The highest men are those who say: “The highest men are those who [insert a predicate here]”–and who do not just say it, but imprint their word on whole ages.
So, you are a hardcore Nietzsche scholar.
You could probably answer all of my questions in regards to him.
What, in your opinion, is the most important thing one can learn from Nietzsche?
The highest men or women, are those chance and situation have determined to be so. You didn’t create yourself, the world, situations involving others and the world, nor your brain and instincts.
The whole ‘magic’ of the world is in that there is nothing to determine how things turn out [a freedom]. No gods [even if there are gods] nor person is in command!
Ergo; the worst kinds of people are those who impose themselves upon others and the world [denying that freedom].
See how the statues of the mighty are all broken now!
_
Nobility. Insofar as that can be learned, of course.
As the Torah and the Koran are considered by many to be instances of divine revelation, so I consider Nietzsche’s writings to be instances of noble revelation.
Most importantly, one can learn from him what a most noble being, a philosopher, is.
I will make you a great gift. I will acquaint you with the great Moody Lawless (not Oswald Mosley), to whom I once wrote:
[size=95]“I read Plato’s Ion recently. In it, Socrates expresses the idea that the great artist, e.g., Homer, is attracted by a god like an iron ring by a magnetic or ‘Heraclean’ stone; the effect of this ‘stone’, this god, is that the artist becomes inspired and thereby also ‘magnetic’; other ‘iron rings’ and even little scraps of metal are attracted by him. If Dionysus is the stone, then Nietzsche is such an iron ring, and you, for instance, are an iron ring that is attracted by the latter; I in turn may be yet another ring, or even a scrap of metal. But even if I am a scrap of metal, I can pride myself on the idea that I have had direct access to the wealth of Dionysus, to the wealth of the greatest Dionysian, and to the wealth of the greatest living Nietzschean - the latter who has direct access to the former two.”[/size]
Now Moody himself once wrote the following:
[size=95]"Nietzsche quickly realised that the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy was immature.
He then saw that the Apollonian aspect was subsumed by the Dionysian.
The whole point was that in a world of Dionysian Becoming, the man of Will imposes the ‘hammer’ of Being.
In other words, art - for example - is the imposing of Order upon the world.
This ‘hammer’ is an example of the Strong Will so important to Nietzsche [hence his admiration for Caesar and Napoleon in politics]." (Square brackets and single quotation marks his.)[/size]
You may want to compare something I wrote years later:
[size=95]“On first sight, Romantic art seems more passionate than Dionysian art, because the Romantic lacks the passion to tyrannize over his work—to yoke the bull, so to say. The bull that is the Dionysian artist yokes the bull that is his work of art. The Romantic artist lacks the might of the bull, and therefore cannot yoke his work of art. For this reason, his work is wilder.”[/size]
Amorphos here is a perfect example of such a Romantic. He actually prides himself on his formlessness! An artist’s principal work of art, however, is himself.–
The greatest thing one can learn from Nietzsche is to understand the will in his way, as overflow (super-ab-undance), instead of in Schopenhauer’s way, as lack, as need, as suffering; to identify with the creator in one rather than with the creature in one (compare BGE 225, whose importance can hardly be exaggerated).
Satyr is really just a shadow of Moody, the surrogate Lys resorts to in the absence of Moody.
Moody was the teacher of Lys, Jakob, and myself.
A gay man, a liscivious Pagan and a Holy Inquisitor walk into a bar and order one Blue Curacao. Who should drink the Curacao?
A: The inquisitor. Unlike the other two it won’t just get him depressed.
Where is he now?
Could be closer than you think.
And not just defending chivalrous virginity on a street tip.
I’d put the White Lotus (WL, “the unfathomable one”, as Sauwelios once called him) on M. Lawless in a think tank and lock the hatch.
Then I would drop James No. 2 or Polemarchus in there and shake it up. Talk about a well rounded montage of thinkers. When everything inevitably slowed down, Faust wold appear to tell some intellectual jokes and self depricate, reviving the thread and spirit.
I read somewhere that N was one of the first to use the typing ball. That’s pretty cool, right? Imagine the first attempt to use it:
m y d e s t i n y i s t oo … fuck this… where’s my pen.
I was talking to Primal Rage.
Yes, I considered mentioning WL (Weary Locomotive) as the fourth student, but most people here don’t know him and there were others as well. (Cezar, too, was present, though he wasn’t one of the students; Moody once called him “a complete ignorant moron”).
And yes, you’re right about the typing ball (not quite at his first attempt, though, but soon).
I see Nietzsche as being a sort of ‘divine’ philosopher, if you will.
