OK, so is there a copy of “Nietzsche for Dummies” out there?
Action Philosophers!
It’s been a while since I read their take on Nietzsche but I remember it being pretty good, and the whole series is generally a philosophically accurate laugh riot.
I know little of his philosophy…I keep hearing stuff about “Will to Power”, lots of Nazi/racist links, etc…altho’ every time I try to read up, it’s full of a lot of philosophical trade-jargon that a puir wee layman like myself can’t understand (I never took Phil 101).
That’s kind of barking up the wrong tree.
Will to Power or
Der Wille zur Macht wasn’t an original work; Friedrich’s sister Elizabeth happened (much to his disgust) to be a Nazi, and compiled a neatly cherrypicked bits’n’bobs collection after his death.
That is the reason you hear about him in connection with the Nazi party; Nietzsche himself had a passionate hatred for both nationalism and anti-Semitism, both of which are notable qualities of Nazism.
I remember reading something recently, some fellow wrote an article stating that the Incredible Hulk was the ultimate Nietzschean Übermensch – beholden only to his own desires and will, and an irresistable force unchecked by such petty and piffling constraints as ethics, morality, or even reason.
Needless to say, I’m not overly impressed with that philosophy, if that is the case.
Unless there’s a huge intellectual side to the Hulk that I’m missing (I haven’t read a single one of the comics), he’s wrong. The Übermensch is beholden only to himself and above what
some people consider ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (this does not preclude ethics itself, just what may be described as petty fiat morality), but reason is, if anything, the character’s most defining quality. I know much less about Rand than I do about Nietzsche, but from what I know she plagiarized and perverted this concept into her impossible idea of the wholly selfish ‘rational actor’. What I know of the Hulk does
not fit the description of the Übermensch I took away from reading
Zarathustra. If you want a comic book analogy, Ozymandias from
Watchmen is actually a great example.
As a side note…when I was doing my design program at college, we did a little art history. The Expressionists, Sturm und Drang, Edvard Munch, van Gogh, August Strindberg, etc…I began to wonder — do the Germanic ethnicities, as a group, need a really good doobie?
They’ve got beer for that
The German reputation for stuffy gravitas is, well, kinda deserved on the grand scale, but they
are quite capable of humor and even sometimes whimsy. Nietzsche himself could be devilishly funny when he wanted. But you know, what they teach in classes is
always the dry stuff, or the funny stuff with all the joy sucked out.
(not that there’s anything wrong with that…)
<chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle!>