/lit/ - Literature

>>21968068
his philosophy is just egoism for neurotics

>>21968068
my iq is not allowing me understand this post on a higher level.
wtf is absolutes
wtf is identity

>>21968087
An absolute would be something which is an all encompassing statement, like there being one unconditioned source of all knowledge (Hegel's absolute knowing), or believing that everything is nothing. It is often said that saying "there are no absolutes" is an absolute statement. It's something which encompasses everything, but something to discard. Identity can be thought of as the table, as opposed to being a compendium of parts, it is a whole vs parts dichotomy. Non essentialist Buddhist philosophers like Nagarjuna question this, and instead propose dependent, as opposed to independent origination. Things lack identities in themselves, they are nominal, not universal.

>>21968087
Your mom gives good sloppy

>>21968068
is the process of continually overcoming old vales not a system itself?
I dont see at all why being "trapped in the Samsara of identity" would be considered undesirable or warranting this negative framing. One could say he ACHIEVED a ""samsara"" of identity could one not?
In other words although Nietzsche may contradict the brand of unelaborated eastern mysticism you ascribe to it has not been justified to me why that should be considered a problem

>>21968101
me mums dead, ya wanker

>>21968138
No to the first question, and Nietzsche specifically says he distrusts system builders in I believe Twilight of the Idols, but I didn't go check the quote to make sure that's the right book. As for the second thing, is identity a problem? I'd call it more of a fixation. If you enjoy your symptom then I can't say that's an illness in the sense of that would be pathologizing something, when in modern psychology something is only considered a pathology if it hinders every day life. I would think it's not necessary, and superfluous at best. Also, I have no idea what you mean by mysticism. That's what I think.

>>21968068
You're professor is certainly far closer too understanding Nietzsche than a Buddhist larper.
Remove his European-ness and you will essentially have "might makes right", i.e., to become the best version of oneself (not "strongest wins").
It's easy to see your eastern philosophy is just a badge you wear. And a coping method, the nature of which you surely won't shed any light upon

>>21968199
>It's easy to see your eastern philosophy is just a badge you wear. And a coping method, the nature of which you surely won't shed any light upon
Not an argument.

>>21968068
>continually overcome old values, and create new ones,
No. Nietzsche did not see that going well, and he was pretty on the nose about what would happen.

>>21968068
Another cope interpretation of Nietzsche for academics to jerk themselves off and pretend like N. wasn't a chud who would've hated their guts.
https://youtu.be/-VCzmnqvr54

>>21968097
talk in english please

>most of western history: omg shadows on a cave, "real" reality, maybe it doesn't really look like that, what even are things?
>Nietzsche: lads, we're at a rave, chill

>>21968426
Retard

Nietzsche is your typical atheist that you find on every street corner nowadays. Those people are torn apart by nihilism and delusion of grandeur where they view themselves as a benevolent despot willy-nilly leading humanity towards a higher life.
Nietzsche is:
-an atheist [there is no god]
-an anti-christian [like any marxist] [Dude dont think long term like the life-denier christians, only the here and now matters OKAY!!]
-a nihilist [there is no truth, only interpretation, TRUTH!!!]
-an hedonist [Only this life matters!!1 live in the present moment to coom like my dancing vitalist idol, the great dyonisus!! teehee im Nietzsche btw, look at meee !11]
-a narcissist [look how I analysed the totally non-judeo-christian-made concept of ''''''human nature''''' , Humanity is will to power!!! LE HECKIN INSIGHT]
-a jew glorifier ["The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe."]
-a postmodernist [values don't exist but reality doesn't matter bro!!! Just become le heckin uberman, sink further into delusion, create your own values and fight for them until you die!!]

You believe you're a woman? You go giiiiiirl, nobody can tell you otherwise, period!!


yeah no wonder that lefty/lit/ trannies shill his diarrhea all the fucking time.

>>21969370
You just made Nietzsche sound really cool.

Still wondering if someone can make a serious reply.

>>21968068
An interpretation refuted by the title of one of his books. Nietzsche thought he was making the philosophy of the future. Also I stopped reading when your buddhist brainrot appeared.

