While the topic of this text is very interesting, it ultimately remains a bit unconvincing.
Nietzsche is depicted in an oversimplified way as a kind of tortured brute, and Otto Dix' late return to Christianity is rather exaggerated.
Dix remained interested in many topics until late in his life. While he radiates more empathy than Nietzsche, the one constant in Dix' art is that he never spared any feelings or aesthetic sensibilities. This urge to remain true to oneself and shed all masks is something he may have found reflected and elavated in Nietzsche's writing, even if he ultimately discovered that some of Nietzsche's admiration of fierceness was a peacetime naivety.
I love Otto Dix, but this essay reads like Christian propaganda. Which is to say, its presentation of the material discussed is superficial and reductive in ways that clearly serve to advance a Christian point of view.
Before I really started studying philosophy, I was still interested in philosophy, but as a novice. During this time, Nietzsche was my favorite philosopher and I read several of his books. I also read a lot of literature, and Nietzsche figured in a lot of the literary texts I enjoyed.
Now that I've read a lot more philosophical texts, I realize that both of the big philosophical camps--Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy--rarely mention Nietzsche. Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher that non-philosophers turn to and often cite.
Also, some pretty substantial continental philosophers wrote about Nietzsche. Heidegger wrote a ton about him. Foucault used his genealogical method. Deleuze, Derrida, etc. all wrote a lot.
Heck, half of the big Continental names wrote books on Nietzsche:
I had a similar experience, but I think a lot of other modern philosophy is really pedantic and builds upon a thousand years of writings. So its very hard to follow without proper academic study or understanding what its in response to.
Nietzsche has paragraphs that could be studied and independently thought about without even reading the rest of the book/chapter. You can crack open beyond good and evil and just start reading a random page.
I still would argue his thought is far more groundbreaking than any contemporaries
> paragraphs that could be studied and independently
Yes, but after reading BGE, I felt like I had to read all his other books to really understand what he was saying (and others too, Kant, Spinoza, etc). And then re-read BGE.
Also Walter Kauffman's on him is very good. Working through that now.
But Nietzsche has more impact on minds of people. In 100 years I am sure Bronze Age Pervert will be seen as more influential than some random philosophist from random university.
I think he's probably seen as more influential now, given that it's widely believed that he's been read by nearly all of the young staffers in the Trump admin.
(Hate to have to add this caveat and acquiesce to the Reddit-ification of HN, but: caveat lector, the above statement is not an endorsement)
I agree with you. My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers (someone included a link to philpapers.org and all I saw were various editions of books written BY Nietzsche, I'm not sure what their point was with that link). Is he widely read by non-philosophers and has he had an impact with this same group? I think he has.
If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. Nietzsche's writings I would label more as literature and not philosophy. When I reread BGE, standing on its own I find it entertaining, but his readings and understanding of past philosophers were quite wrong.
Anecdotally, in my eight years of studying texts with people who are professional philosophers and meeting regularly with them in discussions, I would say Nietzsche's name was mentioned maybe twice, and both times by individuals who were quite new to philosophy. Nietzsche is just not that interesting philosophically.
The bottom right of each work listed shows how many times it has been referenced. For example, the top link, Beyond Good and Evil, has 510 academic citations on PhilPapers, alone. That’s a lot, and very clearly shows that your claim here:
My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers
Interesting. I did some more digging and according to several metrics it seems Nietzsche is, in fact, cited quite heavily, and not just in non-philosophical publications which would've been my first guess. Touché.
> If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc.
Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.
You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.
Yeah, this is such an entertaining exchange of layering being more "inner" and clued in. Reading the Greeks, Nietzsche or even, oh horror of horrors, Marcus Aurelius (if not "more interesting" earlier authors in his tradition) can make people reflect on their lives. All these can lead you astray in interesting ways but at least you are going somewhere, anywhere. There's always salty people who insist you should struggle through respectable academic philosophers instead, lest you are some kind of a prole.
This is kind of analytic (but also continental) mindset really does feel like wannabe math, just without visible correspondence to reality, like can be observed even with basic arithmetic or geometry. Also curiously you cannot really get the same results independently, without being nurtured by people from the circle. If you're shutting down earlier human curiosity about ethics, epistemology, meaning of language etc. and care only about your short lineage, this feels analogous, I don't know, to something like being a lore "scholar" of some franchise considering ponderous questions of how W40K deities relate to each other. And God help you if you bring up anything outside of approved lore or some other parts of human culture.
> There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically
Try reading Parmenidean Ascent if you get a chance [1]. While not his main thesis, Michael Della Rocca argues why not treating "ancient" philosophy as philosophy proper is in error. Personally, I've studied Aristotle, and Plato, quite a bit and I couldn't disagree with you more.
