After coming to actually read some philosophy, alongside lectures, and some essays/light reading of books of philosopher on philosophers. I've realized a problem I've run into that I can't shake off like like a bad head itch.

There's this feeling when reading philosophy, that it is impossible to criticize. What do I mean? I sit in Deleuze threads. Hegel threads, and despite my respect for both, even Kant and Nietzsche threads. And get this feeling that theyre texts are so "deep", so layered (in the sense that theyre responses to responses of multiple philosophers) That if I am ever finding a problem with them, its because im simply not intelligent enough to understand why thats a problem.

This is bolstered by the unfortunate fact that all the people who DO SEEM to have read lengthily and even the prerequisite material, all almost unquestionably understand and support them as great insighters.

It's overwhelming. I could never hope to catch up to all of them, let alone guarantee that even if I tried, I would ever understand the texts as almost magically as they seem to understand it.

That is why, everytime I read some book from a philosopher, I always come here to ask for indepth books from other philosophers critiquing them. I did this for both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, but got nothing.

I ask, because I recently got into this problem of seeing people define socialism in a way that felt absurd, and every time. I tried to appeal to some inherent or historical meaning of the term, I kept thinking to myself "None of that matters because how people use it in any particular language game dictates its meaning" and I DO agree with this. But now it paralyzes me to literally any thought. How do I even begin to think when smarter people than me have. I ran into this problem again in another sense, seeing somebody I KNOW has read infinitely more on Nietzsche and even more on other philosophers on Nietzsche, saying that the right wing ideology is ressentement. I didn't disagree, but I disliked the implication, which I saw as "The left wing ideology is not ressentiment". I picked up my book of genealogy of morals and went to read a line earlier in the book I remember about ressentement (I won't lie and say Im far into the book, I've only completely read BG&E and some of Zarathustra)

Ill post the quote I found in my book of Genealogy of Morals below since I won't have any space left if I post it here. But basically. I felt ressentiment could just as easily apply to feminist ideology and critical theory generally, maybe even marxist theory.

But I dismissed the thought ultimately because there has to be something they understand more about the philosopher, philosophy, and even just marxism and feminism than me, because I know for a fact theyve read more about the latter especially.

This puts me in a comfortable spot where I never really feel like I'm engaging with the philosophy I'm reading. Just reading and nothing else.

Here is what I found:
>The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.

This is the Nietzsche quote I was talking about that I feel could apply to Feminist and Critical theory.

I almost didnt make this thread, because not only lately have I become to feel dumber. But I have a lot of thoughts I generally bundle up that I can never express because they are lengthy and hyper specific to me. Which is a recipe for no engagement, especially on the modern internet.

I have been dismissed on this very board before as being too dumb to even have my queries answered. So thats another thing that discouraged me. Not really sure what to do. At times I feel fundamentally wrong with the world. Like problems and things I dont really see anybody else have to deal with are somehow problems for me. This part is a bit more personal than necessary, but its an explanation maybe for why this spontaneously long amount of text exists that nobody will likely want to answer.

You seem to believe people are smarter than you because they can state something with confidence.

As it would turn out, the people who scream the loudest are usually the most retarded.

Also, /lit/ is borderline retarded.

Hope that helps.

>>24593487
Its not just /lit/ I mean /lit/ is part of it. But I even just know people on youtube who are the same. They can clearly recall and reference very specific quotes from philosophers, when I cant even remember a single quote from a book I read like a month ago. And they can articulate ideas I dont really understand with the sort of clarity and confidence that seems in line with academic understanding. There are those that do that here too. But if it wasnt for the ones on youtube I've seen do it so often, I wouldnt feel this strongly this way.

You won't understand and will just think im referencing some pop philosophy youtube channel like Philosophy tube, but you dont understand that Im actually talking about the exact multitude of clearly educated channels with mountains of books in their bookcase behind them that can just pull out a book instantly and go to the exact page and quote that disproves something dumb Philosophy Tube would say.

I don't think you need specifics of who I'm talking about to understand what I'm getting at. Or maybe you do I dont know.

philosophy wouldn't be very interesting if everyone shared the same perspective. not everyone is going to have the same levels of engagement with any given material. it's why everything's so specialized now. there are some very educated people on this board with a lot of strong opinions. you probably ran into someone who did their doctoral thesis on that particular author. I wouldn't let it discourage you

>>24593478 (OP)
Imagine how I feel, after 11 years of reading the shit I've turned to history and historiography instead?

>>24593478 (OP)
You are under the impression that just because there are "great philosophers", those philosophers are correct. I would ask, then why do so many of these philosophers disagree? The truth is people don't call them great philosophers because they are right, but because they can explain why they believe they are right well.

>>24593524
>I would ask, then why do so many of these philosophers disagree?
Thats what I would like to engage with. But whenever Im in a hegel thread. Schopenhaeur tards dismiss Hegel with admittedlt superficial criticism, and Hegel tards do the same to Schop. As for thinkers like Delueze. He seems to obscure and so beyond in expression I guess that there doesnt seem to be any criticism I can find of him. In his threads youll just see people say "Isnt it silly to criticize the state or something?" when ironically the people who support Deleuze would say the exact opposite.

And which Nietzsche he seems to have the worshippers of worshippers. Schopenhaeurs actual philosophy never even gets talked about, just shitty quotes. So it seems even Schopenhaeur fans don't take his philosophy seriously.

What I mean to ultimately say is. If I cant trust myself, and I choose to not trust the people most well read. Then the only choice I have is to trust the philosophers themselves, and not enough seem to criticize the philosophers Im reading, so It feels like I can just be swooped up by almost any given philosophy at a given time that doesnt completely go against my intuitions (not that I even like intuition, but obviously if i cant trust my intellect, i have nothing else for judgment)

>>24593478 (OP)
>>24593483
>>24593487
>>24593505
I can read, understand, and criticize philosophy. It seems you are a midwit or too ADHD. Sit down without any stimuli and think.

>>24593478 (OP)
Philosophy is reality fanfiction

>>24593478 (OP)
>It's overwhelming. I could never hope to catch up to all of them, let alone guarantee that even if I tried, I would ever understand the texts as almost magically as they seem to understand it.
>That is why, everytime I read some book from a philosopher, I always come here to ask for indepth books from other philosophers critiquing them. I did this for both Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, but got nothing.
It's because you're doubting yourself too much. Stop being a spectator.

>>24593563
Sometimes some of you speak as if the only experience that exists is your own. I dont even know how to respond to this, youre just calling me names for being different to you.

>>24593612
Is he wrong or right that you have ADHD? Just read random portions of books and think about them for a second. Talk to LLMs. Learn like a hunter and gatherer, not like an academic.

>>24593582
>It's because you're doubting yourself too much. Stop being a spectator.
My worry is that if I dont doubt myself ill be incoherent, or worse; conceited.

For example I really agree with Wittgenstein for the most part and hes accomplished his goal in one respect of relieving those who obsess over questions of meaning like him.

But I still believe in meaning, or at the very least that theres an implicit incoherence even within same language games that allows one their cake, and the ability to eat it too.

I could copy paste the particular contention in here if there are any Wittgensteinians, or any anti Wittgensteinians that are familar with his later work

>>24593478 (OP)
>"I didn't disagree, but I disliked the implication, which I saw as "The left wing ideology is not ressentiment"."
this is where you're a midwit. the implication you conjured does not follow. you need to detach yourself from making leaps like that.

>>24593623
Maybe I just assumed, because they are staunch leftists, who openly make appeals only to leftists, and dont criticize leftists, and glorify, and praise feminist and critical theory, at every turn, and are immensely critical of liberals, but even dont ever say theyre ressentiment. That the implication was reasonable.

>>24593478 (OP)
Transcend the paradigm and synthesize the most darwinisticly fit ideas from every worldview.

>>24593635
Thats what I've been thinking to do. But its hard to play pick and choose with philosophies when its all supposed to go together especially ones like Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Hegel/Kant.

Like strictly speaking Wittgenstein Contradicts all these dudes, like at a fundamental level, and Deleuze also contradicts some of them.

I think I need to start out first by having an ability to sort out my problems within individual philosophies, but I just have no grounds to criticize these dudes without just feeling like im a dumbass that simply does not know enough in general or understand enough to even have a valid critique.

It doesnt help when like ive said multiple times, that I have tried to express this here, and have been just dismissed and called stupid or ignored but...frustratingly, people I will generally refrain from calling retards, just read all this and act as if theyre not part of the problem. No self awareness.

I mean whatever man. Maybe im expecting too much not just from here, but philosophy in general. Ive always been a staunch fighter against the idea that philosophy is useless. A supporter of the fact that it has value in and of itself in simply learning.

But maybe its all just too much of a "contradicting" mess where youre just supposed to pick and choose your favourite philosopher like a fighting game character, and not really care or worry about anything else. Maybe thats why it feels like all these people so abundantly well read are so above criticism of their philosophers, because theyre so committed no alternative would feel right.

>>24593632
you're missing the point. the reason why the person said the right are operating on ressentiment is precisely because it's the left that have had cultural hedgemony for nearly a century. now read that quote you cited earlier and see how it applies. whether they're correct or not in their assessment rests on this alone.

>>24593659
>the reason why the person said the right are operating on ressentiment is precisely because it's the left that have had cultural hedgemony for nearly a century.
Nietzsche's ressentiment isnt conditional on a "cultural hegemony" though. Thats such a stupid work that bakes so many stupid things into it. In the beginning of genealogy, he talks about democrats, and socialists and those who believe in "commune". And what they're afraid of that the psychologists inquire into, he even ultimately ends up turning this around on the psychologists too.
Nietzsche doesnt even make clear what the current cultural hegemony is, but in Beyond Good and Evil it would probably just generally be democratic, scientific, Christian (even without belief in God) values that put reason above instinct.

This could literally apply to both the modern left and right.

There are a number of reason I could disagree with you "left cultural hegemony for a century" like the fact that most leftists would disagree besides arguably socially, and even then, that isnt an absolute hegemony, in a world where trans people are being banned from the military and roe v wade was revoked or whatever.

I hate this, I hate that I cant make an "assumption" based on plain implication but you can just assert a hegemony to take down my point.

Feminists created an entire theory centered on patriarchy, where the "OTHER", the "DIFFERENT". The "OUTSIDE" was said no to, and they compensated themselves with an "imaginary revenge" that birthed new values, where all the values which men possessed became "bad" and values women possessed became good. Do i even have to substantiate this? I only have to say two words: Toxic Masculinity.

And I could do this for critical theory and the anti colonialist project, or black rights and white privelege/fragility.

So please. Tell me what I was wrong to think was an implication.
>now read that quote you cited earlier and see how it applies
I did, I was the one who provided it afterall

You learned to read, understand, and even engage with interpretations of philosophers to an extent, but you have not learned how to do philosophy. This is you big block. This is something that cannot be taught or learned in the same way. You have to learn how to do philosophy. You can be trained and inculcated in it to the point where it becomes more natural to do philosophy, but this is not the same as reading philosophy. It's a different skillset. Of course, your ability to say something of substance is not strictly dependent on how well read you are, but being well-read is only going to help you.

Here's one way you can figure out how to do philosophy. Start by developing arguments for simple things you already believe. Try to take a step back and figure out what your weakest premise is. Try to poke holes in it or provide objections. Really develop them. Then after you have steelmanned your objection, reply to it and provide the most compelling defense for why you still think that premise is ultimately correct. This is a great way to start building up your ability to approach 'free' problems like a philosopher. But critiquing other philosophers is similar enough but a lil more focused, as it draws in on an assumed common ground, i.e. a text or typically understood position. Let's look to a more concrete example you provided.

For instance, if you really think Wittgenstein is the end-all-be-all of a way that just shits a given topic, try to think about what reducing a dispute to being a different language game would really be. For instance, do you actually think a substantial disagreement in values for a dispute on socialism and ressentiment is *just* dependent on how people are using the terms? Surely there are avenues of approaching this:
>Consider that reducing a substantial dispute might in fact reflect a more profound disagreement in practical commitments and theoretical commitments downwind of that pragmatic dimension. What exactly is the basis of those commitments? Why might someone endorse that commitment? Are they really reflective a language game in a semantic sense, or do they reflect a set of a background constellation of beliefs? Are those beliefs provided with or without justification? Are people holding them to be self-evident? Why could that be? Could it just be ideology to entertain that position? Is the reduction of philosophical problems to language games just ideology in drag?

You get the point. But generally philosophers utilize other philosophical frameworks as starting points to analyze or interpret other things. There is no one 'right' way to do philosophy, but there are a lot of wrong ways. You gotta start creativity-maxxing. You have enough patience and are already smart enough to have read Hegel or Deleuze or whatever, but can you argue with them? Only one way to find out—go out and practice.

>>24593718
>For instance, if you really think Wittgenstein is the end-all-be-all of a way that just shits a given topic, try to think about what reducing a dispute to being a different language game would really be. For instance, do you actually think a substantial disagreement in values for a dispute on socialism and ressentiment is *just* dependent on how people are using the terms? Surely there are avenues of approaching this:
I already have a criticism for this and have thought of all this. My problem isnt a capacity to think of critique, its a capacity to understand my own critique as valid enough when there are mountains of people smarter than me, who either do not even consider the same critiques, or are hostile to critiques of their philosophers in general if youre seemingly not well read enough.

Ill read the rest of what you have to say, but I just want to interject here because I think its better if I just post my problem with the implications of Wittgenstein's arguments immediately after I had finished philosophical investigations. And then you see if it applies to what you want me to do to better engage with philosophy

These were my initial thoughts on Wittgenstein after finishing PI:
">>24506467
I understand, his revised arguments in philosophical investigations is almost impossible to challenge. So i dont. My biggest problem with PI. Is that he basically validates the poor ways in which oridinary people use language, simply because "thats just how its supposed to be used". Words sort of dont really mean anything essentially and its all about use and context in a language game. If we take this as true (pretty hard to not to honestly). This essentially validates peoples use of words like "nazi" where they can apply it to people who arent nazis to get the derogatory effecy of implying that somebody is UNIQUELY as bad or close to as bad as the nazis and all the number of connotations and associations that come with this.

My problem with this has always been thats its essentially cheating language. The person that uses words so useless objectively cannot be meaning "nazi" literally. But it doesnt matter because the only way the word can have any SPECIFIC value is to intend to mean it literally and bring out all the things uniquely associated with the word.

And this is EXACTLY right. This is why words dont really have an essential meaning. This is what wittgenstein is talking about being on display I think. Words are just something used to communicate some vague encompassing meaning via use. Words are like "tools" and in this case. The word "nazi" is a bludgeon to hit somebody over the head with. Or a target to be draped over for an arrow to be let loose on.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong? Stupid? Recently coming to this board ive gotten a bit insecure that im actually fairly stupid and can never and will never understand philosphers enough to criticize them, because of all the ways people come up with that some other philosphers like hegel and fichte or whatever are misunderstood because of their fancy elaborate concepts."

I included the entire original reply even the post I was responding to since incase nobody understands what Im on about, I can just refer back to the thread to answer contentions with what I answered and clarified to contentions I got. As a heads up, yes I understand that "Nazi" is context dependent. But the use of the word is for lack of better word "unreasonable" or "unfair" even within its own language game. It doesnt make sense...to me. Everything within the quotation marks is the original post.

>>24593478 (OP)
>But basically. I felt ressentiment could just as easily apply to feminist ideology and critical theory generally, maybe even marxist theory.
Yes it does, as those are right wing ideologies.

>>24593745
Well the leftists calling the modern right wing an ideology of ressentiment wouldnt agree. But categories aside, im not political, but I probably agree with you, on what you mean rather than what you literally said.

>>24593736
being stupid is the first step to being wise, if you want to put it in a one sentence sentiment

>>24593775
Okay, but being stupid doesnt feel good, or allow for a lot of growth if one is too stupid to even know how theyre being stupid and literally nobody will engage with queries to remedy that fact, and one can only know as much as theyre aware of and...you get the point.

Uh, are you gunna say anything about the Wittgenstein complaint or not

>>24593478 (OP)
Anon, ill tell you this. You have a good head and the very spirit of philosophia (lover of wisdom). Start with the Greeks. Read Plotinus and embrace uncertainty and not 'knowing'.

>>24593782
about philosophical investigations, i have forgotten mostly everything about it and so have many others who argue about these things on the internet

>>24593782
I think he means ignorance in the ancient Greek and indian sense. The famous statement 'i know nothing' is probably something that would benefit you if you contemplated it

>>24593791
>i have forgotten mostly everything about it and so have many others who argue about these things on the internet
yeah, thats what im thinking, for a guy who was all the rage just barely a hundred years ago, i cant really find much engagement with him. unlucky, hes probably the most informative on me currently, i think so many of the general modern day problems and my own problems with online engagement can so easily be reduced to language. I wish my linguist class in class was anywhere close to as interesting as Wittgenstein rather than learning the numerous riveting ways the human mouth opens itself to make specific sounds.

>>24593784
>Read Plotinus and embrace uncertainty and not 'knowing'.
Ill try him out. It was Platos Republic and how engaging it was to follow that really got me into trying to read philosophy seriously, before that, it was a bunch of people talking about hyper specific concepts I cared little about, in their own specific ways. I think the fact that the Greeks didnt really have a strong idea that they already had everything figured out, and a whole history of knowledge to validate or invalidate helps a lot in keeping their philosophy engaging. Doesnt feel as much like youre entering a secret club you need to know the inside jokes of.

>>24593745
Left wing ideologues were the first to resent things on how they were, not the right. The right is simply following suit since the left couldn't leave things as they were.

>>24593617
>My worry is that if I dont doubt myself ill be incoherent, or worse; conceited.
Hegel needed to be the opposite of this in order to influence the germans proper. It might be helpful if you let yourself go a little crazy as you think about things. It's like having dreams and writing them down, you eventually have control over their automatism and realize that it's much more of a fluid space of potential than a fixed identity of coherence.

>>24593940
>Hegel needed to be the opposite of this in order to influence the germans proper.
Im assuming this is sarcasm, so to this ill say, Hegel was an academic darling, who, no matter how perceptually incoherent he may seem to a lay person, or how conceited, he was validated and paraded and had little reason to doubt.

I get what you mean generally I think. But to me it's kinda like "just be yourself". Unfortunately maybe the internet, despite the numerous amount of people it allows you access to, its still hard to find a voice with anybody.

The biggest problem for exploring philosophy is that there is no space for it. Ironically in this very thread, I expressed one of my criticisms, as the problem had never been whether I had the base level confidence to produce criticism, but the doubt that comes after producing it. The fact that it is either ignored, or dismissed with little engagement. The fact that some understandings of text seem to come easier to others but not me. It all snowballs into this formula that is hard to ignore, which states that what I could possibly have to say or think, is not valid.

I think the realistic answer is that I have to find some philosophy club, or school environment where the expectation is for everybody to engage with one another, or...to be knowledgeable enough of Wittgenstein for it not to seem like youre being ignore when you bring up your contention, but rather simply, they're humble enough to say "I dont know".

The impression gotten on this board is definitely not one of humbleness. Even when theyre trying to not be conceited.

But what I just proposed is easier said than done, and requires far more barriers than simply getting online and typing.

Sometimes one makes the mistake of thinking the internet is some kind of online space to meet different people, and atleast ENOUGH should be open enough, just by sheer access, to talk about things earnestly and thoughtfully with.

>>24593478 (OP)
You can't critique anything because you're too busy sucking their dicks. Are you a foid?

>>24593505
>youtube people are smart
You do realize they just prepare a script, right? Then just read the whole thing in 20-30 tries?

Now, if you were to catch the same seemingly intelligent content creator during a stream, they wouldn't be just as eloquent at all.

>>24594405
>Now, if you were to catch the same seemingly intelligent content creator during a stream, they wouldn't be just as eloquent at all.
Its funny you say that, because I have done exactly that, and what I referenced of them "pulling a book from their bookshelf and remembering the exact page and quote to counter some poor youtube philosophy theyre reacting to" is exactly something that I have seen literally on a stream.

I dont want to start dropping youtube channels because I dont want to encourage any harassment or obsessive behaviour, and besides thats straying too much towards off topic imo

>>24593478 (OP)
Lets do a little thought experiment.
What do you think the first/primary question of philosophy is, OP. Boiled down to its most obviously absolute, unfiltered essence.
Hint: Lots of people on this site like to use it as an insult all the time

>>24594505
>Lets do a little thought experiment.
>What do you think the first/primary question of philosophy is, OP. Boiled down to its most obviously absolute, unfiltered essence.
What is.

>>24594515
Close "what is" is part of the answer/solution. Its:

Why don't you kill yourself?

>>24594520
I dont see a "What is" in there.

>>24594416
That can also be prepared. Even staged.
And there will even be notions of philosophy so common that they expect it too.
But yes, some humans have better recollections than others.

>>24594537
>Why don't you kill yourself?
"You" presupposes the "What is" question, to which the answer is (you). The thinking percieving observing thing called consciousness which is seemingly either bound to or emergent from that living breathing thing percieved and called body which inhabits what you percieve to be living or being alive, or simply being.
>What is? = What are you?
You are a thing that is, that percieves, that thinks. That is you. What is? You are.
And importantly this implies that you could "not be you", or "not be", you could cease being by "killing yourself".
That is the first, fundamental, metaphysical discrimination/disambiguation you can make.
That there is a state of being, and a state of not-being.
This first disambiguation immediately supplies the second one: that you can, despite all the opacity that comes from being within the world with your "percieving" mind (Descartes/Kant/Hume, etc), you are able to know things by discrimination, or differentiation. One thing that is not like another are not the same. Aka:
>What can I know?
This tends to be another typical answer next to "What is?" that people give for this question, but really you can wrap it up wholly within "Why not kill yourself?". If you could know nothing, aka if you could not discriminate, you would find there to be no difference between killing yourself or not killing yourself. But you CAN discriminate, so you can know.
Another "prime" question people like to answer with, which is also wrapped up in "why not kill yourself? lol" is "What is my purpose?" aka teleology. All action (and thus all being) aims towards an end, which is not intuitively/inherently known. Otherwise, you would not need to ask this question.

So the answer to the first question of all philosophy, "Why don't you kill yourself?" is
Because you, being a being thing, which can discriminate from non-being, must have some end your being aims towards, and must work to use your faculties of iscrimination to unveil this end.

If you want the materialist sense to that answer it would be "to get stuff".
Which is why the second question of philosophy is "Why don't I kill you to get YOUR stuff", from which all forms of moral/social philosophy are ultimately derived.

>>24593478 (OP)
My nigga, spit it out

Well you seem to be doing a good job op you kept a thread you yourself made alive for at least 40 posts.

>>24594595
Spit what out?
>>24594586
>That can also be prepared. Even staged.
Sure, I guess.

>>24593478 (OP)
I'll level with you op, the Germans have produced some of the best philosophers on the planet next to the Ancient Greeks, at least insofar as the west is concerned. The East is another beast. A fair number of the best German thinkers aren't easily digested in a rapid manner, you have to basically reproduce the thinker with the same level of introspection upon yourself. The more you do it, the more introspection you put in, the more you find out about yourself. Some of those guys left philosophical contributions that are incredibly difficult to rebut, those are thinkers you may want to slow down on since you can likely spend a considerable amount of time with them. Once you find your comfort zone you might be surprised at what you can do.

>>24594593
>"You" presupposes the "What is" question, to which the answer is (you).
No. Unless you believe that even animals have a "you". Otherwise even animals can wonder and investigate "What is".

>>24594651
Even a plant can exist. Just because it isn't capable of asking "what is" doesnt mean it isn't a thing that is.

>>24594678
Thats a different question from whether its a "You" that can lead to the question "Why dont you kill yourself" every being relevant, valid, or reasonable. And I think I've sufficiently demonstrated with a stretch rivaling yours, with far less text. That no. That question does not necessarily follow from something that could ponder "What is"?

>>24594678
>it isn't capable of asking "what is"
According to who? Plants may as well have a soul and ask questions

>>24593729
>>24593736
>>24593782
Well there are plenty of people who take Wittgenstein's pragmatist approach towards language but don't subscribe to all of his therapeutic conclusions towards philosophy.

For instance, Bob Brandom and Richard Rorty are some good examples if you want to see how philosophers can engage with him, disagree, and still do something different.

Brandom in particular has a deontic scorekeeping model and gives an account of conceptual (semantic) content in terms of reasons in the pragmatic game of giving and asking for reasons. I think you are broadly undervaluing how discursive attitudes and social norms about language in general, and focusing too much on words in particular. Language, broadly construed, is not merely exhausted by use of words. In fact, there are plenty of ways of analyzing attitudes and other normative dimensions that you seem to retreat from.

There are plenty of open questions in philosophy of language that Wittgenstein is simply 'crude' in comparison. I say this as someone who thinks the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations are incredible works, but I would be a fool to admit that Wittgenstein is the culmination of philosophy.

If this is orthogonal to your confidence in your ability to critiques of philosophers, then you have what is called a skill-issue. Literally either git gud and start really digging into the serious defenses of your positions by developing a position that responds to the criticisms of the things you endorse, or get out of caring about philosophy. You probably have mad imposter syndrome and aren't as stupid as you think you are. There's always smarter person, but that doesn't mean they're always right. Smart people can be idiots too, and you seem to fall into the latter category if you think you're not smart enough to stand behind your criticisms. You literally just need more confidence in your beliefs—and the first way to develop that is through radically interrogating them. Sure, you're going to prune a lot of shit you used to believe in confidence, but you will become wiser and cautious with what you do believe while remaining firm in your criticism. People aren't always going to understand you, but don't conflate that with being wrong, not smart enough or whatever

>>24594734
You're right, they certainly might. Though given what we know about plants I think its unlikely. I just used them as a clearer example to show that being is not contingent on percieving yourself. However, the faculty to discriminate between being/not-being is contingent on perception.
>>24594701
My claim is that you, being as you are, can and do discriminate between being and non-being in a way that being is a preferable outcome.
If you agree, then you've given an answer to the question "Why not kill yourself."
If you disagree with my claim, you can prove me utterly wrong by immediately killing yourself, right here, right now. Post proofs, if you want. Because if you cannot discriminate between what is, or is not, then there is no difference between killing yourself or living.
>And I think I've sufficiently demonstrated with a stretch rivaling yours, with far less text.
You haven't demonstrated anything, apart from stating that animals may or may not have self-recursive perception.
Btw I don't mean to sound hostile. Just so there's no misunderstanding:
>What is
Could "technically" be construed as the prime question, but imo "Why dont you kill yourself" is a better way of implicating that question while also adressing "What/How can I know what I know" and also "What is purpose/action?".

