The Nietzsche Channel

[Kronos]

http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/human8.htm

Let's talk about The Moustache. All of you love him, so don't hesitate to quote pieces of his aphorisms for discussion. You pick em, I'll sort them out for you. For the capitalists, I will prove that Fritz finds you despicable. For the miserable little communist worms, I'll prove that Fritz loves you dearly. Say I can't do it. I dare you.

[Holden Caulfield]

i love nietzsche and love the bit he wrote which goes roughly (coz i cant be arsed to type it out fuly):

the man of knowlege must not only love his enemies, but also hate his friends,
and goes on about pupils pulling at their teachers laurels

nietzsche is a god to me, and would be one of three people i would resurect if possible (the others being malcom x, and trotsky)

[Bud Struggle]

It's obvious that Nietzsche's mustache:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Friedrich_Nietzsche_drawn_by_Hans_Olde.jpg/450px-Friedrich_Nietzsche_drawn_by_Hans_Olde.jpg

kicks Stalin's mustache's butt.

http://www.hyperhistory.org/images/assets/stories/stalin.jpg

[Kronos]

Yeah well Fritz and Joseph can't really be compared evenly. Fritz could write and think circles around Joseph, but Joseph was a bad motherfucker in his early days. Read about him. The guy was a hard-core revolutionary. He was about doing, not writing books. He was a brawler (brave little fucker as a kid), a vandal, burns down a factory, goes to prison, organizes and leads a gang in prison, escapes, robs banks and kidnaps people, on and on his rap sheet goes. Fritz didn't do anything but wander around Europe on pension money. Whooptee fuckin doo. But what else could he do? He was terribly sick most of his adult life. Struggling with that sickness alone is enough to make you a formidable person. Fritz suffered very badly....and still he plodded along....full of spirit. Now if we could create a genetic hybrid clone from each one's DNA.....jesus.....talk about an ubermensch. We would call him "Stalietzsche".

[Kronos]

the man of knowlege must not only love his enemies, but also hate his friends,
and goes on about pupils pulling at their teachers laurels

Yes. Excellent. A formula for self-improvement and a mutual respect for those who improve themselves, if even at one's own expense. Without an enemy, there is nothing to overcome. The "friend" presents no challenge and is often to lenient- they accept you for who you are, but what are you unless you are becoming better? When you hate your friends, you are really hating the fact that they do not expect more from you, that they settle for what you are. A friend who offers no alliance in conspiring together for more power, and who has no capacity to be an enemy, is backward and regressive. We see the same principle in the quote- "the more we are apart, the more we belong together", and similarly "it is not that you lied to me, but that I believed you, that has shaken me."

The pupil/teacher relation is along the same theme. The teacher should be overcome by the pupil, or else there is no progress. Often the vanity of the teacher can be exposed when one finds out that he never wanted to develop the pupil for the pupil's sake, but only so he could make himself useful as a teacher- the teacher doesn't want to be overcome, because in that sense he can't be a teacher anymore.

Fritz hits every angle of self-development perfectly. He produces a perfect instruction for gaining power for oneself, and leaves out no horrible detail...the hard truths that one must accept before one can become an honest friend or enemy to anyone.

He once said something like "one has to be overflowing with goodness to honestly give anything to anyone." This means that your charity, your sense of being a good neighbor, cannot be at the expense of your own advantage. One must be so good, so powerful, that lending a hand, or loving, or doing a favor, is no disadvantage to yourself. You have a surplus of power such that there is no self sacrifice in providing a good gesture, or aid, to someone else. Don't help anyone because you merely "want to", for this can compromise your own success. Rather, help someone because "you can", because regardless of your wanting or not wanting to...you have so much power that you can extend it without any loss.

[Sky]

Nietzsche is a representative of irrationalism and voluntarism. His conservative, romantic ideas and his voluntarism predetermined his development toward irrationalism. His philosophy combines heterogenous, often conflicting motifs into a whole that is often difficult to unravel.

Nietzsche's anarchistic criticism of modern bourgeois reality and culture is expressed in a universal despair in life, a despair recognized by him as a manifestation of nihilism. In his myth of the overman, he presents the cult of a strong personality who overcomes the bourgeois world individualistically, operates beyond all moral norms, and is extremely cruel. But this cult of the overman is combined with the romantic idea of the “man of the future” who has left behind the contemporary world with its sins and falseness.

