Nietzche...

[Walk_on_Walk_on]

He could be taken either way, one one hand he talks of untermenschen and the will to power, but on the other he advocates self-rule and total individual freedom...

[rouchambeau]

The Untermensch and Ubermensch do not refer to any kind of racial inferiority that the Nazis believed in.

[Cryotank Screams]

The term Untermensch didn't come from Nietzsche it came from Stoddard and later the nazis, as sort of an opposite term of Nietzsche conceptual archetype, the Übermensch, only it seems to be a misinterpretation of the term, and the Übermensch is more philosophical, and poetic, and does not refer to any certain group, or race of people, nor is it referring to the "mighty," of society, that is a common misconception by most, and is also a misinterpretation of his work, also in regards to his "self [x]," concepts, he doesn't advocate the extreme individualism, that such phrases would usually imply.

He was a philosopher, plain and simple.

[blake 3:17]

I think Nietzsche's great strength was in the questions he asked. Why philsophies of vision but not of smell? Why do the oppressed embrace their oppression? Where do morals come from?

A lot of his answers suck shit, and do have an air of macho-fascism to them. It's thje questions and problems he raises that are of value.

[Cryotank Screams]

Originally posted by blake 3:[email protected] 07, 2007 07:54 pm
answers suck shit, and do have an air of macho-fascism to them.
Are you sure your not just misinterpreting his work?

[BreadBros]

He was neither. Attempts to tie him to Nazi ideas are ridiculous as any readings of him will prove. At the same time he was not an anarchist or revolutionary leftist, he never spoke of class conflict.

I haven't read all of his works but I did find his critique of idealist societies, their decay into nihilism and his call for a new individual who rebukes the dogma of the past and builds a life with meaning inherent in the material world to be valuable.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

I've heard people tie him in with Libertarian Capitalism, but then those bastards will take anything and claim it to be their own, including the word "libertarian."

[Cryotank Screams]

Originally posted by [email protected] 07, 2007 09:00 pm
I've heard people tie him in with Libertarian Capitalism
I have too, however in my opinion, he probably was against capitalism, but that is just my opinion, he was really and truthfully apolitical.

[bretty]

He does mention socialism a few times.

[bezdomni]

He hated Hegel (and everyone else...)

[black magick hustla]

hegel was a huge reactionary asshole anyway

[Ze]

Contrary to any feeble attempts to tie it into nazi nonsense, Che Guevara has been labeled an Ubermensch more than once.

[bolshevik butcher]

He was also part of an artilerty regiment that shelled the paris commune and his ideas to me seem to try and justify capitalism, the powerful will naturally take their place at the top. He certainly wasn't a fan of socialist ideas.

[Cryotank Screams]

Originally posted by bolshevik [email protected] 08, 2007 02:08 pm
He was also part of an artilerty regiment that shelled the paris commune
False, he joined the Prussian artillery division of Naumburg in 1867, and due to a riding accident, that only lasted one year and he was unfit for service, and that was the full extent of his military career, one year, 1867-1868, however during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, he was a medical orderly, and not a soldier, and he contracted diseases and returned to Basel in 1870.

Not to mention he renounced his Prussian citizenship, during this time.


and his ideas to me seem to try and justify capitalism, the powerful will naturally take their place at the top. He certainly wasn't a fan of socialist ideas.

No, those are misrepresentation, every time I have read him speak of mighty and weak, he isn't talking about economic, political, racial, or any such superiority, but more like he is talking about weak and strong in emotional, psychological, archetypical, intellectual, and or philosophical terms, or any combinations of the listed, and is clearly not fitting the claims of nazis or others, nor does he support Social Darwinism, or any associated or related ideas, and he never commented on politics, and remained apolitical, so thus, you can't say he was for or against Socialism, and as I said in a earlier thread, politics and related fields, were not discussed in his works, nor were his interests.

[black magick hustla]

i have this nietzchean ideas in the sense that i think that a communist society would probably be populated by ubermensch--people who threw away class society morality and become themselves a source of a new morality.

i think that postmodern society is the epitome of the last man, people are stopping to grip into their meaningless identities, religion, nation etc, and instead floating around. will those people become ubermensch later?

[bretty]

Cryotank. I'm certain he mentions Socialism a few times infrequently. Not that I would suggest he advocated one or the other type of political standing.

[Cryotank Screams]

Originally posted by [email protected] 08, 2007 09:48 pm
Cryotank. I'm certain he mentions Socialism a few times infrequently.
My response is context, and how do you know he was specifically referring to class war, anti-capitalist, revolutionary Socialism, and not liberalism under the name Socialism, or the like? Also, I would like to see, the texts in which he mentions Socialism.

[bretty]

Originally posted by Cryotank Screams+March 09, 2007 03:26 am--> (Cryotank Screams @ March 09, 2007 03:26 am)
[email protected] 08, 2007 09:48 pm
Cryotank. I'm certain he mentions Socialism a few times infrequently.
My response is context, and how do you know he was specifically referring to class war, anti-capitalist, revolutionary Socialism, and not liberalism under the name Socialism, or the like? Also, I would like to see, the texts in which he mentions Socialism. [/b]
Well like I said I won't try to argue how Nietzsche felt about socialism in the way we understand it but I will provide some parts of his books as requested where he talks about socialism at least to refute your point of him not mentioning it.

In Beyond Good and Evil: 202, 203, 251n, 256. The latter two are small uses of the term.

In The Gay Science: 40, 12, 24, 356.

Anyways make of it what you will.

(all the numbers refer to sections not pages).

[BreadBros]

Originally posted by [email protected] 09, 2007 01:18 am
i have this nietzchean ideas in the sense that i think that a communist society would probably be populated by ubermensch--people who threw away class society morality and become themselves a source of a new morality.

i think that postmodern society is the epitome of the last man, people are stopping to grip into their meaningless identities, religion, nation etc, and instead floating around. will those people become ubermensch later?
That seems to me to be what Debord is talking about in 'Society of the Spectacle'. Nihilism can be construed as the state of cultural banality created by the domination of the commodity over life.

[BurnTheOliveTree]

He was just a weird, misogynistic/patriarchal recluse. I never did understand his importance.

-Alex

[JoyDivision]

The question itself is the problem with this thread, it assumes that Nietzsche advocated some sort of system that everyone would exist in. This is fundamentally incorrect, Nietzsche was a perspectivist first and foremost, and spoke to only those people who held similar perspectives. Politics and government is for the mass of people, Nietzsche had no concern for this very mass. He argued against certain types of government, but did not advocate for one.

As for his stance on socialism, he saw them as irrelevant reactionaries on par with Christians.

[blake 3:17]

This is fundamentally incorrect, Nietzsche was a perspectivist first and foremost, and spoke to only those people who held similar perspectives.

Or people who had equally strange perspectives?

[JoyDivision]

Originally posted by blake 3:[email protected] 30, 2007 02:22 am
Or people who had equally strange perspectives?
There is nothing inherently strange about Nietzsche's perspective, it is the foundation of post-modern thought, and elements of it can be found throughout society. Not to mention that a large portion of what he said can be found in a different form in Spinoza/Schopenhauer/Stoicism/Heraclitus. All well respected philosophers.

Perhaps his polemical/aphoristic style throws you off?

[anomaly]

I think Nietszche is extremely important, especially as relates to post-modernist or post-structuralist ideas. Not only does he question the source of morals and attacks Christian thought, but also he attacks the notion of objectivism. I think "objectivism" is all too often used in this society to justify capitalistic or statist ideas in the social sciences. The question, of course, is how can one be objective, that is, be a passive, not-part-of-the-experiment onlooker when the experiment is the society in which one lives? Doing away with the notion of objectivism empowers humans everywhere, as we can finally assert ourselves as the subjects of society, the prime movers, and realize our own power.

This leads to Nietszche's idea of the will to power. Too often labeled a reactionary idea, the idea also has a quality of liberation. I don't know what terms Nietszche used, but I do no his "will to power" was divided between the will to "power to" and the will to "power over". The former leads to his ideas on individual freedom, that we should have POWER TO do what we like, which he contrasts with oppressive power over, which limits power to. (since I don't know the terms Nietszche used, I'm stealing terms from John Holloway).

I think the dual nature of power, and the realization that power is not necessarily "evil", is an extremely important idea in modern anarchist theory. That is, we, as anarchists, are against power which inhibits our power to be free, to be happy, in a word, to be alive. Modern anarchist theory (or at least post-structuralist anarchist theory) asserts that capitalism doesn't just prevent our natural inclination towards freedom (as classical anarchists would assert), but that it indeed damages our ability to live a truly human life, which would be constituted by a high degree of power to. That, I think, is where Nietszche's high value lies.

[ReD_ReBeL]

I believe his sister at some stage worked with the nazi's or was associated with them . This is a letter he wrote to her about it

You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. … It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well) is as pronounced as possible.
- - Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to His Sister, Christmas 1887

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Indeed you are right Red Rebel, Nietzche's sister was a Nazi:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_F%C...rster-Nietzsche (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_F%C3%B6rster-Nietzsche)

She also tried to edit her brother's work to make him look like a proto-Nazi too.

He, of course, would have found its ideas as idiotic as those of others he lambasted, but probably worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nie...e_and_reception (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Nietzsche.27s_influence_and_re ception)

[tolstoyevski]

we mustn't forget his letter to baron gersdoff after the fall of paris commune:

“Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn't over yet! I'm in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish leveling and ‘elegance', and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (‘now-time').... Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come.”

in the will to power he tries to refute socialist ideals not with proto-fascist ideas, but with his "psuedo intellectual" ignorance. yes, he was an ignorant who was not aware of economy. he never read Marx and his ideas have never helped the laborers in their struggle.

it's nonsense to talk about his innocent philosophy by stressing his non-economical but abstract ideas. there's no innocent philosophy. and i think that liberals may like his ideas which are stressing the unchanging essence of human nature, of the worldly order:

"It is a disgrace for all socialist systematizers that they suppose there could be circumstances--social combinations--in which vice, disease, prostitution, distress would no longer grow.--But that means condemning life.--A society is not free to remain young. And even at the height of its strength it has to form refuse and waste materials. The more energetically and boldly it advances, the richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline."

summary: there will always be prostitutes, rich and poor.

is that anarchy?
let me ask:
what is advance here? what is strength here? what kind of society is that, bourgeois society?
peh..

