I'm a PhD candidate whose been at it for like 7 years now.

>>9709642
why does it take so long to do a phd?

>>9709642
What's your dissertation about specifically?

will i ever find contentment

>>9709648
5 years of funding.
3 years of coursework, and a few years of finishing dissertation.
by the time the 5th year ends, people have to start teaching a handful of classes to make ends meet. Once you teach that many classes, all motivation to write goes away, not to say anything about time.

That, and also it often happens that you put away your childish trifles and idealistic dreams by the time the TAship runs out. People start families in their late 20s, or have relationships which become more demanding, parents get old, etc.

>>9709653
If I could narrow it down to an esoteric level, I'd say that imo Nietzsche's Ecce Homo should be thought of as the last chapter of his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks...indeed, that he saw himself as one of those characters he describes in PTG, the one who succeeds at what Socrates had an opportunity for but failed (to be the first tragic philosopher), and that he wrote as such, and wished to be read as such.

Don't most universities put a limit to when you have to finish your graduate degree? They do at mine, anyway.

Should I do a PhD in mathematics?

Do people mind if students not enrolled in that particular class attend the lectures? I've only tried it for classes within my own department.

>>9709642
did you pursue a phd because it was what you wanted to do, or because it was the only thing you knew how to do?

>>9709642
Brainlet here. What's Nietzsche's position on free will and why people should try to be better people?

Let's say I'm an immature brat and don't want to take responsibility for some bad things that've happened to me. In some ways I've fucked up my whole life. I don't even know if I should believe in free will because then I'll have to take at least some responsibility for who I am now. What's Nietzsche's rationale or logic for not committing suicide or leaning on nihilism? For moving forward?

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>>9709665
Probably not. I've thought of it this way.

Back when Katrina hit, there was some fundamentalists who claimed that it was god's punishment for gay marriage and gay sex. When i heard that, my thinking was that it must be wonderful to live in their world, and I don't mean that ironically or sarcastically.

No. Their life has meaning. Their choices, and the choices of everyone around them are imbued with tremendous significance.Where you stick your dick has an effect on the fucking weather. Can you imagine in a world-view in which you think so highly of your choices? Maybe you can, but you don't live in that world, and you never will live in that world. You live in the world of pic related, and your actions are without significance. Ultimately, your worldview is probably more likely to be true than the fundamentalist's world, but you're no better off for it.

The easy answer in spite of all that, if you want to find contentment, is to embed yourself within some kind of web of social relations in such a way that you matter to those to whom you're connected to. In other words, have your actions, or your inactions matter to other people, and soon enough you'll start to FEEL that your choices are meaningful, regardless of whether there's a fact about them being meaningful, and regardless of what you THINK about them being meanigful, as well. Ultimately, you want to FEEL content, and to FEEL that life is meaningful. Nobody really gives a fuck about KNOWING that life is meaningful or not.

>>9709676
Not mine, although they have recently implemented this rule where if you go above 10 years without a PhD, you start losing the credits you have earned, and so you have to retake those coursework classes you first took.

>>9709679
Get a PhD only if you've first determined that you need it to get at wherever it is you want to go. Don't do it because you want to prolong your adolescence, and because you don't know what to do with your life, like I and most others in my program.

>>9709727
how do you see a PhD for someone who don't know what they want to do (so don't necessarily need it for their future), but want to continue the path of learning?
Like I really like learning and being in an academic setting and learning that way, but don't know what I want to do for a career. Is a PhD a good idea then?

Also how different are Graduate classes vs undergrad classes?

>>9709642
I'd be interested in some specific stories about your interactions with analytic philosophers and grad students

Also, at any point did you doubt that you made the right choice studying Nietzsche rather than something else, something analytic?

How many phd candidates are drug addicts/alcoholics due to unfulfillment, stress and disappointment?

>>9709687
I pursued a PhD because I'm a sperglord who didn't know what else to do with his life, and also because I could play that game well (papers, arguments, research, etc). There was no giant philosophy factory waiting for me after I made the mistake of getting a BA in it, so I went onto the next thing.

On some level I think it's a mistake, but when I think of it in a different way, it's not. Let me put it this way. I put this thought experiment to my students.

I tell them this. Suppose Bill Gates or whoever the fuck offered you 1 billion dollars in exchange for you eliminating all memories of whatever it is that you specialized in in college. Would you do it. Chances are if people specialized in nursing, or computer science, or whatever the fuck, they would take that offer, because they became specialized to make money, even if they have a passion for whatever it is that they want to do.

If I was offered 1 Billion dollars to forget what I know of Plato, and Heraclitus, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoy and so no, I would honestly say I wouldn't take it. This "knowledge" I've acquired is part and parcel of who I am and it determines how I live, and so on. To forget that stuff means to become part of the unwashed masses, the hoy polloy, das man, to essentially die. And so, in this sense, it's all been worth it.

Yet, I'm getting old now. I'm starting a family. My parents are getting old. They need to be taken care of. I need money...and that makes me think I made a mistake.

THese are all things you need to take into consideration if you want to go for a PhD.

>>9709753
>Also, at any point did you doubt that you made the right choice studying Nietzsche rather than something else, something analytic?

why did my sides ever do to deserve this

Is your room clean?

>>9709744
>Also how different are Graduate classes vs undergrad classes?
Not him, but what subject?

I'm getting a Masters in English Lit. Is it a bad thing if I'm one year in and haven't started on my language requirement yet?

>>9709744
Life has many stages. You may not know what to do with your life at this point, and nobody may depend on you either, so you it makes sense. But soon enough you'll want a family, and as I've said before, your parents will need to be taken care of. Also, you'll grow tired of eating ramel all fucking day, fairly quickly.

I'd recommend living in "real life" for a while, before you enter into a PhD program. As I said before, you need to think of the PhD program as a segway into something else. In your head, it has to be FOR something...not a place to loitter around. The latter is a recipe for disaster, because you'll get into debt, and you might find that what you want to do doesn't need a PhD, or you might just run out of steam. I've seen it plenty of times.

Live in real life. Find out what you want to do before going into phd program. Go in it only if you know it to be necessary to get to where you want to go.

>>9709784
My masters was strictly limited to one year full time. Are you doing it part time?

>>9709755
asides from becoming a professor (which i know is very hard because of limited spots), how does one make a living with a PhD or even a BA in philosophy?

>>9709793
Yes. My university says as a part-time student I have like five years. I figure I'll just go hard on the language at some point in the next few semesters.

>>9709753
I went to an analytic undergrad program. I excelled at it--fun little sudoku argument games, but even more inconsequential than sudoku games as far as real world is concerned--but it wasn't what I thought philosophy was, and it certainly wasn't why I went into philosophy.

Analytic peeps are not wise. They are not the sort anyone would look up to, and look at for advice. In my experience they're halfway autists, and more often than not, complete scumbags you should not trust with anything. They wield logic around only to justify whatever bullshit vices they're unwilling to part with, and to rationalize shitty behaviors.

