I like the idea of a reader-driven blog, because in the first place, it allows me to learn as much from my readers as they can pick up from me. Down below, someone sayeth:
I was referring to Nietzche & friends…
It would actually surprise me if Nietzsche had any friends.
The anecdotal story that philosophers like to tell was that Nietzsche had sex exactly one time, and he just happened to catch syphilis on that single occasion. What an amazing coincidence! Of course, this was part of Nietzsche’s schtick: that he had already progressed far beyond the needs of us lowly humans who were interested in sex, and was well on the way to elucidating the Übermensch.
While I don’t mean any disrespect to my old teachers — they were all fantastic thinkers — I don’t personally buy this, any more than I’d buy it from Joel Osteen, who probably claims to only have sex with Victoria. In the first place, being a well-known thinker has a particular charm: not because wimminz like philosophy, math, art, or any other higher form of expression, but only because you have a certain measure of social validation among your male peers. In the second, well, get real. The sex drive is second only to the impulse for eating as far as men’s instinctual needs go, and if the wimminz are willing to have sex with me, they’re certainly willing to have sex with Fred. I’m far scrawnier and paler than he, and can’t grow a cool ‘stache to save my life.
The continental tradition is a personal lacuna. I did that thesis on the analytics, and while I’m very comfortable talking shit about Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, my knowledge of Nietzsche comes largely from reading exactly one of his books. I do know he wrote his thesis on early Greek playwrights, and that his love of the chaotic influenced the psychoanalytic tradition, who adopted his theory that we were all very repressed and needed more outlets for our individual and collective angst. I also know that the mathematician/phenomenologist Edmund Husserl criticized him in his Crisis of European Sciences and that Martin Heidegger (Husserl’s student) rehabilitated him in Being and Time. That’s about it.
I’d actually be pretty interested in the SJW appropriation of Nietzsche.
hits Infogalactic for more
No disrespect; and, you’re not wrong, but Infogalactic is even less reliable than Wikipedia. It’s owned by a guy named Beale, who is lately famous for being the oddball Amerind white-nationalist, who is having a fit at Andrew Anglin, and supposedly threatening to sue Gab because anonymous internet folks are making fun of him. All this sounds very inconsistent to me; though I don’t judge, and perhaps he has some motivation aside from an excess of money and time for his behavior.
Infogalactic pulls (i.e. steals) directly from Wikipedia. I’ve authored Wikipedia articles, and if I can create and modify articles there, you really shouldn’t take anything on it at face value. I tell kids it’s a good place to start, but one ought to follow the sources back to more reliable places.
I was mistaken in calling Frege an MGTOW. I appreciate the correction, because that’s a misconception I’ve held for years.
Of course, as a man, Uncle Karl was a hateful misogynist and rapist by default; but his personal antifeminism goes way beyond the usual boilerplate. For example, Karl Marx was a monogamist who was married to a girl named Jenny von Westphalen. They were married young and had seven children who survived, with at least a couple who died in childbirth. Karl’s father, Heinrich, was a deeply religious man, who converted to Protestant Christianity in Holland. He homeschooled young Karl until high-school.
With all this in mind, it’s strange to see the simultaneous love of him by feminists, and hatred of him in the androsphere. He was wrong about many things, but his post-Hegelian take on the historical imperative proves very useful to men like us. His greatest antifeminist student was probably E. Belfort Bax, whose work is up on marxists dot org. Men on our side ought to at least read Feminism in Extremis here.
Nietzsche was on the correct path originally, choosing a worthy idol in Richard Wagner. However, he was unable to follow in the footsteps of the Great Master. Sometimes this happens…the young apprentice proves to be of less merit than his idol.
Oh that’s what you meant by Karl being antifeminst. Yeah I read up on his family creation.
Married a woman 4 years older than he (bad idea no matter how beautiful he thought she was)
2 of his daughters committed suicide (one with her husband and the other because her ‘partner’ secretly married another woman…she must not have been a catch)
I can’t remember which daughter was the one married but I read the reasoning she had several children with her husband was because birth control wasn’t available. Hence they really couldn’t do feminism well with the socialism back then because things like pregnancy still happened if women decided to have sex.
Also that syphillis story is either the case of the worst bad luck someone could have or the biggest load of horse manure. I’d tend to agree that Fred was most likely more of a cad given he went the godless route.
“I.d actually be pretty interested in the SJW appropriation of Nietzsche.”
I recall it was a religious appropriation. They started with a nihilist perspective of Nietzsche’s writings, to the point of taking his famous “God is dead” at face value, and then interpreting his will to power philosophy as the idea that men can make themselves into gods to perform “God’s” role in giving meaning to life… preventing the despair that accompanies nihilism.
“God is dead… and one of us must take God’s place,” they might say. Hardly an original conclusion and I doubt they were doing even Nietzsche any justice with it.
Such “education” is how I came to believe that philosophy is the art of questioning the answers provided by theology. Not a fair accusation against the philosophers who created Western thought. The true philosophers and thinkers spoke complicated thoughts in old language so having a guide to properly understand their ideas is essential… a guide who values Western civilization and had better motivation for getting his PhD than fear of honest work. I had to self-teach and those language barriers mean I’m never 100% sure I grok their ideas. Anybody who’s read original Shakespeare knows what I mean.
Consequently, I don’t like the STEM acronym. There’s much more to a proper education than learning how to manipulate the physical world. Got a post on that coming up.
“No disrespect; and, you.re not wrong, but Infogalactic is even less reliable than Wikipedia. It.s owned by a guy named Beale”
Everybody is biased. Not everybody is honest about their bias. I feel better about the alt-Right offering Infogalactic as a partisan alternative to Wikipedia than SJWs claiming their Wikipedia is nonpartisan. I don’t know how IG can pull Wikipedia’s material without inheriting Wikipedia’s biases. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the Internet. I probably shouldn’t be on the Internet.
Beale is a deeply flawed, useful, interesting guy. I doubt I’ll ever see another Dark Triad Christian.