Nietzsche: How can the weak constrain the strong?
Could someone please explain how, per Nietzsche, the weak can constrain the strong?
Quoting Joshs
If the "weak" can constrain the "strong", then the "weak" aren't actually weak, and the "strong" aren't actually strong. What gives?
Quoting Joshs
Especially the part about morality being a trick of the weak to constrain the strong. This is what Nietzsche called ressentiment.
If the "weak" can constrain the "strong", then the "weak" aren't actually weak, and the "strong" aren't actually strong. What gives?
Comments (133)
This runs into the problem of what isolation might be. Your description tells a story about it.
Yet more gibberish.
Quoting baker
Its more a matter of constraining the impulses of strength within oneself. By strength Nietzsche meant a will to continual self-overcoming ( not personal growth as in progress toward self-actualization, but continually becoming something different). The weak path is toward belief in foundational morality, a god who favors the meek, universal truth and the supremacy of proportional logic.
Do you mean propositional logic?
I've never understood the point of 'continual self-overcoming'. What does this mean (or look like) in practice when you are going about your daily business? It sounds kind of tedious.
I think it means not constantly wanking in public
Well, that is tedious, as I suspected. Why should some sickly, proto-incel and misogynist tell us what we can do and can't do in public!?
Quoting Tom Storm
yep
Umberto Eco is pretty good on this apparent contradiction in political narratives. His "Eternal Fascism," is a good example.
You see this quite a bit in modern "nu-right," diatribes. These are generally something like: "weak, effeminate, craven, and degenerate Jews, leftists, feminists, immigrants, etc. are all horribly oppressing us strong, clear eyed, powerfully willed hereditary warriors."
How exactly are the strong being endlessly defeated by the weak?
Generally there are two answers.
First, it is because there are innumerable "hordes of subhumans" attacking the numerically inferior "pure." It's just a matter of numbers. However, there is significant confusion on this point, because the movement also wants to claim that the pure are also "the moral majority," and in the US context that, "Trump won in a landslide, if not for the rigging," etc.
I see this bipolar attitude vis-á-vis wanting to be the "moral majority" versus a "small, beset elite," as being a manifestation of the nu-right's increasing ambivalence towards democracy of any form. On the one hand, they increasingly want to dispense with democracy"Red Ceasarism," and all. On the other, democracy has been "the principle," for so long that they can't help but make appeals to popular opinion and their place in a "true majority."
The second, more popular explanation is that "strong" have allowed their hands to be tied by a "false morality." It's here that a relation to Nietzsche's ideas is more obvious. Generally, the claim is that economic elites, the "neoliberals," or simply "the Jews," have tricked the strong into a false morality. Once the strong "wake up," and form their own morality, this age of evil will be resolved.
Generally, it is said that this will not occur until some sort of cataclysmic war, which will have the side effect of turning the currently low status practitioners of the ideology into hardened, grizzled war heros. You can't really underplay the extent to which "war will act as a force of self-transformation and self-actualization," plays into these narratives.
This is a fairly popular line of thought. Hence the popularity of (fairly poor) takes on Nietzsche in this space, for example "Bronze Age Pervert," and to a lesser extent Ayn Rand. I don't think these are particularly accurate interpretations of what Nietzsche had in mind, but it's easy to see how his ideas are easy to co-opt here, and it's a potent and popular modern example of this sort of thinking. Eco goes into good detail on why the enemy needs to simultaneously be "so strong and so weak."
[Reply="Tom Storm;866507"]
You overcome the tedium. :smile:
Always funny how careful analyses of people's [I]true[/I] reasons for believing what they do (Nietzsche, Marx, etc.) so often turn out to entail:
Them: weak, cowardly, desperately making up illusions
Us: clear eyed and strong, powerful truth seekers.
Nietzsche has the whole spiel about how others decide where they want to end up re morality, and then invent reasons for getting there. It's a good critique, but it seems like it could easily be turned back on his own work and his fairly rigour free retelling of Jewish history that just happens to paint a picture where the "real story," lines up with his beliefs.
I always felt these had a lot in common with the old: "you only reject the obvious truth of Christ because you want an excuse to do whatever you want." I'm not against arguments from psychoanalysis as a whole, but they seem to easily fall into this problem of being "too neat."
Quoting Tom Storm
We all do it anyway, whether we want to or not. Another way to put it is that life takes you where it wants you to go, not where you think you should. The feeling of tedium, boredom, meaninglessness arises out of being stuck in a situation, set of practices, way of life, a value system or worldview that one no longer fully relates to. But if we are taught that the way of moral, spiritual and empirical truth involves chaining ourselves to fixed, foundations, we will consider overcoming to be a mark of immorality, irrationality, madness, nihilism, infidelity. As a result we will bear the tedium of our chains as a sign of righteousness. Your emotions tell you how continuous your self-overcoming should be.
I've felt bored since I was a small child. The feeling has never left me...
Quoting Joshs
Maybe my problem is that I've always felt everything was contingent upon culture and history and that there is no foundation or immutable point of reference for humans. Perhaps I need to become a Christian fundamentalist to self-overcome.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I suffer from incurable ennui.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, we're certainly hearing variations of this one.
The other one we hear is that the silent majority is being controlled by the woke mafia.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps. Then again, your reading of Nietzsche may be too neat.
Quoting Tom Storm
If it never left you, you wouldnt know you had it. What I mean is boredom is a comparison, just as sadness or happiness. It requires a letdown from a state which was non-boring or at least less boring. We live our lives as a series of creativity cycles, and boredom is one element of these cycles, the phase of the curve where what had held our interest become constraining and redundant. This indicates that in boredom a part of ourselves has already moved onto the next cycle, but we perceive the incipient phase of the new as a landscape without recognizable landmarks, as dull and empty.
Quoting Tom Storm
Existentialists like Sartre were caught in transition between two worlds, the old one of foundational certainty and the new one of ungrounded values. As a result their philosophies were an act of mourning the loss of the old. They hadnt yet reached the point of affirmatively celebrating ungroundedness , because they still considered negation as a bad thing, inferior to ultimate truths. So they believed they were stuck with an inferior way of life but couldnt go back to the old one.
How so? In what way is Nietzsche's "historical analysis" more actual historical analysis than Hegel or Vico's? I would say Marx actually has a leg up in this department, despite the same charge being easy to level at him.
I don't hold this against them, since even modern political scientists "select on the dependant variable," all the time (e.g. "Why Nations Fail"). The analysis can still be a good vehicle for ideas, even if it's mostly illustrative. But it hardly seems like Nietzsche sets out to do a history of morals and simply "comes across his results." This is even more apparent in light of his publishing history. By the time he is publishing his mature work, he already has the core of what he wants to say laid out, and the analysis seems obviously there to support and develop those ideas, not as a form of "discovery."
And as his critics demonstrate, you can do psychoanalytical explanations in circles. E.g., Bertrand Russell (another famously uncharitable philosopher) on Nietzsche:
Is this good analysis of Nietzsche? I don't think so; it seems like you could come back with another psychological explanation of why Russell was such an ass all the time to people*. I can only imagine the back and forth that could have occured if both were alive at the same time...
* it did occur to me that this analysis might be satire on Russell's part, but this seems [I]too[/I] charitable, based on the rest of his corpus.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In order to treat Nietzsches approach to history fully, I think one needs to be familiar with the following:
1)The difference between history and historicism.
2)The difference between objective empirical history and genealogical history.
3)What Nietzsche meant by the untimely
If Russell had any inkling of what Nietzsche was up to , his own philosophy wouldnt have been so backward. At the very least, a grasp of the later Wittgensteins thinking would be a prerequisite for understanding Nietzsche, and Russell was woefully inadequate at this.
I didn't write that passage. It's by one of my least favorite philosophers, the wonderful Bertrand Russell. It's really a case study in the pitfalls of psychologism as a form or argument, as you could easily come up with a similar argument attacking Russell, and go in circles forever.
Can you have credible explanations of cultural phenomena grounded in a historicism that eschew any sort of commitment to objective history? How then should we prefer any argument grounded in historicism more than any others if they conflict?
Doesn't countering other's arguments require reflecting them accurately rather than beating up on strawmen? But if that's true, then there is a certain sense in which an accurate accounting of the facts of the history of ideas is always essential.
I don't see how it can't hurt the credibility of an argument to claim "here is the history of these sets of ideas," and then to demonstrate a shallow, or inaccurate knowledge of the relevant history, even if the argument is still salvageable on other merits.
Take religion. Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud also developed explanations for religion around the same time as Nietzsche, explanations that also nicely happened to support their particular overarching message. How do we judge between these, in some ways mutually exclusive, versions of history and why wouldn't they be subject to the same charge of "working towards a pre-existing conclusion?"
I see your point. Could it not be said that most thinkers work towards a pre-existing conclusion? I would have thought most philosophical argument is a series of post hoc justifications.
