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I've always thought Nietzsche was the only funny (hilarious more than strange) modern philosopher. Compared to dullards like Kierkegaard, he's a barrel of laugh

I've always thought Nietzsche was the only funny (hilarious more than strange) modern philosopher. Compared to dullards like Kierkegaard, he's a barrel of laughs. I also think he's also the perfect example of the old saw "all modern philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle." One of my professors gave a very learned exposition of Nietzsche as the philosophical forbear of Nazism. It was pretty convincing, frankly, and I still think of Nietzsche as fundamentally evil. Funny, but evil. The exposition took days of his lecture time, so I won't try to recreate it here, but lightly dismissing that charge by laying it all at the feet of his sister is a mistake. The playful disassembling of Western philosophy that Nietzsche indulged in had real consequences in the actions of those who studied his works.

BucketSort 8y ago
He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us understood his lessons, we would be less susceptible to being manipulated and used for evil. I think he was so far ahead of his time that he's even ahead of us in the present. Have we gone beyond good and evil yet? Have we learned how weak those concepts make us? How easily they permit us to be controlled? Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." How could such a modern people be so ignorant of the forces that shape their lives, even when we have such great teachers?
- 1000units 8y ago
  Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." Does this change if we instead consider ourselves "powerful" and "weak"?
  - BucketSort 8y ago
    "Good" and "evil" placate the mind, they encourage us to think less about the nuances of issues, they are traps.
    - 1000units 8y ago
      I agree there.
- btilly 8y ago
  Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real "delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to escape.
  - BucketSort 8y ago
    Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.
    - btilly 8y ago
      As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that anyone else read something else into him. Now consider quotes like these: "The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?" Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.
      - misterdoubt 8y ago
        Cherry-picking sentences out of a famously enigmatic writer is a disservice to both his thought and your own.
- tarsinge 8y ago
  I disagree. Sure, power rules the world, everyone knows it and knew it before Nietzsche, "good" and "bad" are the results of the choice of people to tune up or down their desire for individualistic power over other's people good. I fail to see how Nietzsche is innovative on our understanding of this, I mean that's even the core teaching of christian philosophy. What's original in Nietszche thought is not that power rules the world and that people are longing for it, it is the challenge of the western and christian values that power and individualism is "bad".
  - BucketSort 8y ago
    It wasn't that he just talked about power ruling the world, that wasn't his main thing, he critiqued what people use it for and what the ultimate aim of it should be. He deepened our understanding of what power IS. For Nietzsche, most people possess a fake type of power, they simply use it to maintain "wretched complacency." I think the ultimate conclusion he made was that the most noble goal we can have is to overcome ourselves, and when power is used for that purpose, it is great. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not an end." If you are satisfied with complacency, with pleasure seeking modern society, you will hate him.
1000units 8y ago
Can you explain how he's evil? Simply associating him with Nazism and then condemning him as evil is rather unenlightening and cliche. Zionists also liked Nietzche, my mother likes Nietzsche, &c. Are these people evil?
- sverige 8y ago
  It has been at least twenty years since I read anything by him, so my cliche statement is based on the conclusions I came to over time (I had another period of reading him about 35 years ago) and the judgments I made about those conclusions. I'm frankly unwilling to reread him at this stage of my life, so I don't have any details for you, but my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him, rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do), and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil. Others here have said that violence has declined, which is ridiculous in light of the many genocides perpetrated over the last century. The two atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII likely killed more people in a couple of days than most despots did in a lifetime. And those barely register on the timeline of mass killings in the 20th century.
  - misterdoubt 8y ago
    > my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him, He didn't think well of the state of European philosophy, but "despised all that went before him"? Not at all. He didn't think very highly of his contemporaries working in European philosophy (and politics), but was deeply embedded in classical philology. > rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do) That's a broad brush. To use a slightly narrower brush, he starts from the (by no means unique!) position that no God is the source of morality in the world. > and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil. Sigh. At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical project are attempts to re-ground morality on something other than the crumbling foundations of 'Western values.' He gave you a dozen books with which you can think along with him and try to solve that problem. If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.
btilly 8y ago
You can find a similar case against Nietzsche near the end of Enlightenment Now. The key point being that Nietzsche believed that superior people should rule over inferior people, and should achieve that rule through violence and war. Which are uplifting activities for those who engage in it. And once it is established who is superior, what is done to the inferior doesn't matter. This was an inspiration to the Nazis who, of course, decided that Germans were superior, should establish this through war, and inferior people should be killed or enslaved as the Germans saw fit.
- armitron 8y ago
  That book contains so many outright falsehoods and misrepresentations that it belongs in a garbage bin. Even the guardian [1] thrashed it not to mention titans like John Gray [2]. It doesn't surprise me to learn that Pinker also manages to misrepresent and malign Nietzsche. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-now-steven-pinker-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-... [2] https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight...
- keiferski 8y ago
  I used to see Pinker’s name and ideas around and thought he had something interesting to say, so I picked up this book. What a complete waste of time. It feels like his knowledge of intellectual history comes from skimming Wikipedia articles.
apoph3nia 8y ago
Kierkegaard is pretty hilarious too tbqh
- sverige 8y ago
  Well I had a hard time finding those parts, but maybe I was too young when I read him in my late teens / early 20s. He seemed more dolorous than most to me at the time. Perhaps he's worth revisiting.
interfixus 8y ago
If your moniker is anything to go by, you are Swedish, and should be able to read Kierkegaard in the original Danish. You proabaly ought to if you believe him a dullard. He's funny alright, at times bordering on laugh out loud, but it possibly does take some localised context to quite get it. His content is vapid nonsense, of course, but that's a different matter.
minecrafter6561 8y ago
>kierkegaard isnt funny “Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” - K you've got no sense of humor if you think kierkegaard is a dullard. either/or is basically one long stand-up special, especially the bit about the trophonean cave
- apoph3nia 8y ago
  Failure in loving, failure in living from everyone's favourite pre-quantum either/or philosopher of the 0/1 binary. Let's give it up for Søren Kierkegaard!

