Glenn Binger asks, "Taco Bell tacos don't taste like tacos should.
Do I think that because I've read classic literature?"
The answer is
yes
Glenn Binger made a very complicated sentence a person would who hasn't read classic literature and philosophy would not have made.
FIRST: The use of alliteration(The ta sounds) four times proves that he is well read in classic literature.
SECOND: He is using Wittgenstein to understand the taste of the taco bell taco. The taste of the taco bell doesn't correspond with the elementary facts concerning tacos.
The person who has read classic literature and philosophy will be at least talking in sentences using alliteration.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Why it is worth it to read classic literature and philosophy
This is the only difference between a human that has read classic literature and philosophy and a person that hasn't:
The person who hasn't read classic literature and philosophy just stands in Taco Bell and feels nothing but the need to get a taco.
A person that reads classic literature and philosophy can stand in a Taco Bell and feel all the beautiful irony of needing to get a taco.
The person who hasn't read classic literature and philosophy just stands in Taco Bell and feels nothing but the need to get a taco.
A person that reads classic literature and philosophy can stand in a Taco Bell and feel all the beautiful irony of needing to get a taco.
A Day in the Life of an Ubermensch
8:30AM: The Ubermensch wakes up and thinks, "That dream was stupid."
8:45AM: The Ubermensch walks from the kitchen to the living room. He looks at the living room and thinks, "Why is that shirt on the davenport, I need to put that shirt in the hamper before the day ends." Then he thinks, "Why did I think davenport, oh because of my benny addict grandma."
11:33AM: The Ubermensch stands before a tall building and thinks, "This building is much taller than me, if it fell on me, I would die."
12:46PM: The Ubermensch looks at some dandelions and thinks, "The will to power of dandelions is stronger than my will. The dandelions have taken over the eastern states of America. I need a vitamin water."
3:33PM: The Ubermensch takes a nap.
6:15PM: The Ubermensch stops reading Heidegger to image his girlfriend's naked body in his mind.
8:55PM: The Ubermensch eats ice cream.
11:47PM: The Ubermensch checks his facebook. He has a new message. He reads the message and decides not to respond for three days.
12:56AM: The Ubermensch goes to sleep.
8:45AM: The Ubermensch walks from the kitchen to the living room. He looks at the living room and thinks, "Why is that shirt on the davenport, I need to put that shirt in the hamper before the day ends." Then he thinks, "Why did I think davenport, oh because of my benny addict grandma."
11:33AM: The Ubermensch stands before a tall building and thinks, "This building is much taller than me, if it fell on me, I would die."
12:46PM: The Ubermensch looks at some dandelions and thinks, "The will to power of dandelions is stronger than my will. The dandelions have taken over the eastern states of America. I need a vitamin water."
3:33PM: The Ubermensch takes a nap.
6:15PM: The Ubermensch stops reading Heidegger to image his girlfriend's naked body in his mind.
8:55PM: The Ubermensch eats ice cream.
11:47PM: The Ubermensch checks his facebook. He has a new message. He reads the message and decides not to respond for three days.
12:56AM: The Ubermensch goes to sleep.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Essay on Nietzsche
This is the final draft: this essay is a clusterfuck. It has a lot of words and I'm not sure if I make any points properly. I feel really weird about the whole thing.
Review of Beyond and evil
Nietzsche wrote in 204 of Beyond Good and Evil, “I am of the opinion that only experience- experience always seems to mean bad experience?- can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank.” Nietzsche suggests a person cannot just 'learn something' by hearing it or being taught about it in a classroom: one must experience it. But what does 'experience' mean? The dictionary says, “To live through.” The connotation is that a human does things, has things done to them, is in a certain location at a certain time and the things that surround them give them 'feelings.' What Nietzsche is saying is that knowledge is more than words, it is feeling. That a person can gain better of something by experiencing it, by feeling it, by experiencing something and then analyzing what one felt and remembered.
Nietzsche had a unique experience. He was born in 1844 in Germany which was a chaotic place in the 1800s. At the beginning of the 1800s Germany was not yet a state. It was still a collection of small states. In 1866 Prussia fought Austria and Germany became a state. (Thinkquest.com, no date) Nietzsche personally watched his country go from being a collection of smaller states to becoming an empire. For me, the experience of my country fighting two foreign wars and the protests of teabaggers gives me questions about myself and the nature of things. I could not imagine what effect it had on Nietzsche's mind that such a chaotic upheaval took place in his country. To humans if they admit it in polls or not, the state is the center of one's life. The state protects you, keeps you safe, makes sure that you have what you need. The state designs the roads and locates the buildings. The state even supplies an overhanging generalized philosophy that the people living under that state goes along with. People will say that religion or their God is more important to them than the state. But their bodies always alert them that the state is the thing that they need, food and shelter. But this is why states align themselves with the Gods, in ancient Rome they went so far as to deify their Caesars. In America we call it, “God's country” and many Republican voters and even some Republican politicians believe they have 'callings' from God. In Islamic Theocracies and in the Middle-Ages the European countries had a special connection to God. A person may say that the United States has a free market and even the libertarians have gone so far as to say that the markets should be able to do what they want; but humans when they have no work, no food and no shelter always run to the state to complain about their situation. As Dostoevsky said people will run to the state and plead, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” As can be seen from teabaggers who complain that the government is taking control over the markets but at the same complaining to the state that they have no jobs or need more money. This is a contradiction. One cannot ask for free markets and yet complain to the government when there are no jobs. Humans depend upon the state, the state supplies the means for them to live their lives, and in many countries if not our own in the state supplies the meaning to the lives of their citizens. In modern mass society the state has become more important than ever: a society with millions and some with billions DEMAND large scale infrastructure to feed, shelter and transport their population. What Teabaggers and libertarians do not comprehend when they mention the Framers is that when The U.S. Constitution was written and people had more libertarian values there were only four million non-native Americans sharing a huge piece of land. There was no electricity, sewer systems, public schools, trucks, planes, televisions then. Of course they were libertarian, they were living in a giant forest where you traveled by horse. And if you wanted some land all you had to do was take a wagon a little farther west and you could get some land probably for free or very cheap. There was no DEMAND for government back then. Which leads to another question which befuddles me why people don't ask, “If government is like a business which operates on supply and demand, and if people DEMAND things the government sells(provides) wouldn't more population equal more government.” The Teabaggers are crazy because they are arguing for America to go back to like 1830 when there was less people and more land, and less diversity. They want to turn the clock back to a different time because they think they would be happier in a world with less humans, because less humans means less government DEMAND. The teabaggers do not comprehend this though: what people do not understand is that when liberals talk about Green technology and are pro-abortion they are talking about the same thing as teabaggers, “Population.” It is just that the liberals are willing to deal with the problem, they can emotionally handle it while the teabaggers can't emotionally handle it and when you can't emotionally handle something you don't act rationally.
When the old Germany disappeared and was replaced with the new one. Nietzsche as all German must have felt extreme existential anxiety. The way they had been living for several hundred years had suddenly disappeared.
Nietzsche's writing is prescriptive and at the same descriptive conjecture. Nietzsche in many ways is telling you not how to live, but that there are different ways to live. In The “Prejudices of Philosophers” and “What is Religious” Nietzsche discusses how humans have prejudices, how we have preconceived notions about stimuli we encounter. That religion a mindset of tyranny. Nietzsche wrote in 46, “For the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only what is tyrannical, in morals, too.” A mindset, a world view, or an interpretation of reality is like a structure that one lives in. Nietzsche shows that the religious mindset is tyrannical, to use Sartre's example that a person locks him or herself inside a prison of their bad faith or prejudices. But I would like to add that we are in a prison of our prejudices but the thing is that we are our own guards. We personally make sure that we do not notify ourselves of these prejudices we have. Nietzsche wants you to kill the prison guard. Nietzsche isn't notifying you like a religious teacher or a motivational speaker how to live. He wants you to kill the prison guard so you can leave the prison and 'see things.' In Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 66 Wittgenstein is talking about games and how they work Wittgenstein wrote, “Don't think, but look.” (Wittgenstein, 1953) Wittgenstein was pleading with the audience, 'Quit thinking, you keeping having prejudices and preconceived notions instead of just looking.' Nietzsche is making a similar statement. Nietzsche wants you to leave the prison of prejudices and when you encounter something, not to force your preconceived notion on what it means.
Nietzsche wants the audience to learn about their prejudices, to see their prejudices, to come to terms with their prejudices, to understand their prejudices. As for myself, I know I have prejudices that come from being raised in American culture and its capitalist principles, I have prejudices that come from being blue collar and being raised in the rust belt, from not being forced to go to church when I was little compared to others who were raised with the church, and even by having a hard working mother who didn’t act ‘womanly.’ I know I have prejudices based on past experiences. Now, what Nietzsche wants isn’t something mystical, Nietzsche doesn't think you will wake up from a deep sleep and reach some nirvana-like state. This is what Nietzsche means when he says in 146, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Nietzsche is speaking of when a person isolates themselves from what the mob prejudices, retreats into themselves and faces their prejudices. It is like one has a conversation with prejudices. That one sits down and speaks to the prejudices that the American culture has taught them, or one sits and has a long dialogue with their father’s prejudices. I don’t know how many days of pain I have had trying to deal with the prejudices of my parents, how many times their voices and not mine have arisen in my head. I have to fight their voices, but the only way I can fight their voice is by looking deep into where their prejudices came from. I have to become the monster to understand their prejudices. Nietzsche says monster, today we call it empathy. But to be empathetic one must try to feel and think like the monster. To understand one’s prejudices one become a monster, a person has to look hard at something and learn about it. But just because you have to know what your prejudices are, doesn't mean they go away, they are always there haunting you.
Nietzsche also uses descriptive conjecture. Nietzsche describes how the religious mind works, how one can and cannot be a free spirit. But he doesn't use science. He doesn't state surveys nor does any scientific research. Nietzsche wrote around the same time as Sigmund Freud and William James who did extensive psychological research, Nietzsche could have become a psychologist and done proper and normal research but instead Nietzsche opted out of that new pattern of scholarship and wrote in the style of the old philosophers, which meant a well-read person sitting isolated and alone in a room ruminating or investigating on a certain aspect of human existence.
Nietzsche’s conjecture arose out of the desire to not make his lines science. Nietzsche didn’t fully believe what he was saying was truth. This is what he means when he says, “Supposing truth is a woman.” What Nietzsche means there is that men try to capture women, and women also try to capture men. But we can never totally capture the other one. But no one can truly capture the other one. Even a slave master must notify its slaves that if they leave they will be violently punished. The slave master might tell himself that he has control over his slave’s freedom. As he also knows he doesn’t, but he wouldn’t needed the threat of violence to maintain them if he did. No matter how much a woman shows that she loves a man, the man knows that she is doing it with HER freedom. Truth always runs away eventually, as Kuhn showed a new paradigm eventually comes and replaces the old.
Nietzsche’s style reflects this unbelief in absolute truth, his style is ironic, sarcastic and even fun. Nietzsche never starts a sentence with, “This is” “It is.” Nietzsche starts many sentences with “It seems,” which would get red marks by most college professors. The line from 2, “And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up.” Writing Two professors would take that line and say find a statistic proving that new philosophers are coming up and then write, “According to blank statistics show that new philosophers are graduating from American Universities.” The phrase, “coming up,” that Nietzsche used even has a certain ambiguous nature to it. His linguistic phrasing of using ‘it seems’ ‘coming up’ ‘I see’ ‘in all seriousness’, these are outlawed in American culture. Because as Writing Two professors tell us, “You should always pretend like you are convinced of what you are saying.” Which is a strange thing to tell another human being, because I’ve never met anyone my whole life completely convinced of what they were saying. Oh yeah, I have met some and they were always annoying.
I think Nietzsche’s idea on philosophy can be related to Heidegger. In Being and Time he first begins to speak of Being and if it truth, Heidegger says, “Whether the answer is a ‘new’ one remains quite superficial and is of no importance. Its positive character must lie in its being ancient enough for us to learn to conceive the possibilities which the ‘Ancients’ have already made for us.” (Heidegger, 40)
The medium of philosophy is strange compared to other disciplines and the other activities of life. As Wittgenstein introduced in The Tractatus Philosophy exists only in language. One can do something with philosophical backing, a person can vote a certain way because they read Leo Strauss or another way because they read John Rawls. But a human being standing inside of a voting box hitting a button for a certain candidate is not ‘philosophy.’ The medium of philosophy, if we may look at it like an art, a mythology, or an athletic activity is done through words. The playing field of philosophy can only be done with language. Philosophy isn’t even the people who write it. Philosophy concerns the book that was published at a certain time in a certain place and then the other philosophers over time consider it something new, then they allow it into the great playing field of philosophy.
It may be described like this: Plato and Aristotle put their great books onto the playing field or maybe the field is Plato and Aristotle. Then others come, why do they come, where they come from, probably isn’t a question of philosophy, probably more sociology or history. Someone like Marcus Tullius Cicero and Saint Augustine decide for whatever reason that they can play. That they can have a discussion with the great philosophers: when they decide to play, they attempt to have a conversation with the great books of philosophy. They aren’t having a conversation with other ‘philosophers’ but with their ‘books.’ They write their books in relation to their books. If the book is not written in relation to those other books then it is not philosophy, it is either religion or self-help. Jesus and Mohammad do not cite Plato or Socrates, therefore they are not philosophers. Another way to say it would be that Jesus and Mohammad were not thinkers or investigators. They did not ruminate on the universals. They both KNEW and FELT, not thought. The laws of religion, mainly Judaism, Christianity and Islam do not arise from deep thinking. Their laws arise from emotional reactions. Now the first sign of this emotional literature is that the books are told in stories. The people who wrote the ancient religious books were part fiction writers and if you ask any writer or English Professor what is the point of literature, the first sentence will always be, 'To create an emotional reaction.” All kinds of arguments will follow after that sentence but they will all agree books about teenage vampires and The Brothers Karamazov both have that in common. The laws of the ancient religions derive from emotional reactions, the ten commandments are a perfect example: No body wants to be murdered nor do they want their family or friends murdered, everyone gets pretty pissed off when they happens, and that feeling of being 'pissed' led to that law. The same with getting your stuff stolen, your wife cheating on you and your kids not listening to you. These are divine laws, that is the most basic of basic human nature. You don't need a god to figure out you don't like when someone screws your wife, steal your horse and kills your kid. You know that, everyone knows that, you don't even need to know how to read to that, because it is human nature and we get really pissed when somebody steals our stuff. The great prophets or the great story tellers, I prefer story tellers. Personally as a writer, I like to imagine several ancient Jews sitting in a tent writing by candle light having a great time with words, morals and language as writers do today. But the mass population prefers exciting men of action with great back stories, so that is what came to be loved and not the writers. The writers of the ancient religious texts were trained in the older religious texts just as the Roman philosophers were trained in Greek texts. They were using the old religious paradigms to deal with new situations. (Philosophy also means 'love of wisdom.' Jesus and Mohammad did not love wisdom, perhaps they loved kindness, sharing and organization but they didn't cherish the idea of humans laying around ruminating over the abstract ideas of existence. ) In the rewriting I'm going to say, that the ancient religious writers weren't trained in the Greeks, they were trained with religious books but at times in the New Testament I believe we see something of the Cynics and Plato in it or maybe Buddhism also. But there are no direct citations in The New Testament. But a modern day novelist, say Albert Camus in The Stranger. A man who had read a lot of existentialism can easily write a book containing existential ideas without having to reference Heidegger by name.
Nietzsche with Beyond Good and Evil is merely opening up another dialogue with ancient philosophers. He is carrying on the conversation that began 2,000 years earlier in Ancient Athens.
The thing that makes philosophy not ‘truth’ is that philosophy is ‘conversation.’ Conversation is not truth. We can say, “These great philosophers were very intelligent men” but we all have conversations about life, about what it means to live. Nietzsche talks about this in this line, “Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?” Nietzsche is asking if people even want truth, the answer is mostly no and they do not like to think very much. People want some type of meaning, power, to placate their neediness but not ‘truth’ or ‘fact.’ Nietzsche knows this, but the question if humans do not want truth, does Nietzsche want truth? I don’t think Nietzsche or the great philosophers wanted truth. They weren’t looking for truth by instinct. For whatever reason they decided that one day they would ‘seek truth’ as a profession. The great philosophers considered it a job to seek to truth. And after seeking truth for many as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s did, they live the wilderness, but unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the philosopher doesn’t speak to the masses. The masses want nothing of philosophers and philosophers have known this since the execution of Socrates. The philosopher leaves the wilderness, or maybe stays in the wilderness, probably stays. They stay in the wilderness of philosophy and have ‘conversations’ with other philosophers.
This can be related to Postman's view on the social sciences. Postman in the chapter called Scientism tries to show that the ideas of social scientists aren't anything but stories or mythologies. Postman wrote, “In fact, the stories of social researches are much close in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms.” (Postman, 54) Postman was trying to show that social research if it be philosophy or sociological research can never truly be scientific, only a conversation made with better points. You ask if this makes a new morality. Yes, it makes a morality based off of science, of statistics. As people kind of said after the invasion of Iraq, “Well, we didn't kill as many civilians as in Vietnam.” In Vietnam the U.S. killed like four million people, we only killed 95,000 this time. To people this achievement because the number is so much lower than the other one. Obviously 95,000 is a much smaller number than 4,000,000. U.S. debt is now at this moment like 12 trillion dollars, several years ago it was eight trillion. Both of those numbers are pretty big, but now since it hit 12 it seems like a big deal. It is like we have some statistics based morality. I've heard the sentence, “10 percent of America is homosexual therefore they should be able to get married.” Now, going back to how religious laws were made through emotions. The logic is completely different. An advocate for gay rights could say, “It pisses me off they can't married, they should be allowed to.” Another person might say, “Homosexuals are citizens also, they pay taxes and participate in the society and deserve equal rights.” Of course someone else could say, “Homosexuals pay this margin of taxes to the state and federal governments therefore they require equal rights.” That in the modern era people get pissed about things and then find statistics to back up their being pissed about some thing.
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In We Scholars Nietzsche makes the claim that new philosophers are coming. That a new breed of philosopher with new ideas that will smash on the old ones are bound to be born of the new nihilism that is taking hold in western civilization. Now that God has died, philosophers can really start doing some work.
Nietzsche in 205 discusses how many of the would be philosophers of the future will become specialists. This is can be seen in Sigmund Freud and Max Weber. In earlier Freud and Weber would have been considered philosophers, but instead they were considered a psychologist and a sociologist. Even though they were specialists their ideas fit into Nietzsche's new philosopher ideal of showing that truths that people did not like. Freud's idea that people wanted to have sex with mothers and kill their fathers was and is still horrible sounding. Freud in later career went on to Future of an Illusion describing how religion is just an illusion. And Civilization and its Discontents describing how mankind may not like civilization. Then there is Weber with his attacks on religion using sociology. Both of them are good examples of how a philosopher becomes a specialist.
Nietzsche writes in 212, “Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher-if today there could be philosophers-would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could his responsibility.” This I think can linked directly to Sartre. First it must be said by the time Sartre wrote philosophy had already been divided into Continental and Analytic. And Sartre would be considered a 'specialist' of existential philosophy.
Sartre's main thing was responsibility, that people should consider what they do, as Sartre wrote, “Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. We are taking the word “responsibility” in its ordinary sense a “consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or an object.” (Sartre, 52) Sartre and Nietzsche make the claim that humans are the authors of their lives. That they direct their choices and actions. And that even if someone is completely crazy and has been raised in a state of ignorance they are still directing their own actions. In 2010 America people under 50 would probably say, “So what, what's the big deal about talking about responsibility?” But before the modern era of capitalism and negative rights people thought that people did things because God made them do it or breeding them do it. Nobody was accountable for anything. When a person was born in the Medieval era, if they were born as a blacksmith they would die a blacksmith, if they were born a king, they would die a king. No one could 'take charge of their lives' and become what they wanted. The new culture of negative rights, a lack of aristocracy, and capitalism made a new paradigm that required a new ethics. The ethics became 'responsibility.' To Sartre and Nietzsche, to put into 2010 American language, “There's no God, you have one life on planet earth, don't be lazy and waste it.”
In terms of political philosophy Nietzsche is very much a bourgeois philosopher of the capitalist period, like Saint Augustine was primarily a religious philosopher of the religious period of Europe. Both hit on many universal truths when speaking in descriptive conjecture but their normative prescriptive thoughts concerned the eras they were located in. Nietzsche's focus on individuality and on responsibility are capitalist/negative rights Lockean ideas. In 252 Nietzsche says, “Hobbes, Hume and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of “philosophy” for more than a century. Obviously Nietzsche has a prejudice here against British philosophers. But at the same time Nietzsche is the great Lockean. Nietzsche is like Saint Augustine contemplating the death of Romes influence on the Medieval world, Nietzsche is contemplating the death of Christianity's influence on the modern world. Nietzsche wrote of Saint Augustine, Nietzsche wrote in 50 of Saint Augustine, “There is sometimes an Oriental ecstasy worthy of a slave who, without deserving it, has been pardoned and elevated- for example, in Augustine, who lacks a truly offensive manner all nobility of gestures and desires.” Nietzsche refers to Saint Augustine as a 'slave' because Augustine was a slave to Christianity. But what Nietzsche does not recognize is that he is a slave to the capitalist/negative rights interpretation of reality. Nietzsche wants people to go 'beyond good and evil' because there is no God and we must think past the concepts of good and evil when choosing how to behave. But what Nietzsche did not see was that he was merely giving a voice to the Lockean idea of capitalism and negative rights. Adam Smith's idea of the 'invisible hand' replaced God. Society would be directed not by God but by market forces, human ingenuity and human responsibility. Nietzsche's philosophy relies heavily on the existence of capitalism and when capitalism goes away as all economic and social systems go away eventually, he will become like Saint Augustine, someone who gave voice to a very painful transition human history. And that is where the story or mythology comes from, the 'psychological pain' people felt during the transition from feudalistic/agrarian/kingdoms to capitalist/industrial/states. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche shows it perfectly, about how people were leaving the wilderness of feudalism and that soon capitalism would start creeping into everyone's lives leading to nihilism in the masses. That soon everyone would be beyond good and evil and that philosophers would need to come, to fill that void in their hearts for throwing away their God for the sake of leaving their farm labor to work in alienating factories, live in crowded cities, buy merchandise from corporations, pay off their credit card debt , their mortgages and their school loan debt, work in offices in cubicles, work at restaurants and retail outlets, work tirelessly for raises, and then after working for the steel mills for 30 years, get let go, and end your days sitting at Plaza Donuts playing the scratch offs hoping that the state run lottery grants you enough money to pay off some credit cards and take a trip to beautiful Florida.
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I have to explain the idea of I proposed about Locke and Nietzsche here because it wouldn't fit nicely into the paragraphs and since this is a larger idea a larger explanation is required. I think there is a problem with the linguists, the words being used. They need to be defined, or redefined, or reinvented, or reinterpreted.
Political philosophy runs in epochs based off the economic and the great leaders of the time, Manfield's book shows this well. Plato and Aristotle are the voices of Lycurgus, Solon and Pericles and the economic structures of their day. Cicero and the Roman historians were the voices for the great Roman leaders and the Roman economic and government systems, as the same with Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas. The great philosopher of our modern economic and political systems is John Locke, Thomas Hobbes introduced some ideas but it was Locke who believed in freedom, volunteer based economic systems, private property and wage-labor. We live in the Lockean era, how we interpret reality is through the treatises of John Locke. The first treatise is about not having divine right and the second is about rights and private property.
Before I go on the word “capitalist” must be discussed. I used the word “capitalist” like one uses “Christian” or “Muslim.” They identity the world view of the person. Through what framework they see the world. Americans believe and see the world through market exchanges, we count everything, we make everything into statistics, we talk about demand and supply constantly. We love wage-labor, we love volunteer economies and chasing our little dreams. We honor athletes and musicians that make it from nothing. We all CONVINCED without a doubt that money is everything.
But the belief we cherish most is private property. We believe in OWNING stuff and BUYING stuff and SELLING stuff.
Americans are so capitalist they are like those Medieval Christians that didn't even know what Catholicism was: is not possible to assume that if you went back in time to 1050 Italy and asked Italian Catholics, “What is Catholicism?” They would probably stare at you and say, “Hmm, there's a church over there, something with Jesus.” It is the same today, if you ask a modern American, “What is capitalism?” They would probably respond, “Money, hmm, business, own things. I don't know.”
To go back to the Middle-Ages people like Saint Francis, Saint Dominic and Saint Aquinas were famous because they renotified the masses what it meant to be Catholic. They were the voices of the underlying system that pervaded or maybe 'contaminated' everyone thoughts. Today we have the same thing with Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick and Ron Paul. They tried and Ron Paul is trying to tell people about the religion of capitalism and what it really means to be a capitalist.
Of course this brings into question, “What is religion?” Religion was different in 1050 Italy, in 1050 religion was the State, the economic system and the private life of the individual. Their lives were engulfed in Catholicism. But today religion is not that: religions in modern America are like mafias. They are groups of people that band together to give themselves more power. They give themselves power by helping each other and give themselves political power also by bring out voters in a large mass. Obviously it is not a criminal mafia, but still the theory is the same, “Give yourself power through group cooperation.” The meaning of the word 'religion' does not remotely the same definition as it did in Europe in 1050. But capitalism does fit it the medieval definition I have supplied. They are both worldviews that govern how governments operate, how property is distributed, where people work, how people see the world, and generally how people live every moment of their lives. Modern religions do also require you give your freedom of thought to a particular set of 'thoughts' the group already has. Modern people join these religion mafias because they do not enjoy the freedom of capitalism, they don't like all the choice. So they go to a group or adopt the group of their parents without question so they don't have to think. The religious group like the mafia gains its power through its large of amount of thoughtless physical bodies. Because what is scarier and more threatening, a thousand protesters holding one book or a 1000 protesters holding different books? The individual in the group likes that feeling of being scary. They want to be scary, because scary means powerful. People always say, “Republicans like fear.” Yes, true, but they also like to scare. That is why many Christian groups like war and the idea of U.S. world domination. They like the idea of being under the canopy of the scary American government. Factions often become militant because they are people who like to be scared and who like to scare. They like to scare each other into believing the group-think and they want to scare outside groups into believing it also. But this is also what empires are made of, scared people. The Nazis and he Italian Fascists were a terrified people. America and Russia were terrified during the Cold War, they wanted the other one to disappear so they wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. But where does this fear come from? Maybe it is because deep inside we NEVER truly know if we are right about what we think. Richard Wright in the book The Outsider made the claim that what makes people so scared is that we really aren't anything at all. If existence precedes essence or we are a blank slate, then people aren't anything really. This is terrifying, that you aren't anything, your life is you collecting ideas from the past to live in the present and death lurks somewhere in the future, and you don't even have the gift of knowing when it will happen. What a devastating existence a human must live. An animal that can never be sure what it thinks is true. Which makes us want so much something universal. Science helped us find some things, that we can't walk through walls, the earth revolves around the sun, the earth is round, and many more scientific facts about astronomy, plants and animals. But those facts really don't that much to us, knowing facts about red ants or Mars doesn't teach us how to live, it doesn't bring us together with our fellow humans. Knowing the Newtonian Laws doesn't make losing a loved one any better or worse, it doesn't do anything.
People are so capitalist they do not even know it anymore: when the economy collapsed two years ago people asked the question, “Did capitalism fail?” But it didn't even occur to anyone to ask, “What is capitalism?”
You wrote on the paper that Nietzsche would disagree with my interpretation of where we gained these new modern rights. I take a look at the constitution and see that it is predominately concerned with private property rights.
First: Allows for the ownership of our own personal religion and our opinions.
Second: ownership of guns
Third: Soldiers can't use the house you OWN.
Fourth: Is about people looking through the stuff you OWN.
Fifth: Which contains the Takings Clause, “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
fourteenth: Says, “Life, liberty and PROPERTY without due process.”
The first five amendments concern property in someway. Rights about ownership. You own your thoughts, you own your guns, you own your vote, you own your ability to procreate, and your privacy. “Fundamental Right” is an euphemism for, “Stuff you own that can't be taken away which was stuff you didn't own during Medieval Times.” This is why schooling and health care are not fundamental rights, because not everyone can own a school or a hospital but everyone can own a vote or the ability to procreate, because they are cheap in money value activities.
But this interpretation does make it possible for one to claim that the Ten Commandments influenced the U.S. Constitution because the Ten Commandments concerns mainly property ownership, ownership of God over everyone, you can't me because I own my body, you can't screw my wife because I own her, my kids need to listen to me because I own them, and you shouldn't steal my stuff because I own that stuff.
So how does this lead to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche is about OWNING yourself, OWNING your own thoughts, OWNING your life. Nietzsche wants you to WORK and figure out your prejudices because he wants you to OWN yourself. The Urbermensch is a person that OWNS him or herself completely. The pioneer conquers the Indians and grows makes a farm where there was forest. The Ubermensch conquers their prejudices and makes a farm out of the wasteland that was their prejudices. Nietzsche is the voice that said first, “Look if we can own all these new rights, and own all this stuff, then we can finally OWN ourselves.” Nietzsche is about owning yourself, owning your opinions, owning your vote, owning your thoughts. And by owning yourself you are responsible. This is where Sartre's communism fails, Sartre wants you to be responsibility for owning yourself, but communism isn't about owning yourself, it is about letting yourself become the group, becoming just a cavity for group-think. So I'm also saying that Sartre is a capitalist, Sartre believes in private-ownership.
Nietzsche is like a Saint Francis of capitalism, Saint Francis notified people on how to be a really really good catholic. Nietzsche notifies you on how to become a really really good capitalist, Nietzsche is saying, “Take advantage of these rights while they exist, go with it, don't just own things, go even further, own yourself, own your ideas, make up new ideas to own, make up new prejudices, embrace this new market of ideas, shop around, check out stock prices on ideas, research the competitors, then go beyond the competitors, own yourself. What Nietzsche says that verges on the mystical in some strange way is that no matter what time you live the herd will have their stupid prejudices about reality, read my book, it will help you to get an interpretation of reality that may allow for at least mental escape from the self-imposed prisoners you are surrounded by. This brings us back to Saint Augustine: that a person living in a world they don't really want to live in may make their own city and live in it.
Review of Beyond and evil
Nietzsche wrote in 204 of Beyond Good and Evil, “I am of the opinion that only experience- experience always seems to mean bad experience?- can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank.” Nietzsche suggests a person cannot just 'learn something' by hearing it or being taught about it in a classroom: one must experience it. But what does 'experience' mean? The dictionary says, “To live through.” The connotation is that a human does things, has things done to them, is in a certain location at a certain time and the things that surround them give them 'feelings.' What Nietzsche is saying is that knowledge is more than words, it is feeling. That a person can gain better of something by experiencing it, by feeling it, by experiencing something and then analyzing what one felt and remembered.
Nietzsche had a unique experience. He was born in 1844 in Germany which was a chaotic place in the 1800s. At the beginning of the 1800s Germany was not yet a state. It was still a collection of small states. In 1866 Prussia fought Austria and Germany became a state. (Thinkquest.com, no date) Nietzsche personally watched his country go from being a collection of smaller states to becoming an empire. For me, the experience of my country fighting two foreign wars and the protests of teabaggers gives me questions about myself and the nature of things. I could not imagine what effect it had on Nietzsche's mind that such a chaotic upheaval took place in his country. To humans if they admit it in polls or not, the state is the center of one's life. The state protects you, keeps you safe, makes sure that you have what you need. The state designs the roads and locates the buildings. The state even supplies an overhanging generalized philosophy that the people living under that state goes along with. People will say that religion or their God is more important to them than the state. But their bodies always alert them that the state is the thing that they need, food and shelter. But this is why states align themselves with the Gods, in ancient Rome they went so far as to deify their Caesars. In America we call it, “God's country” and many Republican voters and even some Republican politicians believe they have 'callings' from God. In Islamic Theocracies and in the Middle-Ages the European countries had a special connection to God. A person may say that the United States has a free market and even the libertarians have gone so far as to say that the markets should be able to do what they want; but humans when they have no work, no food and no shelter always run to the state to complain about their situation. As Dostoevsky said people will run to the state and plead, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” As can be seen from teabaggers who complain that the government is taking control over the markets but at the same complaining to the state that they have no jobs or need more money. This is a contradiction. One cannot ask for free markets and yet complain to the government when there are no jobs. Humans depend upon the state, the state supplies the means for them to live their lives, and in many countries if not our own in the state supplies the meaning to the lives of their citizens. In modern mass society the state has become more important than ever: a society with millions and some with billions DEMAND large scale infrastructure to feed, shelter and transport their population. What Teabaggers and libertarians do not comprehend when they mention the Framers is that when The U.S. Constitution was written and people had more libertarian values there were only four million non-native Americans sharing a huge piece of land. There was no electricity, sewer systems, public schools, trucks, planes, televisions then. Of course they were libertarian, they were living in a giant forest where you traveled by horse. And if you wanted some land all you had to do was take a wagon a little farther west and you could get some land probably for free or very cheap. There was no DEMAND for government back then. Which leads to another question which befuddles me why people don't ask, “If government is like a business which operates on supply and demand, and if people DEMAND things the government sells(provides) wouldn't more population equal more government.” The Teabaggers are crazy because they are arguing for America to go back to like 1830 when there was less people and more land, and less diversity. They want to turn the clock back to a different time because they think they would be happier in a world with less humans, because less humans means less government DEMAND. The teabaggers do not comprehend this though: what people do not understand is that when liberals talk about Green technology and are pro-abortion they are talking about the same thing as teabaggers, “Population.” It is just that the liberals are willing to deal with the problem, they can emotionally handle it while the teabaggers can't emotionally handle it and when you can't emotionally handle something you don't act rationally.