Who are Nietzsche's women? They include Life and Wisdom. (Zarathustra, "The Dance Song")
Nietzsche begins Beyond Good and Evil by talking about another woman:
How men treat flesh and blood women, and how they respond, is taken up in The Gay Science. Here we find a discussion of how the "weaker sex" exerts its strength. Behind much of Nietzsche's criticism of women is a criticism of men.
I am interested to see how you will develop this distinction.
I have not looked into this but I suspect that at least in part he is playing on the singularity/duality/plurality of man/men, male/female and god/gods found in Genesis 1.
From The Gay Science:
In both cases (and perhaps others) the heading is singular 'woman' but what is said is plural 'women'.
If 'woman' as concept is considered does the same hold for 'man'?
According to 22 men use force but women are a force:
(60)
God, this reminds me so much why I despise Ayn Randian philosophy :lol:
A favorite of today's Republicans.
I think what you describe here, sir, is a doctrine of the "alt-right" that's been swimming around since about 2015 or so.
And yesterday's. It's been their true north for a while.. Although, with the populism that laid out, it's taken on different seasonings. More culture war now than individual.
Oh god yes.
Sound vaguely Nietzschean?
Quoting Rand - IEP
Quoting Ayn Rand Britannica
It would be interesting to trace that back. When did resentment become central to Republicans? One might think that it is the have-nots who would be resentful, but those with wealth and power can also be resentful. In the name of freedom they stand against any policy or regulation that impedes their ability to become wealthier and more powerful.
Not sure, but perhaps you shouldn't read Ayn Rand as she sounds right up your alley!
But Nietzsche's Ubermensch is not resentful. He does not advocate or feed off of resentment.
Quoting Fooloso4
I mean that can take up volumes and volumes about Republican resentment. It arguably started with Barry Godwater's 1964 campaign and before him with the John Birch Society. Before this, one could safely be a "Northeastern Republican" which meant a sort of Eisenhower or Rockefeller Republican in which you were moderately pro-business but did not mind some government intervention and could generally be considered pro-Civil Rights and cultural liberal (for the time.. this is pre-60s libertinism and hippies). This movement percolated in the 70s with the rise of the Christian Evangelism and its slow migration with the "Moral Majority" cultivated by Nixon (though Nixon himself was simply a pragmatist, more Old School Republican than John Bircher type). Also mix in there a rabid anti-communism, a reaction to the hippies and freedoms of expression, thought, and identity, and you had the roots of the Reagan Revolution in the 80s, which fully formed in the 90s with Gingrich Congress coupled with the repeal of the Fairness Act in regards to media which paved the way for talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh to stoke those flames. Then you can end with social media, Fox News, and conservative media in general (and their counterpart liberal media trying to keep up by competing for the other side). That's what you have now.
I think they inform each other. Rand is the natural outcome of Nietzschean thinking as applied in a more stringent/focused way.
I don't think so. As with other influential thinkers throughout history, his work has been taken and twisted in different ways. Rand claimed that the individual owes nothing to society.
Nietzsche says:
(BGE, 211)
He might agree that the individual owes nothing to society, but that is because, and here he agrees with Aristotle, magnanimity is about who one is rather than what one owes. One cannot be both magnanimous and resentful.
I mean, Nietzsche seems to be seething with resentment for the "slave morality" which is pretty equivalent to Rand's "collectivists" not letting the elite industrialists, inventors, artists, and scientists reach the necessary heights they are capable of. And a Randian would argue that by allowing the maximum individual freedoms of these individuals, it WOULD unleash a magnanimous outcome for humanity.
I'd also like to argue that this simplistic ideology is simply reductive and doesn't account for all the times in history when collectivist government intervention promoted all these things. It seems more-or-less a useful cudgel for unfettered business regulations, or to justify not helping those who might benefit from various programs that would get them means for at least living somewhat comfortably. Hence it was largely lauded by a slew of conservatives:
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/04/7-pols-who-praised-ayn-rand-075667
However, as I stated previously, this "Tea Party" Republican that was started by Goldwater through Reagan, has sort of morphed into something else as @Count Timothy von Icarus seemed to summarize well above. So the influence of Rand in that 2012 article might give way to something like the influence of fascist / cult of personality tendencies, and 1930s isolationism and hostility even to free trade.
This is certainly true. I feel like philosophers themselves can be more or less culpable in how their work ends up perceived. For example, we end up with so many different Hegels because his work is dense and not written in a way that is particularly easy to understand.
In some cases, a philosopher's work can have implications that they themselves either didn't recognize or tried and failed to get around. For example, I don't think Fichte is guilty of grossly misreading Kant. I think he comes to a conclusion that is largely based on Kant's analysis, even if Kant himself didn't want to go in that direction, and indeed we know from Kant's papers and revisions that Kant was quite aware that he had a dualism / subjective idealism problem on his hands.
With Nietzsche, the fact that so many interpreters have been led variously into "might makes right," egoism or valueless post-modernism, seems to represent the same sort of problem. No doubt, Nietzsche himself seemed to denigrate more "brutish" views, abhor antisemitism, etc. But the question would be whether a substantial challenge to these takes can be mounted from within the philosophy itself. It's just like how scholars' assertions that Kant didn't want subjective idealism (some argue the opposite) don't really do anything to show that his system doesn't lead to subjective idealism, they just show that he would have been unhappy with that conclusion.
But what's the Nietzschean critique of self-described Nietzscheans like Bronze Aged Pervert? I haven't seen one.
It's telling that there are virtually no children in Ayn Rand stories. One wonders how exactly someone becomes a "great person," by oneself. We might ask why no great industrialists existed for the first 200,000+ years of the race's existence.
It's pretty over the top. All the heros are attractive, robust geniuses. All the villains and stand ins for opposing ideologies are corpulent degenerates with no redeeming qualities. It's kind of like old Disney movies, where you wonder why people can't tell that the bad guys are bad just from looking at them.
There is one scene in Atlas Shrugged where an entire trainload of people dies in an accident and we get a kaleidoscopic view of how all of them deserved to die due to embracing leftist parasitism in their various ways.
That alone doesn't totally spoil the books, but it gets old given their collosal length. Closest work I can think of is "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," books, where all the good guys are successful, hyper competent, intellectual feminists, and all the bad guys are almost comic renderings of fat, middle aged, untalented misogynists. Those at least had fairly interesting murder plots though, and to be fair, parts of the plot and tone of Atlas Shrugged were still good.
In Nietzsche's case it is a question of perceived by whom. He does not want to be understood by just anyone who reads him. His explicit about this. Perhaps being aware of the fact that a philosopher cannot control how he will be read, he attempts to have control over how he will be misread.
Beyond Good and Evil, 42 (aph 30)
Do you deny he had contempt for slave morality? Can you explain in your own words what you think suppose he meant by master slave morality? Surely we can agree the distortions of the national socialism of his sister was a twisted version, but the only thing I got for why Rand got it wrong was that she was resentful. then you made obtuse references to him not wanting most people to understand him anyways.
You first said:
Quoting Joshs
I don't understand. How is morality "a trick of the weak to constrain the strong"? Where's the trickery? Even when it is in reference to self-overcoming?
How can someone still rightfully be called "strong" if they can be overcome by germs, entrapments, etc.?
Quoting baker
Out of life's school of warwhat doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. (Twilight of the Idols)
Well, IMO, while the modern nu/alt-right certainly shares a lot with/ in some way grows out of more venerable right wing traditions, it is itself something new. It seems to get it's start in the late 1990s and early 2000s, being a phenomena driven by Gen X and Millennials. The biggest cultural examples I could think of would be the emergence of the "Manosphere" blogs, influencers like Andrew Tate, Roosh V, etc., the emergence of "Pick Up Artist" culture, writers like Jack Donovan, and the resurgence of machismo in more mainstream entertainment post 9/11.
A big part of the new movement is its almost total divorce from Christianity, and outright hostility to neoliberalism, particularly the ideals of free trade and free movement. Also, and embrace of post-modernism, despite often vocally decrying it.
To my mind, the movement is a reaction to a confluence of factors. One, is the cumulative effect of major changes in patterns of migration that began in prior decades, but built up steam since 2000. This led to the realization that many Europeans would indeed likely become "minorities in their own country," sometime this century. There is a similar anxiety in the US, although it is less coherent there.
This normally gets most of the attention, but I would say just as important, if not more, is the fallout of the sexual revolution, which has led to a large number of men who remain perpetually single through most of their adult lives. The decline in marriage, birth rates, and relationships also is tied into the growing academic achievement gap between males and females, which is quite stark. This achievement gap itself has been cited as a major cause for the decline of marriage (in the aggregate, women tend to not want to marry men with less education, and now far fewer men complete post-secondary education). This gap also feeds into the widening gender gap in political preferences, which in turn makes relationships less likely.
