Nietzsche - "Irrationality of a thing"


Michael Stuart Kelly

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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, aph. 332

This quote has been haunting me recently. It was spoken on the TV show Criminal Minds and it stuck with me.

It has many levels of understanding, going from the humorous all the way up to the epistemological attitude of valuing observation over preconception.

It worked as a hook for me to look deeper into Nietzsche. I had tried to read Zarathustra when I was younger, but I couldn't get into it. I just now did an overview of Nietzsche by bopping around on the Internet. What a wonder! Where have I been? I know I am at the start of a long journey.

Part of my bopping was a documentary on his life (free online here). I am beginning to suspect that he got a bum rap in the Objectivist world. In the documentary, I saw models of Rand's thinking (large basic approaches, not necessarily the conclusions) all over the place.

I was unaware until now that his sister (his heir) had misrepresented his views to the world by rewriting some of the unpublished stuff and publishing it.

(scratching head...)

That sounds vaguely familiar...

:)

Michael

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I had pretty much the same experience with his work. Actually, he was the first, er, "modern-era" philosopher I was exposed to. It was counterculture, you know...God is Dead, what rebel can resist that one. I believe he did in fact get a "bum rap" in O-town. Baby with bathwater, that's the usual move.

Of course, the other one that really got it was Hegel.

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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, aph. 332

This quote has been haunting me recently. It was spoken on the TV show Criminal Minds and it stuck with me.

It has many levels of understanding, going from the humorous all the way up to the epistemological attitude of valuing observation over preconception.

It worked as a hook for me to look deeper into Nietzsche. I had tried to read Zarathustra when I was younger, but I couldn't get into it. I just now did an overview of Nietzsche by bopping around on the Internet. What a wonder! Where have I been? I know I am at the start of a long journey.

Part of my bopping was a documentary on his life (free online here). I am beginning to suspect that he got a bum rap in the Objectivist world. In the documentary, I saw models of Rand's thinking (large basic approaches, not necessarily the conclusions) all over the place.

I was unaware until now that his sister (his heir) had misrepresented his views to the world by rewriting some of the unpublished stuff and publishing it.

(scratching head...)

That sounds vaguely familiar...

:)

Michael

I got into -So Sprach...- and I got out of it as fast as I could. Nietzsche was a madman. His brains were thoroughly rotted out by an STD.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Michael, are you sure of the citation for that aphorism? I'm not finding it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OK, I see it now. It is 515: “From experience. . . – The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.”

First-off this aphorism made me think of Hume (and Nicholas, four centuries earlier): The rational is not in the world we make sense of, and there is a great divide between belief in the existence of the things proclaimed by our experience on the one hand and rational truths on the other. Be that historical influence as it may be, Nietzsche here, in 1878, seems to be focused not on whether beliefs of existence can only be irrational (or anyway something alongside reason, if not contrary to reason), but on the idea that existence is necessarily something to which the character rational does not apply. (Remember Hegel: The real is the rational, and the rational is the real.) Perhaps, too, Nietzsche is upholding a secular version of the line of Christian thinkers who would maintain the primacy of the divine will over the divine understanding in the creation and continuance of the world; that line would include William of Ockham, Hume’s precursor Nicholas of Autrecourt, and, more importantly for Nietzsche, Lutheranism.

Edited by Stephen Boydstun
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  • 4 weeks later...

From the same work as #515 above, we have this related aphorism:

#31

The illogical necessary. – Among the things that can reduce a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is a necessity for mankind, and that much good proceeds from the illogical. It is implanted so firmly in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and in general in everything that lends value to life. . . . Even the most rational man from time to time needs to recover nature, that is to say his illogical original relationship with all things.

(Translation of R. J. Hollingdale)

Certainly when one goes to sleep and dreams, one recovers a semi-illogical relationship with all things. When one reads a fictional work or sees a movie of fiction, one experiences a world not fully thick with the identities of the actual world, one experiences a sketch of a hypothetical world. Then, too, logicality in thought is not the whole of logical thought. Without creative generation, there are no mathematical proofs, no scientific hypotheses, no conversations, no thinking, and no logical thinking.

