Skewed Perceptions of Nietzsche

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hue-man
 
Reply Sun 25 Apr, 2010 12:10 pm
Now we can blame some of the skewed perceptions of Nietzsche on his aphoristic style of writing or his complex ideas. Afterall, he did attempt to weed out certain individuals with the way he delivered his ideas. However, some of the commentary on Nietzsche, especially in this section of the forum, are clearly more than a result of Nietzsche's relative ambiguity. From the mocking comments on his idea of the overman to the claims that he shared fascist views and viewed the Jews as inferior to the Nazis, some seem intent on not trying to understand the man's ideas. Now I have my theories on why some react this way, but why do think this is so?

I can already see the jesters waiting to perform.
 
Diogenes phil
 
Reply Sun 25 Apr, 2010 01:02 pm
@hue-man,
I think he was a bad man because that is my opinion.
 
hue-man
 
Reply Sun 25 Apr, 2010 01:10 pm
@Diogenes phil,
Diogenes;156485 wrote:
I think he was a bad man because that is my opinion.


Well that was insightful.
 
Fido
 
Reply Sun 25 Apr, 2010 09:17 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;156476 wrote:
Now we can blame some of the skewed perceptions of Nietzsche on his aphoristic style of writing or his complex ideas. Afterall, he did attempt to weed out certain individuals with the way he delivered his ideas. However, some of the commentary on Nietzsche, especially in this section of the forum, are clearly more than a result of Nietzsche's relative ambiguity. From the mocking comments on his idea of the overman to the claims that he shared fascist views and viewed the Jews as inferior to the Nazis, some seem intent on not trying to understand the man's ideas. Now I have my theories on why some react this way, but why do think this is so?

I can already see the jesters waiting to perform.

Before I grew bored with it, I spent some time with one of his books circling all the way he defined the overman and contrasted him with Mr, Goodmench and it was both bizarre and digusting... And the way he attacked Paul and the Church; the church because they did not exclude, as if that were the point, and Paul because he put forward the notion of human equality in the eyes of God, where is just as far as it went for a thousand years, or more, thanks to Plato, who appealed more to the church fathers who accepted their own superiority as a given..

If you read his aphorisms he talks as one who knows, but they are, to any one with life experience, so much garbage...For example: he talks of women; but who were his women??? His mother and sisters were loyal to him, but he held women in contempt... Not one bit of respect for women comes through his words...Easy enough to feel when the darling of ones family; but what of other women??? What did he know of them??? That they all too easily dismissed him??? The closest he ever came to an actual relationship with actual sex with women was not a loving relationship, but a financial relationship, and there is a big difference... And yet he talks like an expert...

Well, no man who ever thought to master the ins and outs of love would ever hold women in such contempt, and from my experience, they are the smarter, the more honorable, insightful, and more naturally philosophical of the species...One must be philosophical when the natural victim of a class that is stonger, and more inclined to rely on strength instead of mind, who by nature are quick to anger, sure to do violence, and way short on socially redeeming characteristics... Such are men to women, and women have provided the bulk of our genetic selection just by deciding who would be decent enough to breed with...Which only goes to prove that no choice is no choice, and no amount of philosophy can make a choice out of no choice...Women made a choice with Nietzsche, and a good one...

There is a particular situation, of being raised without father that leads boys to remain boys, never maturing, never able to supplant their fathers with a test of wills, never able to fully respect their mothers, or become their fathers, and I have seen it often; though I do not pretend to understand how it works... But I do know that Nietzsche's attack on the morals of society and on church, and even on God were all part and parcel of a sainted father he could never discover was human...
 
kennethamy
 
Reply Sun 25 Apr, 2010 09:31 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;156476 wrote:
Now we can blame some of the skewed perceptions of Nietzsche on his aphoristic style of writing or his complex ideas. Afterall, he did attempt to weed out certain individuals with the way he delivered his ideas. However, some of the commentary on Nietzsche, especially in this section of the forum, are clearly more than a result of Nietzsche's relative ambiguity. From the mocking comments on his idea of the overman to the claims that he shared fascist views and viewed the Jews as inferior to the Nazis, some seem intent on not trying to understand the man's ideas. Now I have my theories on why some react this way, but why do think this is so?

I can already see the jesters waiting to perform.


It always seemed to me that one of the main problems with Nietzsche was that he lacked perspective. Right on cue.
 
Fido
 
Reply Mon 26 Apr, 2010 04:52 am
@kennethamy,
kennethamy;156634 wrote:
It always seemed to me that one of the main problems with Nietzsche was that he lacked perspective. Right on cue.

Philology gave him language and language is history...It is the best of perspectives upon which to view humanity...

Why one person sees one thing in a landscape, and another see something other and takes from it a completely different message is the question... I think it possibly true, that Nietzsche really did, early on, because of a situation unique to him really did begin to think of God as evil... At a very young age I thought as much out of circumstances unique to myself... In time, I grew up; but I doubt that Nietzsche ever did... It is not that God is evil, or Dead, or does not exist... The problem across the board is moral forms upon which we build our lives though they be but sand... For all of his talk about good and evil, I don't think he ever questioned their reality since they seem so real to people, but he did reject much of morality out of hand having nothing better to replace morals with than brute will...And, it is easy to point at syphilus as a cauuse of his insanity, but what was the cause of his syphilus??? if his behavior had not always odd as much as his mind was brilliant it was likely he would never have contracted the disease...

We are all on the clock... We are all mortal and must face our deaths, sooner or later... Sometimes people invite the inevitable, and feeling cursed by God, will spit in his eye... As Job's Wife advised: Curse God and die!!! With the early death of his father which made him conscious too early of his own mortality, he began early, too early to make his mark which is all a denial of the power of death over life, but in this his ability exeeded his maturity... He did not see clearly, but starkly the great struggle of man with man, and man with nature, and man with God...He had the same facts as the rest of us, though we do have slightly better information today... He had a better perspective than most of us will ever have... The problem was that he as the viewer was inclined to see in his view what no other would see, and it is not so simple as pessimism or optimism... What he saw he saw out of a deep malignancy that he projected on to all he saw...

I don't know if people do philosophy out of good mental health... If one is normal they do not ask the questions that philosophers ask, but simply live the lives that are handed to them... But not all people are like Nietzsche, and there is a reason he appeals to the young, and it is that all youth, trapped between childhood and adulthood resemble Nietzsche in some respect...
 
amist
 
Reply Mon 26 Apr, 2010 06:16 am
@hue-man,
hue-man;156476 wrote:
Now we can blame some of the skewed perceptions of Nietzsche on his aphoristic style of writing or his complex ideas. Afterall, he did attempt to weed out certain individuals with the way he delivered his ideas. However, some of the commentary on Nietzsche, especially in this section of the forum, are clearly more than a result of Nietzsche's relative ambiguity. From the mocking comments on his idea of the overman to the claims that he shared fascist views and viewed the Jews as inferior to the Nazis, some seem intent on not trying to understand the man's ideas. Now I have my theories on why some react this way, but why do think this is so?

I can already see the jesters waiting to perform.


I don't think there's anyone alive who has read a serious amount of Nietszche that hasn't found at least a few things he has said that weren't completely counter-intuitive. Upon stumbling upon one of these gems people are prone to rereading other passages with a hyperskeptical eye.

Probably the biggest problem I think is that many Christians can't help but become defensive when reading Nietzsche, after all he is launching an all out assault on everything they hold dear most of the time.
 
hue-man
 
Reply Mon 26 Apr, 2010 09:14 pm
@Fido,
Fido;156627 wrote:
Before I grew bored with it, I spent some time with one of his books circling all the way he defined the overman and contrasted him with Mr, Goodmench and it was both bizarre and digusting... And the way he attacked Paul and the Church; the church because they did not exclude, as if that were the point, and Paul because he put forward the notion of human equality in the eyes of God, where is just as far as it went for a thousand years, or more, thanks to Plato, who appealed more to the church fathers who accepted their own superiority as a given..

If you read his aphorisms he talks as one who knows, but they are, to any one with life experience, so much garbage...For example: he talks of women; but who were his women??? His mother and sisters were loyal to him, but he held women in contempt... Not one bit of respect for women comes through his words...Easy enough to feel when the darling of ones family; but what of other women??? What did he know of them??? That they all too easily dismissed him??? The closest he ever came to an actual relationship with actual sex with women was not a loving relationship, but a financial relationship, and there is a big difference... And yet he talks like an expert...

Well, no man who ever thought to master the ins and outs of love would ever hold women in such contempt, and from my experience, they are the smarter, the more honorable, insightful, and more naturally philosophical of the species...One must be philosophical when the natural victim of a class that is stonger, and more inclined to rely on strength instead of mind, who by nature are quick to anger, sure to do violence, and way short on socially redeeming characteristics... Such are men to women, and women have provided the bulk of our genetic selection just by deciding who would be decent enough to breed with...Which only goes to prove that no choice is no choice, and no amount of philosophy can make a choice out of no choice...Women made a choice with Nietzsche, and a good one...

There is a particular situation, of being raised without father that leads boys to remain boys, never maturing, never able to supplant their fathers with a test of wills, never able to fully respect their mothers, or become their fathers, and I have seen it often; though I do not pretend to understand how it works... But I do know that Nietzsche's attack on the morals of society and on church, and even on God were all part and parcel of a sainted father he could never discover was human...


I agree with some of what you said, especially that part about Nietzsche and women. His issues with women are pretty easy to psychoanalyze.

