The Genealogy of Trolling

“If they don’t like it, maybe they shouldn’t have been so keen to breed an animal with the right to make promises!” That always gets a laugh!

I didn’t get it. Could you explain?

This puts the polyamory post in its proper light.

Which translation are you assigning? I assume no one uses Kaufman anymore.

“Does that help?”

You bet! It’s always hilarious when somebody tries to explain a joke. But I still liked the Monty Python Greece-Germany philosopher’s football match better.

I’m not much of dog person.

Any excuse to post a link to Existential Comics

Philosophy News Network: The Death of God via @existentialcoms – http://existentialcomics.com/comic/88

I feel Kaufman is trying too hard to persuade Jewish students that they won’t break out in hives if they read him. Also I can’t get over Sontag’s evisceration of his religion without content anthology.

This very fine Holbo, but the God of Trolls is a jealous god, and reserves special torments for whimsical trespassers on his domains, Internet domains especially. As you will no doubt discover further down the thread. (I’m not normally given to prophecy, but this one was a no-brainer.)

Now I’m wondering what they think of Nietzsche in, say, Japan? Older generation and younger generation…

Tout le monde éxiste pour aboutir un comment box. It was really a common sentiment at the time.

I believe this is my first time commenting on CT but I’ve been a (semi-)regular reader for years.

John, as a Philosophy major and philosophy grad school drop out with a more than passing interest in Nietzsche, I absolutely loved your final paragraph

Barry, I would love to see someone do an edition of Plato’s dialogues where his interlocutors use internet slang. I’d buy that for a dollar!

Since when is dwarfs trolls? Dwarfs is a different thing.

Like, real people, for instance, as opposed to mythical beings.

And their stature is no index of their behavior. Trolls gonna troll. Dwarfs not so.

Anyhow–isn’t Nietzsche’s insight into on-line trollery primarily the result of his engagement with Kierkegaard, he of a million ‘nyms, the sock-puppeteer extraordinaire?

Rather than New Yorker cartoons, perhaps you should be looking at the Family Circus.

Barry @ 20: I may never be able to read Plato again without smiling … thanks!

“Now I often feel that the thoughts he so cleverly and wittily expresses are often also cleverly and wittily expressed on the internet by all the many people who are pretty canny about how the internet makes people nuts.”

I think it’s kind of an important difference that Nietzsche was expressing those thoughts in the desperate hope of *preventing* the internet. But, whatever.

The internet is the last man.

The Clark and Swenson translation is IMO easily the best and should be the standard for bringing students into first contact with N.’s work. I 100% agree that the Genealogy is the best place to begin studying Nietzsche, and that there are some works of his which – if you have not read the Genealogy – actively confuse the student about what N.’s project.

The thing about the Gay Science is that you can pull out a handful of key passages and spend just as much time on them as you would the entire book and have nearly the same ‘intellectual yield’, so to speak. Most students are going to want to spend all their time on the ‘demon steals after you in your loneliest loneliness’ and ‘On the New Year’ passages anyways, so just let them do that without forcing those who don’t take well to the aphoristic style to trudge through the whole book. Then there is that whole ‘Prelude in Rhymes and Appendix of Songs’ or whatever the hell it is called. The Gay Science is a phenomenal work but you can’t expect your undergrads (or really anyone, ever) to have a taste for that sort of thing.

@18 and the Phaedrus the archetypal concern-troll? (cf Birth of Tragedy)

bianca:
again, I cannot praise Clark’s work there highly enough. I share your sentiment above re: Kaufman trying to hard to domesticate N. for an audience he supposes to be less than receptive (if not outright hostile).

Generally: I very much enjoy the OP and concur completely with Belle @18, but I think Anon. @31 takes the cake. I wish I still had my old copies to add another passage or two because now that I am thinking about it in this light it is making my head spin.

Thanks Corey, I’ll look at that article (when I’m at a library computer, which I think will have free access). Looks interesting. Re Shiva: I vaguely remember the story about Robert Oppenheimer quoting Shiva after he saw the test of the A-bomb in New Mexico; something about “destroyer of worlds” — that’s not the full quote, I’d have to look it up.

Sontag’s evisceration of his religion without content anthology.

Haven’t read that particular Kaufmann, but the Sontag is pretty terrible:

SS: “To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historical community, whatever the interpretation of these symbols and this historic community the believer may adopt. ”

… and is refuted by the syncretic hybrid and nomadic practices of Japan. I guess we can say that the person who buys an shrine amulet at exam time and then gets married (after checking horoscope and blood type) in a Christian ceremony doesn’t really mean it because they don’t sincerely believe but then we are getting overcomplicated.

As I said, I haven’t read the Kaufmann so can’t say if his “religion without content” actually does denote an available space to be filled, emptied,and refilled but a Nietzschean existentialist might see that nihilism was more an creative opportunity than a lack and loss. You can believe anything and everything. It’s neat.

“Sober, serious Nietzschean analysis would talk more about how Nietzsche proved that Socrates was an IRL-internet troll of the rankest rank.” Belle@ 18

Yes and double yes. N. diagnosed Socrates as the first, greatest, and most sublime troll to have ever walked amongst us.

“Oh, and I don’t think there is a standard translation. The Cambridge are common, but you’ll still often see Kaufmann in scholarly articles. Part of the reason there’s no standard is that most scholars fix the translations themselves. Another reason is that since Nietzsche is not very precise or consistent in the use of his terminology, it’s rather hard to say any translation is accurate or inaccurate, and the cases can be made for any of them.

The final reason is that readers of Nietzsche appreciate aesthetics as well as truth, and Kaufmann’s translations are beautiful. The others are not beautiful.” Yan@ 29

Also, yes. Kaufmann actually captures the poetry of N.’s prose. The Cambridge translations are, to speak in a Nietzschean manner, typically English– plodding, flat-footed, and of course, “accurate.”

N.’s sentiments regarding the “insulting clarity” of Mill could also be applied to the Cambridge translations.

Nietzsche is definitely the critical figure here, as that article I cite above argues. (From Zarathustra: “Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.”) And Nietzsche gets creative destruction, the article claims, from Indian mythology via Herder and Goethe: “Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was the philosopher who first brought the Indian myths of creative destructions into German philosophy….The man who brought Herder to the court of Archduke Carl August in Weimar was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), and also in Goethe we find clear references to the need for destruction in order to create. If we are to explore intellectual filiations, in Schumpeter’s tradition, the cosmology of Indian religions in all likelihood reaches Nietzsche through his ‘educator’ Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) by way of the orientalist Friedrich Majer (1772-1818), himself a disciple of Herder.”

In economics, Sombart was the first to theorize the idea of creative destruction, and he explicitly cites Nietzsche multiple times as a major influence. [From that article: “Nietzsche’s influence on the work of Werner Sombart is well documented both through Sombart’s many references to Nietzsche and through his biographers. Also the people who most influenced Sombart, some of which were his close friends, were strongly influenced by Nietzsche (Lenger 1994:141). Sombart was himself known to quote frequently from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (ibid.:247).”]

Nietzsche also influenced Schumpeter, though probably more on his ideas about the entrepreneur rather than creative destruction as such.

As far as I know, Nietzsche never read Bakunin. So Bakunin doesn’t seem to play much of a role in this story.

Anon 38: isn’t this what in German has come to be called Gutmenschentum?

Referring to the word Gutmensch (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmensch)

I think the right way to explain Nietzsche is with lots of heavy metal.
Try reading Zarathustra out loud to Black Sabbath.

Black Sabbath always had those hippie boogie parts that undercut the scary bits.

The music for Nietzsche is obviously Bizet’s Carmen, or stuff like it. According to self-report Nietzsche saw Carmen twenty times. The Web, in addition to his own work Case of Wagner, can give you plenty of analysis of what Nietzsche liked in Carmen and perhaps what other music would be “like it.” “Popular,” used for Carmen by N, or “populist” in perhaps an idiosyncratic meaning for N yet absolutely opposed to Adorno’s elitism would be a start.

N: “This music seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. `What is good is light; whatever is godly moves on tender feet’: first principle of my aesthetics. This music is evil, subtly fatalistic; at the same time it remains popular – its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual.” (There is more)

Black Sabbath absolutely too ponderous.