BucketSort 8y ago

He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us understood his lessons, we would be less susceptible to being manipulated and used for evil. I think he was so far ahead of his time that he's even ahead of us in the present. Have we gone beyond good and evil yet? Have we learned how weak those concepts make us? How easily they permit us to be controlled? Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." How could such a modern people be so ignorant of the forces that shape their lives, even when we have such great teachers?

1000units 8y ago
Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." Does this change if we instead consider ourselves "powerful" and "weak"?
- BucketSort 8y ago
  "Good" and "evil" placate the mind, they encourage us to think less about the nuances of issues, they are traps.
  - 1000units 8y ago
    I agree there.
btilly 8y ago
Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real "delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to escape.
- BucketSort 8y ago
  Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.
  - btilly 8y ago
    As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that anyone else read something else into him. Now consider quotes like these: "The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?" Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.
    - misterdoubt 8y ago
      Cherry-picking sentences out of a famously enigmatic writer is a disservice to both his thought and your own.
tarsinge 8y ago
I disagree. Sure, power rules the world, everyone knows it and knew it before Nietzsche, "good" and "bad" are the results of the choice of people to tune up or down their desire for individualistic power over other's people good. I fail to see how Nietzsche is innovative on our understanding of this, I mean that's even the core teaching of christian philosophy. What's original in Nietszche thought is not that power rules the world and that people are longing for it, it is the challenge of the western and christian values that power and individualism is "bad".
- BucketSort 8y ago
  It wasn't that he just talked about power ruling the world, that wasn't his main thing, he critiqued what people use it for and what the ultimate aim of it should be. He deepened our understanding of what power IS. For Nietzsche, most people possess a fake type of power, they simply use it to maintain "wretched complacency." I think the ultimate conclusion he made was that the most noble goal we can have is to overcome ourselves, and when power is used for that purpose, it is great. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not an end." If you are satisfied with complacency, with pleasure seeking modern society, you will hate him.

1000units 8y ago

Can you explain how he's evil? Simply associating him with Nazism and then condemning him as evil is rather unenlightening and cliche. Zionists also liked Nietzche, my mother likes Nietzsche, &c. Are these people evil?

sverige 8y ago
It has been at least twenty years since I read anything by him, so my cliche statement is based on the conclusions I came to over time (I had another period of reading him about 35 years ago) and the judgments I made about those conclusions. I'm frankly unwilling to reread him at this stage of my life, so I don't have any details for you, but my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him, rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do), and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil. Others here have said that violence has declined, which is ridiculous in light of the many genocides perpetrated over the last century. The two atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII likely killed more people in a couple of days than most despots did in a lifetime. And those barely register on the timeline of mass killings in the 20th century.
- misterdoubt 8y ago
  > my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him, He didn't think well of the state of European philosophy, but "despised all that went before him"? Not at all. He didn't think very highly of his contemporaries working in European philosophy (and politics), but was deeply embedded in classical philology. > rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do) That's a broad brush. To use a slightly narrower brush, he starts from the (by no means unique!) position that no God is the source of morality in the world. > and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil. Sigh. At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical project are attempts to re-ground morality on something other than the crumbling foundations of 'Western values.' He gave you a dozen books with which you can think along with him and try to solve that problem. If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.

btilly 8y ago

You can find a similar case against Nietzsche near the end of Enlightenment Now. The key point being that Nietzsche believed that superior people should rule over inferior people, and should achieve that rule through violence and war. Which are uplifting activities for those who engage in it. And once it is established who is superior, what is done to the inferior doesn't matter. This was an inspiration to the Nazis who, of course, decided that Germans were superior, should establish this through war, and inferior people should be killed or enslaved as the Germans saw fit.

armitron 8y ago
That book contains so many outright falsehoods and misrepresentations that it belongs in a garbage bin. Even the guardian [1] thrashed it not to mention titans like John Gray [2]. It doesn't surprise me to learn that Pinker also manages to misrepresent and malign Nietzsche. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-now-steven-pinker-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-... [2] https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight...
keiferski 8y ago
I used to see Pinker’s name and ideas around and thought he had something interesting to say, so I picked up this book. What a complete waste of time. It feels like his knowledge of intellectual history comes from skimming Wikipedia articles.

apoph3nia 8y ago

Kierkegaard is pretty hilarious too tbqh

sverige 8y ago
Well I had a hard time finding those parts, but maybe I was too young when I read him in my late teens / early 20s. He seemed more dolorous than most to me at the time. Perhaps he's worth revisiting.

interfixus 8y ago

If your moniker is anything to go by, you are Swedish, and should be able to read Kierkegaard in the original Danish. You proabaly ought to if you believe him a dullard. He's funny alright, at times bordering on laugh out loud, but it possibly does take some localised context to quite get it. His content is vapid nonsense, of course, but that's a different matter.

minecrafter6561 8y ago

>kierkegaard isnt funny “Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” - K you've got no sense of humor if you think kierkegaard is a dullard. either/or is basically one long stand-up special, especially the bit about the trophonean cave

apoph3nia 8y ago
Failure in loving, failure in living from everyone's favourite pre-quantum either/or philosopher of the 0/1 binary. Let's give it up for Søren Kierkegaard!