Philosophy Now Forum

by Tim B-Gray

https://philosophynow.org/issues/137/Nietzsches_Hammer

Philosophy Now wrote: ↑Sun Sep 18, 2022 4:36 pm by Tim B-Gray

https://philosophynow.org/issues/137/Nietzsches_Hammer

Really, how am I all that different from Nietzsche himself?

I suggest that in a No God world, human existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless. That there is no secular font on this side of the grave from which to derive an objective morality. And that, in the end, we all tumble one by one into the abyss that is oblivion.

Only Nietzsche blinked in my view.

He "thought up" his Übermensch...the next best thing to God on this side of the grave. And he even imagined an "eternal return" so that there was at least the possibility of "I" continuing beyond the grave.

Nope, no one is near the "demolisher" that I am.

The only really "upbeat" spin I put on it is that at least for those who reject both God and Humanism, their options can increase dramatically. After all, if you no longer have to sustain your own rendition of "what would Jesus do?" you are free to embody the suggestion that, "in the absence of God, all things are permitted".

On the other hand, tell that to the sociopaths?

Friedrich Nietzsche is not known as a positive guy. Most accounts of him give us a tender and morose misanthrope consistently repulsed by everything he saw around him (unless he saw a mountain; he liked mountains). As a philosopher, he is widely seen as a destructive force, tearing down anything that gave off the slightest whiff of tradition or convention. There’s little doubt Nietzsche would be proud of this reputation; in his chest-puffing autobiography Ecce Homo, he described himself as “dynamite”. Whilst there is no shortage of evidence for Nietzsche’s demolition programme, it is on particularly clear show in 1888’s Twilight of the Idols. This work is a protracted assault on the philosophical canon that Nietzsche sees flowing forth from errors originally made by Plato. It is subtitled: How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

This part is always tricky.

There are the circumstances unfolding in our our day to day lives predisposing us existentially toward optimism or pessimism, toward idealism or cynicism, toward constructive or destructive behaviors.

And then there is our "philosophy of life". Rosy or bleak.

Sometimes the two are in sync and sometimes they are not. And each of us are embedded individually in our own uniquely complex intertwining of the two.

You might be awash in fulfilment regarding many different facets of your life...but still "philosophize with a hammer".

Nietzsche seems to be someone who did not have access to a whole lot of satisfaction in his life. And spent his last decade on Earth in an asylum or under the care of family members. His love life was the pits and he was often plagued with migraine headaches and assorted other real or psycho-somatic symptoms.

So, who is to say how that might have gotten all tangled up in the hammering he did with his philosophy.

if you aks me, most of his descriptive philosophy is an attempt to demonstrate troofs that are objective, troo for everyone, facts about the nature of life, knowledge, society, etc., that are troo regardless of your own personal 'existential trajectory' and circumstances. such facts and troofs couldn't only be facts and troofs if and because Nietzsche had a disappointing life (not saying he did just sayin), see.

now it could be open season on his prescriptive philosophy if one were so inclined. that's where the bit about his disappointments would get tangled up in his thinking and possibly produce or at least become a catalyst for an overaggressive philosophy. that's understandable. I'll be the first to tell ya disappointments make for hard philosophy, my friend.

what should be in question is whether or not... or even how... a less aggressive existential philosophy could be produced when the objective facts and troofs - the Nietzschean epistemology and ontology  - don't allow for something more gentle, as it were. i mean you couldn't stay troo to The Troof if you didn't aspire to become an ubermensch in your own right... a Stirnerite voluntary egoist in your own right.

course none of this prevents work being done on humanity and its morality. you can still do that. you just can't start until you know The Troof. that is to say if you are not ready and willing to smash your tablets of troof, you cannot begin the work of philosophy.

Nietzsche picks up a hammer to sound out the old philosophical idols. Finding them to be hollow, he takes a firm grip to flatten and smash, claw and bludgeon. But a hammer can also be a fairly useful tool for building new structures. In the last section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche’s hammer ‘speaks’.

Ever and always in regard to "general description intellectual contraptions" of this sort, I ask, "given what particular circumstantial context"?

In other words, what philosophical idols from the past, pertaining to what actual existential situations...interactions that mere mortals find themselves in such that they can all agree on many, many things pertaining to an either/or world encompassed in mathematics, the laws of nature, the rules of language, the empirical world around us, etc., but often come into conflict in regard to the many, many moral and political conflagrations that make it into those big bold newspaper headlines.

The hammer of deconstruction and the hammer of reconstruction there.

Presumably a little work weary, the hammer cannot muster many words and those which it can are not particularly original. The hammer borrows from a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of Old and New Law Tablets’, in which Nietzsche sets out his hopes for the future. It is to this more forward looking philosophy that we turn as we bring you another issue on the man behind the moustache. But don’t worry, if you came looking for explosions and tumbling towers, there’s plenty of that too. Life-denying art, objective history, free will, morality, and, of course, God, will all turn to dust before your very eyes.

Hope for the future. Who here doesn't have a set of moral and political prescriptions/proscriptions to offer in regard to that. Only Nietzsche always starts with the assumption that this cannot include Gods or Goddesses or spiritual paths or religious paths that allow us to anchor these prescriptions/proscriptions in some "transcending" font.

It's got to revolve solely around mere mortals themselves.

Fortunately, if you think it all through more or less along his path, you can still make that crucial distinction between the Ubermen and the Last Men.

Only here, again, I insist that this be explored in regard to a particular set of circumstances. The Ubermen and the Last Men with respect to abortion, and guns and race and gender and human sexuality and social, political and economic...justice?

Okay, we reject the brute facticity embedded in "might makes right" and the ideological dictates of "right makes might".

But there is still a way for us to make intellectually sound distinctions between the best and the brightest among us and the sheep, the slaves, the mindless masses.

Your way, for example?

"Ever and always in regard to "general description intellectual contraptions" of this sort, I ask, "given what particular circumstantial context"?"

okay here's the thing with the 'particular circumstances' you always ask for. depending on what point the thinker wishes to make, general statements can sometimes be enough for that purpose, and particulat statements, particular circumstances, particular instances, etc., are not needed, nor would they detract from the general statement.

for example, politics is rife with deception and foul play, etc. now you could demonstrate that point by referring to a particular instance of that, or you could just make note of the fact that there are many particular instances of that.

that's descriptive there, not prescriptive, as it were. it's stating what are thought to be facts only and says nothing about what that might mean existentially, what one ought to do therefore, etc.

in N's case - take the politics is rife example - a Machiavellian conclusion was drawn as opposed to, say, what Gandhi might advise.

now here's where it gets good and particular applications of that conclusion come under inspection via particular contexts and circumstances. that's your cue to start heckling the thinker. what does an ubermensch/Gandhi-guy do/think and how does he rationalize his actions/thoughts when:

a) confronted with abortion
b) deciding who to vote for
c) asked about gun ownership
d) asked about LGBTQ
e) asked about eating animal products
f) asked about same sex marriage
g) asked about labor unions
h) etc.

Nietzsche would have had as many abortions as his uterus would allow...

-Imp

promethean75 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 5:11 pm "Ever and always in regard to "general description intellectual contraptions" of this sort, I ask, "given what particular circumstantial context"?"

okay here's the thing with the 'particular circumstances' you always ask for. depending on what point the thinker wishes to make, general statements can sometimes be enough for that purpose, and particulat statements, particular circumstances, particular instances, etc., are not needed, nor would they detract from the general statement.

for example, politics is rife with deception and foul play, etc. now you could demonstrate that point by referring to a particular instance of that, or you could just make note of the fact that there are many particular instances of that.

that's descriptive there, not prescriptive, as it were. it's stating what are thought to be facts only and says nothing about what that might mean existentially, what one ought to do therefore, etc.

in N's case - take the politics is rife example - a Machiavellian conclusion was drawn as opposed to, say, what Gandhi might advise.

now here's where it gets good and particular applications of that conclusion come under inspection via particular contexts and circumstances. that's your cue to start heckling the thinker. what does an ubermensch/Gandhi-guy do/think and how does he rationalize his actions/thoughts when:

a) confronted with abortion
b) deciding who to vote for
c) asked about gun ownership
d) asked about LGBTQ
e) asked about eating animal products
f) asked about same sex marriage
g) asked about labor unions
h) etc.

This and what, at any particular moment in my life, "I" happen to think that this...

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

...means.

Or, sure, those here who insist they can in fact give us objective answers to questions such as these, are able to go beyond what they think is true "in their head" and demonstrate to us why all rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to think like they do.

Why, in other words, their own moral and political value judgments are not "fractured and fragmented".

And they can choose the question and the set of circumstances we examine in exchanging our moral philosophies.

What will happen after the dust has settled? Does Nietzsche give us a blueprint for constructing a new home? Can we use his hammer to build it? Well, sort of.

"Well, sort of" is applicable to all philosophers down through the ages. They start with a particular set of assumptions about the "human condition" and then provide us with their own didactic blueprints said to enable us to unravel what it all means. But when the dust finally does settle around them nothing really gets settled at all. Otherwise, we wouldn't still be at it...wielding our own didactic hammers.