This quasi-Nietzschean tends toward Hot 5’s and 6’s, Coltrane, Rollins and Dexter Gordon

I just feel the need to point out that Soceates was the first person to acknowledge his trollish behavior by calling himself horsefly. Also I would say that Nietzsche was likening rationality in late Classical Greece to trolling rather than morality, which was an earlier development in Greek culture I guess beginning with what we call myth.

The music for Nietsche would be Mihaly Vig from the movie about the Turin Horse

http://youtu.be/aoERWukgg_Q

Bob M. @63: This quasi-Nietzschean tends toward … Rollins …

The Rollins Band was alright, but for me, Black Flag was his best work.

(un)related: why do teen/college age boys think Nietzsche is so cool? I’d rather do proofs than hang out with Nietzsche loving undergrads (again).

I think Holbo is obviously right to start students on GM, as it can tie in very quickly to their own experience.

My own intro was Beyond Good & Evil, but I think that worked for me because I was in a two-semester Plato-to-Kant sequence (Kaufman’s anthologies in fact), and BGE turned out to be the perfect book for “where is so much of this nonsense coming from?”

The Gay Science, to me, is candy for people who have read other stuff by N. Book 5 (which of course was written later) is fucking genius.

js.
Anon @38 is amazing!

I’m hesitant to say anything about N., since I’ve read little of him (and whatever acquaintance I have is thus at second hand), but I can’t say I much like the notion that certain books are only fit for the spiritually “evolved.”

From the first passage quoted @38:
There is a human being who has turned out badly …. and … cannot keep himself from becoming more and more spoiled and irritable by reading books to which he is not entitled….

Assuming this translation is close, the notion that there are books “to which [someone] is not entitled” because of his character defects (or whatever) is somewhat repellent. The great works of art are only fit for … whom? Those who have not “turned out badly”? Those who are not deficient in “spirit” and can therefore really appreciate them?

Acc. to mcmanus @66 if I understand him (which I may not), it is improper to use N’s aphorisms to “attack” N. Why is it improper to hold someone to what he has written? Is an aphorism somehow exempt from critical scrutiny because of its aphoristic character?

[P.s. I’m hesitant to post this b/c have already admitted I’m largely ignorant about N. and thus reluctant to intrude on what seems to be an N. lovefest, but anyway…]

Anderson
My own intro was Beyond Good & Evil, but I think that worked for me because I was in a two-semester Plato-to-Kant sequence (Kaufman’s anthologies in fact), and BGE turned out to be the perfect book for “where is so much of this nonsense coming from?”

This is the kind of comment that is frustrating b.c it assumes the reader knows what Anderson’s philosophical proclivities, likes and dislikes, are, when in fact the reader doesn’t. I mean, I know Anderson is interested in the minutiae (sp?) of military history and considers Shelby Cty v. Holder to be an abomination and some other things about his views, but that doesn’t help me much here.

See #65. Henry Rollins, no relation, I assume, to Sonny. But my assessment stands. Sonny Rollins, too, would make a terrific talk show host: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words

Oh, crap. I meant #67.

(Troll pops head above parapet)

I hardly dare speak on this subject but John Holbo @ 76 has just mentioned the very author that was in my actual mind, so …

When I was a young and naive undergraduate, fresh off the farm, many many years ago, one of my friends whom I did then (and do now) love and admire very much, lent me a book by Ayn Rand, saying you should read this, it’s interesting. So I did read a bit, and then a short time later gave it back to her, saying sorry dear friend, I don’t want to insult you, but this seems like fascist rubbish to me.

So the left in general, like JH above, seems to have validated my views on that ever since.

Not long after I also tried to read Nietzsche, and had a not totally dissimilar reaction. But many people on the left have been telling me for ages that I’m wrong, I misread him, he’s not a fascist, and those deconstructionists and French feminists that I like (well am influenced by at least) were all deeply influenced by Nietzsche, etc. And I know there is something in that, but somehow I still feel yeah, but, and life’s too short etc, etc

I haven’t read all the comments, I must admit (I’ve read quite a few and did read the OP twice) but I just wonder, does anyone ever think these same thoughts even a little bit?

(Pops head below parapet and watches what flies overhead)

Anderson @78: yes that helps somewhat.

And sorry, doing that wrong thing of two posts in a row again, but my @ 79 was trying to be a bit funny, but I know that doesn’t always work on the Internet, so just to say I’m not really trying to be trolly, that’s a genuine question about isn’t Nietzsche actually just a little bit like a fascist? but I can see how it might look trolly in this context.

I doubt he would’ve cared for the 3d Reich

Based on secondary stuff I’ve seen that seems to be roughly the consensus, or so I gather. It was his sister, who outlived him, who was close to the 3rd Reich and etc.

So let’s blame the woman! (Val: this is a joke.)

Although I agree with the standard left-exoneration of Nietzsche from the charge of fascism (inter alia, he hated German anti-semites at least as much as he hated Jews!), Val’s comparison with Ayn Rand does provide the right answer to Jim Fett’s question about why N. appeals to teen-agers (esp, though not exclusively, adolescent boys).

Both of them promise that they have a special teaching which will show you who the many stupid people are, and who the few elite geniuses are. And merely by the act of following this special teaching (they assure you), you are proving that *you* are one of the elite geniuses, and not one of the stupid many. If you like this book, you are one of the chosen! If you don’t get it, then you are clearly one of the losers.

It’s a form of fan-service: the flattering insinuation that you, the reader, have been selected by the author to join them in a sekrit and exclusive club of people destined to rule the world.

Teens are both highly insecure, and also convinced that the rest of the world is peopled by brain-damaged dullards (phonies, squares, or in a word, adults). So they are very willing to believe any sort of massive conspiracy theory about mediocre olds keeping them down (e.g. slave morality, moochers and looters), and also desperately need the validation of being told by the author that they are different from that.

Plato diagnosed all of this in Callicles long ago–the desire to be one of the elite few who can throw off the chains of convention, the clear lust for power underneath it all, the transparent insecurity, the incompetent naïveté of it all. Given how well Plato knew Nietzsche, it’s a shame that Nietzsche wasn’t better able to take advantage of the diagnosis.

88: He may have, but he was wrong. Plato consistently saw what Nietzsche accurately observes only now and then: that the übermensch is a great deal like an entitled toddler. Probably fun to live that way for brief periods–no hesitation! no depression! no conscience!–but tiresome for oneself in the long run, and for everyone around you right away.

89: I do not think you’ve gotten very much out of your reading of Nietzsche. Your notion of the übermensch, for instance, would be very difficult to support with citations from the text. (Note how the term hardly appears after TSZ. Is that an accident?)

(Which is more a claim about authorial voice or rhetorical presentation than about the content of the respective theories.)

92: teens are bad readers, so sure.

N admired not Callicles, but Thucydides. “Courage in the face of reality,” he said in the closing pages of TI. The choice of a historian as the anti-Plato is a deep one.

94: fwiw, my own thought is that Plato & N are both top-flight intellects & literary talents, & it’s good advice to students to beware any reading that despises either of them. N read too much Christianity into Plato …

98: interesting & seems correct. Thinking of Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism as account of how Romanticism arises from Xtianity, which is enough reason for it to be off Plato’s radar.

“Pastoral is not Romanticism.” Duh.

I’m now thinking I maybe misread mcmanus @6? I’m not one of those attacking anyone? Please tell me this is true, mcmanus!

John Holbo @ 94
I’m not disagreeing with you or anyone about the sister, I’m happy to now to your superior knowledge on that. But it doesn’t answer my original question: do you think N is a bit of a fascist (even if not as much of a fascist as his sister claimed)?

Because as far as I remember it was more that than his literary style that I objected to when I tried to read him.

Well at no point did I assert that Romanticism is exactly the same as pastoralism — obviously time didn’t stop so no literary developments ever took place after the Eclogues, I was making the point that Romanticism is not new under the sun as you say but is a development from the Pastoral and Myth.

Also you are starting Romance too late in the timeline you provide — you could possibly find something in classical literature, but if not you should at the latest start it in the Middle Ages from earlier spoken traditions.

Plus you have quite mixed up Romance and Gothic when they aren’t the same at all.

You would probably get a Byronic figure in earlier literature like an Elizabethan or Jacobean revenger’s tragedy or there’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. But Gothic it is a quite different genre to Romance, as Romance has a happy ending and Gothic is a tragic genre with an unhappy ending but Gothic is usually also somewhat silly and overly ornate so it doesn’t manage to stand as proper tragedy which should be more austere.

