Nietzsche on the Pre-Platonic Philosophers
 

I'm reading Nietzsche's lectures on the Pre-Platonics. Good stuff. I like that he has the balls to question received history. He has compelling research that challenges the "sucession" of teacher to student, showing to be mere legend the idea that Thales taught Anaximander and Anaximander taught Anaximenes all the way down to Plato and Aristotle.

Pythagoras is an interesting character as well. I didn't know he'd started a religious cult... He was like L. Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith back in the day, but like if they were really into math...


Anybody read this?

Looks like no one's into Nietzsche, bummer.
He had a lot of good things to say, as did Pythagoras, but Pythagoras' follower's weren't allowed to eat beans, it was a sin.

Here's my Nietzsche impression...

THREAD IS DEAD.

Just kidding. I actually am really into a lot of his ideas, and definitely respect his brilliance and fortitude. I think the older I get the more I understand his work, it's deep and complex, just like individuals are, and I may not get everything he's trying to say but we as humans aren't meant to understand everything, either. Anyway, he's written things with a lot of meaning to me but discussions on him tend to get deep and insane, hence why no one else has replied.

...

Okay here's my philosopher impression...

"why?"

a degree in philosophy is something to hold dear while you are cleaning toilets.

...with your degree!

m1rr0r d4$h = 474r1???

¡67F0!

Me too, but the excess of that defines postmodern history's ever-decreasing circle of significance.

Really? I thought it was the obsessive self-referentiality and the refusal to speak unequivocally...

Besides, what has postmodernism got to do with anything? I was talking about the view of antiquity from the late 19th century. Postmodernism was a late 20th century thing that was in love with Nietzsche for sure, but that doesn't make him a postmodernist any more than the attention he got from Hitler makes him a Nazi.

Out of curiousity, is postmodernism even still the dominant paradigm in yr field? In architecture the two predominant modes in the 80s and 90s were a historicist postmodernism and deconstructivism (a mash-up of Derrida's ideas with 1920s Russian Constructivist aesthetics). But both faded away around the turn of the millenium and a sort of minimalist Neo-Modernism set in along with a corresponding counter interest in pre-industrial methods of construction - like Thoreau used at Walden for example - paralleling the Modernist/Craftsman dynamic of the turn of the last century in some ways.

The way Nietzsche describes Heraclitus, he seems like kind of a dick...

Wasn't he a Nazi?

Yeah, it was a slightly flippant point about postmodern history.

My background is in film and art, both of which currently seem to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with postmodernism right now. From what I see, they hold on to much of the language associated with it but feel a bit uncomfortable with the perceived emptiness of the postmodern 'project' itself. Everyone's looking for something new, especially as Derrida, Deleuze, et al have by now become a major part of the establishment in arts education.

No, he was not a Nazi

Not an actual Nazi but he had Nazi ideas that Hitler copied.

Surpassed and preceded.