> What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch.
That claim is contestable. I do agree that Frege, for one, was the first person to advance philosophical logic in 2000 years, with the previous advances made by Aristotle himself. Please study Aristotle's Organon. His singular advances in logic were astounding and not much else was done in logic until the likes of Frege appeared on the scene. What Heidegger did in philosophy was extraordinary, but it was built on the shoulders of previous philosophical giants. So what the "modernists" did was really not "from scratch".
I applaud you for not being in the least phased by blunt, needlessly confrontational manner of my writing!
This is how you really convinced me to read Della Rocca's treatment on history of philosophy that you linked to, even though I personally find the idea of great geneology spanning the greeks up to modern-day philosophy PhD students completely laughable. You said it yourself: Frege was not the result of iterative, standing on shoulders of Giants-esque improvement. He just "showed up." Clearly, developments in language and sciences opened the door to new line of inquiry which largely made whole swaths of the so-called philosophy (historically speaking) completely redundant. Wittgenstein knew this intuitively, and it's perhaps the biggest take-away from his body of work (contra logical positivism nonsensia)
I will concede that Aristotle on logic (specifically) is actually not a waste of time, but in general, all the time spent reading the Greeks, dialectics most of all, is the time I'm never getting back. I'm sorry, but the Greeks' command of language is simply too superfluous, or rather ill-equipped, for the purpose of philosophy. Regardless of translation. You could say they were too early... Which is another way to say they were "wrong." I won't go as far. It's kind of important to teach philosophy undergrad students some of it, because so much of their academic life will be spent performatively back-linking to Hellenic tradition to please their cargo-cultist professors. I know academic philosophy is full of this because I sometimes put myself through the pain of reading what they write. If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato? Did you just pick it up and go with it at some point, or was this a deliberate regression?
> If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato?
I am definitely no Plato expert, but two texts: Plato's Theaetetus and his Parmenides.
Questions of accurate translations aside, if one can focus on the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ideas presented and questions posed, I think one can spend the rest of one's life trying to understand these two texts. As an added incentive to whet your appetite, Wittgenstein was particularly interested in Theaetetus in his later years.
And if I had to recommend two texts from Aristotle, definitely his Physics and his Metaphysics. Here he's dealing with the really deep, and meaty, problems of philosophy.
These four texts definitely get me going, so to speak, although my talking about them bores my wife silly.
[EDIT] And you didn't ask for this, but here goes anyway: the three philosophers that "get me going" and whom I think are the three greatest philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (I know that last one will get me a lot of hate!)
I mean, when I studied continental philosophy in the 90s, there was plenty of Nietzsche discussed. But I'd say, perhaps, more in his influence elsewhere than as primary text. E.g. I did a term studying Heidegger and Nietzsche played into that. Same prof had a 4th year class purely about Nietzsche. (What a great prof, too, my daughter is going to the same school starting next week and I really wish he hadn't retired...)
I do think that maybe more recent work in continental schools (perhaps rightly) de-emphasize him as part of a larger turn away from the "postmodern" more broadly vs what was trendy in the 90s.
Nietzsche is one of the least popular or influential philosophers in post war Germany. You can say it is for the same reasons that Dix finally abandoned him.
I don't think he is very deep. He is popular now among the alt-right because he thought Christianity was perverted because it glorified the weak instead of the strong.
Hegseth though is hiding on a military base instead of being at the front, so I guess he is weak ...
No one reads "Also sprach Zarathustra" in Germany. It is only famous because of Richard Staruss' symphonic poem, which ties into the point that others made: Nietzsche had various influences, but should not be used for policy decisions. Which is probably the reason this Dix article was published during the first Trump years.
Right. From a philosophical pov, you could say Nietzsche is quite mid. I agree he seems popular among the angry non-philosophers who want to attach themselves to pseudo-philosophies in order to help them further their agendas. Ah, Nietzsche, you've become such a tool (pun intended).
While the topic of this text is very interesting, it ultimately remains a bit unconvincing.
Nietzsche is depicted in an oversimplified way as a kind of tortured brute, and Otto Dix' late return to Christianity is rather exaggerated.
Dix remained interested in many topics until late in his life. While he radiates more empathy than Nietzsche, the one constant in Dix' art is that he never spared any feelings or aesthetic sensibilities. This urge to remain true to oneself and shed all masks is something he may have found reflected and elavated in Nietzsche's writing, even if he ultimately discovered that some of Nietzsche's admiration of fierceness was a peacetime naivety.
Dix' painting "Flandern", 1936:
https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/09/68/b1/9d/157856157-...
