Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 13:21:01 +0530 From: "Chand B. Rangwani" <orpheus-AT-india.crosswinds.net> Subject: Nietzsche is Bunk - II The guys I am addressing to on this list already don't believe in god and fake morality. Nz has taught us well. So most of us are already halfway towards greatness. So Christanity is bunk and morality is bunk and so is humanity and love for a woman. The guy who works 9-7 cleaning drains is a camel, and because we have brains and an amoral freedom, we shall rule the world. But like someone said, if all of us were philosophers there would be no one to clean the drains and we'd all die of cholera. Nz does well to give us a tabula rasa, but what next? What makes for greatness: "The goal of humanity lies in its highest exemplar". We decide for ourselves what makes a human. Whereas the entire contemporary mass of "soul-dead" accountants and lawyers and drain-cleaners are perfectly confident about what makes for a human, we seek to differ, intellectualise and often disseminate our our own gut emotions and seek for a higher being, little realising how much we are bound by the exigencies of our type. Isn't Nz'ean individuality - far from being a celebration, merely an apology for the fact that we are all too alike to be comfortable with our king-sized egos? Listen guys, I know of a clerk who hasn't read Nz or anything, can't speak English, and yet has thoughts far more intense than Nz. Honest. Think, what if Kafka didn't write? Step back and witness - the quest of the sons of Zarathustra for greatness is an emotional ploy, a yearning for numinosity - we seek to sink into a deep passion that, like Nz, we cannot assert in the real world. And the proudest will also be the humblest (and also neurotic) - not because of some lofty Nz'ean theory of containing contradictions - but simply because such greatness is a house of cards - a fragile, limnal escape from reality. Read any Nz biography and see him as a person perpetually running away. Nz was a schizophrenic who intellectually proved he was God, showed all pathological symptoms of schizophrenia just prior to his break with Wagner, and glorified his own split personality in theory. "He claimed that his mind and feelings were controlled by others. Refused to read any books for years at a time claiming the authors were trying to put their thoughts into his head." (Al Siebert) Nz was clever, like most schizos, but he was still nuts. So persuasive was he that I have even come across one Nz follower writing a thesis that schizophrenia is an evolutionary leap for mankind! I know of no religionist or true ironical aesthete who prescribes to the view that all has been, unlike what Nz had asserted about their type. In fact, it is only the Nz'eans and later existentialists who assert the view. Eternal recurrence, even if one interprets it metaphorically, (which is difficult, given the clearly literal langue in TSZ), is a lame attempt to inspire a motive for the cynic/realist. Nz said somewhere..."how much truth can a man incorporate into his life...that is his measure." But his own grasp of nothingness was erratic. His likes and loves too were fleeting. All has been. There is no exit. We can aspire to nothing higher than mere renunciation. Like Schopenhauer I too will not shirk from sustained pessimism just because it's a dirty word. What to do? Get drunk, watch more TV, play rock'n'roll really loud, perhaps even fall in love. --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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