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Logic: our sometime-friend, sometime-enemy by PF Dedicated to: the red-headed Spice girl. I will try to clarify something which GW said to Notus on the Gödelian thread. Notus asked:
This is a critique voiced often by GW and myself which runs along the following lines. It was really the belief in the susceptibility of complex social realities, and ultimately the reality of our Being, to extremely primitive analytical tools, which formed the basis for social engineering experiments such as have destroyed our Folk. Marx really perfected this as a tool of destruction - his “scientific” view of history, which was based on a simplistic and in hindsight, very arbitrary analysis of certain historical trends. Thinkers are obviously obsessed with deconstructing the complex reality that is human experience over time, and finding in it “the central meaning”. This is “the meaning of history”. As a student of Nietzsche (ie, I read and thought about him for a few years), I saw how big N was doing this all over the place. It was for him a way of projecting his likes and dislikes across vast distances of time - and it really was basically that idiosyncratic and subjective. I hope I can belabor this point a little bit without boring everyone because it is one of the central ideas to me, although everyone here probably knows already what I have to say about it. Nietzsche hated that his mother in Naumburg wanted to force him into the role of soft-hearted Christian do-gooder. He was a radical, adventurous, crazy man - in his own way, and suffered greatly under this constraint. Yet he could never part with his family, in some sense they were almost his only stable social contact throughout his life. So he conjured in his works a vision of Christianity which ridiculed this Naumburg strain of Protestantism, claiming of course that his critique applied to all Xtianity. F Lea, his biographer, has shown how much N’s “Christianity” was actually “Naumburg social constraint” and not the historical Christianity. Nevertheless, he said some things which have stuck, and his critique is in the main, incisive, at least from my anti-Christian perspective. He likewise held up an ancient ideal of Greece during the time of the Tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) - and I hate to personalize things so much (too bad they are, in fact, so personal), but this had very much to do with the fact that he experienced moments of elation and higher meaning (“am” experiences in my lingo) while reading this at Schulpforta as a young student. His life-long endeavor was to show what ancient Hellas meant and how it could be an alternative model for a reborn Germany and Europe. Wilamowitz, in his critique of N’s philological treatment of ancient Greece in TBOT, basically demolished every substantial assertion of N’s about historical Hellas, showing the extent to which N was being an artist, in his construction of past ages, rather than a scientist. What remains difficult is the fact that N, being so brilliant, inevitably spoke a great deal of truth when he spoke of these things. But look at how huge the human experience is, how difficult to synthesize - and you will realize that each man can forge his own idiosyncratic view, and many of them - where they depart from specific facts - will become mutually contradictory. It’s like the Game paradigm of attracting women by being a jerk. It only explains 20-50% of the actual psychological/sexual dynamic that is going on, but the alternative for its captive audience is ‘nice guyism’ - an indulgence in their loserish co-dependency strategies which has got them nothing, and which has a 5% success rate. So of course game looks like salvation. And even if Nietzche has conveyed 40% of the truth about Xtianity, and 20% about classical Greece, both because of its uniqueness, the absence of competition from alternative explanations, the compelling nature of his personal forcefulness, and the masterpiece-like character of his oevre, even this 20% accurate theory will be eagerly eaten up. Demand for these theories is large, and only a certain kind of mind is able to craft them at all. Rousseau and the Founding Fathers show the degree to which post-Enlightenment and Age of Reason society was amenable to rational explanations, the extent to which the belief was beginning to surface that even a reality as complex as ourselves, was assailable through the scientific method in the same way that germ cells and atoms could be analyzed. This opens us up to the world of what I call The Lone Wolf Analyzer. The Lone Wolf Analyzer is someone who has ruminated on history his whole life, such as Jacques Barzun - who is then fit to comment, and receives no competition because no one else typically does this massive thought-work of attempting to synthesize the whole of human experience. Rather than unpack this whole issue each time, I just ridicule the whole attempt of synthesizing all of human experience. For me, our waking state of consciousness makes us blind to the true meaning of even small, normal moments - and here someone wishes to look back on 1,000 years and distill meaning from it. Personally, for myself I demand a depth of reality that would