What exactly is dangerous about Nietzsche?

[Mouthwash]

Has anyone experienced that feeling when you open your mouth too wide and what feels like a bone protrudes painfully out under your chin, only to slowly slip back into place?

 

[Takhisis]

I don't think any of us have been attacked by facehuggers, so we can't help you there.

 

[Takhisis]

You've been infected by a facehugger too, Lord Baal?

 

[Mouthwash]

Yes, though what that has to do with Nietzsche I can't imagine.

warpus's post reminded me. I didn't know if it was common or if I was the only one.

 

[Kyriakos]

As more of a Debussy kind of guy, that's not necessarily something in his favor.

Kind of relatedly, I've always thought about reading some Nietzsche (recently motivated by playing some SMAC again), and apparently I'm linguistically favorably equipped in this case. What's the best way to start?

Probably his Apollonian and Dionysian short work titled "The birth of Tragedy". It is an early work and he did not yet depict the polemic tone of the later treatises.
Nietzsche seems to have been desperately trying to rid himself from some sort of acute feeling of misery, but in the end he failed to do so, and in the process he did manage to seemingly attribute his own troubles to external influences such as the supposed "german idealism".
I tend to think that there wasn't actually such a prevalent idealism (the term in his work mostly means the belief that man is utterly seperate from any knowledge of the world, so ultimately bound to belief systems which negate the resulting fear), despite it probably being there in previous german philosophical works he read. To argue an entire culture is deeply idealistic (in the philosophical sense) seems unlikely to have been warranted, despite Nietzsche thinking of that in the late 19th century.

 

[Borachio]

Guys, guys. Just listen.

http://www.dict.cc/?s=Nietzsche

(I mean the German version on the right - from Halmafelix)
There even is a version with a big and a subtle Z.

Nah. No one outside a native German speaker is going to say that.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I think the problem with Nietzsche isn't with him at all, it's with people who read him. He talks about individual ambition and maximizing one's potential, free from constraints of any kind. We live in a world where, for better or worse, our actions are largely constrained, and we feel life to be a perpetual struggle against forces which would either actively keep us mediocre, or passively block our way toward what we know we could do. So I think lots of people who empathize with Nietzsche's philosophy also try to transpose that onto their own world-view, because he seems to "speak" to such a wide cross-section of society, and thus they assume that because he says things they agree with, he must be one of them too. But he wasn't. Nietzsche was Nietzsche.

It's a Jew thing. It's so we can talk out of both sides of our mouths.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think the problem with Nietzsche isn't with him at all, it's with people who read him. He talks about individual ambition and maximizing one's potential, free from constraints of any kind. We live in a world where, for better or worse, our actions are largely constrained, and we feel life to be a perpetual struggle against forces which would either actively keep us mediocre, or passively block our way toward what we know we could do. So I think lots of people who empathize with Nietzsche's philosophy also try to transpose that onto their own world-view, because he seems to "speak" to such a wide cross-section of society, and thus they assume that because he says things they agree with, he must be one of them too. But he wasn't. Nietzsche was Nietzsche.

I suppose you haven't read any/much of Nietzsche, then, given that he made a point of frequently mentioning his (correct) general view that "everyone sees his own self into anything he likes", which pretty much is an invitation to not have his reader see him as his own self.
Let alone that such projections are a known subject in philosophy, ever since the time (at least) of Socrates.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

You assume that I haven't read much of Nietzsche, because I paraphrase your quote in my post?

 

[Kyriakos]

You assume that I haven't read much of Nietzsche, because I paraphrase your quote in my post?

What?

You did not paraphrase any quote by me. (edit: i assume you mean that my claim that Nietzsche fought a personal struggle, is to be taken as similar to your claim that others should not see theirselves in his work. This is not paraphrasing, though, it is quite a seperate issue and my own point was to highlight the probably blown-out-of-proportion idea Nietzsche had about a prevalence of 'idealism' in 19th century Germany).

And even if you had (but did not) this would still leave the possibility for projecting your own view on my quote, which is pretty much what our quote-exchange here is about anyway

(however i do agree that my 'tone' was a bit harsh without a need to).

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I paraphrased him, but worded it in such a way as to voice my disagreement with that statement. This is probably the source of our miscommunication.

 

[Leoreth]

Actually, I put a strong emphasis on the 'z', pronouncing it in the English way (as opposed to the German way which essentially is the same as pronouncing the 't' and 's' in immediate succesion, am I correct?). I would have approximated it as Neatz yuh.

You're right about tz, but I still would emphasize the sh sound more than the s sound.

Probably his Apollonian and Dionysian short work titled "The birth of Tragedy". It is an early work and he did not yet depict the polemic tone of the later treatises.
Nietzsche seems to have been desperately trying to rid himself from some sort of acute feeling of misery, but in the end he failed to do so, and in the process he did manage to seemingly attribute his own troubles to external influences such as the supposed "german idealism".
I tend to think that there wasn't actually such a prevalent idealism (the term in his work mostly means the belief that man is utterly seperate from any knowledge of the world, so ultimately bound to belief systems which negate the resulting fear), despite it probably being there in previous german philosophical works he read. To argue an entire culture is deeply idealistic (in the philosophical sense) seems unlikely to have been warranted, despite Nietzsche thinking of that in the late 19th century.