I have no doubts about studying Nietzsche. I've thoroughly drank the coolaid so to speak. I think the man is a genius, not of the same caliber as Plato, mind you, but for whatever reason, a better physician of culture, because I think he has both identified the illness that has befallen the west, and prescribed a remedy that actually works.

>>9709777
philosophy mostly, but i guess in general im just wondering

>>9709807
What is the remedy, O sage?

>>9709767
Yes, though I remain unsorted.

>>9709784
You might be able to get a pass by contacting a professor proficient in a language, and having him assign you some pages to translate within some time period.

What is your relationship with your dissertation adviser? Is he cool with you being a candidate for 7 years?

>>9709811
the pia fraus known as eternal return. It's not for you though, nor for any would be immigrant into that world-view.

>>9709820
err... how not what

>>9709820
He's not, but he's had his own problems. He doesn't give me much trouble, though, because frankly, I think he knows I know more about the subject than he does.

Maybe I'm a bit full of myself, though. Truth is he does a different Nietzsche than I do. I do more of a...literary criticism of Nietzsche type thing, and he does more of a traditional "philosophical" Nietzsche, i.e., looking at the arguments, the metaphysical underpinnings of N's thought, etc.

>>9709807
why are so many departments god damn analytic?

i just want some really good continental departments, or anyhting else asides from analytic

How do I tap undergraduate females as a graduate TA? I see them looking at me with dem eyes and dem smiles

>>9709820
>tfw scared to ask your advisor questions or email him

>>9709704
You should think of N as more of a psychologist, i.e., a doctor of the soul/psyche, than a traditional philosopher, i.e., someone who looks at concepts as abstract things divorced from minds and whatever motivations they may have for thinking them. His thinking is oriented towards ideas as symptoms of a pathos.

Having said that, a better question may be what does N think of those people who believe in Free will, or what does he think of those people who believe in determinism. What does it say about someone that they have to believe in freedom? Or that they have to believe in determinism. For an answer to this question, look at BGE 21.

>>9709754
I am not OP but I am a PhD and drug addiction due to stress, bad habits, and the neverending lure of that fucking carrot.

>>9709840
Because, as N would say, after the fall of religion as the sole monopoly on knowledge, in the battle between Science and Philosophy for this role, science won. As he says in BGE 204, "

"Science is thriving these days, its good conscience shines in its face; meanwhile whatever state recent philosophy has gradually sunk to, whatever is left of philosophy today, inspires mistrust and displeasure, if not ridicule and pity. A philosophy reduced to “epistemology,” which is really no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence; a philosophy that does not even get over the threshold and scrupulously denies itself the right of entry – that is a philosophy in its last gasps, an end, an agony, something to be pitied. How could such a philosophy – dominate?"

In order to remain relevant in light of science's definitive victory, philosophy has had to either pretend to be scientific, i.e., to scrutinize concepts in much the same way that science scrutinizes samples in a petri dish with certain pre-determined methods, or to relegate itself to the role of "handmaiden" of science, i.e., to clarifies some concepts for science, or defines some terms that science can't via it's own methods.

Analytic philosophy is just a job in the university. There's nothing good or useful about it. Schopie has a good short little essay on Philosophy in Universities about this, if you're interested.

>>9709841
try talking to them

>>9709841
Most TAs tap undergrads. Nothing wrong with it. This ain't high school. Females do it, too. Just don't do it while they're your students, and make sure it's not someone who might take your class in the future.


You don't want your balls in that vice.

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what are the links between N. + schoppenhauer and the hinduism + buddhism

>>9709876
are there still any good continental philo programs in the states or even world?


also are you pretty well read in every major philosopher to get to where you are or just kinda well read and then really well read on your thesis topic?

>>9709876
Good lord this post

Continental philosophy was a mistake

>>9709642
Is asian philosophy compatible with ideas of Nietzsche?

>>9709881
well, n was on schopie's dick for about a decade. his early works are heavily influenced by him. later on, N didn't see schopie as anything special...just one of plato's minions rehashing the same decadent world-view in modern garb.

as far as hinduism is concerned, n was somewhat of a fan of laws of manu, his caste system as a eugenics program, and that eugenics program as being in service of what he calls a "morality of breeding" which he thought was better than our morality, which he called a "morality of taming."

N was a fan of Plato's attempt to make philosophers king, and so he admired the hindu caste system which placed the Brahmans at the helm of society. Look at bge 61-62 for some stuff on this.

Apart from that, what comes to mind is the idea of eternal return in hinduism. it's not of the same, but by possessing such a cosmology and not leaving a way out of this circle speaks loads to their strength and love of life for him. Buddhists, on the other hand, for him, are his antipodes. They recognized eternal return, but elevated the man who could escape from such a circle as the highest and noblest human being, and you know, that's like the complete opposite of the highest and noblest human being for Nietzsche.

>>9709883
I'm alright when it comes to a lot of philosophers. I've had several courses on stuff other than what i specialize in, but I'm not proficient in anything but Nietzsche, and Plato to a lesser degree.

>>9709902
I don't think radical individualism is really a thing in asian philosophy

>>9709902
it depends on what you have in mind. buddhism is certainly not. see >>9709917


Nietzsche's fears for europe is that it would decline into such a sad state of affairs that it would embrace a kind of european buddhism. having said that, i must point out that N did say that buddhism is 100 times more honest and truthful than christianity, but that doesn't mean that their RESPONSE to their praiseworthy "beyond good and evil" understanding of the world, i.e., their ability to look at reality without a moral lens, was healthy or praiseworthy. in fact, they seek to escape life upon seeing it for what it is, and N does not think too highly of them for that reason.

>>9709642
Why do you want a phd in a useless field?

>>9709917
and what is your reaction to the eternal return?
what is the reaction of your adviser?

>>9709925
N was not an advocate of radical individualism. he saw it as a symptom of decadence, of fragmentation, of a culture that was dying...of the "atomic individual."

individuality was for him not an ideal for the unwashed masses. it was the unfortunate fate of a Promethean character, a "genius of the species," who creates a new world-view, who shapes the most "noble clay," viz., human beings. Someone like Moses, or Mohammed, Buddha, or Plato, Jesus, etc. These are necessarily solitary and suffering individuals, for him, but they are 1 in 4 trillion. Nietzsche loved these figures, and he thought of himself as one among them, but he should not be understood to be advocating that anyone can be one like them. That's ridiculous.

For N, there's those who create a new video game, complete with new world, and some kind of point system, and then there's those who play those games and try to win all the points or whatever. There's only a handful of such game creators, and they're great, and they're truly individuals. The great masses of men are merely players within such systems. They're "camels," so to speak. They load themselves up with whatever is heaviest WITHIN a game.

There's Lycurgus, the founder of Sparta. He is an individual, so to speak, and then there's Leonidas, one who plays and wins in Lycurgus' game.

Do you really think N wants recalcitrant clay? He absolutely despises democracies, anarchy, communism, libertarianism, and all such political systems that want nothing but, essentially, what he calls "the autonomous herd." See BGE 202.

