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On the rationalist hub per excellence, LessWrong: lesswrong.com/posts/NxYgL5nPMT…
Criticism of Nietzsche has been out there for a good while. Bertrand Russell, for example, wasn’t a fan of Nietzsche, calling his ideology “an appeal to the emotions”: reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comment…
Calling Nietzsche’s philosophy “irrationalist” is still a common trend: monthlyreview.org/articles/on-…
Even Marxists hammer on Nietzsche’s hardcore individualism: queer-bolshevik.medium.com/a-c…
The fact that I know about LessWrong because of Behind the Bastards should say a whole lot about how “moral” their “rationalism” really neither of those things and personally I feel like their thought predecessors would be pretty embarrassed by them
Yeah, rationalism has been twisted into individualism with a lot more steps. If they were truly rational (as in, considering our current knowledge of astrophysics and biology, the heat death of the universe and the origins of survival instinct), they would have probably ended up noticing that attempting to make things better for hypothetical future people is equally as worth(less) as making things better for the people of now - both are merely postponing the unavoidable.
It sounds completely irrational to seriously consider the heat death’s impact on anything when nothing will be alive to experience it, if you ask me
Britt Hartley takes existentialists to the woodshed, pointing out that it’s a fine philosophy if you’re living a comfortable life, but if nothing means anything and your life sucks, might as well put a quarter in the suicide booth if existential philosophy is all you have.
Is that a refutation? I admit, when I consider how my distant ancestors and the majority of humans throughout history lived, I wonder why they chose to go on, and to create new generations who also lived lives like theirs, and the only answer I have is that they lacked perspective. Maybe a philosophy that teaches one to refuse a life without dignity is, in that context, correct philosophy.
Lots more community. Relationships and physical play (e.g. sports, theater, art, ritual, dance etc.) were the primary form of entertainment. Brains were capable of enduring in silence for 10 minutes without exploding in anxiety. Plant medicines were socially acceptable including “drugs”.
Yeah there were diseases, famines, wars, etc. But these weren’t constant threats, often regional until empire developed with (inter)continental trade.
People had joy and fulfillment, a bit of boredom, and many lacked effective contraceptives, so kids happened.
Correct, but maladaptive and evolutionarily unfit…
If you want to be entertained, you can watch True Detective Season 1. Someone brought up Rust, already.
If you want to ruin your life in ten pages, the source is The Last Messiah by Zapffe.
Rust Cohle explains why pretty well I think. Instinct, it’s burned into enough of us that the few who come to that conclusion don’t have any effect. And I agree with his solution
The fact that, evolutionarily speaking, it’s easier to find lifeforms that have a strong survival instinct than lifeforms that question or reject it can be explained with two main reasons. First, assuming that evolution is performed by random adaptations that are then tested by the environment to see if they survive and their wielders reproduce, a lifeform that prioritizes a single task is more statistically probable to develop first than one that performs complex analysis of the environment and then chooses a reaction. Which is to say, dogmatic behavior developed long before critical thinking was even possible, and by the time the latter appeared, the survival instinct was already well baked into the very structure of the brain. Second, beings that prioritize survival tend to live longer than those that end up questioning the survival instinct, as the latter die more often for obvious reasons.
when the world starts to really collapse in a few years we wont have to wonder
people will be rationally offing themselves left and right
governments response will be to make suicide extra illegal lol
It’s sort of paradox that a government that is actively looking to liquidate its excess population would put the kabosh on suicide, but I think it would. Cruelty and control.
Existentialism is a response to essentialism though. It isn’t that life has no meaning but that people can be free to choose the meaning and path of their lives. An acorn can only become an oak tree but a person is not born with their future path preordained. The idea is existence before essence instead of essence before existence.
Yes, read Simone Beauvoir along with Sartre. Sartre is kind of a comically privileged white man. As you say people can be free to choose the path of their lives, but some more than others.
modern people love thinking this but most people never move even 50 miles from where they were born and the single largest indictor of ‘success’ in life is your parents income
for example being born in gaza or ukraine right now is pretty damn bleak
if it were my choice to be born there or not, i’d pass
Yes me too. But that same baby born in Gaza could be born 15 miles away and live an entirely different life. That is the whole point. The gazan child is not essentially a victim by virtue of being born in Gaza. The gazan child is likely to be a victim not because she has to be (is essential to her nature) but because someone has chosen to victimise her. What modern people miss is that that distinction was lacking for the first couple thousand years of philosophical thought.
You’re both correct, but the underlying point is it’s not guaranteed if you’re a human in Ukraine vs an acorn in the forest. HUGE difference, and only a clown would pretend they’re equivalent.
who’d actually choose to roll the dice?
there is nothing glorious about suffering and the human condition being what it is means very few will end with a charmed life
vastly more of existence has been and will be without me existing, I think i’d been fine skipping it entirely
You don’t experience the time you do not exist, so you may as well be complaining about the story of a book you didn’t read with that kind of attitude.