As for the impact of his pious father's death, I agree that it played a huge role in his perspective on the Christian god, the church, and maybe even the conventional morals of society. This, however, does not invalidate his arguments against them. That would be committing the genetic fallacy.

---------- Post added 04-26-2010 at 11:52 PM ----------

Fido;156627 wrote:
Well, no man who ever thought to master the ins and outs of love would ever hold women in such contempt, and from my experience, they are the smarter, the more honorable, insightful, and more naturally philosophical of the species...One must be philosophical when the natural victim of a class that is stonger, and more inclined to rely on strength instead of mind, who by nature are quick to anger, sure to do violence, and way short on socially redeeming characteristics... Such are men to women, and women have provided the bulk of our genetic selection just by deciding who would be decent enough to breed with...


While I agree that there are strengths that women are more inclined to, I have to disagree with your female chauvinistic perspective on the nature of men. The relative comfort of civilization has provided us with such lofty opinions of the nature of men. Women are, on average, more gentle because they were selected by nature to be the more nurturing and delicate of the sexes. Men are more aggressive and physically fit because we were selected to be the hunters and protectors. Women selected men who were aggressive and physically fit for those reasons. Don't buy into this female chauvinism that's gaining popularity in the West. Both males and females have their strengths and roles to play in the nature of things.
 
Extrain
 
Reply Mon 26 Apr, 2010 10:56 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;156972 wrote:
As for the impact of his pious father's death, I agree that it played a huge role in his perspective on the Christian god, the church, and maybe even the conventional morals of society. This, however, does not invalidate his arguments against them. That would be committing the genetic fallacy.


Actually, the very title of his book The Geneology of Morals itself reflects all the genetic fallacies contained within it. N- explicitly disparaged logic over and over again, and wasn't afraid to do that either. He might have been insightful about culture, hermeneutics, and people's personal character up to a point in some matters, but only at the cost of being incredibly illogical, so this turned what could have been a fruitful "objective" perspectivism into a degenerating subjective projectionism. I just see a wealth of ad hominems, strawmans, hasty generalizations, and personal attacks on people in Nietzsche's works. One turns into a lazy-minded fool if one thinks Nietzsche's so-called "arguments" are good arguments, for I know so many academically well-respected atheists who are embarrassed by what Nietzsche's arguments "say"--if one can even call his aphorisms "arguments" at all, which are undoubtedly NOT arguments.

Nietzsche's own felt absence of his father manifests itself in his lonely and frail inability to get close to women, and so turns to an intellectual's Rambo-worship of himself as so superhamanly and defiantly close to the resented Christ as his absent father, which he consistently but unknowingly reveals throughout Zarathustra--Christ being his "only worth enemy" and the "darling" Adriadne, the imagined sexually repressed fantasy (the really existent Salome who married another man instead of him), to whom Nietzsche could never understand or get close in the failed attempt to replace his father's love, the loss of which he consistently resented by attacking Christianity.

His atheism is a 16 year old's caricature of religion, a mock that only succeeded in revealing his own true colors as a scared and fatherless little boy. The Christian's platitudinal charge that atheists deny what they implicitly know exists finds Nietzsche as its poster child. N- being the son of a minister, I only see a cowardly escape from his own personal psychological hangups by derailing precisely where he should not have derailed at all--on real self-introspective honesty--which was the result of the little boy inside him who mistook his own pampered whining as a carefully thought-out deconstructive methodology toward those people and things he didn't actually understand. Completely dissociated from his own self--if there ever was one--his thoughts became so splintered it eventually made him mute. Was it really syphilis or a brain tumor that eventually got the better of him? Sometimes I think he just didn't have anything more "to say under the sun" because he became frozen in time as a result of his own repressed existential terror of failing to take a long, patient, and investigative look at his own personal wounds, which I am confident he never did. He died incredibly lonely, and re-entered the comfort of his mother's womb as an infant with his mother and sister spoiling him until the day he died. Poor man. Perhaps he will recurr again, and give us all the exact same caricature of himself by caricaturizing everyone else.

Just read Ecce Homo again, that last gasping breath of a man suffocating under his own childlike "will to power" gone mad....one can only see a steady degeneration of a very weak and incapable man from the great and youthfully spirited Birth of Tragedy to this allegedly "self-reflective" and truly intellectually plastic so-called "autobiography." Ecce Homo is a caricature of an autobiography, just as Nietzsche succeeded in becoming nothing but a caricature of a man.
 
Deckard
 
Reply Mon 26 Apr, 2010 11:57 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;156476 wrote:
Now we can blame some of the skewed perceptions of Nietzsche on his aphoristic style of writing or his complex ideas. Afterall, he did attempt to weed out certain individuals with the way he delivered his ideas. However, some of the commentary on Nietzsche, especially in this section of the forum, are clearly more than a result of Nietzsche's relative ambiguity. From the mocking comments on his idea of the overman to the claims that he shared fascist views and viewed the Jews as inferior to the Nazis, some seem intent on not trying to understand the man's ideas. Now I have my theories on why some react this way, but why do think this is so?