If you think this is too much text, I'll just give it to you again in the simplest terms.

Why don't you kill yourself?

>>24593478 (OP)
The best way to BTFO any philosopher is an internal critique. For instance: Wittgenstein. Tractatus asserts that metaphysics cannot be put into propositions…while making metaphysical claims. As for language games, if everything is a language game, then so is the statement that everything is language games, which means it has no bearing in reality, which means it’s not actually the case. As for Nietzsche, you can provoke a clear infinite regress by interrogating what “power” is supposed to be. Power isn’t universal. Who decides what “power” is? The most powerful? And so on. A lot of philosopher are just aesthetically opinionated, and their positions have no normative authority if you resist being seduced by their aesthetic sense. Voegelin exposes this about some of the more serious and influential thinkers, how they use sleight of hand to leap over impossible barriers.

>>24593617
>I could copy paste the particular contention
please do

and stop taking bored aristocrats pretending they are smart so seriously, most philosophers probably werent all that special in the first place. alfred north whitehead is probably the best candidate for someone who genuinely is in a league of his own and can make even professors feel like midwits. your issue is that of neurosis, not of stupidity

>>24594345
>just be yourself
It's not just be yourself, it's go still further. Focusing on yourself lies at the hands of your previous coherence. Maybe study D&G's critiques of language and look into anti-oedipus and rise above their pedophilia.
It's not sarcasm, hegel was indeed an academic darling but I like what Zizek said about him being an alien; and it isn't to presuppose a communistic dialectician stupor, it's an actual thought that is influenced by deleuzian critique.
Don't go to philosophy clubs or school environments, they are cancer. No uniqueness in thought if they're plagued by identicality. Go still further. They are the opposite of humble, just like all the academics here who are poisoning this board with shit that isn't new.

>>24593478 (OP)
You've clearly got a lot going on and may require professional help. Maybe hire a philosophy tutor so they would be more inclined to take the time to address all these points. One thing I can add briefly is that when you're looking for critiques of philosophers by philosophers they will often be subtle and may not be out right critiques but only ideas which are incompatible. And vis a vis marxism and feminism being ressentiment driven ideologies; it seems unlikely that every marxist and every feminist and every x-ist is psychologically driven by the same thing as one another, even under the same banner. Do you think Deleuze was a feminist, or a marxist?

>>24594759
>and Richard Rorty
Pretty sure this guy is literally retarded. Like literally.
>There are plenty of open questions in philosophy of language that Wittgenstein is simply 'crude' in comparison.
The way you talk about Wittgenstein's philosophy makes me think you didnt actually read PI. Because "pragamatist approach to language" is not remotely how his broad argument comes across. He makes no prescriptions whatsoever of how language should be used, or treated. His overall claim, is less that what is "true" is useful or used. And moreso that what is "true" is dependent on whatever relevant context dependent use is, but also perspective, such as with the pointing hand example, he makes where it could be interpreted as the lentgh of the tip of the finger to the base of the hand.

Anyway my point ultimately is, its like hearing somebody call Nietzsche a relativist, in some loose sense they might be right, but it feels like that sort of thing that is "true" because its repeated and broadly thought of such, not as if it refers to anything from what the actual text of Nietzsche says.

Also you didnt engage with my criticism.

>>24594954
>please do
I already did:
>24593736

>>24594863
>As for language games, if everything is a language game, then so is the statement that everything is language games, which means it has no bearing in reality
Thats not what language game means.
>As for Nietzsche, you can provoke a clear infinite regress by interrogating what “power” is supposed to be. Power isn’t universal.
I actually do have a critique of Nietzsche that is something like this. Not exactly like this. In simple terms: If nobles are good because they are powerful, then having allowed themselves to succumb to and be subsumed by the priest class implies they were really more powerful blah blah blah. I think Nietzsche would generally escape this, by trying to assert something like "Priest class negates life, not affirms it, and exist only on opposition blah blah blah" or something like that. But to me thats completely arbitrary. It implies two things, that the noble class of the greeks and romans both existed before the Jews, and so by definition the jews who existed within those societies would have to be in opposition or negation of their life afirming, for new values to be "created". But also that the greeks or romans never in anyway existed in negation of a life.

A lot of the ways Nietzsche accounts for this by simply saying "Even when Nobles do some life denying stuff, its just less bad than the Priests because theyre inherently good".

It makes his entire slave master morality philosophy just seem like an arbitrary preference for ones power, and the other power is just the wrong type of power because it can be construed as against life by him.

>>24595385
>it seems unlikely that every marxist and every feminist and every x-ist is psychologically driven by the same thing as one another, even under the same banner.
If so. Then ressentiment can no more be applied to the right.
Also the point was never that theyre driven by the same things.

Two people can hate authority for completely different reasons, and still hate authority. Its the hate of authority that would broadly group them under the same umbrella if the authority is the focus of the critique.

nice try

>>24595984
Well, I tried.

>>24593478 (OP)
>in the sense that theyre responses to responses of multiple philosophers
Starting with the greeks is not a meme.

>>24595995
I dont mean that old. Also I think any philosophy suggestion that is remotely chronological except in the context of school is the dumbest thing you can recommend to somebody starting off in philosophy, if one is reading philosophy for a purpose beyond interest, it just becomes the equivalent of reading a school textbook, except sharply framed by one single guy's perspective

>>24595497
You not only seem to be conflating "a pragmatist approach" with my making a normative claim about how one ought to use language rather than a description about how he approaches language within the philosophical investigations. His approach is indeed broad, and he does actually make several prescriptions within the book. So I wouldn't be so hasty in claiming I haven't actually read the book. If anything you have some strange ideas that he is proffering a theory of Truth, insofar as what is true depends on context, and lots of secondary literature does indeed offer defenses of Wittgenstein advocating for a form of contextualism, but I don't think your notion here captures that, as I believe you are conflating several sections into a particular reading.

For instance, the hand pointing example, even people like Kripke (whose Kripkenstein has plenty of issues besides the point) claim that what's going on here is broadly a matter of norms. Sure, it could be interpreted as the length of the tip of the finger to the base of the hand but this is norm-dependent not only with histories of use and social convention, intuitive forms of communication in games of trying to convey meaning or 'the point,' or even what 'counts' as successful communication.

>My biggest problem with PI. Is that he basically validates the poor ways in which oridinary people use language, simply because "thats just how its supposed to be used". Words sort of dont really mean anything essentially and its all about use and context in a language game.

Okay, so I would agree that Wittgenstein defers to ways that ordinary ways that people use langauge, but this doesn't make the way people use language impoverished in their use. If anything, you are missing a lot of the context in which the debate in the history of analytic philosophy tried to model their theories of language on formal languages, and he is deferring to the way that natural language goes well beyond the narrow frame analytic philosophers have been approaching language.

You actually aren't making the substantial point you think you are making, and I am starting to get what you mean by not thinking you're smart enough to stand behind your criticisms with confidence.

You can think I haven't read the philosophical investigations all you want, but if you can't even connect different philosophers and their work to different concepts that may not necessarily be their own terms, that is your issue and not mine.

>>24595385
>You've clearly got a lot going on and may require professional help.
No he doesn't, armchair doctor. Eat shit.

>>24595385
>Do you think Deleuze was a feminist, or a marxist?
Do you think Hegel was an alien or a retard?

>>24595546
Thank you for replying to my message. I hope you read this one as well. Ressentiment and what we could call the "Nietszchean style of analysis" is explicitly ad hominem. I don't say this to discount it but it's clear in the Genealogy of Morals and Zarathustra that he thinks the great secret of ideas is that they're produced by the character of he who produces them; body, mind and spirit. For this reason it is a pretty poor tool for examining political movements at large. It is true that in Nietzsche's style one can work backwards from an idea to its originator, the ideas themselves have a certain character, but the ideas which make up the left or the right are fairly diverse. You could judge them by their originator, look at what sort of man Marx is or Hitler or whoever and judge thereby what quality their ideas will come to.
I urge you though, personally, to cure your internal left and right divide which makes the world seem so divided.

>>24596354
Probably more like an alien than a retard though in truth I think he was a Lutheran.

>>24596372
>Thank you for replying to my message. I hope you read this one as well. Ressentiment and what we could call the "Nietszchean style of analysis" is explicitly ad hominem.
I would agree. Infact, this very text, and seeing how it was used and applied by people far more read than me is EXACTLY what spurred me to make this thread, among other things, I've obviously had this feeling building even since I expressed my criticism om Wittgenstein maybe a month ago. But it was really this that sent me overboard. Because while reading Genealogy, this was the exact impression and feeling I had the entire time. You can get an idea of my thoughts in another reply to somebody else about Nietzsche criticism.
>I urge you though, personally, to cure your internal left and right divide which makes the world seem so divided.
Youre saying this to the wrong person. Its not me thats attached to a left right divide. I identify as no political leaning, and am generally uncomfortable with either category. I just contexualized things by bringing up the superiorly well read person's characterization of the right. I only characterized the left to equalize things and show how arbitrary the application of "ressentiment" can be, seeing as it can easily be applied to sides that they would disagree with.

But thats the thing. I dont like to get too confident about that. Because as I've said they TRULY are infinitely more well read on Nietzsche and just "leftism" as theyd characrize it than I am. So for me to produce a criticism, so simple, and easy, with a far inferior amount of reading on Nietzsche just doesnt make sense to me.

>>24596341
>Sure, it could be interpreted as the length of the tip of the finger to the base of the hand but this is norm-dependent not only with histories of use and social convention, intuitive forms of communication in games of trying to convey meaning or 'the point,' or even what 'counts' as successful communication.
I dont know what youre talking about. If m. memory serves me right. Im pretty sure Witt's point when he brought up that analogy followed a succession of arguments like the "add + 2" analogy where hes essentially just making the point that words have no true essential unambiguous meaning, and are always subject to interpretation and context. Youre mentioning norms, and I guess that could technically apply, but I dont think Wittgenstein is fitting his philosophy into the box that youre trying to. He precisely brings up that finger analogy even against something norm and "intuition" dependent as pointing a finger.

My point is just. I hate this way of talking about philosophy where we constantly have to refer to special words and labels to characterize the philosophy rather than just talking about it. It starts to feel like the words are compensating to say more about the philosophy with all its implications than the actual philosophy, like how an instagram pic can "say" more to some shallow women, than actually talking (obviously in this analogy nobody is posting a picture of them literally sitting in a dumpster unshaven).

Wittgenstein's work does not require THAT much prerequisite context. He literally makes up an invisible interlocutor to retort with a la Plato that represents all the ideas hes arguing against.

When you argue in this abstracted way, I can't really tell what youre saying because its not pointing to anything directly that I remember when reading Philosophical Investigations.
>but this doesn't make the way people use language impoverished in their use.
I'm not saying this is Witt's point. This is mine. Witt doesnt prescribe much, other than to say "nothing you think matters actually matters, and that's fine". At most Witt gives too much validity to the fact that humans are allowed to just use words as thoughtlessly as they want. I forgot what the analogy was again, was it a gopher, or a hamster in a box? Anyway that analogy perfectly encapsulates how people use language.

There could be no remote content in the actual word, but they will use it as if it contains the content that is supposed to be implied by the word.
>You actually aren't making the substantial point you think you are making
I actually agree here, only because my memory is incredibly fuzzy on PI, and I can barely recall specific arguments. To be fair Witt is incredibly "fluid" for lack of better word in PI, but again. What I wanted was for my criticism to be engaged with. Not abstracted with so many philosophically asssociated words that it forgets whats right infront of it.

>>24596542
>im pretty sure Witt's point when he brought up that ... He precisely brings up that finger analogy even against something norm and "intuition" dependent as pointing a finger.

This isn't about "intuitions", its about successful communication in norm-laden contexts even in counterfactual cases. Like no shit buddy things could mean something other than what we take for granted, but what exactly are those things we are taking for granted? We don't think "ah fuck my heckin contexterino/interpretationino" we respond according to normative standards of assessment like whether its correct when we take an evaluative attitude to those moves in the language game. We might say "oh that's weird that somebody said that after I did _____" but the fact of the matter is that as normative creatures, bound by the brute regularities of nature—or we might slap them with a stick. It depends on the kind norms that are in play, and of course whether those responses are appropriate are at only really subject to scrutiny at a higher order of reflection, or a metareflection of those things—but this isn't a regress necessarily, its just how things go. It's not dependent on context, my actions are not checked as if they correspond to an appropriate context at all, but they are bound by being public acts that they can even be evaluated as such.

>I hate this way of talking about philosophy where we constantly have to refer to special words and labels to characterize the philosophy rather than just talking about it.
lmao find another thing to be interested in. Philosophy, even from a Wittgensteinian perspective just becomes another one of those special language games, even if it is a therapeutic approach. You're still in the game of giving and asking for reasons.

>Wittgenstein's work does not require THAT much prerequisite context.
Sure, you could fly blind, but having that background can really help narrow in on the approach in which he did philosophy. He is not immune from the circumstances that prompted him to write from the approach he did, and I think you will find his work much more interesting if you have a strong working background in the history of early analytic philosophy.

