I guess I know well enough by now that nothing will deter you from your thesis, Saully. Have fun.
If they can prove it repels the male crickets, that would make some sense (if he doesn’t scare them with his smell at the same time), OR if someone can prove crickets have centralized hearing organs in their nerv-system.
The scientific man is too superficial to be taken as a reliable man by default.
That has probably already been proven. It’s up to yourself to make some inquires, however, if you want to find out.
You have not even tried. Tell me, Faust, do you really think that according to Darwinism, “the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average, even the sub-average types” is only a human phenomenon? Of course, other things being equal, the ‘fitter’ in the Nietzschean sense (“the stronger, better-constituted”) will also be the fitter in the reproductive sense. But as my comic strip explains, in ‘the wild’, too, the ‘fitter’ in the Nietzschean sense may often come off second best to the less ‘fit’. Is the problem confronting Nietzsche then the problem of the possible antagonism between the two definitions of “fitness” ((1) and (2) above)? Fitness in the sense of (1) is meaningless in itself, of course—meaningless to the individual. Only my ancestors’ fitness matters to me individually; my own does not. But fitness in the sense of i[/i]) may be ‘its own reward’, so to say: as Nietzsche said, those who laugh best today also laughs last.
He he, “probably”. Is it the probability day or month or year there where you live now?
When I hear that they (scholars) claim there is a “sense for balance” (which basically leans on the sense of touch) then I say “Alles klar!” and forget science.
If you can remember my picture of the Overman has something to do with the nutrition and tongue and the “sense of balance” has really nothing to do with that.
Are you working in science?
Yes Cezar, probably. Or do you really think nobody had thought of that before…
Thinking is a very rare thing in the world. The scientific world knows mostly only [b]transporting of thoughts/b. Thinking is reserved for rare examples.
I know you’ve ‘stolen’ this idea from Machiavelli.
I told you what I thought, Saully. That Nietzsche was being sarcastic.
So, you t…ransport that I have read Mac before Nietz?
But to understand so much of Nietzsche like I do is more than transporting, don’t you transp so?
He does not show his process of thinking before the idea is written. But I show his process… and not only his.
I do it gladly, to attract a large number of people either to start thinking like this or those who already think.
One must start somewhere reading deep things. One needs examples for every start…
Edit: If Mick Jagger is the fittest and strongest, then Darwin rules!
So you think Nietzsche unwittingly sided with Darwinism when it came to civilisation, but not when it came to the wild? Do you think Nietzsche meant his ‘anti-Darwin’ to be only applicable to civilisation?
Reading the passage in the German, it does not sound at all sarcastic to me. And further on in it he says:
[size=95]The error of the school of Darwin becomes a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to see so badly at this point?[/size]
I really think Nietzsche seriously considered this a problem. And I think he at least sided wittingly with Darwin in not standing nature and civilisation in opposition, as you do: civilisation has of course come about naturally, and they saw it.
You defined civilisation as “the ownership and regular, shared surplus of food”; but in TI Skirmishes 14 (which is from the same year), Nietzsche says:
[size=95]As for the famous ‘struggle for existence’, so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the total appearance of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering[.][/size]
In fact, he goes on to say:
[size=95]Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence—and, indeed, it occurs—, its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them: namely, in disfavor of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species [plural!] do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again—for they are the great majority, and they are also more intelligent…[/size]
Really, Faust, I’m not being stubborn here.
No, he is only transporting. He is the philosophical worker.
Saully - I think he was generally disgusted that the masses had taken control of civilisation - in most cases, and as a general rule. Certainly he made it clear that they had done so through religion, which is a major component of civilisation. Christianity became dominant in the Roman Empire, and in its wake. Without the Empire, it would not have been as successful as it was.
I think Nietzsche was feeling a bit cheated when he wrote that - and you know well that it’s a risky business to take any one passage as definitive of his thinking. But I think he felt cheated that evolution worked that way - that a member of the herd could function as well as the lone wolf in their respective milieus - and that we humans were the former type of animal.
I am not speaking of any opposition, or of anything unnatural. Manatees were once land mammals - now they live in water. The requirement for survival of their species has changed. That’s not unnatural. But it was once once set of traits and is now another.
