Quote (Skinned @ Aug 18 2017 03:57pm)

I'm going to try to write about TSZ and talk about some of the things that FN liked to talk about.

Thus Spake Zarathrustra wasn't written like the philosophy of the day, which was modeled after Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, etc. These were dense and prolix volumes which used a lot of words to describe things they viewed as ultimate reality, or at least tried to describe the functions of the mind itself, transcendental idealism, etc. This was after Kant's Critical Philosophy really changed the game, and when I said earlier that Kant and FN were hugely influential and Voyaging objected and named Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, etc, it is because philosophy is generally categorized as kind of old vs new and the defining line is when Kant resolved the metaphysical conflicts between the monisms of Empiricism (Hume, Locke, Berekley) and Idealism (Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz) that had been going on since Plato pointed up and Aristotle pointed down on The School of Athens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens . Transcendental idealism really resolved this conflict and paved the way for the cognitive sciences of the 20th century which was led by Kant's idea that the brain is a sensory organ that takes in atomic data and arranges it in a symbolic (transcendental) universe that the person experiences, so that we see chairs, and computers, instead of atoms, for purposes of survival. All of philosophers after Kant, including logic and mathematics (he had tons to say about all that, which is why he stands just barely under Plato and Aristotle themselves on the hierarchy). He said it was Hume who "woke him from dogmatic slumber". He wrote prolifically in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, and logic and mathematics but unfortunately spawned Hegel. George Soros has a lot to say about Hegel.

Nietzsche wrote a parable in the fashion of the Bible using Zarathrustra as a character because he was the original profit of belief based on there being Good and Evil as opposing forces in the world. Since Zarathrustra values truth above all as he challenged the religious authorities in his time...and since he incorrectly spread this untruth it was his duty to go and correct it, in heavily veils and metaphoric ways, building on his previous works, which are deliberately unsystematic, because systematic philosophy like Hegel deliberately uses verbiage and wording to filibuster their points over pages and pages, and Nietzsche would say they are hiding something in all those words, because the truth is simple, but might require some wisdom to understand.

It is important to note that Nietzsche is different than any philosopher I've named so far because his philosophy was prescriptive, demanding action on the reader, rather than descriptive, letting the reader be a passive receiver of an object. Karl Marx said that philosophy up until this point has been used to describe the world, however, the point is to change it. The Existentialists personified this. They are not nearly as concerned with the potential of combinations of yes and no switches or the uses of the rules of inference which I don't remember because I haven't used them since Introductory Logic, and more concerned with how to live a worthwhile life.

The overarching theme of TSZ is that man is a bridge....evolution is a thing, and we have come from a more primitive form of life. We have evolved and now we are a bridge between ape and possibly superman. We were on the direction to superman, however things went horribly wrong. What went wrong? The death of the Dionysian spirit. Men used to be great; we lived limitless in a state of nature, and barbarians never committed suicide or suffered from things like depression, or lived in big cities full of disease and unemployed peasants. They sang, they danced, they had sexual license, they were personified by the music of the flute perhaps (Nietzsche claims this in The Gay Science and The Birth of Tragedy). People valued the virtues that advanced evolution in a forward fashion, such as strength, courage, intelligence, pride, and action. FN kind of idolized Napoleon Bonaparte as the model of the kind of person who can lead humanity to the superman. Things were going well until things went horribly wrong....first it was Socrates. Socrates created sophistry, and FN hated sophistry. FN understood sophistry to be the tools the weak but clever use to gain power over the strong. Things got much worse when Jesus came, with the creation of the "weak, sickly, priest class" who "uses clever back doors to exert their power" over the noble Blond Barbarian (FN's words). One of FN's major themes is the ressentiment of values, which arose from the revolt of those with Slave morality vs those with Master of morality by using resentment as a creative force and changing Good and Bad into Good verses Evil, while changing what is good to humility, modesty, inaction, weakness, commonness, the traits of those with Slave morality (Christians) and what is bad into Strength, Pride, Boldness, Action, and Aristocracy (Roman Empire, aspects of which were very Dionysian prior to Christianity). Nietzsche believed it was Zarathrustra's duty to right this wrong, since Christianity itself is based on the religion he established. It was up to Zarathrustra to end The Social Contract, which is the cause of all the ills of humanity....this was the basis to much of Freud's work, the idea that man came from something, is motivated by drives, and that the social contract is the source of most neurosis and psychosis due to forcing man to constantly "live calculatedly" (Civilization and its Discontents).

Most of these claims are substantiated, to FN, by his The Genealogy of Morals, which Nietzsche describes his method, which is also something he is famous for. It is taken for granted that things like morals exist, mental health exists, punishment exists, hygiene and self care exist, and it is assumed that they have always existed, or people just did things differently or something....but just as humans started at some point, culture itself started at some point, all these things started at some point, and learning about their history is important to figuring out how we should live. He calls this the Genetic Account, which states when understanding and judging something where it came from matters, and then he uses this technique to trace Christian morality back to its source using the Slave vs Master dynamic of values which exist contradictory to one another in a way that can be never reconciled. So there is the genetic account, which Michel Foucault went nuts with with his histories of the prison, of punishment, of sex, of self care, of mental health and the asylum, and of taxonomy, The Order of Things, which is brilliant.

His views of Slave vs Master morality is based on his psychological critique in The Genealogy of Morals. Within it he described the dynamic between the Debtor/Debtee relationship, and that the natural power differential between the two feels good for the one who has power to extract payment, verses feeling bad for the one who much obey command when payment is demanded. The concept of schadenfreude is discussed about at length, where it is keenly observed that we only enjoy watching people suffer when we think they deserve it, but when they don't, we tend not to (like seeing an elderly woman fall). Between this natural enjoyment of watching others who (we think) deserve it and the intrinsic pleasure we experience with power, punishment is born. FN said the history of the human race is the history of cruelty....

The Eternal Reoccurance.....live your life by values you create and love your fate regardless of what it is. Don't have "outerworldly" hopes because the earth is your home, and "the Earth is your purpose" (TSZ). There is no Heaven, or Hell, nor Plato's world of perfect forms, nor is there an Essential order/Great Ladder of Being that is hierarchical that goes from the worms to God himself....none of that is real so do not base your values on that, but instead base your values on the things that make it conducive so that if you were forced to live this one existence over and over for all eternity, it would fill you with joy, because you will have never done anything you regret. It is a goal and something to think about. Amor Fati. Kind of a Nietzschean take on Virtue Ethics. He wanted to take philosophy back to pre-Socratic times because it had just gotten out of hand, especially with how far away from reality and weird metaphysics has gotten.

My wife is due to be home soon. I talked about Why Zarathrustra, Slave v Master morality and noble values, ressentimentation of values, the genetic account, eternal reoccurance, the Will to Power kind of.

There are other things. Like in Sartre's Nausea, the protagonist has a couple conversations with Nietzsche, who is called "the self-taught man" in the library, where he is reading all the books in alphabetical order, because he is against the epistemology of the day, which was a big problem with Sartre, who believed he had to start somewhere. Sartre and Nietzsche debated Descartes "methodological doubt" before Sartre based his next works, Transcendence of the Ego, and Being and Nothingness on the result of the argument :)

Carrying in stuff from wife's shopping trip. She's a shopoholic.