Science topic
Nietzsche - Science topic
Explore the latest questions and answers in Nietzsche, and find Nietzsche experts.
Questions related to Nietzsche
What is your opinion about the possibility of your own immortality?
How do you perceive space-time?
"All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. " - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"I don't care if I'm remembered or not when I'm dead." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
For our immortality the most important is time of our life. Nothing else will be so for sure given to us like this time events and friends. Still experienced a new.
According to Nietzsche and modern physics. And what is your opinion about such possibility of your own immortality?
This question is continuation of my older one:
Research Proposal Archive of the 1st part of 5 year old RG discussion: Would y...
I submitted one book manuscript and am starting another. This time on Nietzsche's critique of ideology. Work title: Beyond Priest and Slave: Nietzsche's Psychological Critique of Ideology. I ask if anybody is aware of strong recent works in that area. Key terms would be Nietzsche-psychology, Nietzsche-subject, Nietzsche-Priest/Slave, Nietzsche-criticism of Ideology, Nietzsche-Political Criticism. I probably know the classics, but don't pretend to know the entire Nietzsche library. Pointing me towards relevant works would be much appreciated.
The unachieved desire for modernity: visions of Baudelaire, Freud, Nietzsche and Woolf.
I would like to direct my research on the use of memory or history to the development of the vision of modernity in these authors. And one way of doing this, from my perspective, is found in the aesthetics of the work of art. Modern art is the constant representation of an unfinished and unachieved desire for the making and practice of modernity. From the literary and philosophical-scientific work, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Woolf build knowledge about the modern, while in parallel, modern art is being developed. My question is: Is this possible? Is there an aesthetic of modernity, from the ideas of these thinkers, represented in the modern work of art?
"What is life?" question answered such;
Dostoevsky: "Hell"
Socrates: "Agony"
Nietzsche: "The Power"
Picasso: "Art"
Gandhi: "The War".
What is "Life" for you?
(1) Public (media) discourse is mostly an industry of manipulation, in which facts and valid arguments are ignored.
(2) Academic philosophy is a scholastic play with concepts, which is mostly not interesting and which is mostly useless.
(3) Poetry can be enlightening and inspiring, but it is difficult to tell what is poetry, and what is an arbitrary play with words, without a clear meaning.
(4) I tried to join philosophical reflection and poetry into a sort of "reflective poetry". I wrote some "poems in prose" (in my/Croatian language) but I am not quite happy with what I have produced.
Can you give me some advice in this regard? - Suggest me some book of "reflective poetry". The authors I love the most are Nietzsche (in "Zarathustra") and Tagore (in "Gitanjali).
Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil in 1886 calling for a review of concepts of good and evil. These he claims are moral based, looking back to Judaism, Christianity and even Socrates. I contend likewise that morals camouflage 'badness and bad deeds.'
It seems to be little important in the Brazilian tradition, but more important for the English speakers. How do you see this in the different traditions in Germany, France, etc?
I send you my article ("What is a fiction?") as soon as possible. I am also interested in the links between philosophy and psychoanalysis. See you soon, Gilles Bourlot
I currently work on MA thesis which discusses the influence of European existential thought (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre) on American literature. As an example I provide the novels of Ernest Hemingway where I will depict existential themes.
In the modern philosophical culture the concept of duty plays a dominant role in the ethics of Kant. Hence duty becomes specifically not only a lawful action of reason, but also an act undertaken in view and in accordance with that law. Thus there is a clear distinction between action compliant with the law and moral action or duty, i.e. action taken by the law, that is, apart from the natural inclinations and often in opposition with them. The ability to act for duty becomes the witness and expression of human freedom as "autonomy" or obedience to the inner law of reason.
Kant defines, in fact, a moral duty as independent (since it does not come from external sources) and categorical (valid in itself and not to the achievement of other purposes): any motivation or utilitarian purpose corrupts the moral act in its purity. He understands duty as freedom of a rational being who questions and obliges himself, thereby linking closely duty to the essence of morality.
At the end of the nineteenth century the concept of duty was subjected to harsh criticism. First, as part of a utilitarian morality, from Bentham, it has replaced the concept of duty with that of interest, and as a result the duties towards themselves or others have become acts in the name of an individual or social interest.
But the main attack came from Nietzsche, in whose pages the criticism of the idea of duty coincides with the exaltation of the superman, who imposes its morality of an hero and does not accept a preconceived ethical and universal order. To the morality of duty, Nietzsche replaces that of the will (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1892): the superman denies traditional and universal values and asserts his own freedom and the will of power, thus re-establishing a new state of innocence which initiates a New era.
In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant deals with duty and argues that morality must be based on something absolutely certain and firm: duty. Everyone perceives morality, safely and aware, as a duty. Man, endowed with reason, the one with reason, feels in front of certain situations of having to make a choice, to be followed by the moral behavior. Even the most wicked men, who still retain at least part of rationality, will feel having to pose the problem of moral choice, or how to behave. This is the moment that precedes any real moral action.
Morality is thus a matter of reason. Every rational being has morality, because he feels the duty and the need to choose. The duty has nothing to do with causality and determinism of the material world: it concerns only the sphere of morality.
But if morality is duty, then how will compulsion be reconciled with the absolute formal freedom of choice? The answer lies in the concept of autonomy. The morality of the rational being is such that he must obey a command (mandatory) that he has freely given (freedom), in accordance with his rational nature.
Man who performs a certain action according to the moral duty knows that, in so far as his decision can be explained naturally (also with psychological motivations), the real substance of his morality does not lie in this causal chain but in a free will that corresponds to the rational essence of his being.
