Nietzsche on...

[Matthaus Hetzenauer]

Originally Posted by Moose

New readers of Nietzsche might find it interesting to get into the "Apollo versus Dionysus" thing outside of Nietzsche's writings. He constantly references this concept, even when he is not referencing it by name. Puts things into greater perspective. I think it could be argued that most of his work, not all, revolves around this concept to some extent.

An absolutely essential part of this thinking, Moose, you're right. He developed the concept early on to describe man's two inner natures. The Apollian side of man is that which is more structured and rational. The Dionysian side is more or less the instinctive, "party animal" in us wherein we lose our sense of individuality and inhibitions, let our hair down and go with the flow. Nietzsche described Wagner's music as having just this "rapturous" effect on him. Anyway, as I'm a neophyte Nietzschean, this is how I would describe the concept in my own half-assed way; though it's hard for even the "experts" to get his ideas across to mere laymen with any sense of comprehension.

[Karl Radl]

Originally Posted by Matthias Hetzenauer

How's this then, Karl...

I'll take that as you conceding you don't have an evidence-based argument then as to be honest (as much as I like you) I am quite appalled at your post from someone who claims to follow and admire Nietzschian philosophy (which prizes merciless criticism above all things and repudiates subjective moralisms thrown as objective facts).

Oh well: I don't think there's anything more for me to contribute to this thread.

Servus for now.

[P.E.]

Originally Posted by Matthias Hetzenauer

An absolutely essential part of this thinking, Moose, you're right. He developed the concept early on to describe man's two inner natures. The Apollian side of man is that which is more structured and rational. The Dionysian side is more or less the instinctive, "party animal" in us wherein we lose our sense of individuality and inhibitions, let our hair down and go with the flow. Nietzsche described Wagner's music as having just this "rapturous" effect on him. Anyway, as I'm a neophyte Nietzschean, this is how I would describe the concept in my own half-assed way; though it's hard for even the "experts" to get his ideas across to mere laymen with any sense of comprehension.

I've often enjoyed seeing this Apollonian and Dionysian contrast. The first place I saw it, ironically, was Rand's Atlas Shrugged (I still regret reading that tome, but at least I got a tan out of it, as I read it outside).

Everything in life seems optimal when it is treated cyclically. This 'cyclical' approach seems to be at the very core of what's in my signature here, what Klages said when identified Nietzsche's ultimate push for 'Orgiastics'. It is that cold / hot feeling, the feeling of the switch, which doesn't exist if you stay in one too long.

Why, in diet, I am very 'Apollonian' for the majority of the week on my own time. Rigid, strict, optimal. Then Dionysian when I cook well, intoxicating, surely not healthy if consumed 24/7/365 meals, but how great they are thanks to that period of build up, anticipation, they taste 100x better for that, and it seems cyclical dieting is also an optimal form (muscle confusion, and other mechanisms to prevent adaptation, but this isn't a physiological discussion).

Or even the act of sex. Well, I think any man knows that to be Dionysian all week, would leave him, well, weak. But to be so disciplined and organized, rigid and cold for a prolonged period of time, makes the high so much higher. Even the traditional social relations were exactly this: a prolonged period of properness and build-up, and then, well, let's just say it becomes Dionysian. But today? In this hook-up era? How good could it be if it turns into a xxx-movie dialogue within 48 hours of meeting (as is common today)?

But this is all Nietzsche once again. He as much as his predecessor spoke of this, and his mental 'trickery' from Genealogy of Morals when he said:

No more wanting, no more wishing. Avoid women, as much as possible.

And there were other parts, as that is a paraphrase.

Forgive the crassness here, but I should strike at a practical realization and sight of truth we see all around us: A.) The prominence of porn and sexual promiscuity, B.) The physical form and general weakness, tiredness, lackadaisical posture of the majority of people today.

Oh, the people in the 'is masturbation bad for you thread' are chastising me now, I can hear it! I'm sure those chronic 'wackers' are just veritable bolts of lightning!

And oh! I've inadvertently just made friends with the Christian ascetics! Well, I'll raise my glass!

[P.E.]

The spats and tiffs popping up in this thread are regrettable.

I see this happen more often than not within 'WN'.