I do not know why the writers didn’t just stick with plain tragedy like Shakespeare did, but anyhow they innovated and we got Gothic deriving from Tragedy, like Romance derives from Pastoral and Myth.

The problem with this, as with any discussion of trolls, is that goats never get the attention they deserve.

I think LFC is slightly misreading the passage. Nietzsche is not in the business of “restricting” the books either. The point is that some people are self-restricting themselves.

Let’s view this from the angle of esotericism. From N’s perspective, authors write to be understood only by a certain audience:

>On the question of being understandable–One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention–he did not want to be understood by just “anybody.” All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audiences when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.”
TGS 343, aph 381

>Whatever is profound loves masks
BGE 50, aph 40

etc.

Clearly someone who reads an esoteric work for its exoteric meaning is not entitled to its contents. If anyone is doing any “restricting” it’s the reader himself. But the esoteric angle is not necessary, I think it’s easy to extend a similar line of thinking to works that are simply easily misunderstood by “weak spirits”, or can be detrimental to those incapable of digesting them properly (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!).

One striking example: Nietzsche’s writings, and the anti-semitic/nationalist audience that “adopted” them.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Here’s another good bit on trolling:

>Plato has given us a splendid description of how the philosophical thinker must within every existing society count as the paragon of all wickedness

All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audiences when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against “the others.”
TGS 343, aph 381

Anyway sorry for long OT digression, but basically I am using fascist a bit loosely, ok, but the point is I distrust anyone who subscribes to some notion of superior and inferior beings, which if that quote above means what it appears to mean, N did.

OTOH I’ve run into Christians online who intersperse readings of N with Marx and people like Bergson, and they certainly would disagree with that last sentence, so what do I know.

>They desire absolute order and control (Mussolini making the trains run on time is the well known example of course) and believe that it is possible to introduce complete order by getting rid of, or controlling, all that weakness, disorder and vulnerability that characterizes the inferior other

Yup, sounds like Nietzsche to me! Spot on!

According to Wikipedia
Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which he deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. He cautions, however, that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own “inner law.”

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

It seems to me that Nietzsche did believe that some people were superior to ordinary people, and that he wasn’t being ironic in doing so. Also other people up thread, who’ve read more N than I, agree he did not believe in democracy. So those are the questions I’m trying to discuss, with people who have read more Nietzsche than I have. I think they are worth discussing and I don’t see the necessity for insults.

“On a far smaller scale, I can’t count the number of times I’ve written something knowing that one person will understand it and everyone else won’t.”

That’s one explanation, but not the simpler one.

“You have quite mixed up romance and Romanticism when they aren’t the same at all!”

This is a great pity, as I am afraid the genre of the pastoral cannot be such a great influence on a whole historical period compared to how it can be an influence on just another genre

“English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour.” — Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

The Romantic Era is a misnomer — it is an odd choice indeed for the appropriate name for the Modern period from around 1800-1850, as this period saw both increasing urbanisation in England — in 1801 only 33.8 per cent of the English population had lived in urban centres and by 1851 this had risen to 54 per cent, while the population of the city of Manchester grew from 76,788 to 316,213 over these 50 years — and further privatisation of the English commons — about nine million acres of common land was enclosed from 1760 to 1844. There was also the Napoleonic wars and treaties etc. And these years also saw the increase of Industrial technology and production — indeed in May 1851 Queen Victoria exclaimed it was the “greatest day in our history!” — but this was for something so un-Romantic as The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.

Anyway, despite the misnomer of calling this sorry period the Romantic period, we see some voices who might be called Romantic speaking out against proclamations of the ‘blessings’ that ‘physio-mechanical science…[had] bestowed on society’ as they were most upset about the negative environmental and social changes and yearned to return from Byron’s ‘modern Babylon’ to a ‘London, small and white and clean’(Morris).

These Romantic voices came from all colours of the political spectrum, from conservative to radical. Raymond Williams locates the beginning of the re-evaluation of modernity in the works of Edmund Burke and William Cobbett ( a radicalized ex-Tory) — both men criticised the ‘new England from their experience of the old England, and, from their work, traditions of criticism of the new democracy and the new industrialism were powerfully begun’ (1983).

However, these men were really re-inventing the wheel as discourses dichotomising transformation and tradition; high culture and popular culture; nature and culture; “authenticity” and “sham” were already in existence and at the ready to be utilised. Discourse about traditional culture in the Modern period participated in an already existing intertextual Western tradition — this is evident in the Romantic repurposing of Classical and Medieval texts eg. Tennyson’s Tithonus, Idylls of the Kings, &c.

Traditionalism and the attendant romanticising of representations of the countryside can be seen in the pastoral literature of Classical societies , as well as in the lyric poetry and Romances of the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance’s revival of Classical culture and its admixture of this with visions of English arcadias and fairylands etc.

Indeed, if we go back to Virgil we see his Eclogues already looked backward to a Greek past. Virgil arrived in Rome to find the Republic broken, the theatre volatile, the future uncertain, and politics unsettled: casting his eyes backwards allowed him “to envision new authority and order… draw[ing] on social memory” (Sickle) The Eclogues opens with “protests against land seizures destroying the old order but also promise of old order preserved… by new divine power at Rome”. Virgil recreates the voices of traditional song and adopts the popular medium of mimes and the use of lower-class Greek names, yet he also draws our attention to the artifice of the Eclogues by various devices. Virgil’s Eclogues took after Theocritus, and Theocritus himself found the pastoral form was an excellent form to enable discussions of artifice and nature (Kutzko).

Representations of transformations would occasion contrasting representations of timeless tradition. Despite the people of England becoming predominantly urban over these years, just as the physical presence of rural Englanders declined their symbolic presence increasingly came to define the national identity proffering ‘an alternative and complementary set of values’ to ever changing modernity. Representations of rural England allowed urban audiences to escape to ‘green lanes and fields outside [the] prison’ (The Daily News 1902) of industrialised urban reality.

As industrialisation, urbanisation, enclosure, colonialism, etc were so unmooring many people embarked on a search for authenticity (Bendix) which they located in real and invented traditions and in the people of the peasantry — the peasantry were contrasted with the urban proletarians and were imagined to dress ‘not in brown rags, but in green velveteen…[and able to] sing like a robin.’

People were so taken by this quest for authenticity that the poor fellow who invented the term “Englishness” in 1805 — following the Sturm & Drang movement’s ‘Deutschtum’ — was attacked for ‘employing words and forms of construction…not sanctioned [and] not current in our language.’

When the poor rural Englander was not imagined as dressing splendidly in green velvet they were described by similar tropes as the “primitives” in the British colonies were — “If we choose in this way things which have altered little in a long course of centuries, we may draw a picture where there shall be scarce a hand’s breath of difference between an English ploughman and a negro of Central Africa” (Tyler 1871), and they were also increasingly named by terms that signified backwardness or foreshadowed demise: relics, remnants, survivals.

Due to the extent of modernisation and things accompanying it like industry pastoral literature and art often had a tone of passing and loss, although Herder for example saw the folk as being more vital, asserting that “Unless our culture is founded on our Volk, we shall write eternally for closet sages and disgusting critics.” Having said that funnily enough the fake Ossian texts were formative influences for the Sturm und Drang movement Herder was in and as they were fake they were not founded on the volk after all.

Another development from earlier better pastoral traditions was the influence of the scientific approach in the collection, writing, and interpretation of texts. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) takes an approach to collection ‘between editing and authorship’ demonstrating the contemporaneous controversy over the origins of folk culture and the debate over whether texts should be ‘rehabilitated’ from corruption by ‘gross and ignorant minds’ or collected as they were handwritten or spoken.

This takes us to about when Nietzsche wrote.

Everyone should remember the English were just as bad with making the pastoral nationalist as the Germans were — in 1907 the folk-revivalist Cecil Sharp wrote that songs in schools should ‘above all’ be ‘of the same nationality as that of the children; English folk songs for English children, not German, French, or even Scottish or Irish.’ Cecil Sharp further criticised English education for being ‘too cosmopolitan; it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen’ and sadly his comments won favour with the Board of Education and were formally adopted as policy by 1914. After the war in 1921 the Newbolt Report on ‘The Teaching of English in England’ similarly proposed that the teaching of English in schools ‘would have a unifying tendency…pride in the national language would be a bond of union between classes, and would beget the right kind of national pride’ but Sir Henry Newbolt was an imperialist balladeer and in Vitai Lampad he claimed that cricket was to be praised as it prepared Englishmen for colonial warfare.