I don’t know if continual is the right word, but I‘ve started seeing Nietzsche as something like a philosophical Darwinist. Just like how old adaptations are overcome in competition by new for Darwin, values are overcome by new in competition for Nietzsche.

>>21970205
Creating new values is not some sort of survival of the fittest thing in the sense of Darwin, it's not an evolutionary process where the strong survive or something. It's about creating new values and not having herd morality. But think about how hard creating new values is, most of us get our values from others, we do not create values which go against our own time. It's kind of like saying, whatever you have, I'm against, or "what are you against?" "Idk, what do you got?" He literally describes it as a child like game, first you become the camel, carrying loads of knowledge, then the lion, being a radical skeptic type, and then you become the child who is indifferent to what they play with, and continues to reinvent things. He was an elitist in the sense that very few people can actually become the overman, which is why it's stupid that anyone ever calls themselves the overman. Almost no one is the overman because almost no one creates values which are truly new.

>>21969370
It bothers me that someone actually typed all this shit out, even if it is bait. You should actually read him instead of falling for /lit/ memes. He's a great stylist if nothing else.

>>21968097
>Things lack identities in themselves, they are nominal, not universal
Saussure essentially said this outright. Everything is defined not by what it is, but by what it is not.

And of course you still have modern leftists whining about "otherization". Their prime critisism of fascism is that it always requires an enemy to pit itself against, something to be in contention with, when that is the reality of how humans perceive everything.

>>21970398
I'm definitely not a fascist, and I think fascism is a particularist project. It need the exclusion of the other to constitute it's identity. A race of not-them, it's one of the most spooked ideologies of all time. There is no you, there is especially no superior race.

>>21970408
>It need the exclusion of the other to constitute it's identity
As I said, that is quintessentially true of all things. Trying to form a conception of something without defining it in opposition to other things isn't possible.

>>21970170
>>21968412
It's literally one of his most famous rants

>>21970475
It's absolutely possible to define things as not in opposition, symbiotic relations are a thing. Also, opposition is only a matter of contrast, defining one identity as opposed to another identity. But this is essentialist thinking, these concepts are empty, just as the appearance of opposition. It is only conventionally that we talk of things as though they are opposed to each other, it is identity thinking, the very essence of identity politics.

>>21970219
Creating new values is not hard. It’s impossible. And what you described is literally a competition among values, like I described. The only constants in Nietzsche are competition, striving for power and domination. To overturn old values is necessarily to dominate them with new ones, similar to how a new species dominates an old one. I can’t read Nietzsche as anything other than Darwin the Philosopher.

>>21970495
Any books on this?

>>21970537
Nagarjuna, Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Not particularly on the fascism thing, but it follows that if all identities are empty, and are only conventionally real, any identity applies.

>>21970398
Wasn’t saussure studying the psychology of learning languages? He wasn’t like a medieval philosopher examining the concept of identity

>>21970534
So is making values impossible or do new values dominate the old ones? You say both things.

>>21968412
Where in his texts?

>>21968426
he's using a lot of words to avoid your question and really say nothing while making references to irrelevant ideas and philosophers

>>21970670
What's your argument against it?

>>21970495
>It's absolutely possible to define things as not in opposition, symbiotic relations are a thing
No, because even things in symbiotic relation are still distinct from each other via not being one another. A cell is not an organ is not a person. But more particularly a cell is not a cell. In order to believe that two things of like kind are not the same, it's necessary to differentiate them. In other words the essentialist thinking is correct, insofar as it applies to the way we think about or speak on or interact with the world, otherwise known as anything that actually matters.

>>21970591
Yes, but this concept has broader applicability when you realize that language was created by core psychological schema that underlays how we process the world.

>>21970704
Essentialist thinking is a conventional way of understanding the world, disconnected from any sort of thing in itself, an abstraction. Values are creations, not discoveries, and a lot of people create values based on their perceived identity in opposition to other identities, in a small, pointless game of competition which they've created in order to perpetuate the myth of opposition, and the construct of domination.

