[lbo-talk] Nietzsche

[Miles Jackson]

Chris Doss wrote:
> I really don't see what's so earth-shaking in
> Nietzsche. My personal response to reading him was
> always basically "meh." He never shook me up on a
> personal level like Kierkegaard, Heidegger or
> Schopenhauer did.
>
> Maybe I have a sick soul. :)
>
>   
No, Chris, I think the problem is--you have a soul!  N. doesn't want to 
effect you on some deep, personal level; he mercilessly mocks the whole 
notion of people having a  soul or essence.  For N, the self is just a 
fiction we impose on the swirling mass of desires, impulses, fears, and 
thoughts that we experience; thus he makes fun of any philosophical 
project that takes this common-sense fiction for granted.  That said, 
it's strange to me that you're not shaken up by N's argument that the 
self is a useful fiction--or even better, that truth is

    a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in

    short, a sum of human relations, [sic] which have been enhanced,

    transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which

    after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people:

    truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what

    they are.

I:'ll say this was a metaphorical 2 x 4 upside my head the first time I 
read it; I guess we get shaken up by different philosophical challenges!

Miles