So, as you can now see — just like in the works of Virgil and in Roman days, pastoral and epic were used and combined in works by writers etc of England and Germany in Modern times from Romanticism through to High Modernism and perhaps even to our very own day.

Anderson: “That’s certainly one privilege I’ve lost as a lawyer: I can’t console myself that the dim judicial masses weren’t smart enough to understand my argument. If they haven’t understood, then by definition, I’ve failed to explain it properly.”

I offered an explanation: it wasn’t that people were “dim”. Their insistence on believing that I called them dim is just another illustration that my explanation was correct.

Also, this isn’t my job. If people really don’t get it, I don’t see why I should have to waste my time explaining it again. I generally just continue until one person gets it.

If the subject of the OP is how philosophy becomes trolling with Nietzsche (or was it Martin Luther? — now there was a troll! Eschatology or Scatology? Why Choose!?), then the point Rich sometimes makes about the Priesthood of All Believers would seem to be relevant, as trolling turns on the conflict between the claims of Writer Sovereignty as against Reader Sovereignty. Is the Author right to claim to control the meaning of the text with his intention, his Will? How patriarchal! Or, is the Reader the rightful Arbiter of Meaning? Should the Reader and Critic not be respected for the capacity to explore implications, in order to reveal the true meaning hidden in the shadows of the author’s hypocrisy and cowardice? Understanding as subversion from below.

(Written in fulfillment of the Timberman prophecy.)

“If people really don’t get it, I don’t see why I should have to waste my time explaining it again.”

The word ‘masturbation’ comes to mind.

“I get this but I’ve always felt his politics are interesting but not appealing. He’s interesting and appealing as an individual, a psychologist, a culture critic, an autobiographer, an ethicist. Sometimes I joke when a student asks about his political philosophy: the guy didn’t even really know how to make friends or ask a girl on a date. He’s not ready to run the country yet.” Holbo@ 122

Well, yeah. As an actual, conventional “political philosopher” he is perfectly useless or unappealing if you will. More than a few scholars have argued he is anti-political which I get, but the point is (and this is directly related to his critiques of morality, Christianity, Plato, the ascetic ideal, the last man) that *reading* him as a political philosopher ups the stakes of his critiques considerably.

The implication here being that the terrain on which “politics” happen is really quite different that what is commonly supposed (hint: this is the terrain Foucault, and Deleuze in a different way, later *tried* to map). N. has a line in the nachlass: “Enough! The time is coming when the word politics will have a different meaning.” I don’t think even he fully understood just what that implied.

Val@131 I don’t think anyone is trying to insult you, as far as I can tell. However, your questions and the other statements I parodied above are ones which Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale were already tired of refuting in the 1960’s. I suggest you read the texts, say the Genealogy or Beyond Good and Evil. Or not. You’re likely to find some of it disagreeable, but I say this with genuine humility: if one is reading N. or any honest to god philosophy just to agree or disagree with it then there’s no point wasting time reading it. And, yes, there are reasons Luce Irigaray and other French feminists “got something” from reading him. Irigaray’s “Marine Lover of Nietzsche” offers one clue in the title itself. It has to do with love…

Also, the wiki summary of N. you quote is akin to an sophomore term paper encapsulation. It’s “right” or accurate, but dully or stupidly so. Nuance and the ability to handle the tension of multiple, opposing or contradictory perspectives is needed to get something out of the texts.

The overman, which N. never advances after TSZ, can be thought of as Human++. A better or “higher” human being is what he’s after, not unlike any other moral philosopher. Or, you can read the overman as a critique of the anthropological project of Western/European culture and its definitions of what constitutes the True Human Being. And N. is no species-ist, especially for a 19th century intellectual. Zarathustra’s only friends are animals. He says humans owe their first allegiance to the Earth. Later N. will argue that his philosophy seeks to affirm that which is “worm, fish, and ape” in the human being…

Anon. @123
I think LFC is slightly misreading the passage.

Quite possibly, yes.

phenomenal cat @120

Sweet holy jesus: “did Nietzsche really mean some people are not entitled to certain books? was he really a fascist (like Ayn Rand!) and just fooled all those mid-century French intellectuals? isn’t it only mildly depressed teenagers with morose affectations that get something out of him?”

With questions like these who needs philosophers to answer them. I admire your patience and bonhomie, John.

Phenomenal cat appears slightly confused about what a blog, even a (so-called) academic blog, is. It’s not a graduate seminar where one expects everyone around the table to have read much or most of the pertinent secondary literature on the subject, or even necessarily to have read the subject itself (himself, in this case).

So when a commenter puts up a translated excerpt in which N. suggests that foolish or or vain or damaged people who have not “turned out well” go beyond themselves and read books to which they are not “entitled,” it is not in fact stupid and ridiculous — phenomenal cat to the contrary notwithstanding — to wonder whether N. is perhaps suggesting that some people are not entitled to certain books. Quite possibly or even probably such a reading is *wrong* — as anon. maintains @123 — but a wrong reading of a passage is not the same as a reading that has no textual support whatsoever. Only the latter sort of reading would seem deserving of the ridicule and scorn that phenomenal cat unburdens himself or herself of @120.

Also, p.c. goes on about “spirit” without bothering to hint at what the word meant to N., which is not esp. helpful.

@148
Maybe the moral (haha) of this tale is that I should have read Zarathustra to the end instead of judging it early and stopping. And let me clarify for others (not for you JH because you I think get it) I’m not actually saying that ‘Nietzsche is a fascist, just like Ayn Rand’ or ‘Nietzsche wanted to make the trains run on time, like Mussolini’ (even though they would be funny things to say).

In my earlier days of talking on blogs I might have reacted to those interpretations by pouring scorn on those who read me that way (or chose to read me that way) because there’s nothing like a bit of moral outrage for spicing up a conversation, and making one forget those duller things one really ought to be doing. But now I just try say politely, sorry I think I expressed myself clumsily (which may in itself be an elaborate art of putting your interlocutors in the wrong, but anyway …)

So the point of asking ‘is Nietzsche a little bit fascist?’ (by my own admittedly a bit idiosyncratic definition of fascist) is about the ‘little bit’ rather than the simplistic interpretation. Is elitism a little bit like fascism? For someone who thinks a lot about questions of how equity (social justice, egalitarianism) translates into everyday social existence, as I do in my research, that’s an interesting question.

I guess like many people commenting on this blog, I have been identified a few times (through tests, examinations etc) as ‘the smartest person in the room’. And I struggle a lot with the implications of this. Much of our social system exists to privilege this kind of ability, but I try to resist a wholesale privileging. So I react against writers like Niezsche who seem to be suggesting that some are in some absolute way ‘better’ than others, rather than just being better in some specific skills or abilities. I’m quite happy to say I can read faster or add up faster than most people, but N is distinctly going into some different realm than that, which is not about people having superior abilities than others but about being morally or spiritually superior people (and I think oldster had some insights there) and that’s what I resist. And yeah I can see the links to fascism look a bit tenuous, but I won’t try to explain them further now because I’ve said enough.

My last cross posted with JH’s response to Harold, which was a rather lovely and touching take on it.

As to “why read Nietzsche?” the best I can say is, if you like to read really smart people, then he’s worth a try, assuming you’ve figured out that “really smart” doesn’t always mean “has everything right.”

(I still find Aristotle worth reading for the same reason, tho N is of course more accessible.)

LFC @ 160

Not to trouble the clarity of your exposition, but in the Hollywood Imaginary, the bad guys often get better lines and are snappier dressers. Of this, Nietzsche would have found something epigrammatic for Z to say.

ουρεα τε σκιοεντα θαλασσα τε Ϝηχηεσσα

There was no “good side” — only a good death

in the Hollywood Imaginary, the bad guys often get better lines and are snappier dressers.

True.

@Harold
I’ll have to put that Greek into a translate engine, i guess. Have to get off computer for now, tho.