Rising inequality plays into this as well, as growing inequality is the engine for status anxiety, which seems particularly acute for young men. Then you have the "overproduction" of graduate degrees; too many highly educated people competing for not enough opportunities. Economics also matters in that it makes sense that men feel more threatened by migration, as they tend to be dominant in fields like construction, which are more affected by the increase in the labor supply, and are dominant in tech, which is easy to offshore.
All this has led to an ideology that is on the one hand
openly hostile to "post modernism," (the constant refrain of folks like Jordan Peterson) while being itself highly post-modernist. For example, there is the idea that the news media and scientific community cannot be trusted because, really, they are beholden to and invariably influenced by whoever finances them while also being enslaved to hegemonic "woke" social factors. There is also an embrace of relativism re morality.
The result is a movement that is nihilistic, without a clear picture of what it wants, but also driven by resentment. The solution to this lack of a cohesive vision to unify the movement? Conflict! Gotta have that civil war, the "Boog." Plus, a civil war dovetails very nicely with the fetishization of "warrior culture," and the consumption of the accoutrements of combat, tactical gear, etc. It's participation in warfare that will be transformative for the individual as much as it will be for society at large.
This is something it has in common with modern liberalism, which also increasingly defined what it wants to see, and individual virtue, in terms of conflict. Granted that in the liberal vision the conflict is generally more social, speaking truth to power, less kinetic.
With these sorts of social forces becoming increasingly potent, it's interesting to note how completely out of place texts like Porphery's "Life of Pythagoras," or the various Lives of the Saints would be in our current culture. "You mean they just give up on achieving status and go out into the desert and fast?" You couldn't sell "The Life of Saint Anthony," today. Anthony would have to actually fight the demons who attack him, not just get beat up by them. This is ironic, considering these come out of an ancient Roman/Greek culture that was in many ways a lot more martial and patriarchal that ours.
Nietzsche is very popular within the nu-right, but less so than some of those he inspired. Julius Evola and Rene Guenon, and to a lesser extent Aleister Crowley, would be examples here. These guys differ a lot from Nietzsche but I see a significant overlap in tone, and how they flatter the reader. The reader is part of a cognitive elite, and needs to overcome the chains thrown upon them by the "sheep," a motif that becomes pretty common in the 20th century. Past thinkers don't need to be seriously engaged with but can be dismissed in a torrent of abuse.
Anyhow, I think Fukuyama's fusion of Hegel and Nietzsche in explaining this phenomena is pretty apt. The Last Man, having all his basic needs met, and living in a society that gives a sort of base level recognition to all, feels that universal basic recognition is no better than no recognition at all. Thus, he lashes out violently for recognition.
This also explains the huge success of dystopias and apocalyptic stories, where often the apocalypse changes the protagonist from ignored and low status, transforming them. They end up being highly respected leader and hero, whose inner virtues have only been realized through the collapse of civilization.
A popular meme in the movement is Hopf's:
"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
The implication being that the liberals, neoliberals, prehaps Baby Boomers in general the sheep are the weak men. The movement is the strong men who will create good times. But Fukuyama makes a good point, that people who are enjoying prosperity, security, and liberties unmatched in almost all of human history, who are then lashing out to destroy their societies might actually be the "weak men creating bad times." That said, I think the movement has plenty of good points about problems with modern society.
In this, Fukuyama might have might have a critique of Nietzsche himself, as embodying not the vision of the Overman, but of the Last Man, creating his own phantasm of conflict to deal with the threat of degenerating into a bovine consumer. You could variously take Fukuyama as indicating that Nietzsche was a prophet predicting this crisis, or as the first of the Last Men. Maybe both. In any event, what Nietzsche doesn't seem to predict is that his message might be extremely popular with the Last Men, and that they might all embark on the journey to become Overmen. What does that look like? And how do you sort between true Overmen versus Last Men lashing out for recognition who are convinced they are Overman, without it simply becoming a No True Scotsman situation?
There are a few quotes like this in his corpus. I have a hard time understanding them. Nietzsche is not particularly concerned with political philosophy and the masses. So why must the philosopher rule?
A common critique of Nietzsche is that his philosophy doesn't work in the social dimension. How does a whole community of Overmen interact and actually form a cohesive society? A common rebuttal to this is that Nietzsche simply isn't writing for the masses. He doesn't even want to be understood by most. He's writing for a small elite, the few.
But then why does this self-concerned elite need the reigns of temporal power, which also tend to bind? Can't they do their own thing?
It seems to me it comes out of two things. One, Nietzsche's aversion to asceticism. His ideal can't very well live the life of the fictional ancient philosopher ideal of Appolonius, Porphery's Pythagoras, etc. But then I think Russell is on to something here when he suggests this just seems to be thrown in because leaders = high status = good which gets to the idea that the Overman is a phantasm born out of the imagination of the Last Man.
Maybe this doesn't preclude transformation into the Overman, but it seems to complicate the picture. After all, the works written for the elite, the few, are now probably the very best selling works if philosophy, and arguably have the most cultural influence of any "philosopher," even if not being as influential in philosophy proper.
If Nietzsche's prophecy of the Last Man is accurate, then we are forced to conclude that the Last Men really dig the idea of the Overman.
:up: This is fundemental, and is restated many times in stark terms. That said, I don't think anyone could convince me that Nietzsche's actual work isn't dripping with ressentiment. Hence the thesis that the Last Man is the father/womb of the Overman. It actually makes sense, in that, who could recognize the deleterious effects of resentment more than the Last Man himself?
And maybe this is even a good thing. The Overman might be exactly the God the Last Man needs. For my part though, I find the lack of focus on the tradition of reflexive freedom fatal to the Overman concept. The fifth book of the Gay Science, added later, after the Genealogy, is a good summation of thoughts on the "free spirit" of the future age. But it is very much Lockean freedom from external constraint that is countenanced, not reflexive freedom.
This certainly shows up in Nietzschean fiction. Miura, R. Scott Bakker, Rand the heros all have saint-like self control added to their virtues and the villains all embody an essentially Platonic evil, rather than being resentful sheep.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There are at least two disparate uses of the world post-modernist floating around in our era. The first is a socio-political term referring to practices of consumerism and other aspects of mass culture. The other use has almost nothing to do with this kind of analysis, referring instead to a loosely connected community of philosophical approaches that critique such notions as foundational truth , realism and objectivity, grand narratives of history, etc. It sounds like youre talking about the first use here. As far as your (or Fukuyamas) analysis of Nietzsches ideas, I dont think any useful assessment of his thinking can get off the ground until one deals with the basis of the arguments made within such philosophical approaches as phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, neo-pragmatism, enactivism, new materialism , the later Wittgenstein, deconstruction and social constructionism countering traditional realism. I dont find Fukuyamas thinking to be up to the task of effectively grasping what these philosophers are up to.
I just want to know what John Galt and co. eat and who is cleaning their toilets.
In other words, Rand always struck me as a plebeian attempt to reimagine, reinvent aristocracy, with all its entitlements.
Peterson is talking about both. He, and the movement as a whole, is very hostile to critical theory and critiques of objectivity, even as they also employ these techniques frequently to critique opponents. Others, but not Peterson, tend to embrace grand narratives of history as both a means of building up the concept of "the West," and of slandering their opponents (the parasitic classes destroying the West).
What does that laundry list have to do Fukuyama or anything I've wrote and why is a big list of terms developed decades after Nietzsche was writing the only way to properly engage with his writing? Surely he can be engaged with on his own terms. And since a good deal of Nietzsche corpus focuses on representations and critiques of prior thinkers, surely the accuracy of these claims can be analyzed without appealing to say, Wittgenstein.
I mean, does someone really need to be steeped in New Materialism and 21st century thought to decide if Nietzsche accurately represents or responds to Plato?
This needs to be seen within its historical context. It was a way of self-overcoming. It turns inward and makes its weakness into its strength. Their inwardness led to their power. Rather than impose rule on the world they learned to impose their will on themselves and rule themselves. Nietzsche saw this as a great advancement for mankind.
This overcoming now threatens to be man's undoing.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Nietzsche and Rand had different notions of what it means to be an individual. Rand held to Liberalism's claim of the sovereign individual. Nietzsche thought that only a few are capable of becoming individuals. Rand grounds man on the low value of individual rights. Nietzsche held to the possibility of a higher man. Something achieved not given.
From the introduction to a Hare Krishna book:
There's a pattern for dismissing some potential readers, and it can be found all over the places and genres. Once one has seen a few of examples of it, it starts to get silly. All these exalted, oh so special people. And so many of them, so many!
My favorite is Julius Evola titling his book "Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul."
I find esoterica quite interesting, but this facet of it can make trying to discuss it extremely tedious. "Oh, you don't agree with/love x, well then you absolutely cannot have understood it. It wasn't written for you." Ironic, in the esotericists themselves have a tendency to lambast competitors in stark terms.
