Thread 24856475

Whenever someone talks about Nietzsche, inevitably others will say he interprets him wrong.
My impression reading Nietzsche is that firstly you really need to have a solid grounding in history, philosophy, literature, and, more than anything, contemporary European politics, culture, and trends of the time he was writing. Do young edgelords reading Zarathustra really have all that?
Secondly, it's that these are the semi coherent rantings of a madman. They are lucid enough to where you can take those bits and then fill in the gaps with your own ideas. Hence everyone ends up with his own "interpretation," when really it's just a Rorschach test.
Am I wrong?
I tried reading him again to confirm, but I just couldn't. I literally fell asleep. Then I tried again and fell asleep again. I think when you are young, you feel like the Truth is out there and possessed by these wise men and even if they are opaque and indecipherable all the better. Then when you become older you realize "who the fuck is this asshole and why should I care what his opinions are? If he can't even be bothered to present his opinions intelligibly? I have opinions too, what makes his so special?" Anyways. I could be totally wrong but this is what I'm thinking.

>>24856475 (OP)
I had a professor who both taught and loved Nietzsche say that you could pick any sentence from him at random and it would be contradicted somewhere else in his work. This means that pretty much every interpretation is effectively an original creation and that they have to fight among themselves (as I believe Nietzsche would have wanted).
This doesn't at all mean that he isn't worth reading because you can just "have your own opinions." Thinking through Nietzsche is a much better way of thinking than doing it by yourself.

>>24856516
Nietzsche wrote about this

>>24856520
ummmmmm, source?????

>>24856520
No he didn’t

>>24856525
Faggot you ruined this joke with your unfunny 2017 humor you absolute imbecile I will find you in real life and show you what will to p(ower) looks like

>>24856475 (OP)
I get Nietzsche.
And of course, everyone else interprets him wrong.
Also, seriously, he's neither incoherent nor a madman.

>>24856475 (OP)
>My impression reading Nietzsche is that firstly you really need to have a solid grounding in history, philosophy, literature, and, more than anything, contemporary European politics, culture, and trends of the time he was writing
Yeah, I know just the trick...
*googles nietzsche philosophy companion pdf*

>>24856475 (OP)
I get the main ideas and he’s a great thinker but sometimes I have no idea what he’s saying. He tries way too hard to be dense and poetic at times.

>>24856475 (OP)
Does anyone actually "get" anything?

>>24856475 (OP)
the correct way to interpret nietzsche is to see him as someone with a limited and incorrect understanding of western philosophy and culture and ONLY western philosophy and culture. It's why you hear him talking about "master morality" and "slave morality" and chucking buddhism and islam into one of those two categories and straight up ignoring asian philosophy/ culture. again, positioning christian culture and greek culture as absolute opposites and the socratics as proto-christians is nonsense and evidence of someone being incapable of escaping a christian worldview.

Does OP actually "get" pussy?

>>24856475 (OP)
>artists (of the future)

He shot called the course of modernity, the world wars manifesting godless total war by European colonial powers, and evolution of ressentiment driven socialism that fueled them further. You either have a concordance in your head from thorough reading of threads indicating further development or 'systematization', or you don't. Read James Hall's Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body— it's Birth of Tragedy for the Renaissance.

This guy gets him

yes, the distinguishing is:
1) if they read the greeks
2) if they are someone nietzsche is personally attacking and they don't want to grant him anything
Anyone who did 1 and isn't like a totally uncritical academic or Christian should be able to understand him fine

i think this guy just had too much time to think, his thoughts come from a deep loneliness. If he had more people asking him to hang out, he would have never arrived at his conclusions.
By the way it really caught me offguard seeing your pic posted, i dont want you to doxx yourself but are you from that area?

>>24856475 (OP)
I really don't understand what's so hard to understand. The man's also a troll, read Ecce Homo and tell he ain't just fucking about for the most part.

