What do you think of Nietzsche?

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“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”

“When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

“Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing
to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”

(Naked, Enough, Whole Complete;

The only Place i
Arrive New is
Now No Longer
Any Forward
Or
BeHind
With SMiles...)

-by me too

i Literally Just Wrote This
A Few Minutes Ago As Time
Stamped With A FRiEnD iN
A Far Away Land Before i Ever

Read The Quote by Nietzsche Above, Just Now...

Yet Yes, Let's Review Some Others As It's Always
Easy to Cherry Pick Parts of Human Philosophies

Negatively Without Giving Similar Consideration at Least to a Few Others...

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“Ascetic ideals reveal so many bridges to independence that a philosopher is bound to rejoice
and clap his hands when he hears the story of all those resolute men who one day said

No to all servitude and went into some desert.”

(Wow, He Capitalized 'No' For Emotional Impact, Hehe;

At Least for Those Able to Actually FeeL iT; Par for the Course)

“Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself,
is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman,

an official, or a scholar.”

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”

“The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about
a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate
to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those

who think alike than those who think differently.”

“What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

“Become who you are.”

"God Is Dead," Perhaps the

Most Recognizable Quote Attached

to Friedrich Nietzsche And Of Course Many

Folks Take it at 'Face Value,' Literally, Without Understanding

That Nietzsche Saw Benefits to Christianity And That Humans Destroyed the 'Value of God;'

And In This Case, Ethical Traditions That Help Glue Humans Together At Least Enough to Survive...

i Don't Agree With "The Will to Power" That Nietzsche Seems so Obsessed with; my Intuitive Feeling

Is He Dealt With What They Call in the South As "Little Man Syndrome," Envious of Men Who Seemed

More Powerful and Lived Without Fear As Indeed That Longing is expressed in Some of His Writings...

His Writing Style is Unique, Deep, And Originally Creative; It Stimulates my Mind as i Enjoy New

Kinds of Artistic Styles in All the Ways Art Comes Original This Way; Yet of Course It's Like

What i am Gonna Write Next, Unless One is an Originally Creative Person, More in Touch

With the way the Right Hemisphere of the Mind Processes Reality, More Non-Verbally,

Holistically, With More Complex Emotions; Than the Left Hemisphere of Mind, More Grasping,

Materially Reducing, Controlling, and Generally Expressing more 'Butt Hurt' Emotions When We Don't

Get our Ways of Control As Detailed By Modern Scholar, Researcher, And Scholar, Iain
McGilchrist, With More Reference Points than Most Folks Have the Attention to 'Grasp'

In His 1500 Or So Page Research Book, 'The Matter With Things' With 600 Thousand or So

Words That Took 10 Years of His Life to Write on How Western Civilizations/Philosophies Are Indeed

too Systemizing, Analytic, and Verbally Restricted; As Yes, Science Shows the Word Thinking

Conscious Mind, Only Comprises About A Half a Percent of All Human Processes Going on

Deep Within; Yes, With Potentials in More Creative Flow that Meditative More Eastern Philosophies

Surely Still Propagate Now New to Achieve Much Greater Human Potentials in Empirically Measurable

Ways of Creativity
And Productivity
As Science Now
Newly Most Definitely Shows too...

Yeah, If You Don't Wanna Read a
1500 Page Book, You May Find A Free

Summary of Iain McGilchrist's Work

on Youtube, Commercial Free Hehe,

Without Any of Those Annoying Solar Panel Ads...

Of Course, You'll Have to Have Some Attention Span,
Focus, And Interest to Get through His Research too...

Nietzsche, Lived in the 'Victorian Age;' No Wonder Why He Wanted

A Bit of An Escape Out of that Place; Hmm, As Far As His 'Overman'

Aims for Humankind in Regard Then to a Best Life Here Now on Earth,

Appreciating THE REALITY OF LIFE NOW; OH DEAR THAT MAKES SENSE;

However, For Best Success, i Suggest Will to LoVE iN Peace Over Will to Power....

True, Folks Like Trump Show That Exploiting Others With A Will to Power Can And

Will Work Temporarily; Yet the Problem is Ya Never Really Arrive Now Naked Enough
Whole Complete

As You Spend

Your Life

Chasing a

Carrot that
Never Truly Satisfies

A Never Ending Empty 'Soul'

(The Real Organic One As
Described by Nietzsche too)

More Than Just the Next Meal...

"To Listen One Must Be Able to Hear Same With Inner Sight And
Yes MuSiC And SonG Deep Within Coming With A Freer Dance"

-by me

Yep, Like Nietzsche Said Not Everyone Can 'Hear' the MuSiC of my

Dance And Song

Either Hehe...

Yet Some Do

And They Are

Surely Stellar to Interact

With And Surely Beyond

What Most Human

Beings Are Able

to Digest and Co-Create in Life...

Other than that We Are Still Talking

About the Ideas of Nietzsche, Centuries

After His Death, Not Unlike A 'Moonlit Sonata'

By Beethoven, Nietzsche Still Breathes in His Words...

Like 'em

And

or Him

or Not...

