Lecture Notes - Exam Revision

So, it's that time of year again - exam revision. Hopefully these notes can help you understand Chris' lecture a bit better, or just give you some additional information that you might not have picked up during the lecture.

Here goes.

The first topic discussed; whether or not Nietzsche was a Nazi. Due to the fact that Nietzsche was already dead when Hitler and the Nazi movements were active, you could not really say that he was a Nazi.

But why is it then said that he was a Nazi?

Even though the Nazi movements didn't start until 30 years after Nietzsche died, anti semitism was already widely spread over Europe - Germany, Poland, Russia - but not necessarily in the form of hatred of Jews. Nietzsche does not like any kinds of religion, it's a bad thing, and he says that people needs to eradicate religion from their lives to become free. Due to him being such an enemy towards religious people and religion itself, plus his famous statement 'God is dead', Christians tend to say that Nietzsche is a Nazi - they don't like him, and he doesn't like them.

Nietzsche's main philosophies contain all the elements of (extreme) individualism, which can be easily found in his book 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (Humanity must be overcome!) where we find a Superman - some sort of übermensch and untermensch like in the German Nazi movements, which is thought to have been taken from Nietszche's philosophy, but not necessarily meant the same thing. Maybe Nietzsche was the total opposite to a Nazi by being a complete individual and not subsiding his own individual ideas... Maybe he is misunderstood by authoritarian organisations, the church and such as a Nazi?

Conclusion from Horrie was that there is no right or wrong, yes or no - judge for yourself. Was Nietzsche a Nazi?

Other famous people who Nietzsche referred to as super people/supermen were for example Da Vinci, Beethoven and Wagner.

More info about Nietzsche:

Mentally disorientated and unselfish

Zarathustra has once again spoken
God is dead - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Further on we discussed existentialism (1940s until early 1960s), especially from the point of view of Albert Camus and his novel 'the Stranger'. Existentialism is quite a tricky -ism to pin down. Existentialism kind of means that you live now, right now. Yesterday is history, and history is like fantasy, fiction. No one knows anything about the future and therefore it may not happen, it's not there. (Existence precedes essence - Jean Paul Sartre).

Like in the book, existentialists say there is no purpose of life, life is temporary, brief and it has no value cause you are going to die anyway. You might even take it one step further and consider suicide - but then it takes an effort to commit suicide and is it really worth that seeing as it doesn't mean anything whether you are alive or dead... cause everything is pointless. This is usually referred to as Existentialism Void.

In the book, our main character Meursault commits a crime, kills another person. Earlier on his mother has died. Even though both these actions should have affected Meursault's feelings, it didn't and because of this Meursault ended up in prison... (See previous blog)

From a journalistic point of view this book is written kind of in the way that we journalists are getting taught how to write news stories. Short, simple sentences where the subject is followed by the verb in a 'crunchy kind of bored observational way'.

More info about The Stranger and Albert Camus:

Emotionally Detached?

After this subject the discussion moved on to more contemporary, new journalism and focusing on how our history and past have come to shape today's style of journalism into something that is more comparable to a novel, a 'story' than a raw fact news piece. An article today, so called a story, is similar to a non-fiction novel. This intellectual trend seemed to move towards presenting news as fiction - even though the people in the stories are very much real. Tom Wolfe was one of the journalists that highlighted this so called new journalism more than many others, and in his work 'The New Journalism' he shows on different examples of new journalism, such as gonzo journalism, through an anthology of articles. Wolfe's big heroes that inspired him were among others Emile Zola and Charles Dickens, as he we can see traces of within the new journalism as Wolfe uses methods of 19th century literature.

New journalism focuses on being subjective whereas 'old' journalism smacks up the facts in a quite boring linear way of presenting the news - objective. With the movement from 'old' journalism, the storytelling went from being digetic (telling) to being mimetic (seeing). Gonzo and fly on the wall journalism is definitely related to the mimetic side of journalism, aka new journalism.

• Throughout this period existentialism (Camus) becomes the 'normal thing' in society and writing, the norm.


• Psychoanalysis (Freud, Century of the Self) becomes popular and its all about listening to people and analyse them. This is in clinical terms regarded as rubbish, but in literature - brilliant! With psychoanalysis you can get close to someone and make them open up to you by following them around (gonzo). News is news, the Freudian way of approaching news is the opposite.


• ME-generation! Everyone should be happy! This movement in New Journalism is a total individualism movement (Nietzsche). If it feels good - Do It! (Nike). All about self fulfilment, sexual freedom and pleasure - even if it leads to STDs or babies it doesn't matter, as long as it's a pleasure. Hippies, drugs...

Wilhelm Reich, extremist sexual freedom, mentions that you become physically ill if you don't have pleasure sex all the time.

More information on Wilhelm Reich:
Proper orgasms to the people!!

After this movement, something called the Vienna Circle followed and the followers of this listened to Moritz Schlick and they rejected all philosophy, such as metaphysics, nations, classes, abstractions and so on, and relied only on science. Their main point was, if you cannot verify a proposition individually - then you can't trust it, cause you cannot verify it. They would never say that something can not be true, instead they would say 'it could be true, but we can't verify it'. This is called the Verification Principle.

