Philosophy Now Forum

Alexis J. just called you a hack-jobberist, IC.

Are you involved in any hack-jobbery, and how do you respond to these allegations?

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 8:39 pmWe all bleed the same red blood for Christ sake.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 8:20 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 7:26 pmSo...your argument amounts to "People who buy into Nietzscheanism cause wars." Not much of a defense of Nietzsche, that.

However, I find this explanation very simplistic, if it is what I think it is. Still, I'll wait to see this "power principle" of yours spelled out, and then I'll decide whether it's too simplistic or not. Maybe there's more to it than "everything is about power."

My developing sense about you ...

Ah, no, Alexis. That reply was ad hominem, and not in any way responsive to the question.

I'll put it again: what is your "power principle"? Spell it out for me.

Well, really that's not a useful argument for your case. It just amounts to, "If the Nazis had won, we'd all be admiring the Nazis." Maybe we'd have no choice: but it wouldn't make the Nazis any less wrong.

What it points to is something more subtle, more nuanced, and more difficult. Something along the lines that 'the victors write the histories' is one aspect.

Still no good.

All it tells us, then, is "Don't trust the history books." We're not any farther along. It doesn't make anybody right or wrong.

The National Socialists in the 1930s were admired and praised by many different political and intellectual figures for the 'great transformation' they brought about. The economic success as well as the social programs were admired and praised.

If you suppose that's relevant to the question of the evils of Nazism, then that's another fallacy.

You don't erase bad deeds by weighing them off against purported good ones. The bad deeds remain bad.

Nietzsche knew the Bible many many times better than you seem to.

Well, to know whether or not that was true, you'd have to know a) how well I know the Bible, b) how well Nietzsche did, and most importantly, c) what the Bible itself says about the relevant points.

You seem to manage to retain a few quotations, but also frequently get important fact wrong, such as you did with the Genesis account. And the quotations you do make are not treated within their context, but are extracted thence and rewritten into the context of your social theory. That is, in fact, a true representation of all your uses of Biblical text thus far, is it not?

And you don't know what I know. We've never met.

Well, then, you have not the wherewithal to know a) or c), for sure...that you know b) independent of knowing a) and c) as well? Not possible.

So I'm going to say you're wrong.

You have not yet understood what Nietzsche meant when he declared 'God is dead and we killed him'.

I understand it completely.

He meant that God had never existed, except as a human concept. The "we killed him" part was his rhetorical flourish to say "we don't need that concept anymore." He was wrong on both points.

But what's amazing is that Atheists don't read all the stuff beyond that clearly erroneous claim of his. Did you notice what he says about the fate of the Atheists?

Read on, dear reader.

...this is not the same as being amoral.

When you read on in "The Madman", read also his book Beyond Good and Evil, which I have right here. We can talk about his attempt at amorality (and his failure at it as well) if you want.

Also, and from what I have gleaned and gathered, the atheistic position is often a reaction against people within a religious tradition who lack self-awareness and a self-critical spirit.

The problem is that Atheism now falls afoul of Freud. Atheism then can be indicted as "childish wish fulfillment," actually. That Freudian critique is strengthened further by Atheism's complete lack of evidence or proof for its single claim...that there is no God.

To accuse religionists, and thereby try to extenuate or explain somebody adopting Atheism, is two fallacies, at the least. First, it's ad hominem, but secondly, its what 's called an et tu quoque fallacy, which means, a "you did too" fallacy, a belief that if the indicter did something bad, then he can't be right when he indicts some other person.

But let there be any number of lackers of critical faculties, that does not justify Atheism doing the same. Atheism still lacks evidence, and so fails on it's own grounds.

He's also associated with amorality of all kinds, anti-religiosity, Foucault, Critical Theorists, radical individualism, Teutonic romanticism, hubristic Humanism, moral relativism, death-of-meaning thinking...and a whole lot of other toxic movements and trends that have troubled modern and postmodern society. He's not "solely" associated with any of these, but in some measure, with all.

That is a fairly expressed statement! What's the matter with you?!?

I'm feeling fine. It's what I was saying all along.

AJ: There is nothing particularly weird or even unusual about the German desire to expand or to open new territory.
IC: Tell that to Czechoslovakia and Poland...and Holland, and Belgium, and France, and Italy, and North Africa...

You missed the point. Similarly, the United States, led by a man who was directly reading Nietzsche, launched into wars...

You just made your own case even worse. Now you're accusing Nietzsche of causing even more wars.

That's hardly a way to recommend the man.

promethean75 wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 8:52 pm Alexis J. just called you a hack-jobberist, IC.

Are you involved in any hack-jobbery, and how do you respond to these allegations?

Done above.

He's just name-calling. It's what people do when they lack the ability to refute the argument: they go ad hominem, and start insulting the speaker. It's the old "shoot the messenger" ploy.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 2:50 pm

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 8:45 am I get it fine.

I'm pretty sure you don't.

Because you keep thinking I'm saying that Nietzsche knew and supported the Nazis. I'm not saying that, and if I ever gave a basis for such a misunderstanding, I now revise that.

Nietzsche died in 1900, on the cusp of the New Year and the new century. At that time, Hitler was 11, the Third Reich not conceived, and a major war fought on a different ideology was to intervene between Nietzsche and his later admirers. So that should settle the question of what Nietzsche could have known. He certainly fancied himself a prophet, but he wasn't a good enough one to know what was coming. But that's not what's under dispute.

The right charge, instead, is that the philosophy of Nietzsche was exactly what the Nazis needed to rationalize doing what they did. That's quite a different claim; and whether Nietzsche himself knew the Nazis or would have supported them personally is both speculative and irrelevant to the entire question of what his philosophy did, long after he was dead. It is what he wrote that condemns him to association with the Nazis. That much is obvious.

I'm reminded of an old and oft repeated quotation from Gertrude, in Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Every Nietzsche apologist undertakes, as his first job, to prove to the world that Nietzsche was not a Nazi. There is probably nothing much more commonly written in introductions to his work, or on the various sites the laud his philosophy. But in being so "artlessly jealous" to defend Nietzsche, such apologists reveal an opposite overwhelmingly obvious fact, a fact that accounts for all their desperate pleading on his behalf: that fact is that everyone instantly recognizes the affinity between Nietzsche's ideas and those that later powered Nazism. Were in not so, they would need to expend much less energy trying to exhonerate him from association with the Reich's later activities. But the more they protest, they more they remind us of just how very clear the association really is.

Everybody gets it, and gets it instantly, when they read Nietzsche. Those who dislike him can smell it right away; but those who like him also smell it, and get to work immediately trying to disprove the connection. It takes a vigrous effort at revisionism, one of just the sort you're doing, to try to break the close affinities between Nietzsche and the subsequent ideology. And they've given it their best try, and will continue to do so. But in so doing, they undermine the very conclusion they want, and they end up pitching for the other team: no matter what Nietzsche himself may have thought, he was opening the door to a whole nasty package of possibilities, and then giving them the leather wings they needed to flap forth from the Pandora's box of bad ideas he had pried open. And then, of course, Nietzsche propped the box open, but declaring the "death of God" and insisting that we are "beyond good and evil" -- provided of course, that we realize that all that's going on in the moral world is "the will to power, " and are, ourselves, ubermeschen enough to seize our opportunities.

Say what you want, but the clamour of protest itself shows that everybody already knows what Nietzsche is responsible for. And God, who is the only Judge of these things, knows what guilt or innocence falls to his account. And we, we don't really have to decide...so long are we are wise enough not to believe Nietzsche.

Your hate agenda against Nietzsche is clear; it's been clear for years. When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison in 1924 there were a lot of books in his library, but not a single one by Nietzsche. What lead up to Nazi philosophy - if one can put it that way - were a quite a few other names, some well-known, others less so.

But what's the point. You're so blinded by hate because he denigrated your back-alley preacher in proclaiming god is dead. Actually he had a high regard for Jesus as a person, it was Paul he despised for having created the movement.

You say "everybody gets it" when they read Nietzsche, certain they will conform to your opinion! Another colossal, fucking lie! People have behaved in all sorts of disgusting ways throughout history. In the 20th century they didn't need Nietzsche's input to do the same. As mentioned, your mind is closed on all fronts. What evidence is offered not corresponding to your beliefs is instantly rejected no matter what the source...a stratagem endlessly repeated.

