CBC Radio Ideas program on Nietzsche and his life (54m):
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Thanks for that link, it has filled my lunch hour with much mirth.
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And if he had thought about the wrong things he could have gone in a very different direction.
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Okay, time for a musical interlude:
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Further research reveals that Wittgenstein’s dad was a bit of alright in a Freddy Mercury mould.
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The thing that makes him so appealing, and easily misunderstood, is that philosophy tends to be an extremely tedious thing to read, as philosophers generally go to great lengths to clarify and defend the ideas they are presenting before they present them(Being and Nothingness, for instance, is a nightmare to read). They spend a lot of time explaining what they are not saying, for instance. Nietzsche just spits it out. Some of it is brilliant, some of it is misguided, but it is all easy to take out of context, as he makes very clear definitive statements which you can then remove from the overall context and spin how you see fit. And of course, he literally wrote aphorisms. I find him enjoyable even when I disagree.
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We can give Nietzsche a lot of credit if we want, but I find it very hard to think he didn’t have a very, very low opinion of women. The stuff he says about women reads like a joke now because it is so extreme (I’ve laughed out loud at it), but publicly stating the kinds of things he did about women in the 1880s wouldn’t have come across as a joke.
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All I know is that there’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya 'bout the raising of the wrist.
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Indeed.
But still the same thoughts about woman are there. Most not spoken out loud, but for sure in the undercurrent.
Also why reading him, and put in context and mirroring with others, as stated above by a lot, is still valuable.
Nietzsche was an arrogant guy. Many of his books sold poorly during his productive writing years. Some were self-published. But he pretty much assumes in each book that you have read all the previous books, in order. He didn’t like people cherry picking from the books: “the worst readers proceed like plundering soldiers: they steal a few things they can use, and soil and confuse the rest.” But that is what most people do when they read him.
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A hell of a lot easier to parse than Kant anyway… but then just about any other writing is easier to parse than Kant so it isn’t saying much.
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Even Hegel?
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I haven’t had the ummm pleasure of reading Hegel, that I recall anyway. So I bow to anyone who has.
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Ooooh, Dead Philosophers updating again? Sweet.
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I should be clear that I’m not calling Nietzsche a fascist. What I’m saying is that his thinking was influential on fascist politics, and that influence is not the result of a misreading of him by fascists. Consistent or not in his disdain, it doesn’t really excuse Nietzsche’s role in influencing the far right. Even calling voters stupid, while not strictly fascist, is corrosive to democratic politics. It’s an incorrect analysis of how people’s politics form in a liberal capitalist society, one where large parts of it are profoundly undemocratic. This lack of democracy much better explains why the US is in such a mess, rather than blaming voters for being too stupid to vote properly.
It’s a pretty clear rebuke of democracy. Nietzsche was writing at a time when mass political parties were appearing in Europe, demanding greater popular participation in politics, and usually socialism as well. The passage you quoted has him complaining that democracy meant social degeneration because most people if given a choice, don’t want to live in poverty ruled by tyrants. For Nietzsche, such inequalities were desirable, because it created strong men; and democracy would be the mediocre restraining them. This idea is a core fascist sentiment, even if Nietzsche had little to say about race.
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“Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein - der ganze Gesangsverein.”
Nothing grooves like Heidegger.
Hegel is definitely harder to parse than Kant. Early Marx is often worth reading just because he parses Hegel well for you.
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This.
“Ich, Hegel, bin der Weltgeist, bin sehr schlau -
nur warum, daß weiß keiner so genau.” – M-U Kling
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Nieztsche was a professor of classics in his early career. He admired the ancient Greeks, who did invent democracy, but weren’t real big on equality (they had slaves).
However, although he shared a lot of racial and ethnic prejudices of his time, Nietzsche didn’t like German militarism and rejected anti-Semitism, so you can’t really say he was a proto-Nazi.
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