I can already see the jesters waiting to perform.


You have provided some description of the skewed perception of Nietzsche.
What is the correct perception of Nietzsche?
 
Extrain
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 12:04 am
@Deckard,
Deckard;156991 wrote:
You have provided some description of the skewed perception of Nietzsche.
What is the correct perception of Nietzsche?


That's great...lol. One wonders how much objective content is really there in Nietzsche. His dialogues were always with himself. So when someone "misreads" him, is that our problem or his? I'm not sure. Psych's ought to coin a term for it, like, "the Nietzsche syndrome."
 
kennethamy
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 05:23 am
@Deckard,
Deckard;156991 wrote:
You have provided some description of the skewed perception of Nietzsche.
What is the correct perception of Nietzsche?


Skewed or stewed?
 
Fido
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 05:23 am
@Extrain,
Extrain;156986 wrote:
Actually, the very title of his book The Geneology of Morals itself reflects all the genetic fallacies contained within it. N- explicitly disparaged logic over and over again, and wasn't afraid to do that either. He might have been insightful about culture, hermeneutics, and people's personal character up to a point in some matters, but only at the cost of being incredibly illogical, so this turned what could have been a fruitful "objective" perspectivism into a degenerating subjective projectionism. I just see a wealth of ad hominems, strawmans, hasty generalizations, and personal attacks on people in Nietzsche's works. One turns into a lazy-minded fool if one thinks Nietzsche's so-called "arguments" are good arguments, for I know so many academically well-respected atheists who are embarrassed by what Nietzsche's arguments "say"--if one can even call his aphorisms "arguments" at all, which are undoubtedly NOT arguments.

Nietzsche's own felt absence of his father manifests itself in his lonely and frail inability to get close to women, and so turns to an intellectual's Rambo-worship of himself as so superhamanly and defiantly close to the resented Christ as his absent father, which he consistently but unknowingly reveals throughout Zarathustra--Christ being his "only worth enemy" and the "darling" Adriadne, the imagined sexually repressed fantasy (the really existent Salome who married another man instead of him), to whom Nietzsche could never understand or get close in the failed attempt to replace his father's love, the loss of which he consistently resented by attacking Christianity.

His atheism is a 16 year old's caricature of religion, a mock that only succeeded in revealing his own true colors as a scared and fatherless little boy. The Christian's platitudinal charge that atheists deny what they implicitly know exists finds Nietzsche as its poster child. N- being the son of a minister, I only see a cowardly escape from his own personal psychological hangups by derailing precisely where he should not have derailed at all--on real self-introspective honesty--which was the result of the little boy inside him who mistook his own pampered whining as a carefully thought-out deconstructive methodology toward those people and things he didn't actually understand. Completely dissociated from his own self--if there ever was one--his thoughts became so splintered it eventually made him mute. Was it really syphilis or a brain tumor that eventually got the better of him? Sometimes I think he just didn't have anything more "to say under the sun" because he became frozen in time as a result of his own repressed existential terror of failing to take a long, patient, and investigative look at his own personal wounds, which I am confident he never did. He died incredibly lonely, and re-entered the comfort of his mother's womb as an infant with his mother and sister spoiling him until the day he died. Poor man. Perhaps he will recurr again, and give us all the exact same caricature of himself by caricaturizing everyone else.

Just read Ecce Homo again, that last gasping breath of a man suffocating under his own childlike "will to power" gone mad....one can only see a steady degeneration of a very weak and incapable man from the great and youthfully spirited Birth of Tragedy to this allegedly "self-reflective" and truly intellectually plastic so-called "autobiography." Ecce Homo is a caricature of an autobiography, just as Nietzsche succeeded in becoming nothing but a caricature of a man.

It is scaaaary to find myself in agreement with you... Has the world suddenly fallen off its axis and is it rolling toward the gutter???

The only true crime philosophy can be guilty of is certainty, and Nietzsche was too certain...Actually, overman is a caracature... There never was such a man, and you see that, no momma super man or baby superman...The good that one can expect out of new, dynamic societies is lost when one group, the more worthy or powerful put themselves over their fellows because they can...All the overmen do is feed themselves...They don't reap or spin, and they do not create, but live off of others and weaken their societies in the process...Nietzsche and Plato were brothers separated by time...There was nothing new...If one thought wisdom should rule, the other thought rulers were wise...
 
Extrain
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 11:05 am
@Fido,
Fido;157028 wrote:
It is scaaaary to find myself in agreement with you... Has the world suddenly fallen off its axis and is it rolling toward the gutter???