[UndergroundConnexion]

the nazis did not exist until 1920 or aounrd there by the way, Nietzche died in 1900

[RedCat]

Nietzsche evidently was a fierce advocate of bourgeois society and class domination.
In the Antichrist he attacks ruthlessly Socialism and Christianity (according to him the first was a sort of modern heritor of the second) in that they questioned the right of the ruling classes to keep in slavery the labor workers (as happened in Greek democracy).
I think also that his status of thinker that questions all established truths should be criticised: consider for example his adversity for Socrates and socratic maieutics,Nietzsche doesn't seem to feel any sympathy for a thought which had as a reason of being the analysis of every current discourse to reach the what is true

[Le People]

Nietzsche didn't really support the liberal order. He was an individualist through and through. I believe in Zarathustra, he attacks the bourgousie and the working class considering their VALUES to be decadent and weakening. But that attack is really looking at the Christianity that pervaded society. He didn't really believe in reason, so of course he damns socrates. For him, its the will to power not the will to wisdom. I honestly think he was just a nut firing a gun into a crowd. Though I do have to say this; he was one of the first Nihilistic philosophers. (The first being Stiner)

[funkmasterswede]

Originally posted by [email protected] 21, 2007 08:13 pm
Nietzsche evidently was a fierce advocate of bourgeois society and class domination.
In the Antichrist he attacks ruthlessly Socialism and Christianity (according to him the first was a sort of modern heritor of the second) in that they questioned the right of the ruling classes to keep in slavery the labor workers (as happened in Greek democracy).
I think also that his status of thinker that questions all established truths should be criticised: consider for example his adversity for Socrates and socratic maieutics,Nietzsche doesn't seem to feel any sympathy for a thought which had as a reason of being the analysis of every current discourse to reach the what is true
No, Nietzche did not advocate bourgeois class domination per se. He advocated domination but not based on formal political equality. (I have a hard time myself believing any society no matter how equal will be free of some sort of implicit domination). So to group him in with them is inaccurate.

He is highly critical of both socialists and classical liberals and bourgeois society. One of his critiques of the society was that it forces everyone into roles of specialists and thus does not allow transcendence in the sense, of being a complete human. Nietzche hated almost every philosophy and school of political thought other than the pre-socrates. And it was not so much that he did not believe in reason as he saw reason as a tool, like any other. He feared slavery to any singular value and thus attacked reason's sovereignty.

His philosophy is very misunderstood and his ideal is very hard to penetrate, it was individualistic, but I doubt it would fall under liberal ideology. Nietzche really did not have a tangible foundation for a society as the only thing he saw as real and important were desires or wills. Will to power, if taken literally would be more of an emancipation of what he saw to be wills from the "slavery" inherent in the moralism of socialism, liberalism and feudal society.

His issue with socialists is rooted in his view on wills. He was quite opposed to materialism and is mostly critical of socialists for viewing humans as blank slates who were merely created by their environments. He thought their was something that was innate to the human (in their will).

[praxicoide]

Yes, he is hard to pin down, because he critizices everything. He was against any form of heteronomy (submission to a foreing will), but he said that it was natural necessity for a will to assert itself.

He can be said to be individualistic in a sense, but he also criticizes and does not believe in such a thing as an "individual". The modern individual is a secular version of a soul; of a consistent unit, persisting through time and acting out of its own volition. He said that any one person is actually a collection of contradictory wills, and consistency or discipline is simply the enslaving of all wills into one perspective, and the cause of resentment (one of his key ideas).

Another key idea that ties into this is pathos, or suffering. His constant reference to greek tragedy come because of this. In pathos he finds the metaphor to explain that people are made by their circumstances. That conciousness is a product, not cause.

This is why his own moral precepts are things like eating healthy, exercise, etc, and why he shows that morals have material origins as health and control measures, never as disinterested.

His geneology of morals and reason, is an ideological unmasking. He is against them because he sees them as a method of domination.

[Labor Shall Rule]

In Human, All-Too Human, Nietzsche expressed his view of socialism.


Socialism with regards to its means.— Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism, whose heir it wants to be; thus its efforts are reactionary in the deepest sense. For it desires an abundance of executive power, as only despotism has ever had; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, who it sees as an unauthorized luxury of nature, and who it intends to improve into a useful organ of the community. It crops up in the vicinity of all excessive displays of power because of its relation to it, like the typical old socialist Plato, at the court of the Sicilian tyrant [In 388 B.C. Plato visited the court of the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius the Elder in Syracuse, where he returned in 367 and 361 B.C., hoping to realize his political ideals there.]; it desires (and in certain circumstances, furthers) the Caesarean power state of this century, because, as we said, it would like to be its heir. But even this inheritance would not suffice for its purposes, it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed; and since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work automatically to eliminate piety—because it works on the elimination of all existing states—, it can only hope to exist here and there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word "justice" like a nail into the heads of the half-educated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its half-education), and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game that they are to play.— Socialism can serve as a rather brutal and forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulations of state power, and to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its harsh voice chimes in with the battle cry [Feldgeschrei] "as much state as possible, " it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: "as little state as possible."

Nietzsche was a rabid anti-socialist; in The Anti-Christ he stated that he hated "the socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights". For anyone on the revolutionary left trying to connect with them, you have to come to the realization that he has the morality of a slaveowner; to him, there is no such thing as a social order in which workers are free producers, and if you even read into his works Twilight of the Idols, you would encounter the prevailing fact that he does not find anything constructive in the act of revolution - to him it's an instigation created by socialist witchdoctors that want to destroy society as it is.

The Paris Commune is something we could all identify with - Nietzsche didn't. He advocated it's destruction.


"Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn't over yet! I'm in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish leveling and ‘elegance', and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (‘now-time').... Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come."

[hajduk]

Nietche was a philosopher who got the vision about utopia,but they took that vision from him and made something else,something monstrous.So if we analyse his vision we will find lot of god stuff,but lot of others they dont understand what he wrote and they connect his philosophy with Nazis,of course he believe in national german party like some system to put his vision in a real world but lately Nietche understand what Nazis do,like dr Frankestein he understand that he create a monster,but then it was to late.

[Hit The North]

but lately Nietche understand what Nazis do,like dr Frankestein he understand that he create a monster,but then it was to late.

Sorry comrade, but Nietzsche was dead long before anyone had heard about Nazis.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by Citizen [email protected] 22, 2007 01:46 pm

but lately Nietche understand what Nazis do,like dr Frankestein he understand that he create a monster,but then it was to late.

Sorry comrade, but Nietzsche was dead long before anyone had heard about Nazis.
But his sister exploited his national chauvinisim, resistance to egilitarianism, and vulgar denunciation of socialists to contribute to the Nazi ideology.

[praxicoide]

When reading Nietzsche you have to understand that he was a bourgeois (living off a comfortable pension) who was not very social. This obviously affects his writings, especially since these are almost biographical.

As someone else here said, his work was not meant for everybody, but only for like minded individuals (aristocratic thought).

One should be very critical of his thought, which doesn't mean tossing in the garbage in its entirety. There are loads of good insights.

The same goes for any thinker. People should not read anyone uncritically, not even Marx.

[Le People]

Originally posted by RedDali+July 22, 2007 10:38 am--> (RedDali @ July 22, 2007 10:38 am)
Citizen [email protected] 22, 2007 01:46 pm

but lately Nietche understand what Nazis do,like dr Frankestein he understand that he create a monster,but then it was to late.

Sorry comrade, but Nietzsche was dead long before anyone had heard about Nazis.
But his sister exploited his national chauvinisim, resistance to egilitarianism, and vulgar denunciation of socialists to contribute to the Nazi ideology. [/b]
What national Chauvinism? He was as anti-Nationalist as they come, and his country Prussia, is the one he hated most of all! He even renounced his citizenship. You are right though, his sister did willingly misitneterept and edited his works to produce an anti semetic feel to them.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Originally posted by Le [email protected] 23, 2007 02:02 am
What national Chauvinism? He was as anti-Nationalist as they come, and his country Prussia, is the one he hated most of all! He even renounced his citizenship. You are right though, his sister did willingly misitneterept and edited his works to produce an anti semetic feel to them.
Have you read the letter that I posted on here on what he thought about the crushing of the Paris Commune?


"Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn't over yet! I'm in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish leveling and ‘elegance', and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (‘now-time').... Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come."

Since he associated socialist ideas (this includes that of anarchists also), with the general breakdown with all that society was, he concluded that the blood spilled in Paris showed that the "German mission" was not over yet; that the vestiges of what he thought was 'good' were protected when the blood of thousands of workers were spilled, and that the role that Prussia played in assisting the French in crushing the rebellion had revealed that they had not yet capitulated to "Franco-Jewish leveling", and to the general sentiments of the working people that was demanded through the act of armed uprising that he called "Jeztzeit" - a 'greedy instinct' that they had, according to him.

I think he is anti-socialist, and that his works are complete garbage.

[hajduk]

Originally posted by Citizen [email protected] 22, 2007 01:46 pm

but lately Nietche understand what Nazis do,like dr Frankestein he understand that he create a monster,but then it was to late.