>>9709755
>"the hoy polloy"
>the "the people"
>the the
>doesn't know greek but thinks he's not part of unwashed masses

Just being a dick, you seem cool.

>>9709785
Why do you constantly say that academia is not your "real life?" About this I am very curious.

>>9709935
my reaction is that i can't fathom it in much the same way and for much the same reason that i can't truly fathom my own death.

Have you read any famous secondary literature on Nietzsche? (Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Jaspers, etc.) If so, what did you think about it?

>>9709963
Yeah no shit loser, I didn't say anything you're disagreeing with. Don't read bullshit into my fucking post as an excuse to vomit a bunch of overwrought trash rhetoric on my goddam board.

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>>9710105

How do you decide which philosopher to focus on?

Another PhD candidate reporting in. In a Philosophy-related field.

>>9709754
PhD students really fall into two types, in my experience. There are the people who are just good at writing papers in undergrad, and who treat it like a job, and there are the people who are passionate about a subject and weird enough to want to study it at all costs. Both groups have relatively high rates of stress and all the things that go with that, but for different reasons.

The first group gets stressed because the work becomes unrewarding and tedious quickly, if you are treating it like a day job. Even if you're a workaholic grade-grubber, it just feels like a job after a while, and gets harder with each passing year for tedious, unchallenging reasons (endless grant applications are not your scholarly passion). Often, the kind of social life you have in grad school is fundamentally based around coping with this endless schedule of busywork, so it involves drinking and shallow partying.

It's easy to get into a spiral where you just want to have time to relax, so you do what you absolutely have to do and then you watch Netflix with your fat girlfriend for 3 days. But that traps you in grad school for longer, because you never finish your dissertation. Working on your dissertation isn't something you can pencil in time for, it's something you have to be at peak form for and raring to go. Then people have kids, because they still want to live a meaningful adult life despite being a 34 year old glorified intern, and they're fucked.

The second group is just nuts to begin with. Plenty of burnouts and depression cases who only went into it because normie life is horrific for them to begin with. The problem is, grad school is filled with normies and unimaginative jobbers from Group #1, and it's structured around assuming those people will treat it like a job for ten years. So even if you're in group #2, you're forced to do meaningless busywork shit for 5+ years, and the cocktail of inspiration and drive and depression that made you go to grad school in the first place has a lot of opportunities to sputter out, or terminate in a drug problem, or whatever.

Grad school is full of a lot of busted normies and a lot of busted non-normies.

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Do you have any thoughts or experiences with the work of Max Stirner?

Why don't you go into the industry instead? Sure, it may not be as sexy but those seven figures are worth it, I'd say.

Why do professors insist on overexposing Nietzsche?

>>9710742
The same reason Mishima gets a hard on from St. Sebastian. He epitomizes the mad intellectual who went crazy from going too near the "truth" (whatever that is lmao).

>>9710335
wow that sounds horrible.

how about the people that break through all of that? what type of people are they and what do they do in school to achieve that?

>>9710335
Wat

Are most PhD students really normies? Is this just restricted to philosophy or all around?

>>9710335
This is hilariously optimistic, you didn't even mention whoring yourself out both figuratively and literally at every opportunity.

>>9710854
op here. in my experience, people who are grounded--which typically means people who are married and have kids--tend to do well in grad school. They treat grad school like a job, and the PhD as necessary for an actual job. They come to campus with their lunch box, with their reading done, sit through the seminar, and turn their paper in.

The professor tells them to read this author and to take their point into consideration, and they do that. They're told to take some sort of stand on some issue, and they do that.

They don't make the mistake that a lot of other grad students make, namely, they don't treat their dissertation as their magnum opus. They see it for what it is: something you have to write which your advisers will have to approve.

They don't drink, they don't party, they don't try to get laid, they don't get mixed up in the department drama, don't protest, don't try to change the world. They mingle for a couple of hours before or after classes, and you can see that even when they mingle, they're just trying to fish as many fun stories to bring home to their families. The center of gravity in their life is not the program, it's their home life.

They might have a passion for what they're studying, but their primary focus is their life outside of academia. Academia is a job, or a pathway to a job. Some people get up in the morning and go work in a factory. Others, the successful type of grad student and academic, gets up and goes to the department.

>>9709785
>"Segway"

It's "segue". I'm in a STEM PhD and even I know that.

>>9711610
that's actually good life advice

>>9711610
>the PhD as necessary for an actual job
>Academia is a job, or a pathway to a job
Then, after finishing their postdoc reality kicks in; your adjunct professorship barely pays rent, you can't afford that avocado toast any more, dread is really starting to eat you up now, the university just made a entire department redundant because administration redirected their funding to the gender studies department, your teaching at a party college and the guy your competing with for tenure graduated from Harvard, is Evergreen hiring?

>>9709704
[not OP]
Nietzsche does not believe in free will, but ultimately this does not matter considering that within the human frame of reference actions do not matter more or less even if we can't "really" control them. In this sense, the "responsibility" you fear is not in fact the expression of man's control over his own actions, but nonetheless the feeling of "responsibility" exists and has meaning. You won't avoid responsibility just because man doesn't "really" have the final decision in his actions.

Chapter 2 of Human All too Human elucidates this.

How have you coped with Rene Girard and Max Scheler's critiques of Nietzsche?

>>9709679
When I was in grad school the maths PhD people all got huge salaries working for banks afterwards, so I'd say do it.

>>9709674
>the one who succeeds at what Socrates had an opportunity for but failed (to be the first tragic philosopher)

How did Socrates fail at being a tragic philosopher? Surely he was tragic. His philosophy, though pure, ultimately killed him.

>>9711673
JUST

Please leave me in ignorance.

>>9709886

Not an argument, analcuck

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>>9709665
>will i ever find
no

>>9710105

Jesus christ this faggot is insecure

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>>9710335
>mfw #2 with enough of #1 that i can get by decently without real effort
>all effort i've put into busywork has been as a game and because i enjoy having things planned
>no fat girlfriend or normie friends so that means i can do whatever i want with my freetime
>carefully choose what i will enjoy in the offtime so that it aligns with my aims as a whole
>tfw you're not pushed or pushing

>>9712151
read birth of tragedy. for n, socrates killed tragedy with his faith in reason and disdain of the dionysian.

>>9709642
Who accepts a dissertation on Nietzsche these days, and who let's you write it for 7+ fucking years. Normally, you get in trouble after three, maximally four years.

>>9713221
look at courses offered in ivy league unis. look at any university worth its salt. chances are, they have a resident nietzschean, and they probably have a nietzsche seminar every year.

i don't think you understand how big nietzsche is nowadays.