The only true crime philosophy can be guilty of is certainty, and Nietzsche was too certain...Actually, overman is a caracature... There never was such a man, and you see that, no momma super man or baby superman...The good that one can expect out of new, dynamic societies is lost when one group, the more worthy or powerful put themselves over their fellows because they can...All the overmen do is feed themselves...They don't reap or spin, and they do not create, but live off of others and weaken their societies in the process...Nietzsche and Plato were brothers separated by time...There was nothing new...If one thought wisdom should rule, the other thought rulers were wise...


Yes, but I wouldn't be so quick to lump Plato in with Nietzsche. There are similarities, sure, but Plato was cut from a different stock, I think. However, your diagnosis of the philosopher's "self-worshipping overman" is certainly a trend among philosophers. I should know it, I am engulfed in it within my own Philosophy department. I see it all the time. Then again, not all philosophers are that way. So I can separate the real value philosophy has from the plastic-ivory-tower academic elite who don't know their own limits about what they can truthfully say and not say. Funny, I was trained by atheists to critically think and I succeeded in throwing away atheism with that very skill. So critical (as in "logical") thinking is a virtue, not a vice. The problem is that Nietzsche attacks, he doesn't critique. In spite of some clarity on some things, he completely lacked honesty about all things. I don't even consider N- a philosopher at all. I consider him a loud-mouthed cry-baby demagogue. He was a powerful writer, but a terrible thinker. And it takes a certain amount of maturity to recognize that. N-'s fan-club audience are disgruntled youth. I used to be one of these "nietzshean free-spirits." But there is no such thing as a "free spirit" simply because we are all human. So approaching the world as if you were a god is a lie, not to mention completely "green," off-kilter, and illogical.

One of my favorites from N- is from Zarathustra:

"If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god. Therefore, there are no gods. I used to draw this conclusion, now it draws me."

First off, it's invalid. But what is disturbing is that he is saying, "If there were gods, then I would be a god. But I am not a god, therefore there are no gods." What the hell? What is that supposed to even mean? This is a classic example of N-'s arrogant disconnect from the reality of his own all-too-human frailty. This mythic pomposity so often displayed in Zarathustra should be disturbing to anyone.
 
Fido
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 11:22 am
@Extrain,
It's twooo... But he was not entirely wrong; only seldom right... Because he was so irrational, he among others was a tonic for the rationalism of the preceeding age... I am certain Mann covered this in one of his essays, an introduction to a piece on Dostoyevsky, I believe...

Now, if you must know, Zarathustra was my first book of philosophy read when hardly an adult, and it was an impediment to mental and moral growth... But; it did not help that I was the super man... Young, strong, beautiful, Germanic, even blond, working a romantic sort of trade demanding will, determination, and courage... Nietzsche was all I needed, and it was all horse ****... But even Jesus told the Jews that they were gods, and it may have been that what he was saying is that if they would simply stop feeding off each other, and realize their own personal power that they would stand as gods in relation to mere men... They could not cut loose of their hierarchy of priests and privilages... Nietzsche may have been saying the same thing in a round about way, that the difference between the mench and the superman was a simple awarness of ones own power, ones place, and ones own moral authority... There is certainly a reason I am a moralist...

It is possible that in moving from a life without morals and moral constraints to an examination of morals that at any time in many societies I might have been freely murdered... Yet; now that we know something of an objective nature of morals, we should examine them... They are out of the bag, and people should no longer be abused and enslaved by people with some, so called, moral authority... We should not justify what is obviously raw and unjust power with moral authority... Morals are just a form of relationship, but an essential form for the workings of society...And every form can be usurped and turned from its original and good purpose by the willing, unscrupulous and intelligent...I think Plato and Nietzsche were both on the wrong side of the moral argument...
 
hue-man
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 05:42 pm
@Fido,
Fido;157161 wrote:
Morals are just a form of relationship, but an essential form for the workings of society


Throughout your posts, I notice that you see morality as being a strictly interpersonal or social thing. Do you only see morality through the eyes of a collective and not an individual? Would there be a right and wrong action for me to make if I was left alone in the wilderness of Alaska?
 
kennethamy
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 06:09 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;157301 wrote:
Throughout your posts, I notice that you see morality as being a strictly interpersonal or social thing. Do you only see morality through the eyes of a collective and not an individual? Would there be a right and wrong action for me to make if I was left alone in the wilderness of Alaska?