As for example in religion; Nietzsche said: 'God is dead'. The Verification Principle would not accept this cause they cannot verify what he is saying is true. Therefore, they stay open minded about God and decide not discuss it cause there is no answer- this statement cannot be tested and therefore not individually verified as right or wrong. The things that this movement discussed were only things that can be verified.

This sort of applies to journalism today as well. You need to be certain of something before you publish it for it to be a fact, you need to be able to verify every separate fact and make sure it is accurate. If not, that is if not able to verify that that certain something to be a fact, it is comment (bollocks) and therefore not mentionable for a journalist in a news piece as news is fact, not comment.

Verifiable = fact (such as spelling)
Non verifiable = comment (religion)

Religion, poetry, metaphysics and so on are all non verifiable propositions - therefore not discussed by the Vienna Circle. (Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by this group.)

Faults
Karl Popper died in the 1990s and was one of the biggest philosophers in the world. He was against this verification principle because he said that this verification principle cannot verify itself whether it is right or wrong - falsification principle. Popper destroyed the verificationists with this argument. He argued that things are only true if the opposite is also true. If you cannot do the opposite, the proposition cannot be true in itself.

According to this theory Freud, Marx and Hegel's philosophies were all destroyed due to not being able to verify their theories.

Last but not least we discussed John Maynard Keynes (1930s) and his approach on the economical climate. He rejects all economic theories of that time such as free market. Steinbeck claims that unemployment is impossible in a free market system. Today the situation is that the government gives benefit to unemployed people in society, therefore they won't go back to work - they will stay on benefits. Instead, get them working (even if it digging holes and then filling them back up) for them to get a salary and then being able to spend money and get a circle of economy flowing. "Capitalism produces nothing except destruction for themselves."

Cut wages + remove social spending = cures unemployment.

Even if your wages get cut you have to keep spending, cause when you keep spending the company will be able to keep their employers, and within time being able to emply even more people and eventually wages can go up again and things return to somewhat 'normal' - but if you start cutting your spendings the employees at that same company might have to go due to under spendings and not enough money in circulation. Therefore expand and spend your way out of trouble. (More information in Hayek's book Road to Serfdom.)

Emotionally detached?

As a human being you would normally feel sadness when your mum dies.

As a human being you would normally feel happiness and loved when someone is in love with you.

As a human being you would normally feel guilt when killing someone.

As a human being you would normally feel scared and depressed when in front of a court for a murder.

As a human being you would normally feel anger and unfairness when sentenced to death by decapitating in public.

Emotionally detached.

But Mersault does not feel these things. Mersault does not express any emotions. Mersault seems to have this protective layer surrounding him which keeps anything from harming him, or from pleasing him.

Even though the story, The Outsider; Albert Camus, is quite short, it took me quite some time to get through – mostly due to the depressive atmosphere that follows you page in and page out. Somehow I felt all these feelings that Mersault didn’t feel, and on and off I was filled with anger. I got so engrossed in the story that I even became angry with him for not feeling, for not expressing and for not being human.

Instead of describing his own feelings, Mersault tells us all about surroundings, details, people, basically everything that exists and happens around himself, but he never touches the subject himself. When he commits the murder – which is a revenge act – he does not regret it, because; “As an existentialist, he has no reason to regret what he does because it is done; regret is redundant.”

Existentialist’s, and Søren Kierkegaard (who is regarded the father of Existentialism), say that it’s up to each and everyone themselves to give a meaning to their own lives, and to live “that life passionately and sincerely” not being interrupted and wander astray even though many obstacles such as despair, alienation and boredom stands in its way. Mainly this way of thinking became in fashion after the Second World War when people wanted to stand for their own rights, claim that their opinions were the right ones and make sure that the human freedom and individuality would not get in the hands of a tyrant or similar kind of leader, as it did during this war when Hitler had the power. Nietzsche had similar thoughts and ideas before Kierkegaard but his concepts and theories were not really talked about until this period of time (after the wars), when he was already dead.

Existentialism is a very wide subject, lots of different theories within the concept as such. But this is all I'm gonna offer you today. Next - fascism.

Nietzsche - simples!

I have definitely not found Nietzsche easy bed time literature, and I cannot say that I have enjoyed reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But what I can say is that through this intense week when my life seem to have been circulating and focusing on Nietzsche, and nothing else, I have started to realise that I begin to understand his ways of thinking and philosophising, his way of connecting one element in life with another to reach his final ideas... But he is still one very complicated man. And no matter what, I'm sure he always will be.

But, thankfully, my tutor Chris Horrie has simplified Nietzsche and his works for us in his blog, and if you have tried to read my previous blog posts and still cannot understand nothing; do have a quick read on his blog.

Thanks Chris!