God is dead -> No higher meaning -> Nihilism
No god -> No god given morals -> relative morals
Nihilism == Bad -> find new meaning -> become sigma grind set übermensch

Just will the next step in evolution into existence, make your own laws, make the world into what it ought to be according to your will. Baby (free, unlimited potential) -> Become a beast of burden by being formed in the image of society (the dragon and them scales) -> become a lion and say fuck it to the dragon and kill it (awaken) -> become baby, but more evolved über baby of unlimited potential.

neetzuh didn't even get himself

>>24857921
>i think this guy just had too much time to think, his thoughts come from a deep loneliness. If he had more people asking him to hang out, he would have never arrived at his conclusions.
Are you referring to me or Nietzsche?
>By the way it really caught me offguard seeing your pic posted, i dont want you to doxx yourself but are you from that area?
No I just like it.

>>24857953
>I really don't understand what's so hard to understand. The man's also a troll, read Ecce Homo and tell he ain't just fucking about for the most part.
So now we have everyone so far with a different interpretation, the latest one being that he's a troll. You can see where my confusion comes from.

>>24856542
2017? This was a joke in like 2012.

>>24858130
i meant nietzsche
i have spent some time in this city years ago, was beautiful

>>24856533
Have you read him?

>>24856525
BGE

There's really only two ways to interpret Nietzsche
He's either a self help author meant to be read allegorically (Kaufman) or he's a reactionary eugenicist.

>>24856525
Nietzsche

Nietzsches writings seem like ramblings of a bipolar autist during a manic episode. He is mainly vibes. He almost does like an old version of edgy slam poetry

>>24858235
Just imagine how much he would shit on you for that statement.

>>24858284
I'm correct thoughbeit
Nietzsche was either calling for the culling of the weak or he was somehow joking

>>24858363
Are you retarded? The ubermensch is just an ideal, an archetype. It doesn't denote any actual demographic.

>>24858363
He pointed at hard to face, newly exposed facts at the time like the long term results of cultivating weakness according to Darwin. You're the one who thinks in terms of culling. He points out subtleties like how apparent weakness can in a different situation become a strength.
According to him high output golden ages don't come from monolithic focus on goals but interactions between conflicting forces that release pressure in output that synthesize parts of both. Like stagnant scholar societies in conflict with high vitality horse raiders. The raiders absorb knowledge and contribute vitality, the dusty books get used.

>>24858235
That's not what Kaufmann said at all lol. Kaufmann thought we should interpret him as an experimentalist.

Actually that reading is probably more in line with the eugenics than other readings, since Kaufmann thinks that Nietzsche actually want's to try the things he advocates for in his books.

There are like four main interpretations:

1. Everything (or almost everything) he wrote is nonsense (Heidegger, Danto)
2. The perspectivism all the way down interpretation (Nehamas, Butler)
3. Experimentalism (Kaufmann)
4. Neo-Kantian (Deleuze)

Then there are interpretations for specific periods of his writing. Most people see the early Nietzsche, (Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations) as writing in the spirit of Wagner and Schopenhauer. The middle Nietzsche, influenced by Lange and Buchner (HATH and Daybreak/The Dawn, sometimes the Gay Science) was forwarding physicalism and it's conclusions. Then the late Nietzsche, starting with Zarathustra, is where most of the disagreements are.

>>24856475 (OP)
I've never thought of Nietzsche as particularly opaque, even his most arcane and allegorical writings are crystal clear compared to your average French Critical Theorist

>>24859399
>2. The perspectivism all the way down interpretation (Nehamas, Butler)
What do they say? (And which Butler is this?) I agree with the Kaufmann experimentalism angle if what he means by that is that Nietzsche is always trying out new combinations of values and views (which other people tend to think are impossible and incoherent to combine) and later evolving to adopt new ones, because it's impossible to read The Gay Science or Thus Spoke Zarathustra carefully and not see him practically declaring that this is what he is doing. But I also take seriously some things he says regarding the character of ambiguity and perspectivism in The Gay Science. So I want to know if Nehamas or Butler say things I agree with or not.

