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.

  • 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.