Hey Archie, did you know there's a town in Ohio named after you?

.....Nietzsche didn't have an opportunity to develop his work. I don't know that he would have been able to do any better than he first did.....(assuming that he did not consort with a prostutitute, contract syphillus and die a mad man). Were he to have continued his virginal status and to have maintained his fervor for his own sister, I'm not so sure that his later works would have been all that...er...."brilliant." Although (were he not have died prematurely) I would like to have been a German speaking fly on the wall when he and Schickelgruber got together to swap notes on their respective idiosyncracies.

As already was mentioned, what N wrote later was exploited to posit the notion of the ubermann/ubermensch, to help justify Aryan superiority. Miss N, I believe, further strove to generate the logic and rationale for the eradication of lesser humans, in theory. I don't know that what she had to say carried much weight in the Wansee Conference but she was no "saint."

Edited by - Indy11 on 10/6/2004 5:27:07 PM

It really doesn't matter if people remember you or not, in my opinion we each need to search and find our own purpose. Saying the world is not a happy place is pretty negetive though. I think my life is happy most of the time, but I just tend to focus on the bad things. I believe this is the problem with most people.

Here and I thought most people just didn't get laid enough and that is why it is so depressing.

Your throwing greed into "make things easier for survival" is not correct. Even the birds do not eat all the berries or the squirel all the nuts or else the bushes and trees would be gone. The squirels store food for survival and do it instinctively however they show no sign of greed. Greed is to excess and survival is survival not excessive survival. If anything you could have used pleasure of making other people have nothing but this would not go into your sex or survival catagories.

As a matter of fact you can take all of the "deadly Sins" in the bible and you could not set them into any of your catagories. (I can't remember them all but envy, slouthfullness, greed are ones I can)

it's kind of like saying that all the people that play Freelancer fall into 2 catagories PLAYERS and WATCHERS. The statement is true but it is so much more then just that. It is true we want to survive and procreation is survival so in reality all emotions have to do with survival. We are sad so we don't do whatever is making you sad etc etc etc. It's like a bad Dr. Phil show...If you don't want to be FAT then don't be FAT.

Unless, of course, you're Dr. Phil or Oprah in which case, your portly or obese but rich rich rich.... or greedy greedy greedy.....

not that the world is not a happy place at all, what i mean is that if you find the fact that all our feelings are to make us survive and reprouduce, then what i said before is much more depressing. i am basicly putting things in persepctive

@northenslacker
Nietsche talked about HUMAN feelings not bird feelings

Edited by - [UTFDSQrn on 10/6/2004 8:56:40 PM

"i just cannot explain why i like this thoery besides before you knock it read the book."

already have. was about 16/17 when i first read Nietzsche and did it again at Uni and again when i was about 30 doing my M. Phil in erm Philosophy (hides head in shame)
have Penguin editions of Ecce Homo, Mann & Superman, and Zarathustra.

he's a good read, no doubt of that. just take him with a pinch of salt. if you want better thought out and more relevant philosophy from roughly the same period, read Wittgenstein.

lol. politics AND religion!! FANTASTIC! How are you getting away with this?!!

ok ok, so as this seems to be one big arse kissing session at the moment, I think its time for a little spice....allow me to play devils advocate....

So all feelings etc are chemical and electrical reactions, fair enough, but what about the concept of soul? is there such a thing as a soul? what would a soul be? Surprisingly, over the years there has been a great deal of research done into mind and bio-psychology, but very little has ever proven anything....what goes on in the majority of the brain that does not have electrical/chemical reactions being triggered on a regular basis? Is it an organ that we have simply evolved out of using...or are we evolving into using it? But most importantly - because we get no electrical readings from that part of the brain, is it dead at all? Or are there things going on there that we simply haven't got the technology to monitor as yet?

And also, if all feelings are there to help us survive or reproduce, what about :

humility?
comfort?
dispair?
mournful?
irritation?

you may, for example, be able to give me a case example of when irritation could help us survive (certainly not reproduce)...however, my argument is that it always depends on the individual's situation....everybody can have these feelings but they may only benefit the survival or reproduction of a few....so why do the rest of us have these feelings?

You wish to discuss the existence of the soul, Grom? Well that's one way to ensure that this thread get locked .

"politics AND religion!! FANTASTIC! How are you getting away with this?!!"
now trying to get away with souls? personaly i dont believe in them.

one of the feeelings i have to go to school so i can only do one. Humilty. so you can know were you stand at that you are not a great warrior who is unstopable. so then you dont go around picking fights wit bigger and better things

ambivalence is an emotion - how does that fit into the "survival spectrum?"

or indifference?

mild annoyance?

casual interest?

here's a big one. disgust. that's a very powerful emotion, what survival instinct does that serve? I'm talking about emotional disgust, not just a bad smell.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/7/2004 3:22:03 PM

@taw lol...I'm still waiting for an answer on irritation

esky said:

---

You wish to discuss the existence of the soul, Grom? Well that's one way to ensure that this thread get locked

---

dsq said:

---

"politics AND religion!! FANTASTIC! How are you getting away with this?!!"
now trying to get away with souls? personaly i dont believe in them.