This is, indeed, an interesting issue. John Stuart Mill, on the one hand, thought that morality of one's actions had to do with how one's actions affected others. But Kant held that one could have duties to one's self, and that it would be immoral to violate such duties.
 
hue-man
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 06:31 pm
@Extrain,
Extrain;156986 wrote:
Actually, the very title of his book The Geneology of Morals itself reflects all the genetic fallacies contained within it. N- explicitly disparaged logic over and over again, and wasn't afraid to do that either. He might have been insightful about culture, hermeneutics, and people's personal character up to a point in some matters, but only at the cost of being incredibly illogical, so this turned what could have been a fruitful "objective" perspectivism into a degenerating subjective projectionism. I just see a wealth of ad hominems, strawmans, hasty generalizations, and personal attacks on people in Nietzsche's works. One turns into a lazy-minded fool if one thinks Nietzsche's so-called "arguments" are good arguments, for I know so many academically well-respected atheists who are embarrassed by what Nietzsche's arguments "say"--if one can even call his aphorisms "arguments" at all, which are undoubtedly NOT arguments.


Apparently you see yourself as a man of logic, therefore you should know that it is a logical fallacy to say that the title of his book, The Genealogy of Morals, reflects the genetic fallacy. The title itself doesn't necessarily describe the purpose of presenting a genealogy of morality. It could simply mean that the author is being purely descriptive by presenting the genealogy of morality. However, Nietzsche did use the genealogy as a way to justify an alternative to Christian (or slave) morality. He wasn't necessarily saying that Christian (herd/slave) morality and its descedents (utilitarianism and deontology) were false because of their origin. Instead he was saying that we should reject them because they weaken the human spirit by entailing an absolute condemnation of suffering. Suffering, as Nietzsche saw it, is an essential part of life and it strengthens those who do not perish under its weight. It is, therefore, irrational for one to shelter themselves in the belief that nature has a moral order or that the "evils" of this world will be abolished in an afterlife or in a future world where reason and science has cured the human condition.

Extrain;156986 wrote:
Nietzsche's own felt absence of his father manifests itself in his lonely and frail inability to get close to women, and so turns to an intellectual's Rambo-worship of himself as so superhamanly and defiantly close to the resented Christ as his absent father, which he consistently but unknowingly reveals throughout Zarathustra--Christ being his "only worth enemy" and the "darling" Adriadne, the imagined sexually repressed fantasy (the really existent Salome who married another man instead of him), to whom Nietzsche could never understand or get close in the failed attempt to replace his father's love, the loss of which he consistently resented by attacking Christianity.


Once again we encounter hypocrisy. You bash Nietzsche's denial of logic and reason in his arguments and yet now you commit the genetic fallacy with a psychoanalysis.

Extrain;156986 wrote:
His atheism is a 16 year old's caricature of religion, a mock that only succeeded in revealing his own true colors as a scared and fatherless little boy. The Christian's platitudinal charge that atheists deny what they implicitly know exists finds Nietzsche as its poster child. N- being the son of a minister, I only see a cowardly escape from his own personal psychological hangups by derailing precisely where he should not have derailed at all--on real self-introspective honesty--which was the result of the little boy inside him who mistook his own pampered whining as a carefully thought-out deconstructive methodology toward those people and things he didn't actually understand. Completely dissociated from his own self--if there ever was one--his thoughts became so splintered it eventually made him mute. Was it really syphilis or a brain tumor that eventually got the better of him? Sometimes I think he just didn't have anything more "to say under the sun" because he became frozen in time as a result of his own repressed existential terror of failing to take a long, patient, and investigative look at his own personal wounds, which I am confident he never did. He died incredibly lonely, and re-entered the comfort of his mother's womb as an infant with his mother and sister spoiling him until the day he died. Poor man. Perhaps he will recurr again, and give us all the exact same caricature of himself by caricaturizing everyone else.


Wow. This is a very personal attack. "A 16 year old's caricature of Christianity." Really? I've been waiting for quite some time for a 16 year old to present an original genealogy of Christian morality. In this post, you are repeatedly guilty of the crimes that you bash him for committing. Hypocrisy 101 says: Don't criticize someone for something you claim to believe is wrong then turn around and do the same thing you criticize the other person for doing.

Extrain;156986 wrote:
Just read Ecce Homo again, that last gasping breath of a man suffocating under his own childlike "will to power" gone mad....one can only see a steady degeneration of a very weak and incapable man from the great and youthfully spirited Birth of Tragedy to this allegedly "self-reflective" and truly intellectually plastic so-called "autobiography." Ecce Homo is a caricature of an autobiography, just as Nietzsche succeeded in becoming nothing but a caricature of a man.


What a surprise. More insults to the man. You're starting to sound, dare I say, just like him! Nietzsche succeeded in presenting a necessary alternative to the all to popular life negating worldviews of Christianity and Buddhism. He succeeded by creating tons of literature while suffering from excruciating pain. Last but not least he succeeded in making hypocrites out of his future enemies (you).
 
Extrain
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 07:16 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;157324 wrote:
Apparently you see yourself as a man of logic, therefore you should know that it is a logical fallacy to say that the title of his book, The Genealogy of Morals, reflects the genetic fallacy.