never let me look at the results of such an attempt as being honest. My typical argumentative style is simply to ridicule this, which doesn’t serve well. It would be better to actually show how the personal idiosyncracies and what I call salience artifacts - the tendency for the human mind to fixate on certain observable trends which although salient may in no way be highly significant - are corrupting the analysis with arbitrary noise. Please understand that the example of Nietzsche is not unique. In the Jewish thinkers we have not an anti-Christian animus, with which I am perfectly at home, but a genuinely anti-European animus, that seeks us out in all our cultural redoubts and dwellings. Freud, and Marcuse, and Adorno - these men can also analyze history. They can also find the ‘Factor X’ which was missing, can also posit a critique and point to suffering - such as Marx did with his smokey factories - as a reason to liquidate the existing society. In their hands this idiosyncratic critique becomes extremely damaging because - unbeknown often enough even to them - their EGI commands them to destroy us. And because of the state of our culture, we are eager to hear these arguments, we are open to them. But look at what GW has done - he has put Being beyond the reach of pure mentation, beyond the reach of abstraction and logic. He has said it demands that the whole man stand before it, before it reveal itself. In this way he prevents this exploitation which would give us a 20% truthful analysis reflecting the Lone Wolf’s own biases, which seizes on and distorts those aspects of our nature which are amenable to his agenda, and puts it forever beyond them. He is saying Being is inscrutable from the point of view of the brain operating alone. Therefore, there is no Marx to tell us how the Spirit of History wishes for us to have class revolution. There is no Freud to tell us that copulation with strangers and the abolition of the family will lead us to an experience of ourselves. The western susceptibility to logical explanations of complex phenomenon has proven dangerous for this reason - that it has opened the door for plausible analysis peddled by 140 IQ+ lone wolves of various descriptions - to saturate our thinking about ourselves and suggest innumerable social revolutions which all end up disastrous for us. It’s because things we deem sacred - or at least vital to our collective life - have been touched by unsavory hands in the name of logic, that we are sceptical of its right to reign and wish to see it put in its proper place. Forgive me if I have exaggerated my case. Comments:2
Posted by PF on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:19 | # Interesting Notus! I never knew about the Plato connection! N did say that Xtianty was Platonism for the masses.
I’m skeptical about logical analyses of complex systems - Keynsian economics, Game, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, etc - almost none of these could grasp the whole without distorting it into a private vision.
Interesting. Who came in the name of logic and was not an imposter, with regard to analyses of large social phenomenon? 3
Posted by Notus Wind on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:02 | # PF,
That’s right! Let me dig up a more complete quotation for this one: “Suppose that truth is a woman…Aren’t there reasons for suspecting that all philosophers, to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not really understood women?
I completely agree with you here. I don’t think anyone can solely rely on logic and reason to arrive at even a proximate understanding of the complex systems that support our society. These things are and should be approached more holistically (and modestly) than the mode of thinking that our analytical chisels reward.
I can’t think of anyone who fits this criteria off the top of my head. 4
Posted by PF on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:04 | # Notus wrote:
This interpretation does not strike me as plausible because Christianity was so much a part of Nietzsche’s ‘home turf’. I do not imagine a man as conceiving a passion for or against something as a result of reading about it. He had seen his father, a prominent Christian pastor, killed by a disease when he was 5 or so. His family life was torn by strife between aunt and sister about how seriously to take the Word of God. Moreover he experienced in going away to school the difference between the wider world of his Bonn fraternity days, or even the wider world of Schulpforta classicism and male friendship, and the constricting, very Christian environment of Naumburg. How could these three events - each of which in some way resolvable to Christianity - not have been the basis for whatever passions he accumulated? I can agree that he probably disliked idealism/‘the good’ altogether, as not reflecting the life experience he had had. Especially of his father being taken away, and conflicting notions of what constitute ‘The Good’ tearing apart his household as a child. At any rate, I think he was an anti-idealist, dedicated to a notion of life as being fundamentally not fair and not simply resolvable to ‘The Good’, already by the time he was at Schulpforta and would have had access to Plato.