Nietzsche goes squarely wrong with his idea that only the illogical lends value to life. Human life without logic is pain and death. Logic is the weaver of value for human life. Small wonder we enjoy logic, as non-contradictory identification.

Any value coming from the “illogical” does not come from the truly anti-logical. There is nothing contrary to logic in expecting and acting in a physical world saturated with identity and offering opportunity.

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I recently watched the documentary Nietzsche and the Nazis by Stephen Hicks, its available “on demand” from Netflix. It was reminiscent of The Ominous Parallels, tying philosophy into history. Visually there was too much of Hicks qua talking head, though there were plenty of illustrations and film clips ala Ken Burns. He spends a lot of time in front of a bookcase, where Rand volumes are plainly visible. I recommend the program.

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I had the pleasure to watch some lectures from Harvard on Nietzsche (that was posted on OL). Really great. The guy has huge compatibility with Objectivism. I agree Michael, for some reason he got an undeserved bum rap in O'land.

Chris

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If you want to follow up:

Journal of Ayn Rand Studies did a Nietzsche issue a few years ago. ARS/APA devoted a session on him in 2008; don't know what their policy is on sending the papers to non-members. Goldberg's Liberal Fascism talks about him as a precursor of post-modernism; this could make an interesting comparison to Hicks.

On the other hand you could be unorthodox and start with his own writings. I read Beyond Good and Evil years ago with an eye to checking out the frequent assertion that he and Rand have a lot in common. This was before Rand's diaries and Those Passages from the original We the Living had been published. All I saw in common was a certain stylistic device that she may well have learned from him: You might think X is the worst evil possible, but no, the worst is [accepting X and Y on some equal footing / trying to reconcile them, etc]. For example, when she panned a TV production of Cyrano, she ended up saying that the most depraved man is not the one who prefers Tennessee Williams to Rostand but the one who can't tell the difference.

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Volume II, Part Two of Human, All Too Human is “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (1879). Here we find a vein connecting the two quotations above (translation of R. J. Hollingsdale):

The rationality of the world. – That the world is not the epitome of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that that piece of the world which we know – I mean our own human rationality – is not so very rational. And if it is not always perfectly wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be so either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum,* applies, and does so with decisive force. (2)

*from the less to the greater, from the part to the whole. (Cf. Notes a, b and Spinoza E IIP38)

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Volume II, Part Two of Human, All Too Human is “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (1879). Here we find a vein connecting the two quotations above (translation of R. J. Hollingsdale):

The rationality of the world. – That the world is not the epitome of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that that piece of the world which we know – I mean our own human rationality – is not so very rational. And if it is not always perfectly wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be so either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum,* applies, and does so with decisive force. (2)

*from the less to the greater, from the part to the whole. (Cf. Notes a, b and Spinoza E IIP38)

I'm trying to put this into appropriate words... Nietzsche is definitely being consistent in his views, but he's excluded as not rational those aspects of nature that are not immediately understood by a conscious mind.

We know that the mind plays a complementary role to many of our other human aspects (emotions, etc). Until the individual understand the full scope of his/her needs, of course things may appear irrational in man to man. That's more for lack of understanding than for reasoned order in nature. N. is essentially saying man is not omniscient; therefore, he observes things that appear to be irrational. What N. doesn't know is that the appearance of seeming irrationality is not due to the universe per se, it is due to lack of knowledge about the universe.

In a way, we might understand Nietzsche's assertion to be "man is not omniscient, nor can man ever claim omniscience." This is a stretch, but Nietzsche was logical and we just need to figure out where some of his false assumptions are in order to understand exactly what he's seeing and what he's saying about what he's seeing.

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I'm trying to put this into appropriate words... Nietzsche is definitely being consistent in his views, but he's excluded as not rational those aspects of nature that are not immediately understood by a conscious mind.

We know that the mind plays a complementary role to many of our other human aspects (emotions, etc). Until the individual understand the full scope of his/her needs, of course things may appear irrational in man to man. That's more for lack of understanding than for reasoned order in nature. N. is essentially saying man is not omniscient; therefore, he observes things that appear to be irrational. What N. doesn't know is that the appearance of seeming irrationality is not due to the universe per se, it is due to lack of knowledge about the universe.

In a way, we might understand Nietzsche's assertion to be "man is not omniscient, nor can man ever claim omniscience." This is a stretch, but Nietzsche was logical and we just need to figure out where some of his false assumptions are in order to understand exactly what he's seeing and what he's saying about what he's seeing.

On the contrary, there are things which are by their nature not comprehensible to the human mind, and therefore not capable of rational description and analysis.

Consider, for example, whether or not the universe had a beginning. Either it had a beginning or it did not; either it started--and if so, how could something come to be when absolutely nothing was there before?--or it did not--and if so, how could something exist without having a beginning, without having a cause? Both alternatives violate common sense: things come to be from other things, and things always have a starting point and something that caused them to be; and to have an answer one way or another would require us to go outside the universe, which is of course not possible. but there is no other alternative available. Religion posits God, which merely pushes the irrationality back one level, but in doings so, religion merely admits that the answer is not answerable by the human mind: it's merely an admission of the irrationality.

I think Rand's answer, by the way, was that this question (and others of similar nature) is not answerable and therefore to ask it is not legitimate.

Jeffrey S.

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No, Christopher. What we first need to do is read Nietzsche, then stick close to his texts in speaking of what he is saying. If we want to say words along the lines of what some philosopher has said, and if we want to mean something true and valuable by them, according to our own lights, that is fine. But if those meanings are not what the philosopher meant, then they are our words and our meaning, not his.

To speak of Nietzsche seriously, one first needs to read Nietzsche. It is not that difficult these days with all the fine English translations in the Cambridge series. The worst possible place to begin reading Nietzsche is with Zarathustra. One can come to understand that work, but only if one reads and connects what he wrote before it (leaving aside Birth of Tragedy) and after it: Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; Gay Science I–IV; Zarathustra; Gay Science V; Beyond Good and Evil; and Genealogy of Morals. That's the package.

The Cambridge series has Introductions for each text, written by a contemporary Nietzsche scholar, and these are helpful. The Introduction for Z was written by my Nietzsche professor. It was a great boost (and joy) to have studied under him. But the main thing is to read Nietzsche's texts, then give your citations when you represent his ideas. The latter is useful to audience seriously interested in his ideas, including to your own future self, when you have been away from the material for a while.

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No, Christopher. What we first need to do is read Nietzsche, then stick close to his texts in speaking of what he is saying. If we want to say words along the lines of what some philosopher has said, and if we want to mean something true and valuable by them, according to our own lights, that is fine. But if those meanings are not what the philosopher meant, then they are our words and our meaning, not his.

To speak of Nietzsche seriously, one first needs to read Nietzsche. It is not that difficult these days with all the fine English translations in the Cambridge series. The worst possible place to begin reading Nietzsche is with Zarathustra. One can come to understand that work, but only if one reads and connects what he wrote before it (leaving aside Birth of Tragedy) and after it: Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; Gay Science I–IV; Zarathustra; Gay Science V; Beyond Good and Evil; and Genealogy of Morals. That's the package.

The Cambridge series has Introductions for each text, written by a contemporary Nietzsche scholar, and these are helpful. The Introduction for Z was written by my Nietzsche professor. It was a great boost (and joy) to have studied under him. But the main thing is to read Nietzsche's texts, then give your citations when you represent his ideas. The latter is useful to audience seriously interested in his ideas, including to your own future self, when you have been away from the material for a while.

My knuckles feel swollen from this whapping. Yes sir! ...

Of course, if I must understand all Nietzsche's texts in order to comprehend this single quote, it is probably not appropriate you post it on an Objectivist forum without an explanation. (no no, please not the wooden ruler again! My fingers already hurt)

...

Jeffrey,

Yes, I suppose there are questions that cannot be answered rationally - such as the creation of the universe -. But if Nietzsche is beginning with human rationality and expanding the irrationality of human rationality as an example of how the rest of the universe must also be similarly irrational, then it doesn't seem to me he's really talking about "creation of the universe"-type questions. In which case, it seems to me Nietzsche is really saying that anything he doesn't fully understand about human nature serves as an example of irrationality in nature and therefore evidence that much else of the universe is also irrational (although perhaps you really need an expert to tell you what Nietzsche is saying!)

Christopher

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Sorry, Christopher.

I didn’t mean to be discouraging. I meant to be encouraging the reading of Nietzsche. He is a very good writer, and a wide audience finds reading him a good experience, even if they find some of his ideas repugnant. I say he is a good writer, but in taking up the aphoristic style, there is a deliberate element of partial opaqueness, which he will clarify to some degree by subsequent aphorisms and for which the stage may have been set by preceding aphorisms in the work.

There is nothing wrong with speculating about what a philosopher wrote in some passage seen in isolation. I did that with my first note on Michael’s quote. For me those are just conjectures inviting assessment by examining more of his text. That is also the way I will use your own conjecture on the third quotation in this thread (Human I 32 is one aphorism bearing on your conjecture).

One has to start somewhere, and, reading more of Nietzsche often brings better sense to passages with which one started. To discuss, in a thread like this, one’s current thoughts about what a passage means can be of growing value to ourselves if we return to it with more and more information.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS

It is only Z that requires substantial supplementation from the other books I listed in order to be understood. The other books stand fairly well on their own, and Nietzsche went back later, with his philosophy fully matured, and added helpful Prefaces to the earlier books in the sequence. Z can be read as a fairly opaque (and plastic?) poetic experience, of course, and left largely mysterious. Presumably that was how it would be read by many of the 150,000 German troops who were given copies of Z by their government in WWI.

Edited by Stephen Boydstun
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On the contrary, there are things which are by their nature not comprehensible to the human mind, and therefore not capable of rational description and analysis.

Consider, for example, whether or not the universe had a beginning. Either it had a beginning or it did not; either it started--and if so, how could something come to be when absolutely nothing was there before?--or it did not--and if so, how could something exist without having a beginning, without having a cause? Both alternatives violate common sense: things come to be from other things, and things always have a starting point and something that caused them to be; and to have an answer one way or another would require us to go outside the universe, which is of course not possible. but there is no other alternative available. Religion posits God, which merely pushes the irrationality back one level, but in doings so, religion merely admits that the answer is not answerable by the human mind: it's merely an admission of the irrationality.

I think Rand's answer, by the way, was that this question (and others of similar nature) is not answerable and therefore to ask it is not legitimate.

Jeffrey S.

Did your life have a beginning? Did it come from absolutely nothing? I don't believe it's the case that "there are things which are by their nature not comprehensible to the human mind" but I do believe their are questions which are meaningless. If there was a big bang and if the universe as we know it today evolved from a singularity this does not mean it came from "nothing" anymore than saying a new life comes from nothing.

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Did your life have a beginning? Did it come from absolutely nothing? I don't believe it's the case that "there are things which are by their nature not comprehensible to the human mind" but I do believe their are questions which are meaningless. If there was a big bang and if the universe as we know it today evolved from a singularity this does not mean it came from "nothing" anymore than saying a new life comes from nothing.

Then, if I understand her view correctly, you agree with Rand. I disagree. After all, I asked the question and you understood it. So the question has meaning. It's just not answerable by the human mind.

But going back to the big bang and the singularity--where did the singularity come from? You're merely pushing the conundrum back one step. At some point in the process you have to pick among two alternatives--a something which has always been, without a beginning point; or a something which (unlike a human life, and everything else we know of) came into being without any antecedent causes. (You can choose a chain of antecedent causes that never has an initial step, a first cause, so to speak, but that's merely a variation on the idea of something that always been without a beginning.)

Whichever alternative you choose, it's irrational.

Jeffrey S.

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Well, I agree that we will never likely know what came before the Big Bang - maybe the universe pulsates. It doesn't mean we can't comprehend it but the time frame and distances involved make it extremely difficult to gather knowledge about it.

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Here is a 2006 overview of the ongoing work of Roger Penrose on Before the Big Bang.

The lecture he has been giving on the circuit in this area is titled “Aeons before the Big Bang?” Abstract

For more on the second law, follow the development here.

Science marches on. Beyond that question being worked on by Penrose and others, however, there is no explanation of the general and ultimate fact of existence. Fact precedes question. To ask why there is something rather than nothing is a conceptual error. That there is no explanation for why existence exists does not indicate something we do not know nor something unknowable.