Of course The Genealogy is one big fallacy. Nietzsche accounts the so-called "origins" of Judeo-Christian morality and then concludes the tradition reversed the evaluations of "good and evil" in the past. But where's the logic in that? How do we know what N- said was true? What really IS good and evil anyway? Why are some things good and not evil, evil and not good according to N-? His caricaturization of Judoe-Christian morality is a strawman. Every Chrisitian I know agrees. So who is right? How N- approaches philosophical topics is typically one-dimensional and illogical.

Quote:
The title itself doesn't necessarily describe the purpose of presenting a genealogy of morality. It could simply mean that the author is being purely descriptive by presenting the genealogy of morality. However, Nietzsche did use the genealogy as a way to justify an alternative to Christian (or slave) morality.


Right. And this is the fallacy. "Slave morality" is a caricature. And using geneology to offer a justified reason for abandoning it in favor of "master morality" is the genetic fallacy itself--as if N- own evaluations were really good and truthful.

Quote:
He wasn't necessarily saying that Christian (herd/slave) morality and its descedents (utilitarianism and deontology) were false because of their origin. Instead he was saying that we should reject them because they weaken the human spirit by entailing an absolute condemnation of suffering.


And in what sense did they "weaken" the human spirit? In N-'s own private sense? How do you test for that claim? What does "Weaken" mean in N-'s terminology? He just presupposes "Teutonic" contrary opposites of good and evil, master and slave, and then bashes Christianity with it. I wouldn't subscribe to his evaluations in a scientific sense anyway. Just look at the pragmatic argument against it. Christianity is alive and well.

Quote:
Suffering, as Nietzsche saw it, is an essential part of life and it strengthens those who do not perish under its weight. It is, therefore, irrational for one to shelter themselves in the belief that nature has a moral order or that the "evils" of this world will be abolished in an afterlife or in a future world where reason and science has cured the human condition.


That is invalid! That is exactly what I am talking about. It's also a strawman. Christianity says nothing like that. You are apparently indoctrinated with N-'s ideas because you can't see beyond them.

(1) Suffering is a part of life. (christianity certainly agrees)
(2) Christianity places value on the life to come while disparaging the value of the suffering of this life (no, it doesn't. Suffering has great worth and value in Christianity. Just read Paul's message. This life has just as much value as the next. I don't see all Christians committing suicide.)
(3) Therefore, we ought to abandon christianity

The argument is invalid. (2) is false. And (3) is a result of Neitzsche's own hatred for Christianity because he didn't understand its message since he didn't identify with it.

This argument you offered fallaciously derives an "ought" from an "is" and caricaturizes Christianity as if it were nihilistic about this life, placing value only on the life to come. Then tell me why the Catholic Church, for example, has the best track record to this day assisting the sick, feeding the hungry, and taking care of poor with its countless charities? And did you know that "becoming Christian" is not a condtion for receiving that assistance? Catholic organizations are behind much of the secular and religious charity organizations out there, but very people know about that because the media never reports such a thing.

And if Christians didn't value this life, then why don't they just ignore people's suffering and council everyone to commit suicide, while doing it themselves like that religious cult several years ago whose members committed suicide because they thought that action was the quickest path to landing oneself on an alien ship? Suffering is good, it strengthens you and imparts wisdom and character. But what is wrong with the altruistic act of assisting someone in need? My grandmother is now dying of cancer, and I also have a handicapped sister. Should I follow N- advice and stop taking care of them both because N- thinks all altruistic acts of Love come from the sentiment of "pity"? I don't pity my grandmother; I LOVE my grandmother. I don't pity my sister; I LOVE my sister. THAT is why I help her, not because I "pity" her. N- didn't understand that the message of Love is the primary message of Christianity which he mistakenly called "the Religion of Pity." So he was totally wrong.
Love is friendship, love is community, love is the willing sacrifice of one's time and energy to help someone in need; if you don't act on that love for another person, it is doubtful whether one can call that love at all. Sitting in your study as a recluse writing about fictional characters named "Adriadne"to whom you imagine yourself singing songs of praise is not love--it is fantasy. So I just don't see the logic of Nietzsche's own value system at all. Nor do I see the logic of his "re-valuation of all values."

His own life proves that he misunderstood that message of Love, too. He couldn't Love others, but instead, isolated himself from everyone else by escaping to the Alps to attack everyone he hated with his pen behind closed doors. His relationship with his long time friend Richard Wagner is a perfect example of this. That relationship failed when N- wrote "The Case of Wagner," too.

hue-man;157324 wrote:
Once again we encounter hypocrisy. You bash Nietzsche's denial of logic and reason in his arguments and yet now you commit the genetic fallacy with a psychoanalysis.