>>9709642
Tell me about Nietzsche. I keep reading different things online about him. Some people say he's an atheist, basing it off his "God is dead" quote while others are saying he is a theist. Some say he was a nihilist while others say he went beyond that, and said you are free to create your own meaning after realizing that it's all bullshit. Others parrot quotes from his work in the name of Liberalism while others say the same for Conservatism. Even the nazis have used Nietzsche's works to promote their own agenda. I have come to the conclusion that none of these people had any idea what he was talking about, and neither do I. The only thing that I have gained by reading this thread was he was a eugenics sympathizer. Please, give it to me straight, what exactly did he stood for? What did he advocate? What did he condemn? What were his hopes for the human race? Please, summarize as best you can, and take as long as you need to answer.

>>9713316
how about reading, you idiot

>>9713316
Nietzsche was an advocate of philosophy, more so than a philosopher in the traditional sense. He was concerned with much of the same things Plato was concerned with, which is to say statesmanship, and the kind of thing statesmen are concerned with, namely what people think and how they think, and how one may give them something new to think in order to make them behave a certain way...THIS more so than whether particular ideas are true.

As I've mentioned before, N should not be read as holding or trying to advance positions with regard to the free will/determinism debate, or god's existence, or whatnot. He's first and foremost a psychologist (soul doctor) of sorts concerned with the pathos that is attracted to some kind of ideas and not others, and the way in which certain kinds of ideas--when they're bundled together to form a world-view--affect people, how they MOLD them, give them a character, a certain disposition towards the world and life.

Nietzsche advocated for life and those ideas which he thought life-affirming people are attracted to (when those ideas are bundled together to form a certain kind of world-view), and which if they became predominant would re-attune the world to possess a similar life-affirming virtue.

I'd keep going, but I'll leave it here and see where you might want to take it from here. I'm up until litecoin stabilizes and I figure out a good place to sell.

>>9713366
Is selling shitcoins the only way to make a living as a phil major?

>>9713378
yea, i also teach sometimes in between trading

>>9713392
Why not author some books that basically translate complex philosophical principles to normies to "change their lives" like to not be fat, unmotivated shits. The usual ham handed shit that people swallow up and pay heaps of cash for.

>>9713434
Was thinking about making a youtube vid series...basically one general Nietzsche and Plato stuff with regard to nihilism and their thoughts of how to overcome it, and another a detailed one about specific Nietzsche books, e.g., 10 minute videos for each one of Zarathustra's sections. That way audience can read a section and then watch my video for clarification. I don't know that anyone'd care though, and frankly, I'm afraid doing that kind of thing would get be blacklisted in academia.

>>9709902
not OP but I would say the ultimate aim of Taoist philosophy is attainment of the Ultimate Man and what neitzche would call hatred of the body. I think they are almost diametrically opposed tbqh

>>9713366
>concerned with the pathos that is attracted to some kind of ideas and not others, and the way in which certain kinds of ideas--when they're bundled together to form a world-view--affect people, how they MOLD them, give them a character, a certain disposition towards the world and life.
>advocated for life and those ideas which he thought life-affirming people are attracted to (when those ideas are bundled together to form a certain kind of world-view), and which if they became predominant would re-attune the world to possess a similar life-affirming virtue.
Please, explain in more detail.

>>9713456
You could do it anonymously, I think it's too specific to focus on N and Plato however, in this day and age and since we're essentially talking about a stream of income you kind of need to, dare I say, "dumb it down" for the general population into more or less, life lessons inspired by philosophy that are 2-5 minutes. By anonymously I mean you could, yourself or with an associate, create subtitled animations rather than have yourself giving a lecture. That's the sort of thing that could gain traction and social media and inevitably lead people to your channel for subscriptions.

>>9709642
I'm thinking about doing a PhD... I'm applying to a few programs of varying backgrounds (Literature, American Studies, Philosophy, etc.) At the same time, I'd also like to have a relationship with someone, get married and maybe have a kid or two... I'm also 29. Is this possible?

What do?

>>9713526
p1.

Ok, let me give you the example of Anaximander from Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

He says in that book that what's important when looking at philosophers of the past is their PERSONALITY. What they thought, the content of their thinking, is not really important, or if it is, it's only important in that it reveals something about the personality. This is N's starting point, and had been from the beginning of his career. This is how he begins a book about the "pre-Platonic philosophers."

Let's take the case of Anaximander. What does N say about him? He says that Ana began with an inexplicable distaste for suffering in the world, and he correctly saw that suffering is the result of change. Things decay and then they perish. All things do that. So, in Nietzsche's analysis, Ana sought to explain why things change, how it is that anything that changes, perishes, could have a right to live. How could it be just, in other words, for things to perish. Certainly, Ana thought, if something had a right to live, to be, it would not cease to be. Hence, he thereafter reasoned, things that perish must not have a right to be.

But why do they perish? What is it that strips them of their right to exist? Ana's answer: qualities. Things posses qualities, or rather are possessed by qualities for a while, then the qualities leave and other qualities inhere. So a fig might have the quality of being green, then of being brown, then black and rotten. The perishing of the fig is due to these qualities coming and going. Qualities--which make something a definitive thing, a thing with shape and color and extension and so on--are what strips things that exist of their right to be.

Yet, how could it be that anything at all still exists? Shouldn't all that is have perished long ago? Everything is certainly in a state of decay at the moment, being that everything seems to have a definitive shape...due to qualities. This tumor on the world which Ana understood as qualities should have certainly put an end to the world at some point in the past. So why are things with a definitive shape (due to possessing qualities) still around, if decaying?

His answer is that the world of becoming, the world of definitive things possessing qualities comes to be anew and passes away in cycles. But how can it come to be anew? Does the world perish into nothing and then from nothing is born again anew? No. There must be something which is eternal which gives birth to the temporal. This eternal thing, however, cannot possess that which makes the termporal be temporal, i.e., it must not possess any quality at all...hence, Ana called it the "Apeiron," which means the Indefinite.

>>9713526
p2.

The Apeiron has a right to be, and it is consequently eternal, and Ana reasons that the reasons it is eternal is because it must not posses that world-tumor known as qualities. Hence it does not change, either. How could it, if all change is explained in terms of qualities coming and going?

Thus, all that exists and perishes away deserves what's coming to it for having separated from the apeiron. To be indefinite is just, and to be torn apart from the indefinite, to thereby attain some qualities, to become a definite thing, is unjust. You pay for your injustice by suffering, by decaying, and eventually dying.

There are two worlds for Ana. The world of becoming, our world, the suffering world--the unjust world. And then there is the world of being, the world that IS, that does not change, the world that has a right to be--the just world.

---------------

Notice that in this telling of Anaximander, N's tries to explain how Ana coped with his attitude towards suffering. It was his attitude towards it--that there's something wrong with suffering--that spurred him on to create a whole world-view in order to justify, to make sense, of his initial reaction. His "blegh!" towards the suffering of the (changing) world becomes a reasoned thing, but his initial "blegh!" is responsible for his whole philosophy for Nietzsche.

