Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Nietzsche

  • Philosophy between the Impersonal and the Personal

    Philosophy aspires to the impersonal truth but, like a rocket that fails to achieve escape velocity, it remains forever in orbit around the personal, tied to it, expressive of it.  This ineluctable tie-in to the personal works against philosophy's pursuit of the universal. And so, while in aspiration one, in execution philosophy is many, which…

  • The Consistent Nihilist

    The consistent nihilist will hold that it doesn't matter that nothing matters. He is Nietzsche's Last Man for whom nihilism ceases to be an issue.  This distinguishes him from the militant or 'evangelical' nihilist for whom it matters that nothing matters and who feels called to preach this truth and set people straight. It also…

  • Dark Nietzschean Thoughts

    The serious thinker is self-critical: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself.  He has the courage to entertain, which is not to say endorse, dark thoughts. He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line.…

  • Time’s Alchemy

    Nietzsche is more for his present admirers than he ever could have been for Rohde, Deussen, or Overbeck. Time transforms the merely superior into heroes. Some idols are born posthumously.

  • Nietzsche

    It is ironic that Nietzsche, an ascetic of sorts, died of the disease of a libertine.

  • Nietzsche, Truth, Power, and the Left

    According to Victor Davis Hanson, the following is one of the tenets of contemporary leftism as represented by the Democrat Party: Truth is not universal, but individualized. [Christine Blasey] Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth…

  • A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar

    On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication.  The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to…

  • The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

    The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states. The childless are…

  • On this Date in 1844

    Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844.  He died on 25 August 1900.  You must attend to him if you would understand our current spiritual/cultural situation. His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself. What makes it…

  • God, Truth, Reality Denial: A Response to Some Questions

    It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves.  The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue. A few questions about this idea: "As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no…

  • Social Constructivism, Denial of Reality, and the Role of Religion

    John Derbyshire gives the following as examples of reality denial: All but a very tiny proportion of human beings are biologically male (an X and a Y chromosome in the genome) or female (two X chromosomes). A person who is biologically of one sex but believes himself to be of the other is in the…

  • Salvation and the Value of Life

     Patrick Toner comments: . . . as I'm reading your post on Nietzsche, you make a mistaken claim about salvation's implications: namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value."   Professor Toner's criticism offers…

  • Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

    Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2)  I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from…

  • Nietzsche on Pyrrho: Sagacious Weariness, a Buddhist for Greece

    Will to Power #437 contains a marvellous discussion of Pyrrho of Elis.  A taste: A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things. (tr. Kaufmann) Years ago I noted…

  • Philosopher’s Calendar

    Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844.  He died on 25 August 1900.  His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself. Mark Anderson writes to tell me that his book, Zarathustra Stone, has been published. Related…