Reading the sample section of the book “What is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra” on Amazon, I find little to be impressed about. Can you give some examples of what is so advanced about the claims/ideas made in this book?
Freedom itself cannot justify anything. Freedom is simply a condition that is required to be present in some way and to some degree in order for other things to actualize. Freedom as in degrees of freedom, or political freedoms, politics rights etc. and also the perception of our freedoms namely how much latitude do we already allow and expect ourselves to have. All of these act as prerequisite conditions but none of them alone can “justify” anything.
Another problem here, “Contending that decent political life is impossible without obfuscation of man’s nihilist freedom”, well I mean yeah, civilization (being civilized) is impossible if people act like irrational wild animals. Kinda obvious. But somehow this is supposed to justify either a state of “happy ignorance” (quasi-militarized or at least marshalled toward some kind of bare-bones ethos of what could probably unproblematically be called at least semi-fascistic) or a hyper-liberalized form of free market economics where unlimited “nihilist freedom” can justifiably and legally be unleashed but only so long as it does so as competition within purely economic spaces.
I don’t see the connections here between these ideas. We move from something as basic and obvious as to be a platitude, “wild animals aren’t civilized”, to something like an either/or between Sparta or Randianism. I’m pretty sure things don’t work like that in reality, though. And this, “For the unbridled license at the heart of their Lilliputian solution can equally well justify destruction of that solution or of any solution”, what? Again we are back to the platitudes? “Unbridled license” can somehow justify things? How is this not putting the cart before the horse AT BEST, and more realistically just making shit up by creating a radical reduction of meaning as a consequence of merely playing around with words?
=D>
Well played sir. Nietzsche simps never disappoint in the hilarity department.
Bro, what?
Care to restate that into something fitting for people who aren’t on acid?
I can, but the only reason I will is that I have a sense of duty.
I called the book the prequel to its sequel. It is, therefore, nothing to be wondered at that the sample section of the book should fail to impress: it’s only the beginning to a ‘prequel’, after all. To be someone of my level means to have advanced through a long personal development.
The most important idea in the books, for me personally at least, I’ve already expressed. As for the prequel, its aim is to determine whether Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a philosopher or a prophet or, if both, how Zarathustra the prophet and Zarathustra the philosopher relate to one another. To be sure, Laurence Lampert was not impressed by this, either:
[size=95]“Why write a whole book of commentary on the book in which Nietzsche shows that he too must become a philosopher/prophet and have that book systematically deny that Nietzsche is a Two—and then end on ‘Unless’?
Let us look to the center of Meier’s book, a book that relentlessly centers, to see if this question might be answered there. The center is the paired paragraphs 33–34 of the 66. We arrive at the center point between these central paragraphs by passing through Meier’s two-paragraph, ten-page (eight Engl.) treatment of ‘On Redemption.’ At the end of paragraph 33, at the very center, he placed the 4th of his 6 'Two, not One’s. He then fused that ending of the 33rd paragraph to the 34th by opening it rewording the formula: ‘The duality that does not submit to any unity.’ Yes, Meier says in effect, you are at the center. But a center of two very long paragraphs, eleven pages (nine Engl.), is not a very centered center: does it have a center? Paragraphs 33 and 34 are each outfitted with two dashes, so each has its own central segment. Where is the center of the center in all this centering?—this ridiculous centering, ridiculous because once Strauss called attention to it, the most sheltered part became the most prominent part, so steps have to be taken to hide things there.
[…T]he center of the center is the first segment of paragraph 33; the other segments of paragraphs 33 and 34 support it by supplementing it.” (Lampert, “On Heinrich Meier’s What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”)[/size]
Yet as I wrote four and a half months ago:
In the meantime, by the way, Meier has shown me that Strauss, too, was definitely a philosopher. As for Meier himself, I do have a problem with the content of his prequel’s center, although it’s not the same, or not as insurmountable for me, as it is for Lampert. Thus around the same time, I wrote:
Another, minor idea from Meier’s prequel is that Nietzsche published Zarathustra in parts so that, in writing the subsequent parts, he pretty much had to stick with what he’d already written.
I think Neumann means freedom from the requirement of justification…
Sparta was an example chosen in the context of the quoted essay, as indicated by its full title:
[size=95]“As in Sparta, military necessity demanded that Ares (Moloch) be given higher official honors, but Aphrodite (Tanith) was dearest to [Carthaginian hearts].” (Neumann, “Liberalism’s Moloch: An Interpretation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Salammbo”.)[/size]
Such happy ignorance is of the essence of every society, so long as it’s, well, a society…
Sure. In Plato’s Republic, the “conversion” of the terrifyingly enlightened into the happily ignorant is merely the preparation of the conversion into philosophers, which conversion is caused by the insight into the inevitable limitations of even that preparation. Contrary to Plato, Machiavelli does not explicitly write about that conversion. The fact that Machiavelli leaves eros out of the explicitly written equation and that he does not explicitly promote that conversion, does not mean that he has forgotten it. It means that the reader of his two chief works who runs into difficulties like the ones she has run into with Nietzsche, is in need of undergoing that conversion.
Your only sense of duty should be to the truth, otherwise you have no idea what philosophy even is (in theory or otherwise).
Huh, that is strange because I never mentioned which sections I looked at, only that they were available on Amazon. In fact Amazon has A LOT of pages available to sample. I was able to see quite a bit. And you were falling over yourself to heap praise upon the book and its insights as so amazing, but now when asked to give an example you… downplay it? Huh.
No shit? I am relieved to be talking to a legit guru here and not some kind of psychotic god-complex egoist with a fetish for 19th century Germans.
I am sure the content of your post will vindicate that without any doubts.
Wait, what? Is that seriously going to be your cope?
Bro I actually gave you a lot more credit than this.
Yeah, it’s called not being a simp. I could have told you as much. Don’t worship other human beings, they are stupid and don’t know shit. And if you think they know shit then odds are you have been gaslit by their “rhetorical brilliance” or some other asinine merely psychological tactic.
Do I have to? I mean all I wanted was an answer to my simple question, and you didn’t even give me that much. Now you want me to read your entire fetish blog or what?
Sorry, but what? You aren’t a philosopher?
Ok then, thanks I guess for sparing me the rest of your love diatribe. I hope you and, er, this ah meier lambert or whoever can get a room or whatever it is you’re hoping for.
To add to the above, in the second essay (also first one?) …the emphasis on guilt’s origin being the buyer/seller relationship (section 8)…
…compared with his mother’s statement quoted in the article I linked to…
… Nietzsche seems to have been a very devoted son.
Prove me wrong / change my mind. She fed the whirlwind that did him in… does he ever write anything about her that sees her flaws? If that is quoted in that article or elsewhere, please inform/refresh my memory.
For a moment there, I was thinking of his letters—the remarks and indications to be found there. But then it hit me:
“When I look for the deepest antithesis to myself, the incalculable commonness of the instincts, then I always find my mother and sister,—to believe myself to be related to such canaille would be a blasphemy against my godliness. The treatment I experience on the part of my mother and sister, to this very moment, instills an unspeakable dread in me: here, a perfect infernal machine is at work, with infallible [unfehlbar] certainty about the moment in which one can bloodily wound me—in my highest moments,… for then all strength for defending oneself against poisonous worms is lacking [fehlt]… […] I confess that the deepest objection against the ‘eternal recurrence’, my genuinely abysmal thought, are always mother and sister.” (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise”, section 3, my translation.)
Yes. Because the truth is literally everything. So any other possible duties you might have are already contained within the truth anyway. Therefore the truth itself supersedes all lesser (more individual) duties, especially when these (as is often the case) are enacted at the expense of truth itself (and unnecessarily at the expense of other “lesser” (more individual-individuated) truths)
Ok and I am still waiting for those quotes/examples of the amazingly profound things he says in them.
No you didn’t. I asked for specific examples, which you did not provide. And I made sure to emphasize my original statement and request at the beginning of this message. Please take a look when you can, you know in-between the hits of acid.
I can tell you are quite good at self-deception though. No wonder you believe yourself to be a “philosopher”.
Nietzsche was very much the same way, but at least he produced some decent content. Have you? If you want to post some of it here I’ll take a look and judge it fairly, as I judge everything fairly.
If not then at least provide the quotes/examples that I asked for. No more dodging and coping.
In your own mind I am sure you are quite a lot of things.
And you’re sure I wasn’t talking about duty to the truth in the first place?
So you’re sure of that, at least. But someone who’s sure is not a philosopher, but either wise or delusional.
“Absence of the will in the addressee to actualize voluntary intelligible notions in cities or nations somehow affects his theoretical understanding of them, or it produces a lack of enthusiasm for divine and human things as distinguished from logic and physics.” (Mahdi, “The Attainment of Happiness”, ‘The Investigator and the Prince’.)
You asked for examples, not specific examples. And I immediately provided multiple examples.
I think maybe one cause of Nietzsche’s contradictions may be his definition of power & the Dionysian. He seems to rationalize which emotions are actually powerful & which aren’t… I think that’s where he whammied himself into the point of no return. I’ll come back to it. I think if he was truly of power, the contradictions wouldn’t be there.
It is bizarre to me that some one would try to interpret a “will of the people” (of one mind) into his thoughts on being of one will.
Literally no idea what you mean, or why you need to keep making up lies and saying weirdly untrue things. Is it really that difficult to simply engage in the debate? What are you afraid of?
Stop the childish ad homs and made-up insults, and start taking responsibility.
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