Nietzsche attacked democratic ideology for reinforcing the herd instinct and he preached atheistic immoralism. Nietzche’s world view approached the fin-de-siecle mood of decadence (neo-romanticism, etc.)

Altthough contradictory and defying the unity of a system, Nietzsche’s philosophy influenced various trends in 20th century bourgeois thought, including pragmatism and existentialism, each of which has its own interpretation of his thought. His work, which was basically a revelation of self and an affirmation of the tendencies of bourgeois culture in the epoch of imperialism, was a prototype of reactionary tendencies in 20 century philosophy, politics, and morals. Beginning with Mehring and Plekhanov, Marxists have consistently criticized the ideas of Nietzsche.

[Kronos]

Nietzsche is a representative of irrationalism and voluntarism.Wanting to be "right" is a manifestation of the will to live, or more precisely, the will to power, since in man we have seen instances of the purposeful sacrifice of one's own life to uphold a principle (Socrates acceptance of death). So by the sheer fact that there is even a desire to know, to understand, to grasp the world, implies that before there is "truth", there is a perspective in search of it. The first appearance of the will, what proves it exists, is the persistence of the intellect to "find out" the world. Not yet does anyone know what is "true", but one knows they want to consider that there is something true.

In man, the will moves beyond the will to live and becomes a will to persist in possessing the truth, or perish- "power", then, in man, is a symbiosis of physical strength and intellectual understanding. Man can believe something so strongly that he willingly sacrifices his own life if he cannot attain the reality of that belief. Here is the origin of the "virtue", and in man there is the perfect abomination of animal nature. With the intellect, man transcends the brute will to live and redefines "power" to be a marriage between the body and the mind. For how else can we explain the cancellation of a will to live in the martyr, the suicide, the sacrifice of one's life to "keep one's principles"?

Man is not only "blind will", as Schopenhauer called it, but calculated, cautious, "apollonian" as opposed to the dionysian recklessness and service to the drives and desires. I use the archetypes because Nietzsche refers to them often, unfortunately. Much of the same content can be explained without using mythology.

Voluntarism, the singularity of the will, precedes all else. The intellect is a tool of the will, and what is found to be rational is what quenches the desire to be right. The intellect is only a very recent development in man. He persisted millions of years without the capacity for rationality, as rationality is only possible in the logos, in language, in symbolic logic, in epistemology. The will to live, however, has always been present in all organisms, despite the intellectual abilities.

But to ask "what of the rationality of the will" is to ask of its purpose. There is no purpose of the will, except to expand its power, overcome obstacles, resistance, to grow, to survive, etc. It is an organic function and does not surface in the intellect. Cellular growth in an organ is an example- there is no thinking here, no rationality.

Some relevant quotes (open the Will To Power page, there):

http://www.pitt.edu/~wbcurry/nietzsche.html (http://www.pitt.edu/%7Ewbcurry/nietzsche.html)


His philosophy combines heterogenous, often conflicting motifs into a whole that is often difficult to unravel. I completely agree. I recall seeing in one of his letters the quote "if the workers ever gain control of the state, we are finished. But if they don't, we are really finished."

"Ah", I said to myself. He finally came around.


Nietzsche's anarchistic criticism of modern bourgeois reality and culture is expressed in a universal despair in life, a despair recognized by him as a manifestation of nihilism.I don't think so. There is no nihilism in Nietzsche, if one understands that there is no "other world", no redemption from this world, and that in order to rectify this fact, man must make this world radically progressive.

Shit, coffee shop is closing. I gotta go dammit. We'll pick it up later.....

[Kronos]

Nietzsche's anarchistic criticism of modern bourgeois reality and culture is expressed in a universal despair in life, a despair recognized by him as a manifestation of nihilism. In his myth of the overman, he presents the cult of a strong personality who overcomes the bourgeois world individualistically, operates beyond all moral norms, and is extremely cruel. But this cult of the overman is combined with the romantic idea of the “man of the future” who has left behind the contemporary world with its sins and falseness.


The "anarchistic criticism" of "modern bourgeois reality" is both a contradiction and a revelation, though it takes a philosopher, here and now, after having watched the development of bourgeois society, to make this assessment.

