So, Nietzsche. I feel that his works represent not the progress of a philosophical understanding, to be taken literally, but the progress of a personal development, with each embodying the mythology necessary for optimism in its respective stage.

Much as the philosophy of an age is more a reflection of the psychological needs of the people, an isolated perceptual lens developed into a system so as to afford the fallacy of misleading vividness, so is Nietzsche's philosophy a complicated extended allegory of his struggle with hope.

Nonetheless, I feel that it comes closer to "true" philosophy than almost anything else, and resent Kaufmann for attempting to turn it into a cohesive thing, appealing to the dryer sensibilities, by cutting out the undigested bits of beef he didn't like.

I think them a good reflection of the development of any intelligent being that looks about and finds itself to be human--a development loosely mirrored by the history of the Zeitgeist--and unsurprisingly so, as society is wont to stand on the shoulders of its giants. When the question is asked, as it often is, what questions of importance are addressed in Nietsche's works, I think--what other questions are there?

@stoicfury Both of the above were inspired by your last post.

I don't believe that, actually. I think it's the byproduct, if you will (I'll give the naysayers that much!) of many of our higher capabilities taken to extremes where they are no longer of use in their evolutionarily-selected capacities: everything that's coolest about us, pattern-finding, curiosity, empathy, all smooshed into the one truly meta medium. Which of course makes it all kind of ...mooshy, and subjective, and all those other dirty adjectives.

That is to say, though it has awesome medicinal properties, I don't think it was "selected for", but is rather inevitable given the qualities that were "selected for". Philosophy of biology, anyone?

@QuietThud - Regrettably, I've read little Nietzsche. :(

when I'm less tired I will return and think about what you wrote more deeply lol

@stoicfury In very brief overview, Nietzsche goes through phases of veneration, first for the arts, then for science, then for the human potential, basically abstracting farther and farther out beginning with a romantic appeal to mythology and ending with rationalism and transhumanism (although it's more popularly remembered for the nihilistic aspect).

He talks about things like the evolutionary basis of morals, the mass rejection of religion, the limits of language and the effect of this on knowledge and "truth". He's waaay ahead of his time on all of these things, and very poetic about it. Apparently not a good way to win favor in the academic community.

Nietzsche is a chill bro.

Well, he's a lot more sprawly than I made him sound, and that is my personal less-than-objective reading. But point being, I think a meta-analysis of his writing is a more weighty contribution to philosophy than people who take him too much for his word realize.

He says himself in the preface to Human, All Too Human: "Whoever guesses something of the consequences of any deep suspicion, something of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which every man burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, this person will understand how often I tried to take shelter somewhere,

to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for a time (in some sort of reverence, or enmity, or scholarliness, or frivolity, or stupidity); and he will also understand why, when I could not find what I needed, I had to gain it by force artificially, to counterfeit it, or create it poetically."

But constructing meaning is something we all do, and observing the way a very smart guy has constructed his meaning, in full awareness of the irony involved, is very interesting and much cooler than a lot of the philosophy that never "looks back at itself" and only attempts to dictate some universal truth (the tools to do which philosophy largely lacks--I think it's meant rather to be a guide to and an analysis of physical science in the human context).

Hot damn, I talk a lot to myself.

P.S. ...On his word*? I am foreigner, not good with idiom. Interestingly enough, pretty good with the rest of the language. Haven't figured out whether it's because I'm a foreigner or because I hate idioms. I love metaphor, though--anyone have a take on the ontological status of metaphor? Does it add novel meaning or does it rely on an implicit chain of normal generative reasoning?