It is the reason I stopped participating in the remainder of this site aside from this thread as of 24 hours ago, as I am utterly tired of what I increasingly see 'WN' in a practical sense by it's users as a drug, to have smoke blown up their ass just for being white, and no real desire in the past 50 years for it to move anything past that very purpose. Most discussions turn into infighting eventually, no core goals, no core principle of 'is it good for whites?'.

Why, it is the same even among my 'racist' white male family members, who just spat about 'niggers' in pure emotion, and then when you say 'what should happen? ', dare you go further, they go cold, and start fighting with you.

People want it both ways. They want group-organized power, but they don't want to unite under a principle of 'is it good for our group?' and agree on final conclusions. Today, people in 'Kwa' culture want to chastise what they call 'Niggers' and 'Jews', while they want to act like them in so many facets of their life (yes, I have those very people in my family, regrettably).

But I enjoy this thread and the people who have frequented it. To lose Mr. Radl's participation here is regrettable, as his will to operate on reason and fact is inspiring to say the least.

Then again, it seems to me that many people that go much past "fucking niggers", haven't maintained a heavy posting frequency on any such site very long. And not due to detecting a fallacy in their reason, but due to the lack of others who have reason.

[Matthaus Hetzenauer]

I myself am bowing out of this thread. As I really enjoyed it, I don't want to see it ruined. I would also like to apologize to Karl for going overboard in my last reply to him. Though I still maintain I'm in the right on that particular point, I had no cause to go to the extremes I did.

And with that, color me gone...

p.s. my sincere thanks to all those who participated.

EDIT: I've deleted offending post.

[P.E.]

I see no need for anyone to exit the thread, nor continue any pointless animus. Do as you all wish.

I'll post some thoughts that I've recently come across, that I've never seen, but I alluded to in a less succinct way than Nietzsche when I was in VNN Chat talking to a few people, and I had come to a general feeling of animus toward history, with how the holocaust and all of this morality is used against us by authority, and I made the too-rough-a-pill-to-swallow conclusion and statement when I said "history doesn't matter".

I could have said it better. Part of it was influenced by Henry Ford's famous "History is more or less bunk" quote, and the other famous words such as 'History is written by the victors'. In all of this, I stepped out of looking at history as a worthy part of academia for some 'sage capacity of knowledge' or purpose of nobility, or intellect, or whatever, and started to see it for what it was: a tool of morality used by the present authority to indoctrinate a legion of intellectual defenders, be they friend or foe. A tool of morality not quite different from the priests means.

My position was more or less to say this: How can you be sure of anything you read without concrete proof, when we certainly know WWII, which only happened so recently, was twisted with such venomous propaganda on both sides? How can you buy into the stories so far back before that, all the way to the Ancients? More importantly, how can you sacrifice the present and future of your people to this? Or more succinctly, why not fight to make the world ideal for your people, regardless of past failures in history that are rubbed in your face 24/7 on your 'history' channel and it's relentless demonizing of whites, making you feel weak for no good reason?

Of course, I received animus for this "history doesn't matter" statement. Some in chat said 'How can you say that, I'll quote Hitler now and say "The man with no sense of history is like a blind and deaf man"' (or whatever that quote was).

I had stopped the spat after that was said, as I knew it was developing into another spat, and I didn't want to turn that chat into precisely what was said in the following Nietzsche piece, where he said it much more succinctly in his thought.

And, at that time, I had not yet read this particular piece, 'Thoughts out of Season', which was one of Nietzsche's very early works, before most of his popular pieces. At this point, he still saw Schopenhauer and Wagner as god-like figures, who he built up in his head to be perfect, much like many men and women do early in courtship (we all like to build up the person we are entranced by as 'perfect', this is some hope for the 'ubermensch' in man run amok in our daily lives, until we always find out they are not, and see some weakness, and animus ensues as they've shattered our hopes, much like the story of modern courtship and marriage, huh!).

He said what I really meant to drive at in his 'Thoughts out of Season', which is to say that History serves no real purpose but to facilitate life and action, and the fact of the matter is that history right now is being used to thwart the life and action of our peoples, and facilitate a life of unprecedented thriving and growth for an alien peoples at the cost of our own prospering, on the land our fathers conquered, fought for, and built.

From 'Thoughts out of Season - Vol 2' (Nietzsche Complete Works, Vol 2):

PREFACE:

"I HATE everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity." These words of Goethe, like a sincere ceterum censeo, may well stand at the head of my thoughts on the worth and the worthlessness of history.

*brief pause after reading that, to snicker and groan "God damnit, this man thought just like I thought before I even read this"*

Oh, and let us pause for a brief moment of silence, to vomit at all of the modern dumb fucks who think they are intellectuals for having their 'Kindles' full of the current 'best sellers' (which is about as an accurate assessment of quality in leading position as a democracy, both ruled by the mob), Harry Potter books, Stephen King dogshit novels, etc.

They are as equally worthless as modern obese and pathetic desk-dwelling philosophy majors of Kwa universities who preach Nietzsche, followed by their all-too-predictable assessment of how he is 'impractical' (just like putting down the fucking donuts, cutting out the jerk jerk to e-porn, and quitting video games would be impractical too, yes?), or another 'Nietzsche fan', Edward Norton, in his 'Fight Club' movie commentary, where he said the movie is like Zarathustra, and then calls Nietzsche and the book 'impractical', which of course it is if you want to be a multimillion dollar Hollywood Jew-lackey while fucking Mexicans like Salma Hayek.

Could there be a bigger contrast in value between the voracious reader? One can be a genius with a practical ability to see ideal direction in life, another can be as completely vapid as the modern 'movie connoisseur'. Shit media is shit media.

continuing...

I will show in them why instruction that does not "quicken," knowledge that slackens the rein of activity, why in fact history, in Goethe's phrase, must be seriously "hated," as a costly and superfluous luxury of the understanding: for we are still in want of the necessaries of life, and the superfluous is an enemy to the necessary. We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements. In other words, we need it for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base action. We would serve history only so far as it serves life ; but to value its study beyond a certain point mutilates and degrades life: and this is a fact that certain marked symptoms of our time make it as necessary as it may be painful to bring to the test of experience.

Funny. Time and time again, it seems that even though thinkers (or any creative people) tend to evolve their creative product as they grow, there is always a handful of powerful striking gems to be found in their younger, more physiologically potent years.

Then again, Nietzsche was hopped up on narcotics in his later years, boosting him to the capacity of most youth, wasn't he?

P.S.: Extra amusing on that last quote, considering it almost sounds like Hitler's words in Mein Kampf, when he spoke of people who 'read book for book, but cannot sort the wheat from the chaff, with their heads full of pointless knowledge' (or however he said it, he was saying that he reads and absorbs only that which is useful, I don't have the quote from MK on hand).

[P.E.]

Furthermore, from 'Thoughts Out of Season - the Use and Abuse of History'. (a version freely available here: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/history.htm)

Truly enabling disgust at the current situation, and an understanding of the current mentality of just about everyone. This bears explanation for the progressive passivity of the west. From the growing beautifully and ruthless (for their people) ancients, all the way to the decaying present.

I'll make no in-depth assessment, as I do not have the time, but to simply say that when you look at the current situation in the west, it is indeed 'history' that has been a 'Prison Guard'.

And soon enough, 'Pallbearer'.

That is, the nauseating and weakening portrayal of history by those who are waving us down the mountain, and into our coffins, into the ground. That portrayal that they tweak ever so slightly to their agenda and shove it down the throats of the youth in modern academia of the west, and grant those very people the title of 'educated'.

Educated psychological machine gun operators.

If happiness or a reaching out for new happiness is in some sense or other what holds the living person onto life and pushes him forward into continued living, then perhaps no philosopher has more justification than the cynic. For the happiness of the beast, like that of the complete cynic, is the living proof of the rightness of cynicism. The smallest happiness, if only it is uninterrupted and makes one happy, is incomparably more happiness than the greatest which comes only as an episode, as a mood, so to speak, as an amazing interruption between nothing but boredom, desire, and deprivation. However, with the smallest and with the greatest happiness there is always one way in which happiness becomes happiness: through the ability to forget or, to express the matter in a more scholarly fashion, through the capacity, for as long as the happiness lasts, to sense things unhistorically. Anyone who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness and fear, will never know what happiness is, and, even worse, he will never do anything to make other people happy. Imagine the most extreme example, a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own being, no longer believes in himself, sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other, and loses himself in this stream of becoming. He will, like the true pupil of Heraclitus, finally hardly dare any more to lift his finger.* Forgetting belongs to all action, just as not only light but also darkness belong in the life of all organic things. A person who wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who had been forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination. Moreover, it is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is completely and utterly impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture.