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  • https://redsails.org/kriegsideologie/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-und-telepolis/

    I spam redsails but it's such a convenient site. I read The Gay Science as one of my first philosophy books, but I completely turned around because of Losurdo

    • The antimodernism thing is like the least charitable take one can have on Nietzsche but at least it's not one that's based on his sister's stuff.

      Some quick thoughts:

      His stance on democracy has to be understood in the context of its days, much less developed than now, and in the Kaiserreich also very much class-based, ruled more by mass psychology than consideration of what actually good politics would be -- on both sides, though I won't deny that the nobles and bourgeois of course needed their wings clipped. At the same time he's very much an elitist in the sense of, erm, personal improvement, sees the need for the individual to transcend the forces acting around them and develop their own path as sublation of everything, contrast that with the political forces in parliament being not even close to that but simple thesis-antithesis with no sign of actually starting to go beyond that and you have an easy case for "Nietzsche simply didn't believe in the process democracy".

      To all this he prefers “hierarchy” [Rangordnung]

      Is that really the term Anglos use as a translation. "ranking" or even "precedence" might've been a better choice. Honestly just translate it literally: "Rank order". In any case and I won't dwell on it: Nietzsche always describes these rank relations as in flux, not set in stone, and makes fun of tying it to inheritance. I don't see him at odds with Bakunin, here, who will readily bow to the authority of the bootmaker.

      At the same time he warned of the dangers of not having such a thing, of insisting on some moral-metaphysical notion of inviolable human equality, and we just recently had the opportunity to see that kind of thing in action: I'm speaking of the masses of people unwilling to bow to the authority of virologists and epidemiologists, going "nu-uh I did my own research", meaning they read some bullshit blog somewhere. Nietzsche himself might've rather thought about the Jacobine terror and stuff.

      Overall, when reading Nietzsche I recommend starting with Thus spake Zahatrustra, as a work of philosophical mysticism, get to grips with what it means for the individual mind, and interpret the rest in that light, and specifically consider whether he might not have framed a lot of things very differently had he witnessed Nazi Germany.

      A parallel which comes to mind here is Plato, who likely would be similarly at odds with the modern scientific method as Nietzsche is with the democratic process, stressing the importance of intuition as to not de-humanise the process: Are we, as peoples, really engaging in democracy, or do we let a system of mass psychology rule us?

      Lastly, my psychological armchair: Was he someone who often felt alone in a crowd? Yeah, probably. Clowns to the left, jokers to the right.

      • I'm not sure what your intention is with this comment if I'm being honest but it just seems like a broad defense of Nietzsche based in misunderstanding the claims of Losurdo, honestly. Nietzsches obsession with the individual in that way and unwillingness to accept change outside of growing toward his übermensch are a basis for the most anti-communist philosophy.

        If I'm honest, I just doubt you've really read Nietzsche as deeply as Losurdo

      • One more point here, made clearly by Marx, is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it's possibly the most humanising something can be. To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be. It's finding how to live as both a human individual and a human who partakes in, creates, or grows away from mass psychologies. This misunderstanding is exactly Nietzsche hate for the masses. He attempted to understand HIMSELF as not human in this way and create a philosophy around it, while he himself was calling back to individual, anti-change philosophies from the Greeks who did the same (Plato as opposed to Aristotle)

        • is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it’s possibly the most humanising something can be.

          Yes but no. It's dangerous territory, promising both great rewards yet also containing fatal traps: The problem is reducing our own understanding and with that perception of the world to our intellectual understanding. To paint a caricature: When you start to measure mouth angles to figure out whether someone's happy instead of relying on your mirror neurons ("subjective interpretation", cry the Skinnerites). Psychology itself is a very good example here, they legitimately did have to make studies to prove that mood and posture are connected because there were just too many sceptics around with their heads up in their theories, disconnected from their own humanity, their perception of reality having become limited to those theories, not unwilling but unable to see things that don't come with a p value. And that's within psychology itself have a good guess how it's in other disciplines. Not really that relevant in say mathematics, but in economics? As said: Fatal.

          Evolution already gave us tools to understand the world. Sure, it also enabled us with rationality, the capacity for science, but to deny that natural understanding is just as bad as shutting off our rationality, it alienates ourselves from our own nature with contains both, in both cases we're incomplete. And for the record: It also provided us with the capacity to mistake social conditioning for actual intuition.

          And yes this all is very much the crisis of the millennium but OTOH you shouldn't worry too much evolution already seems to have accounted for it: Skinnerites tend to be unfuckable. That's because they're alienated from their own nature, and that makes you ugly.

          To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be.

          There's variance in human psychology that makes individual either more or less prone to move with the flock, or look at it critically, it's a necessary condition for societies to be even half-way functional: With only pure flock swimmers we'd be blindly following each other down cliffs, with only pure critics we'd not be a social species in the first place. And a society made of solely flock swimmers would not develop a critical understanding of psychology in the first place. And when I say "variance" here I very much mean nature, not nurture, nurture in this instance only comes into play if the nature happens to be ambivalent.

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