Is there an ideology of knowledge?

[Alex Jacob]

Boyan wrote:

"So the game is pointless, the powers are playing the game and have no goal they serve to and are therefore without purpose. This means that the exertion of power is innocent, beyond good and evil, because games are essentially without purpose - that is their definition in a way, so the world and the human situation are absurd, like games are absurd but through game Nietzsche arrives to the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, because it serves to nothing outside of it (this is how he defines great music in Daybreak, as the music that is innocent, that doesn't care about pleasing anyone, has no purpose outside of itself)."

It is useful, in a way and for a time, to look down on humans as a sort of ant-colony, to watch them come together in battle, to see the opposite ant-hill get wiped out, and not to have to care. It is tempting to make propositions about human behavior and activity from this remove, to propose what is 'obviously' true: that in comparison to the entirety of the universe 'nothing matters', no event can have any 'meaning', and so nothing really matters, we are just tricking ourselves, and if we are just tricking ourselves, we need to stop doing that so we can really act as we should in the world, which is to say amorally.

But the strange and inescapable fact is that whenever our existing and generally accepted (and valued?) moralities are disregarded---and it has of course been 'mathematically proven' that they are false constructs, an anchor on our behavior---it never seems to bring a clean and 'innocent' well-being, but rather all the acute ugliness of man, the evil even, becomes apparent, and it is inescapable. In the 20th century there are a whole group of horror-events that anyone can refer to for coroboration. Especially in the 20th century, the times when the most 'Nietzschean' behavior (as understanding of N or as misunderstanding) have unleashed themselves, the result has always been incredibly ugly, and these effect linger in culture, and in psychology. OTOH, I have observed that nice, pure, beautiful and 'good-willed' cultural achievement, when it happens, brings delightully rich and subtle feelings in its train.

I assume that for the Satanic-Nietzscheans, pissing while laughing on the altars of their fathers, even to note this is evidence of befuddlement...I mean, Zarathustra never went out skipping to pick buttercups, did he?

"...for the child too feels his game is his work, and his fairytale his truth." (I changed it a little bit).

Looking at it from perhaps a radically different angle, one never intended by Nietzsche (?), what he writes about child's play is interestingly relevant to our identity, to the roles we assume, and to the fluidity of these roles. Life thrusts us into roles, even if we would rather not have them, and we get 'captured' by the roles we assume. (And so much of Nietzsche's voice seems like a playing of a role, a theatre, I might add).

[Boyan]

Boyan wrote:

"...for the child too feels his game is his work, and his fairytale his truth." (I changed it a little bit).

Looking at it from perhaps a radically different angle, one never intended by Nietzsche (?), what he writes about child's play is interestingly relevant to our identity, to the roles we assume, and to the fluidity of these roles. Life thrusts us into roles, even if we would rather not have them, and we get 'captured' by the roles we assume. (And so much of Nietzsche's voice seems like a playing of a role, a theatre, I might add).

Well, actually what you wrote is what Nietzsche meant also it seems (never a lack of interpretations with Nietzsche, eh). I read this in a book on Nietzsche where there is a big chapter devoted to his turning the whole of humanity's practical actions into game. There it says Nietzsche understood the ones playing the game as being controlled by it. Is this simply Nietzsche's determinism or something more I'm not sure.

I'll get back on this tomorrow.

[vicdan]

This is interesting.

Without losers there can't be winners.

Indeed. However, there's quite a big difference between a loser who failed to attain neitzschean freedom and is a loser by dint thereof, and a loser who is such because some bandit is bleeding the life out of him. It's like equating war and soccer by proclaiming that, after all, no matter what your mode of competition, there will be losers and winners.

[Imadrongo]

It's like equating war and soccer by proclaiming that, after all, no matter what your mode of competition, there will be losers and winners.

Honestly there isn't that great of a difference between them. Once ends the losers' lives, the other just gets them dumped from the team. It is your sentimental intrinsic value for human life that makes you see some big distinction here where one is "good" and the other "evil".

[hsandman]

It's like equating war and soccer by proclaiming that, after all, no matter what your mode of competition, there will be losers and winners.

Honestly there isn't that great of a difference between them. Once ends the losers' lives, the other just gets them dumped from the team. It is your sentimental intrinsic value for human life that makes you see some big distinction here where one is "good" and the other "evil".

Because, The Universe is the great equalizer? Shop now, pay latter kinda deal. Law of probability say so. =]

Edit: lol, here is how it works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9s2UQqPAmk

[Boyan]

But the strange and inescapable fact is that whenever our existing and generally accepted (and valued?) moralities are disregarded---and it has of course been 'mathematically proven' that they are false constructs, an anchor on our behavior---it never seems to bring a clean and 'innocent' well-being, but rather all the acute ugliness of man, the evil even, becomes apparent, and it is inescapable. In the 20th century there are a whole group of horror-events that anyone can refer to for coroboration. Especially in the 20th century, the times when the most 'Nietzschean' behavior (as understanding of N or as misunderstanding) have unleashed themselves, the result has always been incredibly ugly, and these effect linger in culture, and in psychology. OTOH, I have observed that nice, pure, beautiful and 'good-willed' cultural achievement, when it happens, brings delightully rich and subtle feelings in its train.