Right after N says all this about Anaximander, he goes and tells the story of Heraclitus, because Heraclitus' initial reaction to the world of becoming--(and you should think of the world of becoming as a pre-theoretical perception of the world for N. You don't have to reason your way to understand that the world changes, and that there's suffering in this world that changes)--to suffering within that world is "Meh. It's fine." In other words, Heraclitus' initial tasting of the world found it fine. And so, N thinks, Heraclitus' psyche had no need to postulate and then reason for another, a second world, a better one than this.

No, Having found this world to his taste, Heraclitus goes on to construct a world-view in which this is the only world that exists, in which becoming is just, even passing away is just, in which everything that happens is just.

See what I'm talking about?! What's interesting to Nietzsche in these two cases (Ana and Heri) is how their pathos, their reaction to the world and to suffering within it, whether they say "yes" or "no" to the world initially, pre-philosophically, determines WHAT they say about the world philosophically. All that they say about the world is ultimately a perspective for Nietzsche, a reading of an inkblot test. He doesn't take the content seriously, nor does he try to argue against or for whatever it is that the psyche of a philosopher has come up with in order to cope, or justify, its initial reaction to the world, to suffering within it.

>>9709642
Do you hate yourself? Why are you pursuing a useless degree?

You contribute absolutely nothing to mankind or society.

>>9714593
p3.

Note that for N all construction of a second world (in Ana, in Parmenides, in Plato, in all the religions, in Kant, etc., are symptoms of a weak constitution, one that cannot stomach this world and the suffering that comes with it.

This drive to postulate a better world can be more refined, and can construct a second world IN this world, as in the case of the socialist idiots, who postulate a perfectly just world in the future of this world, not outside of it.

>>9714612
Agreed.

>>9714648
Now, it's not just whether one postulates a second world, that singular idea, that is symptomatic of a weakling's constitution. There's also other ideas which become serve as foundations of that second world cosmology.

And so, for example, since weaklings tend to see the suffering in the world as a form of punishment, they may need to find people culpable for what they do, which means that they need to postulate free will. People are free, therefore guilty for what they do, and hence, their suffering is their punishment.

Free will in this Nietzschean analysis is not scrutinized as a concept, but as a pathology's coping mechanism.

>>9711610
Starting my PhD soon, gonna note down this comment.

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Not to distract away from a good thread with my blogpost but I'm looking for some advice.

I dropped out of high school due to a bad home life/bullying/emotional issues. After learning how to go outside and working a bit, I managed to slide into university through a bridging program. I fucked that up though, and got suspended for a year. I'm coming back this September to continue my first year at the age of 24.

Philosophy is my main passion and if all goes well, I intend on studying philosophy post grad. I wouldn't want to study phl unless it meant I would be continuing my education.

Alternatively, I could try to put my head down and work through a STEM degree. I'd finish at the undergrad level and get some finance-related job from there.

Do I have any real hope of making it to a phd candidacy, if I can barely make it through my first year? Should I try to pursue something else? Should I quit while i'm ahead?

>>9709642
Where do I start with Nietzsche? At The Birth of Tragedy and just read his works in order? I've read like ten of the Greek tragedies, lots of Plato, and Aristotle's NE, Poetics, and Physics.

>>9709642
how do you study gimme some tips

>>9716315
Dude, I failed my first year of community college. I failed every class. It wasn't until I was in a philosophy class that I had some purpose, something I wanted to do that I got my shit together.

It's definitely possible for you to make it, but I must warn you. You have to like research. You have to be naturally good at reasoning. You have to also make sure that you're not going into philosophy because you're seeking an identity for yourself, and you see philosophy as a nice coat on a rack somewhere which you think would look good on you. Lots of people pursue a career for that reason. Lots of people join the military because they crave the respect they see soldiers get. A handshake here, a beer there, a thank you for your service there. You'll run out of steam real quick if that's why you want it, because at some point you'll be comfortable with yourself, and you won't want that coat anymore, especially since you'll have to keep working to keep it on.

Here's what you should do. Take as many analytic classes as you can in undergrad. For all my hatred of analytic philosophy, I recognize it as indispensable for any beginner. Take some epistemology classes. Take critical thinking classes, then in your second year or later, take a symbolic logic class. Forget scholarship for the first year. Take logic classes.

>>9709784
Does your department actually take it seriously? I already spoke two languages, so they didn't make me do anything for the MA requirement, but they offered a lot of options for grad students who needed to meet the requirement. It was usually two semesters of "French Translation" that students would take, which basically consisted of translating 40 pages from French to English.

>>9709793
Lots of MA programs are two years. Mine was.

I just finished my MA actually, and I'm not sure what to do now. Mostly what I learned was that I'm not ready for any PhD program. I could probably get accepted somewhere with funding, but I don't have a plan for my dissertation yet, and completing the MA program left me less confident in my writing skills than when I began. I think mostly I just became more aware of the limitations of my own writing than anything.

It looks like I'll probably get a comfy non-profit job and start paying off my undergrad debt soon, but after I pay off my loans, I'm not really sure what I want to do. My girlfriend has two years left before she finishes her PhD, and we live together, so pragmatically I don't want to start a program before she finishes hers. There's only one university here, and I don't want to do my PhD in the same place as my MA. Ideally, if she gets a decent job in a larger city, I can do my PhD while she teaches somewhere, but that is a risky proposition. I do really enjoy reading and writing about reading, but grad school is stressful, and even with funding, the pay is shit, and the odds of getting a spot in any English or Comparative Literature department are abysmal.

A few questions sir. Anyone with higher degrees going out of academia with "good" jobs, with a philosophy degree that is. Why does philosophy get such a bad rep? Even among its students and professionals. You're quite articulate. Would you say you became a better thinker, writer and "debater" with philosophy? You said you wouldn't trade your skills for 1 billion dollars. Still you complain of a few aspects. Just in its nature? Whats your IQ? Ive seen statistics with philosophy students being top 3 when it comes to IQ across fields. Does it fit your experience?

>>9716435


I'm glad to hear that it's possible to fully recover from a failed year. I like to believe that I have at least some natural inclination towards analytic reasoning, so I think that part would come with relative ease. Symbolic logic is also a prerequisite for a phl major at my university, so I'm going to have to take it no matter what. I'm thinking of doing a 50/50 split of conty/anal courses, maybe I'll save the conty stuff for the end of my undergrad.

Also, thank you for the identity advice anon. I think at least partially I'm doing it for "nice coat" reasons. Despite that, I feel that my love for the subject has been slowly overtaking any kind of identity-based reasons for studying it, since I've been trying to read and engage with philosophy this time that i've been out of school. Hopefully this trend will continue.

>>9714671
not him but thanks for writing this out

Getting ready to apply for Law School and looking into a PhD program hopefully incorporating my studies in Political Science and Philosophy. I'm interested in getting some mentoring or at least thoughts from people in similar situations.

>>9716411
Read Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Pay attention to how he says one should read philosophers. Read Ecce Homo after that, and pay special attention to what he says he's doing, viz.,he's describing his personality in much the same way that he described the personality of the philosophers in PTAG. Then read Birth of Tragedy. Pay attention to what was lacking in Socrates, where he failed, because where and in what Socrates failed, Nietzsche thinks he succeeded...that is to say, as a cultural moment.

