Thursday 29 September 2016

Biologism part 2: Science can't give you your religious instruction - YouTube

It's so interesting. I have never encountered another person speaking of Nietzshe in this way. At the time I was trying cobble some sort of education together, it was fashionable, (and still may be,) in North America, to use Nietzsche's work as an example of the impulse to fascism. I didn't really see that. Because of my own life experience, I was seeing him as someone who was struggling with physical and mental illness, and who was struggling mightily to seek and to know excellence as he defined it, in his own body, mind, imagination and life. I was told that I was as wrong as wrong could be, and furthermore, if I continued in my delusions about the meaning of his writing to me, it would translate into a failing grade in the course. So, I regurgitated what I was supposed to, and went on with life.

Later, I encountered groups of people who must have been some of the foundational people in what is now called the "alt right" in the US. They all read books by Julius Evola, Fracis Parker Yockey, Jack London, Ezra Pound,
and so on. They of course, also quoted and read Nietzsche constantly, and
wore his name like a badge of membership in their group.

I've always thought it odd how my own experience of Nietzshe's writings
was so "off", from what I was being told he "really meant" and what he
"really believed". And so, it is quite interesting for me, to hear you using his work as you navigate your own personal thoughts and experiences. It makes me think that I would like to begin re-reading him again, with an
eye toward my original experience of his writings.
Jennifer Armstrong 
I really do not see much evidence of fascism in Nietzsche. Perhaps there is some authoritarianism in Beyond Good and Evil, especially with regard to gender roles, but Nietzsche was opposed to brute force, whereas fascism is nothing but brute force. It's the reason why Nietzsche saw value in the Catholic church as a system of SPIRITUAL organisation, which he compared favorably to the state, the latter being a system of force. In all Nietzsche was looking to reinstate a spiritual hierarchy that would be based on his principles of psychology, which he was discovering. Fascism is anti-psychological to the core, and down on the intellect. Fascism is emotion. But fascism also kills the emotions, through its exertion of extreme force. Those who embrace fascism end up dead inside and long to die to seal the internal fact with external evidence. Nietzsche struggled to stay alive.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity