Does anybody remember the Sitcom Charles In Charge? it was the finest of all the Scott Baio vehicles, propelling that paragon of virtuous men to the hights of greatness, far beyond what we , the mean noncitizen plebs, could ever achieve. In Charles in Charge there was an episode where Charles’ friend, Buddy Lembeck, wandered around saying “Nietzsche would say…” and he Would launch into some half-assed wrongly applied citation from God-knows-where.
Does anybody remember this? Does anybody ever feel like that here at ILP?
Ah! Ha. And who spelled the spelling of Nietzsche wrong in the main topic? Oh! Shoot I forgot! It was your ghost, it wasn’t you 
Hey look, no one suggested to you that you read something that stops being interesting or correct. No one is perfect here, we all make mistakes. And I happen to know that more discoveries and inventions are made because of foolish mistakes people make. Okay? So stop being a grouch and find something to read that really interests you and so you can benefit and the others too from you. And don’t make speeling mistakes please! 
Essentially what I’m saying is that if there isn’t some nonsense and wrongness on the forums here, brilliance will disappear. Is that what you’d like to see happen? No offense dear.
Beena, that was a complicated joke. Notice it ain’t misspelled at the end.
Beena, I have created quite a number of posts based on interesting stuff that I have read. Know what happens? People have ended up ignoring it because it is obscure and or difficult (usually because it is obscure).
Nonsense and “wrongness” are all well and good, but you’ve got to know how to play bebop before You can play modal free jazz. those are the rules of the game. More Discoveries than what? Are there more discoveries resulting from accident than from hard work and research? not bloody likely. beena, frankly, I completely disagree with your worldview. If you want to talk about this new found fact, start up another thread. This here thread is for Charles in Charge Fans only
It occured to me that maybe you misspelled it deliberately, but I ignored it. Anyway, good luck to you on your ‘Charles in Charge’ topic, I’ll take off 'cause I know nothing about it.
sad to say, but i got the joke…even before opening the thread. but i’m already familiar with H3M’s internet activities and with his Nietzsche obsession. i could have never guessed that there would be a Charles in Charge reference hidden within, however.
i do think its hilarious that you mentioned the horribly misconstrued quoting phenomenon… why just the other day someone posted “do you have to be intoxicated to be creative” …they had just pulled a Nietzsche quote off of the internet without realizing where it came from (or reading the context of the quote) and ultimately looked very silly. i laughed, but at times, i’m probably no different. 
Man, you make me sound like a Porn Star or some such thing
I’m not quite so obsessed with Nietzsche as I may appear. It’s just that The son of a bitch’s name is everywhere!
yeah, its strange… but when i went to college NO ONE talked about Nietzsche and the ONE TIME we read “beyond good and evil” it was more or less ridiculed. (Saint Anselm College, a private, Benedictine [Catholic] College.)
now it seems as though Nietzsche is ALL THE RAGE! the #1 favorite of pseudo-anarchist-philosopher-punk-rockers and all of those intent upon hacking Christianity to bits. sure, i can see the attraction… but i don’t need to mention that the scope of Nietzsche’s genius goes far beyond those “popular” topics.
now it seems as though Nietzsche is ALL THE RAGE! the #1 favorite of and all of those intent upon hacking Christianity to bits. sure, i can see the attraction… but i don’t need to mention that the scope of Nietzsche’s genius goes far beyond those “popular” topics.
Here is an observation along those lines.
I went to a used book store the other day one that I used to go to often but had not been to for a year or so. I remeber their philosophy section full of nietzche books. They always seemed to have at least 4 or 5 of his titles at any one time, but yesterday, they had nothing except 3 or 4 biographies about him.
I think this Nietzche craze is wider spread than I originally thought. I wonder what is actually going on here.
Oh and Dark Magus I live in chicago, and I am sure that this book store is frequented by the “pseudo-anarchist-philosopher-punk-rockers” that you mentioned, so I am truly curious to know what is actually going on.
It is slighly strange, but I can see how it would kind of be expected as well. And dont forget that Marilyn Manson is/was really into Nietzche which I am sure has brought him to the atteention of a good number of people that otherwise would of lived their entire lives without ever having come into contact with his books.
Anyone who believes almost dogmatically in Nietzsche does so in contradiction with Nietzsche’s own principle that when one agrees with something, one must try to disprove it more diligently.
btw…Nietzsche didn’t “kill God”…he observed that the idea of God held by theists was contradictory to what the theists said they believe, and to the tradition previously held. Hence, the theists themselves “killed God”.
Nieztsche “is all the rage” because he arms people with tools to give themselves more personal value in their life. Nietzsche is somewhat modern, and he does a thorough job of addressing as well as refuting (in several ways) past arguments. So with this knowledge, someone has a pretty good chance of defeating another person in an argument. Usually, I find they are only interested in being the winner, and Nietzsche certainly makes it easy. In an intellectual community where the opposition can merely point to Hitler and Stalin to refute Nietzschean principles, (i.e. the effects not the roots), it really doesn’t require much more thinking than Nietzsche in rebuttal.
Some people are attracted to him because they find value in the modern-day “existentialist” life. I heard someone utter, “Existentialist. I’m screwed”, in a discussion of objective morality. Now, would an existentialist have to say that? This statement tries to make outsiders aware of one’s existentialism - in the attempt to gain personal value from the sentiment that existentialism is a better way of life than subjecting oneself to an outside doctrine. “When one humbleth himself, he wants to be exulted” (paraphrased Nietzschean quote).
