Nietzsche

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    Jennifer Armstrong

    I think Nietzsche was an egotist, but not a sociopath. I think that many of his followers misunderstand Nietzsche's project, which was to explore what life should mean if "God is dead". They don't seem to grasp thenecessary open-endedness of such a project in a philosophical sense. Instead, they read him as a prophet who demands that they stamp on the kind hearted. I think many of his followers try to be sociopaths.

    30 minutes ago · · 1 person
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    Phillip Gioan No, I don't think you're an idiot. Nor am I, in principle, "anti-feminist" (though there are a few different kinds of feminism, and some versions conflict with others). I wasn't being ironic either. Hegel literally makes the same point you're making now: that appealing to emotion/intuition as an immediate source of truth is incoherent, and it is no substitute for solid argumentation.

    25 minutes ago ·
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    Phillip Gioan Nietzsche writes in the Will to Power, "A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! Everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master! Everything that makes man soft and effeminate, that serves the ends of the 'people' or the 'feminine,' works in favor of sufferage universel, i.e. the dominion of inferior men."

    16 minutes ago ·
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    Phillip Gioan

    ‎"In the age of suffrage universal, i.e. when everyone may sit in judgment on everyone and everything, I feel impelled to reestablish order of rank!"
    
    “One has no right to existence or to work, to say nothing of a right to ‘happiness’: the individual human being is in precisely the same case as the lowest worm” (WTP 398–99).
    
    “Perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism is so venerable as their art of teaching even the lowliest to set themselves through piety in an apparently higher order of things and thus to preserve their contentment with the real order, within which they live hard enough lives—and necessarily have to!” (BGE 86–87)
    
    How do we interpret these statements?

    14 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong Yes, yes. Phillip there is a lot I can say here. There is a HUGE problem with the use of language, especially in this instance, Nietzsche's language regarding "effeminacy". Actually, when most people read that word they understand that Nietzsche was explicitly against women.

    8 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong Perhaps the problem even with any interpretation of Nietzsche is that "society" has already sunken to a very low level indeed, so that people interpret Nietzsche's ideas and injunctions in the crudest and most literal manner.

    7 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong In any case, these days what is actually REQUIRED is a certain degree of piety. It's not piety we are missing at all, but the idea that nearly everybody has that each and every little crackpot with an emotion is somehow a naturally born genius. I tell you, I did not like to listen to some of those Americans speak.

    6 minutes ago ·
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    Richard Hawes ‎"In the age of suffrage universal, i.e. when everyone may sit in judgment on everyone and everything, I feel impelled to reestablish order of rank!" Sociopaths of the world, Arise!

    5 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong ‎...and I know *I* am not a genius and that the drive to prove one has a spark of genius is not the product of genius itself but of the capitalist driven economy.

    5 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong That's right, Richard. The sociopaths arise to put women in their place, as they THINK Nietzsche "commanded".

    3 minutes ago ·
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    Jennifer Armstrong Also: Most in Western culture -- but above all in the USA -- think that WOMEN PER SE represent that kind of crude immediacy of feeling and "intuition" that Hegel critiques. Perhaps they don't understand that Nietzsche also critiqued Hegel, which was what I was thinking about in my blog entry below.

    A few seconds ago ·
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