>this is mine
Yeah no shit buddy, I was replying to your criticism. Also its a "fly in a bottle," but this was his approach to geet philosophers to stop creating what he believed were non-problems, and he thought broadly speaking "philosophy" from the point of view he advocates was not something someone SHOULD not do, and that is indeed a prescriptive claim.

At this point I think you should just read Bob Brandom's Making It Explicit.

>>24593736
if we always tried to get the best resolution description of an entity/process/whatever, we would have no useful language. as for the example of the word nazi, why is describing modern far-right agitators as nazis so offensive? because they dont belong to the nazi party of 1933-1945 germany? they dont have to, because similarities between the two are large enough so that a common denominator may be used (just like a spruce and a birch are both referred to as trees, despite the fact that no birch is a spruce and no spruce a birch). you are right in that words do not have an essential meaning, they are human tools. and btw i think right wing practice of calling everything communist is far more egregious than some redditor screeching about le nazis.

>that im actually fairly stupid and can never and will never understand philosphers enough to criticize them
philosophy is a skill, you get better as you go. dont read philosophy books, start by getting a reddit level overview of what the most notable philosophers thought, then how their thoughts were related to each others' (for an example plato's ideas were built atop of the heraclitus' ideas, even though they contrast dramatically). you can then progress to things like essays or trying to investigate questions which interest you, don't worry if you cant come up with interesting questions now

I gotta go to bed, Ill hopefully respond to these tomorrow

>>24593478 (OP)
> How do I even begin to think when smarter people than me have. I ran into this problem again in another sense, seeing somebody I KNOW has read infinitely more on Nietzsche and even more on other philosophers on Nietzsche, saying that the right wing ideology is ressentement. I didn't disagree, but I disliked the implication, which I saw as "The left wing ideology is not ressentiment".
>reads philosophy, and still cares about politics
>adheres to a simple black/white dichotomy for his political views
Imma be real with u cuh... One doesnt read philosophy to become smarter, one reads it to find kindred spirits. If u dont get it u dont get it

filtered by society?

pharmakon

>>24597323
the fuck is that?

>>24597323
This anon is right if there were any serious philosophers here theyd tell you that actually Derrida = Your escape from Wittgenstein.
Much deeper than Wittgenstein on lamguage while not casting out meaning entirely. He's falling out of the limelight in favour of Deleuze, Foucault and the entire shitty existentialism school of thought

>>24597343
where to start with derrida?

>>24593478 (OP)
Seems you have ventured into 20th century wank fest philosophy. Most of that is subversion to justify putting their dicks in things that normally weren’t allowed by society. What exactly did you like about Plato’s Republic?

>>24598716
>muh everything went south after ~Aquinas
You guys are just are retarded as the anons who say
>real philosophy shows you how worthless discursive thinking is! You need genuine Insight, not thinking!
Modern philosophy evolves out of ancient and medieval philosophy, it is in dialogue with it, even something like Adorno and Horkheimer is an organic development. Ignore the moderns at your own peril, they're talking about what's happening right now whether you like it or not. There's a contingent well-represented on /lit/ that thinks we can turn back the clock, but the fact is the past also sucked and you actually can't turn back the clock.

To the OP the anons you find intimidating are grad students, or they're basement dwellers who have been reading philosophy all the time for years. Forget about it just pick a philosopher and master his/her work. If you know one philosopher thoroughly, you know more than 95% of people who post about philosophy online, including the ones who namedrop five or six different thinkers every paragraph.

>>24598651
Buy a packet of crisps

>>24598740
At least two of us are academics.

>>24598716
>What exactly did you like about Plato’s Republic?
It was immensely clear. My memory is fuzzy but im thinking back to when he tries to make an analogy of essences with a boatman or something, or was it a fisherman? Fuck let me go search it up real quick.

Okay I went back to listen to the Republic a bit, and while I cant find the specific analogy I was talking about (Its taking too long to listen, but Ill bring it up when I do hear it).

I think Plato specifically appeals to me very greatly.

I have always been one that values debate above the expression or elaboration of ideas. The reason why?

There are a number of idea that sound pleasant and appealing when expressed without direct context, contrast, and contention to another thing. Even when a philosophical idea is responding to another. It is rarely direct, and its always dependent on that persons interpretation and representation.

There is simply too much than can be "manipulated" whether intentionally or not. Honestly or sinisterly. To present an idea that sounds right or true. But you simply dont know the ways it cannot be, or should not be. Because the fundamental framework presented puts you in a narrow mind.

When somebody has to clash with another idea (assuming both interlocutors are honest and unironically follow logical fallacies, not for truth, but mere honesty. I dont care what kind of truth system justifies calling somebody fat when they express an opinion disliked). They have to JUSTIFY themselves on a level fundamentally different to a basic philosophical proof. They have to engage with the world not as it can merely be observed but encountered.

There are questions their interlocutor may bring up in opposition to their ideal that they never would have or could have even considered. Theres a call to truly define and outline the words they use, accounting for all its implications and associations.

I'm not sure how much I can explain this if you've just never been in a good debate. And yes, I do understand how debate can be "flawed" but that is never because of the debate but the people debating.

Anyway, Socrates and his dialogues do all this. People present Plato’s dialogues for some reason as Socrates essentially "bewitching" people into agreeing with him. Which is ironic because im literally listening to the republic right now and thats exactly what his interlocutors say, so the people who read plato and say that lack self awareness, it reminds me of people who criticize House and be like "heh, i grew up and actually house is a miserable loser and not cool" and they act like everybody in the show isnt saying that like every episode. The fact the show accounts for that, means theres more to him than that, that is what the internal conflict of the show (How people see House, vs Who he is) exists for, to show that. And its the same in Plato’s dialogues.

>>24598759
And you suck. Some of the most arrogant pseuds I've run into here have said they were academics or grad students. You guys know a lot about what you know about, but you'll also think that you're experts on some thinker or text because you "took a class" or were "in a seminar" on said thinker, or because you've heard shit about him/her in secondary literature, then when you start getting your ass handed to you with quotes from primary sources you tell everyone you're a full professor or in an elite PhD philosophy program or whatever. I'm not saying you're like that, but you probably are, and if so fuck you.

>>24598801
Nah, I only comment on stuff I actually know, or homosexual pornography involving mpregnation.

>>24598793
It sounds like what appeals to you is the manliness of the Greeks, that their philosophy is situated in "real life." I suggest you try BJJ because you are gay.

When I disagree clearly with Plato. I can always be assured of it. Because he goes through lengths to make sure that everything that precedes the argument has been established, not just "assumed to be true" but established through conflict where one idea arises out of the ashes of battle. OR one idea arises, because the other idea was weaker (contention proposed was short, or had too much fluff, or assumed too much etc.) Meaning that the idea that arose wasnt necessarily strong (until it can prove itself in subsequent arguments) and can assuredly skeptical of.

This sort of happens when he talks about how different political societies progress from one too another, both Socrates and his interlocutors agree too readily with eachother on the premises that allows that progression to be established, so I can reasonably view it as weak, and on shaky ground, because nobody is proposing a contention with one another, and engaging deeper than the surface of impression.

But at the same time. I obviously understand that not every philosopher can be Plato. Infact some philosophers are like Nietzsche who are diametrically opposed to plato, where they can simply define "Ressentiment, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear all on countless occasions on which it imevitably appears in the weak and impotent". Why is this true? Because the noble man is simply better, stronger and gooder, so literally everything bad that could happen to the noble man, just happens lesser, weaker, and um less worser. Just because of an inherent essence of goodness and powerfulness. Even though the Priests eventually overcame and overthrew the stronger gooder Noble man. You know why they did so? Because "While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (to be fair he says this because the etymology of noble is literally upright and naive or so he claims) the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive, nor honest and straightforward with himself blah blah blah A race of such men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race; it will also honor cleverness to a far greater degree"

You see this shit? Plato would never say any of that shit without first going on a lengthy diatribe where he outlines the throughline from the word, to the meaning, because his interlocutor would say "what do you mean?".

See, Plato is for dumb guys like me that just question and wonder where philosphers get these assumptions and preconceptions and how theyre so confident and assured by them.

I'm just too dumb to get why guys like Deleuze would use schizophrenia, a word with so much inherent clinicak baggage, that is so clearly more than just a simple "other disposition" oppressed by society. To represent the free revolutionary spirit or whatever. At a point it feels whoever likes whats being said matters more than words making sense.

>>24593478 (OP)
man just just shut the fuck up and pretend you're a misunderstood genius like the rest of this board and those philosophers of yours already!

>>24596708
>its just how things go. It's not dependent on context, my actions are not checked as if they correspond to an appropriate context at all, but they are bound by being public acts that they can even be evaluated as such.
I dont know how to respond to arguments that just say, things are just things, and thats good and okay, or not good and okay. Or just okay and okay. Or whatever. So thats what I will do. Not respond. Because I dont think youre understanding my problem with how you engage with me no matter how much I explain it.
>lmao find another thing to be interested in.
okay.
>if you have a strong working background in the history of early analytic philosophy.
I do not want to read every single related thing of mild relevance, because that equals mild interest. I've already used this analogy, but at that point philosophy is equal to reading a school textbook, for the sake of reading something you're supposed to, to fulfill some arbitrary end, for ultimately someone else.

Maybe I'm just not smart enough to do that. Indeed philosophy must not be valuable...for me.

I need a break before I respond to the one that actually responded to my nazi criticism, but just know. Your comment is valuable. >24596844

I found the start of the analogy I was thinking of I think. If anybody just wants to read something fun.
https://youtu.be/CqGsg01ycpk?t=36m18s
I think this entire stretch of dialogue from now till the next chapter "42:00" is basically a masterful representation of what is great about Plato’s approach to philosophy through the dialogues

>>24593478 (OP)
hey, do not be overwhelmed with what looks like an infinite amount of material. I am 23 and started reading at 19, and now my knowledge is mid-PhD level, despite never receiving instruction. IQ is not wholly genetic, do not say that others are 'smarter' than you and thus are more 'right'. If you know anything about Nietzsche, you'll know he wants you to disagree with him at every turn, and to redefine his ideas for your own. Modify him, dismantle him and all else, but recognize what he wants from all of this is for you to overcome yourself, and from that, to pursue what you are capable of exacting into reality.

Write as much as you can, don't feel that you always must know every single thing. If you have indeed read Deleuze, this should be your biggest takeaway. Be nomadic, explore ideas without absolute security. Oppose and challenge conventional philosophical notions.

Another tip, and this is from Nietzsche as well; treat all philosophy not as 'theory' but autobiography. The philosopher is most revealed in his philosophy. Oh and your friend is stupid, it is not the right-wing that harbors ressentiment, but more so the two-party political order and its benefactors. If they genuinely believe it is only the right-wing, ypu shouldn't have any regard for what else they may believe. Such is folly, and a clear indicator of weak thought.

And, also, dont think all philosophers are 'great insighters', as some 'intellectuals' may suggest. What is more enriching is understanding, for example, Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's profound aversion to Hegel and dialectical thought that manifests throughout his writing. Recognizing contexts like this is more fruitful than equally regarding all philosophers. Dont be afriad to take a side in that as well. Disagree with Hegel, or with Nietzsche. Tremble with disgust as I do when you read Husserl.

I hope I have helped in some capacity.

I've never seen anything useful come from philosophy. If your principals aren't simple enough to reduce to a couple paragraphs, they've reached a level of complexity that's useless both to you and anyone you describe them to

>>24598849
>I dont know how to respond to arguments that just say, things are just things, and thats good and okay, or not good and okay. Or just okay and okay. Or whatever. So thats what I will do. Not respond. Because I dont think youre understanding my problem with how you engage with me no matter how much I explain it.

Yeah that's not even close to what I'm advocating for. But I'll bracket this and show you I do understand what your criticism is.

You claim that he validates the ways that ordinary people use language, which is correct. You think that this opens the gate for people to throw around terms that borrow from structural similarities even if they don't UNIQUELY apply. (I am suspicious of this claim, but I digress.) You also claim that this literalizes a vague sense of meaning where it, according to you does not refer to any particular thing. But, here is where your big error is, you conflate the fact that people use words to express something which have normative uptake for there being no such thing as essential meaning, because an essential meaning would be able to be representable in a one-to-one correspondence. This is why you think the way a normal person using a term like "Nazi" would be cheating, because there is no one-to-one correspondence with an actual card-carrying camp-gaurding, book-burning, hitler-saluting *Nazi,* or whatever you consider to qualify as a nazi.

> the only way the word can have any SPECIFIC value is to intend to mean it literally and bring out all the things uniquely associated with the word.

This is exactly why I've been pushing back against you so hard here. Wittgenstein lays out some serious work to push back against as if there are meanings behind words, or thoughts literally behind our words. This is a common error made in undergrad classes on Wittgenstein. You still manage to make the same errors in representationalist styles of thinking that he explicitly calls out as mistaken.

Your being upset that someone can call someone a Nazi, without corresponding to a state of affairs (or whatever, where someone actually is a Nazi), is parasitic on this kind of error. He makes it rather clear that someone saying "ouch!" when someone in pain does not represent anything at all, as if it has conceptual content standing behind it, or that the "pain in our tooth was anywhere before it got in there." The point is that words EXPRESS things.