This is modern esotercism, you don't really see that in Renaissance/Reformation era stuff. Arguably, a lot of the old obscurantism was just functional , aimed at avoiding censorship, although I think it also leads to interesting writing and opportunities for interpretation "death of the author" and all.
This is obviously not true on the face of it, as evidenced by many broken people who have survived a serious physical injury or disease, or a socio-economical fall.
It seems to me that the famous saying is actually intended as a motto, as a life maxim, in a sense like, "Make every effort to overcome life's hardships and don't allow yourself to be adversely affected by them."
There is an old trend of formulating advice or motivation in the form of statements in the indicative, as opposed to in the imperative or some other irrealis grammatical mood.
It seems to me that overall, Nietzsche (and Rand etc.) are trying to do something similar as Machiavelli did with The Prince, except that unlike Machiavelli, they weren't actually functional parts of the ruling elite, and it shows in their reasoning.
I imagine that the true Übermenschen don't write books about Übermenschen, and don't read them either. It seems to me that for the actual aristoracts, the actual elites, actually making a point of saying the things Nietzsche (and Rand etc.) do would be considered vulgar and unbecoming, even if they, ie. the aristorcrats in fact believed those things and held them close to their hearts.
As I understand it, it is not that they must rule but that they do. Perhaps the quote in context sheds light:
(BGE, 211)
Nietzsche's political philosophy is an inversion of Plato's. Both are concerned with the politics of the soul, and in that sense works of psychology. For both Plato and Nietzsche the question of who is to rule is of central importance. For Plato it was the poets who ruled. For Nietzsche it is Christian Platonism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is this Nietzsche' s thesis? Aren't they two different outcomes?
From a source we might not expect:
Wittgenstein Culture and Value
Quoting baker
Nietzsche was among the first philosophers to critique the long-standing bias within philosophy giving preference to presence over absence, the general over the singular, and most importantly, positive unification over negation. Negation has traditionally been thought of as a lack, an accident, something standing in the way of and opposing itself to the good and the true. But postmodern writers
like Nietzsche see negation as a positive, affirmative power. The influence of this thinking can be seen today in the change of language from the disabled to the differently abled, from normal and abnormal neurology to neurotypical and neuro-atypical, from pathologizing schizophrenia to the affirmative message of the Hearning Voices movement. Oliver Sackss positive accounts of people with Tourettes, autism and other alterations in behavior was influenced by Nietzsche.
He wrote:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What do you suppose are Nietzsches own terms? Isnt that the central question? We never read a philosophy by descending into the pristine purity of their thinking. As Nietzsche understood better than most, our readings of philosophers are perspectival, filtered through our own cultural template. This is why objective history is always history as written by the victors, and Nietzsche was not interested i. doing objective history. What he wanted to do was lift out structures of power relations that are presupposed by any history. In spewing forth my laundry list, I didnt say one has to know these approaches, I said one needs to understand their basis, what ties them together with Nietzsche. Otherwise , one may end up reading Nietzsche through the lens of more traditional philosophy and only trivialize his ideas.
Heres a fair synopsis of Nietzsches "The Use And Abuse Of History"
https://www.thoughtco.com/nietzsches-the-use-and-abuse-of-history-2670323
This has got to be a Western phenomenon, though, because in Eastern philosophy, the distribution seems to be more even. There, some desirable, positive phenomena or traits are defined in terms of negation (e.g. ahimsa 'non-violence'), but also some negative ones (e.g. avijja 'ignorance').
Quoting Joshs
A Buddhist teacher once said that when going to the doctor, one should not say "Doctor, something is wrong with me", but instead, "Doctor, something is right with me", reflecting that in some other cultures, disease and other forms of hardship are considered an ordinary given of life, far more normal than in Western culture.
Lol. The self-importance!
From what I understood, the theory of informal logical fallacies seems to be a rather novel development, and that in the past, what are now considered informal logical fallacies used to be considered valid means in debate.
When we now read, for example, Schopenhauer's Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten, we read it as satire, as examples of how not to engage in discussion and debate, but apparently he actually believed that this was how to go about conversations/debates.
First off, I think Nietzsche is utterly wrong in his assessment, and largely garbage. The idea of an Overman and the idea of some new synthesis based on master morality but without its destructive qualities, is not useful, and again, leads to people like Ayn Rand.
And as you can tell by my handle, I think his inversion of Schopenhauer simply leads to a confusing and manic philosophy of a love of life that I do not see is the case, nor endorse. So you can call me all the names you want, I see what I see in my assessment [I say this as Popeye eating my spinach.. maybe the spinach is the key to the Overman]..
Quoting Vaskane
Great, but since Beyond Good and Evil is ill-defined, it will be reshaped in a sort of "fanfiction" to Nietzsche. Her "Objectivist" philosophy is just one version of it.
Quoting Vaskane
Sounds great for a thesis, but doesn't ring as some truth of anything. I don't need to read Nietzsche to understand the notion of catharsis, and sublimation. Other philosophers like Zapffe, Freud, have gone over this, and less manically and less self-importantly in their writing styles.
Quoting Vaskane
I don't know, this actually seems to be a picture of the alt-right ideas that laid out:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I mean, Ayn Rand's notion of the industrialist and artist actually fits this description so I think it is more evidence that her vision embodies the Overman of Nietzsche- A sort of of master morality, but refined to a point to smooth the edges to make them maximize their capacities.. A life-affirming philosophy, blah blah.
Quoting Fooloso4
I think you are actually just reiterating Rand's characters.. Your descriptions of Nietzsche's higher man, seems pretty much in line with Rand's, not opposed or different than it.
It's ill-defined. The fact that you cannot even define it without looking basically like Ayn Rand's characters proves that it's basically that in drag, or vice versa rather.
Again, you haven't defined it. You gave some example that you fit into a thesis- the Hip Hop artist because he is "overcoming" his circumstances. So anytime someone turns a bad situation into something good, he is a Nietzsche Ubermensch now? Okie dokie. I'm glad we can resolve that now.
I have. He is an obscurantist asshole philosopher that is a hotbed for ill-defined ideas for thesis statements so you can then call me an asshole for not reading him on a philosophy forum. He's like continental philosophy's version of the revered analytic Wittgenstein. Overmined, and worshipped.
Read more Schopenhauer so you can fix your ideas that Nietzsche perverted :wink:
Thank you for this reference. Eco's list of 14 features of ur-fascism seems rather general. But I agree, it confirms my intuitive suspicion that there is something fascist about, say, high EU politics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"Those who can't, teach" comes to mind.
Someone who is serious about their own spiritual (and other) advancement wouldn't make a point of spending their precious time reading or debating opponents and those who are less than fit.
Yes, they are two different outcomes. But the need for the Overman seems to be born out of the condition the Last Man to me.
Fukuyama's only point is that the Last Man prediction seems to have missed something. The Last Men aren't content to be bovine consumers. Global, basic recognition at the End of History collapses into being no better than no recognition at all for them. I would just add that this trend has been increased by the collapse of membership in social institutions and "digital balkanization," since Fukuyama was writing 30 years ago.
The Last Men are, in fact, enraged by their state, and yearn for conflict as a means of transforming themselves. This is ressentiment par excellence. Feelings of inadequacy and emasculation get projected on to a society that is seen as degenerate and oppressive, a tyranny of the weak and feeble minded. Hence, in our modern context, the major preoccupation with "cuckoldry," being an "alpha male" versus a "beta male," or the torrent of "Chad versus Virgin," memes. The idea of the latter is obviously that we should identify with the superior "Chad," and yet clearly the audience is also often supposed to identify with the Virgin to some extent. But the larger point is generally that society gynocentrism, wokism, consumerism, the welfare state, etc are what have caused us to degenerate into the "Virgin."
Is the nu-right largely a misunderstanding of Nietzsche? To some degree yes. While I agree with that Rand seems to essentially buy into the superiority of "aristocratic morality," I don't see Nietzsche as advocating a return to aristocratic morality. That said, it's easy to read him that way, and he certainly IS often read that way.
But my point is merely that it does not seem accidental that the concept of the Overman would become immensely popular with the Last Men. Nietzsche's life itself, has a lot of the same threads at the very least. A sense of being a genius who is nonetheless unappreciated, dissatisfaction with society and mainstream culture/politics, lack of any romantic success, low social standing but also the rights of a citizen and freedom from any heavy handed oppression or hard labor, starvation, etc. Biographically, we could consider the long hikes, plunging into a wilderness that one isn't actually well trained or prepared to deal with, to represent a sort of dissatisfaction with "safety net
society."
This doesn't necessarily undermine Nietzsche's philosophy. Bad people can write good moral philosophy, good logicians can act illogically. In Nietzsche's case, the unfortunate comments on women suggest he fell short of overcoming ressentiment, but he doesn't need to be an Overman for the concept to hold water.
IMO, the solution doesn't actually hold water, but that's another story.