Surely he is correct about this. Most species seem to flourish, at least for a while. Populations increase only where their is a surplus of food - as measured against the species that eats it. But that’s not anti-Evolution Theory. He may be speaking about a popular conception - I don’t have the relevant texts in front of me.
Yeah - I might want to see the whole passage and not so much play cat and mouse with you about this. Do you have a link?
Fittest, strongest, best-constituted, sneakiest, whatever-est: all are of the exceptional.
Nietzsche wasn’t being sarcastic, nor misunderstanding.
His observation was that it’s the un-remarkable common who breed the most. In this sense, the most common is a contradiction in terms, so anything-est is by no means the indicator of who breeds the most.
To make “survival of the fittest” into a tautology: ‘best-survival-to-breed of those-who-survive-to-breed-the-best’ is pointless. Not least since the superlative element is still counteracting surveillance of “the broad destinies of man” even to this day.
This is so mistaken it’s hard to know where to begin. First a quote, then. Nietzsche ends that passage from TI as follows:
[size=95]The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again—for they are the great majority, and they are also more intelligent… Darwin forgot the spirit (—that is English!), the weak have more spirit… One must need spirit to acquire spirit,—one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (—“let it go!” they think in Germany today—“the Reich must still remain to us”…). It will be noted that by “spirit” I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).[/size]
To summarise: the great majority (i.e., the common) are ‘exceptionally’ intelligent (i.e., more intelligent than the average, which is the average of the many common plus the few rare), i.e., ‘exceptionally’ full of spirit, i.e., ‘exceptionally’ careful, patient, cunning, adept at simulation, self-controlled, adept at mimicry.
The phrase “survival of the fittest”, which has nothing to do with Darwin but is from Spencer, does not cease to do harm. Even if the word “fit” is taken in the Darwinian sense, by the way, the phrase is not yet a tautology; only if on top of that, the word “survival” is taken in the sense of genetic survival. The phrase is nonsense no matter how you turn it.
Nietzsche was mistaken about Darwin, which is not surprising considering he never even read him. He did read Herbert Spencer, however (and found him despicable)…
Ah TI. i thought part of this was from WTP. I couldn’t remember what TI was, anyway. I can’t find the specific section. I’ll keep looking.
Yeah, you know, I really think Nietzsche is trying to be funny, here. I’m not sure what difference it makes if he got Darwin right or not. He’s really not talking about the origin of the species, anyway.
This is so mistaken it’s hard to know where to begin. First a quote, then.
Comparatives are used here, and simple unqualified adjectives. Not superlatives. The superlative in the above respects would cease to be common as, again, commonality is opposed to the exceptional.
I’ll agree that the phrase “survival of the fittest” is nonsense no matter how you turn it. But survival-of-whatever is identical to what is meant by the fittest, and is thus tautology. Else, you run into a definition of the fittest that isn’t ‘most prone to survival-of-whatever’ and you make/link stupid cartoons to demonstrate why Spencer’s phrase is wrong to the more common.
TI is probably my favourite of his books. He probably is communicating his surprise with a certain amount of amusement, but it’s definitely not sarcasm.
You are all trying to sell your sneakiest existence as “fittest”, that’s all.
But this has nothing to do with Thus Spake Zarathustra, because one can see from the parts 4, 5 and 6 of the book what life is all about.
Superlatives are not absolute… If the rule is more intelligent than the exception, than it is the most intelligent of the two (and there is no third).
It’s not a stupid cartoon. You may feel patronised by it, but that only says something about you. And apparently, simplistic as it may be, you still have not understood it.
“Fit” in the phrase “survival of the fittest” (as coined by Spencer) is not used in the same sense as in Darwinism. You could rephrase it as “survival of the strongest” (and indeed, in Dutch, my native language, the standard translation is “the right of the strongest”). Hence the cartoon’s title “Survival of the Sneakiest”: the point is that the strongest do not always ‘survive’. This was Nietzsche’s point, too.
That passage which Faust thought sarcastic was not from TI. Jeez, can’t you people read? Here, for your info, is a list of abbreviations of Nietzsche’s titles: