[lbo-talk] Nietzsche

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Fri Jun 29 10:19:27 PDT 2007


On 6/29/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> BklynMagus wrote:
> >
> >
> > As he should. The more I read, the more Nietzsche
> > seems to be demanding above all else that people
> > wake up and take responsibility.
>
> This is what baffles me about Brian's thought: he begins with an
> anti-individualist premise but almost always ends with an obnoxious
> moralism which depends on a radical individualism for its validity.
>
> Carrol

is this essentially what we mean when we call N "petit bourgeois"?

i need to get back to CB's note, but i've been wondering why the burden of proof necessarily falls on me to argue that he's not petit bourgeois, and thinking about that made me wonder what exactly we mean by that phrase. i suppose as someone who likes to think of himself as a good marxist, i should know, but i wasn't sure, since the phrase seems to be thrown around a lot, rather like a shibboleth. but reading carrol's response to brian (and i think brian's essentially right when it comes to N), it occurred to me that there is something petit bourgeois in N to the extent that there is a certain radical individualism at the bottom of it. i haven't thought this through, yet, so forgive me, and i wouldn't want to commit to that yet, but . . . so maybe i'll have to surrender on the petit bourgeois thing. but again, more thinking on this. and then, i'm not sure how great a sin that is, but it comes back to ravi's point -- clearly N thinks we *as a culture* need to get beyond where he himself is. and then i start wondering whether he's really arguing that we do that individual by individual.

j -- http://brainmortgage.blogspot.com/



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