The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Nietzsche was a smart cookie
bosley
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Just thinking a lot about a particular passage lately;
"In the end it must be as it is and has always been; great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare."
Food for thought. He really has a way of bringing things into sharp focus.
"In the end it must be as it is and has always been; great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare."
Food for thought. He really has a way of bringing things into sharp focus.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE SIG
bosley on
0
Posts
Nietzsche is dead. - God
This made me chuckle
so who was there to take god's quote and why the hell didn't he make any others? douche.
My apologies. This thread was built around a passing thought. I'll keep this in mind in the future. And no, it's not ironic. and no, I'm not talking about the economy.
Sorry, I guess, for failing to categorize this thread correctly.
Where are you taking this passage from? Which work?
Part of Man Alone with Himself
I read it as things never change, with some stereotyping examples thrown in to look profound.
clever
which is why you will write such good books.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Wow. I thoroughly enjoyed that, I want you to know.
I would be up for a Neitzsche thread though.
What do you guys think? Is he a crackpot? Is there something to the master and slave morality? Should we all live as masters do?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche is a philosopher's philosopher, he's fucking brilliant, and I absolutely hate how people take him out of context. I've been making my way slowly through his stuff (Beyond Good and Evil, Geneaology of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, etc) and I've come to the conclusion that his attack on metaphysics (especially "On the Prejudice of Philosophers" in Beyond Good and Evil) is bloody brilliant, as his denunciation of positivism. I've already read bits of Kauffman's commentaries on him, and I really do agree with Kauffman - you can't simply read one work, or one aphorism without reading the rest of them, or else you will most likely fixate on things which he doesn't actually hold to be true.
I'm really of the opinion that people should have to read Plato and Kant before they are ever allow near Nietzsche.
what is this from?
it was on PvP too.
I did find it very interesting that Obama was very interested. Yesterday at a little indie bookstore in the LES, they had a prominent face out of books that Obama claims to have profoundly influenced him from the year 1980-1988. Nietzche was the most represented author.
Unfortunately, I can't go too deep into this, I'm at work, but I absolutely believe in the master/slave morality. There are definetely some strong paralells between Nietzsche and Plato ("some" being the operative word).
It's not really a "morality."
is this a serious post
No, it really is. The morality presented in Beyond Good and Evil and the Geneaology of Morals is one which is an outgrowth of his metaphysic, which is ultimately one that rejects traditional metaphysical notions such as causality, sets, concepts, and objects. Nietzsche posits that everything is change, it is flux, and that philosophy attempts through varying degrees to arrest this flux, to stop it and make sense of it - through the notion of objects, through concepts, sets, even language itself - are all attempts to create a paradigma (as Plato used) which is easily understandable.
Traditional metaphysics, according to Nietzsche, does one of two things: it either rejects the reality of the flux, such as the Platonists (theory of the forms) or the Kantians (phenomenal/noumenal), or it prostrates itself at the altar of empirical science, like the positivists. He calls what the positivists do a "bric-a-brac" - they construct a metaphysics without doing metaphysics, and it leaves us in a worse position than if we were all simply Platonists, which, while he viciously attacks, says outright in Beyond Good and Evil that he prefers to the positivists. Both of these positions, though, are used by philosophers or the positivists as mechanisms of control (which is where, I'm sure, Foucalt gets most of his stuff on power from), to reject or misrepresent the world as it really is, that being change.
The morality that he develops is one that posits the existence of those who do not need concepts and causality and traditional metaphysics or science to deal with the flux and constant chaos of existence, and those who do. The "noble" are those who can deal, while everyone else would constitute the herd. Philosophers are members of the herd, who represent themselves to be of the noble, and they beat all the herd members over the head with conventional morality, another mechanism of control which is used to make the herd, through their morality, the strong. Simply put, what conventional morality does is convince the noble and strong - those who can deal with the flux of existence - that they are wrong for being noble and strong, and that they should endeavour to be more like the herd. This is what Nietzsche develops in the Geneaology of Morals, where he uses philology to make the point that over time, the concepts used in morality today changed, at some point, from veneration of "strength" (such as it is) to a celebration of weakness, cowardice, and limits.
In the Gorgias, one of the middle Platonic dialogues, Socrates debates three people successively, Polus, Gorgias, and finally Kallikles. The debate between Socrates and Kallikles is perhaps the most interesting Plato ever wrote, but basically, we can view Socrates as the one offering a case for conventional morality, whereas Kallikles is one who is attempting to defend those who are strong as being good - in the end, to his service, Plato doesn't cop out and simply declare that conventional ethics are good, but he ends up in a really interesting place, where Socrates' victory in the debate is really quite dubious (something which doesn't happen very often). This is, essentially, Nietzsche's project - he is acting as Kallikles, to put forward the notion that strength is not bad or wrong, and that it is weakness, not strength, which is the issue. Plato, as a proponent of conventional morality, and Christianity, as watered down Platonism for the masses, is Nietzsche's prime target for his critique of morality.
Both Plato and Christ (or, I guess, Paul and Augustine) create moralities which denigrate the noble and make it so traditional metaphysics can reject the basic sense truth of our existence (change).
There's so much more to talk about, but I think if I go on, I'll start to get scattered, and while I admire Nietzsche's writing style, I don't want to replicate it.
No more than Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology, or anything else you'd learn about in an ethics class I guess. I mean, unless you explain how it's not a morality, and contrast it with one that is a morality I don't see how you can claim this.
Perhaps the master morality is closer in form or style to an ethics of virtue, concerned more with the character of an individual than something like Utilitarianism.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Yes. This is what MacIntyre was doing in After Virtue - Nietzsche's attack has left conventional morality dead. The only two alternatives we have are Nietzsche's conception of morality, or Aristotle's (which are quite similar); the only choice we have is: do we want an ethics that approximates conventional morality (Aristotle) or one which obliterates it (Nietzsche)?
I didn't know he was into video games.
That's one cool motherfucker.