Right, but all Germany was under the Hellenistic banner at that point, as the writings of other philosophers shows. From Hölderlin to Hegel to the whole academic class of those days, you had the idea that Germany was a little ‘Hellas on the Rhine, Elbe and Weser’ (my term). The whole of Thinking Germany wanted to pursue Good Boyism by finding in their reflection in the mirror a reflection of those Ancient Greeks who had accumulated, by common agreement, such prestige in the Western European cultural space. The lack of unity and political power made German Hellenism even more powerful than British/English or French hellenism - because these latter two peoples were already sucked up in their own affairs. Germany existed as an island landscape of little statelets which needed a cultural fabric to fall under - Gothicism, Nordicism and Teutonic folklore were in those days less prestigious and in vogue, thus less of a fabric for creating a teleological unity of Germans-striving-for-shared-Greatness. Hellenism, Prussianism and Christianity were the only strong unifying threads besides language, since at that point Germany was still divided in terms of political interests. Hellenism and Goethe/Schiller/et al - fascination were the thinking man’s German nationalism of that time. Nietzsche wanted to swim against this stream and use the Tragedians to assert that Hellas was something different than everyone thought. He wanted to implant his heroic teleology, his anti-Christian ethics, his love of passion and anti-rationality, and the promise of spiritual truth it held out beyond Platonic form, he wanted to rebirth the concept of Hellenism in a way that would show the Germans that it wasn’t all Plato, Aristotle, et. al. This is why the Birth of Tragedy adduces a counter-argument to the Platonic triumph of reasoning, logic, etc. N’s love of tragedy is his battle cry that life remain, in our conceptual understanding too, the unfair, difficult-to-grasp thing that it really is. I think he understood that in this he was a rebel/renegade/iconoclast. 5
Posted by Notus Wind on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:28 | # PF,
You’ll get no disagreement from me, the man obviously hated Christianity. But I am not interested in his hatreds and other eccentricities, I’ll leave that to others, only in the substance of his ideas and critiques. It is in the latter (I think) that you see a man essentially at war with Plato and his school, because many of the more fundamental ideas that he assails and reacts against are really pre-Christian and Platonic in origin.
You clearly understand Nietzsche and the context that he came out of better than I do, and I would not be honest if I didn’t admit this. I see what I see only because of my own peculiar background and not because of any lifelong experience studying either his work, life, or historical context. 6
Posted by PF on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:46 | # Notus wrote:
And its very useful that you keep us on track by providing that context - my tendency is to slip off into personality porn of various sorts. I see what you’re saying about him being at the ideational level, against Platonic goods/ideals. Its interesting that - at least above - I have asserted that the attempt to resolve our common life into shared, quasi-universal ideals always redounds to the personal. The personal of the person doing the resolving. GW might say because people are fixed on personality and that which is acquired. And in this discussion, the idea is thrown into light that Nietzsche’s attempt to let life be the chaotic beast that it is - freeing it from lasting metaphysically-absolute classification by the persistent critique of forms - lets it retain something of its universal form, for nothing ascriptive is finally said about it that is not accepted as being personal, or in some sense metaphysically incomplete. What do you make of this paradox, Notus? In trying to be universal, we make the universe personal. In being personal, we let the universe be .. um… universal. I wonder if Geri Halliwell will chime in with her thoughts on Platonic form. 7
Posted by Notus Wind on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:27 | # PF,
Remember my comment from the Gödelian thread, our minds can travel the Platonic world in search of universals and discover vistas that are not of our creation, hence not personal to us. We cannot get out of who we are, as I was saying to Jimmy earlier, but we can discover what is. I think that is one way of resolving the paradox.