Yet those very movements get cited as the tyranny of the weak over the strong. I don't see a way for Nietszcheans to adjudicate these sorts of disputes. E.g., is feminism Nietzschean because it affirms woman as woman, not as some sort of defective man, or is it the weak using slave morality as a cudgel, affirmative action the chains weighing down someone like Vonnegut's Harrison Bergaron?
This leads to the "no true Nietzschean" phenomena re moral norms.
I find your failure to resonate with narcissists disturbing. :razz: :grin:
With Nietzsche, I can never tell what is merely rhetoric and what is it that he really means. Perhaps it was his intention to make a point of this dichotomy.
With texts like his, I always wonder how come the author published them*, or, if the individual author isn't known, how come they've become published.
For example, why did Robert Greene publish The 48 Laws of Power? It seems contrary to those laws of power to publish them. Similar with the Chinese Art of War or Thirty-Six Stratagems.
How is it that texts praising power, strength, supremacism, cunning get published at all?
The fact that they are published contradicts their content. What gives?
(*Granted, in Nietzsche's case, the publication of his works is convoluted.)
That's a very good point. I didn't mean to portray it as necessarily universal. I wouldn't want to even actually call anyone a "Last Man," as the term is quite derogatory. When speaking of the "Last Men," what I really mean is "the people who are terrified that they are becoming Last Men." This fear is generally accompanied by the belief that most other people, at least in their society, have already succumbed to "Lastmanism." That's what kicks off the drive to struggle.
And I forgot to note in the post above that in recognizing this problem Fukuyama seems to be misreading Hegel. If a contradiction that big truly does exist in society, then it would appear that we actually have not reached the End of History.
The last man is, as the name indicates, is one out of which nothing is born.
From Zarathustra's prologue:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Fukuyama's thesis it that history has come to its end. This stands in stark contrast to Nietzsche's notions of self-overcoming and the eternal return. Whatever his idea of the last man is, it is not Nietzsche's.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We each get to pick our favorite Nietzschean, the contemporary figure we believe best furthers the path of exploration laid out by Nietzsche. My choice is Deleuze. For Deleuze weakness is thinking that binds itself to a fascism of one sort or another, and the strong path is the path of revolutionary thinking, not bound to any telos, but to becoming for its own sake. liberating us from the intolerable and oppressive conventions we gravitate toward and get stuck in. For Deleuze, affirming woman as an entity in her own right is still to remain stuck in a binary that oppresses.
Yes this idea of the "good man" being seen with resentment seems still very Randian as well. People scoff at the individualist trying to build something in the world with their ingenious, and the collectivists (the heard, the slave morality) see them as selfish, when the selfishness is the way for them to express their inner capacities and in the process transform the world. I can see the naive appeal of this, and also have many criticisms and a sort of cringiness to this whole notion.
One main difference I guess is that Rand attaches her notions in a more traditional milieu. Basically these people are just idealizations of the "Great Men" of history.. Where Nietzsche might entertain a Napoleon, she emphasizes industrialists and the like. To me it's just a different mode of the same idea. Nietzsche's can be applied more universally perhaps.. One becomes a manic transformer into a powerful agent "in general", one is applied in a certain economic model.
Interestingly I found this article comparing the two. It is clear this guy is an adherent of Rand, so that's the bias in trying to distance her from Nietzsche, but I think underneath this distinction you can find the comparisons pretty easily:
Quoting Ayn Rand, Nietzsche and the Purposeless Monster
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think I agree with this. Jack London was another writer who sometimes thought of himself as a Nietzschean, but his account was via Herbert Spencer fused to what he called Nietzsche's 'blonde beast'. London's own journey from homelessness to best selling author of muscular fiction he often dramatized as a journey of personal self-transformation (which it was). London was probably more in the Rand mold, although he (ironically) saw himself as a socialist.
Perhaps a step form London to Rand was HL Mencken, who was also a Nietzsche enthusiast:
Nah. He's pretty obscurantist. It's as clear as mud to me, granted I can't read it in its original [s]Klingon[/s], I mean German.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think a lot of people at the turn of the century were influenced by Nietzsche, especially artists, writers, and the like. Quoting Tom Storm
Yep. Rand was an admirer of Mencken, a fellow admirer of Nietzsche, and even wrote to him about it.
Or perhaps the West is engaged in neo-colonialism by trying to foist their "sexual revolution" on to other cultures, undermining gender identities people draw meaning from? :nerd:
The pluralism seems fine to me. The problem is, what happens when people who believe they are Overmen want to reshape society to fit their vision, and don't really much care what other people think given the opposing masses are slavish Last Men, practitioners of slave morality, etc.? It's not like these groups don't already bludgeon each other in the streets.
What stops such a moral system from collapsing into simple egoism or might makes right? We can say it was written for "the few," but that doesn't really resolve the problem, especially not if the higher men must "rule."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Foisting and mandatory reshaping arent good, and not very Nietzschean. When I said that I take Deleuze to be moving further on Nietzsches path, I had in mind notions like this:
Deleuze understood well that one cannot coerce social change. One creates an opening and hopes that others connect with it.
If you're looking for philosophical insight, Fukuyama's book isn't worth reading. The long and short of it is that he believed the American empire constituted peak humanity.
I'm not sure how someone remotely intelligent and well-informed could view the American empire as anything more than the regurgitation of humanity's past mistakes in a new dress. I would sooner view his work as being a deliberate work of propaganda to promote American hegemony as it appeared after the end of the Cold War.
It's honestly so shallow that even reading a critique about it is something I would consider a waste of time.
He was a classical philologist, and studied ancient Greek texts from a young age. Check out his dissertation on Theognis of Megara. What sets him apart is that he actually did have a good and untainted (source texts) understanding of a part of history that was radically different than his own culture, at an ealy age. What that does, is it gives you a perspective outside of your own culture, and a point of reference from where you are able to evaluate the valuations you are given by your culture and upbringing. Lacking this external point of view, you invarialbly just end up regurgitating contemporary valuations, as many philosophers did.
So you are right that he already had his point of view made up before writing his mature works, but he did have to do a real re-evaluation of his values following a religious crisis and his classical studies at a young age, and a bit later after his falling out with Wagner and Schopenhauer... This was the impetus for his entire philosophy, and why he became a philosopher instead of a philologist, a real personal need to re-evaluate the values that were given him at the time.
I believe I said I did not think Nietzsche had a compelling, coherent theory of romantic/familial/Platonic love, not that he never used words rendered as "love," in translation (which you then preceded to post every instance of, regardless of if they had anything to do with the topic at hand.) "Love of fate," is not romantic love for example, just because it has the word "love," in the phrase. The incel rantings about women are the most regrettable thing the man wrote, and do not constitute a coherent theory on love.
This is a strawman. There are certainly significant problems with the core thesis re liberal democracy, but it does not reduce to "America is the greatest and society cannot get better." Rather, the Last Man thesis might suggest that liberal democracies, America included, are deeply defective.
Sure, and that all helped him be creative. It doesn't change the fact that he is a bad historian of the complexities of Jewish and Christian history.
As I pointed out, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Hegel (plus plenty more) can't all be right about the "real" reasons for historical development of Judaism and Christianity. Hegel was also a gifted student and an avid student of the Greeks from an early age. This applies for most of these guys, due to the ubiquity of classical education.
Yet Hegel and Nietzsche (and Marx, etc.) come to radically different conclusions about the origins and psychological underpinnings or Christianity. This is in part because they have been exposed to radically different aspects of the faith. For Nietzsche, the defining exposer seems to be the German Protestant moralism of his era. For Hegel, it's German mysticism, Eckhart and Boehme. As a result, they almost describe different religions despite both being smart and well educated, and indeed, different forms of Christianity, as with sects in other faiths, essentially [I]are[/I] different religions.
What these authors all have in common is that they have explanations of religion that just happen to dovetail exactly with what they want to say re contemporary society, humanity etc. They also do not produce anything like what would be considered good professional history, glossing over millennia of extreme diversity to aid their reductive pronouncements.
My point then, is that Nietzsche is, to some extent, right in his critique of prior thinkers. People know where they want to end up and work backwards from there. This is very obvious in some cases. Early in his career, Saint Augustine is very obviously working to make catholic Christianity fit with Porphery and Plotinus. But this can't be the whole story. Because we also see stuff like Augustine abandoning his project, precisely because his own thought led him to see his project as flawed.
But this insight isn't as useful as it seems, because it turns out to be a version of the genetic fallacy. "X is wrong because its author had ignoble, ulterior motives for developing the argument," is itself a bad argument. Plenty of great philosophers, logicians, and scientists have been motivated by chips on their shoulders, a desire to bolster their faith, personal feuds, etc., but this hasn't precluded their advancements being sound.
My second point, re the Russell quote, is that you can very easily turn this same sort of analysis back on Nietzsche. This is not supposed to be a critique of the content on Nietzsche's philosophy (although I have given some of that elsewhere) but the form. Showing some line of thinking is grounded in resentment doesn't show that it is wrong.
