^^^^ CB: I've read some Nietzche. I am not favorably impressed. See comment below. Not exactly an idea original with Nietzche, class analysis of the origin of morality. Does he cite Marx and Engels ? The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling classes.
Plus, doesn't Nietzche use faux history as the basis for his arguments ? That's kinda weird. Dionysian and watchacallit are not exactly valid general anthropological categories ( despite Ruth Benedict).
I'll say this: I think Nietzche and Heidegger are on to something in their critique of Platonism, if as I understand it they are into.
You should be able to give an essential and brief summary of the most important ideas in any of these. I can do it for writers whom I read and find worthwhile. Just name one important insight that Posner has. Can't be that hard. What are the important ideas in "The Concept of the Political" ? Can't be that hard to outline them in very few words.
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Michael Pugliese:
Reminder to Charles. You ever get around to pulling out of library stacks these books on Nietzsche I recommended to you a while back?
^^^^^ CB: I've read some Nietzsche. I'm not favorably impressed. I think one of his main defects is that his arguments are based on a mythical and false version of human history. He has bullshit anthropology. You can't make up history and expect to draw important conclusions from what you make up. He represents the petit bourgeois mind gone bizerk under the pressure of the alienation of capitalism. In the course of that, he may hit on some anti-bourgeois insights, but taken as a whole, he's a mess. Plus, he's anti-Marxist, which will just lead his admirers astray on most important, intellectual issues.
Plus, stop giving me reading assignments. It's arrogant. You read the books and bring me book reports on them. Then I'll teach you something.
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MP: Your habitual, "Enemy of the People, " orthodox M-L style thought, to indicate the fascistoid essence of anyone to your Right, is tiresome. Public intellectuals can be any variety of leftist, rightist, centrist.
^^^^^ CB: If it's tiresome to you, I'll try to do it more often. However, it is inaccurate to characterize my thought in the way you do here. It's slanderous caricature and your habitual redbaiting.
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http://old.thing.net/ttreview/images/corpse.jpg , "Nietzsche's Corps/E: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, Or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life, " by Geoff Waite, a post-modern communist reading (Waite was in the PLP when Hilary Putnam was. A "stupid party, " {"Marcuse: Cop or Cop-Out?"} but, I suppose they had their reasons.
"Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, " by Bernice Glatzer
Rosenthal and, "New Myth, New World
>From Nietzsche to Stalinism, " by the same scholar.
. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism.
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In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on.
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Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal
MP: All those Heidegger buffs on the academic left just Fascists? "Left in form, Right in Essence?"
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CB: The Heidegger buffs are just bourgeois liberals.
So, are you saying that Nietzsche's alleged influence on Stalinisim is to Nietzche's credit ?
Is Nietzche really the first one to think that people need illusions to shield them from reality ? Religion as the opium of the people seems to be something of the same idea.
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Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
On Tue, 4 Oct 2005, Charles Brown wrote:
> CB: Give me examples of smart ideas that Posner, Schmitt ,Strauss and
> Nietzsche had.
For my money, Nietzsche's the most important philosopher of the 19th century. His historical analysis of "slave morality" in Geneaology of morals is a good example of his creativity and insight.
Miles
^^^^^ CB: Why doesn't he give credit to Marx for the basic idea of morality being rooted in class relations ? Sort of phony for him to act as if the basic approach - connection between class struggle and morality - originates with him.
As far as the specific of Christianity as a religion of slaves, Engels' writing on the origins of Christianity discusses that it is rooted in the slave classes in the Roman empire in that region. I don't see how Nietzche gets credit for "creativity" on this. I suppose I'd have to check the dates of Engels essays, but the general idea of analyzing Christianity in terms of classes is clearly from Marx's "creativity" , not Nietzche's.
For any atheist, it is a pretty evident notion that Christians being led around as flocks of sheep is somewhat slavelike.
Then doesn't Nietzche indulge made up history some ?