You also give Nietzsche far too much credit in being the source of all the evil that followed when he wrote god is dead; hardly a surprise to anyone at the time it was written. What gave it power is the way it was expressed - poetically, directly, psychologically and not least, tragically as an epoch changing event.

Everything you've written about Nietzsche given all your posts, is based on intentional ignorance anchored in the kind of hatred which will never allow it to disperse. It confirms how toxic the bible can be to a normally functioning mind by those who accept it literally as the word of god. When so inflicted there is no escape from lies, absurdities, devoid of the kind of objectivity it takes to produce a viable thought.

Any Götterdämmerung event in that kind of brain remains permanently absent in its horizon. What normally changes and moves is destined to remain fixed in endless replay.

So keep insisting that Nietzsche is anti-Semitic, that his philosophy made Hitler possible and that he's only bad news in proclaiming the death of god. It seems you must believe that to maintain your belief in the bible or else forfeit the idea that Jesus will save you. I can understand why, in your case, dispensing with that illusion is not an option!

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:02 pmYour hate agenda against Nietzsche is clear; it's been clear for years.

”Hate agenda”? Cute.

No, I couldn’t be bothered. Nietzsche himself is dead and gone…he’s no object for hate or love. All we have left is what he wrote. And one can contest it or believe it as one wishes.

As for Nietzsche, his judgment is as it is. It needs no further antipathy from me. In regards to the man, there’s nothing left to “hate.” He is where, and what, he is.

You say "everybody gets it" when they read Nietzsche…

Yep, they do.

The skeptics get it, and his apologists get it, too. Everybody sees the link. And the apologist’s frenzied efforts to exonerate Nietzsche only confirm that fact.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 10:15 pm That reply was ad hominem, and not in any way responsive to the question.

He's just name-calling. It's what people do when they lack the ability to refute the argument: they go ad hominem, and start insulting the speaker. It's the old "shoot the messenger" ploy.

This is not a fair assessment. By taking this route you dismiss (as you often do!) the content of the critiques that are presented to you. (Still, I do not suggest taking Promethean's bait, and it was bait).

I think I would agree that some part of what I have said questions 'the man' or wonders how it is that the man contrives ideas that animates him. But what you must understand is that as I continue in these investigations (on-going as we carry it out) I am turning back in some ways to a former perspective: a psychological perspective. I am also interested in *interpretive lenses* and hermeneutics toward social and philosophical issues.

So for example we might examine Nietzsche as a syphilitic lunatic (this was how you described him) and, to at least some degree, this is not unfair. So for example it really must be taken into consideration that something drove him insane. It could simply have been syphilis. But when we consider the rise of Nazism, the events after WWl, and the malaise that settled over Europe -- and indeed when we examine our own time -- there is no way around examining psychological issues. So what I said:

My developing sense about you -- the way you think, how you react, and then what you say -- is that you are 'incapable of hearing -- for all that you have ears'. Because you cannot hear, or listen, you then hear-interpret and as a result modify what a person said into what you a) hear them to have said or b) desire them to have said. It is weird indeed but you keep doing it.

Is an honest statement in the context I described: you do not listen and read well enough what I have written. And when you restate it, you twist it out of its intended shape and meaning. Why? I suppose you could insist that my approach to you is ad hominem but that would not be at all fair. In all other places I respond to what you say carefully and directly (examine the ideas).

To bring up the topic of 'hysteria' is also fair -- if it is carried out carefully. What I have noticed about the entire political and social scene (sociological) is that 'hysteria' defines in many ways how people are carrying on. And to one degree or other we are not immune to this 'infection'. But hysteria is a specific (Jungian) term and Jung described himself and the peoplke around his as hysterics from time to time. It is not a personal condemnation.

All it tells us, then, is "Don't trust the history books." We're not any farther along. It doesn't make anybody right or wrong.

No, this is not *what it tells us*. What you have written is what you imagine it can only mean.

But certainly the examination of historiography is super-important, no? Consider how the historiography of the American Civil War has shifted in various interpretive phases. Then there was the phase that the historical Marxians brough their analysis in. And now we are in a general cultural phase where, on one hand, there are those of the CRT school of thought (which we both seem to recognize as a form of idea-infection and thus with a psychological element), and on the other a conventional cultural front, perhaps even Christian or post-Christian by-and-large (?), that tries to develop a platform of resistance to this whatever this *phenomena* that we place under the label CRT (etc) is.

And you recently told me you are reading James Lindsay. So you are right in the thick of it (as most are).

My view is that we cannot but consider psycho-social matters. But it must be carried out respectfully and in a decent spirit.

If you suppose that's relevant to the question of the evils of Nazism, then that's another fallacy.

You don't erase bad deeds by weighing them off against purported good ones. The bad deeds remain bad.

Except I do not propose 'erasing' anything. What I propose is understanding things. And my recent focus has been the 'strict power-principle'. Again, you twist when you rephrase. Can you stop doing that? (I have doubts at this point). But no part of what I write involves animosity toward you in a personal sense).

Well, to know whether or not that was true, you'd have to know a) how well I know the Bible, b) how well Nietzsche did, and most importantly, c) what the Bible itself says about the relevant points.

I surmise what you know by what you say about it. And also by what you say about other people you have purported to have read. I do not think that the possibility of a critical view of the Bible is possible for you, for reasons of your personal zealousness and enthusiasm. So it seems fair to say your reading is likely to be skewed. But if a strong prejudice operates here, where would it end?

So questions here are fair game (if carried out fairly).

He meant that God had never existed, except as a human concept. The "we killed him" part was his rhetorical flourish to say "we don't need that concept anymore." He was wrong on both points.

That is an interpretive statement. You could be right in some sense. But I do think you are very wrong when about the *we killed him* part. To say 'we killed him' is deep irony. We are said to have killed Christ once. And the second time around is when belief in Christ, and belief in a divinely-ordained mission in which God sends his representative son down onto the surface of the planet, became unbelievable. Try as they might some people cannot believe this any longer.

So if 'the truth shall set you free', and the trail of truthfulness was followed, but it led to the impossibility of believing in God because, if one sticks just to the stories it is far too fantastic to be believable, in this way 'we killed God all over again".

What do you think? It makes greater sense.

You are also in error because Nietzsche himself was acutely aware of the psychic and psychological danger involved with *wiping away the horizon*. He would actually say, and did say, that in fact we do need the concept. Many people cannot survive without it and they go nuts.

But the issue, IC, is that we are having a very very difficult time, down here on the planet Earth, recovering the 'concept'.

In my view you reveal that you never read Nietzsche! Or you have yet to read him (and capture his meaning).

You just made your own case even worse. Now you're accusing Nietzsche of causing even more wars.

No, I would not say *Nietzsche caused wars* but I would say that Nietzsche had a strong influence on intellectuals and, through them, on the political class (in this case turn of the century America, as I carefully noted).

That's hardly a way to recommend the man.

I cannot think of a more inappropriate word for what I'd say to a person if I suggested understanding him. To many I would say do not read him. Or I'd encourage the reading of different things.

I recommend that Nietzsche be understood. Presently, one of the better instructors in gaining the understanding I value is CG Jung.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:23 pm

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:02 pmYour hate agenda against Nietzsche is clear; it's been clear for years.

”Hate agenda”? Cute.

No, I couldn’t be bothered. Nietzsche himself is dead and gone…he’s no object for hate or love. All we have left is what he wrote. And one can contest it or believe it as one wishes.

As for Nietzsche, his judgment is as it is. It needs no further antipathy from me. In regards to the man, there’s nothing left to “hate.” He is where, and what, he is.

You say "everybody gets it" when they read Nietzsche…

Yep, they do.

The skeptics get it, and his apologists get it, too. Everybody sees the link. And the apologist’s frenzied efforts to exonerate Nietzsche only confirm that fact.

Yeah! If you say so, preacher. I don't wish to intrude on your conversation with AJ who's much more deferential to your perennial mental immutability than I am.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:25 pm I think I would agree that some part of what I have said questions 'the man'

Yep. And irrelevantly, too.

To be honest, you know nothing about me, really...but you have a whole lot of prejudicial assumptions: that much, you have made very clear.

I'm not offended. I understand. When one is unable to deal with a point, one reverts to insults. It's somewhat natural, even if not a rational impulse.

So for example we might examine Nietzsche as a syphilitic lunatic (this was how you described him)

It's how he was. He died in 1900, insane and most probably syphillitic. That last word might not be confirmable: the rest certainly is.

To bring up the topic of 'hysteria' is also fair -- if it is carried out carefully. What I have noticed about the entire political and social scene (sociological) is that 'hysteria' defines in many ways how people are carrying on.

I don't disagree about that.

All it tells us, then, is "Don't trust the history books." We're not any farther along. It doesn't make anybody right or wrong.

No, this is not *what it tells us*.

Well, that's the normal takeaway from "the winners write the history books." What's yours?

...the CRT school of thought (which we both seem to recognize as a form of idea-infection

It's worse. It's a Marxist propaganda campaign. It has a history, and it's clear from that history that there's a direct relation between Marx, the Frankfurt School and the CRTers, through the Sixties radicals.

Bork got half the story, and got his half right. Lindsay fills out the picture, and provides the necessary evidence of all that. I highly recommend his "Race Marxism" book.

Well, to know whether or not that was true, you'd have to know a) how well I know the Bible, b) how well Nietzsche did, and most importantly, c) what the Bible itself says about the relevant points.

I surmise what you know by what you say about it.[/quote]
Then you know I do know the Bible, and also Nietzsche. And if you have any doubts about either, let's go: I have the relevant tomes on my desk right here.

He meant that God had never existed, except as a human concept. The "we killed him" part was his rhetorical flourish to say "we don't need that concept anymore." He was wrong on both points.

You could be right in some sense. But I do think you are very wrong when about the *we killed him* part. [/quote]
I don't think your explanation adds anything.

He would actually say, and did say, that in fact we do need the concept. Many people cannot survive without it and they go nuts.

Yes indeed.

Why don't the Atheists ever notice that? we might ask. But the answer seems obvious: they read Nietzsche to hear their own prejudices confirmed, and for no other reason. They're not interested in the things he has to say about the terrors and tragedies of Atheism. So they skip those.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:42 pm
To be honest, you know nothing about me, really...but you have a whole lot of prejudicial assumptions: that much, you have made very clear.

Every time someone makes an assertion about you the response is - you can't know that; you don't know me when you consistently do the same to others!

Hypocritically, as always, but not surprisingly your customized version of the Golden Rule runs as follows; instead of - “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Luke 6:31 - is replaced by - "don't do to me as I have done to others". Immanual Can F.u.b.a.r; since that would amount to an ad hominem! I don't think the bible taught you that. Better go back and refresh your bible studies.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:42 pmTo be honest, you know nothing about me, really...but you have a whole lot of prejudicial assumptions: that much, you have made very clear.

You have been on a looooonngg run of getting this wrong. The people who read you, and have read you over a period of time, certainly *know you* in at least the sense that is offered when we read another's written thought.

Nothing I have said about you has been 'prejudicial'. I am coming to certain assessments as we go along. I am forming a 'sense' about you and trying better to understand you. Yet my sense is conditional. If I have made anything clear it is that we have a very hard time interpreting where others stand on a forum like this.

I'm not offended.

Good! Because as we go on I will crush you and then compost you. (Kidding).

It's how he was. He died in 1900, insane and most probably syphillitic. That last word might not be confirmable: the rest certainly is.

You are being dishonest. You sought to discredit and negate Nietzsche's intellectual work by reducing him to a syphilitic lunatic.

Well, that's the normal takeaway from "the winners write the history books." What's yours?

For fuck's sake man, read what I write!

"I have the relevant tomes on my desk right here."

Nuh uh yer lying. Stack the Nietzsche books on a surface in ample light with a sticky note reading 'IC's Nietzsche books' and take a pic of them. Submit the picture for our review.

promethean75 wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 6:54 pm Did you really just say that 'god' is one of these?

ramen-noodle-seasoning-packets-1-700x721.jpg

Yes, I did. Along with duct tape and sodium bicarbonate, ramen (with them lil, salty-spice packets) is the tops.

Never mind that, IC. On second thought, nothing could be so pretentious as showing off your nietzsche books save perhaps setting your bookshelf up so it's directly behind you whenever you're in front of your computer skyping with the CNN anchor who has you on to ask for your expert opinion on recent events.

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:56 pm ...you consistently do the same to others!

The same what? I haven't done anything to anyone.

I just point out that the way one gets to making untrue statements about somebody whom one does not know is through prejudging. That's definitionally true. So simmer down, Charlie.