Think of culture as some kind of substance on a petri dish. There is a first movement of one molecule or whatver that takes on some form, and then the rest transforms and becomes like it, too.That is what philosophers are. They are a first transformation which then enable the rest of culture to become like them. A philosopher, for Nietzsche suffers the suffering present in a culture WITHIN himself, he then finds a solution to that suffering FOR himself. and then--and this is the most important part, presents himself, his character, his PERSONALITY, to culture. The philosopher, in effect, after having convalesced from the illness of his society, says ECCE HOMO, which means HERE IS THE MAN. More precisely, he says this is the healthy man. Be like me.

It's what Socrates did, successfully, and after he died, Socrates became the model for a noble human being. All strove to be like him. Culture itself changed in such a way as to produce people like Socrates, instead of the old ideal (human being), found in Homer's works.

Read Twilight of the Idols after Birth of Tragedy, and more specifically the chapter titled "The Problem of Socrates." Then read The Gay Science, then Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals.

As you're doing this, you should be reading Plato very carefuly, specifically Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology.

>>9716426
Read fast, reread slow, reread again, this time break the text apart into sections in which you clarify what is said in each paragraph as well as what point the paragraph serves in the greater text. Summarize text, condense summary.

When I started out, I would spend--no joke--about 6 hours reading 12 page papers. Granted some of them were extremely dense (like Davidson), but the same holds for every philosopher. They're all extremely dense.

>>9717011
You sound like a committed and insightful scholar. I hope that you finish your dissertation someday.

>>9716588
1. No good job for philosophy grad degree apart from academia.
2. It gets a bad rep because as it stands, it's completely useless. In rare occasions when it's not useless, it's purpose is to energize some political movement, and these movements have a habit of being extremely harmful to society. Nietzsche calls philosophers (citing Epicurious' famous insult of Plato) "flatterers/sycophants of tyrants;" that is to say they provide a rationale for some kind of tyrant's rule and laws.
3. Absolutely. Philosophy will mold the clay, but there of course needs to be good clay for it to mold to begin with. Training in philosophy will sharpen your wits, and specifically it will give you a scale with which to judge good arguments. If you're somewhat reflective, you start using that internalized scale on the arguments you yourself construct. Not often.
4. I complain because I need money, and I need money because I have responsibilities...as a son, as a brother, a boyfriend, a cousin, etc. If I was alone in the world, I'd probably not care. Even an adjuncts pay in community colleges would suffice. I'd just do philosophy and fuck undergrad girls.
5. I don't know what my IQ is, but I do know that grad students in philosophy are very bright, if complete normies, and often times possessed and enlisted as soldiers in service of some kind of ideology.

>>9709642
>whose

who's

>>9717058
whores

>>9716622
You'll know its not about the coat when you can refrain from engaging in a dick measuring contest with people who bring up some philosophical topic. That is to say, when you can hear someone showing off their nice philosophy coat, and you find no urge in yourself to get on that walkway and compete with the motherfucker.

>>9717021
I should add that an additional nice step after the last I mentioned is to start lecturing (if only by and to yourself) on what you just read. Forcing yourself to say it out loud tends to have the effect of structuring your thoughts and for some reason forging long term memory. Its one thing to have what you learned in your head--your mind can pardon and overlook gaps in reasoning. But when you say it out loud, you're also listening to yourself and believe it or not, judging what is being said from an others perspective, and thus, the bar for your performance and for your knowledge is raised.

Holy shit that long? That's definitely higher than the median, unless there is some vast difference between the time it takes to complete a PhD in different fields.

The way you're speaking about your thesis it seems it's going to take even longer.

How does it feel to have failed?

>>9717143
Median is 7 years.

wow couldnt you have just cracked a coconut on your head one day and said you know what all this child splay and malarkey its just 2 + 2 better praxis open a bar or smt idgi what did you learn

>>9710769
in Nietzche's case the truth was a hard fat cock

>>9709642
What was Nietzsche's view on lyric poetry?

>>9717011
Going from that, do you think Nietzsche failed as a philosopher?

>>9709717
Not to be throwing buzzwords around, but this is the end point of postmodernism, isn't it?
>In the modern era we found the Truth
>But the Truth is only that we are small, small people whose decisions, actions, and very existences have no significance whatever in the universe
>Knowing the Truth doesn't make life any better
>Fuck it, who needs the truth?
So we arrive at where we are now, where the only truth that matters is the subjective truth.

^Is this about right?

>>9717539
The truth has been known forever, but there are some truths for philosophers, and others for the people. Every wise man has known this for centuries. Not to get all Straussian here, though he's right here, but the pia fraus has been an age old institution...up until the recent democratic age, and indeed in every democratic age. In Greece, too, the sophists were letting loose this truth, which is why Plato had to combat them. What do you make of Thrasymachus' position and the threat of what he was espousing, if not exactly this?

That the standards upon which civilization stands, for instance, are not themselves founded upon anything apart from the will of men, that is a philosopher's truth. If the people come to know this, then the losers in society will rebel. Always. Why, after all, would they accept that they fall short of standards (are losers in other words) which are not legitimate...whereby legitimate standards are only those found in the very fabric of reality, or handed down from up above or from beyond. Plato's noble lie was the realm of the forms, not merely the myth of the metals. You can guess what Moses' lie was, and even Homer and the poets made sure to preface all their poems by reminding the audience that it was a God speaking through them, and telling their stories.

See for example fat chicks rebelling at standards of beauty.

>>9717439
It should be obvious from my post from the fact that N titled his last book Ecce Homo that he did not think he failed. How it is that he thinks he succeeded...that is what my dissertation is about.

>>9717561
These sort of ideas I learned from Marx and Foucault and the stuff they said about ideology. But it makes sense that the ideas predate them; I guess in the end everything does >start with the Greeks.

>>9716670
This sounds like an interesting path and I wish you luck. Shame no one knows how to help you.

>>9714553
>and he correctly saw that suffering is the result of change.
this is normie talk.
suffering is the clinging to things which change, and no clinging = no suffering which is done by seeing that ''suffering is the clinging to things which change,''

>>9717539
Maybe truth has no "grounding" but one can decide that some truths are better than others. And crucially, maybe one has to decide it with others. Cultural positivism seems like it has more promise than subjective relativism.

>>9717561
>You can guess what Moses' lie was
It's interesting that Moses was portrayed as breaking the tablets. The common interpretation is that it was due to anger, but that seems to me to lead an audience to believe that the laws received possibly have contents lost in translation. Why portray the existence of two sets of laws, the first one being purportedly lost and threatening the legitimacy of the second set? It seems to me however an esoteric way of pointing to the truth but not outright stating it. To not include this fact would be to deceive both the future philosophers and the masses.

So if one were to modify the laws, one would not need to resort to delegitimizing the idea of divinely derived law, only to delegitimize the second set of tablets. One can always say that the modified laws are the original tablets. It is a rather clever truth-preserving balance. In the Quran Moses does not break the tablets, and the Quran is viewed as the literal word of God. Which lends credence to the idea that the removal of that detail is motivated by a wish to re-ground the "truth" at the expense of removing the future ability to modify it.

There are varying degrees of deception though and to stop at the "noble lie" would be to ignore a responsibility to transmit knowledge to future philosophers because it is folly to believe that a law can be valid for all eternity especially if it was something you "made up".

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>>9717095
>mfw I went from making fun of post-structuralism to being someone who thinks that the only continuity is that which arises from persistent discontinuities by imitating the speech patterns and accents of Frenchmen that I watched giving lectures on YouTube

This thread is budding with good advice. I have archived it for my own future reference. Here's the link for anyone else who wants it.
>https://archive.fo/PZJuy

Thanks OP!

>>9709642
>I'm a PhD candidate whose been at it for like 7 years now.

Kill yourself. 7 years as PhD - your professor is either loser or wants to strangle you.

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Tell me about Nietzche and Infinite recursion. Like what the fuck was he on about?

Was he just saying that you should live your life as if it is the life you'll be living for eternity or was there some grander metaphysical thing he was going for?

>>9710335
>Grad school is full of a lot of busted normies...

This was the most unpleasant surprise for me. I hated high school, loved college, hated the work force, and I hate graduate school. I thought college was what higher ed was like and that high school was the aberration. Nope, I just had an unusually good undergrad experience. Otherwise, school is school and it doesn't matter if the arbitrary authority figure who despises you is Principal Douchebag or the dean of studies.

I went to grad school because nothing ever made me happy besides Plato and Nietzsche and I hated work. Turns out that the modern university system is full of normies who work on philosophy or literature instead of sales reports or whatever. In some ways I miss the working world, because at least that wasn't personal (you weren't expected to LOVE it, just to do it.) And at least real employers will pay you in real money and not poverty-level stipend + feels (mostly feels). I kind of wish I had stayed at my first job that I hated but got really good at really quickly.

Also, I hate all my classmates. Even the ones I like. Maybe them most of all.

>>9718913
Shit. Now I have to worry about how I word things in my dissertation, lest committee members are led here.

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>>9710097
Bump for answer if OP is still here.

>>9714195
Yes, as I've said before, I think you might actually be in a better position to succeed in grad school than a green 23 year old who still has something to prove. If you can put aside most childish things, and focus on your studies and your family, you'll find that the two balance and complement eachother very well.

On some level, I think academia is made for that type of person, the one who treats it as a job.

>>9717221
Answer that, OP.

I'm studying for a physics phd. It's nice to have a mix between the science/programming of my day job and being able to watch films/read after work. It's also an ego boost to be the most cultured (in literary terms) among my peers.

Having said that, I do sometimes feel wistful over the idea that I might have done a philosophy/arts phd instead. Not for the content so much, but for the company and conversations. But we can't walk down every interesting road.

>>9709755
I've been meaning to learn more about Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics, do you have any recommendations?

>>9710335
>tfw thin girlfriend who is now an ex
>tfw mixed feels about this

>>9711573
Physics here, mostly normies yes. You only have high aspie concentrations at the uttermost elite institutions (Caltech) and even then it's over half normie I would say.

>>9711610
This is correct, in my experience. Treating it like a job means both working efficiently while you're at work (ie. not procrastinating) and not taking it home and letting the stress overtake you. Treat it like a job where you sometimes have to work late. You don't even have to have a family, just have some hobbies, even if it's just anime or baking or some shit.
Oh, and either work at the office or don't work. If I try working from home I both get nothing done and feel really stressed and guilty.

>>9712141
>300k starting

>>9713456
>That way audience can read a section and then watch my video for clarification. I don't know that anyone'd care though, and frankly, I'm afraid doing that kind of thing would get be blacklisted in academia.
Really? Can't speak for philosophy, but if you did that in my field (and it didn't interfere with your research) it would look pretty good on your CV.

>>9714553
>>9714593
>>9714648
>>9717011
Very interesting. Thanks, OP.

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>>9717561
I thought I'd post a section of Plato's Protagoras to make my point. Look at what Protagoras says, and since you haven't read the dialogue I'll tell to whom he says it. The latter is the real problem. He tells the truth among the wrong company. Present in the house of Callias you have young future nobles who will wield tremendous political power, and hence what they think about the nature of justice is very important. As we know from history, some of those guys became future tyrants, unruly and infamous individuals. Plato's subtle point is to say that the sophists are responsible for the 30 tyrants, not Socrates. He's writing history and driving the point that had these young nobles become Socrates' students instead of the sophists, things wouldn't have gone to shit.

I don't think Plato disagreed with what Protragoras said. He had a problem with the audience with whom he shared it. I've also included a passage from Plato's Laws in which he makes it clear that some things should not be shared with young ones, and it is left for us to infer that he means specifically young nobles who will grow up and wield political power. In The Laws a conversation takes place between old men, presumably old wise men, one of whom is a philosopher, and the other is a future law-giver. It's proper to have an honest conversation in that setting, but not in the Republic nor in Protagoras, because there you have future rulers...and they need to believe in justice, not nihilistic shit like what Thrasymachus tells them, viz., that justice is whatever the powerful say it is.

>>9709642
What do you think is the best reading order of Nietzsche's work without any prior reading of his?

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>>9719246
>I've been meaning to learn more about Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics, do you have any recommendations?
Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is pretty good, but barring that, I'd reccomend pic related. It's got very good commentary in the back and goes into the ambiguities in the original Greek which help to better understand the text.

>>9717095
Human, All Too Human, #333 (Vol I)
"The danger in our own voice. - Sometimes in the course of conversation the sound of our own voice disconcerts us and misleads us into making assertions which in no way correspond to our opinions."

analytical philosophy is the way to clarify vague intuitions and articulate them in satisfying ways which is why you like n in the first place

>>9717561
It seems the progression of philosophical thought has (or is about to) come full circle.

>>9717011
Thanks, best of luck in your studies mate

>>9710335
Any tips for the busted nutter? The madman who just has to study literature?

These graduate studies threads are always very informative.

I miss grad school. I liked the work and the environment. Even though my PhD was essentially a waste of time.

>>9719246
I'm a physics undergrad who hopes to have a life and outlook exactly like yours in a couple years. Came to the same conclusions about picking philosophy or art instead too. Hello anon

>>9709883

Stony Brook University

>>9722644
Hi anon! Best of luck in your journey. It honestly wasn't an easy choice to make. Threads like these both confirm I made the right choice and make me regret it. I don't want to be poor and stuck in a PhD for 7+ years and I like science. On the other hand, I can't really talk philosophy or lit with my colleagues. My plan is to move to a bigger city after grad school, maybe square the circle that way.

No pressure obvs, but if you do want to correspond my email's in the field.

>>9723444
Whoops, forgot it.