Sorry comrade, but Nietzsche was dead long before anyone had heard about Nazis.
it was some kind form of nazies party long a go of course before they get real power and in that time it was oblivious that party become strong and of course he didnt realise the power of the nazies when they show ,but before he realise that is monstrous, before the war happend

[praxicoide]

He would have had to support or associate with these Germanophiles in the first place, for him to realize any mistake. Nietszche hated Germany and especially its Bavarian "culture of beer drinking". He considered himself to be of Polish descent.

He wrote scathing criticisms of his sister, who later moved to Uruguay to found a "new germania" or something of the sort with her fanatical husband. That ended dreadfully, battling malaria and other problems.

Anyways, that's sort of beside the point. You simply have to realize his ideological shortcomings and weed them out when assessing his works.

[Le People]

Originally posted by RedDali+July 23, 2007 03:19 am--> (RedDali @ July 23, 2007 03:19 am)
Le [email protected] 23, 2007 02:02 am
What national Chauvinism? He was as anti-Nationalist as they come, and his country Prussia, is the one he hated most of all! He even renounced his citizenship. You are right though, his sister did willingly misitneterept and edited his works to produce an anti semetic feel to them.
Have you read the letter that I posted on here on what he thought about the crushing of the Paris Commune?


"Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn't over yet! I'm in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish leveling and ‘elegance', and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (‘now-time').... Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come."

Since he associated socialist ideas (this includes that of anarchists also), with the general breakdown with all that society was, he concluded that the blood spilled in Paris showed that the "German mission" was not over yet; that the vestiges of what he thought was 'good' were protected when the blood of thousands of workers were spilled, and that the role that Prussia played in assisting the French in crushing the rebellion had revealed that they had not yet capitulated to "Franco-Jewish leveling", and to the general sentiments of the working people that was demanded through the act of armed uprising that he called "Jeztzeit" - a 'greedy instinct' that they had, according to him.

I think he is anti-socialist, and that his works are complete garbage. [/b]
But dude, read the rest of his works. One letter doesn't neccessaryily prove a damn thing one way or the other.

Human All Too Human


Trade, industry, books and letters, the way in which all higher culture is shared, the rapid change of house and scenery, the present nomadic life of everyone who is not a landowner- these circumstances necessarily produce a weakening of nations, ar least in Europe; and as a consequence of contiual intermarriage there must develop a mixed race, that of the European man ... It is not the interest of the many (of peoples), as is often claimed, but above all the interest of certain royal dynasties and also of certian classes of commerce and society that drives nationalism. Once one has recognized this, one should declare onself without embarrassment as a good European and work actively for the amalgation of nations.

I really do not feel like quoting his anti german rants in the Twlight of the Idols, but I will give you one more Nietzsche quote, not pertaining to nationalism, but just Nietzsche.

Ecce Homo
[QUOTE]My practice of war may be summarized in four propositions. First: I attack only causes which are victourious- and at times I wait until they are victorious. Second: I attack only causes against which I can not expect to find allies, against which I shall stand alone - against which I shall compromise myself alone. I have never take a step in public which was not compromising: that is my criterion of doing what is right.[QUOTE]

[gauchisme]

"The homogenizing of European man is the great process that cannot be obstructed: one should even hasten it." - nietzsche, will to power #898

_

slavoj zizek writes there are three main readings of nietzsche: a traditional one, a modern one, and a postmodern one.

first, there's the nietzsche of the return to premodern aristocratic warrior values against decadent judeo-christian morality (a la ayn rand).

second, there's the nietzsche of the hermeneutics of doubt and ironic self-probing (a la heidegger, foucault and derrida... even rorty).

and lastly, there's the nietzsche of the free play of appearances and differences (a la lyotard and baudrillard).

_

pierre klossowski effectively turns this three-part distinction on its head, when he writes of three alternatives to how to interpret the doctrine of the eternal return:

(1) either the doctrine of the eternal return selects in and through itself, apart from any conscious or unconscious intervention, or else the return was revealed to nietzsche so that a conscious and voluntary selection might intervene (and it's been revealed that way innumerable times).

(2) if it's been revealed numerous times, it doesn't matter, because the experience of nietzsche at sils-maria poses the question with a new urgency.

(3) either the selection depends on the disclosure, or it's a selection that will take place in secret and undertaken in the name of this secret, i.e. it's a political project.

_

notice how these correspond to zizek's dictonomy: an eternal return which goes on without any need of us, or uses us only as its tools, is postmodern - the simulacra of appearances and differences that move through us without our conscious intervention (memes in a simulacrum). in the modern version, we're still not in charge, but our self-probing is what's important. lastly, however, is an eternal return that's a calling to a willed project of training and selection...

what klossowski brilliantly demonstrates is that this project has nothing to do with any return to an organic tradition; in fact, that's the misreading of nietzsche that we must resist at all costs. chapter six, p114 (of 'nietzsche and the vicious circle') :

"Nietzsche's 'aristocratism' has nothing to do with a nostalgia for past hiearchies, nor, in order to realize this aristocratism, does he appeal to retrograde economic conditions."

(remember too, that the over-man isn't an individual, but a state of being/becoming.)

nietzsche is interested instead in untimely interventions that may sow the seeds of a neo-barbarian collective, ready to push the empire over its breaking point. there's no room for either nihilism or nostalgia here -- only practical creativity is most needed. and this'll happen due to a necessary excess, a surplus of industrialism that overflows conventional social molds benefiting the general interest. p119:

"The importance of increasing gregariousness and the growth of populations is only the obverse side of the industrial phenomenon. If there are more and more needs to satisfy, even if new needs imply a so-called 'rise in the standard of living', they are vulgarized by their very multiplication as well as by their satisfaction - a new form of gregariousness.

Nietzsche registers the distant moral and social consequences of this phenomenon with the precision of a seismograph. As exploitation developed, it demanded, under the pretext of a massive (and thus average) saturation, that completely conditioned reflexes be substituted for the appetitive spontaneity of individuals on a vast scale. Consequently, it also arrogated to itself the 'moral' and 'psycho-technical' mission (inherited from the essentially punitive element of the economies of the two world wars, which were prototypes of planetary planning) of exterminating any impulse that might induce human nature to puts its 'useful' specificity at risk by seeking that which exceeds it as an agent: namely the most subtle states of the soul, which are capable of inducing a rapture that surpasses congenital servitude, and therefore of producing an intensity that corresponds to the impulsive constraint of its own phantasms - even if they are themselves due to this congenital servitude, thus magnified...

{S}uch is the luxury (but such is also culture) - the 'aristocratism' which, according to Nietzsche, must be represented by at least one group, one particular case, not as a fraction of humanity but as its surplus (and hence, for the totality, as an exterminable, shootable, odious leech). This group or particular case - if it wants to assume a surplus existence - can live only in the distance it must maintain, morally speaking, from the totality, drawing its strength from the indignation, hostility and reprobation heaped on it by the totality, which necessarily rejects its own 'surplus', since it is unable to see it as anything other than a rebellious, sick, or degenerate fraction of itself."

it's here we get to the point of realizing who wears the pants in this relationship: it's not the rulers (capitalists, militarists, bureaucrats); it's the rare souls hidden among the masses, so-called parasites, who're cultivating an insurrection waiting for sublime and opportune moments to erupt. this effectively dispenses with all guilt trips thrown at those labeled 'non-productive', while simultaneously affirming imperial structures as essentially self-destructive. it displays the positivity of being isolated and useless - provided one has the spiritual discipline to do so. and there's the rub: there's a big difference between disciplinary training and a taming that's akin to domestication. in fact, that distinction is what makes the political project of experimentation necessary in the first place -- p99:

"If the meaning of all eminent creation is to break the gregarious habits that always direct existing beings towards ends that are useful exclusively to the oppressive regime of mediocrity - then in the experimental domain to create is to do violence to what exists, and thus to the integrity of beings. Every creation of a new type must provoke a state of insecurity: creation ceases to be a game at the margins of reality; henceforth, the creator will not re-produce, but will itself produce the real."

_

what does this mean for actually existing political projects? that claiming we shouldn't say 'should' (a self-refutation) is only half the story. the love of fate brings us back to concrete questions, and specifically, for 'the children' of nietzsche, this confrontation can't function as an excuse for incoherence. instead it's a challenge directed at what is: will you remain at the margins, satisfied to reproduce dominant discourses? or will you put forth real experiments in terror?

_

if you don't relate to any of this, if you're not up to the task, then be glad...
you're one of the herd. have a beer and go to bed.

[peaccenicked]

Probably the best place to start is withLukacs (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm). The three representations do not get to the core of the matter which
is that Nietzche was an irrationalist reactionary response to Marx.
His primacy of form over substance, was pretty much a cop out. It meant that anybody could use his forms, which I daresay he is not exactly to blame for but is a weakness. I tend to think of Neitzche, as a ranting sociopath spitting on anything that he deems below compassion.

TO quote.

"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty - I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind”

Marx is much more humanistic, and rational.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

[CornetJoyce]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10, 2007 11:07 am
"The homogenizing of European man is the great process that cannot be obstructed: one should even hasten it." - nietzsche, will to power #898

_

slavoj zizek writes there are three main readings of nietzsche: a traditional one, a modern one, and a postmodern one.


"The will to interpret is also the will to power."- Nietzsche


If there are various readings of Nietzsche, there are also various Nietzsches. The best place to start is by reading his books.

One of the odd political points in Nietzsche is that, in extolling the glories of Dionysianism, he seems not to have noticed that it was the aristocracy who were Apollonian while the Dionysian cult was far more the province of oi polloi and was avidly embraced by women.

[peaccenicked]

I would start with lukacs. He is a much more rich, and deeper thinker and deserves much more status, love, respectetc
Neiztche is bit like reading the works of a spoilt child, Lukacs is the one giving him a proper telling off.
And he is also accurate on Sartre.

[CornetJoyce]

Obviously, people will read what they wish, according to the dictates of their own hearts, spleens, or other organs. I don't regard Lukacs as terribly relevant to anything. The people to tell off were the AVO thugs who ran Hungary, and it was the workers in 1956 who did that.

