Who on ILP knows Nietzsche best?
- Sauwelios
- Daybreak
- Dionysus
- Impious
- The member formerly known as Detrop
- Satyr
- Other (please specify)
0
voters
Well?
’
Knows = Impious
Understands = Detrop
Detrop can’t hack though.
I don’t know/care, so chose ‘other’ - perhaps the question ‘who knows themselves the best’ should be posed: as this yields greater results than knowing about others 
This poll made me laugh. Thanks Impious.
Answer: No idea.
Nihilistic.
I’m flattered to have been included. Cheers, Impious.
Aside from this, however, I suspect most anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time with Nietzsche’s work understands him in unique and valuable ways. Moreover, in considering the question, the first thing that came to mind was Nietzsche himself proclaiming in Ecce Homo: “whoever thought he had understood something of me had made up something out of me after his own image.” I do not agree entirely, but I do not entirely disagree.
P.S. Uniqor, Imp, Dunamis, faust, SIATD and krossie (among others I’m probably forgetting) deserve mention as well.
I can guarantee that nobody knows Max Stirner Nietzsche’s predecessor better than I do. 
( Shrugs.)
I’d generally go with Nihilistc, or maybe Imp.
I know Nietzsche pretty well, but I don’t always have patience for stupid questions.
I’m not naming names, but there is more than one poster listed here that understands almost nothing of Nietzsche.
So much for polls.
Sauwelios has an excellent knowledge of Nietzsche in terms of cross referencing between different books, but I disagree with about 90% of everything he has to say about the man and his writings. Imp has got a very good grasp of it, though good luck in trying to get more out of him but one liners and repeated instructions to go and read the books yourself. Faust probably knows Nietzsche better than he’s letting on, but as ever with him, you won’t know whether he’s joking or not even if he answers your questions directly.
Who else? Daybreak and Jakob seem to broadly agree with me about Nietzsche, so obviously I’ll talk up their knowledge of the guy but I can’t say whether or not that’s them flattering my mind or them actually knowing being the shizzle. Detrop, as ever, is quite fun to read on the topic, but, again as ever, Sartre has tainted his critical faculties.
You’re best off just reading his stuff yourself. And then a bunch of other people’s opinions on his stuff. And then arguing about it for a bit.
Siatd - I have read three or four of your posts today, and I find myself in some general agreement with you in all of them.
I find this quite frightening.
Quite clearly Sauwelios.
I voted Sauwelios because I’m not a scholar of Nietzsche nor am I a devout follower, and I don’t wish to be either.
I agree with him and I get him, he’s a kindred spirit.
Nor is it my intent to know him, like some follower wants to know his idol or his God.
I am me. We agree on many things. I like the way he expresses certain positions. He’s opened my eyes to many side matters.
But I already held my opinions when I read him.
I, as many of you may know, find the majority of the mentioned member’s Nietzsche interpretations completely uninteresting and not worth my time. I think it is the result of an all to easy misunderstanding of him at every possible juncture. It’s the overman fetish, and it works for particular things, but fails miserably at holding my attention. I don’t want to say that they are wrong, or that it is a superficial interpretation, just that it is uninteresting. I could very easily pick up his books and follow the line of reasoning(I did when I first began reading him), but I think as one becomes more familiar with all his works, and starts to incorporate all his ideas together, a more subtle and dynamic philosophy appears. His overman goes from being a Machiavelli to a modern day Aristotle. His typologies usurp the overman, and with it comes a very brilliant model of existence. He is no longer a brick in the face, but a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces that one must fill in for oneself.
Enough with the vague generalizations, though!
My favorite is the ontological interpretation from Gilles Deleuze.
As for ILP members, Dunamis, as he parroted only the most interesting scholarly interpretations.
Don’t be frightened. We’re much more alike that either of us cares to admit.
Funny to read Nihilistic’s reply, as I have just, from Nietzsche’s early essay, The Greek State, distilled a characterisation of the Overman as the military genius in particular. For, according to this essay, it is only the military genius - “that conqueror with the iron hand” - who can not only, like any genius, “create and satisfy a new world of want [id est, of the need for art]”, but also create the condition for this possibility (of creating and satisfying such a world of want). This condition is slavery:
“In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority be slavishly subjected to life’s struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate.”
This minority is “a small number of Olympian men”. “The proper aim of the State”, according to Nietzsche, is “the Olympian existence and ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the genius”. And it is the military genius who makes the State, that is, “the iron clamp […] that constrains the large masses upon one another in such a fashion that a chemical decomposition of Society, with its pyramid-like superstructure, is bound to take place”, possible. As Nietzsche wrote fifteen years later;
“I employed the word “state”: it is obvious what is meant—some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad. That is after all how the “state” began on earth: I think that sentimentalism which would have it begin with a “contract” has been disposed of. He who can command, he who is by nature “master,” he who is violent in act and bearing—what has he to do with contracts! One does not reckon with such natures; they come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different” even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are - wherever they appear something new soon arises, a ruling structure that lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned a “meaning” in relation to the whole.”
[Genealogy of Morals, 2, 17.]
Ah, how boring this all is. No, then the theories of Aristotle!
Nay, Plato was right when he chided Aristotle for placing science above politics in importance. For it is politics - the polis, the State - which first makes art, including the scholarly art, at all possible. And it is the conqueror, the military genius, that is, the high artist of war, who makes the State, and thereby all art, including his own, possible. The scholar or the composer does not create or preserve the conditions of his own art. Of course, if the war artist makes his own art possible, the question as to the chicken and the egg must be answered. The egg, the conditions, came first, because they need not be created: they may come about by chance. But it is precisely Nietzsche’s will as to the Overman that he shall be produced on purpose, not by chance: cf. The Antichrist(ian), sections 3 and 4.
Even if I suppose, for a moment, that your post is in fact comprehensible, and, perhaps more ridiculously, that it is also more than a collection of out of context quotes, it doesn’t change the fact that you still misinterpret Nietzsche’s imagery at every possible juncture.
Come back when you no longer view his imagery as straight forward and in an absolutely lay sense. When the warrior is not the man on the front line, but the active nihilist. When war is no longer a fight between nations, but a fight against idols. When the slave is not one whose ankles are shackled, but whose mind is chained.
You are good at one thing sauwelios…making Nietzsche absolutely boring.
My post is comprehensible if it can be comprehended. I can comprehend it. I was not raving when I wrote it. I was actually saying something.
Aren’t all quotes out of context? Unless one quotes an entire book (and is not then the book out of the context of its writer’s bibliography? And the writer out of the context of his time and place?).
I love the implication that you know the right interpretation of Nietzsche’s “imagery”.
That’s your mistake: “spiritual warrior” is only a simile. How warped must your mind be when you can only take Nietzsche’s imagery metaphorically. Is that the only way it doesn’t offend you?
As I said before: Moralistic more like.
Let me ask you this, Moralistic: can your spirit be free when your ankles are shackled? Can you dance then? But I guess you take all Nietzsche’s remarks about dancing only metaphorically…
Do you think Nietzsche considered man only metaphorically an animal?
Do you think a man can be intellectually cleanly who is not physically cleanly? Do you think there is spiritual beauty apart from physical beauty?
I consider this a compliment, in the light of the above. He who hath ears etc.
=D>
God you two are dense…I’d expect even you, Sauwelios, to understand the importance of the development of his ideas over time. I’m sure, if you continue to site his early works as representative of his mature conception of the overman and,as a corollary, Eternal Return, you will continue to get applause from the audience. But don’t expect anyone that has seriously studied the man to take your posts as anything more than a disingenuous attempt to mold Nietzsche to your conception of him.
That is really fucking ridiculous…and the sarcasm and confidence in your second post is just plain disgusting. Save this dishonest pile of garbage for someone else.