Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Is Nietzsche Lame?

 I have never read any Nietzsche in his own words. There's no reason to think I'm missing out. This never happens: "Oh that's an interesting idea. Where did they get it? Nietzsche, huh?" Worse, even if they did get it from Nietzsche, it's not like he expands the idea in his own words. There's no point going to the original waterhole for more water. For contrast, you can say Plato really loves the sound of himself, but at least he doesn't drop an idea the instant he touches it. If you have to be either too long or too short, be too long.

 What is true, non-obvious, novel, and in Nietzsche? Slave morality. Okay...yes. And....?

 Nietzsche was not a philosopher. He was a prose stylist, like Shakespeare (who wasn't a storyteller). The 'god is dead' passage is highly evocative. It is not highly intellectual. 

 As a scholar, you don't get any points for being less lame. Certainly, of modern-age popular scholars, Nietzsche was at worst third least lame. I guess you do get points for not being wrong. 

 However, a true scholar either says something nobody has thought of before, or explains an old thing well so that new readers can grasp it easy. Nietzsche conspicuously avoids both. N lacked discipline. Artist, not artisan. Performance artist, specifically. He got something right due to sheer volume. Blind squirrels and broken clocks.

 First major fallacy: the modern world is clearly sick. Turns out Fascism is bad, tho. Nietzsche had to be at least locally novel to escape this disease, and wasn't. 

 Second: "popular." If you're well-known, that means you've been flattering peasant egos and peasant superstitions. If you're not reviled and buried for elitism et al, you're doing it wrong. 

 Nietzsche fluffed aristocracy because it made line go up. He wanted culture line instead of GDP line. It's still universalist saviourism, merely the next highest tranche of it. 

 Master morality forms a false dichotomy, due to failing to understand the difference between kratia and dunamis, and failing to appreciate that irresponsibility is even a variable. 

 Will to ""power"" is merely a small feature of natural selection. Organisms that don't try to force the world to let them remain alive get selected out. 

 Nietzsche spends a whole book trying to go beyond good and evil and doesn't once mention social status. This is what's known as a limited hangout, a kind of propaganda. His opus is nothing more than a huge peacocking spree - mentioning social status would undermine his core goal.

 If the Nazis were Nietzschean, that's a slight to both the Nazis and Nietzsche.

 The last philosopher worth reading was Descartes, on account of him not being fuckin' wrong all the time. His temporal remoteness is not a coincidence, by the way. (Admittedly I haven't read him either. Instead I reproduced his work independently.)

1 comment:

JBPGuy said...

Definitely worth a read, the only writer that can make me feel dumb.