I love Otto Dix, but this essay reads like Christian propaganda. Which is to say, its presentation of the material discussed is superficial and reductive in ways that clearly serve to advance a Christian point of view.
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Before I really started studying philosophy, I was still interested in philosophy, but as a novice. During this time, Nietzsche was my favorite philosopher and I read several of his books. I also read a lot of literature, and Nietzsche figured in a lot of the literary texts I enjoyed.
Now that I've read a lot more philosophical texts, I realize that both of the big philosophical camps--Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy--rarely mention Nietzsche. Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher that non-philosophers turn to and often cite.
Nietzsche is referenced constantly:
https://philpapers.org/asearch.pl?strict=1&searchStr=Nietzsc...
Also, some pretty substantial continental philosophers wrote about Nietzsche. Heidegger wrote a ton about him. Foucault used his genealogical method. Deleuze, Derrida, etc. all wrote a lot.
Heck, half of the big Continental names wrote books on Nietzsche:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy
https://sunypress.edu/Books/O/On-Nietzsche
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo276199...
Analytic philosophy indeed didn't write much about Nietzsche, but I don't know why they would have. Very different subject matter and style.
I had a similar experience, but I think a lot of other modern philosophy is really pedantic and builds upon a thousand years of writings. So its very hard to follow without proper academic study or understanding what its in response to.
Nietzsche has paragraphs that could be studied and independently thought about without even reading the rest of the book/chapter. You can crack open beyond good and evil and just start reading a random page.
I still would argue his thought is far more groundbreaking than any contemporaries
> paragraphs that could be studied and independently
Yes, but after reading BGE, I felt like I had to read all his other books to really understand what he was saying (and others too, Kant, Spinoza, etc). And then re-read BGE.
Also Walter Kauffman's on him is very good. Working through that now.
yeah a lot of uneducated analysis was off, but it was still very thought provoking and jarring to my earlier world view.
it depends on which chapters/sections though, some are more accessible than others.
one book I enjoyed is:
"The Mask of Enlightenment" by stanley rosen. I read that along Zarathustra
1) not true 2) guilt by association? A lot of non-physicists talk about Einstein. I still take his work very seriously.
What is a philosopher? Hopefully not someone who constantly refer to others thinking and not their own... tongue-in-cheek
But Nietzsche has more impact on minds of people. In 100 years I am sure Bronze Age Pervert will be seen as more influential than some random philosophist from random university.
I think he's probably seen as more influential now, given that it's widely believed that he's been read by nearly all of the young staffers in the Trump admin.
(Hate to have to add this caveat and acquiesce to the Reddit-ification of HN, but: caveat lector, the above statement is not an endorsement)
I'm not sure I understand your point? Are you trying to equate the two without saying it directly?
He will be seen more like Evola than Nietzsche. So not an exact parallel.
I'm trying to make sure I'm not misreading. Your intent was slander by affiliation, yes?
I agree with you. My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers (someone included a link to philpapers.org and all I saw were various editions of books written BY Nietzsche, I'm not sure what their point was with that link). Is he widely read by non-philosophers and has he had an impact with this same group? I think he has.
If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. Nietzsche's writings I would label more as literature and not philosophy. When I reread BGE, standing on its own I find it entertaining, but his readings and understanding of past philosophers were quite wrong.
Anecdotally, in my eight years of studying texts with people who are professional philosophers and meeting regularly with them in discussions, I would say Nietzsche's name was mentioned maybe twice, and both times by individuals who were quite new to philosophy. Nietzsche is just not that interesting philosophically.
> someone included a link to philpapers.org
The bottom right of each work listed shows how many times it has been referenced. For example, the top link, Beyond Good and Evil, has 510 academic citations on PhilPapers, alone. That’s a lot, and very clearly shows that your claim here:
My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers
…is definitely not accurate.
Interesting. I did some more digging and according to several metrics it seems Nietzsche is, in fact, cited quite heavily, and not just in non-philosophical publications which would've been my first guess. Touché.
> If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc.
Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.
You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.
Comments like this just further my bias against analytic philosophy as a system that helps illuminate the path to human flourishing and truth.
Yeah, this is such an entertaining exchange of layering being more "inner" and clued in. Reading the Greeks, Nietzsche or even, oh horror of horrors, Marcus Aurelius (if not "more interesting" earlier authors in his tradition) can make people reflect on their lives. All these can lead you astray in interesting ways but at least you are going somewhere, anywhere. There's always salty people who insist you should struggle through respectable academic philosophers instead, lest you are some kind of a prole.
This is kind of analytic (but also continental) mindset really does feel like wannabe math, just without visible correspondence to reality, like can be observed even with basic arithmetic or geometry. Also curiously you cannot really get the same results independently, without being nurtured by people from the circle. If you're shutting down earlier human curiosity about ethics, epistemology, meaning of language etc. and care only about your short lineage, this feels analogous, I don't know, to something like being a lore "scholar" of some franchise considering ponderous questions of how W40K deities relate to each other. And God help you if you bring up anything outside of approved lore or some other parts of human culture.
> There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically
Try reading Parmenidean Ascent if you get a chance [1]. While not his main thesis, Michael Della Rocca argues why not treating "ancient" philosophy as philosophy proper is in error. Personally, I've studied Aristotle, and Plato, quite a bit and I couldn't disagree with you more.
> What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch.
That claim is contestable. I do agree that Frege, for one, was the first person to advance philosophical logic in 2000 years, with the previous advances made by Aristotle himself. Please study Aristotle's Organon. His singular advances in logic were astounding and not much else was done in logic until the likes of Frege appeared on the scene. What Heidegger did in philosophy was extraordinary, but it was built on the shoulders of previous philosophical giants. So what the "modernists" did was really not "from scratch".
[1] https://academic.oup.com/book/32030
I applaud you for not being in the least phased by blunt, needlessly confrontational manner of my writing!
This is how you really convinced me to read Della Rocca's treatment on history of philosophy that you linked to, even though I personally find the idea of great geneology spanning the greeks up to modern-day philosophy PhD students completely laughable. You said it yourself: Frege was not the result of iterative, standing on shoulders of Giants-esque improvement. He just "showed up." Clearly, developments in language and sciences opened the door to new line of inquiry which largely made whole swaths of the so-called philosophy (historically speaking) completely redundant. Wittgenstein knew this intuitively, and it's perhaps the biggest take-away from his body of work (contra logical positivism nonsensia)
I will concede that Aristotle on logic (specifically) is actually not a waste of time, but in general, all the time spent reading the Greeks, dialectics most of all, is the time I'm never getting back. I'm sorry, but the Greeks' command of language is simply too superfluous, or rather ill-equipped, for the purpose of philosophy. Regardless of translation. You could say they were too early... Which is another way to say they were "wrong." I won't go as far. It's kind of important to teach philosophy undergrad students some of it, because so much of their academic life will be spent performatively back-linking to Hellenic tradition to please their cargo-cultist professors. I know academic philosophy is full of this because I sometimes put myself through the pain of reading what they write. If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato? Did you just pick it up and go with it at some point, or was this a deliberate regression?
> If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato?
I am definitely no Plato expert, but two texts: Plato's Theaetetus and his Parmenides.
Questions of accurate translations aside, if one can focus on the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ideas presented and questions posed, I think one can spend the rest of one's life trying to understand these two texts. As an added incentive to whet your appetite, Wittgenstein was particularly interested in Theaetetus in his later years.
And if I had to recommend two texts from Aristotle, definitely his Physics and his Metaphysics. Here he's dealing with the really deep, and meaty, problems of philosophy.
These four texts definitely get me going, so to speak, although my talking about them bores my wife silly.
[EDIT] And you didn't ask for this, but here goes anyway: the three philosophers that "get me going" and whom I think are the three greatest philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (I know that last one will get me a lot of hate!)
I mean, when I studied continental philosophy in the 90s, there was plenty of Nietzsche discussed. But I'd say, perhaps, more in his influence elsewhere than as primary text. E.g. I did a term studying Heidegger and Nietzsche played into that. Same prof had a 4th year class purely about Nietzsche. (What a great prof, too, my daughter is going to the same school starting next week and I really wish he hadn't retired...)
I do think that maybe more recent work in continental schools (perhaps rightly) de-emphasize him as part of a larger turn away from the "postmodern" more broadly vs what was trendy in the 90s.
I think Nietszche's anti-egalitarianism makes many otherwise sympathetic modern readers deeply uncomfortable.
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Nietzsche is one of the least popular or influential philosophers in post war Germany. You can say it is for the same reasons that Dix finally abandoned him.
I don't think he is very deep. He is popular now among the alt-right because he thought Christianity was perverted because it glorified the weak instead of the strong.
Hegseth though is hiding on a military base instead of being at the front, so I guess he is weak ...
No one reads "Also sprach Zarathustra" in Germany. It is only famous because of Richard Staruss' symphonic poem, which ties into the point that others made: Nietzsche had various influences, but should not be used for policy decisions. Which is probably the reason this Dix article was published during the first Trump years.
Right. From a philosophical pov, you could say Nietzsche is quite mid. I agree he seems popular among the angry non-philosophers who want to attach themselves to pseudo-philosophies in order to help them further their agendas. Ah, Nietzsche, you've become such a tool (pun intended).