>>24859456
It's just a general category for people who think that his epistemic perspectivism is fundamental. So it's broad and many of the people who I categorize there don't agree with each other at all. I was thinking of Judith Butler here but there are grounds to disagree with my characterization.

Nehamas' project was to explain Nietzsche under his notion of "Aestheticism". I don't think I can explain it very well here, but Nehamas' is one of the most significant Nietzsche interpretations right now. If you're interested I'd recommend reading "Nietzsche: Life as Literature". Maybe the basic idea is something like: "Literature offers an interpretive framework to reconcile the contradictions in Nietzsche" and the reconciliation basically functions by rejecting the idea that there is any foundational truth in Nietzsche. It's more like a collection of interpretations.

The Kaufmann experimentalism approach, which is still fairly popular (I think I remember a professor from Sacred Heart championing this for a while), is opposed to the perspectivism approach on the grounds that experimentalism believes Nietzsche's perspectivism is a tool to better capture a foundational truth. In this respect the perspectivists think that there is no 'truth' in Nietzsche's project, all truth collapses into interpretation (or perspectives) where as the experimentalists think that Nietzsche believes in a foundational truth (or at least the possibility of one) but is trying to better capture truth with perspectivism.

>>24856475 (OP)
Don't really care about your thread, but I was scrolling through the catalogue and immediately recognized that bridge. You made me smile, OP. So I guess I have to contribute to your thread somehow.

Anyway, here is Nick Land's interpretation of the Übermensch, which might be the most accurate I've come across with so far:
>Nietzsche wholeheartedly subscribed to the basic tenets of Schopenhauer’s diagnosis, but sought to deepen his cosmology, and to jettison the residual egoism that lay in its continued obsession with redemption. Nietzsche no longer considered the sufferings of the self to be a serious objection to the basic cosmic processes that underpinned it. Where Schopenhauer had depicted the unconscious striving of nature as a ‘will-to-live’, whose most sophisticated form is the egoism of the individuated human animal, Nietzsche re-named this fundamental drive the ‘will-to-power’, for which survival is a mere tool. For Nietzsche, life is thought of as a means in the service of an unconscious trans-individual creative energy. Mankind as a whole is nothing but a resource for creation, a dissolving slag to be expended in the generation of something more beautiful than itself. The end of humanity does not lie within itself, but in a planetary artistic experiment about which nothing can be decided in advance, and which can only be provisionally labelled ‘overman’. For overman is not a superior model of man, but that which is beyond man; the creative surpassing of humanity. Nietzsche read Christianity as the nadir of humanistic slave-morality, the most abject and impoverishing attempt to protect the existent human type from the ruthless impulses of an unconscious artistic process that passed through and beyond them. The mixture of continuity and discontinuity connecting Nietzsche’s atheism with Schopenhauer’s is encapsulated in Nietzsche’s maxim, ‘man is something tobeovercome.’

>>24859544
Thanks I'll check this out. Frankly the section on style and taste being the one thing needed in The Gay Science does quite support the idea that for Nietzsche life should be lived aesthetically like a narrative. And in Zarathustra there's a lot of similar thinking. So I might be on board with what Nehamas is saying, I'll see what he's up to.
>In this respect the perspectivists think that there is no 'truth' in Nietzsche's project, all truth collapses into interpretation (or perspectives) where as the experimentalists think that Nietzsche believes in a foundational truth (or at least the possibility of one) but is trying to better capture truth with perspectivism.
Interesting. I think Nietzsche is quite explicit in The Gay Science that there is no objective world for him, only perspectives, his "new infinite" and so forth.

>>24856475 (OP)
I agree with your second point in particular, I think Nietzche is better characterised as a proto-absurdist than a traditional philosopher and this is what trips a lot of people up.

>>24858171
No. Have you?

>>24860055
No

>>24858235
lol

>>24857301
kek

>>24856475 (OP)
On the Genealogy of Morals blew my mind when I was in college. I feel like that's where anyone should start if they're going to deep dive Nietzsche

>>24860644
his stone age economics of justice is literally anthropology meets nihilism