who is Nietzsche?

[BlueApple]

<< Who cares? Nietzsche is dead. >>


So is God.

 

[Rio Rebel]

In my educated-but-still-subject-to being-mistaken opinion, Nietzsche contributed significantly to philosophy in two major ways:

1. He helped bring the focus of philosophy back from cerebral irrelevance to the vital questions of human existence. (Whether or not he is a father of existentialism, there is no question that he contributed to this movement by demanding that philosophy address human existence above metaphysical theories.)

2. He challenges the social, political, and intellectual order by describing the Uber-Man, who invents his own values and feeds his own will to power. It is well argued (by Alan Bloom, among others, in The Closing of the American Mind) that Nietzsche is a key influence in the revolution of the 60's in American society, and the current climate in American higher education.

"God is dead" is no pithy, flippant expression of atheism, but rather a vibrant and powerful call to cast aside the social order, overthrow the moral system, and invent new values.

I am not a Nietzsche scholar, or even a strong sympathizer - I am rather traditional in my approach to philosophy - but I recognize his very significant contributions to Western thought.

 

[Novgrod]

Leopold-Loeb (going to their school I know all about it) killed the kid for sort of the same reasons Raskolnikov axed the old woman: to prove superiority to everybody else; to prove they could transcend morality. This is, if memory serves, a facet of the Nietzschean Ubermensch (superman); he isn't subject to normal morality.

I could have the names backwards, but I think Leopold was a certified genius, and Loeb was along for the ride.

 

[rahvin]

One of his more interesting quotes and If I remember it was at the lead of a popular computer game:

"Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into an abyss, the abyss stares also into you."

Nietzsche is a german philospher and the texts are difficult in german, in my experience the translations are VERY VERY hard to read. Most people dismiss him because of the difficulty in reading his texts. There is something to keep in mind, he was a man of his time. They philosophy he discusses in his documents is a result of the same cultural setup that led to the rise of Nazism, it provides a deep insight into what some of the more intellectual people in germany felt/believed at the time. (although even in his time he was controversial) Notice I did not say he was the basis for Nazism as some people misinterpret, in fact a lot of people attribute Hitlers ideas to him but I don't think the link is there. Although Hitler was no doubt aware of Nietzsche I doubt he read much of his works and came up with his own philosophy.

 

[Czar]

Here is some text from use and abuse of history

"For when its past is analyzed critically, then we grasp with a knife at its roots and go cruelly beyond all reverence. It is always a dangerous process, that is, a dangerous process for life itself. And people or ages serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger. For since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely. When we condemn that confusion and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived from it. In the best case, we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited customary nature and our knowledge, in fact, even to a war between a new strict discipline and how we have been brought up and what we have inherited from time immemorial. We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past a posteriori [after the fact], out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended. It is always a dangerous attempt, because it is so difficult to find a borderline to the denial of the past and because the second nature usually is weaker than the first. Too often what remains is a case of someone who understands the good without doing it, because we also understand what is better without being able to do it. But here and there victory is nevertheless achieved, and for the combatants, for those who make use of critical history for their own living, there is even a remarkable consolation, namely, they know that that first nature was at one time or another once a second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature."