babyfinland posted:

shennong posted:

Myfanwy posted:

shennong posted:

Myfanwy posted:

finnish forest racing

rally?

Noo they race on little dirt/snow tracks with 500 dollar cars in the forest, and anyone can buy your car at any time for 500 dollars, so that if you work on your car and put a lot of money into it someone can just take it. So it encourages the development of driving skills in tons of people and that's why there are so many good finnish racecar drivers. And nascar derived from a cheap car racing tradition but became a terrible corporate monolith and my dad is still very upset about it

lol that sounds pretty amazing

ima be a ctf transethnical rally car drive.r ima demand my union subsidize my ethnicity reassignment surgery (need cheek implants, calf lengthening, blond hair) and rally car

gyrofry posted:

and that word is

doesn't wayne make these? that youtube account ended up featured on ellen degeneres's show lol

goons in high places

Christian Emden's _Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History_
is an ambitious, provocative work. It aims to provide a synthetic
reinterpretation of Nietzsche's intellectual itinerary during the
quarter century between his earliest university notebooks and the
texts produced immediately preceding his mental collapse. The kind of
philosophy that gradually emerges as distinctively Nietzschean, Emden
claims, is best described as historicist, as a historical or
historicizing investigation, critique, and reflection that seeks the
meaning of the forms of human existence in the temporally specific
acts and conditions of their historical emergence. Moreover, Emden
argues that a consistent central focus of this historical philosophy
is the political dimension of human experience. That concept includes
the collective or associational life of human beings as structured by
relations of domination and submission, exclusion and inclusion, and
as impelled through constant transformations by the struggle for
mastery and control. Finally, Emden suggests, the recognition that
Nietzsche's thought is a form of historical philosophy, with politics
as its core content, emerges most clearly if his texts are
interpreted as events or actions in the specific historical contexts
of their production. These contexts are best described as intense
public conversations concerning various dimensions of the historical
emergence of modern forms of collective identity in Germany during
Nietzsche's lifetime, during the formative years of the creation of
the modern German nation-state in the particular shape of Bismarck's
empire. In other words, Emden claims that Nietzsche's writings
themselves offer the most effective philosophical framework for their
analysis and interpretation.

Emden cautions that, in order to include Nietzsche as a participant
with a distinctive message within current conversations about the
politics of history, rather than as an echo chamber for our own
voices, or as merged with the voices of various post-Nietzschean
historical appropriators (fascists and authoritarian conservatives in
particular), we must first understand his works as contributions to
specific conversations. These conversations, we must remember, took
place in other times and places. Thinking with Nietzsche historically
allows us to encounter his voice as a distinctive voice speaking
outside of ourselves, and reveals the historically contingent and
specific nature of the assumptions that frame our conversations about
what it means to live historically.

Emden makes three major claims: First, Nietzsche is a historicist
philosopher. Second, the core content of his thinking is political.
Finally, the appropriate strategy for interpreting the meaning of
Nietzsche's texts so that they can intervene critically in our own
conversations is to take on the stance of the intellectual historian;
that is, to view them as a sequence of actions in constantly
changing, specific contexts. These contexts are, obviously,
interlocked and mutually re-enforcing. Emden does not address the
texts separately or "abstractly." Instead, he presents
chronologically organized chapters that roughly follow Nietzsche's
"becoming" as a thinker of the "politics of history" through a number
of historical stages or moments. To be sure, each individual claim is
also complex and contentious, directed at what Emden sees as
simplistic conventions that have defined Nietzsche's work in abstract
philosophical terms as ahistorical or even antihistorical. In this
manner, these concepts can speak to us from a privileged universal
space that we can appropriate as our own. Seen in this manner,
Nietzsche's ideas are focused primarily on the individual
psychological processes of overcoming the power of collectively
imposed norms or values, and thus naturalize and expand the Kantian
notion of individual autonomy. Together, this collective process is
positioned against and outside rather than strictly within its time.

Aside from commitment to the constant practice of historical
critique, what were the implications of defining the discourse of
history as genealogical analysis? In his last two chapters, Emden
tries to recuperate from Nietzsche's non-prophetic, non-aesthetic
texts (_Zarathustra _again makes no appearance here) a conception of
what kind of politics Nietzsche imagined for his self-reflective,
nomadic free spirits: those autonomous individuals daring enough to
live their lives as endless experiments and strong enough to assume
responsibility for the contingent values they affirmed as they lived
out endlessly transforming, self-imposed identities. Here, too, Emden
sees Nietzsche's experimental attempts to imagine a possible
historical politics for the sovereign individuals released into
freedom and responsibility by their genealogical critique of the
present as not _sui generis_, but rather as emerging from and through
a process of thinking that was more than self-reflection. Emden
excavates a new series of interlocutors engaged in the debate about
the post-Kantian construction of a historically changing and
biologically grounded human subjectivity whose cognitive categories
and moral norms evolved in experimental fashion through relations
with the various others that constituted its world. A particularly
intense debate occurred in Germany, especially during the 1880s,
about the implications of the identification of exclusive and
exclusionary racial, ethnic, and/or religious communities with the
essential form of all associational life. What kind of cultural
community could one imagine as a home for free spirits who rejected
all forms of collective identity, not just currently dominant,
historically specific forms? Nietzsche's conjectures about a European
polity "ruled" by free spirits who resisted integration into
exclusive identities and maintained the freedom of experimental value
creation, Emden argues, were part of an ongoing intellectual
discussion concerning the "idea" of Europe as a cosmopolitan humanist
culture that dated back to the Renaissance. These postulations were
deeply engaged in the intense and combative turn this discussion
experienced in the immediate context of the nationalist, racial
ideologies of the 1880s. Nietzsche's projections of possible
alternative forms of associational life to those dominating these
discussions about the historical legitimation of the emerging German
nation-state as a type of moral community--his conjectures about the
historical possibility of producing a political world for free
spirits--were themselves contingent products of the site and
situation of their production. Even the conception of an experimental
community of autonomous nomads, disciplined to take on the freedom
and responsibility of political realism, was open to genealogical
critique.

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-german&month=1002&week=a&msg=ESdc/QsntF0xIRbGlbxiHQ&user=&pw=

Edited by babyfinland (June 17, 2012 19:57:15)

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

The only value I find in nietzsche is that he was a really interesting writer bc he was batshit insane. Other than that his philosophy is mostly dumb as heck

completely ignorant statement.

babyfinland posted:

thats really stupid if thats true

welp, divergent opinions on an inherently subjective topic! color me surprised :p

WeedSmoker420 posted:

I'd say Nietzsche was very interested in the movements and changes of peoples on a large scale and as a whole, and that he was interested in politics. He refused citizenship in his government, rejected democracy, and so on.

I interpret the Ubermensch to be political as well since the idea was that humanity as a whole should be lifted up into something greater than mankind. Mankind must be improved upon and replaced. I think this quote from TSZ really sums that up:

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

"All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

He wanted this creation of a new species that was so different and so superior as to no longer be considered human to be the driving goal of humanity. I think this conflicts with his nihilistic ideas (no reason, no truth, blah blah) but it is still not a simply personal thing. To interpret it as such would require reading everything he wrote as purely metaphorical.

Yeah, it was in keeping with all the other driving philosophical voices of modernity

Jerthebear posted:

WeedSmoker420 posted:

Mankind must be improved upon and replaced.

I think it was more a matter of inevitability rather than necessity.

whats the difference