Why is Nietzsche held in such high regard by Leftist theorists such as Focault, Deleazue, and others?
I'm nearly finished with the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals and, among other things, he's literally said:
I really don't get how the fuck there's anything Left Wing about Nietzsche can somebody give me some perspective here?
Hudson Campbell
Well you have to find out how much of to the left Foucault, Deleuze, Bataille etc. actually are. Which I think the answer to is not all that much.
Secondly, they all appropriate Nietzsche to create their own ideas/systems.
Adorno/Horkheimer argued that while Nietzsche was better than the other modern philosophers only selective aspects of his thought were positive (they devote to him and Sade a whole chapter in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which is also very Nietzschean in itself).
Finally I think Guattari and Deleuze were the only ones who successfully merged Nietzsche and Marx together in creating their master work Anti-Oedipus. Since they take Nietzsche not as an authority but mutate him to create their own chimerical philosophy.
Jace Gonzalez
Nietzsche is very much a right wing philosopher.
Dylan Wilson
I see. I'm not very well read in the French Left, so I suppose that's why I don't get their boner for Nietzsche.
But really so far Nietzsche just seems like Stirner for aristocrats. I don't really see there being even a lot of intellectual value in reading his work except to notice the problems in it.
When I read him I can't help but think of this pic
Carson Watson
He wrote for aristocrats. The idea of the ubermench and the will to live can be applied to many ideologies. As well as the slave morality sometimes being extrapolated as being the morality that the lower class follows because the aristocrats tell them to.
Nothing about him is left wing. If you are leftist it's best to disregard his works.
Jayden Mitchell
Accoeding to Wikipedia (I know lol), Rudolf Rocker was influenced by Nietzche. And Murray Bookchin says the same about Emma Goldman, except in passing. It's really interesting that he's looked on as just a proto-fascist considering how many leftists were influenced by him.
Hudson Torres
See that was the other side of my OP. Rudolf Rocker and Emma Goldman were both 100 percent in favor of what Nietzsche would call "slave morality poisoning society" yet both are on the record as quoting Nietzsche. I don't get it.
The only way it works is if you take his philosophy out of its own context which defeats the purpose and waters down your own argument.
Elijah Roberts
...
Sebastian White
What are you even trying to say?
In my OP all I asked was why people who are considered to be on the Left (are Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker not Leftists but "leftists" according to you?) admire Nietzsche since he seems to be inescapably Right wing and if I was missing something by interpreting it this way
Ayden Williams
I can't say one way or the other definitively since I haven't actually read Nietzche, but there's at least one commentator that argues that basically Nietzche wasn't actually anti-slave morality. He was just more critical of it for reasons I can't remember. I'll post a link if I find out who it was.
Carson Brown
...
Jason Nelson
I've heard from people that Nietzsche's idea was that he was anti-slave morality just not anti-slave and that he actually wanted the slaves to be led towards betterment through the Ubermensch who would emerge from the aristocratic race to led society as a whole toward the true development of higher values rather than the subversion of them through impotent critique
that still just sounds like a Reactionary fedora's pipe dream to me though
Hudson Torres
Just ascribe your own meaning to the words
Thomas Scott
Maybe this is correct. I really don't want to make any claims about Nietzche.
I did find through Google search that he was also critical of master morality also.
Matthew Young
okay
"Leftists"=No true scotsman
Word salads=buzz word
Did I do a good job Mr. True Leftist? :^)
Carson Howard
I guess I'll keep reading then before I dismiss and disregard him. Nietzche is interesting and a wonderful writer I just think his conclusions are stupid because they are huge jumps from tiny grains of truth to things that have almost no basis or can't be argued well beyond just being opinions.
Brandon Campbell
Hush, didn't you know this place is not actually Holla Forums but /lit/ 2.0?
Anthony Taylor
...
Liam Perry
So you prefer the 90000th "is porn/veganism/christianity/islam/ahteism/bronyism/ compatible with leftism?" or "Why Social Democracy is good" thread then?
Michael Carter
It sure is a good thing you had meme arrows and a comic which is completely inapplicable to the current conversation prepared. Otherwise you might have had to develop an argument for yourself and that's difficult for people who hate intellectualism, such as yourself
Jacob Brooks
Mainly because of his critique of bourgeois society and morality. Nietzsche himself was more ambiguous in his politics, but his writings are capable of inspiring people from many different political perspective simply due to the width of subject matter he addresses. He's like a philosophical mirror: one can find whatever they wish in his thought if they look hard enough, from commies to liberals to reactionaries.
Deleuze sucks tho
Gabriel Murphy
Yes.
Noah Bell
His critique of bourg society seems to stem entirely from a presupposition that it emerges from the slave morality of "lesser races" though, so do people literally just try to forget that he said this? in doing so don't they invalidate a part of their own philosophy by being selective about their reading of other philosophers?
Sorry if these are all newb questions I'm just restarting my philosophy studies after like 8 months so I might just be ignorant
Jayden Green
Shut the hell up you uninteresting tripfag
Austin Butler
anarcho-bronyism when
Easton Wilson
you sure showed him with that well thought out response
hopefully never
pic related
Oliver Ramirez
I think we were waiting for yui to exlain the similarities between Zizek and Stirner's philosophy before taking him seriously.
Aiden Allen
Why?
Leo Thompson
His critique of bourg society seems to stem entirely from a presupposition that it emerges from the slave morality of "lesser races" though, Not so much 'lesser races' as 'lesser cultures', Nietzsche uses shorthands like 'what is German' to mean more of a general societal attitude rather than some stupid Darwinian racialist meaning. I would agree with you here, many readers of Nietzsche try to abstract his conclusions without understanding his genealogical method of understanding them, and then they go on to use them with non-Nietzschean methods and it becomes a bit of a clusterfuck.
Quality post!
Bentley Young
Hopefully soon. Combining two different form of autism is always riotously funny.
Nathan Brooks
Faggot
Evan Foster
Nice false dichotomy fam. /lit/fag mysticism and idpol "leftism" are both garbage.
Easton Fisher
...
Matthew Wood
How do you feel about this then?
Is Nietzsche trying to say that through understanding the roots of morals stemming from the nobleness innate in those who are good, since in primitive society good was a rather concrete thing seen as being that which was not negative, rather than from the usefulness of acts towards the least of these by the more priveleged which is the theory of those British psychologists he criticizes in the beginning of the essay, we can create entire societies that function with a higher and happier system through slaves (within modern society) attempting to make themselves into the nobler aristocratic types by understanding that "good" and "evil" aren't definite and that good is something which spontaneously emerges within certain "races" (in the cultural sense)?
Nicholas Rivera
Faggot
Gavin Nelson
You are both really butthurt because people like discussing things you don't like and keep trying to make a relevant argument over it. It's cute but I don't get why you're wasting your time
Grayson Gonzalez
Well Marxist socialism isn't based on some lovy-dovy idea of protecting everyone society in some utopia, its a materialist philosophy that more or less aims to establish a union of egoists
Alt rightist who talk.shit trying to use Nietzsche have clearly never read past Genealogy of Morals because the obsession over traditionalism for.its own sake would make Nietzsche sick to his stomach
Jeremiah Richardson
So he is responsible for this cancer..
Luke Scott
I think he's talking a little bit about how certain "workerist" socialists in a way very reminicient of Christians sort of glorified poverty and demonized indulgences and so therefore turned class-struggle into more of a moralist identity-struggle. This partly fucked up the USSR, because the state-apparatus that owned everything consisted of "workers" (the identity) rather than workers (the function) and so therefore it was just fascism with red flags.
Caleb Hall
/thread
Carter Reyes
...
Leo Jenkins
...
Connor Allen
Nietzsche was just buttmad that anarchists transcended bourgeois and religious morality and he couldn't.
More seriously though, Nietzsche is so fucking contradictory that you can pick any of his claims and thoughts and adapt it to your own. For instance, he was against antisemitism and criticized anti-semits, yet, these same anti-semits, who later became the nazis, used Nietzsche's philosophy for their ideology.
That's just one example, it's been a while since I reread any of his works. But in the end, because of his fetishization of civilizations such as the Roman and so on, the "Ubermensch", etc, we could put him on the right side of the political sphere, altough I, personally, think that Nietzsche is one of the rare that is outside of all political categorization.