Nietzsche expressed conflicting views which must be sorted out. He had a romantic fascination with the greek state, thought that the greatest accomplishment of the state was in the creation of the military genius, and the artistic culture. At his time, industrialized society was generating bourgeois culture, which in its first inception, was the direction which Nietzsche felt was appropriate- the capitalist bourgeois would represent this caricature of the elite, artistic culture. The bourgeois was the higher man who subordinated the slave worker for his own use. We have a modern Greece. At this time also there was a very distinct and recognizable difference between the class intellect- the higher classes consisted of the profound intelligentsia. Greater privileges for education produced the gentiles, scholars, artists, poets, what have you, while the lower classes lived a simple, meager life, fit with "their own physiologies, habits, desires, customs" as Nietzsche says. So far so good- Nietzsche was witnessing the evolution of his ideal. The call for anarchism was stunted here. A master culture was producing itself, politics was no longer for "the rabble", democracy was not the end of bourgeois society, but rather means to bourgeois society. It was fascism proper....the Machiavellian way...politics of deceit and the power to subdue the slave morality for its use.

(I explained elsewhere in the religion forum how Nietzsche has a conflicting concept of the type of man who "invented" religion through resentment toward the stronger, and his mistake in calling the "weak" slave morality that which was practiced by the lower classes. He had it completely backward- the "weak" were the ruling classes, while the master class was the brute worker/soldier caste. It was not the working class, the master class, that invented religion to resent the ruling classes. It was the ruling class that was unfit for work, for battle, for roaming and conquest, for pioneering and venturing, that rooted itself and established the empire by "calming" and subordinating the brute tribes and syndicates. Coaxing the renegades into becoming citizens, into following law, order, and custom rather than acting on impulse. For this, a creed was needed...and for this...a God was needed, an "a prior" source of truth...something which could convince the master soldier/worker class to "stay put" and build God's empire here on earth. Indeed, the weakling ruling class domesticated the master type so that it, itself, would not perish. From the nomadic tribes to the first agrarian culture was this leap.)

What Nietzsche did not live long enough to experience was the degradation of bourgeois society as a result of its lack of cultural refinement. The bourgeois became a clumsy, stagnant, lazy, contented fossil, as a result of the ease and effortlessness of its lifestyle. No longer did bourgeois culture struggle to become, it no longer suffered resistance, it was comfortable. Its gestation was complete, while in Nietzsche's life it was evolving, becoming, merging out of the rabble.

It is my contention that Nietzsche's formula for greatness must now be applied to the revolutionary type, as a reversal and re-administration of the original ideals. Combined with the importance of struggle, suffering, the ascetic principle and stoic virture, though not expressed as that "oriental nihilism" which Nietzsche saw in the east through its asceticism, but as the primitive strength in resolve, the mastery of military strategy with minimal resources, the wanting of war, the cheerful attitude at the thought of enduring fatalism or even failure, amor fati....loving one's fate, "carrying oneself with style" as an expression of the metaphor and art of being a soldier, and finally the fascist secrecy of the revolutionary guerrilla, the "underground rebel", the new military genius, the hierarchical ranks of the vanguard- the perfect war machine .....all these formulas belong now to the revolutionary, not the bourgeois. The bourgeois is an utter embarrassment, a "fat satisfied face", as Sartre called it.

No, Nietzsche would not raise a finger at bourgeois society today. He would demand that the proletariat become the master, to "kick what is already falling", as he put it, and this is bourgeois society. Fritz would have fallen out of his chair had he lived to witness men like Mao, Stalin, Guevara and Castro. These men are the modern Napoleons, the modern Caesars.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Nietzsche can eat my ass...

[Kronos]

"Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't."

[Kronos]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABZcO3Fq64E

[Kropotesta]

i love nietzsche and love the bit he wrote which goes roughly (coz i cant be arsed to type it out fuly):

the man of knowlege must not only love his enemies, but also hate his friends,
and goes on about pupils pulling at their teachers laurels

nietzsche is a god to me, and would be one of three people i would resurect if possible (the others being malcom x, and trotsky)
You'd resurect a crazed fool, religious nationalist black separatiist and the man responsible for the massarce at Kronstadt. Good on you.