I personally think there’s a lot of support for fascism to be found in N. There are arguments on the other side in there, too. The thing about N. and fascism, if you stick to GM, is that N. is about the privileged few and society as it was before there were empires, much less industrialism. N. skips the Middle Ages and goes straight back to Athens. Fascism is about the privileged many, industrial society, and selected aspects of medievalism (Parsival in Wagner, etc.). There is one great leader, but to rally the masses. You could say that the masses are encouraged, under fascism, to think of themselves as sharing in the leader’s greatness while simultaneously being exactly what N. hates.

There’s some stuff in N. about what human beings need, grappling with Darwin especially, that might be what theorists see in him. There’s a defense of relativism: “why not rather untruth?” (which is framed in what you could call a masculinist way). There are the arguments that modern society will never understand the art and writing of heroic societies like Ancient Greece as they understood themselves.

JH @ 171
I know you gotta go, but I still don’t feel you’ve fully engaged with my point about ‘differences between people’ and ‘differences between types of people”.

Eh, just find anything that seems individualistic. And then extrapolate from that, in a totally un-Nietzschean way, to democracy.

Cheers, but if that’s “finding democracy in N,” one might as well skip N, since you could do just as well with a Nickelodeon sitcom.

N is more valuable as a critic of democracy. We have no shortage of pro-democracy thinkers. It’s useful to study someone who has an eye for its downsides.

I myself dislike teleology enormously, but Nietzsche — like Marx — definitely is employing teleology, although at least he doesn’t do the steps of mankind thing.

If Nietzsche was just going on about the how it is better to enjoy the shady hills and the lovely vistas in one’s retirement then he would be more like Emerson and his idea of one living up to one’s Higher Self.

But Nietzsche is more positing the Over Man as being the cultural equivalent to the next stage in biological evolution (sort of like Social Darwinism which was popular at the time, except Nietzsche was more of a character):

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

And in the Over Man Nietzsche is sort of prefiguring the constructionist epistemology, where humans make meaning rather than finding the inherent meaning in things:

Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth.Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!

But as you see in his worry about going backwards — I guess he is not straightforwardly teleological as he has this worry of going backwards and also opposes The Last Man to the Over Man:

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small.
…. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”

The Last Man seems to refer to an English Poem The Last Man about the death of the sun and the death of humans:

“Yet, prophet-like, that lone one stood
With dauntless words and high,
That shook the sere leaves from the wood
As if a storm passed by,
Saying, “We are twins in death, proud Sun,
Thy face is cold, thy race is run,
‘Tis Mercy bids thee go.
For thou ten thousand thousand years
Hast seen the tide of human tears,
That shall no longer flow.”

He may also have been influenced by Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic novel The Last Man, where there is a great plague in 2092 and America invades the British Isles and the main characters go the live on the Continent, then most of them die and the last man swims ashore. Then more recently Fukuyama used the idea of The Last Man in his book, although maybe he was being ironic and did not like liberal democracy after all?

So I guess if the Overman in the only alternative to the Last Man, then the Over Man is not so bad.

Except this is where the problem of the practice of just letting people make up theories with scanty evidence comes in, as there is very little evidence other than made up teleology that shows the only two options for the future of humanity are in becoming the Over Man or the Last Man.

This is why nowadays everything is much stricter and you have to provide numerous citations with plenty of evidence, except in internet comments.

“I honestly think you need to read more Nietzsche, ZM.”

I have already read the whole Zarathustra book for an essay in Year 11 and I’m not going to re-read all of it now when I’m writing another assignment.

I have read enough Nietzsche except when I think something in particular will be useful for an essay or a train of thought, because I think he just makes up theories and does not attend to evidence properly, so if you read him you have to read books about the same thing by people who attend to the evidence better.

“concluding N. is a sloppy evolutionary biologist”

I already said he was more of a character than the average Social Darwinist.

“But – here’s the bit you are missing – this has got to be complex irony. N. is playing with a mythic-poetic form that he knows is sort of … epistemically illegitimate, to put it mildly.”

I don’t believe it is complex irony at all. At the most you could say he was Janus faced in utilising contrasting epistemologies of 19th C positivism and proto-20th C constructivism and throwing in some poetic language either for rhetorical purposes or more likely because he believes it.

This is also what Foucault does when he gets to The End of Man in The Order of Things too — I was reading it and was quite stunned at the great leap of how he gets to forecast The End of Man without evidence. The I remembered this is Continental philosophy and they are allowed to do this — but I don’t think it is Irony it is just a leap of logic that you can’t do in the allowed styles of Anglophone academic essays these days. Except now I am studying planning not history I can do a similar thing, and I just put it in the vision or mission or principles part of the assignments.

“epistemically illegitimate, to put it mildly”

This is quite key.

In my lengthy comment above relating Romanticism and Post-Romanticism (as you term it) to the classical form of pastoral I have already acknowledged the tension that was generated by the mixture of the return to traditional forms like the pastoral in folklore and languages and how this actually fit with an Industrialised and urbanising Europe and the dominance of the epistemology of the natural sciences.

Of course, the epistemology of the natural sciences does not really translate exactly to the social sciences as you can’t measure social things and there are problems with theories if you can’t measure things to prove or disprove them, as Karl Popper etc go on to say.

I gave the example of Percy’s Reliques but of course the more well known example is The Brothers Grimm who were similar to Percy in thinking the common people had bungled the early original folk tales and laws etc (they studied more than fairy tales but they were most popular) so the Brothers Grimm edited the stories they collected to make them more like the “originals” were in their imagination ( of course this was quite contradictory but being contradictory is common enough).

Another less famous example is Lachmann — who was the opposite of the Grimms. His favourite thing was to go though manuscripts and take out verses that he thought were inserted at later dates and just keep in the oldest parts remnant even if this meant what was left was fragmentary or it caused controversy like when he did it to Parsifal and The New Testament.

Lachmann may have influenced Nietzsche as he said what he did was genealogy too I think.

So you have an epistemological problem at this point in time — which progresses into High Modernism and its failure and then leads to Post-Modernism and whatever they call this era.

““Appreciation of Simple Truths…. Now, if you took THAT in isolation, you would just say: huh, so he’s some sort of naturalist, maybe even a kind of positivist. I’m sure he would have no patience for myth-making or poetry! But that wouldn’t turn out to be right.”

No I wouldn’t think that at all since I have read him so I know that would be a mis-characterisation. What I would think as someone who has read Nietzsche is here is where Nietzsche connects with the Grimms & Lachmann et al on the value of homely folk lore when recorded and interpreted by Modern Men Of Science: “Nevertheless, the hardwon, the certain, the lasting and, therefore, the fertile in new knowledge, is the higher.”

“So the question is: what kind of a naturalist turns around and writes mytho-teological hoo-ha like Zarathustra?
… I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t: he’s just a teleological idiot. ”

A naturalist writes a teleology with the 12 Stages of Mankind or some such thing. Nietzsche is a character so he makes up a teleology where humankind must choose between two fates The Over Man or The Last Man (cliffhanger music)

Possibly if I wanted to give Nietzsche credit and overlook his lack of using enough evidence, I might allow he was an early adopter in recognising the limits of translating the epistemology of the natural sciences to the social sciences. Yet at the same time the sciences have an appeal to him — in the folklore passage and in his own use of the genealogy technique like Lachmann.

I have only read in full Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra so I have not read The Frolicking Science (which makes me picture Nietzsche as a clumbersome butterfly catcher ) — but possibly Nietzsche would grapple with his epistemological problem in that book so I will google it.

Grand Conclusion :

In the work The Frolicking Science, which I have never read and just now googled, Nietzsche recalls his youthful misunderstandings of Romanticism and returns to the vital spring of Pastoral poetry & writes some poems — and just as centuries ago in Rome Virgil emulated the Greek Theocritus so more recently does the German Nietzsche in his Song Of A Theocritical Goatherd.

I have to say his pastoral poetry is not the best, but I guess he didn’t practice much beforehand and then he was sadly struck mute and didn’t progress in his poetry writing.

So actually Nietzsche’s very own work is vitally important in looking at the continuity of the Pastoral form in the Modern era from Romanticism to Post-Romanticism.

How about some more “The Genealogy of _______” posts?

Phil,

I did not read the Ruskin quote in Ruskin, I read it in an essay by Judith Stoddart The Formation of the Working Classes: John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera as a Manual of Cultural Literacy, in Scott and Flectcher Culture and Education in Victorian England.

>I am still entirely dubious about your theory that Nietzsche’s theories and teleology about Over Man vs Last Man in Zarathustra are a lengthy elaborate irony. Why would he write ironic philosophy he doesn’t mean which is not very funny?

I mean, Z is essentially a parody of the bible, I don’t think it’s that weird to find a lot of irony in it.

I would even defend ZM’s “hoax” attribution, though perhaps only ironically.

ZM “But Nietzsche is more positing the Over Man as being the cultural equivalent to the next stage in biological evolution”

Wrong, so very wrong.

First, you’re quoting Z’s prologue. The literary nature of TSZ ought to cue you in to the idea that there’s some development along the way. Z eventually gets floored by the notion of the eternal recurrence, which means there’s no such thing as progress.

Second, N doesn’t have any theory of “cultural evolution” that I’ve found. He believes in Darwin’s evolution (even if he gets Darwin himself confused with Spencer & co.), and he believes that the trend of evolution is very much against higher culture. BGE 203.

His point in that passage is that, from his p.o.v., the only hope for humankind to improve is deliberate breeding, which I think he means both literally and figuratively. Whatever else can be said about this, it ain’t teleology. Not even natural selection. He thinks that the human race, or at least its philosopher-kings (oh the irony there), can be deliberately molded like a work of art. It’s almost Asimovian.

You really need to slow down on snarking at others for “making up theories with scant evidence,” because that’s exactly what you’ve been doing with Nietzsche.

The overman appears only in Zarathustra because the name is a joke that depends on the story’s context: the overman is the man who “goes over” by “going under”–i.e., by dying. As Z says, humans are a “crossing over and a going under.”

But the key is to not resolve this intentional paradox: the overman cannot directly be a goal or end, because it’s by definition beyond or over whatever state is achieved. Z says “man is a rope fastened between animal and overman.” Note that man *is* the rope, not travels over it: there is no crossing where man has finally ceased to be animal and become the overman.

There is no overman: just man, over and over. The overman is an empty, perpetually sliding category, nothing but the will to overcome man and oneself. As Z has “life” say: “I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends…whatever I create and however much I love it–soon I must oppose it and my love.”

With further reflection, I don’t buy the idea that N is principally or at all a critic of “trolls.” If anything, he is the arch-troll, trolling Socrates as the self-serious face of philosophy.

The opposite of the troll is the serious interlocutor, the Socrateses of the world. They can be just as disruptive, rude, cruel, and digressive as any troll, but they aren’t trolls because they intend their negative techniques to be constructive and fruitful for the conversation. At the end of the day the Socratics believe in dialectical method, they believe that conversation will bring the truth, they believe that the mob produces reason.

In that sense, then, Nietzsche’s critique of the Socratic method is a pro-trolling position, favoring non-constructive intervention in the illusion of dialectically produced social reason.

Read all of the following as a critique of the anti-troll:

“With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of logical argument. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, argumentative conversation was repudiated in good society: it was considered bad manners, compromising.The young were warned against it. Furthermore, any presentation of one’s motives was distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not have to explain themselves so openly. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the logician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?”
…
“Is the irony of Socrates an expression of revolt? Of plebeian ressentiment? Does he, as one oppressed, enjoy his own ferocity in the knife thrusts of his argument? Does he avenge himself on the noble audience he fascinates? As a dialectician, he holds a merciless tool in his hand; he can become a tyrant by means of it; he compromises those he conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is not an idiot: he enrages and neutralizes his opponent at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless. Indeed, in Socrates, is dialectic only a form of revenge?”

202: Bianca, I liked that comment except I don’t understand this sentence: “Are their expounders to be eradicated from human memory?” Whose expounders?

My lack of understanding aside, I’m thinking of how conspiracy theorists can’t accept that (say) a lone nutter was the whole explanation for the JFK assassination. Your comment interests me because it makes me wonder to what extent explaining, say, the Nazis as the outcome of 19th century history is the same kind of conspiracy theory with the same general kind of motive.

Anderson @205
fwiw, my own inclination is to differentiate a lot betw WW1 and 2 re causes. WW1’s causes multiple and tangled, whereas WW2, tho prob wdn’t have happened without WW1, can be seen as largely the work of one person in terms of its initiation (this w/r/t Europe, not the Pacific, tho they are connected of course). Insofar as everything stems from something else, Nazism and fascism prob do have 19th cent roots, but that’s a different pt.

LFC, Anderson,

The rhetoric, in each case, inevitably seems to suggest that a writer under examination is considered a necessary or at least contributing cause, and for this reason is an unreliable source at minimum, someone to be held at arm’s length or further. Val suggests something similar above with regard to a specific idea that actually is nearly universal (though “primrose path” could have other interpretations). More plausibly, the unstated suggestion might be that there’s a culture that ended in fascism, and certain writers participated in it, or similar such theories of history. I agree that when you think of it, the idea that there could be so many men who led directly to Hitler is absurd.

The more I think of it, though, I think LFC @ 204 is quite unfair, to hold a graduate student responsible for an entire discourse, simply because you are unfamiliar with it or dislike it. Even if you think it’s bankrupt, it veers near ad hominem.

My working theory at the moment is that a theory is needed to make sense of this phenomenon; common sense would be misleading. ZM’s Menippean satire idea is interesting–should it be applied to N., though? I’m dubious–but OTOH not quite a theory in the sense I mean.

“It is his own teleology where there are precisely two possibilities.”

Okay, you don’t appear even to understand the word “teleology,” then. My apologies for engaging you in what must appear an unprofitable conversation.

… Bianca, thanks for the reply. Maybe the idea goes back to the accusations against Socrates. Surely someone’s done a book on the claim that the philosophes were responsible for the Terror, though maybe not from your exact angle.

there are passages in the Old Testament that achieve a grandeur/perfection for which even the Greeks have nothing to compare.: This is really of a piece with Continental Romanticism’s elevation of art that ignores classical rules (as Wagner did and Bizet did not). Where does N. say his admiration for the text has anything to do with morality, anything that wouldn’t be true of Homer or the Icelandic sagas?

I think one should mention Nietzsche’s critique of language as a key element in his work – it’s hard to “get” Nietzsche at all without understanding it and it’s also what the decon/pomo critics/philosophers found so fruitful:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations 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; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

phenomenal cat @212: thank you for the paragraph on ‘spirit’.

I didn’t need that clue thank you as I already mentioned it in my comment about epistemology.

Anyway that does not mean it is ironic but it’s hard to get taken seriously if you write out of the day’s fashion.

In one of my letters to the last Governor General I wrote in my best Middle English as I was trying to get her to appoint a high lord chancellor for us in Australia like we should have and the secretary wouldn’t pass my letter on, despite the secretary to Her Majesty The Queen writing to me that the Queen told the Governor General to read my previous 28 page letter.

@224

IOW, I will surely understand that what I said was ridiculous? And your saying nice things to one of our hosts is a counter example to the idea that you’re treating female commenters worse than the men?

“IOW, I will surely understand that what I said was ridiculous? And your saying nice things to one of our hosts is a counter example to the idea that you’re treating female commenters worse than the men?” Bianca Steele

Jeez, really? You really think I said something nice to (Belle) “one of our hosts” b/c she’s a host? In point of fact, I wasn’t saying something nice *to* Belle at all. I was seconding her post/thought/insight. Look, if you actually think I think that what you say re: N. or the Genealogy is “ridiculous” b/c you are a woman then, really, what am I to do to convince you otherwise?

Do tell me why it appears Val’s spurious imputation of “oh, now I get it. It’s really about protecting important dead white guys” is admissible for you though. Does that have to do with a gender axis as well? Is that a helpful or insightful analytical frame?

Anyway, bottom-line, genuine apology from me if I made *you* an object of ridicule. Wasn’t my intention and I am sorry.

In BGE 52, the passage in question, N isn’t admiring the morality of the OT or any “archaic past.” He calls one’s “taste” for the Tanakh “a touchstone for greatness or smallness.” At least in the Faber translation I’m looking at, he attributes to it the “grand style,” which is perhaps the same grand style he discusses in Twilight of the Idols (it’s harder to shorten that to “Twilight” nowadays, tho much fun could ensue).