You are in error when you see these events as simply having a Nietzschean philosophical justification or even origin or displaying a Nietzschean behavior, because in history, in times long before Nietzsche, we have examples of such events of the same brutality and disregard for human rights.

Hitler had his eugenics program with sterilizing and killing(?) the retarded and such, and in ancient Mesopotamia there was a queen that castrated all skinny weak men in order to preserve her state by eliminating the amount of not warrior like men from the gene pool.

Hitler rounded up and killed many Jews and Romans had their persecutions of the Christians often killing them in also brutal ways like throwing them to the wild animals.

Caesar committed mass genocide while conquering Gaul. 1000 000 Gauls killed.

So Nietzsche did not came up with as in completely invented will to power with disregard to weak ones, and the right of the men of strong will to power to rule and use those of lesser will as molding material for their intentions - this was always there. Napoleon annihilated 500 000 of his own troops in a poorly thought out campaign in Russia just like that.

[Alex Jacob]

Boyan,

There is an important difference, and an important point to be made. You are obviously right that brutality and conquest did not begin with Nietzsche---it would have been absurd to have said such a thing. What I was rather trying to point out is that it is in Nietzsche that there occurs a battle, or a rebattle, of a more primitive morality against a more recent one, over-laid if you will. Doesn't Nietzsche give expression to the Teutonic longing for days long past? Isn't that the romanticism of Wagner and wasn't that the 'music' that Nietzsche heard and admired?

It seems that Nietzsche, often at deep levels, at a psychological level, is attempting to throw off a restraining and a reining morality, and to return to something original, essential, pure, 'better', and necessary. In any case, that is how he is often read. In my experience so far, many who read him, read him in that way, as did HL Mencken at the turn of the century for example. It is as if it is some part of a 'rational structure' of modern man that, after doing some equations, decided on the basis of the analysis of a certain 'input' ( group of facts that exclude many others), that, 'oh yes, clearly! it is so obvious: these morals are a construct, they are arbitrary, it could just as well be something else...'

And all this modern personality needs, this modern barbarian who had been taught to read and had been nicely tamed and 'punished' to behave so nicely, unlocks the cage where the beast has been stuffed, and all hell breaks loose.

The thing about Nietzsche, at least as he is---what is the way to describe it?---psychologically interpreted by many of his readers, is that he provides a 'conceptual pathway' to the re-unleashing of a restrained, submerged brutality. Well, that is one way of interpreting Nazism. There are other examples: the Americans in Vietnam, the Guatemalan generals in Guatemala who 'could have rubbed shoulders with the worst of the Nazis' (according to Chomsky).

Whether one reads the 'soft' side of Nietzsche or whether one reads the 'hard' side, it is a little difficult to separate Nietzsche from the advent of National Socialism, not necessarily as an outcome of Nietzschean ideas, but as a whole movement that was stirring in the European soul. Many people were pulled into this vortex, many great intellects, and it was only after the massively destructive WW 2 period, when the result was there for everyone to see, and it was inescapable, that it became clear what really happened.

[hsandman]

You are in error when you see these events as simply having a Nietzschean philosophical justification or even origin or displaying a Nietzschean behavior, because in history, in times long before Nietzsche, we have examples of such events of the same brutality and disregard for human rights.

Hitler had his eugenics program with sterilizing and killing(?) the retarded and such, and in ancient Mesopotamia there was a queen that castrated all skinny weak men in order to preserve her state by eliminating the amount of not warrior like men from the gene pool.

Hitler rounded up and killed many Jews and Romans had their persecutions of the Christians often killing them in also brutal ways like throwing them to the wild animals.

Caesar committed mass genocide while conquering Gaul. 1000 000 Gauls killed.

So Nietzsche did not came up with as in completely invented will to power with disregard to weak ones, and the right of the men of strong will to power to rule and use those of lesser will as molding material for their intentions - this was always there. Napoleon annihilated 500 000 of his own troops in a poorly thought out campaign in Russia just like that.

It's lucky then, that today people are so much smarter? You know, iq is rising by 3% every decade.. lol

[Boyan]

Boyan,

There is an important difference, and an important point to be made. You are obviously right that brutality and conquest did not begin with Nietzsche---it would have been absurd to have said such a thing. What I was rather trying to point out is that it is in Nietzsche that there occurs a battle, or a rebattle, of a more primitive morality against a more recent one, over-laid if you will. Doesn't Nietzsche give expression to the Teutonic longing for days long past? Isn't that the romanticism of Wagner and wasn't that the 'music' that Nietzsche heard and admired?

Yes, Nietzsche is the culmination of the conflict in the modern man. But we also know that Nietzsche separated from Wagner precisely because of Wagner's nationalism and anti-semitism. But this longing of a modern man for the times of war and heroic struggle (with many idealizations of course), the shaking off of the rules of society's contract, you speak of, is present and was present before Nietzsche, in the Romantic movement.

I'll get back on the rest of your post, it needs more consideration.

[Alex Jacob]

Don't mean to complicate things, it is only that it is interesting to exchange ideas. I read a biography, written maybe 40 years ago, can't remember who it was, who pointed out that though Nietzsche was not driven by animus against Jews (and the effect of Jews on Europe, tied-in oddly with the Roman conquest, the 'civilizing of the European frontier), and defended Jews in his writings, he was nevertheless still repeating the essntial core of ant-semitic doctrine, a way of viewing Jews and describing what they do, who they are.