Caleb Green
The "Übermensch" kinda goes against traditionalists and reactionary thought. The Übermensch is one that has transcended good and evil, moved beyond both master and slave morality. It is a new Man, neither master nor slave but driven by egoist self-interest and will to power.
Sounds like the milk-man doesn't it?
Aaron Allen
Beyond Good and Evil.
Thomas Russell
Everything you posted is out of context. Nihilism is inded rampant because of that, but that is actually the true nature of existance.
Also "noble".
Ye… It's all out of context.
That's the thing with Nitzsche. You can't take "this paragraph" and say "oh, he's X wing".
He doesn't actually have any wing.
You can see the Class Con prol in the Übermensch. You can see the "pure aryan". You can see whatever you want to see. If you take it out of context.
And this is why, it's not about wings. It's about self theory. It's about
BEYOND IDEOLOGY
Mad Max: Beyond Ideology. Starring: Max Stirner
Also, this is one of the few times we Yui is usefull
Leo Cox
You're right, I included the nazi/far right interpretation of the Ubermensch. My bad.
Xavier Howard
nigger, anarchists just want to destroy society, they've transcended nothing
Nicholas Ortiz
...
Jeremiah Gonzalez
They want other comrades to transcend it too, not to destroy society, which already destroys itself by being shitty. Otherwise they wouldn't have been so repressed throughout their history, the bourgies wouldn't be so obsessed by quelling them if they weren't dangerous.
Samuel Gonzalez
DUMB
AND
PROUD
Levi Myers
smh.
Ayden Walker
Wahhh no criticism allowed pls no bully ;_;
Michael Campbell
Is Nietzsche trying to say that through understanding the roots of morals stemming from the nobleness innate in those who are good, since in primitive society good was a rather concrete thing seen as being that which was not negative, rather than from the usefulness of acts towards the least of these by the more priveleged which is the theory of those British psychologists he criticizes in the beginning of the essay, we can create entire societies that function with a higher and happier system through slaves (within modern society) attempting to make themselves into the nobler aristocratic types by understanding that "good" and "evil" aren't definite and that good is something which spontaneously emerges within certain "races" (in the cultural sense)? Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. Nietzsche believes that moral categories have become abstracted toward subtle but still tyrannical social rules in modern bourgeois society. Instead of the ancient king deciding what is good based on his authority, now every subject is expected to have authority over themselves in liberalism, so they must all also punish themselves by making morality into voluntarily imposed system in each and every slave. For Nietzsche even the rich bourgeois are slaves the morality of the market economy.
>Also, this is one of the few times where Yui is useful I take what I can get!
Anthony Thompson
You idealists are only good for thread like this! but you are good at it. TOO GOOD!
Ian Peterson
...
Caleb Harris
This.
At no point Zarathustra says "see what you are doing? Keep doing it, because these random activities our ancestors did are the only way to go, no need to question or change anything"
He certainly didn't stop and say "GODDAM POSITIVISTS AND FEMINISTS RUINING MUH WHITE SOCIETY REEEEEEEE"
Connor Kelly
DUMB
AND
PROUD
Dominic Edwards
...
Samuel Cooper
This is actually sort of correct. If you cannot explain theory in fairly simple terms, then you either don't understand it well enough, or your just a religious person.
Easton Cook
SO DUMB
SO PROUD
Henry Jackson
I think these are fairly simple terms.
Justin Scott
That would describe /lit/
Eli Murphy
...
Isaac Gray
Then why did he hate Socialism so much? Was he just being a special snowflake or was he just opposed to what he perceived as an excessive emphasis on the "goodness" of movements and ideas based around the collective and cooperation? Because if the latter is the case I kind of see where he's coming from, as the late 19th century and the early 20th century Labor movement WAS pushed forward by a lot of spooky propaganda and rhetoric about "workers identity" and "nothing to lose but our chains" which didn't really do anything but build up a false idea in people's heads that literally everyone who was a worker was equal and that it was about achieving a "worker's world" rather than actually implementing a Socialist system that would fundamentally transform society in general rather than just for Labor.
But it seems to me that Nietzsche rather couldn't stand Socialism merely because he thought individuality was sacred in itself, which is a bit hypocritical on his part, if I am correct.
Ayden Young
He felt that socialists made too many appeals to moralism and that it glorified communitarianism and poverty, just like Christianity. In this he was right, and this was also a criticism of state-socialists that Max Stirner made.
Justin Martinez
Yeah I think I would have to agree withe Nietzsche on this one. My problem though is that this is something I already thought about after reading Stirner and thus I'm starting to realize that Nietzsche just kind of seems to be a long winded version of Stirner in some respects, at least in the Genealogy.
is this an unfair thing to say?
Noah Jones
...
Bentley Bailey
Not really. Nietzsche is really only superior in his answer to nihilism and his analysis of slave-master morality. A lot of good stuff from him, but I like Stirner better.
Ayden Gutierrez
...
Jose Cook
This tbh. Every. single. time.
Alexander Morales
wow rebel ur shitposting is really rising in quality lately
Nicholas Gutierrez
God is dead though.
Which is good. Now we can focus on all the other tyrants.
Brody Lee
CRAWLING
IN
MY
SKIN
Jordan Cruz
You know what's edgy?
Being a member of an organization that subjugated and killed millions historically and still glorify suffering as a virtue.
Now that is edgy.
Carter Wood
THESE
WOUNDS
THEY
WILL
NOT
HEAL
Jason Powell
...
Ayden Flores
Uhh, he tore Anglo scum a new one in Beyond Good and Evil specifically because of their fedora autism
Michael Martin
ANCOM DUMB
ANCOM PROUD
ANCOM DUMMIST AND PROUDIST THER IS
Ayden Bennett
You could almost say… Proudhon…
Ayden Morales
He didn't say white because he was well acquainted with the history of civilizations and saw the rise and fall of different races but he did say god damn positivists and feminists and he did believe in 'national characters'. So…
Brayden Martin
Here is Foucault discussing Nietzsche from an interview in 1983 from "The Essential Foucault" (New Press):
I do not believe there is a single Nietzscheanism, There are no grounds for believing that there is a true Nietzscheanism, or that ours is any truer than others. But those who found in Nietzsche, more than twenty-five years ago, a means of displacing themselves in terms of a philosophical horizon dominated by phenomenolgy and Marxism have nothing to do with those who use Nietzsche nowadays. In any case, even if Deleuze has written a superb book about Nietzsche and although the presence of Nietzsche in his other works is clearly apparent, there is no deafening reference to Nietzsche, nor any attempt to wave the Nietzschean flag for rhetorical or political ends. It is striking that someone like Deleuze has simply taken Nietzsche seriously, which indeed he has. That is what I wanted to do. What serious use can Nietzche be up to?…The only rather extravagant homage I have rendered to Nietzsche wsa to call the first volume of my History of Sexuality "The Will to Know"….My relation to Nietzsche, or what I owe to Nietzsche, derives mostly from the tests of around 1880, where the question of truth, the history of truth and the will to truth were central to his work."
Christian Garcia
because fuck the jews. until Holla Forums throws off their ideological blinders and understands this simple facts (a fact known by marxists of an earlier age) they'll never fucking get it
Jaxson Sanchez
So I guess the Nietzschen influence on Foucault and Deleuze is more in taking the radical questioning of the origins of particular social norms and the tracing of their development with a dialectical eye, rather than just the general, ontological conversations of the phenomenonologists on the one hand and the repetitive hardline Socialism of the young radicals of their day on the other regarding Marxist and Anarchist orthodoxy?
Basically, that the influence on Foucault and Deleuze of Nietzsche is more in his radical tracing of social development and thinking outside the box of how modern social norms (and perhaps even modernity itself) emerged as constructs of things outside of itself?
Xavier Collins
As for Foucault, that does seem to be what he is saying, for Deleuze I really do not know. I've not read Deleuze or Nietzsche. I intend to but there's too much else going on. I hope the Foucault quote helped.
Jonathan Phillips
why are you saging
Brayden Powell
apparently Nietzsche wasn't racist or very much political at all and his sister rewrote everything he wrote to fit a nazi narrative.
Isaiah King
Flawlessly played.
Evan Robinson
ebin
Bentley Robinson
...
Nathan Wood
so cringe worthy
Adam Bell
Hating on Deleuze. You are truly an idiot.
Nicholas Gray
This thread says to disregard Nietzsche because he doesn't fit with typical leftist beliefs.
Is that not incredibly dishonest, not to mention cowardly?