[monkeydust]

Was Nietzsche a proto-fascist or a proto-anarchist? To be honest, he wasn't really either.

If you read Nietzsche the majority of what he talks about is personal, not political. He isn't talking about how people should live as a group, but rather about how you, as an individual, should live.

Most people aren't capable of making this decision, of course. The majority, according to Nietzsche, are like sheep, following the herd, slavishly obeying the "slave morality" without question.

He is concerned with the minority of people who, like him, can live as "free spirits", following their own morals in their serene realization that what the rest do ultimately means nothing.

Where he does speak about politics, though, Nietzsche seems to be pretty explicitly elitist. Democracy he doesn't like, for example. He was also pretty reactionary on the topic of women, who he views as inferior. But his main concern wasn't politics at all.

[gauchisme]

recent replies force us into the standard binary trap which we must at all times seek to destroy: we're either to join in a proud marxist dismissal of nietzsche ('he's the anti-socialist par excellence') or we're to give into an existentialist reduction of his aims ('his is just a personal philosophy').

of course, there's a kernel of truth in both of these interpretations, which is precisely what makes either alternative only half-true. there's certainly an elitism in nietzsche, but it's not one defined by race, gender, or class : nietzsche says, he's interested in free *spirits*, in building 'hothouses for rare and choice plants'. the immoralists dare to sanctify parasitism, sucking from the system in order to spoil it from within -- as opposed to the leftist game of revolution that only serves to reinvigorate the ideals of the system.

yes, this is an anti-humanism (or more accurately, post-humanism), but for followers of nietzche, the genocidal events we've witnessed in the west haven't been the result of 'irrationalism', but hyper-rationalism: a ranting sociopath could never result in as much mass death as a well-reasoned policymaker (...think of robert mcnamara and donald rumsfeld, to stick to american examples).

in fact, if we take deleuze&guattari's reasoning to heart, that "the aphorism... is very different from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic state act or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always *awaits its meaning from a new external force*, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize it" (a thousand plateaus, page 377), then reading nietzsche is worthwhile only as an act of political intervention.

'the administered world' (to use adorno's phrase) eliminates the exceptions to service the comforts of the mediocre herd. resisting this isn't simply a personal desire to 'be different'. it's a terroristic call to arms, however subterfugeously conceived.

socialism is as dead as god. nietzsche's children are alive and kicking. but perhaps i'll always take the side of the 'spoiled brats' in the face of paternalistic scorn.

[CornetJoyce]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12, 2007 12:23 pm
yes, this is an anti-humanism (or more accurately, post-humanism), but for followers of nietzche, the genocidal events we've witnessed in the west haven't been the result of 'irrationalism', but hyper-rationalism: a ranting sociopath could never result in as much mass death as a well-reasoned policymaker (...think of robert mcnamara and donald rumsfeld, to stick to american examples).

in fact, if we take deleuze&guattari's reasoning to heart, that "the aphorism... is very different from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic state act or sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always *awaits its meaning from a new external force*, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize it" (a thousand plateaus, page 377), then reading nietzsche is worthwhile only as an act of political intervention.

Good comments, Gauchisme. Nietzsche lamented that mankind had not only fallen far short of the superman but had not even attained full humanity. The past century has certainly not disproved that judgement.

He remarked that he was for the strongest and that he would be happy with the victory of the working class if they were indeed the strongest. If the working class is the strongest, it does not need self-appointed, softhanded guardians of the "theoretical" class.


socialism is as dead as god. nietzsche's children are alive and kicking.

Thank the gods for eternal recurrence.

[black magick hustla]

Nietzche was wrong about socialists, because if anything, revolutionary socialists want to assert their will to power through revolution.

After all, what is revolution--isn't it the manifestation of will to power of a group of people?

Saying that socialism is "slave morality" is a product of Nietzche's antisocial tendencies, and its refusal to take into account the collective, or any form of cooperative work.

The situationists understood the balance of the individual and the collective, and understood that in order to reach that world of dreams and pleasures, we need to work together.

[UndergroundConnexion]

Nietzche was indeed enormously antisocial, when there was in earthquake in venetia killing thousands of people we jumped in thee air of joy wishing it couldve killed even more...

however the way he analyises religion among others in immensly interesting

[peaccenicked]

"Admirers of the ‘purified’ Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decadence. I have demonstrated the kinship of these contrasting qualities in other contexts in the oeuvre of Rilke, who practised a far greater refinement still.[62] Secondly, in the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche gave an excellent description of the type he favoured. Unlike the passages previously quoted, it not only reveals its psychology and ethics, but also sheds much light on the subterranean class basis of this contrasting duality and unity. Here Nietzsche examined pairs of moral opposites: the aristocratic concept of good and bad, and the concept of good and evil dictated by plebeian disapproval. And to the question of how the concept of evil arose he replied as follows:

To answer with all severity: it is precisely the other code’s ‘good man’, noble, powerful and dominant, only given a different hue, meaning and perspective by malicious, resentful eyes. Here we are glad to admit that anyone getting to know those ‘good men’ only as enemies would find them evil enemies indeed. The very men whom etiquette, respectful feelings, custom and gratitude keep strictly within the pale, as do mutual surveillance and jealousy to an even greater extent, who, on the other hand, prove so resourceful in consideration, self-control, tact, loyalty, pride and friendship — once estranged from these confines, they will behave little better than predatory beasts at large. For then they will enjoy a freedom from all social constraints; out in the jungle they are immune from the tensions caused by long incarceration and domesticating in the calm of the community. They step back into the wild animal’s state of innocence, the kind of exuberant monsters that might quit a horrible scene of murder, arson, rape and torture with the high humour and equanimity appropriate to a student prank. They would do so in the conviction that the poets would have plenty to celebrate again. Behind all these noble breeds there is no mistaking the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast in greedy search of spoils and conquest ... It is the noble races that have left the word ‘barbarian’ in their tracks wherever they prowled; even their highest culture betrays this awareness and their pride in the fact.[63]

To sum up: we find aesthetic, moral and cultural refinement within the ruling class, brutality, cruelty, barbarity towards ‘the alien element’, i.e., the oppressed and those it means to oppress. As we see, the young Nietzsche’s enthusiasm about slavery in ancient times remained a constant — indeed constantly heightened — motive of his philosophical work. To be sure, a romantic element thus entered into his ‘prophetic’ anticipation of the imperialist future. For Nietzsche’s prototype, for instance the slave-holding and culturally refined Pericles, adapts itself most awkwardly to such persons as Hitler and Göring, McCarthy and Ridgway. Apologetic aims aside, his ignorance of the socio-economic differences between two ages necessarily led to this romantic idealism. Certainly it is no coincidence that Nietzsche lapsed into romantic fatuity in this particular area; after all, it is the main problem in his philosophizing. Nietzsche’s cultural concern was definitely not just the bait for the decadent intelligentsia, but always occupied a central place in his life, emotions and thoughts. In challenging cultural decline and in trying to pioneer a future revival he was no doubt sincere in his own mind, albeit personally sincere from an extremely reactionary class standpoint. In this light the romantic dream of a culturally highly-developed ruling stratum, representing at the same time an indispensable barbarity, takes on a special colouring. And the subjective sincerity of this false prophetship was itself an important source of Nietzsche’s fascination for the parasitic intelligentsia of the imperialist period. With his assistance it was able to conceal its cowardice, compliance with imperialism’s most repugnant forms and mortal fear of the proletarian revolution behind the mask of a ‘concern about culture’.

But we can leave this subject and still find ourselves at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Superficial commentaries have interpreted his ‘Superman’ as a biologically more highly developed form of man, a view which certain remarks in Zarathustra tend to support. But in the Anti-Christ Nietzsche very firmly disavowed such a reading: ‘Not what is to supersede man in the biological series is the problem which I am now posing (man is an end), but what type of man we should be breeding, willing into existence, a superior being more worthy of life and more assured of a future. This superior type has already dwelt among us frequently enough, but as a stroke of good fortune, an exception, and never something willed.’But in this case the ‘Superman’ is identical with the ‘lords of the earth’ and the ‘blond beast’ whose barbaric morality we have just examined. Nietzsche plainly indicates that this type has repeatedly existed in isolation, seeking deliberately to make the rearing of it the focal point of the social will of the ruling class.

With this construction, Nietzsche foreshadowed in the most concrete fashion possible both Hitler’s fascism and the moral ideology of the ‘American age’. And likewise, the fact that barbarity and bestiality are the very essence of such ‘Supermen’ was plainly stated in The Will to Power: ‘Man is a brute and super-brute; the higher man is the monster and Superman: thus the two go together. Whenever man adds to his greatness and stature he also increases in lowness and fearsomeness. The one is not to be desired without the other — or rather, the more thoroughly you want the one, the more thoroughly you will achieve the other."
Lukacs (who has his faults)from Destruction of Reason linked to above

[gauchisme]

"Saying that socialism is 'slave morality' is a product of Nietzche's antisocial tendencies, and its refusal to take into account the collective, or any form of cooperative work."

first, nietzsche considered himself a follower of dionysus; in this affirmation of life, an individual loses themselves, lose that which separates them from their surroundings, and experience de-individualization (to use foucault's term). this is the collective dance (we might find a modern equivalent in raves), an important form of cooperative work.

second, 'antisocial tendencies' seems caught up in a psychiatric discourse that's quite individualistic/ego-centric, and represents the very type of mindset critiqued by a pair of nietzscheans i'm fond of - deleuze&guattari in their book 'anti-oedipus'.

third, when has radical socialism (i'm not referring to the canadian or scandanavian compromise with capitalism, or the socialistic tendencies inherent in america's so-called capitalism) ever empowered people? and if it has, how has it differed substantially from the political project nietzsche outlined?

[black magick hustla]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 05:04 am

second, 'antisocial tendencies' seems caught up in a psychiatric discourse that's quite individualistic/ego-centric, and represents the very type of mindset critiqued by a pair of nietzscheans i'm fond of - deleuze&guattari in their book 'anti-oedipus'.

third, when has radical socialism (i'm not referring to the canadian or scandanavian compromise with capitalism, or the socialistic tendencies inherent in america's so-called capitalism) ever empowered people? and if it has, how has it differed substantially from the political project nietzsche outlined?
The political project of nietzche was an anarchistic one, hence why he said in thus spoke zarathustra something similar to "where the state ends, the rainbow leading to the superman emerges".

I think though, that if anything, nietzche was much more akin to stirnerite, individualistic anarchism than the more traditional anarchism akin to the labor movement, hence emma goldman was wrong when calling nietzche her"ally"

I don't know if radical socialism has empowered people or not, this would be more of a question if you consider countries like cuba "owned by the people" or "real socialism" or not. However this is another debate, and it is somewhat irrelevant to the point i tried to make.

Wether socialism empowered people or not, it is irrelevant, but the motive behind it has always been to assert the will to power of a group of people. The communist and socialist movement has had a lot of people behind willing to tear down the walls of civilization, challenge moralism and instead, construct a society based on creativity and life.


Forgive me if you find me pointing out the inherent anti-social tendencies of nietzche egoistic. but noone that dislikes people in general can ever transcend in the way nietzche envisioned. trascending morality can only be a collective project, because otherwise you would be pulled back by the system and the people surrounding you. besides, we are social creatures, and people derive pleasure and strength from collective projects and from interacting with each other. hence, why I thought that the situationists' synthesis of individualism and collectivism was brilliant.

[gauchisme]

zarathustra says, "what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what *can be loved in man* is that he transcends and descends" (asterik-emphasis mine). he then goes on to proclaim his love for various people, including "i love him whose soul can be deeply wounded and who can be engulfted by a small experience". d&g allude to this when they write, anyone can be swept up in a process of becoming by anything at all, even the smallest of things. it's this idea which effectively eviscerates all residual prejudices in nietzsche's work, from sexism to racism to classism.

let's take another instance from twilight of the idols, which also includes his critique of socialism : 38 My conception of freedom. -- The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug - it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time. Liberalism: in plain words, reduction to the herd animal. . . . As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions produce quite different effects; they then in fact promote freedom mightily. Viewed more closely, it is war which produces these effects, war for liberal institutions which as war permits the illiberal instincts to endure. And war is a training in freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance which divides us. That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice men to one's cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mastery over the other instincts - for example, over the instinct for 'happiness'. The man who has become free - and how much more the mind that has become free - spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. - How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically when one understands by 'tyrants' pitiless and dreadful instincts, to combat which demands the maximum of authority and discipline towards oneself - finest type Julius Caesar - ; it is also true politically: one has only to look at history. The nations which were worth something, which became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger which made of them something deserving reverence, danger which first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our spirit - which compels us to be strong. . . . First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it. - Those great forcing-houses for strong human beings, for the strongest kind there has ever been, the aristocratic communities of the pattern of Rome and Venice, understood freedom in precisely the sense in which I understand the word 'freedom': as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers . . .

_

first note that as he's upfront with his politically incorrect stereotypes - "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats" - in the same sentence he leaves us a way to debunk them: "the man who has become free - and how much more *the mind* that has become free". it's the mind that's crucial, not the identity of the 'owner' of that mind (the classifications: christian, woman, etc.).

second we're confronted with the same criticism of leftism that's found in baudrillard; take this example from 'the spiraling cadaver' in simulacra and simulation : The university is in ruins: nonfuctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge. ... In a now uncertain institution, without knowledge content, without a power structure (except for an archaic feudalism that turns a simulacrum of a machine whose destiny escape it and whose survival is as artificial as that of barracks and theaters), offensive irruption is impossible. Only what precipitates rotting, by accentuating the parodic, simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power, has meaning.

A strike has the opposite effect. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university. ... [E]verywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the justice of the Left that reinjects an *idea* of justice, the necessity of logic and social morals into a rotten apparatus that is coming undone, which is losing all conscience of its legitimacy and renounces functioning almost of its own volition. It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it.

The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay siege to them one day: from private property to the small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university - everything that is disappearing, that the system itself, in its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved.

Whence the paradoxical but necessary inversion of all terms of political analysis.

Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that is it is *only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age*, it therefore has only to select[.] ... Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody; why this provocative politics, if not in order to crystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection, work, diplomas, etc.) on an already dead and rotting referential?

_

in nietzsche: "liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions."

in baudrillard: "the historical and revolutionary left sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay siege to them one day."

note the combination of marxism in the latter view: the system *would* self-destruct except that it keeps getting re-injected with the ideal of justice; this is then combined with nietzsche: only what precipitates rotting, by accentuating the parodic, simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power, has meaning. whence the sanctification of parasitism that klossowski reads in nietzsche, or if you prefer, "the paradoxical but necessary inversion of all terms of political analysis".

[gauchisme]

nietzsche was not an individualist; he couldn't have put it more clearly in the genealogy of morals: "just as popular superstition divorces the lightning from its brilliance, viewing the latter as any activity whose subject is the lightning, so does popular morality divorce strength from its manifestations, as though there were behind the strong a neutral agent free to manifest its strength of contain it. *but no such agent exists*; there is no 'being' behind the doing, acting, becoming; the 'doer' has simply been added to the deed by the imagination - the doing is everything."

nietzchean 'self-responsibility' is thus sacrificing oneself for this doing that is everything. or we might go back to the birth of tragedy:

"the subject - the striving individual bent on furthering his egoistic purposes - can be thought of only as an enemy of art, never as its source." and...

"dionysiac excitation is capable of communicating to a whole multitude this artistic power to feel itself surrounded by, and one with, a host of spirits. what happens in the dramatic chorus is the primary dramatic phenomenon: project oneself outside oneself and then acting as though one had really entered another body, another character... what we have here is the individual effacing himself through entering a strange being... a whole crowd becomes rapt in this manner... enchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art."

[Sacrificed]

It is utterly absurd that people should still be interpreting Nietzsche's Will to Power as a psychological concept a hundred and twenty years on. It is ontological in nature, meant to explain why Nietzsche so firmly rejects the dichotomy between 'appearance' and 'essence' (or 'representation' and 'will'). It has a psychological aspect, but only insofar as man is a creature within the order of appearances.

Nietzsche is and will continue to be the face of modern revolution. Whatever rivalry was imagined between he and Marx was won long ago, and a Nietzschean mood predominates almost everywhere today, much to my delight. And is today fascist? No, not at all. We today think in terms of power and not productivity, which is precisely how it should have been from the very start. Productivity is only one characteristic of power, and is not central to anything.

And again, Nietzsche was not an individualist. How could an entity constructed out of multiple Wills to Power (the Will to Power being Will to Multiplicity) 'exist' at all? "The ego of which one speaks when one censures egoism does not exist."

[peaccenicked]

In one word- gobbledygook - in two words -postmodern gobbledygook.

The psychological aspect of the ontological - rejects the dichotomy of appearance and the essential-

Here we have monumental brain death put forward as substantial human thought.

Nietzsche was aware of Hegel,He plainly set about to attack all that was rational in Hegel

and more so Marx. He becomes inscrutable in his wordplay because he plays with forms much like Plato. When comes to substance he is a brute. what he loves in man is superficial and elitist. Post-modernist irrationalists who dominate the modern philosophical world love him.

Here we have seen the destruction of thought in practice. The will to power, is nothing to do with Marx, it is basically a phony anarchist criticism which belies the temporary nature of the transitional State, saying power corrupts, points to the victory of counter revolutions in the last century, and immortalises them. Fundamentally, opposing revolution by making a completely irrationalist assumption that the workers State, which is that which defeats the capitalists, can disappear immediately as soon as its done that job.

Those who do not see this necessary evil, are kidding themselves on. What I do think
is that present day anarchists are erring on the side of Leninism, we only need to look at Indymedia for leadership in this direction. While Leninism has been bastardised out of all recognition.

[black magick hustla]

and more so Marx. He becomes inscrutable in his wordplay because he plays with forms much like Plato. When comes to substance he is a brute. what he loves in man is superficial and elitist. Post-modernist irrationalists who dominate the modern philosophical world love him.


nietzche is one of the most lucid philosophers of the german variety. His writing is very clear, contrary to what we can say of our friends Kant and Hegel.

[peaccenicked]

Well Kant and Hegel are difficult at times, but they have been cleaned up so to speak.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/cata...isbn=0521369088 (http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521369088)

and Hegel can be approached better if you go around him first. I would start here.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/...ks/ae/index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/index.htm)


As to Nietzsche, he has to be placed historically as a response to the height of philosophy.
In short, Kant, Marx, and Hegel. He represents a bourgeois anti-climax, in general where his is lucid he is crude or producing a metaphor, that never touches on any concrete truth, or philosophical discourse.

When he obscure and his largely obscurantist, he is replacing his own self celebration of
of bourgeois shallowness and brutality with the actual achievement of German philosophy.

[CornetJoyce]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 07:20 am

and more so Marx. He becomes inscrutable in his wordplay because he plays with forms much like Plato. When comes to substance he is a brute. what he loves in man is superficial and elitist. Post-modernist irrationalists who dominate the modern philosophical world love him.


nietzche is one of the most lucid philosophers of the german variety. His writing is very clear, contrary to what we can say of our friends Kant and Hegel.
Nietzche observed that Germans mistake opacity for profundity and that "there is too much beer in German philosophy." That is certainly true of Kant and Hegel, and to Marx when he's being "philosophical." All of this can indeed be placed historically: as someone said, "the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left met at Stalingrad."

