Funny, I remember a whole chapter of his book where he argued, quite convincingly, I might add, that people such as him should die out and be replaced by "the mediocre" and then argued for his readers to pursue mediocrity for its assurance of survival among the herd of Man... and in the very same chapter, said something about how so few people will ever understand what he was truly doing by sacrificing his newborn son to Dionysus... let us thank him for his temerity and his oblation
While we are talking about complete non-entities that for some reason a bunch of retards assumed were oh so wise philosophers, let's add Schopenhauer to the list. And I've never been particularly fond of Machiavelli either despite all the fanfare he seems to get from... Traders?
I found Myamoto Mushashi to be far superior to most so-called "modern" philosophers.
Essentially when Philosophy stopped being the study of what was once called Natural Philosophy, which really was the study of the very nature of reality, the gammas invaded the entire genre with their nonsensical "but if you are just a dream of a dreamer's dream, then, are you really here?" Smacks to their foolish ears is all they deserved.
When I was briefly in minor seminary studying philosophy, my impression once I had finished was that very little spilled ink after Aristotle amounted to much, and after DeCartes, most of what has been written was just error compounding on error.
I think people try to use the Prince, but gloss over/forget the context surrounding why he wrote it -- as an antidote to the saccharine "manuals" that if followed would only result in good men being killed/deposed/exiled.
I can't say that I'm an enjoyer of his Art of War. As I recall when his theories were put into practice Milan suffered several military set backs, leading to him being imprisoned and having lots of time to write...
Most interestingly Vox's inversion rubric fits the best here. That is to say, Nietzsche killed his ability to see God, or was simply too autistic to perceive God's work, and can no longer see him. It's as if he tore out his own eyes and declared the world to be shrouded in darkness.
Being a great stylist is not a harbinger of truth. Many people followed Freud, who won prizese for his essays, much of which had no basis in reality. At all.
Well, they did have a basis in reality; it's just that he was inverting reality. His patients were being raped by their own family members, who were the people paying Freud so handsomely that he was obliged to ignore the evidence he gathered and create a completely upside-down story to blame the victims.
I have also heard that Freud's work applies marvelously to jewish families and family dynamics. So just add that addendum to every sentence of his. "The son wants to kill the father and sleep with the mother (in jewish families)", and so on. The apologists say that his main clientele were jews so he couldn't help but have their neuroses paint his worldview, which does make sense.
I read a story once that says a lot about Nietzsche. I got the impression while reading it that is was a true story, but can't remember the source.
Anyway, there was some guy living out in a shack in the desert who would drift into town once in a while to make some extra money by working. Somewhere he picked up a copy of Nietzsche's writing and left it in his shack. One day he returned and found a poisonous snake coiled on top of the book. He threw it away.
You lost me there. I did say it was only a story, but the image of a poisonous and deadly snake coiled on top of one of Nietzsche's poisonous and deadly books is a striking one (to me anyway).
I see a spiritual curse from continuously rejecting their Messiah. Knowing the Son is knowing the Father, and continuing to reject the Son is rejecting the Father, which translates to the human fathers by association.
That's a profound topic for insight. How do you think inheritance, and coronation, and such things as are passed from father to son in this world, are endowed to the Son from the Kingdom of God? Shall he have his own Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Son?
Were there angels before Christianity? Where did they go? Were those the angels of God and has God passed on the Kingdom of this world to the Worldly Host of the Angels of God's Son?
There’s an inextricable link between authors/films that are considered “cult-classics” and their predominant gamma audience. It explains why as a delta it’s been difficult to share the enthusiasm for movies like Donnie Darko, Clockwork Orange etc. that other men do
A little harsh how he treated his moon cameraman, Tyrone, though. They told Tyrone they were going out for smokes and would be back in a while, but he's still waiting, probably a little sad and maybe acting out in school and such. He took some great video of them leaving with that excellent panning work.
Blog reader request: Vox can you do an article about dress standards for gamma men and their personal hygiene like haircuts facial hair etc? I really want to see this article because it’s just too damn fun. Another trait I’ve noticed is men wearing polo shirts buttoning the top button that’s so weird looking.
Once again Vox makes me laugh with the bottom picture. That beard which is unkept is gross and he looks like an annoying know it all type. I really got to know where Vox gets these images and what AI he is using.
What little I could stomach of Nietzsche's writings are morally retarded and deeply anti-Christian (obvious correlation) and are replete with personal power fantasies. At the risk of mixing philosophical metaphors Nietzche was the ultimate fox pretending to be the ultimate lion.
His Master/Slave Morality dichotomy is particularly repugnant and you can see a direct line between his thought and the disaster of WWII, just as you can see a direct line between Rousseau and the disaster of the French Revolution.
