Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 4 hours agoPhilosophy aside, the comment on LessWrong that said “Nietzsche is a great source of aphorisms, and may be able to trigger some Deep Thoughts in readers, but a lot of his writing seems more like a sort of performance art to me. At least on a superficial level, he’s much easier to read than Kant or Hegel, but that also means he does not even try to argue his point in a rigorous way”.
Meh. If rigor were the path to the truth, wouldn’t we have the found the One True Philosophy? At the end of the day, all that matters is if the philosophy vibes with you, which you can discover just as well from a comic book version of the philosophy as painstakingly deriving every point.
I think thinking you’re using your rational mind to determine the capital-T Truth is delusional.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
Yeah not so much that. It was kind of refreshing to read something where the author gives up on trying to preempt arguments against him early in the process of creating his work (exhausting, boring, and as time goes on inevitably futile).
I meant more that the prose is full of self-certain trueisms and has that superficiality to it. It doesn’t discount his points to me either, I’m often a vibes person myself. But it offloads a lot of the cognitive work of basically finishing his philosophy onto you as you’re reading it. I think that’s probably the deeper cause of most other problems people have with his philosophy, like how bad actors took and used it for nefarious shit. But, he was a lonely guy in a lot of pain who took to writing to manage it so that’s par for the course.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
For all the good it does you. The public will ruthlessly interpret your work however it wants; look at Broicism (neé Stoicism) or Christianity.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
Ooh, I have some opinions about Christianity’s potential to be used by bad actors. Honestly I feel pretty similar about it as I do Nietzsche but more like the architecture for doing evil has always been latent in the ideology for as long as it has existed sperate from Judaic and Gnostic faith.
I definitely would like to hear more about how exactly Broicism diverges from Stoicism though, if you have the time. You’re the first person I’ve heard say that it’s different.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
The term “broicism” is implicitly a critique. I don’t know much about the stoics, but I understand it has a bit more emotional complexity where as broicism is just machistic indifference repackaged. Here’s one article: trillmag.com/…/broicism-the-manospheres-obsession…
I think all monotheisms are toxic; not sure how you think Christianity and Judaism are different, architecturally speaking. It just cracks me up that Jesus explicitly talks about all the ways religion is misused (Good Samaritan, Pharisees, etc.), he lays it out and black and white, and it just gets ignored. Not to mention how its used to support hierarchy when smashing hierarchy is absolutely in the text; but it’s complicated because the appropriation of Jesus was well underway when the bible was decided on. I think if Jesus was able to self-publish his memoirs, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.