Having been reading my way through the Jewish Study Bible these past few months, I’d really love to know what passages in particular he has in mind (dang few qualify, IMHO) – but I think Bianca is right that N is mainly praising the book to taunt Christians (“house-pets”). I can’t think offhand of anyplace he actually discusses a scene from the book, except maybe the serpent in Eden.

““As Nietzsche wants his vision of The Over Man to prevail I don’t think he is being ironic.”

Since he thinks that, if the Overman prevails, it will be terribly ironic – a wonderful table-turning breaking of the tables of values – I fail to see why there couldn’t be some irony involved.”

How is that ironic? If I barrack for a football team and they win the grand final it is not ironic? I would just be pleased.

Something ironic would be that Nietzsche makes up The Over Man to escape The Last Man and then terribly this influences banal evil doers like Eichmann. Excerpt I think this case is too grave to be ironic.

I assumed Holbo was referring to N’s treatment of Jesus in The Antichrist. No?

phenomenal cat @ 212

Can we have some rules of argument here? (I am always vainly asking for this in one form or another, but one can but try)

You @ 212
Meanwhile Val responds to Bianca Steele: thanks, that’s what I originally thought of N’s writing.

What I actually said:
Thanks Bianca that’s very interesting – the kind of information I was looking for when I asked the question in fact. Don’t know if I will take the time to read N again, but I feel a bit more informed.

You’ve also totally misread me on the Very Important Dead White Men stuff, but I guess that’s not surprising.

phenomenal cat @ 212

More rules of argument for you to consider:

It is very well established that philosophy in particular is, historically, and still to a large extent in the present, dominated by white men. Just go and browse feminist philosophers, please, before making any further comments on this.

Your imagined scenario of yourself defending Billie Holiday if I suddenly started making ridiculous racist claims about her, is a rhetorical device intended to position you as a good guy and me as a bad person who is probably racist to boot. It has nothing to do with the argument at hand.

“there are passages in the Old Testament that achieve a grandeur/perfection for which even the Greeks have nothing to compare.:

https://books.google.com/books?id=DJ4_sMpCYmgC&pg=PA275&lpg=PA275&dq=burke+old+testament+sublime&source=bl&ots=_q3WPWnkxC&sig=6NTlzUQVT8T6ReYk6R5aXp3gE28&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0CKjVcrlHdLYggTio43QCQ&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Bianca, I never said and don’t think you have a problem. Nor do I think you or anyone else should “repudiate” Val. But really, you didn’t answer the question I posed.

Val, no doubt I took interpretational liberty with your statement. But it appears to me you have been looking for some confirmation of the “fascism” in N. Bianca kindly supplied it (while noting there is the opposite to be found in N. –whatever that means exactly, I don’t know and Bianca hasn’t explained it) and your reply is “thanks, that’s very interesting– the kind of information I was looking for when I asked the question in fact.” What kind of information are you looking for? Not the kind I or Holbo, or j.s. or several others have offered, or so it appears to me in front of the computer screen so far away.

You’re free to explain what you mean by the dead white guy stuff. You’re also free to explain how I or anyone else in this thread is “protecting” a dead white guy. And you’re free to explain how engaging with the philosophy/thinking of living people of whatever gender or ethnicity is better than doing so with dead people of particular genders or ethnicities.

Bianca says there’s something to the fact we’re discussing N. b/c we’ve been doing it for a long time. I would say:

1. N. was persona non grata in most American and English phil departments up until 40/50 years ago so I don’t know about that claim. 2. Do we want to re-litigate the Canon wars from 20 years ago or discuss N.’s texts in this thread?

You know, I don’t think N.’s work is important b/c I was instructed that it was. Most scholars I’ve known, and there are quite a few, and certainly most non-scholars I know, have at best a very vague understanding of his work if at all. I’ve read it and reached the conclusion on my own. Read it and reach your own conclusions.

@ 243
Look my original question was about the fact that I’d read N when I was a very young undergraduate and thought he seemed a bit fascist, but was aware that many people whom I respected had a lot of time for N. So I was asking (in a joking way in keeping with the theme of the OP) people who clearly knew a lot more than me, whether N could be seen as even a ‘little bit fascist’. Now you might wish to insist that only people who have read a lot of N should participate in this thread (and indeed I have backed off several times in respect of the people who might want that), but presumably some questions from people who have a negative attitude to N, about whether that attitude is justified, are not completely out of line.

As I have said, regarding the feminist critique that philosophy is dominated by the thoughts of white men (particularly from earlier times, ie dead white men), it’s well established. I don’t know why you would bother to argue with it. The question then becomes do all these dead white men justify their place in the pantheon? Are there women and non-white men we could be profitably reading instead? (It’s like John Quiggin’s discussion of opportunity costs, even though I don’t like econo-speak – we have limited time to read, so who is the most worth reading?)

I think one strong theme in John Holbo’s comments here is that people can write ironically or jokingly and still have important messages. So perhaps you could do me the favour of extending that courtesy to me – I might write jokily (by the way the comment about the ‘primrose path to fascism’ was expressed that way partly because I thought it was a funny and incongruous juxtaposition) and I might use short hand expressions like Very Important Dead White Men, but that doesn’t mean I’m talking nonsense. I do have real questions about N and, if not fascism, at least elitism, and about the preponderance of white men (dead or not) in philosophy and social theory.

John Holbo,

“ZM, for someone who complains about speculations on the basis of only a few data points, you seem oblivious to the potential downsides of that procedure in your own case. You are confabulating. You aren’t inquiring as to what N. is doing. You are asking what you can stipulate N. to be doing, to keep yourself from having to adjust your strong priors, potentially, regarding what he’s doing. ”

I only complain about people who make up theories without evidence in books.

I often enjoy making speculative arguments in Internet comments, but in this case I am more interested in my Nietzsche and Pastoral Poetry idea than this idea about The Over Man being an ironic joke, or whether Nietzsche is just writing philosophical books out of irony rather than conviction.

Maybe you can provide a passage where you think it is ironic, as I don’t really just want to argue about whether any irony is employed in the whole book.

In terms of the teleology it just occurred to me maybe The Last Man comes before The Over Man rather than being alternatives , thus being a normal teleology. However I didn’t look anything up and was just saying it was possible as Snderson said I didn’t understand what teleology was.

Val, seriously, I’m not insulting you! It’s not about you. I can’t be any plainer.

As for this @ 243: Are there women and non-white men we could be profitably reading instead? Yeah, of course. But to answer literally, no. No one I’m aware of writes or thinks like N. so if you want to read something like N. then you’ve got read N. But to answer more expansively and more in keeping with the spirit of the question: For myself, any time I can get my hands on what gets called in the academy “Indigenous epistemology and/or ontology” I devour it. Anything that can reasonably demonstrate and convey the “intelligence” of species other than humans, I engage. In fact, anything that actually challenges the so taken for granted it basically goes unthought common epistemic frames we all know and love so well– I engage it. If it actually has the horsepower to confront the yet deeper and still more insidious ontological frames, all the better. And while I’m on it, if we all could agree that epistemology actually always winds up being ontology… but that’s a fight for another thread and maybe another century.

So yeah, I agree, a lot of feminist thought has and continues to do more than its share in fighting the good fight as it were. No argument from me on that score. But here’s the rub Re: this thread. (Caveat: my own opinion here, others may disagree) N. is actually a significant player in that fight–as I’m framing it of course. One may disagree with him on one, several, or many points– and if you don’t or at least if you’re not unsettled by some of his thoughts then you’re probably not a human– it doesn’t pay at all to read him for political solidarity. But for insights into human beings, the things humans beings do , especially to themselves and others, and, really, the limits of what European “culture” believes it has known heretofore, he’s indispensable.

With regard to your request for courtesy and respect, consider it already done.

1. Irony is the beating heart of Nietzsche, to me. I’m with JH on that — I don’t know how you could read him any other way. That’s why complaints about how unsystematic or inconsistent he was are fruitless, and why he’s such an important precursor to the Continental philosophers. He analysed philosophy and found that all the carefully rational systems were little more than elaborate ways of justifying a philosopher’s existing prejudices — in this he is far closer to the rhetorical techniques of feminism and modern anthropology than he is to any Fascist fantasy of One True Race, etc.

