What are your thoughts on Nietzsche?

[1otherS]

Hard to say really: you start with watching Teletubbies, you end up here... duking it out with the 'geniuses'.
BTW Have we gotten to the bottom of this?

[Unidian]

I could go either way. Nietzsche is interesting and provocative, but his Ubermensch mentality is at the bottom of a lot of nonsense.

Nietzsche is worth reading, but I find that people who take him too seriously invariably become assholes.

[Dan Rowden]

I haven't met many people who have a half decent understanding of him.

[Ataraxia]

I haven't met many people who have a half decent understanding of him.

Everyone thinks they know the "real Neitzsche",Universities are full of them.That readers can project some of their own beliefs upon some of his positions is probably one of his great allures.

"What Nietzsche Really said"--Robert Solomon, is a pretty good companion for people starting out with him.

[Unidian]

Remember that one guy? I forgot his name, but he was always preaching social Darwinism and throwing Nietzsche's name around.

I've seen too much of that to trust Nietzsche fans, as a rule. I realize that says little about the value of Nietzsche himself, though.

[Ataraxia]

Yeah,there's something for everyone with Nietzsche,from fascist n00b to enlightened sage.

This is one of my favourite passages.I don't know how anyone could read him anything other than positive of spirit; life affirming.


Human,all too Human

292

Onwards. And so onwards along the path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence! However you may be, be your own source of experience! Throw off your discontent about your nature; forgive yourself your own self, for you have in it a ladder with a hundred rungs, on which you can climb to knowledge. The age into which you feel yourself thrown with sorrow calls you blessed because of this stroke of fortune; it calls to you so that you may share in experiences that men of a later time will perhaps have to forego. Do not disdain having once been religious; investigate thoroughly how you once had a genuine access to art. Do not these very experiences help you to pursue with greater understanding enormous stretches of earlier humanity? Have not many of the most splendid fruits of older culture grown up on that very ground that sometimes displeases you, on the ground of impure thinking? One must have loved religion and art like one's mother or wet-nurse-otherwise one cannot become wise. But one must be able to look beyond them, outgrow them; if one stays under their spell, one does not understand them. Likewise, you must be familiar with history and the delicate game with the two scales: "on the one hand-on the other hand." Stroll backwards, treading in the footprints in which humanity made its great and sorrowful passage through the desert of the past; then you have been instructed most surely about the places where all later humanity cannot or may not go again. And by wanting with all your strength to detect in advance how the knot of the future will be tied, your own life takes on the value of a tool and means to knowledge. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through-attempts, false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your love and your hope-into your goal, with nothing left over: you are to become an inevitable chain of culture-rings, and on the basis of this inevitability, to deduce the inevitable course of culture in general. When your sight has become good enough to see the bottom in the dark well of your being and knowing, you may also see in its mirror the distant constellations of future cultures. Do you think this kind of life with this kind of goal is too arduous, too bereft of all comforts? Then you have not yet learned that no honey is sweeter than that of knowledge, and that the hanging clouds of sadness must serve you as an udder, from which you will squeeze the milk to refresh yourself. Only when you are older will you perceive properly how you listened to the voice of nature, that nature which rules the whole world through pleasure. The same life that comes to a peak in old age also comes to a peak in wisdom, in that gentle sunshine of continual spiritual joyfulness; you encounter both old age and wisdom on one ridge of life-that is how nature wanted it. Then it is time, and no cause for anger that the fog of death is approaching. Towards the light-your last movement; a joyful shout of knowledge-your last sound.

[1otherS]

I haven't met many people who have a half decent understanding of him.

1otherS
What's the steppingstone to understanding him correctly?

[Dan Rowden]

To be candid, it requires a decent measure of personal wisdom. Without that there's not much hope.

[DivineIntercourse]

No wonder people fail to understand that which is I as in me minus the you.

[1otherS]

To be candid, it requires a decent measure of personal wisdom. Without that there's not much hope.

Is this wisdom innate or can it be fostered?

[Dan Rowden]

Wisdom is fostered. There's no such thing as innate wisdom.

[1otherS]

That's good to know, Dan.

[Alex Jacob]

Uniden wrote:

"Remember that one guy? I forgot his name, but he was always preaching social Darwinism and throwing Nietzsche's name around."

That was Neil, I think. A young man with no real background in philosophy who drank the dangerous Nietzschean potion and, as so many before him, proposed a sort of Nazism; an apology of the worst of the worst of human possibilities.

Dan writes:

"I haven't met many people who have a half decent understanding of him. [...] To be candid, it requires a decent measure of personal wisdom. Without that there's not much hope."

The problem with this is that, though it may be true, he who says it might have failed to understand some significant portions of 'what Nietzsche meant'. Anyone who 'claims' Nietzsche, who claims to 'understand' him, to be able to represent the 'true Nietzsche', seems to me to reveal their own foolishness. All of the GF formulations are like 'revealed doctrines' and are chock-full of conclusions piled upon conclusions, but they often appear partial, not fully rounded. Boyish and adolescent as I am fond of saying.

But one can overcome that...

If Dan and David are two creatures who 'understand' Nietzsche, who have correctly interpreted him, and who are 'wise' as a result, I say 'God help us all'.

[Carl G]

I want my time back. I want to go out into the desert and fast, and lash myself with a hawthorn whip. I hereby repent for the hours I have spent reading any and all of Alex's posts that I have had the weakness to look upon, and to worm my way through. I want to fathom the reasons why, why I would have done this, and still do this, with life so precious and with time so fleeting. I tell myself should have learned early on, I should have become wiser, I should have developed will. But no, I have kept going back looking for something, something which is not there, something which is never there. Now, Lord, please drill it into me. Have mercy on my poor wretched soul. Have mercy.

[1otherS]

Uniden wrote:

"Remember that one guy? I forgot his name, but he was always preaching social Darwinism and throwing Nietzsche's name around."

That was Neil, I think. A young man with no real background in philosophy who drank the dangerous Nietzschean potion and, as so many before him, proposed a sort of Nazism; an apology of the worst of the worst of human possibilities.

Dan writes:

"I haven't met many people who have a half decent understanding of him. [...] To be candid, it requires a decent measure of personal wisdom. Without that there's not much hope."

The problem with this is that, though it may be true, he who says it might have failed to understand some significant portions of 'what Nietzsche meant'. Anyone who 'claims' Nietzsche, who claims to 'understand' him, to be able to represent the 'true Nietzsche', seems to me to reveal their own foolishness. All of the GF formulations are like 'revealed doctrines' and are chock-full of conclusions piled upon conclusions, but they often appear partial, not fully rounded. Boyish and adolescent as I am fond of saying.

But one can overcome that...

If Dan and David are two creatures who 'understand' Nietzsche, who have correctly interpreted him, and who are 'wise' as a result, I say 'God help us all'.

1otherS
"There's always more to learn" -Orson Scott Card

[Dan Rowden]

All of the GF formulations are like 'revealed doctrines' and are chock-full of conclusions piled upon conclusions, but they often appear partial, not fully rounded. Boyish and adolescent as I am fond of saying.

You experience these formulations this way precisely because that's your standard filter. It has nothing to do with us and everything to do with you. When and if you grow up, you'll understand.

[dysfunctionalgenius]

He went mad!

[Dan Rowden]

So? Do you know the reason for his collapse?

[dysfunctionalgenius]

Syphillis not proven! Though he might have been brilliant i think he suffered from conflicting issues in regards to his religious upbringing and the hope that he could somehow work out the meaning of life and maybe help people, BUT he failed to reach the winning post.

I am not brilliant and i do have problems but i also believe that a brilliant person in the complete sense is someone who goes six feet under in a calm and greatful manner either wise all intellectual brilliance is futile

[Ataraxia]

It could've been a number of things. Syphillis, change in brain chemistry, overstressed with the concepts he was dealing with, or a combination of all those. He was in a lot of pain and didn't sleep much as well.

I don't see that it has much relevance to his body of work, personally.

[dysfunctionalgenius]

Isnt his body of work a reflection and the creation of his torment and vice versa, i dont think you can seperate the two.

I do not know much about his work so could you please tell me what positive effect he's had on society, say as apposed to Buddha or Da Vinci?

[Ataraxia]

Well in my view he rewrote the book (at least in the West) on how people could think about the world.

It would probably be better if you investigated that for yourself, however. You don't really need him to be sold to you, do you?

[dysfunctionalgenius]

Thanks