The Dude is Considered

Brilliant By Most Respectable Scholars;

As Iain McGilchrist is Well Respected too;

Yes, With More Modern Ideas, Enhanced By Science too...

Without All the 'Butt Hurt Emotions,' Propagated on So Many

YouTube Channels That Seek To Spread That Negative Social Emotional

Contagion
to SeLL A STory...

"Master 'The Tool;'
Do NOT Become Both
Mastered By The Tool
And More 'Tool' Than 'Human'..."

-me

It Seems to me, Just

Being 'Human' Is A More

Achievable Goal Than 'Super Normal'...

Yet i'm Not One To Settle For 'Normal' in Any Way...

And True, i Do Come With Plenty of Empirical Evidence too, HAha...

With Plenty
of 'Rabbit
Holes' to Visit too Hehe

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In theory and in rhetoric, yes. In practice, not so much. In practice, America was founded, to a significant degree, on the conquest of land and the displacement of indigenous people. Oh, and let's not forget slavery.

To whatever extent economic libertarianism can be said to have been feasible, at least in the free states (the states that had renounced slavery, or where slavery was never allowed), it worked because of the easy availability of cheap, freshly-conquered land. The solution to poverty then was "Go west, young man!" So-called "frontier mentality" worked because we had an actual, physical frontier.

In today's world, pure economic libertarianism would inevitably be a game of musical chairs. There would inevitably be lots of losers who would starve to death.


Not altogether. Over the centuries, there has been a struggle to bring the U.S.A. closer to (the good parts of) its founding ideals, such as by ending slavery (for the most part, at least) and expanding the suffrage.


Hmmm, could you please clarify your wording above? It's not 100% clear to me which parts of the above are sarcastic.

Be that as it may, the person you were replying to, stratozyck, is an actual economist, thus in a better position than you to evaluate whether Keynes's "entire work is pseudoscience" or whether "his approach is largely abandoned basically everywhere."

This is why a big portion of people informed by the Chicago school (and similar) appear more like the Cult of The Invisible Hand instead of a credible school of economic thought.

Yeah, he's pinning hope for humanity on strength, while simultaneously acknowledging types of entropy that can destroy almost anything (strong or not).

But I think Rand is worse. And they're both better than mainstream philosophers who just ignore those problems.

One thing Neitzsche got absolutely right is that you can't count on inculcation to fix social problems. If you take religious dogmatists out of churches and put them into secular schools, they'll just turn those schools into new-age churches (i.e. the current situation). You have to change the population, or at minimum make institutions that thwart those impulses.

He put his finger on a few really important things (and really, this is a lot of the same that I'd say for Dostoevsky):

1) For what we are we can't very easily formalize ethics and on a personal level and most of us are utter frauds and even cowards in this regard (one of his major critiques of Christianity is for whatever the rules were actually intended for people used them as a convenience not to have to grow up or think for themselves).

2) That the 'death of God', ie. death of belief, would force all kinds of things that we had on autopilot for thousands of years in a place where they needed to be under manual control - ie. no divine escrow account for social contract anymore. In a way he predicted the rough outline of the titanic ideological clashes of the 20th century.

3) That without religion we would need to do the equivalent (in today's parlance) of self-authorship. No reliable 'way to be' would be available to us and we'd have to make meaning on our own (those who succeeded would be the ubermensch).

I do need to read more of his work but I had the change to read 'Birth of Tragedy', and aside from seeing that he really couldn't stand Socrates he had a bit of a model of tendencies in human life that he broke down between the Apollonian and Dionysian which would in a way break down between traditional morality on one hand and the energetic release of license, or in some ways right hand path and left hand path spirituality in today's parlance.


I also get the sense that he was a large influence on Carl G. Jung.


IMHO he was right about a lot, particularly on topics that seemed like they were a bit taboo at the time (Schopenhauer helped break some of that down) and he said those things without flinching.

Otherwise - both he and his stance were needed, if it wasn't him it would have been someone else and it's an open question whether someone else would have done it as well.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 20 Feb 2023, 4:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Many points here to reply. First lets talk about the U.S. and the ideals of it's founding. Yes, there are plenty of negatives associated with the American history. Slavery and the displacement of the indigenous peoples comming first. But you should consider were humanity comes from. History has always been my special interest and what I've come to understand is that human nature is barbaric and the norm has been tyrany and universal oppression. We are lucky to live in such a scale of dignity and liberty us we do now. America has played an important role in shaping our modern world. America was a radical experiment at the time, which unlike other experiments, like the French revolution, the Bolshevik coup, the Fascist usurpation of power and others, was actually successful. What were the odds. The ideology behind the founding of the U.S. is called classical liberalism. Librals have been reformers all arround the world but nowhere was expressed so purely as with the founding of the U.S. It took time though until it fully cleansed the barbarity of the past. It wasn't an easy task.
The U.S. did a massive civil war fighting for the rights of an oppressed people of another race. Which pepple has done that before or since in history?

America has its sins but comparatively has been a benevolent force for humanity. Think of which could have been the alternatives: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, an islamic caliphate or modern distopian China. The U.S. fought and fights those potential world conquerors with those Classical Liberal ideals in mind.

Is there room for furthering those ideals? There certainly is. Wokeism is not part of those ideals, the contrary.

As for stratozyck, the fact that he may be an economist means nothing. It's like a psychiatrist supporting lobotomy. You don't need to be a psychiatrist to refute him. Keynesianism is as obsolete and pseudoscientific as lobotomy.

Another thing, for those who like fiction by existentialist authors, the short stories in László Krasznahorkai's 'The World Goes On' have a lot of neat little references to Neitzsche.

I first read a bit of Nietzsche as a teenager. I never really felt I understood it, and it seemed to me he was often just being deliberately shocking and contrarian.

Now I am a bit older, I still wouldn’t claim to really understand him, and I doubt I’d agree with everything he wrote even if I did, but I feel I have a better appreciation for certain concepts he wrote about such as ‘the Last Man’ and ‘Slave Morality’.

I think his warnings about ‘the Last Man’ were prescient when I see how if modern culture ever strives for anything at all, it strives merely for comfort (technological progress has clearly played a part here too).

I think his warnings about ‘Slave Morality’ were even more prescient. Look at our society (this sub-forum included) and see how much of modern political discourse revolves around ‘ressentiment’. Look at how much of modern political discourse revolves solely around the interests of whomever the media has declared to be ‘marginalized’. Look at the mobs of useless degenerates calling for great monuments to be torn down and works of art and literature to be ‘cancelled’ on the grounds that they are symbols of ‘oppression’. Look at how these mobs delight in destroying things they do not have the ability to create themselves.

As for Ayn Rand, for reasons I won’t go into, I suspect I’d find her philosophy less worthwhile. I don’t think I’ll be reading any of her incredibly long novels anytime soon. I did watch The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper a while back, and it was ok I suppose (Slavoj Zizek once said it was one of his favourite films, bizarrely).

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.

One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Agreed so far.


Not that radical, actually. The American "Revolution" was a "revolution" in only a limited sense. No governments were overthrown. Rather, the local governments of 13 British colonies decided to declare independence from the distant British government. Hence the American Revolution was not followed by the kind of chaos, followed by tyranny, that is the typical result of "Revolutions" in the sense of overthrow of government, however lofty the ideals of said revolutions.


Correct -- and mainly for the reason I mentioned above.


Actually the founders had a mix of ideologies. What they ended up creating was a compromise.

In any case, "classical liberalism" drew on older traditions such as the Puritans, who typically had a democratic form of church government and also believed in "Sola Scriptura," with the consequence that literacy was deemed to be a fundamental human right. Thanks to the influence of both Puritans and Quakers, the northern colonies were already relatively democratic even before the American Revolution.


The British Empire (and, if I'm not mistaken, some other European empires too) outlawed slavery before the U.S.A. did.

Some historians (e.g. those associated with the "1619 Project") argue that one of the motives for the American Revolution was the desire by Southern plantation owners to preserve slavery, which the British Empire was soon likely to outlaw. I'm not sure to what extent this was really a factor in the American Revolution -- I certainly don't think it was the main factor -- but the Declaration of Independence does briefly complain that King George "has excited domestic insurrections amongst us" -- a reference to slave revolts.

Be that as it may, British abolitionism was already very much a thing by the time of the American Revolution.


Agreed that the U.S.A. has been, at least for the most part, better than most of those alternatives.


Depends how you define "Wokeism" -- which is not the actual name of any ideology, but is a label used by (mostly right wing) outsiders to the set of beliefs referred to.


No it is not. Some of Keynes's ideas may be outdated, but his basic ideas are still a foundational part of mainstream macroeconomics to this day.

Are you religiously inclined?

How is keynesian economics foundational part of macroeconomics? Any examples of major contemporary keynesian policies today? Even if there are, it's more likely policies made by democrats who want to appear as if they are helping the economy. There is no shortage of crony economists who want to further their carear by entertaining the desires of an economically illiterate voter base. Keynesianism is as obsolete as lobotomy.

These days, not only are we all Keynesians (as Milton Friedman sort-of said), but we're also all informed by the Chicago school. They're both key parts of the new neoclassical synthesis. The Austrians are closer to being a cult.


Some key elements of Keynesianism that are important to modern economics include the idea of economic stimulus during downturns, price "stickiness", and the idea of imperfect competition. New Keynesianism is one of the major components of the new neoclassical synthesis, which is taught to undergraduate economists throughout elite universities, including in, for example, Greg Mankiw's textbook. The idea of cutting taxes to stimulate the economy is itself Keynesian.

Most economists don't have any real exposure to the "voter base". Nobody knows who Austan Goolsbee is.

There are two ways for an economist to become somewhat famous:

1) be really weird and also have the ear of a major politician (like that guy from Cardiff University who kept giving Liz Truss bad advice)

2) write a book (best case scenario is that this makes you as famous as Steven Levitt)

For real success you need both, like Keynes and Friedman. I don't think nyone active today is that famous.

About 0.0000000000000000000000000001%

I think his name is hard to spell.