And if it works to psychoanalyze a 2,800 year old religious tradition that has evolved across multiple continents based on scant engagement with its core thinkers, then it's certainly ok to psychoanalyze an individual based on their specific writings, letters, personal papers, and biography, which is what Russell is doing (rather uncharitably) in the quote I provided. I personally don't think this works, it devolves into insults incredibly quickly. And I personally don't find Nietzsche's history of Judaism particularly convincing, in that "slave morality," can be identified in plenty of other cultures, organically developing without Jewish influence, and because pre-Exilic Judaism actually doesn't seem to be a good candidate for the "slave morality" label. It isn't that different in many ways from all other Near Eastern societies.
That's fair. Lots of thinkers have good ideas that nonetheless need future thinkers to make workable. I don't think this gets around the problem in Nietzsche's thinking in isolation though. This is relevant in that, ironically, no philosopher tends to have modern disciples treat their corpus more as a sort of Holy Scripture (maybe Marx is a competitor here).
I personally don't see how coercion employed by the strong/higher man is unNietzschean. He seems to be saying quite the opposite in many passages.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Do you expect the real reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation? And if not, how does one understand and separate the role of cultural bias from objective fact of history? What method do you prefer and which philosopher of history do you think best achieves this?
If one assumes, as I do, that the idea of empirically objective history is incoherent, this does not mean that there arent more and less rigorous ways to do a relativist history. Have you read Foucaults The Order of Things This is a relativist, or as he calls it in the book, an archeological approach to history. He describes three periods of Western history, the Classical, Renaissance and Modern chapters, and analyses each of these in terms of overarching paradigms or worldviews ( he calls these epistemes). These systems of thought encompass all modalities of culture. He focuses on linguistics, economics, biology and the human sciences. The transition from one episteme to another is guided by no logic, except that each episteme is conditioned by what precedes it.
In later Foucault works we come to understand the mechanisms of organization of an episteme via the dissemination of forces of power through societies. His focus is less about overt coercion than a bottom-up reciprocal shaping of values through the way institutions comes to establish their material relations with persons. He was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche in his understanding of the relation between power and knowledge in creating value systems and the institution's that materially express and perpetuate them. It was Nietzsche who allowed Foucualt to get away from the dialectical idealism of Hegel and dialectical materialism of Marx in understanding historical motivations.
Me too. These days my self-overcoming amounts to disrupting my routine of sitting on the couch watching cartoons and eating Cheetos to moving to the recliner watching cartoons and eating potato chips.
No. I'm actually quite a fan of speculative history.
What I am saying is that the method is easy to do poorly, and in some respects Nietzsche does it very poorly indeed. His Plato is almost a gnostic, and it is indeed hard to see why he would have become so influential. But because Nietzsche's claims do depend on the supposed failures of all prior thinkers, it is indeed relevant if past thinkers appear only as shadowy ghosts of themselves or pale strawmen. That and, it's possible to do history without commiting to the genetic fallacy.
And this is ironic since, where I think Nietzsche gets the most right, he doesn't actually differ from Plato very much. When Socrates throws back his cloak and starts spouting divinely inspired dithrayambs in praise of love he seems very Dionysian and life affirming indeed. Overcoming ressentiment, rigid ideologies, cultural biases all in Plato. But I think that Plato [I]also[/I] gets at other things worth overcoming, and has a good argument for why an attitude of love frees one from being externally determined. So the baby gets thrown out with the bath water and then like, half the baby gets recovered, but the claim is that our half baby is totally new, or something like that.
That, and I simply disagree with some conclusions. Socrates is a step up as the tragic hero. A man who is willing to die because he loves what is good in life so much. This is in no way a step down from Achilles, running off to pout because he had to set his rape slave free because he was getting his brethren killed in droves, who then gets his friend killed due to his sulking, and goes on a murder spree to cope. Even on purely aesthetic grounds, Socrates is more compelling, even as a heroic figure (he fights the Spartans without the benefits of invulnerability.)
Quoting Fooloso4
Oy. Your cardiovascular system may not be too thrilled with that routine.
Why do you suppose that Nietzsche's armchair philosophy of "slave morality" (asceticism and the like), is out of ressentiment? Just knowing this fact doesn't mean it's thus the right analysis. It is very idiosyncratic to setting up his own justification.
But either way, his concepts are loosely connected and so becomes up to the participant to make of it what they will.
If you want to provide your explanation of Nietzsche by quoting a few passages and then explaining your ideas on it, go ahead.
If you want to provide academic interpretations of it, and then provide commentary, go ahead.
But, to pretend that his writings are clear and systematic and that anyone reading them will just "get it" by reading them because the language is clear and direct, then that seems false to me. His writings are extremely idiosyncratic and obscurantist. Unlike Schopenhauer, who though lengthy in his prose, was a clear, direct writer and you can always see the plain understanding of his ideas, EVEN in his aphorisms which were meant to be short but convey some profound ideas.
So, if you would like to indicate what you (or another academic you think is accurate) got about Nietzsche's ideas, go ahead. I know that Hubert Dreyfus is a good place to start. There are others that are also a bit more accessible. But, this is one of those cases where "reading the text" doesn't necessarily get you that much closer to a more direct understanding of the author's ideas without prefacing it with some secondary literature.
What I do get from Nietzsche, I don't like, and I feel leads to even worse philosophies. Either they are trivially true, framed better by other philosophers, and are too open for any interpretation. Some think these are strengths, but I see it as tiresome and useless.
Cursory list of Nietzsche's ideas:
Will to Power:
Clearly taken from earlier ideas of Will, mainly from Schopenhauer, but instead of "will-to-live" it is "will-to-power". Will to power is more amorphous and to me, is just about individual creating their own values and overcoming challenges, embracing life etc. It's basically positive praise of the individual to become his own person.. This was treated better in an existential way by Camus giving more concrete examples of the actor and such, and Maslow with his idea of self-actualization. Both of which I think don't contend with the real problems Schopenhauer already discussed and defeated many years earlier.
Ubermensch:
Someone who is able to transcend the conventional morality and live life to its fullest. Every cocaine addled world-traveler thinks they're an ubermensch. Every punk rock drunk howling at the moon thinks he's an ubermensch. Every hipster doofus leading a bohemian lifestyle thinks he's an ubermensch. Every Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk thinks he's an ubermensch. Every dictator and cult of personality thinks he's an ubermensch. In a descriptive sense, it can describe a lot of meglomaniacal thinking. In a normative sense, it is narcissistic duschbaggery.
Eternal Reoccurrence:
Again, Schopenhauer dealt with these issues in a more nuanced and informative way. This can easily be co-opted by fitness instructors and company gurus.. Rand types actually, who want to make sure that everyone is living the best moment they can over and over, embracing the "suck". Nope, the suck just sucks, and you are not a pussy for acknowledging this. It is just life. It's juvenile to think that at every moment one is calculating the best way to live that. Why? Because if you lived to the extreme at all moments, you end up burning out, becoming homeless, dying, suffering more. But then if you claim that it requires structure as well, it just starts looking like a Randian industrialist, artist, inventor, and the like. You become exactly sublimating in the way that is conducive to society. Besides which Freud got to these ideas better with his ideas of the Id, Ego, and Superego. You can't just live as an Id.
Apollonian and Dionysian:
Again, this is better laid out by Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego. Also, Schopenhauer's theory of aesthetics is more in depth, exploring the idea of how the artist is bringing out the forms of the object, and how this temporarily stops one's will. Even if you don't agree with him, it is more explanatory.
"Resentment (in French) is the enduring psychological state of resentment". Interesting.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Said one skeptic about another. Both must be read skeptically, and this in the original Greek sense of skeptis. In light of their irony and esotericism.
I confess to being an ignoramus when it comes to Classical history, as well as Greek philosophy. I always skip past Nietzsches writings on the Greeks, so Ill take your word for it that his account doesnt donthat period justice.
What Im interested in is not whether Nietzsche gets the content of historical events right, however one wants to define that, but, as you put it, the formal structure of historical change. Speculative history is grounded in one kind of formal account. Nietzsches formal approach constitutes a critique of speculative dialectics, leading to genealogical forms of analysis, like those of Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. I suppose my question would be why you prefer speculative dialectics over this alternative path.
Quoting Vaskane
My favorite section of Anti-Oedipus:
Feh! What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
I need to rest up now. And I need to do something about the orange dust on my keyboard. But that can wait. I just don't seem to have the energy now.
Yes, as with worship of other philosophers, I am not debating Nietzsche on his own terms, because I don't agree with his terms.
That's like saying, "Debate Donald Trump using only arguments that Donald Trump would use". Of course, that is a bad example because he has no actual beliefs other than narcissism, but you get my point.
