Nihilist Club

[Byzantine Prince]

Nietzsche was no Anti-Semite. There is a line that says that he wanted all antisemites shot.

[lars573]

You obviously haven't read the right passages. The bits that I have read, which to be sure were meant to disprove him and Nilhilism as a whole. Show him to be as much an anti-semite as Hitler or Himler (maybe even worse).

[Byzantine Prince]

No, Lars, that's not right!

I know the passages you are talking about. They are in the end of 'The Will to Power', but Nietzsche didn't write those. They were added later by his sister(or cousin) who published the book after he died. He was not anti-semitic at all. All his writing about how *any* humans can achieve greatness if they appiled themselves.

Lemurnia will back me up on this. He's the one that brought it to my attention to begin with.

[Devastatin Dave]

Conformity of the non conformist, isn't it adorable....
I'm going to join the club against clubs that promote all clubs.

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

There also comes a point where words can no longer desribe the truth

Maybe you could try and use pictures? Or sock puppets?

[Devastatin Dave]

Maybe you could try and use pictures? Or sock puppets?

Smoke signals are also a nifty way to communicate. Body language is also a good one. But I do like the sock puppet idea.

[sharrukin]

There also comes a point where words can no longer desribe the truth, and one can only but comprehend himself through guidelines. Some things are taught, others require more personal thought behind them.

I have always liked Nietzsche along with Thomas Hobbes as philosophers who generally avoided the utopian nonsense of too many of the others. However people have a deep need to believe. They believe in the replacement religions of Liberalism, Communism, Conservatism (the best one), or some other -ism. They believe in the old religions or new cults, but they believe!

People are not rational beings. They are a mix of rational and irrational and a philosophy that doesn't take both these things into account cannot have much validity. This is the reason that I believe religions have as much to tell us as ideologies or philosophies.

You may be referring to the irrational part of human nature here? Or do you mean something else?

[JAG]

No, Lars, that's not right!

I know the passages you are talking about. They are in the end of 'The Will to Power', but Nietzsche didn't write those. They were added later by his sister(or cousin) who published the book after he died. He was not anti-semitic at all. All his writing about how *any* humans can achieve greatness if they appiled themselves.

Lemurnia will back me up on this. He's the one that brought it to my attention to begin with.

What BP stated here is completely correct, to my knowledge anyway. It is a shame he is tarred with the whole Nazi thing, because in reality he did not have anything to do with them and was not anti-semitic.

As for Sartre being Nihilistic, he was accused almost constantly by many people of this, but he always defended himself against it and to great effect. I understand how he could be perceived to lead to nihilistic ways, but he most definitely was not one and his philosophy was not either. However that does not stop his philosophy in places being similar.

[Byzantine Prince]

JAG have you ever seen the existential comedy movie 'I Heart Huckabees'?

link

It's freaken hillarious, if you like philosophy. It's also funny how it portrays Nihilism and Existentialism as mortal enemies and then in the end it ends up they work together. HAHA!

[lars573]

No, Lars, that's not right!

I know the passages you are talking about. They are in the end of 'The Will to Power', but Nietzsche didn't write those. They were added later by his sister(or cousin) who published the book after he died. He was not anti-semitic at all. All his writing about how *any* humans can achieve greatness if they appiled themselves.

Lemurnia will back me up on this. He's the one that brought it to my attention to begin with.

It could have been him. Nietzche was a ward of his sister for the last years of his life. He was quite mad at the end hence why he was her ward. Now like I said the passages were chosen to discredit Nietzche's theories.

Also I found where the passages I read all came from and they are from "The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals". Every last anti-semetic verse and rant on racial superiority are from that book. Some examples,

"...Let us face facts: the people have triumphed -- or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them -- and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on earth. The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant. I don't deny that this triumph might be looked upon as a kind of blood poisoning, since it has resulted in a mingling of the races, but there can be no doubt that the intoxication has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the human race (from the lords, that is) is well under way; everything is rapidly becoming Judaized, or Christianized, or mob-ized -- the word makes no difference...."

The Latin malus ["bad"] (beside which I place melas [Greek for "black"]) might designate the common man as dark, especially black-haired ("hic niger est"), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distiguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color. At any rate, the Gaelic presented me with an exactly analogous case: fin, as in the name Fingal, the characteristic term for nobility, eventually the good, noble, pure, originally the fair-haired as opposed to the dark, black-haired native population. The Celts, by the way, were definitely a fair-haired race; and it is a mistake to try to relate the area of dark-haired people found on ethnographic maps of Germany to Celtic bloodlines, as Virchow does. These are the last vestiges of the pre-Aryan population of Germany. (The subject races are seen to prevail once more, throughout almost all of Europe; in color, shortness of skull, perhaps also in intellectual and social instincts. Who knows whether modern democracy, the even more fashionable anarchism, and especially that preference for the commune, the most primitive of all social forms, which is now shared by all European socialists -- whether all these do not represent a throwback, and whether, even physiologically, the Aryan race of conquerors is not doomed?) [p.164]

And we are the first to admit that anyone who knew these "good" ones [nobility] only as enemies would find them evil enemies indeed. For these same men who, amongst themselves, are so strictly constrained by custom, worship, ritual, gratitude, and by mutual surveillance and jealousy, who are so resourceful in consideration, tenderness, loyality, pride and friendship, when once they step outside their circle become little better than uncaged beasts of prey. Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their own community. They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank -- convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise. Deep within all the noble races there lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness. This goes as well for the Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Sandinavian vikings. The noble races have everywhere left in their wake the catchword "barbarian." .....their utter indifference to safety and comfort, their terrible pleasure in destruction, their taste for cruelty -- all these traits are embodied by their victims in the image of the "barbarian," and "evil enemy," the Goth or the Vandal. The profound and icy suspicion which the German arouses as soon as he assumes power (we see it happening again today [i.e. 1887]) harks back to the persistent horror with which Europe for many centuries witnessed the raging of the blond Teutonic beast (although all racial connection between the old Teutonic tribes and ourselves has been lost). [pp.174-175]

Here is the whole essay http://www.friesian.com/nietzsch.htm. It's from a larger page on philosophy threw the ages. Nietzche got his own page, as did other like Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, and René Descartes. All divided into time frames like Hellenic, medieval, and modern. Here, http://www.friesian.com/history.htm

EDIT, so BP can I be in the club or not?

[Taohn]

On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse's neck and collapsed, never to return to full sanity.

Maybe he saw a profound injustice in whipping the horse?

[Byzantine Prince]

I don't know what to tell you Lars. As of now I've never heard any "legitimate" proof that he was anti-semitic. Even if he was that is irrelevent. Frankly I don't care about the whole whole issue enough.

https://img308.imageshack.us/img308/...ietzsch8gf.jpg

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche continued the revolt against reason initiated by the romantic movement, but he scornfully repudiated Schopenhauer’s negative, resigned attitude. Instead, Nietzsche affirmed the value of vitality, strength, and the supremacy of an existence that is purely egoistic. He also scorned the Christian and democratic ideas of the equal worth of human beings, maintaining that it is up to a few aristocrats to refuse to subordinate themselves to a state or cause, and thereby achieve self-realization and greatness. For Nietzsche the power to be strong was the greatest value in life. Although Nietzsche valued geniuses over dictators, his beliefs helped bolster the ideas of the National Socialists (Nazis) who gained control of Germany in the 1930s (see National Socialism).

That is pretty close to my own belief. I espeacially love this part:
~"the value of vitality, strength, and the supremacy of an existence that is purely egoistic"~

[Redleg]

Maybe he saw a profound injustice in whipping the horse?

Could be - or it could be that he had one of the conditions mentioned in the article and that is what caused his mental breakdown and path to insanity. Or it was a combination of several things. To include a gentic trait passed down from his father.

Who really knows - mental illness during his time period was not really addressed very well at all.

But I think it had an impact on his writings and philisophy.

[lars573]

I don't know what to tell you Lars. As of now I've never heard any "legitimate" proof that he was anti-semitic. Even if he was that is irrelevent. Frankly I don't care about the whole whole issue enough.

https://img308.imageshack.us/img308/...ietzsch8gf.jpg

That is pretty close to my own belief. I espeacially love this part:
~"the value of vitality, strength, and the supremacy of an existence that is purely egoistic"~

Well like I said I agree with most of what Nietzsche says, except the anit-semite parts.

[Kanamori]

So, does this mean you're Christian now BP?

[Byzantine Prince]

Kanamori, I have no idea what you're talking about. Anyways I decided to freshen up this club seeing as we have a Christian Club. Let's make the most out of this great opportunity.


I updated the member list.

So now the people in the Club are:

Regulars:
Byzantine Prince
PanzerJager
TuffStuffMcGruff
Lars573
Ronin
Irregulars:
Lazul(only in the mornings)
JAG(only existentialist nihilist)

[lars573]

Yay, I be in the club, I feel so special right now.

[Papewaio]

I thought I should start a club with the ideals I am most attracted to and if people want they can join.

1. total rejection of social mores, especially of morality and religion

2. belief that nothing is worthwhile: a belief that life is pointless and human values are worthless

3. disbelief in objective truth: the belief that there is no objective basis for truth

How long would this type of non-society last?

1. Social Mores... aren't they the lubricant of society that allows us to get along in populations far denser then otherwise possible? Don't they allow us to create a society that goes beyond the family and tribal unit?

2. Surely this self defeats the movement as its belief system is also worth nothing. The idea that life is pointless I encounter far more with the two extremes of the downtrodden and the indolent. I'm not sure what value are human values unless they were listed.

3. Disbelief in objective truth means what? Does it mean disbelief in facts and phenomena? Does it mean that the act of observation effects the outcome? Does it mean truth is dependent on frame of reference (a no brainer)?

[Byzantine Prince]

I noticed a few new members who seem not to be christian. Anyone else want to be in my club?

Let's discuss how things go circularly and how the meaning of the world lies in it's meaninglessness.

[Aenlic]

Truth is always objective - because its being viewed by human beings who all have thier own individual thought process. However don't let the truth get in the way of your inablity to cope with the rest of society.LOL

You mean subjective, I suppose. It never hurts to use the correct term when arguing terminology.

[Aenlic]

While I respect the work of people like Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner on the subject, I think you might have been a little too precise in your surgical removal of all the rest of their works, BP. The nihilists may use their works as a source of influence; but Stirner and Bakunin were anarchists, not necessarily nihilists. And anarchism, even the very specific form called individualist anarchism or sometimes egoist anarchism of Stirner is very different from nihilism. Claiming that Bakunin and Stirner were nihilists is rather like making a case for Jesus being a socialist. The case can be made; but it requires very narrow interpretations and definitions and a somewhat one-dimensional viewpoint.

[Reverend Joe]

I am sort of a nihlistic socilaist- I believe in socialism wholeheartedly, but I am also convinced that it will never work, nor will any other governmental system. Is that close enough?

[Adrian II]

I believe in socialism wholeheartedly, but I am also convinced that it will never work, nor will any other governmental system. Is that close enough?

Don't quit your day job.

[Soulforged]

While I respect the work of people like Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner on the subject, I think you might have been a little too precise in your surgical removal of all the rest of their works, BP. The nihilists may use their works as a source of influence; but Stirner and Bakunin were anarchists, not necessarily nihilists. And anarchism, even the very specific form called individualist anarchism or sometimes egoist anarchism of Stirner is very different from nihilism. Claiming that Bakunin and Stirner were nihilists is rather like making a case for Jesus being a socialist. The case can be made; but it requires very narrow interpretations and definitions and a somewhat one-dimensional viewpoint.

Yes you're right i think that the poster is mistaking nihillism with atheism. The true nihillist don't even believe in existence, if he doesn't exist then he cannot be passionate about anything, he can kill himself because all is pointless, if all is pointless why create a club? I think that the antireligion fever has gone far beyond of what that great sage said one time: "happiness is the just middle" (Aristotle).

[Byzantine Prince]

Nihilists don't kill themselves. If they did they wouldn't exist, because they would kill themselves as soon as they could legitimately call themselves nihilists.

The true nihilist is just the same as every other person, making the best out of what he knows is a hopeless situation.

[Byzantine Prince]

Any new nihilists?

[Soulforged]

Any new nihilists?

It appears that you're really alone.