For instance, you don't actually have to be chud, or nazi, or an incel, or whatever, but if someone is calling you one, they are expressing something about you that has bearing on the culturally normative background that others can understand. Whether or not someone believes it when someone else calls you Nazi is a different story. You might even go into a language game where you give and ask for reasons why that person is a nazi, or even call that person an idiot for claiming that. See what I mean?

>>24598902
you aren't mid-PhD level and you need to stop smoking weed young man

>>24599041
It is not by my own accord I would say that, but is what a professor close to me has said, particularly of the second to third year. I only had said this here as a reference of knowledge.

I generally hold contempt for Philosophy PhD programs in America, and I dont have a high regard for academia in this country nor its members.

>>24598946
>You think that this opens the gate for people to throw around terms that borrow from structural similarities even if they don't UNIQUELY apply.
I do not think that. Whether Witt validates it or not, I rhink it would happen, and already did before he captured it in his words, and keeps doing so. If taking his philosophy to be true, and valuations just end at essenitally what can be summarized as "It is what it is". Then I reject the acceptance of a philosophy that does the equivalent of nothing, in the face of somebody beating another person.

The person who walks by somebody beating somebody to death, and says "thats just life" doesn't really "open the gate" to anything. He just through his inaction, allows a society that perpetuates such behaviour. I think you probably understand this. I just want to be clear with my framing on what I am concerned with. I want to escape Wittgenstein because, I want to be able to address what I determine wrongs, or at the very least, bring to light that there even can be a wrong not rationalize it.

>This is why you think the way a normal person using a term like "Nazi" would be cheating, because there is no one-to-one correspondence

No. You misunderstand. I'll reframe my criticism to get at what I mean when I reply to the guy I said I would before the break. Itll act as a response to both of you. So thats just a heads up.

>>24596844
>because they dont belong to the nazi party of 1933-1945 germany? they dont have to
To be fair. I have no idea why you guys think that when I refer to how people use Nazi, you think I am being absolutely "literal". Thats not the problem.
>because similarities between the two are large enough so that a common denominator may be used (just like a spruce and a birch are both referred to as trees, despite the fact that no birch is a spruce and no spruce a birch).
Theres already a word for that. Its called political ideology a more apt analogy, would be if somebody called a Deer fawn just grazing with its mother "dinner" and then me going "what?" and you going "da common denominator is dat animals can be food". A bit of a spontaneous analogy, so if you dont get it I understand, I had to pull from experience from this one. But if you understand my point about Nazis intuitively, you'll understand this analogy.

It doesn't matter whether a word can technically be "construed" as applicable. The word "dinner" like the word "nazi" reduces both subjects in different but similar ways. When language and words lack meaning, but yet want to intend meaning. That is the problem.

This is a quote from the thread where I first expressed my problem with Wittgenstein:
>"My problem with the use of nazi, is that despite literally not beings used in any essence appealing way, it is still appealing to some essence of the word, to lambast somebody. Thats why it doesnt matter that words meanings can change, because the word "Nazi" even when used broadly and meaninglessly, still seeks to evoke its original meaning."

You say, "words arent supposed to have a meaning or essence". But that doesnt actually matter or mean anything. The use of the word, appeals to no essence obviously, because it doesnt actually reference anything. BUT the word isnt just being used to mean "highly authoritarian and discriminatory" as people try to imply whenever I bring up this criticism. Everybody argues as if theyre opposing a literal meaning, because otherwise it would become obvious the incoherence of the word.

The word is used in a vague way, but does not refer to a vague thing. It is referring to a very specific type of person, with specific iconography(representations)/associations that indicate somebody that should be treated not just as "bad" but "harmful". I would have the exact same type of criticism for the use of "psychopath" or like 90% of psychological disorders. Narcissm is a perfect example.

Essentially, language wants to say something, but its use fundamentally does not allow it to say anything. That cannot be. You cannot have both. You cannot both appeal to "Nazi" and all its such literal associations that somebody should be treated with near similar disregard or representation of harm. But also use it so loosely, and shallowly, that it is possible that it can be applied to somebody that does not represent those same harms, or even those same FUNDAMENTAL values.

And just in a loose political sense. Nazism was a fundamental rejection of modernism.

People think that because both the Nazis and conservatives glorify "tradition" that they can easily be likened. But the "tradition" modern conservatives value, even the most far right ones that arent necessarily nazis (even to a lay person, as language is conditioned by) want to return to "tradition" in the sense of "Wow I just want classic American ideals even if thats subconsciously racist" But that is exactly the values with which Nazism was a rejection and response to. Just because they're both racist doesnt mean they'd be friends.

Yes I know "language isnt supposed to mean anything blah blah blah, so the lay person who yet decides meaning anyway, can be as fucking stupid and ignorant as possible".

Yes that is the point.

>>24598740
>Forget about it just pick a philosopher and master his/her work
this is retarded, getting a broad overview of the evolution of human thought is the most important and autistically focusing on one dude means nothing, especially for someone who is brand new

>>24599317
I'd actually say the opposite. I mean I think I disagree with both of you. But what got me interested in reading philosophy wasnt doing the vague broad overarching "history of philosophy!" thing everybody tells you to do. All the introductory books recommended don't work. Its a bunch of complex disparate ideas with seemingly zero relevance to you, and more often than not, the ways those ideas are expressed is either fundamentally imbued with some bias or another, or so dry it might aswell be the equivalent of flowing every single crack in an old tree and seeing whether it connects to others.
It was Plato’s republic, which spontaneously ended up on my radar, not chosen or anything, that got me to read philosophy. Not even Nietzsche, whos books were actually the first I bought myself on philosophy (I actually also tried reading one of Platos shorter books from the school library but it didnt work out) Obviously this might not apply to everyone else. But I think the broadness of Plato in general, and the simplicity of his mission (dude literally just wants to define Justice) is what hooked me.
Meaning I didnt really need to "force" interest, the interest was always there, I just hadn't been opened to it yet. I think if not for the fact that I was planning on going into philosophy, that at 17-18 I would have probably read Aristotle since that was who my religion teacher in school introduced us too, and what pushed me further towards an interest in philosophy.

Maybe this experience isnt the same for everyone else but I'd be genuinely surprised at anyone who genuinely got interested in philosophy by feeling like they "should" read in any particular way disconnected from their interests.

just read nigga

Deleuze sucks

>>24599317
Read the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History lectures by Hegel then

>>24598902
>Another tip, and this is from Nietzsche as well; treat all philosophy not as 'theory' but autobiography.
I already do this. Infact I worry I do it too much. A long while ago, I purported a theory here that the reason why "schizophrenia" was used in such a RADICALLY poor way in Anti Oedipus, is because Guattari is the homo, whos homosexuality was categorized by psychology as a pathology, and therefore, he radically and stupidly sought to reevaluate psychological categories completely and pretend schizophrenic people are just "different" and their way of thinking and engaging with the world is diametrically opposed and rebellious to capatalistic society blah blah blah. Its possible im misremembering a bit. But people always tell me "they dont literally mean schizophrenia!" but the whole book is not only a response to a psychological theory, but also they LITERALLY talk about the ways in which a schizophrenic is misinterpreted or something of the like.

Anyway, as for Nietzsche. I kinda just consider him a loser kind of like myself, trying to get an "imaginary revenge" on modern society by a complete rejection and reevaluation of the dominant moral and epistemological principles. Almost every single one of Nietzsche's books read like a rant. And sometimes that rant is insightful, and sometimes hes just talking about how nobles are so perfect, that they're less clever than the priest class because theyre more honest. And whenever they do "sin" or succumb to ressentiment, its a lesser kind because of just how perfect they are. They also truly forgive because they can forget, again, because of how perfect they are.

I'm obviously embelleshing a bit but you get the point.

When I look at this criticism, I feel shallow and dumb, because its criticism I never hear smart people, or even people in general throw out.

If I think for myself, I produce stuff like this. And worry I'm missing out on something that everybody else obviously already understands, especially people more well read on these concepts than me because:

How does any seriously self respecting intelligent individual possibly take a concept like ressentiment seriously? Unless they just know more and are smarter than me, and I'm like a retarded child who still thinks electrons orbit neutrons.

>>24600627
Is this a suggestion for me (OP) or that guy? Could be interesting, like simultaneously getting a specific focus on one dude while also a general view of philosophy. Is Hegel's history of philosophy lectures considered broadly good? or too biased? or?

Nobody responded to the elaborated criticism hmmm point proven?

>>24600643
Nietzsche uses 2 words, iirc vergeltung [think repayment] and rache [think what you would normally associate with revenge], he treats vergeltung as almost a sort of accountancy system or reciprocity system where there is a presupposition of 'equality' like in a formal judicial setting or a literal settling of accounts. Rache he treats as deeply psychological, wholly individual, and passionate.

How he treats the interchange of these 2 depends entirely on which book you're reading. Early Nietzsche basically said the 2 are so intertwined that justice itself was a form of resentment and society had to invent settlement procedures just to make itself work. Nothing too wild.

Somewhere around Daybreak he started treating them as 2 entirely different things. He tries to make one out as a form of weak self-preservation and the other out as a form of noble settlement procedure where the person knows there is no actual form of repayment available and acts coldly in their own self interest to secure the best deal. He even separates it further and claims taking violent measures against inanimate objects is type of defensive posturing.

GoM he goes back to societal necessity. AC is his usual anti-christianity stuff. You can read either or both if you care to but his opinions are commonplace on here so I'm not inclined to repeat them since it's more or less a waste at this point.

In some of his lesser known works he attributes the impulse of revenge to a sort of conditioned anesthesia response subconsciously, you quickly and impulsively seek it to dull out whatever other pain you might be feeling. Elsewhere he claimed it was the result of an overload of nervous energy and your mind/body has to create the desire in order for you to keep functioning. I could go on but those are probably his 2 best lesser known ideas.

In Zarathustra he treats it as something you have to overcome, rache at least. You can almost just think of it like this: you are going along in life and something happens which you perceive to be an affront to you. This is created by your imaginary notions of free will and the resulting passions you experience are you trying to figure it out but whatever happened already happened and you can't change that. You literally have to toss the cope and keep going. On the upside whatever survival mechanisms you have lodged in your grey matter were activated and you're still around so now you know more about yourself and can access them whenever you like and might even be able to innovate or transcend your previous thought patterns.

I would agree he can go on some rants. Nietzsche is a philosopher who can strike any given number of people in multiple different ways, and even the same person rereading him might walk away with 2 different takes on Nietzsche.

If you have an assertion and can make it then don't feel stupid. I personally don't know enough about the use and context in this case so I have no basis to comprehend. Cont.

>>24601007
If you can make the assertion successfully amongst those who do know and can comprehend then you may legitimately have something. What you choose to do with this is your choice.

>>24601007
>On the upside whatever survival mechanisms you have lodged in your grey matter were activated and you're still around so now you know more about yourself and can access them whenever you like and might even be able to innovate or transcend your previous thought patterns.
Thats interesting and id agree. I've read a bit of Zarathustra, but obviously not enough, I stopped reading prematurely, because a lot of it just felt like a repeat of Beyond Good and Evil in less clear language. Will probably return to it last.
>I personally don't know enough about the use and context in this case so I have no basis to comprehend. Cont.
Regarding what in particular? Ressentiment? Im just referencing what he talks about fairly early in Genealogy. Theres already a quote I laid out at the very beginning of the thread that shows how Ressentiment could just as easily apply generally considered leftists ideologies. Even things that generally arent encompassed by the two party system, like the imperialism that it relies on to provide cheap goods to its populace. Id actually generally say the two big parties probably generally cannot be ressentiment because they literally represent the big dominant powerful society that would have no need to seek an imaginary revenge, when they can simply do things.

Anyway im getting off track

>>24600619
Indeed.

>>24598923
>I've never seen anything useful come from philosophy
>says the man whose words are encoded in a symbolic logical system developed by philosophers
stay retarded anon

>>24601066
If you're treating the 2 as one concept then your still in early Nietzsche and this is resentment by default. Claiming to be an anarchist isn't going to help you much either since Nietzsche thought they were the equivalent of Christians. In fact I would say any ism or ology is fodder for Nietzsche. This doesn't stop people from trying to claim him but it never works out well for those who do. Any political overlap is always incidental. He is still largely popular despite all this. I can't honestly tell you why but he is still one of my favorites.

>>24601103
Why has nobody taken up the challenge of criticizing or opposing his philosophy indepth? I dont mean retarded liberal echochamber wank where they say "We can just make capitalism and democracy better! Even though were still thriving off of foreign slave labour!" I mean, actual engagement with his ideas

>>24601151
>If you're treating the 2 as one concept then your still in early Nietzsche and this is resentment by default.
I don't understand what you mean here. What is treating the 2 as one here?

Truth is that everything is nothing more but someone's opinion. And your's is as valid as any other. It literally makes no difference.

>>24601172
Contradictions exist.

>>24601168
Vergeltung and rache.

>>24601176
sigh i dont know about those specific words, im just engaging with Nietzsche's words as he presents them. Is genealogy really considered "early Nietzsche?" Twighlight of the Idols honestly seems like the most interesting book to me, based on bits ive heard from Nietzsche tubers about casuality and truth etc. Im much more inclined to that, than his quasi psychoanalysis rants. Which are at its absolute worst when talking about women.