When the old Germany disappeared and was replaced with the new one. Nietzsche as all German must have felt extreme existential anxiety. The way they had been living for several hundred years had suddenly disappeared.
Nietzsche's writing is prescriptive and at the same descriptive conjecture. Nietzsche in many ways is telling you not how to live, but that there are different ways to live. In The “Prejudices of Philosophers” and “What is Religious” Nietzsche discusses how humans have prejudices, how we have preconceived notions about stimuli we encounter. That religion a mindset of tyranny. Nietzsche wrote in 46, “For the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only what is tyrannical, in morals, too.” A mindset, a world view, or an interpretation of reality is like a structure that one lives in. Nietzsche shows that the religious mindset is tyrannical, to use Sartre's example that a person locks him or herself inside a prison of their bad faith or prejudices. But I would like to add that we are in a prison of our prejudices but the thing is that we are our own guards. We personally make sure that we do not notify ourselves of these prejudices we have. Nietzsche wants you to kill the prison guard. Nietzsche isn't notifying you like a religious teacher or a motivational speaker how to live. He wants you to kill the prison guard so you can leave the prison and 'see things.' In Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 66 Wittgenstein is talking about games and how they work Wittgenstein wrote, “Don't think, but look.” (Wittgenstein, 1953) Wittgenstein was pleading with the audience, 'Quit thinking, you keeping having prejudices and preconceived notions instead of just looking.' Nietzsche is making a similar statement. Nietzsche wants you to leave the prison of prejudices and when you encounter something, not to force your preconceived notion on what it means.
Nietzsche wants the audience to learn about their prejudices, to see their prejudices, to come to terms with their prejudices, to understand their prejudices. As for myself, I know I have prejudices that come from being raised in American culture and its capitalist principles, I have prejudices that come from being blue collar and being raised in the rust belt, from not being forced to go to church when I was little compared to others who were raised with the church, and even by having a hard working mother who didn’t act ‘womanly.’ I know I have prejudices based on past experiences. Now, what Nietzsche wants isn’t something mystical, Nietzsche doesn't think you will wake up from a deep sleep and reach some nirvana-like state. This is what Nietzsche means when he says in 146, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Nietzsche is speaking of when a person isolates themselves from what the mob prejudices, retreats into themselves and faces their prejudices. It is like one has a conversation with prejudices. That one sits down and speaks to the prejudices that the American culture has taught them, or one sits and has a long dialogue with their father’s prejudices. I don’t know how many days of pain I have had trying to deal with the prejudices of my parents, how many times their voices and not mine have arisen in my head. I have to fight their voices, but the only way I can fight their voice is by looking deep into where their prejudices came from. I have to become the monster to understand their prejudices. Nietzsche says monster, today we call it empathy. But to be empathetic one must try to feel and think like the monster. To understand one’s prejudices one become a monster, a person has to look hard at something and learn about it. But just because you have to know what your prejudices are, doesn't mean they go away, they are always there haunting you.
Nietzsche also uses descriptive conjecture. Nietzsche describes how the religious mind works, how one can and cannot be a free spirit. But he doesn't use science. He doesn't state surveys nor does any scientific research. Nietzsche wrote around the same time as Sigmund Freud and William James who did extensive psychological research, Nietzsche could have become a psychologist and done proper and normal research but instead Nietzsche opted out of that new pattern of scholarship and wrote in the style of the old philosophers, which meant a well-read person sitting isolated and alone in a room ruminating or investigating on a certain aspect of human existence.
Nietzsche’s conjecture arose out of the desire to not make his lines science. Nietzsche didn’t fully believe what he was saying was truth. This is what he means when he says, “Supposing truth is a woman.” What Nietzsche means there is that men try to capture women, and women also try to capture men. But we can never totally capture the other one. But no one can truly capture the other one. Even a slave master must notify its slaves that if they leave they will be violently punished. The slave master might tell himself that he has control over his slave’s freedom. As he also knows he doesn’t, but he wouldn’t needed the threat of violence to maintain them if he did. No matter how much a woman shows that she loves a man, the man knows that she is doing it with HER freedom. Truth always runs away eventually, as Kuhn showed a new paradigm eventually comes and replaces the old.
Nietzsche’s style reflects this unbelief in absolute truth, his style is ironic, sarcastic and even fun. Nietzsche never starts a sentence with, “This is” “It is.” Nietzsche starts many sentences with “It seems,” which would get red marks by most college professors. The line from 2, “And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up.” Writing Two professors would take that line and say find a statistic proving that new philosophers are coming up and then write, “According to blank statistics show that new philosophers are graduating from American Universities.” The phrase, “coming up,” that Nietzsche used even has a certain ambiguous nature to it. His linguistic phrasing of using ‘it seems’ ‘coming up’ ‘I see’ ‘in all seriousness’, these are outlawed in American culture. Because as Writing Two professors tell us, “You should always pretend like you are convinced of what you are saying.” Which is a strange thing to tell another human being, because I’ve never met anyone my whole life completely convinced of what they were saying. Oh yeah, I have met some and they were always annoying.
I think Nietzsche’s idea on philosophy can be related to Heidegger. In Being and Time he first begins to speak of Being and if it truth, Heidegger says, “Whether the answer is a ‘new’ one remains quite superficial and is of no importance. Its positive character must lie in its being ancient enough for us to learn to conceive the possibilities which the ‘Ancients’ have already made for us.” (Heidegger, 40)
The medium of philosophy is strange compared to other disciplines and the other activities of life. As Wittgenstein introduced in The Tractatus Philosophy exists only in language. One can do something with philosophical backing, a person can vote a certain way because they read Leo Strauss or another way because they read John Rawls. But a human being standing inside of a voting box hitting a button for a certain candidate is not ‘philosophy.’ The medium of philosophy, if we may look at it like an art, a mythology, or an athletic activity is done through words. The playing field of philosophy can only be done with language. Philosophy isn’t even the people who write it. Philosophy concerns the book that was published at a certain time in a certain place and then the other philosophers over time consider it something new, then they allow it into the great playing field of philosophy.
It may be described like this: Plato and Aristotle put their great books onto the playing field or maybe the field is Plato and Aristotle. Then others come, why do they come, where they come from, probably isn’t a question of philosophy, probably more sociology or history. Someone like Marcus Tullius Cicero and Saint Augustine decide for whatever reason that they can play. That they can have a discussion with the great philosophers: when they decide to play, they attempt to have a conversation with the great books of philosophy. They aren’t having a conversation with other ‘philosophers’ but with their ‘books.’ They write their books in relation to their books. If the book is not written in relation to those other books then it is not philosophy, it is either religion or self-help. Jesus and Mohammad do not cite Plato or Socrates, therefore they are not philosophers. Another way to say it would be that Jesus and Mohammad were not thinkers or investigators. They did not ruminate on the universals. They both KNEW and FELT, not thought. The laws of religion, mainly Judaism, Christianity and Islam do not arise from deep thinking. Their laws arise from emotional reactions. Now the first sign of this emotional literature is that the books are told in stories. The people who wrote the ancient religious books were part fiction writers and if you ask any writer or English Professor what is the point of literature, the first sentence will always be, 'To create an emotional reaction.” All kinds of arguments will follow after that sentence but they will all agree books about teenage vampires and The Brothers Karamazov both have that in common. The laws of the ancient religions derive from emotional reactions, the ten commandments are a perfect example: No body wants to be murdered nor do they want their family or friends murdered, everyone gets pretty pissed off when they happens, and that feeling of being 'pissed' led to that law. The same with getting your stuff stolen, your wife cheating on you and your kids not listening to you. These are divine laws, that is the most basic of basic human nature. You don't need a god to figure out you don't like when someone screws your wife, steal your horse and kills your kid. You know that, everyone knows that, you don't even need to know how to read to that, because it is human nature and we get really pissed when somebody steals our stuff. The great prophets or the great story tellers, I prefer story tellers. Personally as a writer, I like to imagine several ancient Jews sitting in a tent writing by candle light having a great time with words, morals and language as writers do today. But the mass population prefers exciting men of action with great back stories, so that is what came to be loved and not the writers. The writers of the ancient religious texts were trained in the older religious texts just as the Roman philosophers were trained in Greek texts. They were using the old religious paradigms to deal with new situations. (Philosophy also means 'love of wisdom.' Jesus and Mohammad did not love wisdom, perhaps they loved kindness, sharing and organization but they didn't cherish the idea of humans laying around ruminating over the abstract ideas of existence. ) In the rewriting I'm going to say, that the ancient religious writers weren't trained in the Greeks, they were trained with religious books but at times in the New Testament I believe we see something of the Cynics and Plato in it or maybe Buddhism also. But there are no direct citations in The New Testament. But a modern day novelist, say Albert Camus in The Stranger. A man who had read a lot of existentialism can easily write a book containing existential ideas without having to reference Heidegger by name.