Some forms can be enjoyed without communication. 8
Posted by Sam Davidson on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:28 | #
This is the ol’ paradox… we’re constantly coming up with ideas that can help us, but there’s usually bad ideas that come with it… Get stuck in one place for too long and the bad side, like a recessive disease, starts showing up. The only thing that cleanses the system is criticism, but can we have too much criticism? (Marx: For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing) I lean towards ruthless criticism. It’s a sign of vitality. A people that stops fighting is a dead people. Our problem is not too much ‘culture of critique’ but not enough! The current multicult regime is a paper tiger waiting to be demolished. But I usually don’t focus on this because the ultimate stumbling block is our lack of physical control of the media. (The ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.) We need more Jim Bowie and less John Locke. More Eichmann, less Rosenberg!
Tricky question because it assumes dishonesty on part of the thinker. I’m willing to accept that most thinkers are honest, even if they work with faulty premises. Plato may or may not have been an honest thinker. His dialectic becomes a bit too ironic in parts… Like Orwell said, “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”
I love it. 9
Posted by PF on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:45 | # Sam wrote:
What do you mean by this? I dont get the precise meaning of the references in our context. 11
Posted by PF on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:14 | # When is Logic our friend, when is Logic our enemy? (Not in terms of understanding mathematics, but in terms of understanding and creating theories about social arrangements and social phenomena. ) Our friend - when it is wielded by people with interests similar to ours. But not only that… those logical stories created by our friends are also dangerous… It is our friend when we are in the 20%/50%/80% of the cycle of the phenomena for which it has predictive value. It is our enemy when we are in the 80%/50%/20% of the cycle of the phenomena for which it has no predictive value. Game is your friend for meeting lower class girls in clubs - but betrays you when you try to forge a relationship with a quality girl. Kenysian economics gives temporary stability in a system that inherits a strong currency, but destroys you if you use it as we have. The Master morality explains why Christianity has sown the seeds of egalitarianism etc., but when you try to implement it, its not clear what remains to do besides conquering your neighboring states and ‘being Heroic’. Freudian psychology might conceivably have once helped someone understand the meaning of a dream they had, but it set up a generation of susceptible people to all manner of misunderstandings of self. We can’t grasp anything firm because we grasp from the personality when we conceive and label things, and we grasp onto the personality - we grasp as tortured academics, and what do we grab hold of - heroes, who themselves were trying to be heroes. The critique of the past means “why couldnt you be more like me?”, a reflection of the critics “why cant I be more like the image of perfection in my mind?”. In the metaphysical sense neither the critic, the past, or the image of perfection can be experienced as being real. You get to read the biography of Caesar - and let him distend to exactly that dimension in your mind which you need him to fill. An ambitious military man on the order of McCain and Dick Cheney - whose ambition extended to the literary field and was considered so remarkable because it was an illiterate age and commanders didnt write histories…? Or was he the personification of a kind of virtue that every human being needs to show you to be validated? Was he a God? People did worship him at the time, it was said. Then again there are people who worship Obama. Likewise the girl in the club - she is the question mark on which any number of psychological sketches can be pinned. Is she a whore? Are all women whores, just some more subtle than others? Filling in these spaces, its more about what you need. Objectivity reigns first where we see authentic behavior - but look at the teleological grasping of each of these personalities - the game-guy starved for ‘contact’, the militarist starved for prestige, the traditionalist starved for Good Boy Cred and a picture of stability. I should say that the objective realities that were Iulius Caesar, Club Girl #11340, and Athens of the Tragedians are first (partially) knowable when you have ceased to want to use them to fulfill your own needs. But that being the case, why would anyone enquire? Nobody really cares about a long dead military commander, a random club skank, or a certain city one has never been to in a historical era thousands of years before one’s own. These are glyphs which are worked into the scheme - and the scheme promises us the goods: real reward. Stability. Security - or, acceptance. So who crafted complex reality models authentically? Who