>>24601175
So? Everyone experiences and interprets things differently. There is no such thing as objective truth. You can simply make shit up and it's as true as anything else.

>>24601198
I don't know what that has to do with anything. There doesn't need to be objective truth for contradiction to be incoherent.

>>24601200
If it's incoherent then it doesn't contradict anything. It's just incoherent. There is no such thing as a real contradiction, it's all just a variation of "that's just like, your opinion man".

>>24601195
I tried to offer a quick difference in my first response. Now that you know you can try rereading it or searching for the differences in Nietzsche if you care to. GoM was his middle phase, he may have been in his late 30's or 40's, it's one of his most influential books. If you're just interested in this topic you can skip his earliest material and read H2H. Tubers are about as useful as tubers, soaking views for asexual reproduction.

>>24599123
>>24599178
I think a lot of the issues a lot of us seem to think you have is that you frequently conflate or overstate you things that are besides your point, or make it more difficult to understand what your point is.
>Essentially, language wants to say something, but its use fundamentally does not allow it to say anything.

Especially with your use of the term "reference" you seem think that things cannot be referred to. Not all words have references, but some words do refer, like a proper name or something that can be indexed. Not all moves in language games are the same.

>You cannot both appeal to "Nazi" and all its such literal associations that somebody should be treated with near similar disregard or representation of harm. But also use it so loosely, and shallowly, that it is possible that it can be applied to somebody that does not represent those same harms, or even those same FUNDAMENTAL values.

Here's your issue, you literally can use words to do both. People can talk emphatically and not mean a literal nazi. People can talk literally and just be descriptive in calling someone a nazi. The differences between these is in the pragmatic dimension that you can see in intensions. People can have different intentions with using the words, and therefore mean different things (like ironizing as a classic example). People don't typically approach natural language as if it were a formal language where some sentences aren't admissable and have an absolute index of things and sentences as if we can cross check them if they can be admitted into a range finite meanings. It is one of the things characteristic of natural language that we can find novel ways to express things not wholly dependent on prior uses. In one sense, that's how diachronic change works in language.

What is at stake is that your issue with Wittgenstein is something that is just characteristic of a bad reading of him. Especially that his work does not boil down to "things are what they are." He definitely has a quietest and a therapeutic approach to philosophy, but this is a methodological and programmatic bent to his work, and not just a claim about language. He is literally make a claim about what philosophy is and can do, and not even his claim that 'there are no philosophical problems' is immune to people doubting him over it.

Even more your focus on words in particular, rather than language proper, or ways of using language is a paradigmatic example of your difficulty. Your real issue is with the ways people use language and it clearly frustrates you. You are frustrated with the way that you have generalized something from Wittgenstein's work that is actually inconsistent with the claims he makes in a broad appreciation.

>we can say "apple," but not mean the computer company, a particular computer, a fruit, or a graphic representation of a fruit
Do you see how silly this sounds?

>>24601220
If this is his middle phase then what Am i supposed to take from Genealogy that I cant just skip? Seriously. This is another annoying thing about philosophy, the later thought, and is why I basically skipped tractatus save for some lectures on it, because theres no point wasting my time on it if its addressed by the very same person who wrote it years later. The only people who would attach themselves then to the older work, are those who like the idea, like somebody like the colour red. I'm not talking about mere subjectivity.

Anyway, for now, Ill just keep reading until he says something more interesting than "The nobles are perfect and even when theyre flawed, theyre actually inherently less flawed". For those who dont believe me, and think im being hyperbolic, I could literally link the entire chapter where he says this, I reread it like 10 times to make sure I was seeing right.

>>24601240
I'll try to clarify a bit, for the purposes of your specific inquiry and how you are currently looking at it you specifically are in Nietzsche's early period in terms of your thinking, if you want to read a version of Nietzsche in tune to your mindset then his early works are going to make more sense to you.

All personal opinions on Nietzsche's rants aside, the GoM was arguably one of his most influential books, and it's lasting impact is still scattered across a host of subsequent movements. If you dislike Nietzsche at least read that one book, because if you do have an aversion to his psychological derivations the social evolution of repayment is addressed in that one and you might be surprised at how many subsequent thinkers borrowed from him.

Sleeping is a skill. He had an aphorism on this specific sentence. You skip sleep and keep reading and rereading. I believe in you noble anon.

>>24601237
I don't know how to respond to you, and you didnt engage with what i said...in MY opinion, before I get ahead of myself and start delusionally thinking that words have meaning and that truth and sensibility can exist. Anyway so Im just going to respond to the implications in a somewhat cheekily way

>>24601237
>Not all words have references, but some words do refer, like a proper name or something that can be indexed. Not all moves in language games are the same.
"Not all uses of the hard r N word are racist. But some words are racist, even without any explicitly racial connotation. Not all moves in the racist game are the same."
I say, in response to somebody telling me they think its bad to call Black people the N word. Isnt nuance so beautiful amazing and useful?

>Here's your issue, you literally can use words to do both.
If someone says "you cannot both be reasonable and racist" do you think "you literally can doe" is addressing the point?

Even considering everything you say after
>People can talk emphatically and not mean a literal nazi. People can talk literally and just be descriptive in calling someone a nazi. The differences between these is in the pragmatic dimension that you can see in intensions. People can have different intentions with using the words, and therefore mean different things
These are all things I already implicitly acknowledge, account for, and am aware of. If my faith in truth was not shaken by your replies, I'd go on a long indepth tangent explaining my problem with your engagement, but im afraid in our amazingly freedom valuing post truth world, id just be questioned on my arguments rather than proven against them.

>People don't typically approach natural language as if it were a formal language where some sentences aren't admissable

There was also a time people didnt typically approach surgery as requiring you wash your hands before handling surgical equipment as if it was a "formal". See how what you did is a bit circular? You inject the word "formal" as if theres something particularly special about not being retarded with language. I can just as easily characterize washing hands with a word that already containa an implication of what I already think is true.

This is why I prefer direct responses. I'm sorry if my style of speech is weird or unclear because i conflate things as you say, but you can just ask and inquire into what you're not clear on.

>It is one of the things characteristic of natural language that we can find novel ways to express things not wholly dependent on prior uses.

And one of the characteristics of technology is that we can find novel ways to be racist not wholly dependent on prior racisms (Auto detect public hand driers, if you know you know)

My point ultimately is that yes. I acknowledge all these things. And simply disagree and think they're wrong. You are fundamentally arguing on a level I'm not even on. Implicitly in my argument I have left that level behind.

>>24601237
>Even more your focus on words in particular, rather than language proper, or ways of using language is a paradigmatic example of your difficulty.
>Your real issue is with the ways people use language and it clearly frustrates you.
?
>your focus on words in particular, rather than language proper, or ways of using language
>rather than language proper, or ways of using language is a paradigmatic example of your difficulty.
do you see the problem yet?
>Your real issue is with the ways people use language
>rather than language proper, or ways of using language.
anyway
>You are frustrated with the way that you have generalized something from Wittgenstein's work that is actually inconsistent with the claims he makes in a broad appreciation.
What did I generalize precisely that contradicts Wittgenstein broadly? Genuinely curious on some clarity because I thought that it was broadly agreed anyway that Philosophical Investigations barely makes a clear argument and is moreso just questioning things that dont make sense. Because I know from my experience with Witt, he frequently prematurely ends a point he makes to move on with little elaboration.
>Do you see how silly this sounds?
First of all "apple" is in one of those categories thats closer to a "name" than a descriptor. Kind of like how somebody name can reference them specifically but technically references nothing about their actual identity other than arguably gender, but even that isnt a given.

"Nazi" is not a name it doesn't just conjure up a thing. It represents it. Well this is my baby attempt at philosophy so you can ignore this.

Second of all, you havent read my argument properly. The problem and flaw isnt using a word to mean a different thing (although thats a problem in its own way). Its using a word in a different way, yet meaning what that word is supposed to represent...wait...kind of like using a word like a name...but meaning it as a representation. I didnt script that, that came to me spontaneously.

>>24601286
>I believe in you noble anon.
Ill try.

>>24593478 (OP)
>>24593483
Right wing ideologies tend to cast their negative feelings onto an out-group. This is what Nietzsche means by the word "ressentiment", literally re - sentiment. To reassign a sentiment from oneself onto another group. Left wing ideology tends to be borne out of a feeling of resentment towards a power structure itself, and only occasionally on those who appear to occupy a place in that power structure.

>>24601826
Youre retarded. Also whenever I see people engage with an argument by way of appealing to "This is what X means" it tells me theyre retarded, because they cant express ideas in anyway that implies a synthesis of original thought with external thought. But instead simply refer to an already established thought, as if it meaningful in and of itself.

On another note.
>Left wing ideology tends to be borne out of a feeling of resentment towards a power structure itself
This doesnt mean anything and Nietzsche's entire philosophy is incoherent then. Christianity never assigns evil to a specific group or "persons". It assigns evil to "sin" and its representation in the devil, Christianity is so delusionally benevolent, that for its most ardent followers it will teach forgiveness to criminals that murder entire families, it creates a booth where the most evil people can confess their sins and simply allow themselves to be told "pray more and deeper" and become better people. There are no "evil" people in Christianity, only sinful. And thats a meaningful distinction. It does not hate the rich, it does not hate the powerful, there are like a dozen holy people of both classes in the old testament.

Nietzsche is a fucking retard by allowing such an open, broad, self validating, confirmation biasing idea, to be used so "intellectually" by people to conveniently characterize and dismiss whole swaths of people and thought, while being blind and ignorant to their own folly's of equally narrow, dogmatic, narrative constructing thought.

As one can likely tell. Im in a bad mood. So i dont particularly care how this reply is received.

>>24601869
kek, ah yes, the greatest of all minds, the one that begins a post with "Youre retarded".

Bro, you need to calm down, do you really think a heavy reliance on insults and profanity contributes to clarity of thought?

This type of post smacks of a confused and violent mind, closed even to the possibility of wisdom. Sad.

>be Nietzsche
>Make Priests the other, the outside, the different, the "not itself" invert the value positing eye. Priest actually bad, made society mundane and mediocre. Greatness good. Christianity always hostile external world. In the modern day, noble life affirming values first needs to negate Christian values and desecrate the concepts of objective values to create own values. External stimuli needed to act at all. Reevaluating of values fundamentally a reaction to the objectivizing of modernity and values such as all men created equal, subsumed under fundamentally Christian values. Fundamentally a reaction
>tfw when ressentiment turned back on Nietzsche

>>24593478 (OP)
You're probably convincing yourself these philosophical texts mean a lot to you, but they actually don't. You may actually care a lot about philosophy but find that other philosophical methods don't integrate into your world view at all, and that's why your eyes glaze over text. If logic or IQ were the only problem, there are ways around that if you care enough.

>>24601782
At any rate, your idea about Guattari, if you can successfully defend this notion amongst those who possess some understanding of the material then this is an idea you can do what you like with. You can even create facsimiles and contrast the recollection with the original idea itself. You might even be able to put it to a larger audience if you so desire.

>>24602634
>You may actually care a lot about philosophy but find that other philosophical methods don't integrate into your world view at all, and that's why your eyes glaze over text.
I think I explained this earlier in the thread, but I think the way my brain works. Ideas that never conflict directly with other ideas, bother me for my capacity for understanding. Its not that I glaze over the text. Its that when I see Nietzsche effectively ranting to what feels like a very very specific type of person, engaging barely directly with almost any conflicting or contending idea. It feels like the equivalent of being on 4chan, and hearing some retard who only has an incredibly narrow, already bias ladden view, talk about "trannies".

The ways in which people talk about them. ISNT actually engaging with any of their experiences. They do what I call "framing and characterizing". That outline some characteristic (for example mental illness) and then frame their entire judgement around that, so that you only see and understand them through that lens. And the greater the characterization (The more associations, and implications a characteristic has in defining somebody) The easier it is to produce an all encompassing view of a person or group of persons.

Mental illness embodies dysfucntionality, it embody's difference, our society already validates the idea that people with mental illness can or should be institutionalized. Mentally ill people can lack self awareness or other mental faculties. Even though the framing is narrow, because the words "mental illness" bundle in so many implications and associations, it ends up seeming like a valuable framework of understanding somebody, because it gives "a lot" to understand. The point isnt whether its "true" or not. I think just about the biggest thing I agree with Nietzsche on, is that facts are just interpretations. It COULD be true that they are mentally ill. Thats not the point. The point is that the framing is often used to HIDE another perspective or understanding. If a picture is framed in such a way that a plant is always infront of it, and you can only see the edges and top of the picture. The picture is "true" but what youre seeing isnt really what it is.

For example PTSD when framed from the perspective of a war veteran is almost never lambasted and characterized as "mental illness" its called PTSD before anything. But depending on what group or social class one is in, PTSD from rape, or some other thing may be invalidated. At that point, youre not really seeing it as it is: PTSD, youre seeing it as you've characterized: Mental illness.

Nietzsche LOVES doing this. Even when just talking about other philosophers not necessarily their ideas. He calls Spinoza "sickly".

And thats the thing, because framings can be true, ressentiment as a concept is so alluring, I can think of so many groups of thought I could easily apply it too, it can so easily conform to my biases.