Thanks!

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

Couple of interesting thoughts from Sri Aurobindo:

........Nietzsche first cast it(supermenhood), the mystic of Will-worship, the troubled, profound, half-luminous Hellenising Slav with his strange clarities, his violent half-ideas, his rare gleaming intuitions that came marked with the stamp of an absolute truth and sovereignty of light. But Nietzsche was an apostle who never entirely understood his own message. His prophetic style was like that of the Delphic oracles which spoke constantly the word of the Truth but turned it into untruth in the mind of the hearer. Not always indeed; for sometimes he rose beyond his personal temperament and individual mind, his European inheritance and environment, his revolt against the Christ-idea, his war against current moral values and spoke out the Word as he had heard it, the Truth as he had seen it, bare, luminous, impersonal and therefore flawless and imperishable. But for the most part this message that had come to his inner hearing vibrating out of a distant Infinite like a strain caught from the lyre of far-off Gods, did get, in his effort to appropriate and make it nearer to him, mixed up with a somewhat turbulent surge of collateral ideas that drowned much of the pure original note.
Especially, in his concept of the Superman he never cleared his mind of a preliminary confusion. For if a sort of human godhead is the goal to which the race must advance, the first difficulty is that we have to decide to which of two very different types of divinity the idea in us should owe allegiance. For the deity within may confront us either with the clear, joyous and radiant countenance of the God or the stern convulsed visage of the Titan. Nietzsche hymned the Olympian but presented him with the aspect of the Asura. His hostile preoccupation with the Christ-idea of the crucified God and its consequences was perhaps responsible for this distortion, as much as his subjection to the imperfect ideas of the Greeks. He presents to us sometimes a superman who fiercely and arrogantly repels the burden of simple sorrow and service, not one who arises victorious over mortality and suffering, his ascension vibrant with the triumphsong of a liberated humanity. To lose the link of Nature’s moral evolution is a capital fault in the apostle of supermanhood; for only out of the unavoidable line of the evolution can that emerge in the bosom of a humanity long tested, ripened and purified by the fire of egoistic and altruistic suffering.

 

[bathsheba666]

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach yer about the raising of the wrist.


Link to video.

 

[Angst]

Another major misinterpretation is that he believes in truth as something that does not exist, even though he is more likely stating that the truth is incomprehensible. This misinterpretation spawned a whole a group of "philosophers" called Postmodernists, which includes such airheads as Derrida and the like.

edit: ok that was a little rough. i'll try again.

what are you talking about

 

[aelf]

There's nothing particularly dangerous or problematic about Nietzsche per se, in my opinion.

One problem comes from 'students' of his who, ironically enough, hold that there is One True Nietzscheanism. This thread has one or two exhibits. They aren't in principle different from those who make all sorts of fantastic claims about his philosophy (i.e. a larger set that includes people who think he is 'dangerous').

 

[plarq]

He hated Christians, that's the only impression I have from his works.

 

[Borachio]

Did he hate them? Or was he just mystified by their logic?

(He may have hated them, for all I know. I can't say I've ever studied him with any attention.)

 

[Peck of Arabia]

The Judeo-Christian take on morality, yes. He saw it as a corrupting influence, turning (by his reckoning, of course) vices into virtues: meekness, submission, humility etc. (You know, Sermon on the Mound stuff) making all his ubermensch into bad people whose ambition and "greatness" would be drowned in a sea of mediocrity.

That's Genealogy of Morals in a nutshell, I think.

Though whether he hated Christians on a personal level- I'd hazard a guess at mild disdain.

 

[Kyriakos]

Did he hate them? Or was he just mystified by their logic?

(He may have hated them, for all I know. I can't say I've ever studied him with any attention.)

I am not sure if "hate" is the optimal term here. What is obvious, though, due to many passages by him with this and related meanings, is that Nietzsche regarded christian ethics as being pretty much a reversal of all 'viable' or 'noble' ethics of old, given that the old ethics seemed to be about promoting positive qualities like strenght of body or intellect, health, will for life etc, whereas christian ethics seemed to mostly be about what he termed as "the revenge of the pariah": weak and sickly individuals trying to present theirselves as higher by promoting an unnatural aspiration to weakness and demise of the senses and mental world.

I tend to agree with all that, but at the same time it seems to me that Nietzsche had other issues which only momentarily or seemingly appeared to be caused by the christian decadence he described. That he utterly self-destructed in the end does seem to allude to such a reality too.

His "The Genealogy of Ethics" is a more refined (and larger) work to read on his view on ethics, and not his latter "The antichrist", which has its own problems anyway.