Christopher is correct in surmising that Nietzsche is not, in these quotes from Human, “talking about ‘creation of the universe’-type questions.” Nietzsche is here indeed following the old Humean sleight of slipping from the non-rational to the irrational. Nietzsche is adding his own further sleights (though, unlike Hume, not crafting a case for skepticism).

In Human Nietzsche speaks of “the strict necessity of human actions, that is to say, the unconditional unfreedom and unaccountability of the will” (Part II, 33 [1879]). The will is something whose character he takes as unfree, yet partner to the purposive; and a couple of years later he proposes to unify, if not identify, that duo of the intentional with its antipode chance, “the great cosmic stupidity."

Yes, perhaps there is only one realm, perhaps there exists neither will nor purposes, and we have only imagined them. Those iron hands of necessity which shake the dice-box of chance play their game for an infinite length of time: so that there have [$] to be throws which exactly resemble purposiveness and rationality of every degree. Perhaps our acts of will and our purposes are nothing but just such throws – and we are only too limited and too vain to comprehend our extreme limitedness: which consists in the fact that we ourselves shake the dice box with iron hands, that we ourselves in our most intentional actions do no more than play the game of necessity. Perhaps! – To get out of this perhaps one would have to have been already a guest in the underworld and beyond all surfaces, sat at Persephone’s table and played dice with the goddess herself. (Daybreak 130; translation of R. J. Hollingdale)

So one way in which the will is unaccountable is by its roots in chance, which Nietzsche takes as contrary to reason for most of the throws of nature. Chance in nature (and nature in us) is “irrational” in the Nietzschean way of speaking.

$ – No, there do not “have to be throws which exactly resemble purposiveness . . . .” There are no throws of nature that have to resemble anything absent the unfolding of nature in constrained ways.

Edited by Stephen Boydstun
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That last quote by N. that you posted seems to really show N. struggling with the dichotomy of free-will in a rule-oriented universe. It is an issue dealt with in numerous places on OL (of which I have attempted to contribute my own views), and it seems many a healthy thinker come upon this problem and must simply choose or reject one option out of necessity.

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My introduction to Nietzsche, strangely enough, was in the prologue to Conan the Barbarian:

"That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger"

The rest of what I know comes from bashing and not much else. It will be interesting to read his work. Either way, I never held him in a positive or negative light (due to my lack of knowledge of his works and societal impact).

~ Shane

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  • 3 weeks later...

No, Christopher. What we first need to do is read Nietzsche, then stick close to his texts in speaking of what he is saying. If we want to say words along the lines of what some philosopher has said, and if we want to mean something true and valuable by them, according to our own lights, that is fine. But if those meanings are not what the philosopher meant, then they are our words and our meaning, not his.

To speak of Nietzsche seriously, one first needs to read Nietzsche. It is not that difficult these days with all the fine English translations in the Cambridge series. The worst possible place to begin reading Nietzsche is with Zarathustra. One can come to understand that work, but only if one reads and connects what he wrote before it (leaving aside Birth of Tragedy) and after it: Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; Gay Science I–IV; Zarathustra; Gay Science V; Beyond Good and Evil; and Genealogy of Morals. That's the package.

The Cambridge series has Introductions for each text, written by a contemporary Nietzsche scholar, and these are helpful. The Introduction for Z was written by my Nietzsche professor. It was a great boost (and joy) to have studied under him. But the main thing is to read Nietzsche's texts, then give your citations when you represent his ideas. The latter is useful to audience seriously interested in his ideas, including to your own future self, when you have been away from the material for a while.

Stephen,

Certainly I agree that you must read Nietzsche first, but I strongly disagree with the rest. To read Nietzsche literally in search of his intent would be a prime example of "context dropping." Nietzsche didn't intend for his texts to undergo the kind of reading and analysis you've proposed; to stay true to his intentions would be to abandon the reductionist agenda of turning his philosophy into a neat system where each text fits nicely throughout his ouvre. Your advice would be akin to using deconstruction to understand the meaning of the Constitution, that is, disregarding the meta-discourse of the text itself. To read Nietzsche as he intended and to understand him (more importantly, to actually get something out of him) one needs to first recognize and accept the most basic concepts at play within his texts. If one were to follow your suggestion they'd end up exactly where they began and, if nothing else, Nietzsche intended to move us.