People who admire Nietzsche's pitiful philosophy of selfishness refuse to see any connection between Nietzsche and WW2 and the Nazis. After all, if Nietzsche was good and the Nazis were bad, what sort of connection could there possibly be?
People on the other hand who reject Nietzsche's false and ugly philosophy can more easily see the connection between Nietzsche and WW2. The Nazis quoted him often. People say they took him out of context, but what if they were not taking him out of context? What if Hitler and his followers understood that Nietzsche really meant what he said about cruelty and violence and harshness being superior to kindness, mercy, forgiveness and love?
The Nazis never quoted Kierkegaard, Kant, Descartes and many others out of context that way. Nietzsche gave them a lot to play with.
Rousseau gets a very bad shake because of how his work was endorsed -- and distorted -- by Robespierre and other French Revolutionaries. He was very much a pioneer of the Counter-Enlightenment movement and is well worth another look, particularly his last and unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker.
There's a really good book from a British political philosopher who covers the distortions and of Rousseau's thought in great detail:
He takes rural living to be ideal and most natural for man, and takes cities to be cesspools, urban living more or less being the source of corruption and perversion in man. His political project is concerned with making city life more palatable and less perverse.
Beyond that, he affirms the need for religion, the importance of the Bible, and laid the foundation for Montessori style education.
One may not agree with some of his positions, but he's hardly in the category of Nietzsche.
Rousseau wrote parenting books while dumping all his own children at the orphanage, for starters.
His insistence on the absolute purity of children and rejection of original sin is the basis for modern society's indulgence of every childish temper tantrum.
His BS about the "Noble Savage" laid the ground work for White Guilt.
I read somewhere of a Frenchman in the old days who tried to bring up his son according to the philosophy of Rousseau, and concluded in the end "I have raised an idiot."
Whoa! I had no idea he had kids and abandoned them. Well, shit. I'll eat my words and concede that that makes him a pretty terrible person.
He did oddly advocate for letting children learn from the natural consequences of their actions rather than outright disciplining. Obviously don't spare the rod, but there is something to letting them see how things unfold on their own at times.
The white guilt/noble savage connection I think is people reading him wrong -- he's explicit that the "noble savage" is still a deficiency, and that it is a premature state to be left behind.
But yes, on the whole, point taken that he was a scumbag.
I had such trouble making sense of his writings probably because the IQ gap so I am glad we have people of capacity to give us cliff notes.
It sounds like he was writing from the position of a absolute superiority, holding all of humanity to a ruthlessly high standard he himself could never achieve. Having been unable to make sense of his writings I have no idea if he was aware of this contradiction but it sounds like he was purely delusional.
Nietzsche's IQ is not terribly high. What you failed to do is follow the largely disjointed ramblings of a madman, which is no great failing on your part.
I dont doubt it. I have no idea how to even gauge his IQ. I cant tell if his super complicated writing style was just a gamma attempt to sound smart through obfuscation or if there was actual concepts I was failing to grasp. Probably a bit of both.
All Word Salad is designed to make the writer look smart and the reader feel dumb so the writer looks like a genius in comparison. Once you understand that Word Salad is just a rhetorical wizard trick then it loses it's ability to manipulate you and when you see Word Salad you can dismiss it as nonsense quickly.
I have it on good authority that German prose translates into the most awkward, clunking, tortured English imaginable. It's a feature of the linguistic style that Nietzche leaned into.
Can confirm. German doesn't translate well into most languages because of its building-block style. It's very natural to create words on the fly in German to illustrate a phenomenon, but the consequence for translators is that seldom is there a fitting word already existing in other languages.
A lot of rich connotation for common words is lost, too. E.g., the German word for mood is "Stimmung," which originally referred to the tuning of stringed instruments. Built into the idea of a mood in German is being tuned in a certain way or being attuned to something in a particular way. Just as an instrument produces different sounds with different tunings, so too with moods.
It's amazing how such a beautiful language can both sound so heinously ugly and translate in such an ugly and impoverished way.
Our language might not be as melodic as French or Italian, but it enables us to specify anything in a very precise manner. Why do you think we've been crushing so hard when it comes to machines?
Anyway, I admit that German has a rather technical tone, but you've obviously not been around drunken Finns if you think German sounds "heinously ugly". If I was some torturer in Guantanamo, I wouldn't waterboard those guys, I would put them in a bar somewhere in rural Finland every night.
btw, we've tried to eliminate the translation issue twice in the 20th century (we've been very open about it the second time), but, it didn't work out. Now we have to learn all those other languages in school.
