Materialism>idealism

I’m not trying to get into a whole debate, it’s just interesting to me the way some people cling to these idealist philosophers. Same w the stoics imo. As a guy who used to read all of them… they’re useless to actually understanding life. Like it can be helpful to read them in order to understand how the Western worldview evolved, but they really shouldn’t be taken as some sort of handbook - which many seem to do. (reactionaries). People who read Nietzsche or Plato and think they have some sort of secret insight is my biggest red flag irt pseudo-intellectual who is just going to waste your time… same with Dostoevsky btw.

Confucius is based af though.

Edit: Also, yes these kinds of people exist- my former mentor/boss who spent decades at a white shoe DC law firm would accept any idea if you found a quote by Plato to justify it lmao.

  • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
    8·
    2 years ago

    I love philosophy and I actually take my reflections from philosophy and apply them to life a shit ton, I just think Plato and Aristotle’s approach to it is not very useful. Plato in particular. Aristotle has some better concepts but I think approaching life with abstract virtues is a really easy way to manipulate your population. Because you ascribe certain values to certain behaviors which may or may not have that value which makes it very easy to play with the worldview of the populace. As to the origing of their ideas I think that is less important than how they were used (not unimportant -just less important). Those ideas laid the foundation of oligarchic rule in the ancient world and then again during the renaissance until today. Western thought is contaminated at the roots by elitist ideas on a whole different leve.

    If you like Nietzsche I recommend you read the things I linked below. I’m kind of surprised how many people on here seem to like him… he’s literally the grandaddy of fascist thought. I think people tend to assume sincerity from writers of that era for whatever reason. Nietzsche literally wrote anti-communist propaganda at a period where communism was experiencing a massive increase in popularity. If you’ve read Nietzsche without that context then you should re-evaluate.

    What I like so much about Confucianism, for all it’s faults, is that it prizes benevolence (ren) above all other virtues and it takes the approach that humans are not these static creatures but grow and learn. The western philosophers really inhabit the world of ideas far too much. To confucius the people are not bad, they are misled and impoverished. To the Western thinkers, there is something wrong with most humans and they must change from the inside outward… it’s justification of oligarchy through and through.

    • Samubai@lemmygrad.ml
      5·
      2 years ago

      That’s true, but there is no evidence nietzsche ever read Marx. I think he was too far in his own bubble to even notice tbh. When nietzsche refers to socialists i believe he is referring to who we’d call the utopians. Not dialectical materialism.

      The way I understand it, nietzsche hated Plato and Socrates because they were idealists, he thought idealism was the birth of Christianity and the denial of the real world. I agree with that. Nietzsche is an edge lord tho.

      Part of the reason I read him is exactly bc of his collision with socially-minded philosophies. Call me a masochist but I want to understand the idiot nietzsche edge lord as deeply as possible. One of the biggest reasons being that a lot of reactionaries like JPeterson and his followers use nietzsche to fit their needs and there are few people that ever challenge them or their made-up great man ideology.

      My opinion is that there is a lot of good in nietzsche at least when it comes to aesthetics, morality, a kind of psychology and some decent social critique. However, he is no anthropologist. I think it was Beyond Good and Evil that he posits that trade is the beginning of humanity. A cursory view at animal behavior disproves this premise quite easily.

      His idea of the ubermensch and all that’s related is both terribly named and contradictory to his own claimed philosophical project. He constantly repeats the idea that philosophy should be species-nurturing and life-affirming, the “gay science” right? Well, the ubermensch is anything but life affirming or species nurturing. It is a complete rejection of humanity. It is the anti-mensch. It is human to be average. If we weren’t, humanity would have never existed. It would be more akin to tigers or pumas, non-cooperative. He also claims to be against resentiment, but his philosophy is built on it. It doesn’t really compute.

      You cannot overcome humanity; to do so means extinction. At the very least, the rhetoric is absurd.

      Edit: I think to get anything from nietzsche it has to be read in a specific way with a lot of disclaimers and caveats. Just read Lao Tzu and Guangzhou. They’re better and less tedious IMO.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
        4·
        2 years ago

        Read closely.

        Let us look a century ahead, let us suppose that my attentat on two millennia of anti-nature and the violation of man succeeds. That party of life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless extermination of all degenerate and parasitic elements, will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life out of which the dionysian condition must again proceed. — Friedrich Nietzsche, 1872

          • Oatsteak@lemmygrad.ml
            6·
            2 years ago

            I really would like to hear the context behind how on earth that isn’t just a blatantly fascistic quote… How do you interpret it?

              • Oatsteak@lemmygrad.ml
                4·
                2 years ago

                It’s not about genetics or race. But it’s about evolution.

                …

                That doesn’t make any sense. Are we talking about a spiritual kind of evolution or something?

                • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
                  6·
                  2 years ago

                  Nietzche absolutely was talking about race and genetics.

                  Will this aristocracy be a caste, and their power hereditary? For the most part yes, with occasional openings to let in new blood.

                  • Oatsteak@lemmygrad.ml
                    6·
                    2 years ago

                    Okay so IF I was trying my very hardest to interpret the quote in the most agreeable way possible I could MAYBE convince myself that “the higher breeding of humanity” actually refers to a spiritual/cultural evolution and that the “remorseless extermination of all degenerate and parasitic elements” is just an edgy way to say eat the rich or something.

                    But like… come on. That’s such a ridiculously generous interpretation. Am I wrong?

          • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
            51·
            2 years ago

            I definitely recommend reading this if you have any positive thoughts about Nietzches philosophy. Its completely anti-feminist, anti-socialist, pro-war, orientalist, and a lot more.

            • Oatsteak@lemmygrad.ml
              71·
              2 years ago

              Thanks for sharing this. He’s so much worse than I initially thought. I have a very hard imagining any context that could make him even remotely redeemable after reading that.

                • Seanchaí (she/her)@lemmygrad.ml
                  7·
                  2 years ago

                  It’s almost like he only said really troubling things, and the people who like him are projecting their own views of what he actually meant. But he’s dead, so we can’t ask him, we can but read the things he published (and be pissed about how terrible they are)

                  • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
                    5·
                    2 years ago

                    I recommend Domenico Losurdo’s book on Nietzsche, this review on midwestern marx gives a decent snapshot of it, and directly addresses how Kaufman rehabilitated Nietzsche. Losurdo essentially follows Nietzsche’s life from beginning to end and situates every piece he wrote in that timeline to contextualize it.

              • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
                31·
                2 years ago

                I don’t think you read the right link, that’s a compilation of Nietzche’s own quotes, not a full analysis.

                  • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
                    61·
                    2 years ago

                    Yup I don’t get it. Nietzche says shit like “only men of intellect should hold property”, “all women do is lie, and their only role should be to sexually please warriors”, “socialism is for the weak and inequality is great”, and “blond beasts of prey need to hellenize the world”… and ppl act like he’s some profound thinker and not some incel from the 1800s.

                  • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
                    71·
                    2 years ago

                    This is a historically standard reactionary trend, to say extremely heinous shit, then their defenders say “context!!!”. You even see it a lot today with ppl like vaush, jordan peterson, ben shapiro, etc.

                  • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
                    41·
                    2 years ago

                    stupid lmao.

                    You read a whole book and certain lines jump out at you. You share the quotes which encapsulate the authors perspective. If you shut off the ability to share quotes then you shut off the ability to critique.

              • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
                42·
                2 years ago

                Jfc dude. Tell me you don’t know how western academia works without telling me you don’t know how western academia works. I’ve literally read nietzsche as well and I stand by everything I’ve said here.

                “There are a lot of his stuff that looks controversial at first glance but it takes a bit of work to understand him.” Next thing you’ll tell me that Foucault actually made some intelligent observations…

                I’m sorry but this is pissing me off that you are this obtuse. The entire western bourgeois study of philosophy, especially in the 20th century is aimed at enshrining elitist, anticommunist ideas and rehabilitating the fascist worldview… which is still alive and well.

                This thread is about you. Learn what fascism actually is.

                  • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
                    52·
                    2 years ago

                    This is an anonymous forum I can be as emotional in my responses as I want. Ideas matter. I get worked up about them.

                    This is like jordan peterson levels of avoiding answering a question.

              • ZarathustrasApe420@lemmygrad.ml
                21·
                2 years ago

                I agree with checking out Kaufman. Again I’m mainly speaking to readers of this thread. I read the criticisms that OP posted and they seem to be doing the same cherry picking as reactionaries. Nietzsche doesn’t advocate for systems. Nietzsche advocates for Nietzsche. I think that left critics are making him out to be something he wasn’t. Yes he was a professor and bourgeois for a period of his life. By the end he was not widely read, had few friends, and he died penniless and insane. It was only after his death that real interpretation of Nietzsche began (which he predicted). If you’re interested just read him and come to your own conclusions. I recommend Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Idols.

                • SpaceCowboy@lemmygrad.mlOP
                  32·
                  2 years ago

                  I’m really not. I’m not saying he was goose-stepping around europe but literally his ideological framework built the foundation of dehumanization which brought race science into the 20th century.

                  you are so engrossed in his personal life you can’t see what his writing created and enabled.

    • ButtigiegMineralMap@lemmygrad.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought Nietzsche himself was not a Fascist but his sister or sister-in-law or something became a huge Nazi supporter and used his works as evidence to support Nazism. I don’t know much else about him except for Nihilism (which I primarily remember bc of The Big Lebowski)