[peaccenicked]

Nietzche observed that Germans mistake opacity for profundity and that "there is too much beer in German philosophy." That is certainly true of Kant and Hegel, and to Marx when he's being "philosophical."



Nietzche was indeed an idiot. What an idiotic observation. There is much profundity in German philosophy in general. It is an empty sneer . Yes there are obscure texts
and convolutions but there are many pearls of wisdom which helped to bring mankind out of the religious backwaters toward science.


" All of this can indeed be placed historically: as someone said, "the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left met at Stalingrad."

What is that supposed to mean? Talk about obscurantism.

[black magick hustla]

"the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left met at Stalingrad."

I think he meant that the hegelian right represented the germans and their philosophy while the hegelian lett was represented by the russian marxists, hence the clash in stalingrad.


Yes there are obscure texts
and convolutions but there are many pearls of wisdom which helped to bring mankind out of the religious backwaters toward science.


I don't think scientists in general cared about hegelian obscurantism or kantian ethics.

[peaccenicked]

The historical connection between Hegel and Hitler is baffling, it is like comparing Shakespeare to Pol Pot. It makes no sense. Stalin and Hegel are so irreconcilable,it is not worth going there. Dialectical materialism as conveyed by Stalin was a complete bastardisation of Marx's interpretation of Hegel, and Aristotle.

Marmot, the point is not about Kant, or Hegel's, or even Marx's direct influence on
science.

The feudal period was dominated by catholic dogma, and religious dogma in general.
Scientists were done for blasphemy. The Rennaisance and the Reformation constituted the first breaks from strict observence of Vatican protocols.
Religious philosophy had subsumed science. King and Queens who thought they had the divine right to rule subsumed science. I believe we are still struggling to breakout of the Dark Ages. Commodity fetishism restricts scientific development by keeping the majority of the people out of the discourse, and the political discourse too.
Kant, and Hegel represented shifts in the dominant protestant dogma toward secular studies. in other words they helped create the conditions for scientists to operate in a freer environment less accountable to religious authority.

Just look at the stick Darwin got.

The class struggle takes ideological forms, and Kant and Hegel represented the
new bourgeois order freeing itself from the shackles of religious dogma.

Kant turned athiesm into a neutral question, by proposing that the arguments could prove both cases. Gods existence and non existence. Nonsense but it was a political breakthrough. Hegels work was to seperate scientific method from god's domain. He integrated god as an historical entity. Nonsense but it set the tone for secular scientific study.

Marx's discovery of the dictatorsip of the proletariat, finally rooted politics scientifically in the lucid expression of opposing class interests.
He is tamed and and taught in sociology departments throughout the world. Yet the power of his analyses gives a root to science as a mass practice. The revolution will be confirmation of that.

[gauchisme]

Nietzsche and Science, by Gregory Moore & Thomas H. Brobjer, explores the German philosopher's response to the extraordinary cultural impact of the natural sciences in the late nineteenth century. It argues that the science of his day exerted a powerful influence on his thought and provided an important framework within which he articulated his ideas. The first part of the book investigates Nietzsche's knowledge and understanding of specific disciplines and the influence of particular scientists on Nietzsche's thought. The second part examines how Nietzsche actually incorporated various scientific ideas, concepts and theories into his philosophy, the ways in which he exploited his reading to frame his writings, and the relationship between his understanding of science and other key themes of his thought, such as art, rhetoric and the nature of philosophy itself.
_

Peaccenicked, tell me if the following makes sense to you...

The means to real peace.— No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We break the sword," and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a "gradual decrease of the military burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.

-- http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/was.htm --

that's a critique of xenophobic threat construction, an alternative of demilitarization, and a preemptive response to gradual reformism. written in 1879... if only the nazis would've been *more* influenced by nietzsche.

[Sacrificed]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 01:13 am




Nietzche was indeed an idiot. What an idiotic observation. There is much profundity in German philosophy in general. It is an empty sneer . Yes there are obscure texts
and convolutions but there are many pearls of wisdom which helped to bring mankind out of the religious backwaters toward science.


" All of this can indeed be placed historically: as someone said, "the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left met at Stalingrad."

What is that supposed to mean? Talk about obscurantism.

Nietzche was indeed an idiot.

Indeed, peacenik? I presume that you yourself are a master philologist and interpreter of classics?


What an idiotic observation. There is much profundity in German philosophy in general. It is an empty sneer . Yes there are obscure texts
and convolutions but there are many pearls of wisdom which helped to bring mankind out of the religious backwaters toward science.

To the contrary: the German idealists (including the journalist Marx, who, beneath the veneer of his 'materialism', was as much under the thrall of dialectical idealism as any of them) made of Man a religion; we have in them a new Heaven and a new Earth, revealed to Man through ('logical') revelation and which can be brought about only by (apocalyptic) revolution. None of this in any sense 'touches' the Earth at any point. Marx of Patmos was wrong.


What is that supposed to mean? Talk about obscurantism.

Giovanni was a Hegelian. Marx was a Hegelian. Both embraced totalizing philosophies of a spiritual nature masked by a crude worship of science as a 'process of revelation'.

[tolstoyevski]

eh, it has been quoted a thousand times that nietzsche cursed workers as slaves and socialists as provokers of these slaves. This is how he sees the world.

what is the progressive thing about that idiot?
you can embrace anybody no matter if he's an idealist, an enemy of workers and of socialists as long as he makes abstract statements, pseudo-opposing expressions, huh?

Nearly all the reactionary tendencies in the 20th century are influenced by Nietzsche; most of them collaborated with fascists, many of them supported USA in Vietnam war. And the rest drew upon his philosophy to attack the scientific and class base of our world view by building would-be contradictions.

He was at the opposite side of the barricade; if we want to discover his "virtues" we have to admit it first.

[Sacrificed]

Except Nietzsche clearly does not see the workers as 'no better than slaves', which you'd know if you actually bothered to read him:


"'The workers should learn to feel like soldiers: a fee, a salary but no payment. They should one day live like the bourgeoisie at present; but above them, distinguishing itself by its lack of needs, the higher caste, poorer and simpler, but in possession of the power."


"Only those individuals can emerge from this horrifying struggle for existence who are then immediately preoccupied with the fine illusions of artistic culture, so that they do not arrivate at that practical pessimism which nature abhors as truly unnatural. In the modern world which, compared with the Greek, usually creates nothing but freaks and centaurs, and in which the individual man is flamboyantly pieced together like the fantastic creature at the beginning of Horace's Ars Poetica, the craving of the struggle for existence and of the need for art often manifests itself in one and the same person: an unnatural combination which gave rise to the need to excuse and consecrate the first craving before the dictates of art. For that reason, people believe in the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of work'.
The Greeks have no need for conceptual hallucinations like this, they voice their opinion that work is a disgrace with shocking openness - and a more concealed, less frquently expressed wisdom, which was nevertheless alive everywhere, added that the human being was also a disgraceful and pathetic non-entity and 'shadow of a dream'.... Nowadays it is not the man in need of art, but the slave who determines general views: in which capacity he naturally has to label all his circumstances with deceptive names in order to be able to live. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of work, are the feeble products of a slavery that hides from itself."


"The impossible class. - Poor, happy and independent! - these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! - these things can also go together - and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition - I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations - the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer posess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbor, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived - until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? - In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: 'better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!' This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption. Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be all the better for it! Only in distant lands and in the undertakings of swarming trains of colonists will it really become clear how much reason and fairness, how much healthy mistrust, mother Europe has embodied in her sons - sons who could no longer endure it with the dull old woman and were in danger of becoming as querulous, as irritable and pleasure-seeking as she herself was."


What is Nietzsche's fundamental grievance with socialism? Precisely this, from Human, All-Too-Human 473:


"Socialism in respect to its means. Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism, whose heir it wants to be. Thus its efforts are reactionary in the deepest sense. For it desires a wealth of executive power, as only despotism had it; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, and which it intends to improve into an expedient organ of the community. Socialism crops up in the vicinity of all excessive displays of power because of its relation to it, like the typical old socialist Plato, at the court of the Sicilian tyrant; it desires (and in certain circumstances furthers) the Caesarean power state of this century, because, as we said, it would like to be its heir. But even this inheritance would not suffice for its purposes; it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed. And since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work to eliminate piety (because it works on the elimination of all existing states), it can only hope to exist here and there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word "justice" like a nail into the heads of the semieducated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semieducation), and to give them a good conscience for the evil game that they are supposed to play. Socialism can serve as a rather brutal and forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulation of state power, and to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its rough voice chimes in with the battle cry "As much state as possible," it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: "As little state as possible."

Nietzsche is not an anarchist, but is quite close to such a position - again, he is not, at all, a political thinker. His aesthetic mode of existence, the Dionysian state, contains within itself a communal form of living centered around gift-giving and free associations of power; it is very much a sort of potlach. Nietzsche takes no issue with a communalistic economy; he does have a very serious grievance against communalism which uses the apparatus of state power to secure such a state. Hence he is anti-Marxist -- and in your confusion you have labelled this a reactionary position. Poor, reactionary Lucaks felt the same.

And again: how many tyrannical, reactionary regimes were Marxist? And Marxist they were; not 'degenerated worker's states'. Such is the price of philosophical and religious idealism.

Nietzsche detested capitalism as a means by which man is demeaned, in several meanings of the term. He loathed socialism as a means to the establishment of the dictatorship. He despised liberalism for projecting an image of universalized Man in the figure of a middle-class know-nothing and for granting to him 'rights' which do not exist except on paper. He abhorred the proto-fascism of his day for numerous reasons, and outright rejected nationalism. And although he called anarchists "dogs", he shares more affinities with them than with any other political movement, although, again, to call him an anarchist is to posthumously subscribe to him a political view he never held.

