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Post by Dirty Santa PaulsLaugh on May 19, 2020 19:05:45 GMT
A crazy genius. Some try to walk the line between those two states, but he straddled it fearlessly like a titanic demi god. His writing is extremely compelling even when you find yourself disagreeing with him. Probably could've developed a cult of personality if he'd taken to politics rather than philosophy. Perhaps more than any great philosopher, Nietzsche has found his way into the popular cultural consciousness, often without many even knowing the ideas originated with him (though some ideas weren't necessarily originally his, per say, he was the one that popularized them). If you've read ideas about the death of God, of facing down nihilism with self-determination, of transcending cultural norms to be kind of superhuman, of truth being largely relative, etc. it's probably due to Nietzsche. Everyone with even a passing interest in philosophy should at least read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is probably his most substantial work. Actually, right now you can get most of Nietzsche's writings on Kindle for $8 in two volumes: HERE and HERE. At $2 the Portable Nietzsche is a steal and contains TSZ. Walt Whitman said that to have great poets there must be great audiences. Nietzsche had an awful lot of poor audiences. I too don't know much about him, but I suspect that was partly his fault. I'm guessing he was wrong and fired people up about wrong. His "success" might be the result of having much learning and ease of language. Perhaps he made dummies feel smart. Remember Newt Gingrich? Many people thought he was especially intelligent. He did in fact have a large vocabulary and used it with ease. His ideas were not however all that special. You’ve never read much Nietzsche, “don’t know much about him,” and yet did you know you would not have the great philosophy of the New Republican Party found in such popular right wing books like Atlas Shrugged without him? If you want a crash course into Nietzsche, read Beyond Good and Evil. And along with Freud and Marx, he was one of the Masters of Suspicion. You like suspecting things of not really being what they are because you have a unique vision, so I think the philosophy of the New Morality would interest you. What have you got to lose?
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