Aphoristic structures are perfectly suited to the Gamma type. Authoritative posture without the hard work or accountability of working out logical coherence.
It can yield insights, like a fortune cookie or Aesopian fable. But even Nietzsche’s best insights - like the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in tragedy - are diluted Christian metaphysics through a humanist filter. The skill as a stylist and bombastic self-empowerment rhetoric does appeal to bright adolescents. It really needs to end there though.
It’s amazing that his writings influenced some of the worst people and movements in recent history. He finally became the secret king he always yearned for.
There’s a passage in the Soviet novel The Keeper of Antiquities that presents a very similar critique of Nietzsche’s philosophy
Funny, I remember a whole chapter of his book where he argued, quite convincingly, I might add, that people such as him should die out and be replaced by "the mediocre" and then argued for his readers to pursue mediocrity for its assurance of survival among the herd of Man... and in the very same chapter, said something about how so few people will ever understand what he was truly doing by sacrificing his newborn son to Dionysus... let us thank him for his temerity and his oblation
I don't think he thought of himself as Übermensch.
Surely there are some folks out there who have strengthened their faith in Christ by taking Nietzsche seriously?
Nietzsche hated Christianity. You can read the last section or two of The Antichrist (depending on which edition).
Drinking his urine for 11 years is ALPHA. 😂
While we are talking about complete non-entities that for some reason a bunch of retards assumed were oh so wise philosophers, let's add Schopenhauer to the list. And I've never been particularly fond of Machiavelli either despite all the fanfare he seems to get from... Traders?
I found Myamoto Mushashi to be far superior to most so-called "modern" philosophers.
Essentially when Philosophy stopped being the study of what was once called Natural Philosophy, which really was the study of the very nature of reality, the gammas invaded the entire genre with their nonsensical "but if you are just a dream of a dreamer's dream, then, are you really here?" Smacks to their foolish ears is all they deserved.
When I was briefly in minor seminary studying philosophy, my impression once I had finished was that very little spilled ink after Aristotle amounted to much, and after DeCartes, most of what has been written was just error compounding on error.
Machiavelli is an excellent political philosopher. Don't judge him by The Prince or his Art of War. His Discourses are the work worth reading.
Discourses on Livy is great, highly recommend.
I think people try to use the Prince, but gloss over/forget the context surrounding why he wrote it -- as an antidote to the saccharine "manuals" that if followed would only result in good men being killed/deposed/exiled.
I can't say that I'm an enjoyer of his Art of War. As I recall when his theories were put into practice Milan suffered several military set backs, leading to him being imprisoned and having lots of time to write...
Admittedly I have not read those. The previous two made me conclude he was an impractical theorist at best.
I judged the same. Thanks for that info. I'll check out discourses
Nietzsche is dead (and God has killed him)
kill confirmed
Most interestingly Vox's inversion rubric fits the best here. That is to say, Nietzsche killed his ability to see God, or was simply too autistic to perceive God's work, and can no longer see him. It's as if he tore out his own eyes and declared the world to be shrouded in darkness.
i think the term "Spiritually Crippled" is a good fit for this!
Crippled fits, but I would say blind is better.
I'm surprised I haven't read this before hahahaha short and sweet.
Neechee's translation went hard, though. I can really feel the ranting, raving madman through the text of the aphorisms!
Being a great stylist is not a harbinger of truth. Many people followed Freud, who won prizese for his essays, much of which had no basis in reality. At all.
Well, they did have a basis in reality; it's just that he was inverting reality. His patients were being raped by their own family members, who were the people paying Freud so handsomely that he was obliged to ignore the evidence he gathered and create a completely upside-down story to blame the victims.
I have also heard that Freud's work applies marvelously to jewish families and family dynamics. So just add that addendum to every sentence of his. "The son wants to kill the father and sleep with the mother (in jewish families)", and so on. The apologists say that his main clientele were jews so he couldn't help but have their neuroses paint his worldview, which does make sense.
This is brilliant, you guys just unlocked the whole fraud of it for me... I'm so glad I didn't read him, this is all I needed
I read a story once that says a lot about Nietzsche. I got the impression while reading it that is was a true story, but can't remember the source.
Anyway, there was some guy living out in a shack in the desert who would drift into town once in a while to make some extra money by working. Somewhere he picked up a copy of Nietzsche's writing and left it in his shack. One day he returned and found a poisonous snake coiled on top of the book. He threw it away.
Yeah, me three, but now I have three snake rattles
You lost me there. I did say it was only a story, but the image of a poisonous and deadly snake coiled on top of one of Nietzsche's poisonous and deadly books is a striking one (to me anyway).