So, though you don't find much open resentment against Jews in his writings, and some defending, nevertheless he is repeating the basic ideas and interpretation that define 'anti-semitism'. (My particular take is that the whole issue---that issue---is so confused, so screwed up, that it would take a far too huge an effort to get to the bottom of it). Nevertheless, and still, when I think about it, Nietzsche is caught right in the middle of a huge conflict, the source of which is difficult to locate, but there at the core of the problem and conflict are those pesky Jews, that curse apon Europe, whose morality was a yoke set upon European shoulders, rendering them nice and docile, dressing Europe up in its Sunday best, as it were. And there he places himself, and all his discourses take place there, his dietary recommendations and his views on morality (!).

Like I say, it is only interesting to read Nietzsche and his time more philologically...and there is no reason at all why Nietzsche himself, the unloved dyspeptic refugee, cannot be put on the dissection table, why we cannot read his guts and muse on the auguries of his jaundiced liver...

I'd like to know more about the Romantic era you refer to...I always had the impression that Ramanticism was more about putting on shackles than taking them off...

[Boyan]

Even though the Romantic era seems all about heightened emotionality, suffering the 'world's pain' and young Werther's sorrows, it is at its core the first open rebellion against the enlightenment and age of reason with their focus on rationality and exclusion of any mysticism.

The enlightenment figures attacked medieval world view and religious dogma because it was degrading and stopping reason in its development. Now, the romantics attacked the enlightenment's scientific, stern rationalism for suppressing and hindering emotions and neglecting free creativity. Romantics were against what they saw as turning humans into soulless machines (look up french materialists of the 18th century, and the mechanistic world view based on Newtonian physics) fixed together with the whole world into a mechanical, predetermined frame and cold reason.

This, the romantics believed, dwarfed the individual, crushed creative imagination, removed men from their emotions etc.

They called for returning to man's true nature, and yes, shaking off the chains of overly intellectualized, rule filled, civilized world. They gave superiority to emotions over reason, personal unique experiences over the cosmopolitan views of enlightenment, there's no doubt about it. Take young Werther when he says - what I know (referring to his fine education) anyone can know, but my heart... is one and only. (or take Goethe's Faust for example). Emotion, personal intuition is therefore man's essence, not reason, is what he's saying.


Romanticism started out as a literary and artistic movement, but soon found its way deep into the political and philosophical thought, especially nationalism and conservatism. They were also about the myth of a nation, the soil, the blood (sounds familiar?), appreciating the unique the national, national past - and with this they contributed to modern nationalism and conservatism.


So the romantics, who enriched our culture in numerous ways and thank them for it, although not being compatible with Hitler's racist nationalism because of their accent on individuality and diversity, shackled the respect towards the enlightenment tradition of rationality and set the ground for the rise of fascistic movements and their triumph.

Their intentions were cultural and artistic above all but through glorifying the mythic national past they brought a irrational component to the political life of Europe, and an emotional approach to political issues.


There's a great book I got most of this from, its called ' An Intellectual history of modern Europe' by Marvin Perry - a fine synthesis, a history of ideas, and essential reading.

[Boyan]

Don't mean to complicate things, it is only that it is interesting to exchange ideas. I read a biography, written maybe 40 years ago, can't remember who it was, who pointed out that though Nietzsche was not driven by animus against Jews (and the effect of Jews on Europe, tied-in oddly with the Roman conquest, the 'civilizing of the European frontier), and defended Jews in his writings, he was nevertheless still repeating the essntial core of ant-semitic doctrine, a way of viewing Jews and describing what they do, who they are.

So, though you don't find much open resentment against Jews in his writings, and some defending, nevertheless he is repeating the basic ideas and interpretation that define 'anti-semitism'. (My particular take is that the whole issue---that issue---is so confused, so screwed up, that it would take a far too huge an effort to get to the bottom of it). Nevertheless, and still, when I think about it, Nietzsche is caught right in the middle of a huge conflict, the source of which is difficult to locate, but there at the core of the problem and conflict are those pesky Jews, that curse apon Europe, whose morality was a yoke set upon European shoulders, rendering them nice and docile, dressing Europe up in its Sunday best, as it were. And there he places himself, and all his discourses take place there, his dietary recommendations and his views on morality (!).

Like I say, it is only interesting to read Nietzsche and his time more philologically...and there is no reason at all why Nietzsche himself, the unloved dyspeptic refugee, cannot be put on the dissection table, why we cannot read his guts and muse on the auguries of his jaundiced liver...

I'd like to know more about the Romantic era you refer to...I always had the impression that Ramanticism was more about putting on shackles than taking them off...

Ok, lets see where Nietzsche stands in relation to Nazism:

nationalism - openly against, disgusted

socialism - openly against

anti-semitism - openly against, thoroughly disgusted

myth of a great German nation - ridicules whole heartedly

I get what you're saying on the issue of Nietzsche ans Jews. In the genealogy of morals, yes, he says Jews invented Christianity and fooled everyone into accepting it, by killing Christ and removing all suspicion from themselves.

But what else does Nietzsche says in the same work?