Nietzsche's use to the revolutionary is manifold; he is, all things considered, the single most useful philosopher ever to have written. His cultural critiques segue nicely into a method of analyzing the very construction of reality itself under the dominion of various forces. This method can be applied by anyone, from across the spectrum; therein lies its utility.

His one real political statement, in fact, is almost pacifistic:


“And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, ‘we break the sword,’ and will smash its military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best armed, out of a height of feeling — that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.”

However, it must be said that Nietzsche's method is a philosophy unto itself, and is quite correctly the apotheosis of radical thought. It will become necessary for the left in the near and new future to do away with those who want to see Saint Marx placed upon a cross (surrounded, no doubt, by his disciples, from Engels the Beloved to Josef Iscariot) and to institute a regular Nietzscheanizing of the left. Not productivity but power will be the spigot about which the wheel of political discourse turns, with productivity being but one axis on this wheel.

[tolstoyevski]

yes yes, since he has no consistent theory, and no idea about what the economy is (which, in Marxism, means the material conditions that shapes our ideas) you can make random quotations from him; this can be idealist and that can be materialist. but it is already what we call reactionism in Nietzsche. And I can also make many quotations from him (though you think I never bothered to read him), which shows him as a pure idealist, as an inconsistent atheist and as a consistent bourgeis philosopher. But in the last analysis, Nietzsche was an idealist philosopher who thinks metaphysically and therefore saw the State not as a class based institution but as the reflection of an abstract idea of power.

It is the easiest way to show the USSR as the proof of his abstract ideas on socialism, without touching the revisionism and bureaucracy inside the USSR. Marxist economy politics is the only reasonable way of analysing the proccess in USSR not abstract philosophical empty words. You admit that Nietzsche has nothing to do with politics, economy and still depend on his "analyses" on socialism (if he has any idea what the Marxist socialism is, of course) which are extremely abstract and non-scientific. Maybe they have a literary value, however I am not that sure.

You say that he was close to anarchism. Well, do I have to repeat Engels' words on anarchism which saw it as the reflection and companion of petit-bourgeoisie way of thinking: "As little state as possible." Yes, this is what the neoliberals say nowadays in my country.

In fact Nietzsche's loaths against dictatorships were most useful for USA, which used the same argument for all socialist states. All states are dictatorships, and yes Marxists fight to build a proletarian dictatorship.

Calling Marx as saint-marx is such an irony that you have no "idea" about idealism. The only thinker who was able to build a consistent materialism is accused for being an idealist by means of an inconsistent idealist philosopher who has nothing but nonscientific philosophical fragments...

[Sacrificed]

yes yes, since he has no consistent theory, and no idea about what the economy is

Neither did Marx.


(which, in Marxism, means the material conditions that shapes our ideas)

Which is demonstratably wrong.


you can make random quotations from him; this can be idealist and that can be materialist.

How can making "random quotations" be either? I didn't realize that making "random quotations" presupposed a philosophical position.

For the record, I am neither an idealist nor a materialist. Recent forrays into the subatomic realm have rendered mechanistic theory obsolete.


but it is already what we call reactionism in Nietzsche.

Yes, just as the Christians call historical analysis of the Bible "heretical". In neither case is it a cause for alarm in the individual propounding the methodology.


And I can also make many quotations from him (though you think I never bothered to read him)

Which you haven't, or you'd not be touting the Marxist line in regards to Nietzsche.


which shows him as a pure idealist

To the contrary:


There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its objects purely and nakedly as "the thing in itself," without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involved a contradictio in adjecto, (contradiction between the noun and the adjective) I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!

Nietzsche is univocal in his utter rejection of both philosophical and 'pragmatic', 'utopian', or 'common-sensical' idealism. Neither hold any philosophic weight and are all-too-often attached to each other as magnets to a rod of steel.


as an inconsistent atheist and as a consistent bourgeis philosopher.

Strange that Marxists demand ideological purity in their erstwhile opponents while acknowledging the reality of class war. Ad hominem of the most useless sort.


But in the last analysis, Nietzsche was an idealist philosopher who thinks metaphysically and therefore saw the State not as a class based institution but as the reflection of an abstract idea of power.

Have you ever considered giving reality a shot? It's certainly much nicer than one might care to think.

Power is real. It is malleable. It exists:

* In institutional apparatuses of the State

* In coercive media outlets which use their monopoly of 'reality' to formulate images and soundbytes without any connection whatsoever to anything in Heaven, or in the Earth beneath, or in the waters under the Earth.

* In social relationships

* In the workplace - in this instance as productivity.


It is the easiest way to show the USSR as the proof of his abstract ideas on socialism, without touching the revisionism and bureaucracy inside the USSR.

Wow! So a monolithic entity made itself slightly less monolithic for Western television sets! Frabjabulous joy, we're saved!


Marxist economy politics is the only reasonable way of analysing the proccess in USSR not abstract philosophical empty words.

Newsflash: concepts such as:

* the dialectical process

* historical 'character'

* the ever-elusive and effervescent 'class consciousness'

Are as abstrct as any idea in Kant.


You admit that Nietzsche has nothing to do with politics, economy and still depend on his "analyses" on socialism (if he has any idea what the Marxist socialism is, of course)

Certainly not. At the time Nietzsche wrote, Marxism was still one ideological strain amongst many. It had not yet had the time to turn cancerous and devour all the rest.


which are extremely abstract and non-scientific.

Much like "scientific socialism".


Maybe they have a literary value, however I am not that sure.

Of course you're not. I understand, comrade.


You say that he was close to anarchism. Well, do I have to repeat Engels' words on anarchism which saw it as the reflection and companion of petit-bourgeoisie way of thinking: "As little state as possible." Yes, this is what the neoliberals say nowadays in my country.

I don't particularly care what a third-rate disciple of a second-rate thinker had to say on the subject. Marx and Engels were dogmaticians, more interested in "ideological purity" than in actually accomplishing anything which might be said to advance the goals of The Cause™. Those of us who aren't quite so repressed take great joy in appropriating that which is traditionally taboo.


In fact Nietzsche's loaths against dictatorships were most useful for USA, which used the same argument for all socialist states. All states are dictatorships, and yes Marxists fight to build a proletarian dictatorship.

Which is precisely why, in the event of a predominantly Marxist revolution, I'd not have the slightest qualms in engaging in counter-revolutionary activity, even at the risk of death. Never again can a Marxist society be permitted to exist.


Calling Marx as saint-marx is such an irony that you have no "idea" about idealism.

It's meant to be ironic. He dismissed Max Stirner in precisely the same fashion in one of his other books you might like to think you've read.


The only thinker who was able to build a consistent materialism

And materialism is an erroneous philosophical view.


is accused for being an idealist

Which he is. Protip: whenever a philosopher begins to discuss the "unity of opposites", run away. He'll likely begin to speak in tongues of fire before you know it.

*snip*

[tolstoyevski]

yes yes, since he has no consistent theory, and no idea about what the economy is


Neither did Marx.

are we discussing under the opposing ideologies title? well, in fact i'm glad to make you show all your secretions and ignorance on marx. Your words talk for themselves.



(which, in Marxism, means the material conditions that shapes our ideas)


Which is demonstratably wrong.

no, I bet you are praying to your poststructural saints everynight for it; but it is the reality of life which is demonstrably right. Even your way of thinking has a material base. I don't understand that, you clearly admit that you're an idealist but when somebody calls you as an idealist you get mad!


How can making "random quotations" be either? I didn't realize that making "random quotations" presupposed a philosophical position.

Let me tell you, by talking about making random quotations from Nietzsche, I wanted to suggest his fragmentary and inconsistent philosophy. In Nietzsche, there are pages full of idealist bullshit, of a vain search for god, of open hostility towards workers and socialists, and statements on the unchangeable essence of the word. So what are going to do with them? This is what makes him a reactionary philosopher.


For the record, I am neither an idealist nor a materialist. Recent forrays into the subatomic realm have rendered mechanistic theory obsolete.

This is what makes you an idealist. Will you reject the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, do the recent subatomic experiments tell something about that? I invite you to the real world, even you are at the opposite site of our struggle.

Oh I didn't expect to find somebody who defends the third way between materialism and idealism anymore, but as long as the capitalism and petit-bourgeois exits, there will be these kind of nonsenses. Well, you don't determine if you are an idealist or a materialist. Your way of thinking shows it clearly.


Yes, just as the Christians call historical analysis of the Bible "heretical". In neither case is it a cause for alarm in the individual propounding the methodology.

you are rolling in an idealist mud bath and accusing me for being just as the Christians. These are ready-made attacks of the secular idealists.



as an inconsistent atheist and as a consistent bourgeis philosopher.


Strange that Marxists demand ideological purity in their erstwhile opponents while acknowledging the reality of class war. Ad hominem of the most useless sort.

what is ad hominem here? aren't we talking about Nietzsche, or somebody else? Yes, he was an inconsistent atheist who couldn't reject the Idea with big "I" totally because of his way of thinking.


Have you ever considered giving reality a shot? It's certainly much nicer than one might care to think.

Power is real. It is malleable. It exists:

The power, in the Nietzschean and Foucauldian sense of the word, does not exist. It is the power of a class, it is not an abstract thing, not a classless, indepentent entity independent from material conditions. And it can't be criticised by using another abstractions away from the time and place.

It can and must be used by working class upon bourgeoisie.



Wow! So a monolithic entity made itself slightly less monolithic for Western television sets! Frabjabulous joy, we're saved!

It made no sense. Yes the USSR was not a monolithic entity and cannot be criticised for being so. But, anyway, I know you idealists are wholesalers and I am sure that you see the evil, horrible Power in the Soviet State which must be crushed.


* the dialectical process

* historical 'character'

* the ever-elusive and effervescent 'class consciousness'

Are as abstrct as any idea in Kant.

none of them is abstract; cleary, concretely defined in Marxist classics.




which are extremely abstract and non-scientific.


Much like "scientific socialism".