Rand called him a mystic-philosopher, I believe - something like that, due to his WTP principle; she associated it with animism.
I associate Nietzsche with Thor, the god of thunder; he wrote like lightning, an idol smasher. In my opinion, I find him to be the greatest of them all;
wittiest, most veritable, most daring, and most entertaining.
There is much I don’t know about him. I’ve only read WTP, Anti-Christ, and BGE.
Much of what I know of him was learned from other people’s writings and YT videos.
This is one of my favorite quotes:
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
I know what the quote means, but perhaps you can shed some new light on it.
Ohhh… so WL isn’t the White Lotus that was around back then. Shit I thought they were the same dude.
there was an iconoclast from the 18th century who had smashed idols unlike any philosopher had before him or would after. I won’t tell you who, but it was to date the most extensive refutation of theology ever given, and nothing since has matched its prose.
He was the man who kept as a souvenir the cloak he had been wearing when an attempt was made on his life. The one with the slash in it.
One would normally say Kant did this, but he didn’t. He left opened the possibility of a transcendent creator god, while the dude I’m talking about made any conception of such a thing logically impossible.
I looked it up, and he’s from the 17th century, silly.
[cough]
that was a test. I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention sauwelios.
Yes, I agree with all of this to some extent. He was, as Claudia Crawford puts it, a “mundane mystic” (Crawford, “Nietzsche’s Dionysian arts”); his divinity, Dionysus, is an earthly divinity. I’m reminded of this pretty great essay I saved from the internet before it was taken off: it says Thor was the principal god of the warrior class, but not of the highest class; those were Odhinn and Tyr (which is also the title of the essay). Odin is then the dark one, the god of dark thunderclouds and the night, whereas Tyr is the god of the calm brightness of the sun, especially at dawn. Compare:
[size=95]“It is a comfort to me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number (for everything outstanding is by its nature rare): one belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous of more heroic or more loving than the men below, but–because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness, as privilege, indeed as a condition of existence; because one live among clouds and lightning as among one’s own kind, but equally among rays of sunlight, drops of dew, flakes of snow, and everything that necessarily comes from the heights and, when it moves, moves eternally only in the direction from above to below. Aspirations toward the heights are not ours.–Heroes, martyrs, geniuses and enthusiasts are not still, patient, subtle, cold, slow enough for us.” (Will to Power 993 whole, Kaufmann trans.)[/size]
This is a perfect description of nobility in the Nietzschean, Classical sense. But how long does someone like us have to aspire toward the heights–to be a hero, a martyr, a genius and an enthusiast–before he attains that height! One’s huge heart must first be hollowed out by the erosion of emotion, of passion, the strong passion of weakness, of the creature in one; then, one must go a little further even, one must still shed one’s last tears, weep over the fact that one’s “heart is empty” now–“my heart is empty, but the songs I sing are filled with love for you”. Only when even that is no longer noble enough for one, when even Nico is too modern, too “sublime”, too Wagnerian for one, only then can one fully appreciate Nietzsche’s music, literally and metaphorically.
It’s a fine translation and pretty self-explanatory. There is, however, something I can add to it. In fact, I’ve been thinking of dedicating a thread to passages like these for a while now:
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WP 957;
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BGE 44;
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Notebooks 1884-1885 34 [176]. An excerpt: “This whole way of thinking I called in myself the philosophy of Dionysos: a view which recognises in the creating/reshaping of man as of things the highest enjoyment of existence, and in ‘morality’ merely a means to give the ruling will such strength and flexibility as to impress itself onto mankind like that.” (My translation);
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WP 981 = Notebooks 1885-1887 10 [68]. An excerpt: “Not to make people ‘better’, not to preach morality to them in any way, as if ‘moralness in itself’, or any ideal kind of person, were given at all: but to create conditions that require stronger people who for their part need, and consequently will have, a morality (more clearly: a physical-spiritual discipline) that makes them strong!” (My translation; when reading the unquoted part, compare WP 984);
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WP 464. An excerpt: “[A]ll the world bewails today the evil situation of the philosopher in earlier times, hemmed in between the stake, bad conscience, and the arrogant wisdom of the Church Fathers; the truth, however, is that precisely this was a much more favorable condition for the education of a powerful, comprehensive, cunning and audaciously daring spirituality than the condition of life at present. [… Superior artists] are no longer tyrannized over from without by a church’s tables of absolute values or those of a court; thus they also no longer learn to develop their ‘inner tyrants,’ their will.” (Kaufmann trans.);
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TI “Skirmishes” 38.
Are you angry at me?
You mean Historyboy? I’d like to read these posts.