''I also do not like these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who today roll their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-bourgeois manner and exhaust one's patience by trying to rouse up all the horned-beast elements in the people by a brazen abuse of the cheapest of all agitator's tricks, moral attitudinizing (that no kind of swindle fails to succeed in Germany today is connected with the undeniable and palpable stagnation of the German spirit; and the cause of that I seek in a too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, together with the presuppositions of such a diet: first, national constriction and vanity; the strong but narrow principle “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” [nationalism] and then the paralysis agitans of “modern ideas” [socialism]).''


The question that's bothering you it seems is what Nietzsche would say if summoned by Hitler on a Nazi rally and asked the following:

These Jews fooled the brave, the noble, the strong and reverted the values in their own favor and had their slave values rule the Europe for two millenia - so Nietzsche, wouldn't it be good to remove them so that new better values could grow? For you yourself explained how this reversal took place, and expressed your anguish over this fact. Shouldn't we remove this poison from the European man? We can do it, just give us the nod.

And what would Nietzsche say? From what I know of him and the writings I've read I think he would had said: No, you nation worshiping anti-semitic reactionaries, this people beat you because its stronger than you in every way, and to Jews we owe innumerable debts.

It is Nietzsche we're talking about, the God slayer, the satyr of Dionysus, the apatrid... linking him to a deranged movement of Germans he despised is ludicrous.


You do know that in the Dreyfus affair the left winged defenders of Dreyfus were labeled as Nietzscheans?


Consider these statements by Nietzsche and tell me if you had ever heard of a greater defense of the Jews, and a greater refutation of anti-semitism, topped with such admiration and respect towards Jews.

Nietzsche was sent several unsolicited mailings of anti-semitic literature, by Theodor Fritsch a leading writer in the anti-semitic movement, eventually losing his patience, Nietzsche sent the following response to Fritsch:

Herewith I am returning to you the three issues of your correspondence sheet, thanking you for your confidence which you permitted me to cast a glance at the muddle of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement. Yet I ask in the future not to provide me with these mailings: I fear, in the end, for my patience. Believe me: this abominable ‘wanting to have a say’ of annoying dilettantes about the value of people and races, this subjection to “authorities” who are utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind (e.g., E. Dühring, R. Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, P. de Lagarde -- who among these in questions of morality and history is the most unqualified, the most unjust?), these constant, absurd falsifications and rationalizations of vague concepts “germanic,” “semitic,” “aryan,” “christian,” “German” -- all of that could in the long run cause me to lose my temper and bring me out of the ironic benevolence with which I have hitherto observed the virtuous velleities and pharisaisms of modern Germans. And finally, what do you think that I feel when the name of Zarathustra is mouthed by antisemites?

Nietzsche in a letter to his friend Overbeck on the subject of his failed attempt to remove ownership of his printed works from the publisher Schmeitzner:

My writings lie completely buried and unexhumeable in this antisemitic hole

Human all too human:
Incidentally, the whole problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as their energy and higher intelligence, their capital of spirit and will, which accumulated from generation to generation in the long school of their suffering, must predominate to a degree that awakens envy and hatred; and so, in the literature of nearly all present-day nations (and, in fact, in proportion to their renewed nationalistic behavior), there is an increase in the literary misconduct that leads the Jews to the slaughterhouse, as scapegoats for every possible public and private misfortune.

[to Jews, humanity] owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world. Furthermore, in the darkest medieval times, when the Asiatic cloud had settled heavily over Europe, it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars, and doctors, who, under the harshest personal pressure, held fast to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence, and defended Europe against Asia; we owe to their efforts not least, that a more natural, rational, and in any event unmythical explanation of the world could finally triumph again, and that the ring of culture which now links us to the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity, remained unbroken. If Christianity did everything possible to orientalize the Occident, then Judaism helped substantially to occidentalize it again and again, which, in a certain sense, is to say that it made Europe's history and task into a continuation of the Greek


Jews among Germans are always the higher race--more refined, spiritual, kind.


I mean, find me anyone who spoke more favorably of Jews than Nietzsche.


How can one praise and glorify a nation as a whole?--Even among the Greeks, it was the INDIVIDUALS that counted.

From this site http://www.nikutai-to-kageboushi.com/ni ... facts.html

[ZenMuadDib]

I haven't had access to the internet for the past four days so I'll try to catch up on this.

[Alex Jacob]

You remind me of possibly the only book I read dedicated to the subject of romanticism: Romanticism and Revolt, I don't know who wrote it. But it opened up similar doors as to what you are talking about. It is a vastly interersting area of investigation. Makes me think that perhaps so many of us, or all of us, are caught in things we don't fully understand, because we cannot name them.

Well, it looks like we have to let Nietzsche off the hook. He was a blameless, guiltless man, and he loved the Jews so! ;-) I guess that is why Walter Kaufmann could rally behind him without second thoughts. Yet even if that is true, in his heart of hearts, I am personally nevertheless quite confused at times about what to make of him, and his ideology. Although I am not sure if I will have time for an exhaustive research of the matter, I remain...skeptical. And maybe it's because Nietzsche himself seems a little unstable to me, poetical, romantic, as if he is listening to some far off music and furiously writing down what he thinks, but what he thinks changes, it is never the same, and it could be this or it could be that, depending on the day and who is interpreting him. He is so volatile, and so his writing has the effect of volatility, like volatile spirits. That has certainly how it has been for me. Nietzsche is something I subjected myself to, and I can't think of any writer or any philosopher (is he really a philosopher...or a spiritualist of some strange sort?) who had as strong an effect.

So, despite his apparent friendliness for the Jews of Europe, I will always remain suspicious of him, even with all those lovely things to say. One should perhaps be suspicious of effusive praise, don't you think? Actually, his praise of the Jews reminds me of some post-war books published by the Jewish Publication Society of America: all sorts of effusive praise for the Jewish historical project, an extended apology, so noble, so fine, so misunderstood. And even if it speaks truth it somehow still plays into the hands of darker animus. Martin Buber, oddly enough in an introduction to Hassidic thinking, wrote about 'diaspora pathology', a sort of general sickness as a result of being in diaspora, galut, dispersion, exile, and though he didn't go farther into what exactly he meant, the idea always intersted me. So, what I will say is completely speculative, but even so much of the good things one can say about 'Jews', maybe because it arises as a defense against so many lies and distortions, never quite seems to be purely true. Jews get caught up in these polarizations just as much as anyone does, it has always seemed to me. I have seen it thousands of times. Honestly speaking, Jews sometimes construct their identity on the tendentious conceptions offered by the 'disapora pathology', that is to say, distorted ideas about them. Also, praise is a tough one to sort through. Praise can be a set-up, it really can. Inside of praise often lurks 'ressentiment', I think that is true.

If someone asked me, I would say that Nietzsche is never one to believe because there is no doctrine there, and no order to it. In his own special way, he is a poet-philosopher...a psychologist. I am not trying to be uncooperative in respect to what you are trying to communicate, I'm just sharing what I think.

The site you pulled those snippets from looks compelling, I was reading through it. I live in a war-torn, broken-hearted place that may never recover, where the doctrines of anarchy sound like sheer madness, but nevertheless I thought it was interesting.

[Imadrongo]

Nietzsche is definitely confusing.

I think he is not against Jewish people in the sense of heredity, but against that type of people, the type of people Christianity and morality spawned in.

Perhaps he thought antisemitism spawned from a similar type of people, or was for the wrong reasons.

He definitely didn't want to destroy this type of people, perhaps to enslave them and maybe cut down their population at best.

I bet he simply viewed himself as infinitely superior to the antisemitic movement.

At any rate, I'm confident he would have admired something in Hitler, if not his reasoning then at least his will to power.

[Boyan]

.

That has certainly how it has been for me. Nietzsche is something I subjected myself to, and I can't think of any writer or any philosopher (is he really a philosopher...or a spiritualist of some strange sort?) who had as strong an effect.

Nietzsche is very much regarded as a philosopher in his own right. If you look at the books written about him, not only that there are thousands of them, but some of them they are serious studies about Nietzsche's effect on philosophy - his relation to other philosophers, not just explanations of Nietzsche's specific thought. Sure most academics shy away from Nietzsche as he was not a philosopher in traditional sense, but those that took an interest in Nietzsche see his huge impact on philosophy.


Nietzsche is a very influential thinker. The whole postmodern philosophy is influenced by Nietzsche. Take Foucault: he claimed how all truths and notions of justice are temporal, partial and always related to some particular power, how the terms we use our constructs of a particular civilization and culture and so they too have a limited capacity for explaining anything etc. These are basically footnotes on Nietzsche.

I'm writing a seminar paper on Nietzsche and Heraclitus and I am reading two very good books - Nietzsche and metaphysics (yes metaphysics, and the book is 400 pages long) is one of them. The second Nietzsche and philosophy by Jilles Deleuze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze, and they both showed me there is more to Nietzsche's thought than I thought.

So, despite his apparent friendliness for the Jews of Europe, I will always remain suspicious of him, even with all those lovely things to say. One should perhaps be suspicious of effusive praise, don't you think?

Sure, but in this case I see no second thoughts whatsoever in what he said about Jews. Just look at those statements, and even more so, look at his actions: he broke off with Wagner, who was his soul mate almost, his fellow fighter in the battle of reshaping the German culture, because of Wagner's antisemitism and nationalism. Nietzsche was actually physically sick when it happened, when he became aware of it. Nietzsche laughed at his sister when she told him she will be founding a Germanic colony in Paraguay.

Look at his mockeries aimed at German culture that persist in his writings from the beginning to the end. Starting with the open attacks and harsh criticism on it in Untimely meditations in mid 1870s, where he uncompromisingly and against the entire public opinion criticized a nation that just won a war and united. At the time when everyone was quick to point out to the greatness of German culture that prevailed, Nietzsche steps out, with no regard to academic politeness whatsoever and launches his attacks, saying Germans have no culture, calling German intellectuals educated philistines.

If someone asked me, I would say that Nietzsche is never one to believe because there is no doctrine there, and no order to it. In his own special way, he is a poet-philosopher...a psychologist. I am not trying to be uncooperative in respect to what you are trying to communicate, I'm just sharing what I think.

Well this is basically what many academics find annoying with Nietzsche. Yes, he was always changing in some ways. Upon revealing his bust in Basel University, a lady who knew Nietzsche was asked to give her opinion of the work. She said - yes, that was the look of Nietzsche, the look of one Nietzsche... but you must keep in mind that I knew at least thirty Nietzsches.

[Alex Jacob]

Neil wrote:

"At any rate, I'm confident he would have admired something in Hitler, if not his reasoning then at least his will to power."

Well, there you have it.

The above seems to indicate, basically, where this Nietzschean analysis leads, and that is basically to madness. Always, there on the fringes of the Nietzschean orbit, you find more-or-less the same sort of weird musings, as the site below indicates:

"I glory in the evil of my ancestors; it is their lapses into kindness that shames me."

You could easily come across hundreds, thousands!

It is peculiar to me how a style of thinking, in a certain sort of person, leads always toward a similar end, a similar result.

[Imadrongo]

Neil wrote:

"At any rate, I'm confident he would have admired something in Hitler, if not his reasoning then at least his will to power."

Well, there you have it.

The above seems to indicate, basically, where this Nietzschean analysis leads, and that is basically to madness. Always, there on the fringes of the Nietzschean orbit, you find more-or-less the same sort of weird musings, as the site below indicates:

Huh??

Nietzsche doesn't say "GOOD" act, "BAD" act, etc, he doesn't make a new dogmatic morality. After relentlessly attacking Christianity what does he have to say about about Jesus? -- That he was noble, but misguided; that he might have seen what Nietzsche himself did if he didn't die so early. What does he say about Napoleon and Cesare Borgia? They are also honorable for their will to power.

One of the best quotes from him IMO:
"You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause."

Nietzsche is talking about will to power here -- "the good war", fighting for one's cause. Those who lack it are the decadents and the source out of which Christianity came, the source in which supernatural morality thrives, the idiots, the herd, etc.

[Alex Jacob]

Sure, Neil. But here's what I think. You sort of have to take into consideration that you, the one who has this opinion and this interpretation, are a 20 year old kid living at home in suburbia with your parents, bags of dog food in the closet, Cambells soup and other victuals from your local supermarket all neatly stacked up in the pantry. You live in a neat and environmentally controlled world and from the sound of it, you have not as yet ventured up and down the dusty face of the earth.

So, with your freshly washed undies you proceed to the University where YOU are the slave that is being educated and YOU represent precisely the threat that Nietzsche warned of. A generation or two ago, your illiterate ancestors plowed some land somewhere, until some priest got it into his head to set up some institution of higher learning for y'all, and voila, a few generations later, there you are, roaring like the Nietzschean lion. It really is all pretty absurd if you really were to consider all the elements and put them all on the table. I have only pegged together a few, but if I were a little more cynical and a little more vicious I don't think it would be too hard to tear you to shreds. What in the fuck do you know about any of these things, really?

"You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause."

Whatever. Different people have taken these poetical phrases in different ways. But let's take it at face value for the sake of conversation. Right now, I live in a culture that has been torn apart by war for something like 40 years. A low-intensity guerrilla-style war, true, but a war nonetheless. And what I can immediately say, even without thinking about it, is that there is not a great deal of 'hallowing' that I see going on, and what I do see instead is a severe and disastrous tearing of the social fabric. I see torn society, torn future, a retrograde movement, and consciousness of what has been lost...impovrishment.

Just out of curiosity, and you can think about this as you are putting on some fresh fabric-softened undies as you prepare for classes tomorrow---sorry, I am on a roll with the idea of you as the university student living at home with your decent Christian parents while you are mentally and spiritually throwing off the Christian yoke, but it provides an approapriate contrast to some of what you say---but out of curiosity are you really considering that ramifications of what you write, these opinions you seem to parrot? Have you ever seen any of the results? Have you been in communities where people have suffered these losses? Are you aware of the psychological dimensions? the long-term cost of war? I am not at all negating that war and conquest is a real and perhaps necessary part of our world, but to elevate it with the word 'hallows' just doesn't quite ring true, not from what I've seen. I really feel I could go on and on about this, and could make a very good case as to how it is really so very much the opposite. I will leave it to you to connect some of this with your preferred example: Hitler and the European experience of WW2. It just seems to me that you really have NO IDEA what you are talking about, and how could you?

Well, there is another side of the coin too. And that has to do with what is gained when a civil society functions, and when there is an intact 'morality', and yes, Judeo-Christian morality, which has some exquisite features. What do you really know about what happens in a culture when these moralities disappear? The structures that create civil society? I would really like to hear a little more from you than the usual silence. What in the fuck do you actually know, Neil? Where have you been, what have you seen?

And finally, I don't know if it is too wise to completely dismiss the metaphysical possibility, to be frank. 'Modernity' has a deep problem with metaphysics, and certainly Nietzsche did insofar as there was no place for it in his materialist interpretations. But I merely suggest that though we may not be able to describe the mechanisms, it is not so wise to dismiss the notions to which they allude so completely. In other words, I think we may very really have to consider 'karma' (in the fullest sense of the word) and its implications, and also those activities and mind-frames that keep us enchained into patterns of disaster, pain, misery. That is of course just my personal opinion and I do think I could say a great deal more about it.

[vicdan]

Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark... :D

[Imadrongo]

So, with your freshly washed undies you proceed to the University where YOU are the slave that is being educated and YOU represent precisely the threat that Nietzsche warned of.

I think this is rubbish. But exactly what threat do I represent that Nietzsche warned of?

What in the fuck do you know about any of these things, really?

Not much. Yourself? I bet you were raised in a more tamed setting than a few generations back too, I guess that means Nietzsche is refuted until someone comes along who led a holocaust?

"You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause."

Whatever. Different people have taken these poetical phrases in different ways. But let's take it at face value for the sake of conversation.

I think you might be taking it too literally. Basically it says: "Fighting for one's cause honors it". This doesn't necessarily involve physical wars.

Right now, I live in a culture that has been torn apart by war for something like 40 years. A low-intensity guerrilla-style war, true, but a war nonetheless. And what I can immediately say, even without thinking about it, is that there is not a great deal of 'hallowing' that I see going on, and what I do see instead is a severe and disastrous tearing of the social fabric. I see torn society, torn future, a retrograde movement, and consciousness of what has been lost...impovrishment.

You are a victim. Aww poor Alex. This whole paragraph reeks of it. The language would be altogether different, if you even bothered "debating", if you were on the other end of the struggles. Do you feel torn? Have you lost something? Has it been taken from you? Is this a disaster?

I suggest perhaps you go beg the rebels tomorrow to join them and run around through the jungle killing and pillaging. This would be a cure for your problem. Or maybe you should take up arms against them. Or you could sit there crying about it, but that really isn't hallowing any cause at all, that is just wallowing in your problems rather than doing something about them.

Just out of curiosity, and you can think about this as you are putting on some fresh fabric-softened undies as you prepare for classes tomorrow... but out of curiosity are you really considering that ramifications of what you write, these opinions you seem to parrot? Have you ever seen any of the results? Have you been in communities where people have suffered these losses? Are you aware of the psychological dimensions? the long-term cost of war?

You are attaching some "badness" to people suffering and their psychological problems. Have you considered that I might not care at all about these people suffering as an end in themselves, only as a means?

Well, there is another side of the coin too. And that has to do with what is gained when a civil society functions, and when there is an intact 'morality', and yes, Judeo-Christian morality, which has some exquisite features. What do you really know about what happens in a culture when these moralities disappear? The structures that create civil society? I would really like to hear a little more from you than the usual silence. What in the fuck do you actually know, Neil? Where have you been, what have you seen?

I don't know what you are alluding to (what is "gained" when moral society functions).

And finally, I don't know if it is too wise to completely dismiss the metaphysical possibility, to be frank. ...

What possibility? That metaphysics might not be nonsense? I discount it simply because we don't know and it has no affect on real life anyways.

[Alex Jacob]

If anyone has to explain to you what benefits and what 'goodness' arise from functioning civil society, if it is not already at least somewhat clear to you, and if you can only offer an invitation to partake in a strange Game of Defintitions (a fave 'round here), I doubt that you will accept anything anyone would have to say about it anyway. You would do yourself a service, it seems to me, to read some of the people who have written from the post-war perspective (of numerous wars) and who might at least present to you some ideas and images to enrich your poor vocabulary of ideas. I am leary, especially on this list, of getting sucked into stupid arguments, by stupid pre-literate children who cannot discern their asses from holes in the ground, whose tactic is to try to grind you down in ridiculous linguistic games. That is pretty much what QRS stands for in my book, and the same technique is employed by many others. I guess this is 'the intellectual world'. (Juaaaar, juaaaar).

I think you flip-flop between poles, but it is capricious and rather thoughtless on your part (and more evidence of essential lack of experience, and a foolish talking out of turn if you will permit me, that is only my opinion). Here, you speak of 'noble causes' and there you speak of culling the Jewish herd and admiration for the Hitlerian project. I guess there is some removed, ethereal space where arrogant youngsters can chirp to their heart's content any inanity that flies into their head (as for example the portentious musings on the spiritual-neonazi blog a few posts up), but in the real world there is a point where the rubber meets the road, and with experience there you can make real assessments about what is desirable and undesirable, or good and bad if that blows your dress up. I think it might have to do with being either 'responsible' or 'irresponsible' too, and having the integrity to do some research before one speaks.

I think it is always better to try to include elements from one's real life and from one's real self whenever one writes. That is one of my main complaints about this forum, for example the Nietzschean Buddhist Boyscouts who speak from an almost imaginary position, from the inside of a costume they have pastiched together, like bower birds. But where is the 'real person' in all this? (The only thing that counts). I mentioned the on-the-ground realities here in Colombia not because they are my realities or that I am involved in them, or suffer from them---I can leave at any moment and there is nothing tying me here---but to illustrate that it is one thing to comment on culture and history from a remove, and offer all sorts of opinions about it, and quite another to be in the midst of it and offer up opinions based on real thinking about real things.

I was certainly not invoking pity for myself, but describing what happens in a war-torn environment. The Hitlerian example is not an example that functions, you fool, and yet you keep bringing it up. You mistake the unleashing of brutal force, that rips apart things that took a thousand years to construct, with a legitimate 'will to power', I mean one that any sane person could rationally---or even romantically---defend. In short, you know as much about any of these things as a horse knows of his own asshole and I am doing you a favor by pointing it out and I am not even asking for recompensation! Take it or leave it, doesn't really matter to me.

(And there is a little clue in there for you: Those things that took a thousand years to construct---and a day to destroy. Think about that in relation to the 'good' of what comes out of 'civil society' and---is it asking too much?---try to sound intelligent, because you don't at all, regretably).

What you write, Neil, it seems to come back to this, is what results from a 'bad reading' of Nietzsche, and is a known phenomenon, something that many have written about, and something to be countered.