In fact not: socialists had a socialism experiment and a state which used science to construct itself and therefore can be analysed by science. But I am glad that you admit the abstractness of Nietzsche's thoughts.


I don't particularly care what a third-rate disciple of a second-rate thinker had to say on the subject. Marx and Engels were dogmaticians, more interested in "ideological purity" than in actually accomplishing anything which might be said to advance the goals of The Cause™. Those of us who aren't quite so repressed take great joy in appropriating that which is traditionally taboo.


Yep, you ignored the idealism-materialism basis for the philosophy and now you think you can ignore the ties of anarchism with the petit-bourgeois way of thinking.. In fact I see some nonsense attacks in you threats and it makes me believe that your ignorance makes you such courageous.

It underlines the fact that your ideology has no place in the peoples' struggle going on all over the world. And it's open that you defend a very well known type of idealism which began its work by accusing materialists as dogmaticians.



Which is precisely why, in the event of a predominantly Marxist revolution, I'd not have the slightest qualms in engaging in counter-revolutionary activity, even at the risk of death. Never again can a Marxist society be permitted to exist.

Well, this is what I was implying when I said:

Nearly all the reactionary tendencies in the 20th century are influenced by Nietzsche; most of them collaborated with fascists, many of them supported USA in Vietnam war. And the rest drew upon his philosophy to attack the scientific and class base of our world view by building would-be contradictions.

Why do you get offended when I call you reactionary while you're ready to collaborate with fascists and bourgeoisie?
We will be in front of you and I will be glad to shoot you in a revolutionary rebellion.

Since you openly declared your counter-revolutionary point of view, I see no use communicating with you.

[Raúl Duke]

And materialism is an erroneous philosophical view.

You mean materialism or oxymoronic "dialectical materialism"?

[AGITprop]

honestly i dont know anything about nietsche but i person i know relates him very closely to having alot of thoughts which helped for fascism. i dont know. can anyone tell me otherwise?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Ender, we have actually covered this several times here.

It was his sister who edited his writings so that they looked like they supported a Nazi view of the world, when Nietzsche himself would have probably been an anti-fascist.

Check this out:

http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic...st&p=1292291187 (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=63760&view=findpost&p=1292291187)

[tolstoyevski]

yes he would be a perfect anti-fascist with his philosophy rejected by all Marxists during the revolutionary era between 1900-1950 and referenced by nearly all fascist movements, including Mussolini in the Italy, Nazis in the Germany, in the Romania [see the relation between Cioran and Garde de Fier]..

with the rise of revisionism and the retreat from class based world view, he is the new prophet of "anti"s..

touching..

[black magick hustla]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 02:57 pm
yes he would be a perfect anti-fascist with his philosophy rejected by all Marxists during the revolutionary era between 1900-1950 and referenced by nearly all fascist movements, including Mussolini in the Italy, Nazis in the Germany, in the Romania [see the relation between Cioran and Garde de Fier]..

with the rise of revisionism and the retreat from class based world view, he is the new prophet of "anti"s..

touching..
Nietzche was embraced by some leftists way before it was mainstream in the right.

You can argue nietzche was a reactionary, but you can't argue he was a fascist. Only people who have truly not read him will ever argue that.

A man that states that "the rainbow of the superman starts where the state ends" can't ever be a fascist.

[Rank]

He was a philosopher, plain and simple.

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

That's why we can tie him in with many of the more "modern" beliefs.

[Paris '68]

When Nietchze talked about the Ubermensch he was reffering to the self-overcoming artist--one who creates a life out of his passions,

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Tolstoyevski, Nietzsche was in fact popular among the Bolsheviks, and others on the left, as Jim Far's post shows:


Perhaps, we should start a discussion of Nietzsche's influence on Marxists. While, Nietzsche, himself, was a kind of political reactionary, he has, nevertheless, long had many fans on the radical left. And that is something that goes back a long way. As early as the 1890s, there were already discussion underway in the German SPD over Nietzsche and how his philosophy could be used to support socialism. However, it was in Russia where Nietzsche's influence among Marxists first began to really take off.

In Russia during the Silver Age that followed the failed revolution of 1905, Nietzschean thought became pervasive among Russian intellectuals and artists and this had an effect on Russian Marxism. Within the Bolsheviks, the "god-building" faction centering around Anatoli Lunacharsky and novelist, Maxim Gorky was very much taken with Nietzche's romantic individualism and his "amoralism" and they sought to reconcile these with Marxism. Whereas, Nietzsche had seen his ideal of the Overman as being reserved for the elite few, Lunacharsky as an egalitarian argued that under communism, this ideal would be realizable by the many. Lunacharsky, rightly or wrongly believed that there was common ground between Marx's critique of bourgeois morality and Nietzsche's "amoralism." Lunacharsky also became convinced that one of the reasons for the failure of the 1905 revolution was that Marxism came across to workers as being overly cerebral and lacking in emotional appeal. Lunacharsky proposed to remedy this by creating a new non-theistic religion which
would increase the appeal of Marxism to working people.

All this was a part of a general attempt by a portion of the Bolsheviks to rethink Marxism in the wake of failure of 1905. Lunacharsky had been closely allied with Alexander Bogdanov, who attempted to reinterpret Marxism in the light of the empiriocriticism of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. Both Lunacharsky and Bogdanov challenged the 'orthodox' Marxism that was being promoted by Plekhanov and Kautsky. However, as it so happened, Lenin was not at all taken with these attempts to rethink Marxism, and despite his past political opposition to Plekhanov, he came down on his side in the dispute over Marxist philosophy, especially in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Bogdanov was eventually expelled from the Bolsheviks while Lunacharsky stayed on, eventually becoming the first Soviet commissar of education after the October Revolution. But in the meantime, he dropped the attempt to create a new Marxist-based religion.

And of course there have been many other Marxists who have been influenced by Nietzsche too. The philosopher, Georg Lukacs, was one famous example, as were the members of the Frankfurt School, like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. And there are people like Sartre too.

http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic...st&p=1292128330 (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=53116&view=findpost&p=1292128330)

[tolstoyevski]

Yes Rosa, of course, that's why lenin said:


In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semi-defeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other -- just like our Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries.

The quotation that you made clearly shows that with their Nietzsche influences, some "Bolsheviks" started to preach idealism, "non theistic religion", individualism, just after the 1905 defeat...

Lukacs condenms Nietzsche in his "destruction of reason" not as a pre-fascist but as a bourgeois thinker who reflects the characteristics of imperialist age. And he warns us; there's no innocent philosophy.

Well, I think twice if I will say something about the progressive character of Horkheimer or Adorno. It is hard to call them as Marxists. They are bourgeois philosophers who have Marxist influences. No need to mention about their immigration to USA and coming back to West Germany under the protection of an American General as cold war ideologic propaganda instruments; Adorno's open support to the Vietnam war and Horkheimer's (the first and only person in the world who has both American and W. German passport for a while) reactionary attitude towards 1968 events.

Their Nietzsche influence, therefore, makes his reactionary philosophy more significant...

With Marxists and leftists, I don't mean the revisionist, non-communist left.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I absolutely agree, that is why I am against all philosophy, not just the stuff one finds in Nietzsche.

But, the same can be said of dialectics, and with equally good if not better reason.

Lenin only turned to it after 1905. Trotsky only after 1929. Mao only after 1927. Engels only after 1867-68. Stalin only after 1926.

Moreover, it originated in what many take to be the founding philosophy of Nazism: Hegelianism.

Now, I do not believe the latter of dialectics, but then I do not of Nietzche's work either. [I also happen to like his anti-metaphysical stance, even though he bottled it in the end.]

But I do believe the former; they both act as a form of consolation for defeat, among other things.


Their Nietzsche influence, therefore, makes his reactionary philosophy more significant...

Same with Hegel, only more so.

[tolstoyevski]

yes, I partly agree with you...

Hegel's worshipping of the state and his idealism was one of the influences of Nazi idealism. But fascist ideology has one of the most metaphysic idealist background of all. That attitude keeps them far away from dialectics; the simple separation between left and right hegelians...

And it would be metaphysical and a kind of wholesaling to condemn the dialectic method as reactionary. As Marx says, there are two kinds of dialectics and the materialistic version is just the opposite of Hegelian dialectics.

[cappin]

I'd say Nietzsche was anarchist all the way. His advice was to do what you will and not let anything else tell you how, including any form of government.

"The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task."

"Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, political parties, nations, and eras it's the rule."

"Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires."

"On its political sickbed, a people usually regenerates itself and finds its spirit again, which had been lost gradually in the seeking and claiming of power. Culture owes its highest achievements to politically weakened times."

"The same new conditions under which ... a leveling and mediocritizing of man will take place [i.e. democratization] -- a useful, industrious, variously serviceable, and clever gregarious man -- are in the highest degree suitable to give rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities.

"The collective impression of such future Europeans will probably be that of numerous, talkative, weak-willed, and very handy workmen who require a master, a commander, as they require their daily bread; while, therefore, the democratizing of Europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term: the strong man will necessarily in individual and exceptional cases, become stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before -- owing to his unprejudiced schooling, owing to the immense variety of practice, art, and disguise. I meant to say that the democratizing of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants."

Well now, here he seems to be praising democracy for the equal opportunity it brings in bearing forth the rare ubermensch.

"The interests of tutelary government and the interests of religion go together hand in hand, so that if the latter begins to die out, the foundation of the state will also be shaken. The belief in a divine order of political affairs, in a mysterium in the existence of the state, has a religious origin; if religion disappears, the state will inevitably lose its old veil of Isis and no longer awaken awe. The sovereignty of the people, seen closely, serves to scare off even the last trace of magic and superstition contained in these feelings; modern democracy is the historical form of the decline of the state."

"There is an instinct for rank, which more than anything else is already the sign of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence which leads one to infer noble origin and habits."

Very anti-commie.

"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."