/lit/ - Literature

>>20426998
>last 3 books you read
A Biography of Nietzsche by Rudiger Safranski.
First four Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo).
The first volume of Werner Jaeger's Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.

>what are you reading right now?
Nothing.

>books you want to read next
Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.
William Guthrie's A History of Greek Philosophy.
I don't know what else. Maybe I should read these first. I want to start learning French and German soon, btw.

An ugly person walks up to an attractive person. "It is better for you than it is for me, for you are attractive," they say.

The attractive person snarls and says, "How dare you say that. You are unattractive. It is not for you to believe what is true, you must belittle attractiveness and create a new realm to prove yourself superior in."

Isn't it ironic that everyone who calls Nietzsche weak as an argument against his philosophy are themselves providing the penultimate Nietzschean view? When Nietzsche argues from the perspective that strength is obviously better, he's just being truthful, despite his weakness.

By attacking Nietzsche's weakness, what his opponents are legitimating his argument that falsehoods are better to believe than truths.

It's deeply ironic that the anti-truth philosopher is most truthful, and also manages to expose the vapid untruth of his interlocutors who care so much about the appearance of truth.

>All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship; it sighs 'if only' or knows 'there once was' and does nothing else. Within a historical culture philosophy possesses no rights if it wants to be more than a self-restrained knowing which leads to no action; if modern man had any courage or resolution at all, if he were not merely a subjective creature even in his enmities, he would banish philosophy; as it is, he contents himself with modestly concealing its nudity. One may think, write, print, speak, teach philosophy - to that point more or less everything is permitted; only in the realm of action, of so-called life, is it otherwise: there only one thing is ever permitted and everything else simply impossible: thus will historical culture have it. Are there still human beings, one then asks oneself, or perhaps only thinking-, writing- and speaking-machines?

Post based prescient tirades against the institutional NPC apparatuses

2/3

>In no other age have men ever treated the weaker sex with such respect as in our own—it is part of our democratic inclinations and basic taste, as is our irreverence for old age. Is it any wonder that this respect is already being abused? They want more; they are learning to make demands; they end by considering that modicum of respect almost irritating, preferring to compete, or even to battle for their rights: let's just say women are becoming shameless. And let us add at once that they are also becoming tasteless. They are forgetting how to fear men—but a woman who 'forgets how to fear' is abandoning her most womanly instincts. It is fair enough, even understandable enough if women dare to assert themselves when the fear-inducing elements in men (let's put it more definitively: when the man in men) is no longer desired or cultivated; what is harder to understand is that this is enough to result in—the degeneration of women. This is happening today; let's make no mistake about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military or aristocratic spirit, women are striving for the economic and legal independence of office clerks: 'Women as clerks' is written over the entrance-way to our developing modern society. While they are gaining these new rights, aiming to become 'master', and writing about women's 'progress' on their flags and banners, it is terribly clear that the opposite is happening: women are regressing.

>Ever since the French Revolution, women's influence in Europe has decreased to the same extent that their rights and ambitions have increased; and thus the 'emancipation of women', in so far as women themselves (and not only shallow males) are demanding and encouraging it, turns out to be a curious symptom of increasing weakness and dullness in the most womanly instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, which a truly womanly woman (who is always a clever woman) would have to be utterly ashamed of. To lose the scent for which battleground best leads to victory; to neglect the practice of her true defensive arts; to let herself get ahead of a man, perhaps even 'up to a book', where she had earlier been well behaved and subtly, cleverly humble; to work with virtuous audacity against man's belief in a fundamentally alien ideal, cloaked in the shape of woman, in some Eternal- and Necessary-Feminine; to disabuse men volubly and emphatically of the notion that women should be kept, provided for, protected, indulged like delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animals; to gather indignantly painstaking evidence of everything about the position of women in our own and earlier social orders that suggested the slave or bondman (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition for every higher culture, every heightening of culture)—what does all this mean, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminization?