I have to say I'm a little bit shocked that neither of you mentioned that this book is basically just anti-Semitic hate speech veiled as philosophy. Please tell me I'm judging too quickly and it's not really like that, or I'm moving on the next book.
It's not that I don't understand what he's saying, I just think the insidious hatred it's spreading isn't worth spending time on.
Sorry, really annoyed right now.
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um, the thing with nietzsche, i'm getting, is that he says things that that are meant to sound outrageous and blasphemous to get you're attention and get you thinking. like, in ecce homo, for instance, his chapter titles are things like "why i am so wise," "why i am so clever," and "why i write such good books."
even though he completely rails on the jews, he also does so on the christians (to an extent which I found even harsher), and pretty much everyone else. that's the thing with nietzsche--he criticizes and makes low blows. what's interesting is that the blows he makes are so low that (seemingly) only he is perceptive enough to make them. the title of the work is, after all, "on the genealogy of morals: a polemic." It's a polemic, i.e. an attack on accepted ideas. he's not being anti-semitic (at least in the traditional sense) and even if he is, just reading it isn't going to corrupt you too much (assuming you're not *that* impressionable). so i say keep going and at the very least you'll learn what you dislike about it. it can never heart to be familiar with a philosopher whose critique of society has been so studied and so influential.
also, i will add that no one is expected to take nietzsche as gospel and agree with his mindset. if anything, doing so would probably make you go insane (as he himself did) or become allen porter, neither of which are viable options. my appreciation for what i've read is not so much 'agreement' with what i'm reading, as much as the overall idea of trying to overturn western values and approach them in a way that is not only detached (to the point of cruelty) but also humorous and mocking. nietzsche knows that most readers (especially stuffy nineteenth-century germans) will be offended by what he's writing (indeed, jews formed a large chunk of the intelligentsia at that time, as of course did christians) and he's expecting you to eventually realize that this is partially his goal, and interpret that as you like. it's similar to how freud came along and said "everything is sex we all want to our dads and fuck our moms" in terms almost as blunt, knowing it would shock his readers but feeling that such a shock was necessary. nietzsche had a great deal of influence on the ideals of modernism, partially because he was one of the first to break from the conventions of the nineteenth century.
also, it should be noted that most scholars don't think of nietzsche as being 'philosophy' in the same sense that, say, plato or hegel is. his influence was more on the critical theorists that would pop up throughout the twentieth century, like ardorno and derrida.
claire, if you read the wikipedia article "philosophy of friedrich nietzsche," and scroll down a bit, you'll see a section about nietzsche's criticism of anti-semitism, addressing the fact that his work had been wrongly interpreted to be ideology that would lead up to naziism. i think that, as with reading, like, marx, it's important to step back from the history that followed the work and try to interpret it itself.
i hope all this stuff i've said has actually addressed the point and been vaguely accurate...
also, i finished the kundera today in the office, and when i was reading the section about karenin, i actually had tears in my eyes which i had to artfully pass off as allergies (which luckily i have been experiencing lately anyway). such a pretty book.
Okay, John. Here's the thing. I think Nietzsche is full of shit. He attacked a group of people who have been victimized for centuries and may have contributed to their mass execution. The fact that he did it "to be outrageous" is a lame fucking excuse. It doesn't matter whether he also attacks Christians. Christians are not the opposite of Jews; in fact, as Nietzsche points out, they are relatively similar and closely related. He does, however, seem to buy into the whole blonde-noble-races bullshit completely. The words he uses to vilify the Jews are not always the same as those he is attempting to deconstruct. Freud did not use this kind of harmful speech, though his ideas were outrageous. And he didn't say outrageous things TO GET ATTENTION - he MEANT them.
Saying he didn't "mean" for it to be interpreted in that way is bullshit. It was, and he sure wasn't trying hard - or trying at all - to prevent that from happening. Honestly, would you read Mein Kampf as art? Some people would, and I respect that, but I wouldn't. Unlike a novel or poetry, the point or thesis of his work IS THE WHOLE POINT. German philosophy isn't "art" outside of the thought and idea behind it. I can think a philosopher is wrong and respect his intelligence, but if I think he is wrong to the point of offensiveness and destructiveness, I prefer to respect his intelligence from afar.
Nietzsche is smart and all, but honestly I just don't think I can stomach it. I'm sorry, I wanted to read it, but I can't escape the notion that he's so widely adored today because of his Miltonian tactic of being a clearly brilliant man and then belittling everyone who doesn't agree with him (because clearly they don't understand or just aren't intelligent enough to ever understand). I let it pass in Milton, but this is just revolting. Write up something nice about him and I promise to read it, but I can't promise to read any more of his book.
so Nietzsche...
I finished the first essay last night - and as for warning you about the nature of the text, Claire, when I mentioned that I was making my way through the Nietzsche slowly and that I found it interesting, I really meant slowly - I was only on about the 4th section of the first essay.
I respect your choice to not read any more of the Nietzsche, Claire, and I also respect your choice to read the Nietzsche, John. It is totally your choice, and I hope that neither of you feel any pressure from me to read or not read it.
I would agree that saying Nietzsche writes such inflammatory things simply for the sake of being outrageous is a poor excuse for the content of his text. I think Nietzsche is too intent a writer for that. However, I don't think John was arguing that Nietzsche didn't mean what he said... am I right, John?
For me, I am willing to read it- and I'm guessing both of you agree that reading a work in no way indicates you are validating, or are any more tolerant of, what the speaker is saying. I find a lot of what Nietzsche says pretty detestable, but I also don't think I can blame him for Nazi-ism or any subsequent anti-semitism. I guess for me, it's more important that I try to have a better understanding of the work of such an influential thinker, despite my aversion to some of his arguments.
it's fair to say we all approached nietzsche with different expectations. frankly, i thought i would hate it because of the strong associations it originally had with allen porter. the difference i realized once reading it was that yes, if you actually agree with everything, you would be allen porter, but that's the thing - no one really reads nietzsche (at least in the academic circles that we technically are (or are attempting to be)) in order to understand how better to live their own lives. the merit one finds in him is in his exposing trends in western rationality that were quite novel, and would go on to shape intellectual history in the coming era. some of those consequences were clearly negative (i.e. people interpreting him too literally/using him to justify crudely thought-out racist beliefs) but others were quite positive (i.e. modernism - people reevaluating old conceptions upon realizing that we indeed didn't have everything figured out).
I didn't mean to imply that nietzsche didn't mean what he was saying. what i was thinking of was the fact that nietzsche was a philosopher who wrote books for a (fairly small) segment of educated people to read and didn't have the hindsight of twentieth-century history to put things in perspective. just as peter singer doesn't donate as much of his income to charity as his philosophy 'says' one is morally obligated to do (nor do I think he would actually approve of infanticide if carried out in the real world), nietzsche didn't necessarily want all the jews to eliminated from europe (or anything like it). he was a smart person, one who saw things in a subtle and complex way, so i doubt that he would advocate the holocaust as a viable solution to any problems in european 'slave morality'. yes he meant that the jews were responsible for deeply seated flaws in western rationality (the jews, i might add, of ~4,000 years ago), and he did belittle them, but (and I'm by no means condoning anti-semitism here) a lot of people throughout history have said mean things about groups of people that we now find morally disgraceful. thomas jefferson owned slaves, nietzsche insulted jews, and it's safe to say that nearly every important man until about 1900 was a sexist by today's standards; but in academics we would be nowhere if we overlooked other sides of them that remain relevant today. Perhaps I should have just said all this in the first place.
Basically, I think that nietzsche's ideas truly are interesting, if for no other reason than that they hold western history, religion, and thought under a new light. to rule it out completely is to miss out on a learning experience that, in the very least, puts the beliefs one already has in a deeper perspective.
Thank you for your input, Dana.
John, I still can't agree with your comparing him to other men. I can study and admire Jefferson's life and accomplishments separately from his private slaveholding; I can read a misogynist author without having to worry about his personal misogyny. I have done this and can do it because their views are usually pretty separate from their work. And even if not, they are rarely so central. And no, I don't really care to read many authors whose main point crucially involves women or black people or some such being evil. Maybe this makes me a poor academic, but that alone isn't going to persuade me to read Nietzsche. I'm fairly well read, and I've read prejudiced things, but I've never read something that offended me to this degree.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts, and I do hope someday I will be able to come back to Nietzsche with a slightly more objective mindset. For now I just think I'll read a nice light mystery for a while.
So I guess I should warn you now about Fagin, (just in case you haven't heard)... we wouldn't want to have to repeat this.
Yes, hilarious, John. You know perfectly well this is nothing like Fagin.
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