>>21970717
Define thing in itself without essentialist thinking

>>21970727
I don't believe in the thing in itself, but essentialist thinking implies that there is one. The thing in itself, without essentialist thinking, is naught.

>>21970742
if
>essentialist thinking implies that there is one.
then how
>Essentialist thinking is disconnected from any sort of thing in itself, an abstraction
and how
>The thing in itself, without essentialist thinking, is naught
You seem to be contradicting yourself here

>>21970762
If there is an essential nature of a thing, such as a whole which persists through its parts, then that means there is an essence of the whole - a thing. The thing in itself was Kant's posit of a noumenal, unknowable world outside of perception, which we know for Kant through the categories. This thing in itself was unknowable for Kant, but for Hegel, he gets rid of the thing in itself. If we can't know anything about it, why posit it? A fundamental question of epistemology I think direct realism about objects overlooks. You can, of course, get around this question if you are Hegel, and posit essences in thought, but Hegel's project is based on the notion of a self creating social construct which underlies all shapes of the idealist consciousness which he is proposing. I accept Hegel's notion of the rejection of the thing in itself, because it follows from the concept of the emptiness of things that there would be no thing in itself, but I do not fall back into his ontologizing of subject through shared, social identity.

>>21970788
>which we know for Kant through the categories
perception which we know for Kant*

>>21970659
Not him, but that anon is probably talking about The New Idol chapter in Zarathustra if by new values you meant modern ones after the death of God. He could be referring to a lot of things though, including going all the way back to the Jews in Egypt, or Jesus and Paul. Nietzsche in most texts doesn't see the new values as better or overcoming anything. That's why he has the whole transvaluation of values thing, and it's also why he's deeply critical of most modern identities, like Jews, Germans, Christians, academics, historians, scientists. He sees them as a very anaemic continuation of what's been happening since Jewish values changed under slavery, much like he disses Christianity as the same thing. The modern idea of "the thing-in-itself" gets called an even lower form of God than the Christian one.

>>21968068
Nietzsche said that the will a system is a will to dishonesty. I understand him to say that any system tends to rely upon unexamined premises, which FN regarded as being a philosophically dishonest course. To learn anything we have to work very very hard, and in this way we learn very very little. When approaching things it is philosophically necessary to take baby steps.

>>21970656
New in the sense that they’re the ones doing the displacement. Imagine you have two sets of values. Neither is really new. One set is the mainstream. The other comes in and knocks off the mainstream. This is the “new” set of values.

>>21970788
>If there is an essential nature of a thing, such as a whole which persists through its parts, then that means there is an essence of the whole - a thing.
I can agree with that
>The thing in itself was Kant's posit of a noumenal, unknowable world outside of perception, which we know for Kant through the categories. This thing in itself was unknowable for Kant, but for Hegel, he gets rid of the thing in itself. If we can't know anything about it, why posit it? A fundamental question of epistemology I think direct realism about objects overlooks. You can, of course, get around this question if you are Hegel, and posit essences in thought, but Hegel's project is based on the notion of a self creating social construct which underlies all shapes of the idealist consciousness which he is proposing. I accept Hegel's notion of the rejection of the thing in itself, because it follows from the concept of the emptiness of things that there would be no thing in itself, but I do not fall back into his ontologizing of subject through shared, social identity.
Can't we just define the relation between thing and thing in itself through shared origin or form when it comes to the things natural and through shared intent when it comes to things human. I still don't get the purpose of epistemology in the first place, it seems to be endlessly self-referencing navel gazing to me. Anyway, more on that concept of emptiness of things? That >>21970580
book explains Buddhist rejection of essentialism? My problem with the whole thing is that even if our categories are completely arbitrary, assigning them seems to be product of our biology and language, something that's completely necessary to gain even most basic understanding of the universe. What if we were to define the thing in itself as material form of the universe and all things as references to it based on either shared origin, commonality or contradiction? I am not hard determinist but doesn't rejection of free will solve this problem all together? Many thoughts. Loving Sophie hard. Head empty.

>>21971078
>That >>21970580 (You)
>book explains Buddhist rejection of essentialism? My problem with the whole thing is that even if our categories are completely arbitrary, assigning them seems to be product of our biology and language, something that's completely necessary to gain even most basic understanding of the universe.
Nagarjuna does not reject conventional reality, he would agree that it is important to know of the conventionally existing world. He denies that it has essences.
>>21971078
>Can't we just define the relation between thing and thing in itself through shared origin or form when it comes to the things natural and through shared intent when it comes to things human. I still don't get the purpose of epistemology in the first place, it seems to be endlessly self-referencing navel gazing to me.
Sorry, I don't have a response to this because I don't follow.
>>21971078
>What if we were to define the thing in itself as material form of the universe and all things as references to it based on either shared origin, commonality or contradiction? I am not hard determinist but doesn't rejection of free will solve this problem all together?
Defining things as the material form of the universe is materialism. It's noteworthy that for Nagarjuna, there's what's called dependent origination, as opposed to independent, essentialist origination. For essentialist origination, things have a fixed, stable identity, but for dependent origination, things arise from causes and conditions. Causes and conditions are what conventional reality is based on, the thing which you use to climb up, and throw away the ladder in the "ultimate reality" of emptiness. Emptiness is not a void in space, like a black hole, but emptiness itself is empty, and has no essence.

A way to think of dependent origination, and emptiness, is a table is made of various parts, legs, surface, screws, but independently they are not originating that way, but arise from other various sources, and in themselves are not a continuous unity. The same applies to all identity, racial, sexual, national.

>>21970717
Asking people not to define is pointless and foolish. If people didn't need to draw distinctions, their psychology wouldn't be perfectly adapted to do so. Even the most extreme social constructivists conceptualize "us vs them", and still use language exactly the same. It's so deeply ingrained that it can't be erased any better than one might erase someone's perception of colors being different.

>>21968068
His best works were on aesthetics, I don’t find much value in him otherwise

>>21971155
>Asking people not to define is pointless and foolish
Nagarjuna doesn't deny "conventional reality." You can define stuff, it's just that it's empty of essence.

>>21971155
Us vs them is a concept, not inherent. You have choice, agency, the ability to not do certain things. This is what it means to be a legal subject. Not that I promote legality, but just to say, you have this agency, you can use it.

>>21971289
>>21971293
>You can define stuff, it's just that it's empty of essence.
Then there is no essence. But that's besides the point, my argument is that this form of conceptualization is a necessity for human psychology. It's how people think about everything in the world. Arguing against it is just denying the reality of the human experience.

>>21971350
Aren't you using this argument to justify why everyone should be fascist? I don't agree that us vs them is necessary, you will keep thinking that because it's your ideological belief though.

>>21971362
>Aren't you using this argument to justify why everyone should be fascist?
No, rather I'm just pointing out why one criticism of fascism is internally unfounded. But if you branch out with this idea, a lot of modern political thought is nonsense. In a more general regard disdain for the nation-state and a desire for a single global polity is foolish, because if people everywhere didn't define themselves in the organization of "nations" according to the ways in which they are not other nations, then the global polity would lose all sense of self-definition. Another example is the countless "counter-culture" movements we've seen throughout time in the western world - Once those movements are integrated by the dominant culture, and thus become part of it, they lose energy and die because they've been deprived of definition. Similarly the modern LGBT movement really only has sense for the T+, the LGB is vestigial because once they gained dominant acceptance they serve no real purpose in unifying the movement.

>>21971362
>>21971405
Put another way, "Everyone should be a fascist" is the opposite of what I'm saying. If everyone was a fascist, nobody would be. Unipolarity or all-inclusivity is inherently a destitute and self-destructive concept because it fails to self-define, thus becoming devoid of meaning and unity.

>>21971405
There's no problem with having the verbal concept of a state, it's just that it's empty of essence. I think there's still a purpose in having the LGB part of the movement, even though the current struggle is for the rights of the T+. Organizations which support lgbt people are called lgbt centers, and they are where people get together, communicate, and possibly even meet partners.

>>21971432
>it's just that it's empty of essence
You already said that essence doesn't exist.

>Organizations which support lgbt people are called lgbt centers, and they are where people get together, communicate, and possibly even meet partners.
If LGBT+ achieved all objectives and garnered unanimous support for LGBT+ peoples, would there be any point to the movement? If any random person on the street was just as accepting of LGBT+ as everyone within the movement, what is the point of having a movement? You could communicate with LGBT+ or meet partners anywhere in any context. It would be like having a "whites only" social club in Scandinavia in the 1100s, it's quite literally meaningless redundancy.

>>21971466
I think it's an ongoing thing. Plus celebrations are social gatherings, and so are lgbt centers. It is still harder for lgbt people to find each other than straight people, as being gay is not visible on its own. Being visible is a big part of being lgbt, and florida is still trying to ban teachers from being openly gay or teaching about sex. So it's definitely not over.

>>21971485
>So it's definitely not over.
Not what I said. Do you not understand what a hypothetical is? By saying "it's not over, there are still people who don't share our views who we must stand opposed to", you're quite literally proving my point.

>>21971496
It seemed like you were asking why to have the movement

>>21968068
>continually make something new, an absolute, only to have someone else, the new overman, create another absolute
Where are you getting that there is an absolute here? If anything here is similar to Buddhism it would be the doctrines of momentariness or nairatmya

>>21971701
I'm afk and I will get the quote in a few hours

>>21971701
It's an idea which occurred to me when I was reading page 147 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the portable Nietzsche where he talks about despisers of the body not being able to create beyond themselves, the creating beyond oneself being an expression of the overman. I think this is something I am reading into from the context of the class I'm taking on Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the the overman creates new values, but the overman also continually fails, the overman cannot constitute a norm forever because then a new one will take its place when someone creates new values. I can't find a particular place in the literature at the moment which backs up that reading,

>>21972356
>For Nietzsche, the the overman creates new values, but the overman also continually fails, the overman cannot constitute a norm forever because then a new one will take its place when someone creates new values
So why are you reifying this as an absolute if you are being told right there in the text that it is in some way contingent or ephemeral? And the overman isn't trying to establish a "norm"—those are for herd animals.

>>21972757
That's the whole point I was making, it's a failed absolute.

Your professor will never be a woman. Tell him that next time you see him

>>21973267
Evaluation isn't about creating an absolute, so where does a "failed absolute" come from?

>>21973633
The overman creates new values which are overcome with new values.

You will never read it in German.

>>21973647
You can't "create" an absolute. It would be dependent on you for its existence to have occurred. So clearly you are using some non-philosophy definition here and making confused conclusions about Nietzsche's thought

>>21974212
Absolute here just means truth in general.

>>21968068
isnt that basically just liberalism and the idea of spontaneous order?

>>21976125
Not familiar.

>>21968068
being buddhist is cringe and gay as fuck
you can keep quoting platitudes about identity and the self not being real all you want. you still have to relate to the physical reality and grapple with it on just the same level as all the rest of us, all it enables it you to do is feign a nonchalant sense of superiority. which, when challenged would quickly crumble and you would find yourself no more dignified in your suffering than the next person
ascetism/buddhism is just spiritual opium no different than ordinary religion. as for the rest of your rant you don't even seem intelligent enough to grapple with the basic philosophy you're trying to establish here

>>21976509
I hope you know that for Nagarjuna, there's a thing called conventional reality, as opposed to the ultimate truth of emptiness. It's a really dumb straw man you just made, clown. Homophobic bigot too. Stop existing.

>>21969382
Great comic.
Nietzsche is cool. Even if you disagree, you cannot read him without ending up with a firmer base for your values.

>>21968068
If your question is if your professor has an accurate understanding of Nietzsche, then the answer is yes. For Nietzsche, stagnation is death. "Only those who continue to change remain my kin."

>>21968068

Nietzsche was not writing in the eastern tradition.
Apples to oranges moment.

Also -- you cannot disprove him.

>>21976923
I'm comparing the two, I'm not saying he's writing in the eastern tradition.

>>21968068
Post pronouns of your professor

>>21978080
Gender is not important.