/lit/ - Literature

Read his autobiography

>>20849086
You can go hours without bumping

>>17362507
He explains this in his autobiography Ecce Homo, which translates to "Why I am a Homo", expounding on his belief in The Gay Science.

>>12751834
>and then fading into madness once again

>The scholar who, in sooth, does little else than handle books---with the philologist of average attainments their number may amount to two hundred a day---ultimately forgets entirely and completely the capacity of thinking for himself. When he has not a book between his fingers he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus (a thought he has read),---finally all he does is to react. The scholar exhausts his whole strength in saying either "yes" or "no", to matter which has already been thought out, or in criticizing it---he is no longer capable of thought on his own account.
>In him the instinct of self defense decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly endowed, and free spirited natures, already "read to ruins" at thirty, and mere wax vestas that have to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks---or thoughts. To set to early in the morning, at the break of day, in all the fullness and dawn of one's strength, and to read a book---this I call positively vicious!
Well /lit/, was he right?

>>11436387
i saw this, but my brand of shitposting doesn't really seem to be required. the role of violence and sacrifice in religious tradition seems pretty much built into our DNA.

the more difficult question is not whether or not girard was right or wrong (protip: he was) but whether or not a reasonably/minimally violent civilization, but whether or not this can be achieved without a religious dimension in our thinking. and, of course, whether a world which slips into complete nihilism will not in the end necessitate precisely the kind of scapegoating he would have disdained.

the point is not to go full-blown jain monastic, but only to distinguish those forms of violence which obviously serve a cultural-symbolic function from those which are contingently necessary to survival. that imho is the real point and value of his work. premodern hunter-gatherer bands don't refute girard, and neither does a cop using a jiu-jitsu move to subdue a dangerous felon, or self-defense, or any number of other examples you might want to name. the question is more about the liturgical value of violence or sacrifice and the other psychological factors involved: attribution of shame, guilt, cosmic significance and so on. it's the ritualized inter-human violence that matters inasmuch as it serves cultural narratives, not a sort of infinite tail-chase about what metaphysically constitutes violence itself. fwiw.

his own ultimate goals and project are so minor they're virtually commonsensical, but this is what makes him an interesting thinker: he produced a concept.

An autobiography is the lowest possible form of art in literature, which makes it all the greater when a good, or even amazing one comes out.

Have you read this? It's probably my favorite. I'm not even a huge Nietzsche fan (I've read a lot of his stuff, incidentally), and I don't subscribe to a lot of his views. I just love the way this is written.