Nietzsche  

yeah i don't think he hates jews (tho my opinion on this is constantly evolving) but i do think he "hates" judaism but again i think a. he doesn't fully hate it (he appreciates that it forced humanity to change and in some ways that change was not good), and b. he doesn't really get judaism except as the progenitor of christianity. he blames the jews for jesus (and that their hatred of him was feigned in order to get the critique assimilated into hellenism) but he really should see that the reason jews hate jesus is the same reason he does - bc jesus abrogated the covenant and abolished the obligations entirely in favor of redemption/mercy. but judaism is not all that merciful as anyone who has read the OT knows. i thought "he must know this himself" and my conclusion is that maybe he felt like once the kernel of 'slave mentality' was permitted, even moderated and mediated, it is inherently totalizing and christianity was the inevitable conclusion. you can't just have a little bit of kindness/compassion/whatever - even a little bit keeps opening wider. it's kinda the fundamental logic of egalitarianism (there's always someone new to extend equality to) and BTW that nietzsche will not truck w/ equality i think should be troubling for anyone.

xp tldr if you follow nietzsche's breakdown you will come to a place of psychopathic anti-egalitarianism. that psychopathic anti-egalitarians like him should therefore not be a surprise.

have only read the first half of this but it's an interesting read so far:

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/

I'm not sure he does hate Jesus tbh.

again insofar as he appreciates the wrinkle maybe not but idk he really seems to hate jesus

i'm not committed to having a conversation about nietzsche or most philosophical writings anymore, because while i was once interested and invested a lot of time in them, i grew tired of them, but:

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

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Sunday, February 11, 2018 2:35 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

try alexander nehamas's book on nietzsche. it goes into how to read him and explains some of his perspectives. i wouldn't spend any money on it, though

also kaufmann is the one translator avid nietzsche readers prefer, at least while i was in university (it's been a very a long time)

anyway the rest of this isn't directed at you sund4r

iirc we spent an extra week reading nietzsche than any other philosopher, for a total of i want to say three weeks, give or take. the first day and a half we went through all the dumb, contradictory, potentially racist/immoral/wacky stuff with our prof saying there was strong indication that he suffered from mental illness and psychotic episodes from very early in life. so this contributed to his unconventional writings, because they weren't treaties or systematic texts, and at one point N actually said his writings weren't supposed to be systematic, which would make his writings professionally unphilosophical for the time, but you know, people got interested

and that's kind of the thing. the wacky stuff is due to him essentially dropping into a subject and taking a quick shit and bailing. he described it as taking a quick cold shower and getting out though, as far as i remember? so he knows what he's doing. and then there's his artist side, so he's not a philosopher in the classical sense

we spent a lot of time discussing his critique on christianity and christian-based morals in 19th c western europe. i thought his anti-semitism was debunked by jewish scholars, but i have never read any of them. we certainly never read N's writings as critique of judaism, and judaism was only mentioned, iirc, when comparing how christianity had strayed far from it, but this part is hazy in my mind

the thing i remember from it is how european society was supposedly built on christian morals but there was not a trace of it anywhere, and it was in a moral decline. and we spent a lot of time discussing why N basically hated christianity as it was practiced in 19th c europe

i also remember how N's erratic and meandering writings could be interpreted the opposite way our prof and the class was interpreting him, and there were pretty big assumptions made, which didn't seem to matter to anyone

meh, always felt bad for N but he is good for memes

Erratic and meandering does sound otm. His arguments are pretty half baked.

this book looks cool:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Asian_Thought

mordy, i've only read GM a little bit, quite a while ago, but a few things come to mind

1. starting at least from GS, i think coincident with his heightened interest in the possibility of knowledge that can be 'incorporated', as well as his overt employment of highly rhetorical personae and tactics (not always the case: compare to the fairly cool restraint of HH), n. starts making what seems to be deliberately ambiguous use of a variety of ethical and philosophical concepts that have, etymologically, physiological or physical 'original' meanings - for instance connected to the roots of virtue in 'strength' as well as excellence, or to 'nobility' and ideas of heredity. but it goes the other way, too, so that he uses concepts with still primarily physiological or physical senses, which he tends to belabor, in senses that appear intentionally not to have repudiated traditional valences they had in religious or philosophical contexts, like the idea of virtue as the health of the soul. the point of the ambiguity is hard to suss out. but

2. in certain ways this makes the overt racialization and biologicalization of the GM genealogies suspicious.

3. i've read, somewhere - i checked a couple books and didn't see it, but perhaps i'm recalling a paper by ken gemes about GM being fairly ironic, which appears in the 'oxford readings in philosophy' collection of papers on nietzsche - a plausible argument that the three essays comprising GM are intentionally internally inconsistent, using among other things the blond beast framing to accomplish... something suitably critical. i forget what. the gemes paper leans on the opening line about how we're strangers to ourselves. the idea would be not that we find out about ourselves immediately from nietzsche's accounts, but that their misleading attractiveness to 'us' for various reasons enables quasi-psychoanalysic possibilities of uncomfortable/unwanted/terrifying self-knowledge.

i think very broadly Nietzsche's attitude towards the monotheistic faiths is similar to an orthodox Marxist's take on capitalism - a necessary evolutionary step in the development of human society which needed to be shucked off as part of the next evolutionary step. when/if he's thinking of humanity as a whole his stance is not the modern atheist's "no God because science". he's only thinking of faith as a human construct and its relations to other human ideological constructs.

how much he understood about the actual experience and meaning of individual people's Jewish/Christian faith in his own time i'm not sure, i think "not that much" and i don't think it mattered too much to him - he deals in archetypes or generalizations. he treats Faith in a similar way to Law - control mechanisms that were outliving their usefulness for the development of the species

the race archetype stuff - Aryans, Celts, Latins etc is indefensible bollocks but was considered reasonably mainstream scientific history at the time, especially in Germany which was the spiritual home of that kind of "science" in the latter 19th century. the notion of waves of racial types subjugating each race that came before them travels a long way into 20th century history, and not just the Nazi variety. which isn't a defence of Nietzsche but an observation of a part of his milieu.

i didn't mean to get into this at this time of the morning but one further thought for me is that there's a constant metaphorical/allegorical element to his work - stuff that can be entirely fairly considered to be political philosophy is always working on at least one level as personal psychological philosophy - "overcoming" and "the will to power" are as much fantasies of personal struggle with state power/ideology as they are blueprints for fascist aggression.

i agree Mordy that it's far too simple to say that right wingers are "misreading" Nietzsche when they find his ideas appealing - but the same is true of the interpreters of the central texts of monotheism - most "bad" actors, even bad faith actors, have based their arguments on defensible - if selective - readings of the texts

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?