Nietzsche just starts with the assumption that there is a world of difference between wielding a hammer in a God world and in a No God world.

Nietzsche refused to give his readers a manual for living. Not wanting a band of followers, he does not provide a new set of values, principles or rules for us to follow.

Perhaps because he recognized that in a No God world "right makes might" was no longer an option. So he "thought up" his own rendition of "might makes right". The mighty prevail...but not because they exercise brute force. They prevail because they are "superior" men. They deserve to prevail. Then the squabbles over whether this revolves more around genes or memes.

Thus...

But he does offer an ideal to reach for. Nietzsche’s ideal individual is someone who can build for themselves. We are supposed to look at the dark earth smouldering around us with a hungry smile. This wasteland is our great opportunity. Grasping it involves creating our own set of values, our own rules to follow, our own reasons for living.

Why? Because in being superior men [and back then it was always men] our values, our rules, our reasons for living were the next best thing to God and His Scripture.

Don't believe it? Then go here: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

He'll explain it to you.

Nietzsche also provides some guidance to those hoping to reach his ideal. It is of great importance for us to embrace life in all of its splendour, squalor and absurdity.

Right, like, even among the Masters, there won't be many hopelessly conflicting renditions of the Ubermenschs' own One True Path for mere mortals can embrace. Just pick a conflicting good of note...guns, gender, sexuality, the role of government, abortion, war and peace, social justice...and note your own description of the "best of all possible worlds" amidst the splendor, squalor and absurdity.

As we shall see in our opening article, the idea of Eternal Recurrence could help here. Imagining your life on repeat forever, identical in every detail, can reveal how you really feel about it, and it may also motivate you to make changes to the way you live that will lead you to relish the prospect of this eternal repetition.

Okay, but that still leaves the part where my frame of mind comes in. This: that what each of us decide this entails is hopelessly rooted in the existential and subjective parameters of dasein. You decide to take one set of behaviors along with you into eternity while others take entirely different, conflicting sets of behaviors into their eternity.

So, for each of us, our very own individual eternities? It has to be, right?

Eternal Recurrence Revisited
Brandon Robshaw

I read Friedrich Nietzsche with a mixture of admiration, amusement, outrage, and exasperation. His philosophy is the antithesis of the kind of philosophy I usually like to read and to do (that is to say, analytic philosophy), and I cannot read him for very long at a stretch. It’s like listening to a man talking at the top of his voice all the time, and it becomes wearisome. But his writing is extremely rich, stimulating, and crammed with ideas.

How about this: Given what particular context?

Only, for some, that's the thing about analytic philosophy. The context tends to be ever and always up in the technical clouds. Logic and epistemology. What is entirely rational to say and, having said it, what are the parameters of human knowledge in grappling with it, say, deductively, inductively, a priori, a posteriori.

The whole point is analysis itself. Analysis of thought, language, logic, knowledge, mind.

Not much of that in Nietzsche. For better or for worse?

Again, however, given the context.

One particular idea of his has always intrigued me: the idea of eternal recurrence (or eternal return, as it is also known). It is a bizarre, fanciful, poetic idea, and it occurred to me that applying the methods of analytic philosophy to it might be a fruitful marriage between the analytic and the so-called Continental traditions.

Really, though, how on earth would analytic philosophers go about grappling with that? The language and ideas and thoughts used to encompass it involve something that "here and now" we have no way in which to even grasp whether it does in fact exist at all. You might as well explore the existence of ghosts or poltergeists "analytically".

Instead, it seems more in the way of a "thought experiment". Suppose we did continue on after death...repeating our life over and over and over again in exactly the same way. In other words, if that were the case wouldn't we strive to live to the fullest, to cram as many different experiences into it as possible. It's basically just another rendition of religion. Only with God you would strive to live in a manner such that you judged by God as worthy of immortality and salvation.

Eternal Recurrence Revisited
Brandon Robshaw

Infinite Reflections

First, let’s look more closely at the idea. It’s mentioned a number of times in Nietzsche’s works. It crops up in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for example, where Zarathustra repeats seven times this incantation: “Oh, how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings – the Ring of Recurrence! Never yet did I find the woman by whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman, whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity! For I love you, O Eternity!” However, the idea is not fully examined or explored there: instead one is supposed to ponder its implications for oneself.

What way is there to reflect upon it for oneself other than in how religious folks reflect upon their own immortality through God.

Okay, you don't die and tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion. You live the life you now live over and over and over again. But just as the religous folks then choose to live their life "here and now" so as to go up instead of down, a believer in eternal recurrance would choose the behaviors on this side of the grave that would be the equivalent of up instead of down if they had to be experienced -- enjoyed, endured -- forever and ever and ever.

Only from my frame of mind the parts embedded here in dasein don't go away. The only difference being that given the manner in which our likes and dislikes are derived existentially from particular historical and cultural contexts...and from personal experiences...we'd still only have so much understanding and control over why we like these things and not those things. This and the crucial fact that with No God, anything goes.

Thus, read this...

The fullest treatment of eternal recurrence appears in The Joyous [Gay] Science (1882):

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’

A speck of dust perhaps. But is or is not the life that you live the only speck of dust you know? And if you had to live it over and over and over again would you not choose to live it as the master rather than the slave?

As for this...

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”

What demon? What god? With both comes the "man behind the curtain" pulling the strings.

Right?

I don't know what all the fuss is about you guys should be worried about and focused on politics and economy and environment and a whole bunch of other stuff rather than your mortality because...

"...the real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves." - L. Wittgenstein

Eternal Recurrence Revisited
Brandon Robshaw

Nietzsche did not invent the idea of eternal recurrence. The notion that life is cyclical, that death is followed by rebirth ad infinitum, was entertained in the ancient world not only by Eastern philosophers but also by Greek thinkers such as Empedocles and the Stoics, as Nietzsche would certainly have known.

More to the point, it is one thing to "think up" the ideas we concoct in regard to the myriad possible posthumous outcomes, and another thing altogether to actually demonstrate that what we think up is the real deal. All revolving of course around the fact that for most of us death is terrifying...unless we are able to believe what we think up. Or, rather, for the preponderance of mere mortals, what others think up for them.

So, really, ponder Nietzsche's own speculative conjectures. But how are his not just the same as all the others? Something believed more or less in one's head, but never going much beyond that.

But there are two key differences in Nietzsche’s presentation of the idea. In the first place, he posited that each recurrence of history would be identical in every respect, down to the tiniest details. Your life can never change. So Nietzsche himself, who in many ways had an unhappy life, full of suffering, would have to go through the death of his father and brother when he was a small child, his chronic ill-health, chest pains, migraines, and insomnia, his unrequited love, his visual impairment, his poverty and lack of recognition, and eventually his descent into madness, over and over again for eternity.

All the more reason to recognize that vast gap between what you imagine in your head regarding "beyond the grave", and what you are actually able to demonstrate will in fact unfold.

Or, perhaps, Nietzsche was a masochist?

In the second place, in his published works Nietzsche did not advance the theory as a factual claim, about how things really were. However, according to Kevin Hill, an editor and translator of The Joyous Science, entries in Nietzsche’s private notebooks suggest that he did believe it to be true – on what evidence it’s hard to say.

What evidence can there be? Besides, evidence is hardly ever the point. It's the imagining of something -- indeed, for some, even burning in Hell for all eternity -- rather than nothingness, oblivion that sparks at least the possibility "in their head" of "I" continuing on forever and ever.

As a claim it would be impossible to test by scientific means, since one would have to get outside time to make the necessary observations. But we do not have to follow the Nietzsche of the notebooks. We can more profitably think of eternal recurrence as a thought experiment to determine how one would react if one believed it to be true. This is precisely how he presents the idea in The Joyous Science.

Gasp! Who would have thought that?!

So, what do you imagine your own fate to be if you believe immortality to be true?

Recognizing that "here and now" for most it's what they do believe "in their head" that counts, not what is demonstrably true. I mean, look at some of the ridiculous things some believe here.

Well, if they are ridiculous of course.

Philosophy Now wrote: ↑Sun Sep 18, 2022 4:36 pm by Tim B-Gray

https://philosophynow.org/issues/137/Nietzsches_Hammer

My take on eternal recurrance is not that N was proposing this was true BUT....
that using this as a kind of introspective fantasy one could learn a lot about oneself. Then forward from this experiment choose to live more consciously. As if it would eternally recur, rather than your actions in the next half an hour just disappear into the past - so why not surf youtube - but you will do them again and again as that half an hour recurrs for all eternity. To give them more weight. Evanescence has one kind of weight. Repeating something forever another.

Now, my main reaction to the idea is horror, right off the bat, and I can't say how often I have used this experiment for more than 30 seconds at a time.

But I can imagine it might help someone prioritize and also realize how they really thought about themselves, life, what they do, etc.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is a litmus test for an individual’s capacity to affirm life. Your reaction to the prospect of living every single moment of your life over and over again in sequence is, for Nietzsche, a crucial measure of your ability to become who you truly are

from
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/et ... ruly%20are.