As you can maybe see. I already have an internal framework for interpreting and understanding thought. But I am not well read, I'm like 23 years old and barely in school. The people who use Ressentiment so "conveniently" and "biasedly" as I would put it, so as to seemingly only apply to Right Wingers. Are waaaaay older than me, and so much more well read on almost everything I'm interested in.

I understand and get this post
>At any rate, your idea about Guattari, if you can successfully defend this notion amongst those who possess some understanding of the material then this is an idea you can do what you like with.
It shouldnt be about whether you can have the criticism or not. But whether you can defend it. But not only do most of these people who engage at length with these ideas not seem to have any interest in debate, but rather prepared content. But it feels like the way in which such criticism is engaged with is one of immediate dismissal "Thats not what they meant by schizophrenia" and immediate dismissal rather than engagement typically isnt typical unless the thought is really dumb. So if more well read people are saying and doing that. And I have nobody to directly engage with my dumb and ignorant criticisms, Im kind of stuck in a place where I can only believe that I am dumb, and everybody else understands things easier than I do and thats why nobody ever brings up the criticisms (and lasts) that I do.

Everybody treats the ideas with the inherent respect and reverence that...they seemingly are supposed to be.

>>24602634
>If logic or IQ were the only problem, there are ways around that if you care enough.
Yes, I'd be interested.

>>24603459
>necessity is part of contemplation linked to conjunction
>paradox vs orthodoxy of the thesis

You can argue it to me if you like but I've already admitted I'm not familiar the core offerings. I'm not sure I would actually understand but all I can offer you presently is that if the definition of schizophrenia they chose deviates significantly from the recognized psychological standard then there is already a linguistic argument you are looking at. You are now either posing as an orthodox interpretation or trying to offer a paradoxical offering to a paradoxical offering which would incline people naturally towards dismissal. If you want to make the argument then make it, if you need to resort to idpol then I will dismiss it, you can leave your ontological baggage inside you and make the argument without.

>>24603429
>Nietzsche LOVES doing this. Even when just talking about other philosophers not necessarily their ideas. He calls Spinoza "sickly".
Nietzsche understood what you're trying to say at a very deep level, and he was completely self-aware of the fact that he greatly minimized and simplified the perspectives of other people. For him, this was a conscious decision for the ulterior purpose of reaching his true self. You should understand that from Nietzsche's POV, even the most well-intended and respectful treatment of another person's thought is still hopelessly subjective, so whether you choose to be charitable or steamroll over their entire world view for your own ends does not matter. You are never going to arrive at what the other person truly means because you are not them.

>Its that when I see Nietzsche effectively ranting to what feels like a very very specific type of person, engaging barely directly with almost any conflicting or contending idea.
There's really not many back-and-forth statements you can have in a good faith debate before you hit rock bottom. Everything just boils down to "We value different things" and "We experience different things". You can read some old epistolary exchanges between philosophers if you like.

The only cure to your disposition is to consciously talk bullshit in front of people. You will learn that most it will pass and nothing will happen to you if you are talking bullshit. Hope that helps.

>>24598923
You have fallen in a dangerous frame of mind that will weaken your capacity for creativity. Never care about what 'smart' people think.

The reason why he holds the nobles so highly is because their existence is an affirmation of hierarchy and of superiority. You clearly need to read more secondary texts. It isn't that he draws upon the noble to rebel from society, but that there is no need for negation in the recognition of superiority.

To mediate an understanding of the nobleman as emblematic of superiority through contrasting it with ressentiment or inferiority, is, in fact, to harbor ressentiment yourself. His point in the evocation of the noble, the active, the superiority of master morality, is that it must be entirely understood in-itself. This even extends to Dionysus and Apollo; dialectically speaking, their difference does not form out of negation, but is affirmed in the dynamic of superiority and inferiority, (active and reactive) respectively. Deleuze shows this in N&P.

To view the active through the reactive, the affirmative through the negative, is not only a form ressentiment but a hallmark of dialectical thought. It is, then, the innocence and forgetfulness, the heroic and tragic character of the noble that is unwillingly cast within moral category. To mediate the view of oneself through moral category therefore is of ressentiment because, to Nietzsche, it is to 'get revenge', as you say, on the master morality that do not need such categorization of good and evil, etc, for their being.

This frame of mind, of course, parallels his admiration of aristocracy, but not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that there are those who are independent, exert control over their thought and will, and those of the herd who are of bad conscience; those who come to create their own value and those who do not.

Nietzsche was poor, he went from city to city in boarding homes and at times ate the same meal every day. He had very limited possessions that he kept in a wooden trunk, and he only took cold showers. He wrote BGE on a typewriter because, by that time, he was undergoing paralysis. Yet, he unquestionably understood himself as an aristocrat.

Your understanding of Nietzsche, despite reading his books, is so inferior because you have all of these reservations about yourself, about the 'right' way to think, to critique, to read. Nietzsche, more than ramblings, is a continuous poem. Your very suspicion that you have looked into the philosopher's life too much is, on the contrary, one that you have done so too little. Know how they died, their life history, what their pleasures and vices were, how they lived, even in some cases, what they ate. If you don't know these sort of things, your reading will have no direction, which is what I can sense from how you speak of Nietzsche and of Guattari.

>>24600627
This is what OP should do. Your biggest aim should be to understand the creation of Hegel through understanding the evolution of German Idealism broadly. From Kant to Hegel, and all in between. But don't neglect figures such as Kojeve, Wolf, etc. Mark Fisher has a good reading of Hegel, but don't get sucked into Zizek. University of Leipzig has some amazing scholars of German Idealism to start looking at before you read primary texts.

>>24593478 (OP)
Read Adler's How to Read a book. It won't make you understand, but it will show you the path to understanding.

>>24603969
>You can argue it to me if you like
I already basically loosely presented the argument, I havent got much else to say, Id have to read Anti Oedipus again or kickstart memory through lectures. But I actually got the idea about Guattari FROM a lecture because I didnt know his background but one lecture highlighted the irony of Deleuze basically being a traditional family man for the most part and Guattari, well being a homo academic, so not only characterized on the outside by society, but le solitary academic (well he had deleueze) its why I always say AO is probably eh more because of Guattari

>>24604132
>You should understand that from Nietzsche's POV, even the most well-intended and respectful treatment of another person's thought is still hopelessly subjective, so whether you choose to be charitable or steamroll over their entire world view for your own ends does not matter. You are never going to arrive at what the other person truly means because you are not them.
I dont like this implication, this implication that subjectivity gives a carte blanche for whatbis effectively stupidity and meaninglessness.

The example I always give to demonstrate the folly of this is
>"White girl says black people are scary and disgusting"
>Has never met or interacted with a black person
Most people would say it doesnt matter if these are there "subjectibe valid experiences" Only an enabling therapist would engage with this with complete zero value judgement. It doesnt matter that its their subjective experience its a fundamentally objectively untrue and irrational judgement. Its a generalizing statement, thats based on almost no direct experience with the subjects shes characterizing. It literally has ZERO reasonable basis, unless the idea does not come from themselves, theyre just the equivalent of a bot, and AI, something that consumes and subsumes content with no critical thought to validate norms they value for arbitrary reasons. I have literally seen these expressed feelings and thoughts btw, and the data backs it up that the type of retards that often think like this have little to no direct interaction with people of the other race.

And if youre stupid and pedantic with that example (I dont have patience for le higher order philosopher whos able to rationalize racism)

Then theres the pure and simple fact that FEELINGS arent REAL.

I have seen people get SO genuinely angry or emotional over something they assumed or believed too be true. Just for it to not be.
Have enough of these experiences occur to you, where somebody GENUINELY and truly believes something and they feel they have the justification to, and you have NO way to "logically" defend yourself, but you are absolutely 100% the victim of fake emotions that refer to and come from nothing real. And youll understand. Not that you need to as it doesnt take a genius to know that feelings and subjectivity are not "equally all valid and its just about different perspectives dude!"

This is the point I was making with the other anon about Wittgenstein as he proceeded to cleverly dodge all my arguments.

But it DOESNT matter that nothing can be "true" or really "mean" anything. Because DESPITE THAT WE CONSTANTLY TRY TO BE TRUE AND MEAN THINGS. Also CONTRADICTIONS exist whether subjectivity is "true" (lol ironic) or truth exists. If somebody is having feelings based off a misunderstanding, the reason they are FAKE and FABRICATED depends not on how much they feel it. But on the fact that they can be contradicted by their own understanding afterwards of it having nothing to refer to

>>24604132
>Everything just boils down to "We value different things" and "We experience different things". You can read some old epistolary exchanges between philosophers if you like.
Which is also why I vehemently disagree with this. You have no had enough good debates with a genuinely honest interlocutor. Because there is ALWAYS a conclusion. That can be arrived at. True honesty is forfeiting ones attachment to purely affirming their believes, and engaging with the other side. Or else. Why not just talk to yourself? There is no point if youre only engaging with the other as a way to bounce back the strength of your ideas to yourself. The strengthening of your ideas should come from a hole being poked by the interlocutor, for you to fix up.
This DOES happen in philosophy, just look at how the philosophy of names progressed for a relatively recent example.

>>24604420
>Your very suspicion that you have looked into the philosopher's life too much is, on the contrary, one that you have done so too little. Know how they died, their life history, what their pleasures and vices were, how they lived, even in some cases, what they ate. If you don't know these sort of things, your reading will have no direction
I dont know who youre talking to since nothing about Nietzsche is contained in the reply you responded to, so Ill assume youre inadvertently talking to me. Nothing about Nietzsche's life and backstory was considered in any criticism of him, everything is just an analysis of his own words thrown back at him. Also dont be so defensive about Nietzsche, he probably wouldnt like my criticism, but I remember him saying in Zarathustra that the true followers are the ones who dont believe and swallow his philosophy wholesale immediately.

Also using "you cant criticize a philosopher by looking at their life history" while defending Nietzsche, the guy that literally called Spinoza "sickly" to dismiss most of his philosophy is hilariously ironic, I dont know if youre doing a clever bit by making a "defense" of Nietzsche to make me feel comfortable and fine making criticism of philosophers.

And lastly.
>which is what I can sense from how you speak of Nietzsche and of Guattari.
Id prefer you just tell me what I got wrong about Nietzsche. I did spend money on his books. Id hate for them to be a waste, and I mostly liked and got used to his style of criticism in BGE and even some of Zarathustra because the way in which he was criticizing and questioning things was bold and novel to me. He didnt really seem to care whether he could or should. But the differences there also is that a lot of his criticism mapped onto what I currently experience of modernity and truth.

As tempting as ressentiment is. Its too...arbitrary.

>>24605304
>It doesnt matter that its their subjective experience its a fundamentally objectively untrue and irrational judgement. Its a generalizing statement, thats based on almost no direct experience with the subjects shes characterizing.
The part you're getting snagged on is this.
What Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, and countless others are trying to tell you is that material truth is not the core at all. This is because fundamentally, the categories that make up all our possible experiences, feelings, concepts, and so on are completely pre-determined and have an independent existence from our material world. It doesn't matter whether it's appropriate to be racist; what matters is that racism has a kind of eternal existence much like love and the other human emotions, and the material world is only a trigger to make particular instances of racism occur.

Your mistake is caring deeply about material "truth" to begin with -- it doesn't matter. The material world is only a stepping stone to a higher order of truth that exists independently of the concrete world. Aristotle's system states that any time one of his natural rules seems to err, it's actually a mistake of creation, and the material world simply failed to conform to reality. People have criticized Aristotle for this, but in truth every material world explanation has some convenient out like this. They all have gaps. No matter how desperately you try to make out every nook and cranny of the material world, you will never map out the true laws of reality because the inductive approach of experimental science simply cannot do this. So even if we abide by your purely material approach, it's not actually going to give you the truth you want in the end. Like if something is 97.2% true, that's not actually true then, is it? All you've found is a statistical correlation, and this is all modern science can actually give you. Both Aristotle's science and our science only successfully maps out a fraction of a fraction of reality, and neither will ever reach a point where "mistakes of nature" disappear. Aristotle was smart enough to see this, whereas we aren't.

>>24605273
I haven't read AO, so I have no basis to say whether it is 'meh, eh, or yeh' so to speak. The notion that it is any of the above simply due to the sexuality of one of the contributors means nothing to me though. The work functions on it's own merits or it doesn't. If there is already a cycle where this particular aspect is of importance then there is just a sort of ego validation. Something to the extent that he chose to rebel against psychoanalysis by engaging in Freudian speculation on sexuality. Conversely there could be a claim that the person wasn't 'insert an identity here' enough, as if to say that if only Guattari had been gay beyond gay he would have found a thought that could have landed the work that tried to get away from standardized universalized sentiments a standardized universal sentiment in and of itself. To simply say that the work cannot stand on it's own merits because of one of the contributors being gay is already an admission of sorts in the sense it just doesn't validate an ego. Any or all of these could apply and I have no basis for making a judgement. I could say with an equivalent justification that if the work can function on it's own merits then it doesn't matter how odd the couple that produced it are, and subsequent de-evolution into semantic games of whether it's gay enough, or trans-enough, or heterocoded enough, etc are just the result of lack of substantive responses.

I’m not reading all the shit ITT, including that long-ass OP. I didn’t get learnèd just to wank. Try a dialectal approach, i.e., assume the opposite position of what you’re reading. Work out the contours of what it means to hold x principal against y theorem, and have a good think about why things are both one way and another. Relax, drink some beer. They’re just words. You might get lucky enough to work out some convictions, and then luckier still by learning to how abandon them in time.

