Reading Nietzsche here is what I think

Sounds like it will be a worth a look anyway, I will get around to it in mid-september when my MA dissertation is submitted :p Right now I am too burned out to read/research anything other what is immediately relevant for my diss.

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lol yeah I didn't think he was literally plagiarising Suzuki. Try explaining that to TurnItIn though :)

That said, there is an essay in that collection that he wrote while he was in college where he steals a story told by Alan Watts and passes it off as one of his own experiences training. I guess he partied a little too hard when he was supposed to be doing his homework and got Watts to pinch hit for him. Turnitin would've had his ass for that one :oops:
 
How come? Not disagreeing btw.

I think the philosophy behind those books are much more actually repeatable and actionable. I think they create a balanced and realistic, non edgybruh outlook and at the end of the day put the issues that effect you back on you. As Marcus says, you are only in control of yourself and you have to let go of what is outside yourself and instead focus on being the best you. That, to me, speaks much more then "we all die so fuck it" which to me is nietzche, I just don't gravitate to his everyone is a monster outlook. While I get his without god where do we get morals from and we will all naturally fall to nihilism outlook, I dont agree with it. Him putting the uberman as the only people able to create their own meaning rings false to me. Him saying pain is the only way to meaning, and that we exist just to suffer which in turn makes us profound just seems...emo as fuck. I understand why people like him, and certainly if I am in the mood relate, but as a life philosophy stoicism and its champions speaks to me, but whatever works for the person is ultimately all that matters so if he strikes a cord by all means.
 
That said, there is an essay in that collection that he wrote while he was in college where he steals a story told by Alan Watts and passes it off as one of his own experiences training. I guess he partied a little too hard when he was supposed to be doing his homework and got Watts to pinch hit for him. Turnitin would've had his ass for that one :oops:

What is the Watts story he used?

Watts has a bad rep these days, but I like him still...obviously not the same standard as what you'd get nowadays, but as an introduction to various eastern ideas I think he does a good job. Some people seem to dismiss him as if he's Deepak Chopra or something lol.
 
I think the philosophy behind those books are much more actually repeatable and actionable. I think they create a balanced and realistic, non edgybruh outlook and at the end of the day put the issues that effect you back on you. As Marcus says, you are only in control of yourself and you have to let go of what is outside yourself and instead focus on being the best you. That, to me, speaks much more then "we all die so fuck it" which to me is nietzche, I just don't gravitate to his everyone is a monster outlook. While I get his without god where do we get morals from and we will all naturally fall to nihilism outlook, I dont agree with it. Him putting the uberman as the only people able to create their own meaning rings false to me. Him saying pain is the only way to meaning, and that we exist just to suffer which in turn makes us profound just seems...emo as fuck. I understand why people like him, and certainly if I am in the mood relate, but as a life philosophy stoicism and its champions speaks to me, but whatever works for the person is ultimately all that matters so if he strikes a cord by all means.

Fair enough, stoicism is a pretty good and actionable philosophical outlook. Also agree re: whatever works for the person. After all, it's not necessarily a competition lol.

But I think you are going a little harsh on Nietzsche, he really wasn't so much "we all die so fuck it" which he is often characterised as. There is a very elitist aspect to Nietzsche thought regarding the overman (which is pretty undeniable), but I think there is a lot to like in there as well, though I can see why it might ring false. But for Nietzsche the Death of God, the absence of morals leading to nihilism, and human suffering in general, is something to be overcome philosophically...which is essentially what he tried (and thought he did) in his philosophy. So I think you can find stuff in there which is useful. Even in Nietsche, with the idea of eternal recurrence and amor fati (love of ones fate) a stoic could find something to like:

'My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it'.
 
What is the Watts story he used?

It's not so egregious as a simple copy-and-paste job, but for the basic gist: In his 1959 book This Is It, Watts has a chapter called "Zen and the Problem of Control" in which he uses judo as an example of the importance of wu wei (Watts' emphasis on which was also hugely influential on Bruce), the difficulties posed by self-consciousness, and even the metaphorical salience of water ("Be Water" anyone?). A couple of years later, student Bruce wrote an essay called "A Moment of Understanding" in which he made up a story from his Wing Chun days back in Hong Kong and basically put Watts' insights into the mouth of Ip Man. And, at one point, he does actually steal direct from Watts: Watts describes a Zen man as being one "through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water" and Bruce explains that what he realized thanks to Ip Man was that his "thoughts and emotions" when facing an opponent should "pass like the reflection of the bird flying over the water."

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Watts has a bad rep these days, but I like him still...obviously not the same standard as what you'd get nowadays, but as an introduction to various eastern ideas I think he does a good job. Some people seem to dismiss him as if he's Deepak Chopra or something lol.

I haven't read that much of his stuff (I've pretty much limited myself to what Bruce read :D) but I like what I've read. I've also watched a bunch of his videos on Youtube. Hell, in that lecture I did on Inception last year, I kicked things off with this:

 

Ya, know, ...always glad to help. YOU fucking try to purchase whatever construes as relevance over a period of given time, an epoch lived viably and with nostalgia to a number of truly decent kindred with the same bright eyes and feathered hair, and when a $U#% sluces your @#$#S your jump out of a driving car and 8#14-a nuance on the , thread could use some music. ...maybe some Gordon Lightfoot.
 