>>9719246
>Having said that, I do sometimes feel wistful over the idea that I might have done a philosophy/arts phd instead. Not for the content so much, but for the company and conversations. But we can't walk down every interesting road.

I'm a physics undergrad, and like you, I could easily have enjoyed a philosophy degree. Fortunately for my second year I lived with a bunch of extremely passionate English students, and a philosophy tutor happened to take an interest in me, so discussion was easy to come by. My classmates though? I'm sure they don't even like physics. (Sometimes I don't either. First year was awful.)
I'm not sure how to continue my education though. On the one hand, four more years seems like a fuckton of drudgery. I could get lucky and land some interesting topics, I suppose. The dilemma is whether to go for a philosophy MSt or an MMathPhys. I just hope my intellectual life doesn't go downhill from here. I'm sure it won't, as long as I manage to stay in Oxford. God, I hope I got a 2:1 this year. I failed first year because of a massive metaphysical/existential crisis, which I fortunately managed to stop caring about. It sucks because realistically, unless I become a neet author/musician/artist, academia is the only thing that appeals to me.

>>9723485
>>9722644
>>9723444

what do you retain from epistemology for loving science this much?

>>9724209
a lot

>>9709717
Why should it matter how fuckhuge the observable universe is, if for all we know 99.9999999... percent of it are a barren wasteland? Whether you can justify the belief that your actions are significant doesn't depend on your ability to manipulate astronomical quantities of matter, it depends on your influence over conscious existence. We, and all other life that might exist somewhere out there are, if not the center, then at least the peak of the universe if only just in terms of pure information density and quality.

>>9713456

That actually sounds really cool. There's definitely a lot of people who would be interested in having a quick recap and a compare/contrast from someone who knows it really well.

Nietzsche is fundamentally a nihilist, and his life-affirming attitude is just that, an attitude. All the talks about vitality are moral statements derived from Nietzsche's preferences. After all, even he admits in Ecce Homo that he is, at its root, an essentially healthy person (and in the Geneaology he goes to great lenghts to make the reader skeptic of the usage of certain loaded words, "healthy" is one of them).
Basically every prescription Nietzsche gives is merely superficial, what really counts is the genealogical method, of which Nietzsche's writings are nothing more than an application. There is no epistemological ground in Nietzsche's thought, therefore he is a nihilist (for whatever belief you might have is considered in this framework as an illusion, not enough to give any foundation to our understanding and reality).

Anything wrong with this?

>>9725586
yeah, this part:
>There is no epistemological ground in Nietzsche's thought, therefore he is a nihilist

>>9725629
What's wrong with it? Nihilism does not imply pessimism.

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Do you agree with this view of Nietzsche?

>Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

>I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.

>Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost. And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.

G. K. Chesterton

>>9719445
ma boi

>>9726429
I mean, this is true of most philosophers they don't actually live their ideas at all.

>>9726429

Chesterton is a fucking dipshit - this is absolutely pathetic sentiment. What did Chesterton ever 'do'? And why is he betraying the craft of writing like this? I suspect he's just massively butthurt about Nietzsche. Not sure why Tolstoy draws his ire.

>>9727033
>I mean, this is true of most philosophers they don't actually live their ideas at all.
When I do that I become a hypocrite but when old dead men do it they are revered for it, bullshit I tell you.

>>9727202
Nietzsche was also in millitary right?I don't know why he says "for all we know, was afraid of a cow".

>>9719445
I don't think this is true at all. As a continentalfag who loves Wittgenstein, and a small few analytics (mostly philosophy of science types), the single most frustrating thing about analytics is that they THINK they're being really clear by doing what is actually the exact opposite of clarity. More specifically, they think that saying something "simple" (or "simply"), and then systematising that regularity, avoids misunderstanding. They don't realise that the more basic, "simple," a word is, the more opaque and mercurial it is.

This is unimaginably frustrating when you realise that the whole continental tradition has essentially (and rightly) been doing transcendental anthropology for 250 years, precisely to secure some foundation from which to speak about things, to overcome this problem. Granted, the proposed foundation usually ends up being a vague modality or attitude of "being toward being," at least they are self-conscious of the bewildering difficulty of "holding onto" being itself, and making it do what you want it to do. Hence all the focus on communication, dialogue, intersubjectivity, local lifeworlds, resisting the urge to hypostatise or perennialise concepts and rationalities, etc., etc., etc.

Analytics and their satellites tend to have absolutely no sense of this sort of philosophical grammar. Especially the workaday ones, the unremarkabe graduate students and such, who just want to pick up something like Sellars and start hammering away at practical, surface-level problems. I always wince when I hear someone say they study "philosophy of mind," and then list three or four English and American philosophers.

There are historical reasons for this, but they don't justify it. No amount of dislike for vulgar Hegelism can justify the naive epistemologies (not to even mention the political naivete) of the "realist," logicist philosophies that dominated from the 1890s to the 1960s. Everything since the '60s has been a slow recovery from that era, mostly as old British dudes die off.

Continental philosophy is obscurantist horseshit a lot of the time, but that's because a lot of its great hotbed moments had strongly shared philosophical registers, like psychoanalysis or post-Kantian jargon, that they wrongly assumed would stick around forever. That's a sin, but it's much less of a sin than the analytic tradition being close to 100% redundant pointless crap, because they can't take a fucking year in graduate school to check out what the Germans have been doing for six decades and realise "oh that completely restructures the terrain on which all of my most basic questions and presuppositions have been formed lol."

There's a reason that American philosophy, especially, has abandoned the insular British tradition and smuggled in a lot of German idealism or French theory. As soon as they started reading it, they realised it was simply better, for all its failings. Logic-heavy philosophy is a legacy holdover at this point.

>>9729070
>Posting your AP Philosophy fanfic on /lit/

>>9729070
Gee, it's almost like analytic and continental are vague and insufficient terms. I do agree with you anon, but the shitposting is worth it. My favorite posts are those trying to turn analytical philosophy into a redpilled anti-jew movement.

>>9728251
If you find his writing useful, read him. If not, don't. None of this is about you and how you want people to affirm your existence by noticing you.

>>9726429
fucking idiot wanking off about Joan of Arc

She was a teen girl turned into a symbol, and a tool, by politicians and military men. At best she was a figurehead. She was certainly no warrior. Of all the lies told about her, there's never even a suggestion that she ever wielded a sword in battle.

>>9729147
>Gee, it's almost like analytic and continental are vague and insufficient terms.
Is this what actual retards believe?

>>9726429
No.

But Nietzsche was definitely proud and pathetic, that's undeniable, he constantly lied about his academic and educational achievements despite being constantly spoonfed undeserved positions of authority and attention by his much more successful friends. The closest he ever came to practising what he preached was distancing himself from Wagner because he couldn't bed his wife.

>>9725586
>>9725767
So? You won't answer to this?

>>9725586
N does not care much for truth as fantasized by rationalists

>>9729942
people are predisposed to find the truth extremely satisfying, and n is a person