Quoting Vaskane
Yet you haven't said so. Don't worry when you flesh out your "radically different version based on the REAL Nietzsche" I will just show how it is indeed what I described. But go ahead, shit or get off the pot. Go read Schopenhauer then. I can say to go read anyone.
Quoting Vaskane
Same with this.. Go tell me what the REAL Nietzschean expert knows about this idea, and then I will probably just see that it is indeed the same as I characterized. There is a difference between KNOWING something and then EVALUATING that something. A lot of posters on this forum think that simply KNOWING what someone said confers that one must ACCEPT THE TRUTH of what is said. That is not the case.
Quoting Vaskane
I don't confer any Truth (capital letter T) to Freud, I only see that his general ideas are more on the mark than Nietzsche's notions.
You can make the following moves.. ]
Nietzsche is all ID I claim..
You can say
No he isn't! He believes in TEMPERED enthusiasm for life.
I say:
Then he is an Ayn Rand
You say NO He's not, he believes in a more generalized overcoming to be an ubermensch etc. etc.
It's all the same thing in circles.
Be careful! But also, you should write a book called "Nietzsche on Nietzsche" and have Nietzsche explain himself to himself.
Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face.
Classic
What philosopher before Deleuze ever began a work this way:
I would say that it is more than a thought experiment. The eternal return is a riddle. One key to reading that riddle the problem of creation. If all is eternal return then there can be no creation, but above all Zarathustra wants to create are creators. This is why the child is an essential part of the metamorphosis of the spirit:
There are some passages that seem to affirm the eternal return and others that seem to deny it.
If on the mark means more objective, then that gets to the heart of the difference between Freud and Nietzsche.
As Daniel Berthold puts it:
Isn't that almost everybody? :grin:
Quoting schopenhauer1
What about being a sexy, most intelligent, exuberant, successful orange billionaire?
Quoting Vaskane
I was not poking you in fact I haven't really followed the thread. I was poking fun at a horrible translation practice. Derrida's différance is another one, but since it is not a proper term of the French language it does not require translation.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think there are many useful readings of Nietzsche, but as is the case with any notable philosopher, these often conflict strongly with each other. The existentialist readers of Nietzsche seem to have nothing in common with his postmodernist interpreters. I say choose the reading you find the most daring and interesting.
Given your background in the classics, I recommend you swap these for figs and dates. The cartoons are less problematic, Looney Tunes and Rocky and Bullwinkle, say, might well pass for philosophy in some parts.
I don't give a fig about dates. I do eat Froot Loops though. My education in philosophy is solely through cartoons, but I don't limit myself to the classics such as Looney Tunes and Rocky and Bullwinkle.
But given the eternal return all those outcomes have played out a countless number of times.
And given the eternal return there is nothing new in the revaluation of values. All have occurred countless times before. All that elevates man will in time drag him down. All values are ephemeral, transitory, changing. All are of equal value so why the "sacred yes' to these and not others when in time the sacred yes must become a sacred no?
All are not of equal value during the period of time when one is working ones way through a particular value system. One doesnt live in all values, any more that one lives within all ecological systems, but in one particular way of life at any given time. Eventually, that way of life will come to seem intolerably repressive, and the value system that replaces it will at the same time reject it and be conditioned by it.
I agree.
From The Three Metamorphoses.
I think part of the answer to the riddle or enigma of the eternal return is "the moment", the "gateway", the "abyss". Whatever was and will be we stand at the moment of the abyss. We have limited knowledge of what was and limited or no knowledge of what will be. Here, now, we must decide, we must act, we must move toward what will be. For us now it is all new.
Describing it as a thought experiment seems too detached. It is without the struggle:
I think our disagreement is mostly a matter of terminology. As I understand it, a thought experiment is hypothetical. Something that can be entertained while one sits comfortably in his armchair. Your quote is from aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, "The Heaviest Burden". It begins:
Although this is a hypothetical: "what if ...", what the demon says is not posed as a hypothetical, but as something existential. Something that speaks into your loneliest loneliness. It is the thought that acquires power over you, the thought that transforms you. I do not think a thought experiment has this power. We think about if from a safe distance. I don't think as a hypothetical it has this power over us.
Well, I think you are trying to show difference in form, and I'm just trying to show some similar ideas that were tackled better with Freud's ID, Ego, Superego.. I see these all as basically folk psychology, but can be useful. Nietzsche's transformative Apollonian is kind of ID-like. But ID on its own burns out. It is just instinctual drive for pleasure. It is tempered by society's expectation's in development, (Superego), until one forms a sense of balance between one's own interests, and that of living in a society (Ego).
Anything that tempers Nietzsche just starts looking technocratic and I don't think a Nietzschean would want that. So I brought up throw away burnout culture.. Punks, traveling with all that money you have accumulated, living on the road like a glorified Jack Kerouac.. I mean hell, RV culture for retired folk might be considered Nietzschean then.. But I don't think it's that either.. Pursuing your interests to the best of your ability was better stated within Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs anyways. So I don't know what to make of Nietzsche except as a sort of jumping off point for other people who made similar articulations but more systematically. I don't know what a systematic Nietzschean philosophy looks like since it's a hodgepodge of ideas that are roughly related, and have much to do with pursuing one's interests aggressively and not being meek.
Ok so let's compare here:
schopenhauer1 said:
Nope, the suck just sucks, and you are not a pussy for acknowledging this. It is just life. It's juvenile to think that at every moment one is calculating the best way to live that. Why? Because if you lived to the extreme at all moments, you end up burning out, becoming homeless, dying, suffering more. But then if you claim that it requires structure as well, it just starts looking like a Randian industrialist, artist, inventor, and the like. You become exactly sublimating in the way that is conducive to society. Besides which Freud got to these ideas better with his ideas of the Id, Ego, and Superego. You can't just live as an Id.
You quoted Nietzsche saying:
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: "You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: "Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favourably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?
I don't see how that diverges much from my interpretation. Again, he is pretty abstract here and up for interpretation. I take him as meaning that we should live a life where we would say "yes!" to life over and over.. Sometimes you have to wait at the post office (aka Satan's asshole) for hours, or visit someone you dearly love in a hospital, or deal with terrible tragedies, and these are not things one would want over and over again.
And then the next move is to say "NO You fool!! HE means that you must EMBRACE the SUCK!"
Well, suck just sucks.
Take a look at these! :snicker:
Quoting schopenhauer1
That cartoon is funny. But theres a reason its a cartoon. It collects all the misguided cliches about Nietzsche, i.e. that hes just promulgating a self-aggrandizing form of existentialism, that hes all about the supremacy of the autonomously willing subject, that he replaces God with Man. One of the many issues that needs to be addressed is Nietzsches split with Schopenhauer over the unity of the Will. For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasnt advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we cant predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative.
It is an interesting and affirmative but incomplete perspective on the implications of the theory of a will to power. There is a need to clarify what kind of ethics can be conceived beyond the Nietzschean fictions of the world comprised of precarious objective truths, illusory identities, and morally acting subjects. For Habermas, Nietzsche has become a founder of the aesthetic Dionysian program based on self-dissolving and self-oblivion: What Nietzsche calls the aesthetic phenomenon is disclosed in the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from everyday conventions of perceiving and acting. Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open. (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p 93). How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion?
I wonder what that looks like outside of a paragraph - how does one do this in life?
Quoting Number2018
Well, I dont think following Habermass Kantian modernist path is the answer.
Then what is the answer?
If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace moral or empirical notions of truth? It seems like we have some capacity for truth and self-determination or we don't, and if we don't, then books about self-overcoming are useless. And why the focus on being controlled by bad ideas?
It always seemed to me that Nietzsche's fatalism was more about attitude, and left plenty of room for self-determination. Maybe "self-actualization" is the wrong term, but I always took him as advocating for something at least similar.
As for his fatalism:
And I'm inclined to agree with Nietzsche in a lot of this. But the funny thing is that, pace Nietzsche and Solomon's article, there is a lot of this in Patristic thought (e.g., Saint Augustine's view of our status as pilgrims in the "earthly city.").
Maybe that's the part I dislike most about Nietzsche, the tendency to misrepresent and heap scorn on people only to recapitulate their positions. Aside from being an aesthetic problem, it leads to missing some important things. For instance, it seems obvious that, aside from different people having differing talents for self-control and discipline, that these can also be developed, and to some degree, taught. They can also be fostered or frustrated by the social environment.
This has relevance for Nietzsche's take on asceticism. I think he has some brilliant insights on the ways in which people dominate themselves in self-destructive ways to give themself a sense of control, to be tyrants over their corner of the universe. However, this is not true of all asceticism. The word itself comes from the routines of athletes, and where it is employed by thinkers like Saint John of the Cross, it serves a similar practical purpose vis-a-vis our meta talents. Such asceticism enhances our ability to "become who we are," (as well as a higher mystical purpose).
