2/18/21

Writers like Nietzsche...

I didn’t encounter anyone that wrote much like Nietzsche in reading western philosophy of the 20th century. He wasn’t a popular professor at college with the janitor being about his only regular student attending his class.

In my opinion mainstream philosophy went into linguistic and analytic philosophy from Russell and Wittgenstein to Quine, Strawson, and other logicians that could apply rigorous logical parameters and the development of the philosophy of logic to fields like ethics, computer science and etc.

People like Sartre, Husserl and systematic rationalists tended to fade a bit in popularity in comparison to specialists with a variety of logical tools and scientific, cosmological and quantum knowledge that allowed reformation of metaphysics and ontology to a certain extent.

Sartre called his Existentialism a continuation of French rationalism. I guess it might be reasonable to say that the existential viewpoint is that of first-person analytical ontology. Developing that sort of thing is quite difficult today. His Critique of Dialectical Reason is a very good tool for thinking about how individuals and organized individuals interact phenomenally and then modeling particular elements of those with philosophy of logic tools. Dewey and Derrida, deconstructionism and post-modernism that reduced language and epistemology to a level of subjectivity that caused some to virtually conflate meaning with meaninglessness objectively as if truth and falsehood were entirely relative and subjective (and not just as nominal variables) might be a kind of dilute version of the grand weltanshauungs of people like Hegel.

Nietzsche on the other hand was a 19th century writer who worked hard yet was limited to what Kant might have called a posteriori social-circumstantial analysis. He was probably influenced by Darwin and Zorastrianism. The philosopher of the eternal recurrence paradigm might have been stimulated by syphilis yet is admired by ‘we have all been here before’ rock and rollers. A band called ‘Spandau Ballet’ wrote a popular song about the eternal recurrence. Spandau prison was where the last famous Nazi (Rudolph Hess) spent the remainder of his life. His work was liked by the Nazis because of the anti-Semitism in some of his aphorisms and of course the development of the Superman. With regard to the latter maybe comic books and graphic novels continued Nietzsche’s idea of super-men and super-beings best.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8naoe1YYFak

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