pursues them authentically? Who grasps the past authentically? Who dissects the Blob of Everything-that-happened-before-1945 authentically? Even to want to do this springs from a misunderstanding of what is real and what is possible in the world. Where is the good, trustworthy, well-fathered girl in the game paradigm? Could you even argue for her existence using that toolset? Where is the soldier who chokes on the noble lie, lying half-dead in a mud-pit on one of Caesar’s campaigns, his death agonies a question mark over the reality of military glory? Where is the non-Judaized white person who chafes under the strictures of our ancient, borrowed religion and its moral strictures? In the moment of Person X needing to prove his point, I saw all of these people suddenly vanish. 12
Posted by Sam Davidson on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:10 | #
I was making l’art pour l’art. Welcome to the text. 13
Posted by uh on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 01:30 | # Welcome to the text. And welcome to Sam Davidson trying to sound “meta”. 14
Posted by John on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 07:32 | # “Could you even argue for her existence using that toolset? “ Read some Roissy. That’s a good third of what he does. 15
Posted by Grimoire on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 11:47 | # A problem you have PF is that you over-characterize things, and then go on to describe observations of the characterizations as the things themselves. You will never understand anything of depth as long as you continue with this practice. 16
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:23 | # Grim, Here is PF explaining why a principle tool of our intellectual system can reveal so much without revealing anything. Just so in the conversations you and I have had. How many times have I poured praise upon your intellect and learning but stated that your understanding of something written here is inadequate? PF is not writing in lemon juice, or in code. He is trying to be understood. Never mind his comments about Nietzsche or the Western canon. He is not writing about Nietzsche or the Western canon. He is writing about how to come to terms with what it is that lives out our time, calls itself by our name, assumes it a-thinks our thoughts, and is in every respect a match for the last sentence of Josiah Royce’s quote in your comment on Notus’s Ontology of Mind thread:
17
Posted by Sam Davidson on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:40 | #
What’s this? You’re not going to bother dissecting my posts? No more Talmudic commentaries? I’m shocked. 18
Posted by Grimoire on Sun, 05 Sep 2010 06:10 | # Guessedworker: 19
Posted by Grimoire on Sun, 05 Sep 2010 06:24 | # Sam: I shall restore you to ontological authenticity even if I have to kill you first to restore you.
Spoken like a true Mother hater.
Stop being a jerk in order to get women.
You idealization of the Talmud is unscientific.
Over-intellectual lone wolf who’s understanding of things written here is deemed inadequate. Go now….and sin no more. 20
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:51 | # Grim, PF is using N for a criticism other than philosophical criticism. 21
Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:11 | # Gworker You need to stop mothering him G. He needs to get his hair cut and clean his room. He’s going to find a surprise palllngenetic Nazi jackboot up his ‘rudeboy’ ass. If I find a skateboard in the driveway once more time I’m going to kill him. Do you realize I drive a Porsche? I’m sick of this. He’s going to military school and_that_is_final. He can use N for a criticism of the Taliban. 22
Posted by PF on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:47 | # Grim wrote:
I don’t desire to attack or deconstruct Nietzsche. Wilamowitz and Lea showed how he was stacking the books. His biographers have shown how his personal life ran its course. A man who reads history, and who reads Nietzsche, and forms his own opinion of these things - will inevitably see for himself how much the man has painted himself into the background of Christian Europe, late Empire Rome, and Classical Athens. I wish I had the patience and time to recreate for you the picture of these things that emerges when you study them. As is, what I wished to do was to show that this is going on in all knowledge systems that touch upon man. The personality has a moist grip, and it grips more personality. There is some slippage. In realizing how concept and thing do not align 100% - in realizing how personal is man’s quest for historical knowledge - one can begin to question for oneself the validity of all knowledge that is acquired through the prism of the personality. That is the larger point I was attempting to get at. And yet, all this is logical. The fraud was accomplished in how the glyphs were constructed, or in how they were arranged on the board, or how they were selected. Their movement and relation, once the framework has been established, is near perfect in a thinker of Nietzsche’s ilk. The entities themselves are slightly off - something is wrong about them. There is something wrong with the Overman, and something wrong with Nietzsche’s Athenian, and something wrong with his Cesar Borgia, and something wrong with his Christ, and something wrong with his ‘Man of the Future’, and something wrong with his Englishman. They all have strange cheek-bones, all their cheek-bones look like his cheek-bones, photographed at different angles. Other pieces of the face are missing, simply missing. The point of this piece is to say to us: I don’t care if you are the Ubermensch himself - reclusive genius with a lust for self-dissection - you will never achieve foundational knowledge on the basis of your personality. Never. There is none to be had this way. I now see that Nietzsche was a bad example for making this argument and in the future I will use simpler arguments that dont involve people following me out onto limbs of philosophic and historical inquiry. For myself, glimpsing this truth through an investigation of this thought-territory was a beautiful experience. 23
Posted by Grimoire on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:46 | # PF the mujahadeen:-bait I have read Nietzsche and obviously know him far better than you ever will. There is more to Nietzsche than is available in English for the lobotomized out-patient. I have nothing but jihad for somebody who reads some wanker jew Wilamowitz and his trendy po-mo feminist ‘he hates his mom’, ‘the greeks were boring’ sourced from some other jackass’ so our greeks are pc and his are not politically correct and therefore socially inappropriate infidels. Nonetheless I grant the point you initially started with is a valid thesis - unfortunately you were led like a 9 year old hindu boy into the heart of blind foolishness. Nietzsche never meant to be taken literally except by idiots. He wrote intending that idiots would pick up the bait never realizing the joke was on them. . Nietzsche was a punk philosopher and a scatological satiric comedian.. His point was he could make a more spiritually valid case for the extreme, off the wall lunacy than the imbeciles who call themselves philosophers and academics who reign supreme while hanging by the lips from the anus of the status quo. There are inside jokes and spoofs embedded all through Nietzsche’s ouvre. The supremacy of his humour shows in the fact that a hundred years later the dim still don’t have the slightest clue he was taking the piss. Even stupider than he ever imagined, they now wank for his oppressed mom and the downgraded new and improved Greeks. But seriously, even though your latest isn’t fit for my toilet. Don’t stop reading, writing or thinking. Your premises are good and intentions noble….keep on. What you need is some thinking time in the mountains of Afghanistan. The importance of one moment alive and breathing, and understanding the written word are remarkable similar. 24
Posted by PF on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:46 | # Grim wrote:
Some minor corrections: Wilamowitz was a German, actually a Prussian. Nietzsche’s difficulty with his mom is evident in his correspondence and was catalogued by Lea writing 30 years before the dawn of feminism. The quote about Plato being boring is from N himself, given by Notus.
Its a grave mistake to suppose that Nietzsche viewed his philosophical work as a joke. Those idea-sets which he had discredited, or which came to him as moments of mere fancy, he would deal jokingly with. Other idea sets he took too seriously for his own good. This is evident in the correspondence. He wrote to tell his confidants that he despaired of a small living audience - feeling at the time that only six men on the planet were really alive to his ideas. These included one Dane, one German, one Jew (Ree) and some others. What he considered the enormous, even messianic import of his ideas is underlined in the tone of passages in Die Frohliche Wissenschaft and Also Sprach Zarathustra. There are more than 2 passages where he implies or directly states that the acceptance or non-acceptance of his ideas will determine the fate of Europe. As a generalization, I would also say that nothing short of raw earnestness could have led a man to pursue the sorts of inquiry on which Nietzsche based his writings. Nietzsche’s “laughter” was the repudiation of archaic idea sets, and a subsequent loosening of the belt upon realization that one was in fact, free of them - this did not mean he was a jolly person, his letters will testify to that much. Nietzsche was not a punk philosopher. He was a man sufficiently serious in his inquiry towards what constitutes truth that he was led to up-end societal forms in a wide variety of guises. When adolescents affect this tendency they are said to be ‘punk’. In reality the combination of extreme seriousness and a gifted intellect causes one to find societal pieties as being nothing of any substance, and one is obliged to mock them somehow - one is then classed with the innately irreverent. As if it is simply that the person does not wish to be respectful. In reality they find nothing, or little, to respect.
I’m also happy to end this without ceremonially eviscerating one another. *puts on big red sunglasses and hawaiian shirt, grabs skateboard* Catcha l8r dudes, there is a hedonist’s conference down the street, and I’ve got to go be spineless there! 25
Posted by bickle on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:44 | # “A problem you have PF is that you over-characterize things, and then go on to describe observations of the characterizations as the things themselves.” LOL - excellent observation and summary. 26
Posted by Jimmy Marr on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:25 | # PF and others, I’ve just reviewed this thread in one sitting, and found it very enlightening. I wish that I had something of substance to add, but the best I can do is to acknowledge my debt of gratitude. Thanks to each of you for your contribution. 27
Posted by Grimoire on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:16 | # PF:
Ultimately, I don’t care if Wilamowitz is head of the Taliban. Nietzsche was not a historian but a philologist of the word and pathologist of the conscious world. Whether he had problems with his Mom is irrelevant….how do you know she wasn’t a castrating bitch? Did he not light candles to the sacred holy vagina? A credit to him. The point is nothing but meaningless slur.
Satire is never a joke, neither are very good jokes…it is always quite serious. What can I say to a person who only sees humour as challenging as a peanut butter sandwiche? Nietzsche personal correspondence and poetry reveals how he foresaw the objections of critics, in particular ‘Zarathustra’ (a mythopoesis of internal struggle he intended critics to take as literal word). Wagner objected strenuously to the indignity of this invidious behavior in obfuscation. This is one reason Wagner regarded Nietzsche as a ‘cynic’, while Nietzsche regarded Wagner’s religious earnestness and volkisch orientation as nihlist reaction. Nietzsche was a punk philosopher. .You say he was not because he was serious etc. and point to various social conventions as seen from your point of view. My view was that punk was an accurate caricature and satire of the social reality, similar to Nietzsche’s caricature and satire. Whats with the title “Logic, our sometime…..etc.” Logic is not a friend or an entity. But PF sees it as some Dude who is dubious….and presents a po-mo approved Nietzsche as evidence. Just dealing with this is depressing. 28
Posted by uh on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:17 | # So don’t deal with it. Let PF have his bizarre Daddy-Mommy damaged Nietzsche. Post a comment:
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Posted by Notus Wind on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:58 | #
PF,
[laughs]
I have a different interpretation. I think that his attack on Christianity is just a smokescreen for his real enemy in Plato and the intellectual tradition that grew out of Ancient Greece, of which I am a disciple. At bottom, he’s furious that history has favored Plato over Homer. The real question for me is to what extent he was aware of the irony of ostensibly elevating the Hellenistic banner while waging war against the School of Athens.
A few quotes to suggest that he was not completely ignorant of this:
“For heaven’s sake, do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato. . . . Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic instincts of the Hellene, is so moralistic, so pre-existently Christian—he already takes the concept ‘good’ for the highest concept—that for the whole phenomenon Plato I would sooner use the harsh phrase ‘higher swindle,’ or, if it sounds better, ‘idealism,’ than any other.” - Twilight of the idols
“The old theological problem…of instinct and reason-the question whether…instinct deserves more authority than rationality…it is always the old moral problem that first appeared in the person of Socrates, and had divided men’s minds long before Christianity. Socrates himself, following…the taste of his talent…took first the side of reason; and, in fact, what did he do all his life but laugh at the awkward incapacity of the noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and could never give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of their actions?
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Plato…wished to prove to himself…the greatest strength a philosopher had ever expended—that reason and instinct lead spontaneously to one goal, to the good, to ‘God’; and since Plato, all…have followed the same path.” - Beyond good and evil
Here is another irony, that so many “gothic” college students can proudly tote their Nietzsche while paying for Plato. It is an irony that I know escapes them.
Not only is it not unique to him but it was also known to him as well.
“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” - Beyond good and evil
Marx and his ilk might have come in the name of logic, reason, and science; but they were imposters! If you try to place them in my company then I will expel them.
We should not be skeptical of logic only more discriminating of those who come in its name.