Just quick short thoughts before I continue reading because I really thought these are immediately striking without further dissection:
Philosophy aside, the comment on LessWrong that said “Nietzsche is a great source of aphorisms, and may be able to trigger some Deep Thoughts in readers, but a lot of his writing seems more like a sort of performance art to me. At least on a superficial level, he’s much easier to read than Kant or Hegel, but that also means he does not even try to argue his point in a rigorous way”. Spot on, this is like the main barrier to his books. I see this as the first problem you’ll encounter before getting to how fascists twisted his words into justifications for doing fuck-all
Then, I REALLY like this Monthly Review article. This passage pointed out a perspective of the problem initially sounding like a misread about how “this is just doing barbarism but with extra steps” but actually pretty accurately describes how greater powers in the world will take almost anything we try to do and turn it into barbarism: The liberalization and deregulation of the most intimate sphere of the person will completely achieve the fetishism of the commodity. And the sole revolt which will from here on be permitted to the Nietzschean by power, when an irreducible part of his disarmed consciousness has, through misunderstanding, fomented some insurrection, will be total annihilation, bestiality towards the other animal which his masters will have brought into the neighbouring cage.
I still need to finish it and get to the Marxist critique but thank you for this
Meh. If rigor were the path to the truth, wouldn’t we have the found the One True Philosophy? At the end of the day, all that matters is if the philosophy vibes with you, which you can discover just as well from a comic book version of the philosophy as painstakingly deriving every point.
I think thinking you’re using your rational mind to determine the capital-T Truth is delusional.
Yeah not so much that. It was kind of refreshing to read something where the author gives up on trying to preempt arguments against him early in the process of creating his work (exhausting, boring, and as time goes on inevitably futile).
I meant more that the prose is full of self-certain trueisms and has that superficiality to it. It doesn’t discount his points to me either, I’m often a vibes person myself. But it offloads a lot of the cognitive work of basically finishing his philosophy onto you as you’re reading it. I think that’s probably the deeper cause of most other problems people have with his philosophy, like how bad actors took and used it for nefarious shit. But, he was a lonely guy in a lot of pain who took to writing to manage it so that’s par for the course.
For all the good it does you. The public will ruthlessly interpret your work however it wants; look at Broicism (neé Stoicism) or Christianity.
Ooh, I have some opinions about Christianity’s potential to be used by bad actors. Honestly I feel pretty similar about it as I do Nietzsche but more like the architecture for doing evil has always been latent in the ideology for as long as it has existed sperate from Judaic and Gnostic faith.
I definitely would like to hear more about how exactly Broicism diverges from Stoicism though, if you have the time. You’re the first person I’ve heard say that it’s different.
The term “broicism” is implicitly a critique. I don’t know much about the stoics, but I understand it has a bit more emotional complexity where as broicism is just machistic indifference repackaged. Here’s one article: https://www.trillmag.com/culture/broicism-the-manospheres-obsession-with-stoicism/
I think all monotheisms are toxic; not sure how you think Christianity and Judaism are different, architecturally speaking. It just cracks me up that Jesus explicitly talks about all the ways religion is misused (Good Samaritan, Pharisees, etc.), he lays it out and black and white, and it just gets ignored. Not to mention how its used to support hierarchy when smashing hierarchy is absolutely in the text; but it’s complicated because the appropriation of Jesus was well underway when the bible was decided on. I think if Jesus was able to self-publish his memoirs, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.
Sweeeet, I’ve been curious about this since my first assumption has always been that “Bros” just were doing Stoicism in its best possible interpretation. Maybe I’m too critical of it and not of them.
That’s valid and a pretty widely agreed on belief. I tend to make a few more concessions for Hebrew and Catholicism because they have controls and political structures for negating barbarism built in to their scriptures, even if those controls have failed in both past and recent history.
The difference with Christianity from those is you’re given leave by the text to engage selectively and do post-modern interpretations of what Jesus wants or the personal cost of not living up to his expectations. Like it’s not that he’s being ignored, it’s that his sacrifice canceled any price I have to pay for my actions in this life. You’re right, though. The person Christ was pretty different from the faith that inherited his name, they probably wouldn’t have had much to do with eachother if he had a choice in the matter. Mainly because he was a Jew and that’s not compatible with how Christians want to believe he was.
I’m not sure what concessions Catholicism has. It built itself into a major political player and was the spiritual foundation of the feudal system and king’s right to rule… and this for over a thousand years.
The Catholic Church was aware there was stuff in the bible that wouldn’t go in its favor, which is why they killed anyone who tried to translate it into a popular language… At the same time, all these priests and bishops and cardinals and popes COULD read it, and they consistently chose to support their own power. Very human, that, craving power above all else.
One defining weirdness of Christianity is the emphasis is puts on FAITH, on protestations of belief. I don’t think even Judaism cares that much about it.
But the religious situation around Jesus’ time was absolutely WILD. I’d start with The Life of Brian, but then read about the Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (there are probably better books by now). There were cults springing up all over the place, each with their own vibe-coded stories that were ChatGPTd from prevailing culture. I think thinking of “Judaism” as an unitary religion/culture is a bit of anachronism.
Ty! All the criticisms I’ve heard I’ve only really absorbed through cultural osmosis so I want to read some hard stuff