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Some idiot skate boarder on the tube repeated that oft quoted line from Nietzsche in this fashion: Like they say, what ever doesn't kill you makes you stronger...
If that is not the greatest lie philosophy has told the world, then I don't know what is bigger... What does any one think they die of if not the totality of their injuries when they die of nothing else...I can count my bones... Some days everything hurts...Ironwork for thirty years and a rough and tough life besides has me hurting from what may be called sports injuries...I still power through them on will, but if the pain grows too great, then the will goes with it and once any one becomes immoble at an advanced age, then everything, especially cardio vascular starts to fail... We hurt from all that does not kill us, and the pain kills us eventually... He proved it himself with syphilus; only for him the mind was the first to go...Very often people have perfectly fine minds trapped in rotten bodies, and they see life as through a window, at a distance... I don't want that to be me...
Nietzsche does not fascinate me. I just find him an annoyance because he gives philosophy a bad name.
It is the young who love Nietzsche because he justifies them, because he is a sort of Peter Pan of lost boys who never grew up...He was trapped in boyhood, a juvenile, unable to see the point of morality, family, community, and adulthood...
Einstein helped the bomb exist. Modern biology helps germ warfare exist. Progress is a two-edge sword, and Nietzsche was a progress in philosophical self-consciousness...at his best anyhow.
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Nietzsche was also great at mocking the shallowness at some who covet the title of Foolosopher.
Despite all his flattery of and popularity among the artistically inclined, isn't there something of the philistine about Nietzsche? "God is dead" and "Beyond good and evil" at the core are just the credo of the philistines and Nietzsche is their Moses.
Sure. It is The Weekly Reader stuff. The same people who think that Kahil Gibran was a great poet think that Nietzsche was a great philosopher. That is why Wittgenstein wrote of, "the darkness of these times". It really comes down to just a lack of taste.
And this is Nietzsche's revelation to us, that progress has its downside? I read that in The Weekly Reader my granddaughter brings home from school on Friday afternoons. Maybe the saying should go, "What does not kill you makes you dumber".
Despite all his flattery of and popularity among the artistically inclined, isn't there something of the philistine about Nietzsche? "God is dead" and "Beyond good and evil" at the core are just the credo of the philistines and Nietzsche is their Moses.
There is also dandyism which, on the playground at least, seems to stand opposite to philisitinism. Oddly Nietzsche might also be considered both dandy and philistine at the same time... and this dual nature might be the key to the enigma.
For example, the reactionary born-again Christian may see progress as the actualization of a world in which the white, Christian male is justified in their brutality towards others who do profess to believe their held dogma.
There is also dandyism which, on the playground at least, seems to stand opposite to philisitinism. Oddly Nietzsche might also be considered both dandy and philistine at the same time... and this dual nature might be the key to the enigma.
Apart from his telling us that God is dead; that we should get beyond good and evil (and pull our socks up); and that there are many perspectives on the same thing (if there is anything) but that none of them are correct or incorrect; is there anything else Nietzsche informed us about that I should know?