True, I am psychoanalyzing N. But this isn't hypocracy or a genetic fallacy. I am not bashing N to draw the claim that what he said is false--that would be an ad hominem--the most predominant style of Nietzsche's own approach to philosophy. On the contrary, I am saying what he says is false because it is false: so many of his claims are either empirically incorrect, non-historical, or invalid. I am claiming he doesn't offer very good arguments for establishing the truth about anything at all, and this is a necessary consequence of his psychological condition. I am tired of hearing the stereotypical plasticity of his claims I encounter from amateur philosophers who mouth his doctrines as if they were gospel truth. First learn how to think, then we'll discuss his arguments. I have studied N, I have taken several classes concerning his philosophy in my department, and have written several essays on him. You ought to know that maintstream philosophical academia generally makes fun of him, including other atheists, because everyone is all-too-familiar with what passess as a series of implicit illogical Ideologies by present-day philosophical standards. So I am well within my epistemic rights to discuss the topic of "Nietzsche" since I am well-acquainted with his writings. And there is nothing wrong with evaluating the personality that led to the development of his philosophy. I am confident many psychoanalysts would agree with some kind of evaluation like that, too. His personality is immediately evident in his writings. Do you deny that? After all, N- wrote "in his own blood."

Quote:
Wow. This is a very personal attack. A 16 year old's caricature of Christianity, really?


Absolutely. Understand Christ's message, first, before you strawman it with N-'s caricaturizations.

Quote:
What a surprise. More insults to the man. You're starting to sound, dare I say, just like him!


I like to Nietzscheanize Nietzsche. What's wrong with that? If he actually gave me a good rational argument perhaps we could discuss it. But until then, I'm just going to make fun of him.

Quote:
Nietzsche succeeded in presenting a necessary alternative to the all to popular life negating worldviews of Christianity and Buddhism.


And what exactly was that alternative? N- didn't even have an alternative. Do you mean the ideal of "the free-spirit"? Do you mean N-'s overman? Do you personally know anybody like that? I don't.

Here's another question: was this alternative really "successful" as you claim it is? Or a "necessary" replacement of C and B for that matter? In what sense was it successful? How do we evaluate that "success"? By its being a partial influence on the Columbine Shootings in Colorado several years ago?...By partially influencing Mein Kampf and Nazism Ideologies? Are N-'s writings good for anyone? especially for disgruntled youth who come from shitty homes and find themselves identifying with N-'s own arrogance, anger, and disparagment of logic, sensibility, and truth?

Further, what does "life-negating" even mean? If all the followers of C and B actually committed suicide, I would agree. But believing in a life hereafter doesn't negate the value of this life. Why would it? --Just because I think something has intrinsic value, doesn't mean I think everything else has no value. That's illogical and totally misinformed if you think that.

Quote:
He succeeded by creating tons of literature while suffering from excruciating pain. Last but not least he succeeded in making hypocrites out of his future enemies (you).


"Tons of literature," eh? I only know of the 8 or 9 books, and the collection of his silly notebooks titled "Will to Power" highly edited and put together by his own anti-semitic sister Elizabeth for the rising Nazi propaganda.

So N- made me a hypocrite? How does that work? Are you saying that anybody who disagrees with N- is a hypocrite? Just for your information, religious cults say stuff like that. This is an instance of confirmation bias, namely, looking for examples to confirm what N- said in spite of all the counter-evidence against his claims. It's also ad hoc. Astrologers do the same thing.

And he most certainly might have been correct about you if you think those arguments you offered are good, well-formed arguments against Christianity, since they are not: "what need do I have for mindless followers? However, I know that someday I will."
 
Fido
 
Reply Tue 27 Apr, 2010 08:46 pm
@hue-man,
hue-man;157301 wrote:
Throughout your posts, I notice that you see morality as being a strictly interpersonal or social thing. Do you only see morality through the eyes of a collective and not an individual? Would there be a right and wrong action for me to make if I was left alone in the wilderness of Alaska?

Nope... Not exactly... Consider all the moral forms, and even the physical... If you were the last person alive on the planet, which of those forms would would have meaning??? Meaning is something we share, and without people to share with, then, there is no meaning... When we communicate, what do we share??? We share meanings...What do you have to say with no one to say it to??? No individual has morality unless he carries it with him from his community in the traditional sense of ethics as custom or character...Indians would let themselves get burned up, cut up, butchered for days on end for the enjoyment of their captors because to do less than would disgrace their own people, and invite attack upon them...They were ethical as we cannot imagine being ethical, and that is the sort of society all our lives have come out of; but they survived, and we have not... We have lived with our Western laws for only a thousand years, and we have not captured justice or morality with them and we have not brought it to bay with philosophy...Until we grasp what it we are seeking we will never know it, and yet we all know something of morality since we all learned some of it at our mother's knee...
 
 

 
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