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The Twilight of Nietzsche

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Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#11
post #2

As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.

>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage

Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life.

Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important.

Maybe I’m just outing myself as a PoMo, but thought is life and living begets thought. Philosophers are interpreters of the grand drama in which they have a part.

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#12
post #11
post #2

As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.

>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life. Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important. Maybe I’m just…

Hard disagree, PoMo. The work stands alone. "No man is a hero to his valet" is the truism that springs to mind. Reducing everything to the times & the man is just a way to bring it all down to our own pedestrian level so we can feel equal. The goal of every great artist is to transcend their humanity.

We know nothing about Homer, or even if there was such a person, but The Iliad and The Odyssey have been read for 3,000 years.

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#13
post #11
post #2

As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.

>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life. Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important. Maybe I’m just…

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”

-- F. Nietzsche

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#14
>To regard Nietzsche as a self-help author, writing primarily for himself, helps to put his least convincing idea – eternal recurrence – into perspective. This is the idea that we will live our lives again and again, ad infinitum. For an anti-metaphysician who suggested that we can strive to be higher, better beings, this fatalistic notion of eternal recurrence seems jarring. He devised it in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket. It could be put more prosaically thus: shit happens.

This is actually a terrible take and you should not listen to this person at all.

Nietzsche's thoughts on Eternal Return is, at a theoretical level, an attempt to reconcile an ethical framework that is completely atheistic and non-idealist (non-idealistic, so not tied to any notions of the "end of history" or "right side of history", notions of providence generally), with the understanding of physics modern to his time.

The Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell Pearson is one of the foremost researchers around Nietzsche's grounding of his philosophy in the physics and biology of the 19th century, which was a tumultuous period, and you can read Nietzsche himself attempt to elaborate Eternal Return more concretely in one his fragments, the Time Atom Theory fragment[0].

The idea that the universe is a kind of infinite loop with no begin or end, which therefore defies human narration since we very uncomfortable with a thing that has no origin, is even entertained by serious contemporary physicists such as Brian Cox. Nietzsche simply thinks this must be the foundation for an ethics that is resilient to idealism and theism, and therefore, necessarily _tragic_; his first book was an attempt to retrieve a sense of tragedy from Greek literature that had been overruled and trampled upon by the last 1800 years of Christian asceticism in the West (though the asceticism of Christianity isn't exclusive to the West as he points out).

It is against the backdrop of Eternal Return that Nietzsche wants to develop his idea of "double affirmation" as found in _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_: that I not only accept contingency in the outcomes of my actions and external events ("shit happens") , but _desire_ it too and without resentment and sadness but love (hence: Amor Fati).

This is why Good and Evil are to be surpassed and disastrous axioms to base real ethics on: not only because, for Nietzsche they presume a normalized psychology, but because both fascism and its opposite are both refusals of the essential role of contingency and for that reason breed their own antagonist; only understanding the tragic can get us on the way to a path beyond Good and Evil, and Eternal Return and Double Affirmation are his contributions to furthering that journey.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is also aware of the thematic adjacency of his work on non-fragility with Nietzsche's ideas. That's more the direction Nietzsche would have had in mind.

I'm condensing and simplifying _a lot_ of stuff, there is an entire scholarship dedicated to researching his ideas as he understood them, but reducing all of that down to "his life sucked and so he needed tell himself 'shit happens'" is an outright assassination attempt meant to terminate thinking.

Edit: As an aside, there is this strong tendency from liberal/progressive writers to neutralize, if not dismiss, the notion of the "Death of the Author". This value of this neutralization is to be able to neutralize the value of a person's ideas because of their biography. The point of "Death of the Author" is that the human relationship to its own symbolic practices is not a proprietary one, at least not exhaustively proprietary; in some ways, it is the human being being inscribed upon rather than the human being inscribing 'their ideas' (this is something Michel Foucault spent a lot of time and effort elaborating). Early 20th century fascism was not founded by some specific origin, but was the outcome of a miasma of anonymous forces and specific consequences. The game of 'telephone' is a sort of concrete example of what is meant by this non-ownership.

[0]https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717742

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life. Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important. Maybe I’m just…

Hard disagree, PoMo. The work stands alone. "No man is a hero to his valet" is the truism that springs to mind. Reducing everything to the times & the man is just a way to bring it all down to our own pedestrian level so we can feel equal. The goal of every great artist is to transcend their humanity. We know nothing about Homer, or even if there was such a person, but The Iliad and The Odyssey have been read for 3,0…

It's like arguing whether a mountain ought to be experienced from a distance, so you can see it, or from the top, so you can see from it.

Both!

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#16
post #11
post #2

As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.

>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life. Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important. Maybe I’m just…

Case in point: Russell’s views on Nietzsche.

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#17
Why Nietzche's ideas can be so dangerous without the aid of proper context and perspective. They are very seductive to a certain type of young man. But the reality of human fallibility leads to terminal ressentiment in the end for anyone fixed in that philosophy. It is a total dead end.

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree, PoMo. The work stands alone. "No man is a hero to his valet" is the truism that springs to mind. Reducing everything to the times & the man is just a way to bring it all down to our own pedestrian level so we can feel equal. The goal of every great artist is to transcend their humanity. We know nothing about Homer, or even if there was such a person, but The Iliad and The Odyssey have been read for 3,0…

It's like arguing whether a mountain ought to be experienced from a distance, so you can see it, or from the top, so you can see from it. Both!

OK w/me

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#19
post #2

As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Twilight of Nietzsche

#20
post #14

>To regard Nietzsche as a self-help author, writing primarily for himself, helps to put his least convincing idea – eternal recurrence – into perspective. This is the idea that we will live our lives again and again, ad infinitum. For an anti-metaphysician who suggested that we can strive to be higher, better beings, this fatalistic notion of eternal recurrence seems jarring. He devised it in 1881, at a time of perso…

> This is actually a terrible take and you should not listen to this person at all.

Please keep this sort of internet name-calling and swipes of HN. We're trying for a different quality of discussion here. Both of those things are in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I only skimmed the rest of your comment but it looks like it would be fine without that bit.

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