Nietzsche with Beyond Good and Evil is merely opening up another dialogue with ancient philosophers. He is carrying on the conversation that began 2,000 years earlier in Ancient Athens.
The thing that makes philosophy not ‘truth’ is that philosophy is ‘conversation.’ Conversation is not truth. We can say, “These great philosophers were very intelligent men” but we all have conversations about life, about what it means to live. Nietzsche talks about this in this line, “Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?” Nietzsche is asking if people even want truth, the answer is mostly no and they do not like to think very much. People want some type of meaning, power, to placate their neediness but not ‘truth’ or ‘fact.’ Nietzsche knows this, but the question if humans do not want truth, does Nietzsche want truth? I don’t think Nietzsche or the great philosophers wanted truth. They weren’t looking for truth by instinct. For whatever reason they decided that one day they would ‘seek truth’ as a profession. The great philosophers considered it a job to seek to truth. And after seeking truth for many as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s did, they live the wilderness, but unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the philosopher doesn’t speak to the masses. The masses want nothing of philosophers and philosophers have known this since the execution of Socrates. The philosopher leaves the wilderness, or maybe stays in the wilderness, probably stays. They stay in the wilderness of philosophy and have ‘conversations’ with other philosophers.
This can be related to Postman's view on the social sciences. Postman in the chapter called Scientism tries to show that the ideas of social scientists aren't anything but stories or mythologies. Postman wrote, “In fact, the stories of social researches are much close in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms.” (Postman, 54) Postman was trying to show that social research if it be philosophy or sociological research can never truly be scientific, only a conversation made with better points. You ask if this makes a new morality. Yes, it makes a morality based off of science, of statistics. As people kind of said after the invasion of Iraq, “Well, we didn't kill as many civilians as in Vietnam.” In Vietnam the U.S. killed like four million people, we only killed 95,000 this time. To people this achievement because the number is so much lower than the other one. Obviously 95,000 is a much smaller number than 4,000,000. U.S. debt is now at this moment like 12 trillion dollars, several years ago it was eight trillion. Both of those numbers are pretty big, but now since it hit 12 it seems like a big deal. It is like we have some statistics based morality. I've heard the sentence, “10 percent of America is homosexual therefore they should be able to get married.” Now, going back to how religious laws were made through emotions. The logic is completely different. An advocate for gay rights could say, “It pisses me off they can't married, they should be allowed to.” Another person might say, “Homosexuals are citizens also, they pay taxes and participate in the society and deserve equal rights.” Of course someone else could say, “Homosexuals pay this margin of taxes to the state and federal governments therefore they require equal rights.” That in the modern era people get pissed about things and then find statistics to back up their being pissed about some thing.
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In We Scholars Nietzsche makes the claim that new philosophers are coming. That a new breed of philosopher with new ideas that will smash on the old ones are bound to be born of the new nihilism that is taking hold in western civilization. Now that God has died, philosophers can really start doing some work.
Nietzsche in 205 discusses how many of the would be philosophers of the future will become specialists. This is can be seen in Sigmund Freud and Max Weber. In earlier Freud and Weber would have been considered philosophers, but instead they were considered a psychologist and a sociologist. Even though they were specialists their ideas fit into Nietzsche's new philosopher ideal of showing that truths that people did not like. Freud's idea that people wanted to have sex with mothers and kill their fathers was and is still horrible sounding. Freud in later career went on to Future of an Illusion describing how religion is just an illusion. And Civilization and its Discontents describing how mankind may not like civilization. Then there is Weber with his attacks on religion using sociology. Both of them are good examples of how a philosopher becomes a specialist.
Nietzsche writes in 212, “Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher-if today there could be philosophers-would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could his responsibility.” This I think can linked directly to Sartre. First it must be said by the time Sartre wrote philosophy had already been divided into Continental and Analytic. And Sartre would be considered a 'specialist' of existential philosophy.
Sartre's main thing was responsibility, that people should consider what they do, as Sartre wrote, “Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. We are taking the word “responsibility” in its ordinary sense a “consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or an object.” (Sartre, 52) Sartre and Nietzsche make the claim that humans are the authors of their lives. That they direct their choices and actions. And that even if someone is completely crazy and has been raised in a state of ignorance they are still directing their own actions. In 2010 America people under 50 would probably say, “So what, what's the big deal about talking about responsibility?” But before the modern era of capitalism and negative rights people thought that people did things because God made them do it or breeding them do it. Nobody was accountable for anything. When a person was born in the Medieval era, if they were born as a blacksmith they would die a blacksmith, if they were born a king, they would die a king. No one could 'take charge of their lives' and become what they wanted. The new culture of negative rights, a lack of aristocracy, and capitalism made a new paradigm that required a new ethics. The ethics became 'responsibility.' To Sartre and Nietzsche, to put into 2010 American language, “There's no God, you have one life on planet earth, don't be lazy and waste it.”
In terms of political philosophy Nietzsche is very much a bourgeois philosopher of the capitalist period, like Saint Augustine was primarily a religious philosopher of the religious period of Europe. Both hit on many universal truths when speaking in descriptive conjecture but their normative prescriptive thoughts concerned the eras they were located in. Nietzsche's focus on individuality and on responsibility are capitalist/negative rights Lockean ideas. In 252 Nietzsche says, “Hobbes, Hume and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of “philosophy” for more than a century. Obviously Nietzsche has a prejudice here against British philosophers. But at the same time Nietzsche is the great Lockean. Nietzsche is like Saint Augustine contemplating the death of Romes influence on the Medieval world, Nietzsche is contemplating the death of Christianity's influence on the modern world. Nietzsche wrote of Saint Augustine, Nietzsche wrote in 50 of Saint Augustine, “There is sometimes an Oriental ecstasy worthy of a slave who, without deserving it, has been pardoned and elevated- for example, in Augustine, who lacks a truly offensive manner all nobility of gestures and desires.” Nietzsche refers to Saint Augustine as a 'slave' because Augustine was a slave to Christianity. But what Nietzsche does not recognize is that he is a slave to the capitalist/negative rights interpretation of reality. Nietzsche wants people to go 'beyond good and evil' because there is no God and we must think past the concepts of good and evil when choosing how to behave. But what Nietzsche did not see was that he was merely giving a voice to the Lockean idea of capitalism and negative rights. Adam Smith's idea of the 'invisible hand' replaced God. Society would be directed not by God but by market forces, human ingenuity and human responsibility. Nietzsche's philosophy relies heavily on the existence of capitalism and when capitalism goes away as all economic and social systems go away eventually, he will become like Saint Augustine, someone who gave voice to a very painful transition human history. And that is where the story or mythology comes from, the 'psychological pain' people felt during the transition from feudalistic/agrarian/kingdoms to capitalist/industrial/states. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche shows it perfectly, about how people were leaving the wilderness of feudalism and that soon capitalism would start creeping into everyone's lives leading to nihilism in the masses. That soon everyone would be beyond good and evil and that philosophers would need to come, to fill that void in their hearts for throwing away their God for the sake of leaving their farm labor to work in alienating factories, live in crowded cities, buy merchandise from corporations, pay off their credit card debt , their mortgages and their school loan debt, work in offices in cubicles, work at restaurants and retail outlets, work tirelessly for raises, and then after working for the steel mills for 30 years, get let go, and end your days sitting at Plaza Donuts playing the scratch offs hoping that the state run lottery grants you enough money to pay off some credit cards and take a trip to beautiful Florida.
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I have to explain the idea of I proposed about Locke and Nietzsche here because it wouldn't fit nicely into the paragraphs and since this is a larger idea a larger explanation is required. I think there is a problem with the linguists, the words being used. They need to be defined, or redefined, or reinvented, or reinterpreted.
Political philosophy runs in epochs based off the economic and the great leaders of the time, Manfield's book shows this well. Plato and Aristotle are the voices of Lycurgus, Solon and Pericles and the economic structures of their day. Cicero and the Roman historians were the voices for the great Roman leaders and the Roman economic and government systems, as the same with Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas. The great philosopher of our modern economic and political systems is John Locke, Thomas Hobbes introduced some ideas but it was Locke who believed in freedom, volunteer based economic systems, private property and wage-labor. We live in the Lockean era, how we interpret reality is through the treatises of John Locke. The first treatise is about not having divine right and the second is about rights and private property.
Before I go on the word “capitalist” must be discussed. I used the word “capitalist” like one uses “Christian” or “Muslim.” They identity the world view of the person. Through what framework they see the world. Americans believe and see the world through market exchanges, we count everything, we make everything into statistics, we talk about demand and supply constantly. We love wage-labor, we love volunteer economies and chasing our little dreams. We honor athletes and musicians that make it from nothing. We all CONVINCED without a doubt that money is everything.
But the belief we cherish most is private property. We believe in OWNING stuff and BUYING stuff and SELLING stuff.
Americans are so capitalist they are like those Medieval Christians that didn't even know what Catholicism was: is not possible to assume that if you went back in time to 1050 Italy and asked Italian Catholics, “What is Catholicism?” They would probably stare at you and say, “Hmm, there's a church over there, something with Jesus.” It is the same today, if you ask a modern American, “What is capitalism?” They would probably respond, “Money, hmm, business, own things. I don't know.”
To go back to the Middle-Ages people like Saint Francis, Saint Dominic and Saint Aquinas were famous because they renotified the masses what it meant to be Catholic. They were the voices of the underlying system that pervaded or maybe 'contaminated' everyone thoughts. Today we have the same thing with Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick and Ron Paul. They tried and Ron Paul is trying to tell people about the religion of capitalism and what it really means to be a capitalist.
Of course this brings into question, “What is religion?” Religion was different in 1050 Italy, in 1050 religion was the State, the economic system and the private life of the individual. Their lives were engulfed in Catholicism. But today religion is not that: religions in modern America are like mafias. They are groups of people that band together to give themselves more power. They give themselves power by helping each other and give themselves political power also by bring out voters in a large mass. Obviously it is not a criminal mafia, but still the theory is the same, “Give yourself power through group cooperation.” The meaning of the word 'religion' does not remotely the same definition as it did in Europe in 1050. But capitalism does fit it the medieval definition I have supplied. They are both worldviews that govern how governments operate, how property is distributed, where people work, how people see the world, and generally how people live every moment of their lives. Modern religions do also require you give your freedom of thought to a particular set of 'thoughts' the group already has. Modern people join these religion mafias because they do not enjoy the freedom of capitalism, they don't like all the choice. So they go to a group or adopt the group of their parents without question so they don't have to think. The religious group like the mafia gains its power through its large of amount of thoughtless physical bodies. Because what is scarier and more threatening, a thousand protesters holding one book or a 1000 protesters holding different books? The individual in the group likes that feeling of being scary. They want to be scary, because scary means powerful. People always say, “Republicans like fear.” Yes, true, but they also like to scare. That is why many Christian groups like war and the idea of U.S. world domination. They like the idea of being under the canopy of the scary American government. Factions often become militant because they are people who like to be scared and who like to scare. They like to scare each other into believing the group-think and they want to scare outside groups into believing it also. But this is also what empires are made of, scared people. The Nazis and he Italian Fascists were a terrified people. America and Russia were terrified during the Cold War, they wanted the other one to disappear so they wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. But where does this fear come from? Maybe it is because deep inside we NEVER truly know if we are right about what we think. Richard Wright in the book The Outsider made the claim that what makes people so scared is that we really aren't anything at all. If existence precedes essence or we are a blank slate, then people aren't anything really. This is terrifying, that you aren't anything, your life is you collecting ideas from the past to live in the present and death lurks somewhere in the future, and you don't even have the gift of knowing when it will happen. What a devastating existence a human must live. An animal that can never be sure what it thinks is true. Which makes us want so much something universal. Science helped us find some things, that we can't walk through walls, the earth revolves around the sun, the earth is round, and many more scientific facts about astronomy, plants and animals. But those facts really don't that much to us, knowing facts about red ants or Mars doesn't teach us how to live, it doesn't bring us together with our fellow humans. Knowing the Newtonian Laws doesn't make losing a loved one any better or worse, it doesn't do anything.
People are so capitalist they do not even know it anymore: when the economy collapsed two years ago people asked the question, “Did capitalism fail?” But it didn't even occur to anyone to ask, “What is capitalism?”
You wrote on the paper that Nietzsche would disagree with my interpretation of where we gained these new modern rights. I take a look at the constitution and see that it is predominately concerned with private property rights.
First: Allows for the ownership of our own personal religion and our opinions.
Second: ownership of guns
Third: Soldiers can't use the house you OWN.
Fourth: Is about people looking through the stuff you OWN.
Fifth: Which contains the Takings Clause, “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
fourteenth: Says, “Life, liberty and PROPERTY without due process.”
The first five amendments concern property in someway. Rights about ownership. You own your thoughts, you own your guns, you own your vote, you own your ability to procreate, and your privacy. “Fundamental Right” is an euphemism for, “Stuff you own that can't be taken away which was stuff you didn't own during Medieval Times.” This is why schooling and health care are not fundamental rights, because not everyone can own a school or a hospital but everyone can own a vote or the ability to procreate, because they are cheap in money value activities.
But this interpretation does make it possible for one to claim that the Ten Commandments influenced the U.S. Constitution because the Ten Commandments concerns mainly property ownership, ownership of God over everyone, you can't me because I own my body, you can't screw my wife because I own her, my kids need to listen to me because I own them, and you shouldn't steal my stuff because I own that stuff.
So how does this lead to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche is about OWNING yourself, OWNING your own thoughts, OWNING your life. Nietzsche wants you to WORK and figure out your prejudices because he wants you to OWN yourself. The Urbermensch is a person that OWNS him or herself completely. The pioneer conquers the Indians and grows makes a farm where there was forest. The Ubermensch conquers their prejudices and makes a farm out of the wasteland that was their prejudices. Nietzsche is the voice that said first, “Look if we can own all these new rights, and own all this stuff, then we can finally OWN ourselves.” Nietzsche is about owning yourself, owning your opinions, owning your vote, owning your thoughts. And by owning yourself you are responsible. This is where Sartre's communism fails, Sartre wants you to be responsibility for owning yourself, but communism isn't about owning yourself, it is about letting yourself become the group, becoming just a cavity for group-think. So I'm also saying that Sartre is a capitalist, Sartre believes in private-ownership.
Nietzsche is like a Saint Francis of capitalism, Saint Francis notified people on how to be a really really good catholic. Nietzsche notifies you on how to become a really really good capitalist, Nietzsche is saying, “Take advantage of these rights while they exist, go with it, don't just own things, go even further, own yourself, own your ideas, make up new ideas to own, make up new prejudices, embrace this new market of ideas, shop around, check out stock prices on ideas, research the competitors, then go beyond the competitors, own yourself. What Nietzsche says that verges on the mystical in some strange way is that no matter what time you live the herd will have their stupid prejudices about reality, read my book, it will help you to get an interpretation of reality that may allow for at least mental escape from the self-imposed prisoners you are surrounded by. This brings us back to Saint Augustine: that a person living in a world they don't really want to live in may make their own city and live in it.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Looking at Statcounter
Someone from San Bernardino looked at my blog for 5 minutes and 40 seconds.
Hi, I drove through San Bernardino once. It looked hot.
I imagine you sweating reading my blog drinking iced tea.
*
Someone from San Francisco looked at my blog for 2 minutes and 7 seconds.
Hi, I imagine you walking up a hill. You stop at City Lights Book store, look around the store and not buy anything.
I'm assuming it is Dave Eggers. I think Dave Eggers lives in San Francisco.