Mentally disorientated and unselfish

Nietzsche’s philosophy builds upon equality and people being unselfish and true to one another. He says that philosophers serves people’s superstitious ideas, and not the truth, which seems to annoy him a bit since the truth, for him, seems to be one of the most important building parts to get the society to work. I do agree with this, look at a relationship between man and women, a work place – boss and employee, a family – parents and kids; if the opposites in these relationships are not true to each other it will not work out in the long run and chaos will develop from something that should be a base in your life.

An action is good when it is unselfish. (p119)

Nietzsche’s theories criticise many parts of the human’s life and also the ways human beings choose to live their lives. He says, for example, that religion – Christianity – is something people use to comfort themselves, so he did not actually criticise Christ but the believers and the beliefs. He also criticised the different morals people seemed to base on an abstraction. Nietzsche was a person hard to please; he found negative angels too many aspects of society and his fellow citizens and their ways of believing and moralising their children. But in all honesty I agree with his theories, to some extent. Society is still today not perfect, and will never be, but I think that if higher authorities together with the citizens in their country could cooperate in a friendly, more equal (as in power etcetera) way, less people would probably suffer from less wealthy conditions and starvation – but on the other side of the coin, the wealthy people ruling and deciding over our nations, would probably lose out on quite a bit of their fortune and fame – and I am not sure they would be willing to do this... People with power and money are, in my opinion, far too greedy and selfish. As Nietzsche believes; human civilisation can destroy itself.

Towards the end of Nietzsche’s life, he suffered from mental illnesses, and he died in 1900. Many philosophers have unfortunately ended up suffering from mental problems, whether this is from the philosophy in itself or due to other reasons, I do not know – but I can imagine myself ending up mentally disturbed if I kept philosophising for too long. I better just stick to the facts and build up a boring life based on knowledge and existing facts that I can feel, touch, see and eat.

More information about Nietzsche, his life and his literature can be found here - do pay a visit, it is actually quite interesting and it makes things a bit easier to understand!

Zarathustra has once again spoken

Zarathustra lived on his own for ten years in the mountains where he listened to the trees and learnt the ways of the nature. When leaving to get back to the civilization again, he meets saints on the way and they recall who Zarathustra once was, and who he has changed to become during the years in exile. During this time Zarathustra came to believe in his own ‘God’, which he called Superman – as he did believe that God, as we know him from Christianity, is dead. But Superman is the purpose of the world, the meaning of life and the reason why we are all alive.

‘I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman’ (p45)

We follow Zarathustra’s journey as he travels from village to village to spread his ideas and theories about everything you can ever imagine – and a few of them does not make sense at all to me as they are very much expressed in a philosophical way, which to me equals confused and complicated. He expresses a lot of thoughts on how the body and the soul are not necessarily connected, instead the soul is just a separate part inside your body but the two of them do not cooperate in the way we might think they do. Further on, Zarathustra speaks of the Ego – the great contempt of man – and how it rules our Self through our different senses, through passion and joy, through love and hate and so on.

‘There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness’ (p68)

Zarathustra speaks of the state as the coldest of all cold monsters, and how it seems to turn everything into sickness and tragedy that it touches. He speaks about your neighbours as poisonous flies. He speaks of the filthiness that exists at the bottom of a man’s soul – because the only thing they seem to find satisfying here on earth is sex with a woman. He believes that a slave, a tyrant and neither a woman can be a man’s friend for the reasons that a slave cannot be a friend, a tyrant cannot have a friend and a woman can do nothing else than love, not be a friend.

‘If I wanted to shake this tree with my hands I should be unable to do it. But the wind, which we cannot see, torments it and bends it where it wishes. It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst’ (p69)

God is dead - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche abandoned religious believes at an early age, and replaced it with ‘freelancing philosophy’. His ideas were, as many philosophers, very complicated and revolved around common philosophical topics, such as whether the truth is actually discoverable, the different types of errors mankind goes through throughout their life and how they manage, or more likely not manage, to correct these errors. Nietzsche is a nihilist, just like Kierkegaard, which means that he believes that “life is without objective meaning, purpose or intrinsic value”. He was very fond of sexual relationships and over the years he seemed to have one too many humiliating affairs. Nietzsche explains fear as the feeling of abscence of power.

What is truth?

Meaning of life?

In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

Goethe once wrote an essay on Winckelmann, and this came to be kind of the motto of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "Zarathustra is the founder of of the ancient Persian religion" (p30) and his religion is basically built on conflicts between the Gods of good and light, and the Gods of darkness and evil. Even though the book is kind of loose with no real storyline as we are used to in novels written today, there is still something similar to a plot. Through the four different parts of this book his message about how man is something that must be overcome.

This is just a short summary of what the book is about, what I have managed to find out about it from reading the introduction, different reviews and blogs on the internet and also by talking and philosophising with friends about his ideas and work. I can't say I am more enlightened in the different topics being discussed in the book, but I do now have a better understanding of the various aspects of philosopy from a nihilists point of view - just like I got a wider understanding on architecture from reading From Bauhaus to Our House (see previous blog post) than I would have had about architecture if not reading it. The more time I spend reading works written by well known philosophers, the more knowledge I gain - but at the same time, I also seem to confuse myself even more, as new theories and ideas appear in my head.