Alan Watts, and you know that's not a birth name. Has anyone studied electricity.
 
I have a decent understanding of poetry and literature, but if you throw philosophy in my face, it'll take me 15 reads to understand it.

Albert Camus' The Absurd was a whole summer of confusion. It was pretty absurd.
 
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Don't usually care about quotes or references, anything with my name is pre-fizzled fireworks, but early on, kinda chunked out my life onto a couple sails that I'll never fully understand, but I knew would I could hold on to enough at that moment as a messed up kid, who's winds dark as hell, never wouldn't fuck me over from a speaker, no false or shifty or suspect narrator, that's all the rage in the early and mid 20th novels and drama, in that, there was the old time religion, ... my story with Nietzsche is pretty fucking pure and holy to me. I'm not a dabbler, I knee-jerk with Nietzsche because of how I found him, the fucking journey and deep study deep religion I put into his words. I was so gone as a kid, he saved me when I just got a taste. As a young punk with a brain and a young family. It's hard to peel potatoes on a conveyor belt or dallying electrical harnesses to Lord Buckley on a walkman with cassette tapes, and (seriously, it used to really fucking take a monumental effort to get your shit on a Buckley album, A Lenny Bruce bootleg, or Redd Foxx any legg. I had to fight so fucking hard to get each Nietzsche book. I was a stupid little punk who knew I had a fucked up mind and I would die very young, but I didn't want to die just stupid. This story used to be precious to me, so much, I'd never talk about it, because, ....well, you're talking about magic, what ever little you have, you don't give your sources, they'll see behind the curtain.

Well, I can't credit everything to Jim Morrison. I was pretty much the same me before I met Morrison, but, ...I've never met anyone who's actually known Jim, did have guy who knew Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and Clellon Holmes crash at my place for awhile. And back to his place, it was envelope, not even a jail cell, ...I had good time, he drank with Kerouac and said ...stories, ...

There's a picture of me crashed in first period, 8th or 9th grade, yearbook, my shit haircut and No One Here Gets Out Alive in my hand. I've come to terms that every thing I say seems self-congratulatory, to the point, I don't give a fuck. It's huge amusement to me, my life, and if I thrust some of the complete insanity out there to friends, you don't have to believe me, my ego is sausage buiscut. It's meant to be warm, but I'm burnt and inedible around the edges to a discerning eye.

So,....skipping a few chapters. I spent a great deal of time in college and recreationally and third grade, and a little bit in fifth grade. ....This Nietzsche, before I figured out Al Capone, I was a messed up kid, thrown out of third grade. Nietzsche was the anti Christ, I was in fifth grade, I knew he wasn't any more than Robert Johnson, ...but he was nightmares like only Crowley, I was a kid. I want to pin it on the little version, because he can take it, we have a shorthand, we've seen some things, we're fond of the same old music.

I could write a horrible book, yeah probably not gonna happen, end tapes, how Nietzsche shaped me after the introduction from Morrison as a kid, and through deep academic years, and gut, and all after.

Apologies. NN
 
If a guy could feel the vibration getting out of control, he'd be Johnny Cash, ...so, I guess since I don't think I hit you Carl, no apology necessary.
 
Nietzsche ain't a nihilist you kooks.

Yeah, but his model of value creation was so far fetched he may as well have been... Nietzsche's anti-nihilist project goes a bit like "The cornerstone of values we have hitherto relied upon is no longer functional, and we are lost in a void with no objective source of value creation. Nihilist? No, I'm not a one of those. Why? You can create your own values! How? Well, let me explain that in deta..." *goes crazy* *dies* He was a emphatically not a nihilist in proclamation but in practice? His philosophy made a very comfortable space for nihilism while offering no clear, systematic, or arguably even functional way out. I suspect a lot of people went nihilist after reading Nietzsche's work.

From here on out, this is a response to the OP, not Caveat. I only have time to pipe in with an argument from authority here, but Nietzsche is one of the true cornerstone thinkers of modern philosophy. If you read anyone from Derrida to Foucault to Butler or Spivak, or even a popular author like Chuck Palahniuk, or a foreign giant like Josh Malihabadi, and you'll see the influence of Nietzsche's work dripping off the page. Whatever you think of the guy, his work has shaped postmodernism, deconstructionism, and existentialism, and had a profound creative impact in Western culture. His anti-metaphysical project was also indirectly of immense important for the development of phenomenology into the robust field it is today, since the absence of a metaphysical explanation and an increased focus on personal/subjective experience and perspectivism lead to a lot of thinkers looking to phenomenon (Nietzsche's "apparent world") for the answer. Hell, even things like his short paper "Truth and Lie in and Extra Moral Sense" have been influential in fields above and beyond the things he's usually associated with.

There are a few reasons why it's easy to be dismissive of Nietzsche. He rarely presents comprehensive arguments - only insights, critiques, and general points arrived at by narrative. On top of this, many of his works have points spread throughout a sort of ongoing philosophical narrative so, until you've managed to literally decipher the narrative/philosophical strands of his work, it'll just seem like a bunch of somewhat simplistic points spread about haphazardly. Lastly, his later (likely when the syphilis really got to him) work was, I would argue, not particularly good compared to his earlier and middle works - and you can pair that with some incoherence between the periods of his writing making him a thinker who, under scrutiny, will contradict himself. This all makes him an exceptionally easy figure to either nitpick or dismiss. Do that at your own peril though - this is one of the true giants of modern thought and he profoundly shaped the world you live in. I find a lot of Nietzsche's work a bit tough to swallow in light of some of his beliefs, but I teach it in a field it is not usually taught in because of how important it is as a groundwork for so much of what kids are learning in college today.

I can say, with a fair bit of confidence, that if you think Nietzsche is silly, superficial, and just not very good, you're not getting it, and the problem is you and not him. He's not for everyone, stylistically or from a stance of how palatable his ideas are, but he is both profound and astoundingly important. That all being said, his relevance is becoming more tenuous as times goes on, as many of the doors he opened are fleshed out in a more useful and timely fashion by more contemporary and systematic thinkers...
 
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I've gotta pee, but ...Nietzsche....not the flippancy or the spouting or a course or reading the collected Kaufmann, ...I don't know how you tell a son or daughter, or smart academic and beautiful kid with all the grants and a gifted IQ, you go spend the gift you have for this world on what's beautiful to you. Study Lit and Philsophy and Psychology, but depth study, Nietzsche and the turn of the century boys, they called it, and it played out to the degree that I literally choked and threw up high school, lock me away (song?....)

I'm no giant genius, somewhere along the line ya just hope you stumble on some people who talk to you. Like an old wizard, we're all heroes and alchemists, and if I can relay (genuinely, genuinely,..) one grain of Nietzsche son of a bitch. Nietzsche wasn't a professor of Nietzsche,...and this shit, in the day, scoring some F$%Q%s would've stung a little bit while I'm getting the back of my knees sucked to Hard Luck Woman in movie theater.

Curtis Cate's Bio, there's nothing in the ballpark. And as a lifelong guy, It's , I can't argue with it, you wana be someone, step on top of your giants that are no more but in the gentleness of a couple people who mutually cared and got a personal "taste"...

Nietzsche will always be not a philosopher with a hammer, was Christ a hammer? He wasn't the fucking nail, so he's the "passive element"....the "passive dictate" of 2100 years.

Nietzsche, very cool, meant or otherwise, positive or negative. He was a butcher block. I gave real part of myself and an ocean of years wagered it would be worth it, ..that my stupid fucking brain was worth the time and I wasn't just gonna have to
 
Yeah, but his model of value creation was so far fetched he may as well have been... Nietzsche's anti-nihilist project goes a bit like "The cornerstone of values we have hitherto relied upon is no longer functional, and we are lost in a void with no objective source of value creation. Nihilist? No, I'm not a one of those. Why? You can create your own values! How? Well, let me explain that in deta..." *goes crazy* *dies* He was a emphatically not a nihilist in proclamation but in practice? His philosophy made a very comfortable space for nihilism while offering no clear, systematic, or arguably even functional way out. I suspect a lot of people went nihilist after reading Nietzsche's work
Yea, I think Nietzsche's relationship to nihilism (actual and perceived) is a product of the tension between his desire to conduct a "revaluation" of Western values while also remaining thoroughly skeptical and outside the realm of "system-building" that he constantly criticized. I mean, you can't blame him for dying when he did, but it's notable that the 4-part series he had mapped out before he died (of which only The Antichrist was ever published) was 3 parts criticism and one part positive assertion. It's hard to tear down with one hand - especially the way he did it - and build with the other.

That said, touching on @Bullitt68's post above, a thorough reading of Nietzsche that results in proclaiming him a nihilist misses the whole purpose of his philosophy. Plus it's just lazy ;)
 
Ray Nitschke won two Super Bowls and was a great Middle Linebacker.
Fuck are you clowns even talking about.
 
I'm truly sorry I got pegged in this. To claim you know the answers...I don't, Nietzsche didn't, the Coen Brothers didn't. Hitler..., Elizabeth, ....I don't have any answers, and with all things I'm involved with I imagine it was in jest. I don't profess anything, but I can give you my take on Nietzsche, and the giant recommedations I put the time in for. Two of his books are on my bed. ...that's why I need to not be here.
 
I liked the Genealogy of Morality.

Currently reading Beyond Good and Evil. Feels insignificant. He just blathers on about how much he doesn't like other philosophers because they seemingly set out to pursue knowledge but rather used knowledge in the service of their latent moral assumptions.

That's decent, I guess. But everything he says just folds in on itself because there's no discipline to his writing. He's just gushing over with annoyances that are petty.

Seems to me that he's overrated by fan boys.

All these philosophers and thinkers, and writers who just write what they think about things are just plagiarizing what they read or heard somewhere else. Nothing they have is original, or novel, or ground breaking. Yet people treat them special.
 
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how" is one of the GOAT lines in philosophy
 
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