14 ms·
The Twilight of Nietzsche
- Borrible 4y agoThe interesting thing about Nietzsche's eternal return of the same is that he must have known that there is no choice if loving, hating and thinking itself is part of the return. The moment you decide will have have been over and over again and will be over and over again and your decision will always be the same. But without a choice, there is no heroic stoicism. It's philosophical predestination doctrine without God.
- fedeb95 4y agoAs any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.
- circular_lights 4y ago
- dang 4y agoMaybe so, but please don't fulminate on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html edit: and please don't snark or post shallow dimissals, as you did in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33632057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33632057
- circular_lights 4y agook, thanks for the warning.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoRight on. I really enjoy Stoic philosophy, Nietzsche, and Buddhism. I actually consider this my "serious" reading, not like fun reading of sci-fy, etc. I like to read things that allow me to reevaluate my behaviors and beliefs.
- maxbendick 4y agoI think diving into his personal life can be very useful with Nietzsche. I can't say the same with every philosopher though. Wonderful Wittgenstein quote, btw. Nietzsche's almost constant sickness helps explain concepts like the eternal return and will-to-power. Always keep an eye out for "health", "cure", and "convalescence" in his writing (great example: the preface to The Gay Science). Nietzsche's romantic failures also color his works. I skip large chunks because I can't stomach his sexism.
- fedeb95 4y agoIt doesn't explain the concepts, it explains how the concepts may (big may!) have been originated. It's way, way better to read about what texts Nietzsche read and which didn't.
- ngcc_hk 4y agoIs that from w first era that he changed his mind? The language divide is not that exact and stair in fact cannot be throw away. As there could be a stair?
- mikrl 4y ago>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life. Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important. Maybe I’m just outing myself as a PoMo, but thought is life and living begets thought. Philosophers are interpreters of the grand drama in which they have a part.
- Cupertino95014 4y agoHard disagree, PoMo. The work stands alone. "No man is a hero to his valet" is the truism that springs to mind. Reducing everything to the times & the man is just a way to bring it all down to our own pedestrian level so we can feel equal. The goal of every great artist is to transcend their humanity. We know nothing about Homer, or even if there was such a person, but The Iliad and The Odyssey have been read for 3,000 years.
- dbtc 4y agoIt's like arguing whether a mountain ought to be experienced from a distance, so you can see it, or from the top, so you can see from it. Both!
- Cupertino95014 4y agoOK w/me
- nyolfen 4y ago“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.” -- F. Nietzsche
- dang 4y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fedeb95 4y agoThat's not what I did. Read better. I state that it's garbage because the very first thing you learn when analysing literature is separating men from their ideas. This article doesn't do that and proceeds to find meaningless conclusions.
- yamtaddle 4y agoSome currently-fashionable methods of literary analysis deliberately ignore author biography, but I don't think most people who favor those would claim there's never any reason for or value in examining the biographies of authors. I don't think they'd suggest people, say, entirely ignore the biography of an author forever and in all cases. Besides, it's common for one person to apply multiple approaches for a really deep analysis of a work, whether independently or together. Plus, this is a review of a biography, so it's not the reviewer's fault the book is concerned with biography.
- dang 4y agoErroring out at the first detail that contradicts a generic principle is a classic type of shallow dismissal.
- circular_lights 4y ago
- yamtaddle 4y agoYour sarcastic paraphrase does not capture what the review says.
- dmm 4y ago> He devised [eternal recurrence] in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket. That doesn't sound comforting to me. Wow my life sucks right now but at least I'll be able to relive it exactly as it is again-and-again forever.
- whateveracct 4y agoIt's meant to be a rejection of the inherent nihilism he found in Christianity.
- drewcape 4y agoThis was not meant to be salvation, rather a reason to love one's own fate "Amor fati."
- Veen 4y agoI always read 'eternal return' as a sort of decision making procedure. Is the thing you are about to do such that you wouldn't mind doing it forever as time repeats?
- bheadmaster 4y agoIn contrast with Christianity, where this life is to be "endured" for the promise of afterlife, "eternal return" is exactly the opposite - "enduring" this life is the worst possible decision, as you'll just have to "endure" it again and again for eternity. In context of "eternal return", good decisions are those that make life worth living for the sake of itself - embracing life completely and doing whatever you can to enhance your will to power (which Nietzsche sees as the source of all that which is good).
- imbnwa 4y ago>To regard Nietzsche as a self-help author, writing primarily for himself, helps to put his least convincing idea – eternal recurrence – into perspective. This is the idea that we will live our lives again and again, ad infinitum. For an anti-metaphysician who suggested that we can strive to be higher, better beings, this fatalistic notion of eternal recurrence seems jarring. He devised it in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket. It could be put more prosaically thus: shit happens. This is actually a terrible take and you should not listen to this person at all. Nietzsche's thoughts on Eternal Return is, at a theoretical level, an attempt to reconcile an ethical framework that is completely atheistic and non-idealist (non-idealistic, so not tied to any notions of the "end of history" or "right side of history", notions of providence generally), with the understanding of physics modern to his time. The Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell Pearson is one of the foremost researchers around Nietzsche's grounding of his philosophy in the physics and biology of the 19th century, which was a tumultuous period, and you can read Nietzsche himself attempt to elaborate Eternal Return more concretely in one his fragments, the Time Atom Theory fragment[0]. The idea that the universe is a kind of infinite loop with no begin or end, which therefore defies human narration since we very uncomfortable with a thing that has no origin, is even entertained by serious contemporary physicists such as Brian Cox. Nietzsche simply thinks this must be the foundation for an ethics that is resilient to idealism and theism, and therefore, necessarily _tragic_; his first book was an attempt to retrieve a sense of tragedy from Greek literature that had been overruled and trampled upon by the last 1800 years of Christian asceticism in the West (though the asceticism of Christianity isn't exclusive to the West as he points out). It is against the backdrop of Eternal Return that Nietzsche wants to develop his idea of "double affirmation" as found in _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_: that I not only accept contingency in the outcomes of my actions and external events ("shit happens") , but _desire_ it too and without resentment and sadness but love (hence: Amor Fati). This is why Good and Evil are to be surpassed and disastrous axioms to base real ethics on: not only because, for Nietzsche they presume a normalized psychology, but because both fascism and its opposite are both refusals of the essential role of contingency and for that reason breed their own antagonist; only understanding the tragic can get us on the way to a path beyond Good and Evil, and Eternal Return and Double Affirmation are his contributions to furthering that journey. Nicholas Nassim Taleb is also aware of the thematic adjacency of his work on non-fragility with Nietzsche's ideas. That's more the direction Nietzsche would have had in mind. I'm condensing and simplifying _a lot_ of stuff, there is an entire scholarship dedicated to researching his ideas as he understood them, but reducing all of that down to "his life sucked and so he needed tell himself 'shit happens'" is an outright assassination attempt meant to terminate thinking. Edit: As an aside, there is this strong tendency from liberal/progressive writers to neutralize, if not dismiss, the notion of the "Death of the Author". This value of this neutralization is to be able to neutralize the value of a person's ideas because of their biography. The point of "Death of the Author" is that the human relationship to its own symbolic practices is not a proprietary one, at least not exhaustively proprietary; in some ways, it is the human being being inscribed upon rather than the human being inscribing 'their ideas' (this is something Michel Foucault spent a lot of time and effort elaborating). Early 20th century fascism was not founded by some specific origin, but was the outcome of a miasma of anonymous forces and specific consequences. The game of 'telephone' is a sort of concrete example of what is meant by this non-ownership. [0]https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717742 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717742
- ramesh31 4y agoWhy Nietzche's ideas can be so dangerous without the aid of proper context and perspective. They are very seductive to a certain type of young man. But the reality of human fallibility leads to terminal ressentiment in the end for anyone fixed in that philosophy. It is a total dead end.
- cr4nberry 4y ago> But the reality of human fallibility leads to terminal ressentiment in the end for anyone fixed in that philosophy. It is a total dead end. Could you elaborate a little bit? If you're going to disregard his thought with a broad stroke, you might as well
- ramesh31 4y ago>Could you elaborate a little bit? If you're going to disregard his thought with a broad stroke, you might as well I'm certainly not disregarding him. His work was (and is) important. But the reason it lives on is to serve as a cautionary tale. It saves you from taking a turn down that road which can be so appealing to precocious young minds who aren't aware of its' logical conclusions.
- cr4nberry 4y agoSomething to keep in mind with Nietzsche is that he made enemies out of both Christianity and egalitarian ideology. A lot of the criticisms of him come from these two crowds, and a lot of it is an ad hominem attack on his character Why do these folks dislike him so much? Because no one saw their flaws and latched onto them as viciously as he did It's one thing to point out his own fragility and the obvious contrast with his writing, but he never intended to wholly embody the ideals that he wrote about. His goal was to pave the way for others to free themselves from the sickness of the sad passions that these belief sets so eagerly try to cultivate. A sickness from which he himself was not immune
- bheadmaster 4y agoChristians call him a nihilist, when it is Christianity that is nihilistic - denial of everything carnal for the ideal of post-death salvation.
- bergenty 4y agoI don’t understand his underlying premise. Life doesn’t need meaning, just existence is blissful. In fact meaning is this context is meaningless. “What is the meaning of life?” is a nonsensical question/sentence.
- tsol 4y ago>just existence is blissful Erm.. citation needed. I'd say all the existential angst in the first world disproves that.
- bergenty 4y agoI’m speaking for myself.
- bheadmaster 4y agoThen saying "MY existance is blissful" would be more precise. Though it would boil your comment down to "My existance is blissful, I don't need a meaning of life", in which case, good for you. Other people may differ though.
- HKH2 4y agoWhen people do not embody the values they possess, how can they be happy?
- drewcape 4y agoCall it a guide rail. What should you orient yourself towards during your life?