---

@DSQ/Esky - my point exactly. This thread is basically all about belief, which is the core of all religion. The fact that you don't believe in souls is obvious from your opening post - but this is my point - religious argument is the only way to debate this belief system. All I did was mention the word that seems to have been appropriately left out of the debate, for want of it destroying the argument.

I'm playing devils advocate here - I stated that initially.

My point is that this thread should only be able to continue if beliefs are taken out of it entirely. At the moment there is far too many "This is my belief system, you're all wrong except me, screw you all" type posts going on. Thankfully no-one has yet raised the christian/muslim/buddism/hindu point of views...but it will happen sooner or later.

I suggest that if you refuse to discuss the existance of a soul or the possibility of the "dead" parts of the brain actually being awake and unmonitorable, then you should keep the thread strictly to a third party viewpoint.

Sorry if you think I'm being pedantic, but I hate the fact that you are having a religious discussion under the pretence that its non-religious philosophy.

Effectively what you are doing is exactly the same as a fundamental christian coming onto TLR and posting a thread called "Jesus". In this thread he offers to tell people what Jesus would say about various emotions and situations. But also he refuses to allow it to become a "religious discussion"! Don't you see my point??!!

lol. aaah I give up

Edited by - gromit on 10/7/2004 6:31:04 AM

Well, never mind "souls" then. Just call it mentality or sentience.

Is a person's mentality merely the sum of the brain's chemical parts?

Edited by - Indy11 on 10/7/2004 8:08:08 AM

oooo such a good point.

I'm not even going down that route anymore. I'd rather have a look at some of the irresponsible consequences of this philosophy that took place in N's own lifetime.

On the basis that "will" is everything and all feeling/emotion/thought is geared towards survival, it was q natural for people around N like his dreadful sister Elizabeth to extend that into the realm of racial purity - nordic/german types have stronger wills than other racial groups therefore will prosper in circumstances that would overwhelm *lesser* races.

so, N's sister along with some other racial purist pseudo-scientists carted 50 north german peasant families off to S America and dumped them up the Amazon, expecting them to *prosper* and overcome the local tribes and spread german *kultur* and civilisation in the Amazon basin. in fact they were quietly forgotten.

in the 70s these Neu Deutschen were rediscovered by western explorers and anthropologists. they'd certainly kept to their german traditions. with a technological level that hadn't changed since they left their villages in the late 19th century, ie horses and oxen, they hadn't exactly prospered. refusing to mingle with the local tribes theyd been thinned out by conflict and ruined by interbreeding, to the point where birth defects and mental/physical instabilities were the norm. proof, if ever proof were needed, that *will* does not overcome and that the theory of eugenics, which Nietzsche himself was an ardent supporter of*, was total *bollox*

N's nihilist and atheistic ideas are very seductive for a lot of people, unf they are misleading at best, and their logical progression ends up in a very bad place. I rather enjoyed the scene in the Day After Tomorrow when the two bookworms agreed to relegate Nietzsche to the flames. it's would probably have been better had he not written the things that he wrote, and even better had his dreadful sibling Elizabeth died prematurely instead of him. you know she edited a lot of his writings to reflect her own anti-semitic and pan-german sentiments? indeed, in his final years she was in effect telling him what to write, and if he disagreed she'd alter it to suit her own agenda. not that he ever would stand up to her of course, he lacked the basic integrity that the philosopher needs. no modern day Socrates was Freidrich, oh no.

Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche and Cosima Wagner, what a pair of Hitlerite dowagers they made.

*but unlike his sister FN wasn't actually anti-semitic; eugenics was a widespread dilettante pseudo-science which was common coin of the period, an extension of the equally popular but similarly erroneous Social Darwinism. but N had nothing against jews himself. just to be fair to the diseased nutcase.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/7/2004 11:22:17 AM

Eugenics, White Man's Burden , Social Darwinism, etc. Late 19th AND early 20th Century "advanced" thinking by many.

The material advances which marked the progress of Western European nations and the US ahead of the rest of the globe did tend to support the idea that, somehow, caucasian cultures were superior to the others in general and, to the Germans at least, those of more purely aryan stock were the best of the best. The fact of European imperialism can't be denied and the rest of the World was confronted by this same truth.

Today, things are viewed differently but there remain issues on whether the perspective has changed at all. Do we still judge based purely upon "Western" standards or is there a more global perspective that is being applied?