>>24593478 (OP)
honestly philosophy simply isn't for you. if you don't approach almost any work with contempt and ridicule you're never going to have an original thought on your own.
just do something else

>>24593478 (OP)
someone with exactly the same amount of reading and intelligence as you would not have this problem if they weren't crippled by self-doubt. you only feel like you can't think because you immediately believe your thoughts are wrong. what you have is a perfectionism, more precisely, a coward's form of vanity where you prefer to be wrong from the start instead of putting in the effort to realizing how you are wrong. you think you're wrong? no, you really only think you're too good to be wrong, so rather than putting an honest effort into stumbling and failing you prefer the safety of being wrong from the start. you've lost your own primacy. you remind me a little of Kierkegaard's character in the first part of Either/Or. perhaps that book will help you a little. to choose yourself is infinitely more valuable than knowing yourself since the choice is constitutive of your entire personality whereas contemplation always stops short. or perhaps Nietzsche's "I am for any skepticism so long as it's still willing to experiment" will help. it really only seems you've lost the immediacy of your own person, like someone who eats and eats but tastes nothing.
all thoughts eventually dissolve themselves. that does not make thinking worthless. whether your thinking is of any value to anyone else is another problem entirely. but certainly you would not go so far as to say they are useless to yourself?

just keep going. build around one idea and think about it for days. see it in what you do, what you've experienced, what others say. no amount of reading will make up for poor thinking. no amount of thinking will make up for the density of living.

>>24605304
you are out of your depth. the other anon has at least 5000 hours of study over you, moreover, he read it well. you're syncretic and haven't developed your own language well enough to engage with these thinkers on their level. your writing is littered with the vocabulary of your time, symptomatic of the gap you'll need to bridge before being able to read and understand anything. im saying that you're still thinking like an NPC which is why you won't attain the depth necessary to comprehend any of these ideas past a surface-level function of memory and a poor misapplication to problems that are merely current. you borrow too much from what is just the fashion of today. "enabling therapist," "black person", "AI", etc.

>>24606469
This is by far the most valuable advice OP can get at this point in their understanding of philosophy.

>>24604420
Great post. Shame it is wasted on >>24605340. The difficulty with Nietzsche is not that he's hard to understand, but that he's incredibly easy to misunderstand. Master morality and slave morality are historical types that were necessary for him to delineate in his Genealogy of Morals in order to set the path for Beyond Good and Evil, the title being self-explanatory for the self-suficient primacy he found necessary in order to face the death of God and nihilism. Nietzsche knew master and slave to be mixed now among moderns. It's not the case that he was looking to typify everyone around him in a chad-beta meme or urge slaves to be masters in one big cope.

Philosophy is a very deep rabbithole full of possibility for errors. Its difficulty could almost excuse the most heinous charlatanism from the likes of men like Hegel.

>>24607207
>language is the totality of all herd signaling conventions

>a falling apart of a life moment into 2 distinct things, one gives way to the other, both retained by memory. When refined of all quality there is but an empty form.

>the greatest progress men have made lies in their learning to draw correct conclusions.

sigh, a lot of responses to get to and none of them engaging with what im actually saying, i dont know how to express this fundamental thing. i make the criticism, and then instead of something saying why the criticism is wrong, things are first filtered through the philosopher or philosophy. so what ends up happening, is that people just reexplain or reelaborate the philosophy concepts, that i already implicitly acknowledged or was aware of in the criticism.

its an incredibly weird feeling. its making me rething philosophy completely if this is what it produces. I dont know how to explain it, but this is like almost EXACTLY why philosophy feels like something that cannot be criticized. And its making me wonder, if the reason so many scientists seem to be so dismissive of philosophy, even when so much of it seeks to validate science, is because of this. How do you even engage with any philosophy from any manner outside of the system? Its not as if science is without this fault, but when the Galileo's and Einsteins come along, and cant really prove any of their intuitions. Their theories eventually get validated and subsumed anyway, so somehow. Someway, science has a way of directly engaging with ideas outside of its own internal system, even if its a process slower than it should be that exposes a hole in science's process.

anyway im just rambling. sometimes philosophy, as its expressed online, feels like a collection of clubs you either have to become part of, or join another team/club.

when I used to argue much more online, the way Id explain this sort of lack of engagement disconnect is this:

Somebody makes the claim that the earth is billions of years old, because we can measure the age of rocks from the moon and earth to understand how long theyve been here.

A Believer of Christ refers to the bible and says "No the earth is 7000 years old".

Somebody#1 questions and inquires how that makes sense considering the direct evidence of the earth itself.

Believer points to the specific scripture in the bible and explains how it is explained as if the Somebody#1 did not understand that the earth is 7000 years old because the earth is 7000 years old (as per the bible).

>>24605340
I think, at rock bottom, Nietzsche is simply overrated. He had a few good ideas buried amidst an ocean of inane babblings fueled by, and directed at increasing, his own inflated ego.

I'm pretty sure that in BGE he extols the superiority of certain languages (and thus the people who originated them) because they sounded more musical to his ears. People who find this kind of comment deep or insightful are easily fascinated.

>>24605995
I have no idea what any of this has to do with anything said. Or who youre responding to. I never said or implied Anti Oedipus is invalid because Guattari is gay.

>just keep going. build around one idea and think about it for days. see it in what you do, what you've experienced, what others say.
I already do this. The cowards vanity thing is an interesting thought. I disagree with almost your entire psychoanalysis, you simply dont know enough about me and therefore cant imagine that the "you prefer to be wrong from the start" is a response to predicate experiences
>so rather than putting an honest effort into stumbling and failing you prefer the safety of being wrong from the start.
So this entire spiel is a fundamentally flawed judgement that comes from an impression of a person.
>to choose yourself is infinitely more valuable than knowing yourself since the choice is constitutive of your entire personality whereas contemplation always stops short
Especially this. You have no idea how much of my identity is a conscious choice and has nothing to do with "knowing myself" and is even arguably a rejection of "knowing myself" besides, how much of oneself can ever be determined to be "chosen" rather than known. One could argue ones chosen personality comes from "knowing themself" and vice versa. Knowing yourself comes from a choice to finally be truly self aware.
Or what if there is nothing to be known but impulses? How does an identity arise out of that.

anyway just rambling to show the folly of your at the very least appreciated attempt at a diagnosis, so that a prognosis could be produced. atleast you tried to solve the problem.

>>24607542
A lot of the responses here, combined with the consideration of how the original person who sparked this entire questioning that used ressentiment in such a comvenient way so as to only apply to right wing ideologies has made me wonder this.

Nietzsche is somebody in my personal reading that makes no sense to me for leftists to be so attached to. But when I see how selectively they talk about him and his ideas, and how they abstract them so that instead of "No human beings are equal, Some people are simply better by virtue of constitution, and women cant make good friends because theyre both tyrant and slave". Its instead "people constitution is important because sometimes we might give black people the wrong treatment because we dont value their race" or something like that. Im embelleshing a bit but you get the point...

I can only come to the conclusion that people sort of just make Nietzsche out to be greater than he is, and I dont mean "greater" so as to imply that his ideas are lesser. I find his challenges to conventionality interesting. When I say "greater" I mean, they make his ideas sound much more appealing and almost glorified. Sort of how everybody thinks of Jesus as the nice guys, but forgets when he trashed a bunch of peoples stuff for selling shit at a church. Idk im thinking on the spot.

>>24607527
you're either engaging with people who don't understand the ideas of these thinkers, or you are one yourself and are being corrected, or both. when you're on the same page with someone about a thinker is when things get exciting. the exchange is deeper, and it's no longer a question of whether either of you fully understood the text but instead how far you take it and where. it seems more like you lack the discipline to stick to one idea and navigate it properly, first as the author of that idea intended, and only after that does your commentary deserve merit. using science as an analogy already reveals your lack of the basics, since science is restricted to objectively verifiable reality and the currently accepted explanations for it. you even make the error of thinking science is amenable to explaining things outside of its domain. science can explain how the world began, but it can't explain the spiritual significance of God creating it 6000 years ago, or whether the men who wrote Genesis meant it in a literal factual sense or figuratively. you're too excited to put together a variety of ideas you only dimly understand and that's the resistance you get. internal validity and external validity are the keys you're looking for. a philosopher does not end up with theories that are testable the way those of science are, so they're rarely codifiable into a set of concise hypotheses for you to work around in order to prove or disprove; yet they aren't religious dogma. you can't adequately critique even one idea from a thinker if you haven't gone through their main corpus, since the thinker is tied to the thought and in most cases, has already answered your questions if you made a closer reading.

what you're really running up against is the fact that philosophy isn't inclusive: it's not a table anyone can just sit on when they have no table manners. you can argue about ideas alone if you'd like, but if you're arguing about Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment then obviously you are expected to have read him well. those little clubs you end up arguing with are comprised of those persons who do agree with a thinker and for one reason or another find your interpretations lacking. maybe they're right or wrong, but your own understanding should have reached the appropriate level to be able to tell for yourself who among them has engaged with him sufficiently. if you cant tell, then it's not yet the time for you to critique.

>>24593478 (OP)
Read secondary literature so that you can learn how to think about philosophy in a retrospective manner. The thing which makes western philosophy distinct from eastern philosophy is that westerners have long had a tradition of self-critique while easterners have prioritized the creation of new systems. Whitehead said that western philosophy is a long series of footnotes to Plato and honestly that’s the best way of describing it. Secondary literature will help you to learn how to think about the tradition from outside of one specific instance of it. (Although this is never fully realizable, you will always approach the tradition from a standpoint which will include certain predispositions and values which will color your understanding of it) The biggest things which you should look for are internal incoherences in a philosopher’s work, self-contradictions from previous works, and innovations from older methods. You need to realize that philosophy is a kind of tool to help man reach understanding of the world. As the world is constantly changing the tool which comprehends it has to change as well. You cannot expect one form that the tool takes to be inherently more valuable than the others. As such it is usually pretty helpful to have an understanding of history and psychology as well. All new philosophy is born because the changing world necessitates new forms of understanding itself.

>while easterners have prioritized the creation of new systems.
until the french in the 20th century inspired by Nietzsche. Not that I dislike all of them anyway, Focault is pretty nice.
>is that westerners have long had a tradition of self-critique
I think
>Secondary literature will help you to learn how to think about the tradition
Is what Im looking for, a way to escape the circular echo chamber feeling of some philosophies where they just make "too much sense" because they have to by virtue of you reading it, and that implicit relationship makes it hard to engage rather than just read.

But anyway thats just rambling. What do you mean by Secondary Literature and how do I go about that?

>>24607546
Ah D&G anon, I know not the numbers of those representing D&G here nor whether you are D&G anon. I suspect there are many criticisms of the German Idealist movement lodged in the works of D&G but likely few refutations, this is not meant in any pejorative way mind you, it was the most dangerous school of philosophy in history. Hegel did speculate that spending too much time in the doctrine of notion (iirc although it may have been the tail end of doctrine of essence) would produce a Spinoza style thinker that lacked 'absolute person'.

Rest assured that I will continue my reading of D&G, and hopefully will contribute a meme here and there, I have liked what I have read thus far. Rest assured, there is no spirit that cannot be added, and a mere refutation could only be the beginning yon D&G anon.

>>24607610
Dont really care about any of this. again doesnt engage with anything i said. i tried to pay attention to the critique of the science analogy, but you didnt understand what i was saying
"science is actually different from philosophy!" thank you for again, proving exactly what i was talking about, and EXPLAINING something that I already implicitly acknowledge in my criticism, or rather in this case "analogy" like said Nietzsche and Wittgenstein criticism.

So. To your contribution I say. Okay. I am not good enough for philosophy. I dont care anymore.

>>24607207

Hah, thank you. Your last remark is something missed in the usual understandings and depictions of master and slave morality, and is something I saw as a contrasts to other philosophers when first reading Nietzsche, BGE particularly.

Namely, that his philosophy isn't for everyone to follow, in fact, many people cannot and are not able to follow it, rather, are not able to release themselves from bad conscience, from other moral imperatives, etc.

As you say, it is not to classify someone with, as a sort of prescriptive measure, but they are each a response and life outlook from the death of God. This is especially apparrent when inferring Nietzsche's aphorisms on the relation of ideal to the self in BGE.

You're on 4chan so I'll assume you're around my age of 23. Are you studying philosophy alongside your major, or are you majoring it for a further academic path, such as JD/Philosophy PhD? It is the former in my case.

>>24601195
You have a bad mindset here, very bad.

What you view as 'quasi psychoanalysis rants' are actually the beginnings of the discipline. As much as Freud thought bad of Nietzsche, he, in his beginning works, quoted nietzsche numerously and the discipline of psychoanalysis is indebted to Nietzsche. Instead of, say, trying to trace the development of those ideas to Frued, or perhaps correlating them with his notion of forgetfulness as an active force of instinct, you do nothing but bemoan even having to read it in the first place. You need to change your mentality significantly when you read.

>>24593483
Critical theory can be used and subverted by hardcore religious reactionaries such as myself, my written work has engaged thoughtfully with people like Marcuse and Foucault as much as people like Evola and Schmitt. Some say playing both sides is a Jew tactic but what's good for the goose is good for the gander I guess.