2. This picture of Nietzsche as precursor of socially liberating modern thought sits strangely with his elitism and sexism. Yes indeed. His attitude towards Judaism is a deliberately trollish mix of disdain and reverence from page to page, but his attitude towards women is more unthinkingly of-its-time, and if he were re-reading himself from the Beyond he’d probably be chuckling at his own capacity for self-deception and acceptance of current social norms on that score.

3. I’m the classic young-white-male Nietzsche fan, so some of the criticisms of this tribe are making me squirm a little. I can only speak for myself, but: I never related to the Ubermensch or with N’s disdain for socialism and democracy. (Bear in mind that N is constantly talking about both the virtue of physical health, how it is essential for a healthy soul, and about his own sickness and its benefits to his thought. He doesn’t try to be consistent.) What attracted me to Nietzsche was the value he placed on aesthetics; beauty is the only virtue he seems to definitely and consistently value. Sometimes our society seems to value nothing other than money, celebrity, and questionable Protestant ethics of work and conformity, so when he insists that the highest virtue is in fact aesthetic, a warm feeling of brotherhood might overcome a young person who has for instance dedicated their youth to playing music instead of forging a financially viable career. I would also say that the most objectionable tribe of young white males (and older lecturers) I’ve found in philosophy are not Nietzscheans, but ‘strict rationalists’ (often libertarian) who enjoy stuff like Thomas Nagel, and debates where they can show off their superior rationality and ingenuity debating, say, how to reconcile, in a pain-filled world, the supposed omniscience and omnipotence of a loving God that no-one in the room even believes in.

4. Sometimes he’s serious, sometimes he plays the part of the irascible contrarian for laffs. He always believes what he’s saying to some extent. Like an opinion columnist who exaggerates for effect, you know? It’s entertaining. I found more genuine profundity and far more enjoyment in my initial readings of N than I did in my previous years of studying dry, circular, petty-minded modern Anglo philosophy, and it made me receptive to a whole lot of crazy irrational modern stuff like Wittgenstein and feminist theory and philosophy without formulas in it.

Finally the thread has progressed to the point where I can talk about the over-expansive view of trolling in more detail.

Look at Holbo’s writing style in these things as a sign of what N.’s influence might do. Can’t be completely serious about anything, always a more or less clear ironical tone, moral condemnation kind of fell out of the rhetorical toolbox and got lost, but basically sure that you’re wrong. Unlike the Spinal Tap dial that goes all the way to 11, the dial here goes up to about 4 (mild exasperation) and gets stuck. (See e.g. #248). But even that is mixed with pseudo-Socratic questioning and can plausibly be said to be about 2 on the dial.

The point is that just as many people have called this a kind of trolling as have accused people of being trolls in the other direction. A Nietzschian view sees the trolls as the joyless, simmering indulgers of ressentiment, and the arguer the light-footed dancer around these clods. (An over-expansive view, yes! — we can’t take anything seriously.) But it’s just as easy to invert the values here, and see this dance as the real true passive-aggressive trolling, in which one party tries their best to be serious and the other one just can’t stop ironizing, being joky, and expressing disagreement within the form of leading people on. If ZM doesn’t want to read N. as being globally ironic, is telling her that she might as well write her own passage going to get her to? Is it really some kind of teaching technique? Or is it an eye roll? (I know about those.)

Is N. really looking for “a non-trolling way to get around the trolling”, or is he basically writing to troll people?

I know that it’s going to be impossible to get any serious read on what trolling actually is, because “we’re joking!”, but when everyone is a troll, maybe it’s time to narrow the term back to its original definition.

Well now we have a passage, I don’t think it is ironic I have to say ;)

JH: “He wouldn’t approve of blogging.”

OK, if No True Nietzschian can be a blogger, then all blogging is trolling in a Nietzschian sense.

This is why people were justifiably a bit doubtful of the breezy “oh, you could just as easily find support for democracy in N. as support for fascism.” N. seems to me to have a basically aristocratic view, which I agree is not fascistic. But aristocratic values are sure a lot closer to the right than the left. If blogging qua blogging is out because you should “reserve oneself for a worthier foe”, then it’s hard to see what kind of democratic values really are supported in any way.

Thucydides the dude. At least Nietzsche wasn’t a dude.

Teaching by selective and tendentious examples, you mean.

Speak for yourself.

But his later 20thC legacy is Foucault and the de/constructionists who borrow techniques and ideas. This is interesting because this is where you have identity politics etc change the nature of the left to where maybe Nietzsche can fit it after all, plus he is a good real life example for the needs of universal healthcare.

(p.s. sorry for misspelling of N’s name in above comment.)

Just a suggestion, but in teaching undergrads Nietzsche, I found it very useful to start with aphorism 125 of Book Three of Gay Science, the madman one.

It might be a bit, well, obvious, but I found it both grabs attention and dramatically situates the irony and the dancing and the varied and sundry Nietzschean stylistic weirdnesses within a clear, recognizably prophetic context that resonates with almost everyone: our murder of God. The pedagogical narrative can then be some version of ‘reading Nietzsche requires us to honestly confront what this event means. He demands we ask ourselves how to live in a world without Truth to cling to.’

Which leads nicely into the Genealogy and just what Truth and God mean in the Nietzschean discourse, and why, as the prophecy runs, ‘There has never been a greater deed, and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.’

I quite agree with most of what you say. The aphorism prophecises the the failure of the Enlightenment, as much as the collapse of religious orthodoxy. But please note, it is a dramatic prophesy, and moreover it is not a triumphant declaration: ‘great’ is used to express the overwhelming magnitude of what has happened:

“How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives — who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games will we need to invent? Isn’t the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?”

Also, I would read the rise of the religiosity you mention as a kind of Pentacostalism, à la David Martin, https://books.google.ca/books/about/Christian_Language_in_the_Secular_City.html?id=TV92Zb3Q99gC&redir_esc=y which is to say the babbling of a thousand tongues as the great orthodoxies both religious and secular decline in power; as sacred games of atonement, and maybe even as the becoming of ‘gods’ ourselves… .

Overall, I’d emphasize again the importance of thinking carefully about what prophecy, as opposed to philosophy, or the various genres of discursive writing generally, does. It’s complex and multifaceted and I think indispensable to human life. What’s announced here is the end of an age, the end of a long and complex history. There is no attempt to prove or demonstrate. The focus of the appeal is to our sensibilities, not to our sense. The prophecy functions as a rabbit hole, the beginning an intellectual, or a poetic, or a muscial, or etc. journey into the stresses and strains of modernity.

I’d never try to sell you a Nietzschean ‘programme.’ But I would recommend Nietzsche as a literature, a hermeneutic tool uniquely useful for understanding things like the ‘failure’ of high modernism and the rise of identity politics.

I was thinking yesterday about the passage Lawrence cites, and N’s disgust that Europeans found no problem in continuing to live by Christian morality even with its linchpin, God, subtracted, as if they were intellectually dishonest in doing so. (Cf. Gay Science on the intellectual conscience.)

But, having read N., I can apply his insights to ask him: whatever made you think that “Christian” morality was a logical deduction from the existence of God? If the Christian God was a rationalization to support a desired morality (as with metaphysics, so with theology — at what ethics does this thinker aim?), then what does it matter that we no longer pretend that God underlies our morality?

It’s as if N. frets that we are becoming Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean.

phenomenal cat,

“Lawrence Stuart quotes this bit above: “With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games will we need to invent? Isn’t the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?” N. actually means this stuff. What (communal) rituals, festivals, sacred games, objects of reverence, customs, tabus, and all the rest are “we” going to invent? Meanwhile, everyone around him yawns.
…
He signs off in his last book with “Have I been understood?– Dionysus versus the Crucified.” For N. it was of the utmost importance. YMMV.”

The part about rituals and festivals &c. is reminiscent of Bakhtin later on (don’t know if Nietzsche was an influence on him?) — while still not agreeing Nietzsche is globally ironic, I think with his later style you could say he was being carnivalesque.

Also my understanding is that Nietzsche saw Dionysus as having a lesser role that both was a rupture from but ultimately controlled by Apollo. In which case taking on that role does not mean he sees the part he plays as ultimately what should prevail — but perhaps that he saw this as being phased out.

From memory I’ve an idea that Bakhtin similarly saw the carnivalesque as a way of maintaining Communism in Russia by allowing periods of Communism’s inversion to take place like Saturnalia in medieval Christian Europe.