(In regard to 'the metaphysical', I do have a few things to say about it, to suggest, but don't have the time right now).
___________________________________________

Do intend to comment, Boyan, on what you wrote. But later).

[Imadrongo]

The Hitlerian example is not an example that functions, you fool, and yet you keep bringing it up. You mistake the unleashing of brutal force, that rips apart things that took a thousand years to construct, with a legitimate 'will to power', I mean one that any sane person could rationally---or even romantically---defend.

What exactly is a "legitimate will to power", one that you approve of? I'm sorry if destroying something that took thousands of years to build seems like an illegitimate thing to do to you, but to deny that destruction can be an act of power as construction is, would be ridiculous, especially when the original word in the quote was in fact WAR. Maybe Nietzsche was wrong and you need to stop defending him from "bad readings". It took thousands of years to build the good, civil, Christian state -- Nietzsche himself was fighting against it, was destroying it.

What you write, Neil, it seems to come back to this, is what results from a 'bad reading' of Nietzsche, and is a known phenomenon, something that many have written about, and something to be countered.

By "bad reading" surely you mean "reading with immoral (bad) outcome", not an interpretation other than the one that was intended. I don't understand how any reading can not be "bad" from the moralist perspective, when his central theme is an attack on morality. I can see how this would be a well known phenomenon. Out of curiosity what is a "good reading" -- one that strengthens one's altruism and moral integrity? One that rejects most of his writings, perhaps latches onto the "eternal recurrence" and a type of constructive "will to power" to improve one's moral life? Let me guess... the rest of his writings were metaphors, or substandard, or deluded... a QRS reading.

[Alex Jacob]

Thanks for the link to the Deleuze site, and thanks for this: "Deleuze once famously described his method of interpreting philosophers as "buggery (enculage)", as sneaking behind an author and producing an offspring which is recognizably his, yet also monstrous and different".

('Cue' in French is the base of so many fine swear-words and terms, but a more modern term than 'buggery', I think, would be 'finger-fucking'. Buggery is too old fashioned, too anal. There is a similar word in Spanish to the French unculer: culear, the 'culo' being the rear-end and the sex organs.)

I once read and interview of Noam Chosmky where he was asked what he thought of post-modernism, and he responded by saying that generally he only entered into that conversation when someone twisted his arm, always relucantly, and that when he read post-modern texts his 'eyes glossed over'.

And it wasn't because of Chomsky or my own stupidity that I often had the same experience; where I'd sit there and read the same damned sentance over and over again and still not feel that I got it. And even when I'd managed to get through a whole chapter or even a book, I retained so little of it, I couldn't really repeat what it was in fact about. And yet, strangely enough, post-modernism is upon us, like a mental disorder, and they come at you like out of Night of the Living Dead, like on this forum. I keep trying to relocate myself in post-classical modernity but then I realized that the post-modern problem resides in me, and I am its spokesman (one among millions I guess). I am still looking for a cure for that, I'll let you know how it goes...

But even in that Wiki page, there is a reference to Nietzsche as a 'reactionary mystic' or 'mystic of reaction', though if you twist him one way or the other you can get him to serve many purposes. I have often wondered what effect he's had on haute cuisine, has anyone worked that angle? If I were to be quite truthful with you, I have not as yet been too impressed from the doctrines and ideas that have spun out of Nietzsche, although I do find them enchanting and compelling in their ways. Where they lead, I don't want to go. And that is why, for now, employing my own enculage, I refer to Nietzsche as a snake-charmer and hypnotist.

Here in Colombia, Nietzsche is the preferred philosopher for a sort of Gothic urbanite pot-head that attends the left-leaning public universities, where oddly enough he is used as a sort of validation for escape, a sort of spiritual dropping-out from very depressing realities. Yet, at another time, he was apparently a source of inspiration for an unusual Colombian poet: Porfirio Barba-Jacob. (This is of course irrelevant to anything at all).

"Sure, but in this case I see no second thoughts whatsoever in what he said about Jews. Just look at those statements, and even more so, look at his actions: he broke off with Wagner, who was his soul mate almost, his fellow fighter in the battle of reshaping the German culture, because of Wagner's antisemitism and nationalism. Nietzsche was actually physically sick when it happened, when he became aware of it. Nietzsche laughed at his sister when she told him she will be founding a Germanic colony in Paraguay."

Like I said, I believe you. But I don't think it was his sister that did any founding, but rather her husband, wasn't it? Who then committed suicide?

(I have often wondered---not that I palce great stock in it necessarily---what Chomsky thought of Nietzsche? It just seems that good manners would not allow him to say much of anything).

[ZenMuadDib]

Alex,
I will pick up Brave New World, it looks interesting, and maybe the other too, though I have way too much on my to-read list right now, I could sit for a year doing nothing else. Ayn Rand was pretty ridiculous.

Victor,
Do you see your place in that story? Discouraging the untamed man -- "ohs noes, disease and suffering are bad we must eliminate them!! peace for all, long lives and science!!"

Neil thinks that moving beyond Christian morality means simple-minded rebellion against every precept of it, in the manner of a teenager who rebels against the Christianity of his parents by becoming a "Satanist."

No, but it definitely involves... moving beyond Christian morality. You can't move beyond it and continue to be governed by it. I'm not at all saying you should be a Satanist.

You can read the whole book online here http://www.hedweb.com/huxley/bnw/