*
Someone from Canton Ohio looked at my blog for like 5 hours.
I'm assuming something is wrong with you.
*
Someone from Huddinge, Stockholms Lan, Sweden looked at my blog for 43 minutes and 28 seconds.
You have national health care. I don't have any health care. I am deeply jealous of your political situation.
In my country we don't like anybody to go to the doctor, we may start closing down hospitals and replacing them with shamans and herbal supplements.
*
someone from Jamaica, New York, United States for 10 minutes and 57 seconds.
What is Jamaica New York?
I googled mapped it, that somewhere in New York City.
It is probably somebody I know that feels bad for me.
*
Someone from Gloucester, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom read the blog for 7 hours and 16 minutes.
This person must have read the whole blog
But I'm assuming they left the blog up on their computer, passed out drunk and the computer had it up all night.
*
keyword search
Num Perc. Search Term
27 28.72% noah cicero
4 4.26% tao lin ezine
4 4.26% Noah Cicero, the Outsider
3 3.19% the outsider
2 2.13% ***********
2 2.13% what rhymes with orange
2 2.13% strangest story about bukowski
2 2.13% outsider oranges
2 2.13% drunk women stories
2 2.13% porn stars from youngstown ohio
2 2.13% 40 YEAR OLD STRIPPERS
1 1.06% How to write a philosophy book
1 1.06% affect of gas prices on trucking industry
1 1.06% pagan religion and orgies
1 1.06% black in the outsider
1 1.06% Orgy
1 1.06% History of serial monogamy
1 1.06% the insurgent noah cicero
1 1.06% misaila pusyy
1 1.06% will drinking theraflu get you high
1 1.06% the.outsider
1 1.06% "Weep for the poor dumbfucks of this world" kerouac
1 1.06% outsiders blog
1 1.06% strip club florida
1 1.06% who hates journey by joyce carol oates
1 1.06% serbian waitress -bill
1 1.06% the outsider cicero
1 1.06% elise franco
1 1.06% ultimate warrior plane
1 1.06% "Heidi James"
1 1.06% quotes by dadaist
1 1.06% GRYSPSY.PL
1 1.06% what rhymes with preference
1 1.06% stopped caring
1 1.06% ryan manning
1 1.06% "glenn beck's beliefs"
1 1.06% pagan orgy
1 1.06% drunk women
1 1.06% did durant finish college
1 1.06% The-Outsider.com
1 1.06% noah cicero the outsier
1 1.06% ladies telling drinking stories
1 1.06% what do the mexicans say in cloverfield
1 1.06% the outsider by anonymous (poem)
1 1.06% how does it feel to be focked
1 1.06% are there any porn stars from Youngstown, Ohio
1 1.06% black cat poem
1 1.06% i dont want to finish college
1 1.06% quotes on dadaism
1 1.06% can you get high on theraflu
1 1.06% hamster dirty ass
1 1.06% poem cat
1 1.06% licking inside the belly button
94 100.00%
Hi, I drove through San Bernardino once. It looked hot.
I imagine you sweating reading my blog drinking iced tea.
*
Someone from San Francisco looked at my blog for 2 minutes and 7 seconds.
Hi, I imagine you walking up a hill. You stop at City Lights Book store, look around the store and not buy anything.
I'm assuming it is Dave Eggers. I think Dave Eggers lives in San Francisco.
*
Someone from Canton Ohio looked at my blog for like 5 hours.
I'm assuming something is wrong with you.
*
Someone from Huddinge, Stockholms Lan, Sweden looked at my blog for 43 minutes and 28 seconds.
You have national health care. I don't have any health care. I am deeply jealous of your political situation.
In my country we don't like anybody to go to the doctor, we may start closing down hospitals and replacing them with shamans and herbal supplements.
*
someone from Jamaica, New York, United States for 10 minutes and 57 seconds.
What is Jamaica New York?
I googled mapped it, that somewhere in New York City.
It is probably somebody I know that feels bad for me.
*
Someone from Gloucester, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom read the blog for 7 hours and 16 minutes.
This person must have read the whole blog
But I'm assuming they left the blog up on their computer, passed out drunk and the computer had it up all night.
*
keyword search
Num Perc. Search Term
27 28.72% noah cicero
4 4.26% tao lin ezine
4 4.26% Noah Cicero, the Outsider
3 3.19% the outsider
2 2.13% ***********
2 2.13% what rhymes with orange
2 2.13% strangest story about bukowski
2 2.13% outsider oranges
2 2.13% drunk women stories
2 2.13% porn stars from youngstown ohio
2 2.13% 40 YEAR OLD STRIPPERS
1 1.06% How to write a philosophy book
1 1.06% affect of gas prices on trucking industry
1 1.06% pagan religion and orgies
1 1.06% black in the outsider
1 1.06% Orgy
1 1.06% History of serial monogamy
1 1.06% the insurgent noah cicero
1 1.06% misaila pusyy
1 1.06% will drinking theraflu get you high
1 1.06% the.outsider
1 1.06% "Weep for the poor dumbfucks of this world" kerouac
1 1.06% outsiders blog
1 1.06% strip club florida
1 1.06% who hates journey by joyce carol oates
1 1.06% serbian waitress -bill
1 1.06% the outsider cicero
1 1.06% elise franco
1 1.06% ultimate warrior plane
1 1.06% "Heidi James"
1 1.06% quotes by dadaist
1 1.06% GRYSPSY.PL
1 1.06% what rhymes with preference
1 1.06% stopped caring
1 1.06% ryan manning
1 1.06% "glenn beck's beliefs"
1 1.06% pagan orgy
1 1.06% drunk women
1 1.06% did durant finish college
1 1.06% The-Outsider.com
1 1.06% noah cicero the outsier
1 1.06% ladies telling drinking stories
1 1.06% what do the mexicans say in cloverfield
1 1.06% the outsider by anonymous (poem)
1 1.06% how does it feel to be focked
1 1.06% are there any porn stars from Youngstown, Ohio
1 1.06% black cat poem
1 1.06% i dont want to finish college
1 1.06% quotes on dadaism
1 1.06% can you get high on theraflu
1 1.06% hamster dirty ass
1 1.06% poem cat
1 1.06% licking inside the belly button
94 100.00%
I Keep thinking really serious thoughts
Here is a serious interview on word riot
*
The other day at somewhere someone said to someone else, "Why are you trying to suck everyone's dick?"
*
I think I should twitter these thoughts, but I lost the twitter website. And now I cannot twitter.
*
Today a professor wrote on the board IMF and screamed, "INTERNATIONAL MONKEY FOUNDATION!"
*
Drinking a lot of vitamin water now.
*
Finals are coming, I keep expecting to get nervous but all i feel is a strange smothering apathy and like I want to eat pussy or something.
*
Thought of a story where God tells Moses that he did a statistical SPSS analysis of humanity and found it was human nature that people didn't like when their shit was stolen, their friends and family got killed, they didn't want to be killed, when their kids don't listen to them, and when people are jealous annoying bastards.
*
Decided around 1:14 today to start referring to Teabaggers as The Iagos.
*
I want to listen to a song right now, but have too much anxiety about which one to pick.
*
Nothing I'm saying right now will sell fuckloads of The Insurgent
*
Came to the conclusion the other day that I was afraid of adults and adulthood and decided this was a bad idea. This would lead to my demise as a person.
*
The other day at somewhere someone said to someone else, "Why are you trying to suck everyone's dick?"
*
I think I should twitter these thoughts, but I lost the twitter website. And now I cannot twitter.
*
Today a professor wrote on the board IMF and screamed, "INTERNATIONAL MONKEY FOUNDATION!"
*
Drinking a lot of vitamin water now.
*
Finals are coming, I keep expecting to get nervous but all i feel is a strange smothering apathy and like I want to eat pussy or something.
*
Thought of a story where God tells Moses that he did a statistical SPSS analysis of humanity and found it was human nature that people didn't like when their shit was stolen, their friends and family got killed, they didn't want to be killed, when their kids don't listen to them, and when people are jealous annoying bastards.
*
Decided around 1:14 today to start referring to Teabaggers as The Iagos.
*
I want to listen to a song right now, but have too much anxiety about which one to pick.
*
Nothing I'm saying right now will sell fuckloads of The Insurgent
*
Came to the conclusion the other day that I was afraid of adults and adulthood and decided this was a bad idea. This would lead to my demise as a person.
Friday, April 16, 2010
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