"The son wants to kill the father"
I see a spiritual curse from continuously rejecting their Messiah. Knowing the Son is knowing the Father, and continuing to reject the Son is rejecting the Father, which translates to the human fathers by association.
That's a profound topic for insight. How do you think inheritance, and coronation, and such things as are passed from father to son in this world, are endowed to the Son from the Kingdom of God? Shall he have his own Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Son?
Were there angels before Christianity? Where did they go? Were those the angels of God and has God passed on the Kingdom of this world to the Worldly Host of the Angels of God's Son?
there's a reason doubt rhymes with duped
Them: His blood be on us, and on our children.
God; OK.
Jesus: "I banged all ur mums"
There’s an inextricable link between authors/films that are considered “cult-classics” and their predominant gamma audience. It explains why as a delta it’s been difficult to share the enthusiasm for movies like Donnie Darko, Clockwork Orange etc. that other men do
Except for Remo Williams.
Don't kill across me: it's very rude.
His moon landing videos were a big hit, for sure.
A little harsh how he treated his moon cameraman, Tyrone, though. They told Tyrone they were going out for smokes and would be back in a while, but he's still waiting, probably a little sad and maybe acting out in school and such. He took some great video of them leaving with that excellent panning work.
Should have left the bike alone.
Barry Lindon was his best film. Fight me.
Done
Blog reader request: Vox can you do an article about dress standards for gamma men and their personal hygiene like haircuts facial hair etc? I really want to see this article because it’s just too damn fun. Another trait I’ve noticed is men wearing polo shirts buttoning the top button that’s so weird looking.
It’s the smell
Once again Vox makes me laugh with the bottom picture. That beard which is unkept is gross and he looks like an annoying know it all type. I really got to know where Vox gets these images and what AI he is using.
That picture isn't generated. Thats a very old meme.
But I to would like to see a Darkstream where he demonstrates his method for prompting.
Not me, I was eating lunch when I scrolled down and gagged. Luckily, I didn't need the Heimlich procedure.
What little I could stomach of Nietzsche's writings are morally retarded and deeply anti-Christian (obvious correlation) and are replete with personal power fantasies. At the risk of mixing philosophical metaphors Nietzche was the ultimate fox pretending to be the ultimate lion.
His Master/Slave Morality dichotomy is particularly repugnant and you can see a direct line between his thought and the disaster of WWII, just as you can see a direct line between Rousseau and the disaster of the French Revolution.
People who admire Nietzsche's pitiful philosophy of selfishness refuse to see any connection between Nietzsche and WW2 and the Nazis. After all, if Nietzsche was good and the Nazis were bad, what sort of connection could there possibly be?
People on the other hand who reject Nietzsche's false and ugly philosophy can more easily see the connection between Nietzsche and WW2. The Nazis quoted him often. People say they took him out of context, but what if they were not taking him out of context? What if Hitler and his followers understood that Nietzsche really meant what he said about cruelty and violence and harshness being superior to kindness, mercy, forgiveness and love?
The Nazis never quoted Kierkegaard, Kant, Descartes and many others out of context that way. Nietzsche gave them a lot to play with.
Rousseau gets a very bad shake because of how his work was endorsed -- and distorted -- by Robespierre and other French Revolutionaries. He was very much a pioneer of the Counter-Enlightenment movement and is well worth another look, particularly his last and unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker.
There's a really good book from a British political philosopher who covers the distortions and of Rousseau's thought in great detail:
https://www.amazon.com/Rousseaus-Counter-Enlightenment-Republican-Philosophes-Political/dp/0791456048
No. Rousseau was awful in his own right. And he was an absolutely horrible man.
I'm curious as to what makes you say that.
He takes rural living to be ideal and most natural for man, and takes cities to be cesspools, urban living more or less being the source of corruption and perversion in man. His political project is concerned with making city life more palatable and less perverse.
Beyond that, he affirms the need for religion, the importance of the Bible, and laid the foundation for Montessori style education.
One may not agree with some of his positions, but he's hardly in the category of Nietzsche.
> I'm curious as to what makes you say that.
Rousseau wrote parenting books while dumping all his own children at the orphanage, for starters.
His insistence on the absolute purity of children and rejection of original sin is the basis for modern society's indulgence of every childish temper tantrum.
His BS about the "Noble Savage" laid the ground work for White Guilt.
I read somewhere of a Frenchman in the old days who tried to bring up his son according to the philosophy of Rousseau, and concluded in the end "I have raised an idiot."
Whoa! I had no idea he had kids and abandoned them. Well, shit. I'll eat my words and concede that that makes him a pretty terrible person.