These are only some of the reasons of course…the largest category being that they obtain social/personal value from Nietzschean ideology.
I certaintly hope everyone on here is wrong, and that there is no nietzsche fad going on. And if there is, I hope it is short lived and that no one remembers it.
It takes a special type of person to understand Nietzsche for more than one reason. It takes dedication and the ability to decipher the undecipherable. Unfortunately I’m afraid most people will simply read anti-christ or (insert synical nietzsche book here) and go around spouting off pseudo-Nietzsche. I had always hoped Nietzsche and philosophy in general wouldn’t collect a following similar to religion or politics. Popularity of both is a plus, but not when it enters pop-culture. Damn.
Nietzsche pop-culture. God damn it.
unfortunately, there is a Nietzsche fad going on at the moment. anyone who approaches any of his works already has some preconcieved notions about him and his ideas (exaggerated stereotypes of NIHILISM and/or EXISTENTIALISM…). so yeah, i agree with whoever said that, it does take a certain sort of person to read and actually “get” Nietzsche. anyone with a purely academic interest should be able to “handle it”. but as for the punk-rocker-anarchist-antichrist-marylin-mansons, not much gets through except whats useful to “the cause” of the individual reader.
getting more serious, i think you have to have had a decent background in ancient philosophy as well as in the “big names” in philosophy to really get the context right. anyone who is familiar with Hermeneutics can see what’s happening with this phenomenon… people read something with their own prejudices filtering and interpreting what they read/understand and as a result… they hardly understand what they read except in terms of what they had already thought it would be OR in terms of their own personal goals/interests/values. (e.g. i’m on a personal quest to take christianity apart, so i’ll isolate a bunch of “good quotes” that help my cause. scenario #2, i haven’t gotten laid in years and i’m starting to hate women so let me sift through some Nietzsche and find some support for my own thoughts.) and then there’s the Nazi connection… the idea of “the superman” being interpreted in terms of the Nazi ideology. its not hard to see how this connection could be made, but to a serious scholar of Nietzsche, its safe to say that that idea is pretty ludicrous. of course Nietzsche was NOT suggesting the superiority of any one race.
i think you could do this a LOT, particularly with Nietzsche, who writes so aphoristically… much of the time he’s speaking in sort of “poetic” type generalizations. so he’s WIDE OPEN to a huge variety of interpretations.
DarkMagus
I definitely agree with your assessment on where a reader of Nietzsche’s could get help. I happen to like Hermeneutics also and have read Hellinic. Yet apparently it wasn’t enough for one analytics who just would not accept my understanding of Nietzsche. So, tell me, I could go back and forth, up and down with this person proving my case and I would never arrive at anything concrete. Why? Because I believe it’s more a case of everyone who reads Nietzsche thinks that he/she has a firm grasp on the philosopher’s work and no other undergrad could achieve that success–sort of like ego or arrogance. Nowadays, I try not to cite too much because there’s always going to be someone who has read a “different” Nietzsche or Kant or Descartes.
yet marie, you can always attack individual words. Start with individual words and work from there. Cite away, but be prepared to defend with highly specific quotes. Book, Chapter, Page, Paragraph. there’s no defence.
Well there is the small problem of different translations hermes the thrice great…
But I tend to agree with marie, that the problem of arrogance is far more prevalent.
Yes. Everyone claims Nietzsche, the existentialists, the positivists, the atheists, and others. He covered such a broad spectrum of ideas in such a perspectivist fashion that it is easy to find one’s ideas as well as the corresponding refutations.
The metaphorical, aphoristic style of writing easily lends itself to quotes out of context. One has to breath Nietzsche with almost every breath to even begin to understand where he is coming from, to read him lightly is to misread him. Nietzsche despised the ‘reading idler’ and put lots of distance between himself and them in his writings.
“He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.” Thus spoke Zarathustra
“the reading idler”…perfect. very well said. its funny how unknowingly ironic some folks’ narrow, “dogmatic” interpretations of Nietzche can be… no no you can NOT just read it lightly. you have to spend lots and lots of time and just let it sink in… and still, it seems like you have to be sufficiently “personally unhinged” from the realm of ideologies to get to the heart of Nietzsche’s thought. you can’t have a personal philosophical agenda and simultaneously take Nietzsche’s writing for what it is. its just not gonna work.
Marshall, i’ve never been very good at finding such specific quotes… can you think of any others that deal with the “reading idler”? i’d get such a kick out of any others you could dig up. not to sound ostentatious, but i’ve read so much of him that its all one miscellaneous blob of ideas and thoughts to me. i know the “general sense” of Nietzche’s ideas so well… the details escape me at times. that’s just how i kick it.
I got that quote (as well as ‘reading idler’-- Nietzsche’s neologism, not mine) from part 1 chapter 7 (not counting Zarathustra’s prologue) of Thus spoke Zarathustra. It’s on pg 67 of the Hollingdale translation and pg 152 of the portable Nietzsche by Kaufmann. You might also look at Human all too human section 4 “from the soul of artists and writers” pg 103 in the Marion Faber translation. Pg 80 in the cambridge university version by R.J. Hollingdale.
And this most telling quote which exemplifies what i am trying to relate comes from the last part of the preface for ‘The Dawn’ or ‘Daybreak’
Remember also that Nietzsche slipped titles of his other books in his works.
I am sorry. That is all i can come up with at present, but i know there is much more.
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