Plenty of philosophers have held that the self/person is a disordered, composite entity. This is key to Plato's anthropology. And yet we do have this limited, constrained capacity for self-direction. Where does this come from?
I tend to agree with Plato that rationality is the place to look. Nietzsche has a point that there is a problem with the tyranny of the intellect, a position he foists onto the Platonic/Christian tradition. But the actual tradition has both rationality and empathy/the aesthetic sense harmonizing the disordered self. I find this view compelling.
Plus, the entire idea of philosophy, particularly existentialism, as well as therapy, sort of falls apart if the intellect can't do anything to harmonize the person. If that was true, doing such philosophy would be like trying to reform a group of people by talking to someone none of them pay any attention to. Implicit in the act of writing this sort of stuff itself is a sort of concession to the idea that reason plays a crucial role in "becoming who we will be."
The other problem is when this fatalism is applied to the social sphere. It is very true that we have limited control over our environment. Yet, in the aggregate, institutions possess an emergent capability to have immense influence on the environment, and through that influence, individual character. The focus on the immutability of character for the individual, aside from being overblown in Nietzsche IMO, can become downright noxious when applied to the social sphere and towards people groups. E.g., Richard Hanania's white supremacism, which would be noxious even if he didn't apply his philosophy along racial lines.
And, IMO, a moral philosophy needs to translate up to the social sphere.
Well done. Plenty to think about.
Whether Heidegger was right or wrong to describe Nietzsche as producing the last metaphysic is a question here. Is the ground of personal being wrestled with here or are conditions not so easy to approach?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We already know we colloquially use and understand notions like decision, choice and will in different ways according for different philosophies. Cartesian desert-based approaches , which are assumed to arise from the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible subject, are harsher and more blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control. The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.
This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus. Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order .If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.
Whereas Pereboom and Nussbaum argue that moral blame is irrational', postmodern approaches, defined in very broad terms, don't view blame in terms of a rational/irrational binary but rather in terms of pragmatic usefulness determined in relation to contextually changing inter-subjective practices.
Gergens postmodernist constructionism argues:
Enactivist writers such as Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela emphasize the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.
It should be noted that In postmodernist accounts like that of Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze, a personal point of view or perspective isnt eliminated from the participation in a social community. But in effect, this point of view is pre-personal, not the possession of a substance we call the self or the ego or the soul.
Nietzsche writes;
We can say that someone chooses or wills, and mean that what they do is not simply a carbon copy of a pre-established social norm. But it also does not mean that choice and decision draw from an innner mental space that just sits there to be ultized. When we intend to mean something , to choose, we always mean something slightly other than what we intended. What we call volition is this unpredictability within the structure of choice. We are always slightly surprised by what we find ourselves willing.
So there is a loose internal coherence to volition, but it is not the rationality of propositional logic. Rather, it is a certain inferential compatibility between one moment of experience to the next that provides the glue of personal unity.
Robert Solomon was an existentialist philosopher, and read Nietzsche through that lens. Thats fine , but his perspective has little to do with the Nietzsche I am discussing. Im not saying Solomon is wrong, only that his work wont provide any tools for dealing with the Nietzsche of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, which is the one I am representing. Solomon wants Nietzsche to be a philosopher of personal responsibility, like Sartre, Kierkegaard and other existentialists Solomon champions. But postmodern interpreters of Nietzsche argue this is precisely what Nietzsches notion of personhood critiques. More important than which interpretation is right is which reading is more promising from a psychological and ethical point of view.
Nietzsche's quotes are from BGE 17. On first reading it may seem that he is denying that there is an "I" or individual. He is not. What he is denying is an interpretation of what that is.
This is easier to understand if we look an earlier section:
(BGE, 12)
But if we stop there we will not understand him. He continues:
(BGE 12)
What he is rejecting is the notion of a thinking substance. The soul is not something we have. In his refinement of the soul-hypothesis Nietzsche posits a soul of subjective multiplicity. This solves the problem of the seeming mystery of a thought that comes when it wishes rather than when I wish. It is not that the thought has some kind of independent existence and comes to me from elsewhere, but simply that there is not something within me, an I or ego or little one that is the agent of my thoughts. This is not a denial of agency, it is a denial of something within me, some substance or soul-atom that is the agent.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, the self is a community of competing drives, and
they are loosely united by one overarching drive or will to power, that dominates at any given time. A thinking substance must go the way of all substantive things. Agency organizes particulars according to relational patterns whose origins and purposes it does not have mastery over in the sense of the carrying through ofna prior self-knowing.
Thanks. I'm not sure I really understand the question, maybe because I'm not super familiar with Heidegger.
In general, I think pronouncements about the "end of metaphysics," have always been a bit much. We had a period in the 20th century where it was popular to embrace the death of metaphysics, itself a position that made many metaphysical assertions, but as the generation that bought into the "death of metaphysics," and the "linguistic turn," retires, it sort of seems like we are in the beginnings of a "ontological turn," where metaphysics is embraced again.
What Heidegger meant was that Nietzsche was the last to follow in Descartes s footsteps in treating the world as picture , as objects represented by and placed in front of a subject. Any philosophy which uses concepts like paradigm, worldview , point of view or perspective is, in Heideggers thinking, a metaphysics of world as picture.
I'm seeing more clealy where the :100: :smile: came from. :wink:
Quoting Joshs
Habermas insists that his theory breaks with Kantian philosophy of the subject. And, if we leave aside Habermass insistence on the primacy of implicit rationality, solidarity, and consensus, we should admit that he could successfully advance our understanding of contemporary social realities. In his conceptual framework, lifeworld has become an inexplicable and resourceful background and shared horizon of social agents; it is the store of knowledge and the source of symbolically mediated legitimate orders regulating a field of interpersonal relationships. Personality serves as a term for art for acquired competencies and renders subject capable of speech and action, to participate in processes of mutual understanding in each given context and to maintain his own identity in the shifting contexts of interaction. Individuals and groups are members of a lifeworld only in a metaphorical sense (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p 343). This conceptualization of the self is quite close to Deleuze and Guattaris apprehension of a conscious individual as an assemblage of the mechanical, bodily, affective, perceptive, and cognitive capacities embedded within the socio-technical terrain. The shifting contexts of interaction animate intersubjective events of communicative actions so that social actors exercise their cognitive, normative, and personal faculties. Further, each act of communicative practice sustains the universal structures of the lifeworld and the concrete forms of life. While the reproduction of lifeworld has become less and less guaranteed by traditional and customary means, highly abstract ego-identities condition the risk-filled direction of the selfs identification. (p 345)
Quoting Joshs
This Nietzschean insight has undoubtedly determined some aspects of postmodernist thought.
Thus, in 'Difference and Repetition', Deleuze completely follows Nietzsche: What the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself The I which is fractured and the self which is divided find a common descendant in the man without name, without qualities, without self or I (D&R, p 90). Yet, Deleuze also insists that in fact and principle the drives and impulses comprising the self are not simply fractured but are always assembled or arranged. Clarifying the nature of this synthesis has always been the primary task for Nietzsche and his followers. The Genealogy of Morality can be read as the inquiry into the conditions of
moral ranking of impulses so that the mechanisms of morality maintain the integrity of self. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari have offered the different theory of self, but, later, Deleuze
admitted the need to further develop the notion of an assemblage of non-personal individuations.
Identity politics affirms that there are highly conditioned and intensified processes of autonomous will formation. The self is an assemblage of multi-levelled societal and individualizing processes and components.
Quoting Number2018
If we leave aside his focus on rational communication and consensus, arent we ignoring the central features of his philosophical outlook? It seems to me that Habermass notion of communicative action is anathema to Deleuze.
Which text are you quoting?
The Age of the World Picture. You can find it in The Question of Technology.
Surely whether some reading is promising or not is relative to the psychological, social, ethical, economical context of each particular reading, no? So we're stuck in relativity. Or do you propose a way around it or out of it?
Quoting Joshs
In other words, the notion of "Buddha nature". The notion of "Buddha nature" is not universally Buddhist, though. Early Buddhism and Theravada reject it.
It's not at all difficult to understand the co-determination of subject and world, the interconnectedness, the mutuality. But it doesn't have the rosy implications Varela and so many Western Buddhists think it has. It's not only the pleasant, warm "interbeing" of Thich Nhat Hanh. It's also the ugly inter-eating that goes on at all times and all levels. Presuming to have empathy, compassion, or benevolence for those one eats is perverse.
Agreed recently, more broadly, albeit tangentially , recently read an anecdote about whether phenomenology was more determinative, in regard to reduction of variables blocking smooth transitions, that the question of who was of more consequence in that realm, William James or Husserl?
The uncertainty is formidable, however recent searc of correspondence discovered that James was less awed by Husserl then the other way around, even against Sartres opinion to the contrary, who attended Husserls lectures .
Is it really possible to understand someone from their perspective and be free of one's own interpretative values and frameworks? How would one go about that?