He did oddly advocate for letting children learn from the natural consequences of their actions rather than outright disciplining. Obviously don't spare the rod, but there is something to letting them see how things unfold on their own at times.
The white guilt/noble savage connection I think is people reading him wrong -- he's explicit that the "noble savage" is still a deficiency, and that it is a premature state to be left behind.
But yes, on the whole, point taken that he was a scumbag.
This is reported in Paul Johnson's excellent work, "Intellectuals".
I had such trouble making sense of his writings probably because the IQ gap so I am glad we have people of capacity to give us cliff notes.
It sounds like he was writing from the position of a absolute superiority, holding all of humanity to a ruthlessly high standard he himself could never achieve. Having been unable to make sense of his writings I have no idea if he was aware of this contradiction but it sounds like he was purely delusional.
Your experience mirrors mine and others so I dont think its an IQ gap.
Its simply a bit of inspired writing mixed with an increasing bit of madness.
It's not you bro. Here, this guys more interesting than Nietzsche.
https://www.amazon.com/Mean-Sunday-Autobiography-Ray-Nitschke/dp/0385068980/ref=sr_1_2?crid=QKY4PCX2IWZU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vOhB_zmdtityrlK-s5P3h_9KPDOENKG9UyG5F5xQxJywC7iQx4E2a4Uq797I3d-Z6etqEv7k2pOcZRq5wqejfhmMNZl-zBFrjcXBPdVg9W8juXGkbsTVqoH23TYrFaQ4zjkn3J_k85P9sZcHn8f6TNsi4pHEbmxEjXoF9Z4zeczMbG0aoymmzkTSMbCeqCAn.URBtsvCjPSvJlI8jW7QcYG3qY9JUaI8j7xrR-GZCOaE&dib_tag=se&keywords=ray+nitschke&qid=1718907789&s=books&sprefix=ray+nitschke%2Cstripbooks%2C68&sr=1-2
I don't know about his IQ but I always attributed his opaqueness to the syphilis.
Nietzsche's IQ is not terribly high. What you failed to do is follow the largely disjointed ramblings of a madman, which is no great failing on your part.
I dont doubt it. I have no idea how to even gauge his IQ. I cant tell if his super complicated writing style was just a gamma attempt to sound smart through obfuscation or if there was actual concepts I was failing to grasp. Probably a bit of both.
All Word Salad is designed to make the writer look smart and the reader feel dumb so the writer looks like a genius in comparison. Once you understand that Word Salad is just a rhetorical wizard trick then it loses it's ability to manipulate you and when you see Word Salad you can dismiss it as nonsense quickly.
I have it on good authority that German prose translates into the most awkward, clunking, tortured English imaginable. It's a feature of the linguistic style that Nietzche leaned into.
Can confirm. German doesn't translate well into most languages because of its building-block style. It's very natural to create words on the fly in German to illustrate a phenomenon, but the consequence for translators is that seldom is there a fitting word already existing in other languages.
A lot of rich connotation for common words is lost, too. E.g., the German word for mood is "Stimmung," which originally referred to the tuning of stringed instruments. Built into the idea of a mood in German is being tuned in a certain way or being attuned to something in a particular way. Just as an instrument produces different sounds with different tunings, so too with moods.
It's amazing how such a beautiful language can both sound so heinously ugly and translate in such an ugly and impoverished way.
Our language might not be as melodic as French or Italian, but it enables us to specify anything in a very precise manner. Why do you think we've been crushing so hard when it comes to machines?
Anyway, I admit that German has a rather technical tone, but you've obviously not been around drunken Finns if you think German sounds "heinously ugly". If I was some torturer in Guantanamo, I wouldn't waterboard those guys, I would put them in a bar somewhere in rural Finland every night.
btw, we've tried to eliminate the translation issue twice in the 20th century (we've been very open about it the second time), but, it didn't work out. Now we have to learn all those other languages in school.
Aphoristic structures are perfectly suited to the Gamma type. Authoritative posture without the hard work or accountability of working out logical coherence.
It can yield insights, like a fortune cookie or Aesopian fable. But even Nietzsche’s best insights - like the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in tragedy - are diluted Christian metaphysics through a humanist filter. The skill as a stylist and bombastic self-empowerment rhetoric does appeal to bright adolescents. It really needs to end there though.
That's a good summary of Nietzsche -- if philosophy branched out into fortune cookies.
His contrast with Thomas Aquinas is tremendous. I can disagree with the cases The Doctor Angelicus makes, because he actually makes them.
Nietzsche can be simply dismissed by another Atheist truism: "Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
It’s amazing that his writings influenced some of the worst people and movements in recent history. He finally became the secret king he always yearned for.