Man, in short, is a 'being' belonging to two worlds: inasmuch is gifted with sensory capabilities, he belongs to the natural one, and therefore is subject to the phenomenal laws; as a rational creature, however, he belongs to what Kant calls the "intelligible" world or noumenon, that is, the world as it is in itself independently of our feelings or our cognitive ties, and therefore in it he is absolutely free (autonomous) , a freedom manifested in obedience to the moral law, to the '’categorical imperative".
The analytical philosopher Anscombe recognizes as empty and meaningless the various 'boxes' in which to enter her concepts of" obligation " " duty, " " right, " " wrong "(in a moral sense). According to her theory, in fact, the concepts of obligation and duty exist only as psychological survival, because they are based on a conception of ethics, grounded on the belief in a divine lawmaker, no longer existing. The concept of "moral duty" was intrinsically tied to a certain ethical conception that, by virtue of the beliefs and practices that characterized it, meant that it took on a special meaning, regulatory, and clearly intelligible.
The issue is that the "pseudo notion” of moral obligation, on the one hand, shares its characteristics with the correct concept which appears in legalistic conception of ethics, but at the same time does not qualify for the background, intended as a set of practices and thought, necessary for the intelligibility of a concept with these features. That of the concept of moral duty is a case where we transfer an expression from one context to another without affecting the use completely but at most some meaning, which is however insufficient to the intelligibility of the concept.
The categories are the attribution of a predicate to a subject. They are specifically supreme classes of every possible predicate, with which it is possible to order the whole reality.
For Aristotle, the categories are groups or primary genres which collect all the properties that may be the explanation of ‘being’. They are the predicaments of ‘being’, which refer to primary qualities (the immutable essences of objects), or secondary (the mishaps that may change).
The categories of Aristotle have an objective value, because they refer to concrete entities. Our judgments use them not only according to a relationship purely logical, typical of syllogism, but assembling them owing to the intuitive capacity to effectively grasp the relationship between the real objects. But beyond that, to each of the categories it relates a part of those semantic constructs of the discourse that have to do with the real world: for example, a name or a noun refers to the category of substance; the adjectives to quality, those indefinite to quantity, or to the relationship etc. It is therefore assumed that for Aristotle categories are a classification of the components which make a discourse.
Starting from the distinction between the objective level and the semantic one, that was not missed in Aristotle, who, however, would not know what to attribute to one and what to the other, Immanuel Kant admits that to judge, source of all objective discourse, is a 'multifaceted activity, which arises from the application of different categories or pure concepts, through which the intellect unifies multiple data from sensitive intuition.
These concepts, however, are transcendental, namely that they need starting data in order to activate, without which they would be empty: it's because of the sense organs that an object is "given," to us becoming a phenomenon; with categories then it is "thought".
Then, unlike Aristotle, for whom categories belonged to the ontological reality of ‘being’, the Kantian categories fit in to the intellect; that is, they become the ‘a priori’ functions, or means of working of our thought that frame reality according to its own preconceived scheme. They do not apply to reality in itself, but only to the phenomenon.
As in Aristotle the categories needed judgment to be used, then in Kant they require a supreme activity, of a thought in the process of being created, to exercise their unifying function of the manifold. The categories are the multiple facets of a prism which is called thought; they are unifying acts, but not yet active, only potentially activated.
This opens the question of the deduction of the categories, that is, how to justify the use we make of them: for example, is it legitimate to assign different categories to the same object?
This is the problem faced by Kant in the Transcendental Deduction of Critique of Pure Reason, to unify categories, finding a principle from which they can all derive. This principle will be found in the ‘I think’ or transcendental apperception.
Kant will be accused of having locked himself up in a subjectivism with no way out, given that his categories do not serve to know the reality as it is in itself, but only as it appears to us.
With Fichte they assume a different role: while Kant had intended to unify the multiple, for Fichte they assume the inverse aim of multiplying the uniqueness of the ‘I’, bringing it to divide and produce unconsciously the ‘non-I’. Thus the categories of the intellect have also a real or ontological value, albeit unconscious. The ‘thinking’ is to create, but only at the level of intellectual intuition.
In Hegel, instead, it is the same logic that becomes creative. The cognitive categories of Kant, which were merely "formal", become together "form and content": they are logical-ontological categories, determinations of the Idea as it proceeds dialectically. An object exists to the extent that it is rational, that is, only if it falls within a logical category.
For Nietzsche, finally, categories become the result of the evolution of the breed: their effectiveness would be given not by the ability to reflect what is true, but by the utility in aiding survival. Concepts taken and endorsed by ethological-philosophical studies of Konrad Lorenz, who defined the categories the 'apparatus image of the world. "
Nihilism theme is fundamental for understanding the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger. At the same time , the influence of nihilistic concepts in contemporary thought has become an undeniable aspect in the West in its cultural and political aspects . What is the extent of the influence of such works on aspects of the political history of the West in the first half of the twentieth century , especially in the distorted ownership of perspective works in the training of the Nazi - fascist thought. What the cultural phenomena that have , in their foundations influences of the seminal thoughts of Nietzsche and Heidegger ?
Nietzsche's Zaratustra introduced moral nihilism in Western Europe. His arguments were recuperated by ideologies that denied the achievements of the Enlightenment such as freedom and equality for all citizens. These virtues are symbols of human dignity for every man and woman. However advertisement reduces these human values to slogans urging citizens to consume and to put on their identity a normative set of substitute consumption goods. Is this after all the victory of Zaratustra's nihilism? (see attachment)
I'm seeking interpretations (hermeneutics, etc.) and insights into how we go about to understand and decipher the "meanings" of this sentence? Who are these "rope dancers"?
