclusion if he treated Negroes (those taken as representatives of prehistoric people--) for severe internal infections that would drive even the best-constituted European nearly to despair; -- in Negroes they do not do this. (In fact the curve of human capacity for pains seems to drop extraordinarily and almost abruptly as soon as we leave behind the upper ten thousand or ten million of the super-cultured; and for my part I do not doubt that the suffering of all animals taken together that have so far been required to answer scientific questions at the point of a scalpel simply does not merit consideration compared with a single painful night in the life of one little hysterical educated woman.)"

I'm still on BGE, you had to be awkward and jump to GM leaving sund4r & I behind, didn't you

I always thought it was cool that he admired Emerson for his sunny disposition.

oh Mordy I thought you’d have dug deeper than those, the most obvious ones. What’s to be said about that hasn’t yet been said?

nietzsche is prob not someone who can be fairly judged by taking quotes out of context, even the ones that sound most "damning." and yeah of course nazis and alt-righters misunderstand him, they're fucking morons.

oh Mordy I thought you’d have dug deeper than those, the most obvious ones. What’s to be said about that hasn’t yet been said?

Do you have a link or reference for good commentary on these? It doesn't seem like they've been addressed on the thread.

I don't know much about Nietzsche other than having read a VSI, and just started BGE. So I'd quite like to read what has been said.

yeah i posted them sincerely. i didn't like hit up an anti-nietzsche website. i'm reading through the book and pulling quotes as they strike me. speaking entirely as an amateur who has no right to say this, to "yeah of course nazis and alt-righters misunderstand him," i'm thinking maybe they don't?

like i bet there are good apologetics but i've been thinking about it for a while and i'm not entirely sure what they could be. so if i could be pointed to some that would be cool!

The reason nazis misunderstand him is not because they mistakenly thinks he hated Jews, but because they think he liked Germans.

I'm not sure 'psychopathy' is the right word, but the idea that N was a great genius all the way until january 1889 and completely ill thereafter is simplified imo. It's been a while since I've read anything by him, but there are parts I would consider lucid and insightful, and other parts that seem like pure hateful mania to me. In all I've read. The thing I remember clearest is his calling in Zarathustra for a Copernican turn in philosophy - to me that is achieved by Wittgenstein - and his spot on explanation of why Bizet is a greater composer than Wagner.

I listen to Die Walküre more than Carmen, though.

(Tbf, I'd probably rather go see the latter and would be able to hum a tune from it more easily.)