Ian

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Welcome and thanks, Ian.

I do not and would not look for a system in Nietzsche. From my study of Nietzsche, I think (and some Nietzsche scholars of the highest caliber concur) he has no system (notwithstanding Prof. Richardson’s valiant effort in Nietzsche’s System). Nietzsche spoke against system, and he succeeded.

I do not agree that studying the works of Nietzsche that I listed, and integrating them, would leave one back where one started. For example, by opening my books since making the post quoted below, I have been able to settle the conjecture therein about Nietzsche’s meaning in the negative.

Perhaps, too, Nietzsche is upholding a secular version of the line of Christian thinkers who would maintain the primacy of the divine will over the divine understanding in the creation and continuance of the world; that line would include William of Ockham, Hume’s precursor Nicholas of Autrecourt, and, more importantly for Nietzsche, Lutheranism.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS

Nietzsche insisted in the Preface to his later work On the Genealogy of Morals: "If this book is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do assume, that one has first read my earlier writings and has not spared some trouble in doing so . . . ." Kaufmann adds a good amplifying note at that point.

Edited by Stephen Boydstun
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Welcome and thanks, Ian.

I do not and would not look for a system in Nietzsche. From my study of Nietzsche, I think (and some Nietzsche scholars of the highest caliber concur) he has no system (notwithstanding Prof. Richardson’s valiant effort in Nietzsche’s System). Nietzsche spoke against system, and he succeeded.

I do not agree that studying the works of Nietzsche that I listed, and integrating them, would leave one back where one started. For example, by opening my books since making the post quoted below, I have been able to settle the conjecture therein about Nietzsche’s meaning in the negative.

Perhaps, too, Nietzsche is upholding a secular version of the line of Christian thinkers who would maintain the primacy of the divine will over the divine understanding in the creation and continuance of the world; that line would include William of Ockham, Hume’s precursor Nicholas of Autrecourt, and, more importantly for Nietzsche, Lutheranism.

Stephen,

Thank you for the warm welcome. Please don't mistake my rather academic prose for abrasiveness. If I choose to reply to a comment it is out of respect for the ideas and to hopefully provoke the kind of responses that you shared here. I would not reply if my intention was to merely assault a person's point of view without hope of gaining something from the exchange.

I will concede that reading and rereading Nietzsche's works can lead to a greater understanding. That being said, in my opinion, it is more interesting and perhaps more revealing to study what's happening in Nietzsche at the interface of text and reader than to extrapolate answers to conventional questions of philosophy. I'm more interested in what his text is "doing" or attempting to "do" to his reader through the written word and the often uncomfortable relationship forged between reader and text that ultimately leads one into new and undefined territory. I often read Nietzsche as a primer to working with other philosophers as I find that it opens me up to new ideas and ways of being with the text.

Perhaps this is the wrong place to introduce myself, but I can always re-post this elsewhere. I'm a graduate student who is interested primarily in rhetorical studies. I am most familiar with the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Foucault, Aristotle and Dewey; to a lesser degree Bateson, Bergson, and Plato; and to a much lesser degree Arendt, Hegel, and Kant. I have a soft spot for the so-called existentialist and find their ways of shaking foundations to be particularly useful. I'm here because my studies thus far have been skewed away from the Objectivism of Rand and I'm always up for learning a new perspective.

Ian

I like the preface to the Antichrist:

"This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my "Zarathustra": how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?—First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him… He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner—to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm… Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self…

Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?—The rest are merely humanity.—One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt."

Friedrich W. Nietzsche.

He loves to taunt his readers! To be honest, I'm not sure whether he's being literal here or not. I tend to think that he could use psychology as a soldier uses a gun. It seems to me that he's trying to impose a specific mindset on his readers; perhaps transferring his contempt to us by making himself the object of it. Who can read this and not think "this guy is narcissistic s.o.b.!" It makes me ask: "what author would want their reader to go into their work with this mindset?" I don't know the answer, but my guess is someone who doesn't want to be read with any sort of reverence.

Edited by Panoptic
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Ian:

Welcome aboard. I taught rhetoric at a university. Are you studying in America or abroad?

Adam

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