read Nietzsche

just for a bit. this was more an impulse start then anything, otherwise I would have been done in a weekend.

I’ve got too much on my plate right now to carry on with this now. I will get back to him in time.

I’m a goodly portion into Zarathustra (or however it’s spelled) and quite frankly I’m not a huge fan of his thought processes.

I do like some of his thoughts on the work ethic and the desires of wealth, on the idea of what is required of humanity when god is assumed to be dead.

But at other times he seems to be filled with the same problems of his Last men, but is deluded into thinking he holds the wisdom of his overman.

He seems just as much to like the roll of the matyred figure as those he rails against.

I did find that while some of his descriptions didn’t seem to make any sense as far as anything in my life it did once I relised that they are exagerated charicatures of some of the people in my life. But on the whole there is a lot or slogging through things that I don’t really think are true or profound in anyway, in order to find the few semi-redeeming ideas.

I have gotten a couple hundred pages of reading in. Unfortunately a full tenth of it is the silly editor/compilors comments on the material. He is totally obsessed with Nietzsches writing and believes that the world has done a grave disservice to the work thus far.

So many pages of things like, You can not fully appriciate the play in the language in translation and it is made even worse by past translators taking his words literal when the meaning of…

I’d skip sections of it if in every third to tenth page there wasn’t one peice of valuble insight to the mindset and linguistic implications of what Nietzche was saying.

The actual writing of Nietzsche on the other hand I find less then awing, though thus far I have enjoyed two sections greatly for their their interesting thoughts and how they mirror and illustrate concept I’ve felt myself from time to time.

I’m interested to see if he has anymore gems like those.

I found a book at a local thrift shop, and after having his name come up so often in my philosophy group, I’ve decided that getting a basic jist of the man is not enough. So Now I intend to see the thoughts for myself and sythesise them into my own understanding of the man.

Kind of put this off & to start again because I want to take notes & because I want to focus on reading things related to what I might study next year instead. Sorry Nietzsche but I am ditching you for Jung for a while…

Properly started reading Beyond Good & Evil. Well, I’m still in the translator’s introduction section but I will be reading more tonight on my way home on the train. Looking forward to it!

This was on the side of the 43 things page:

“What was silent in the father speaks in the son.”
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Well I don’t know what that means exactly but perhaps in context in makes more sense. I’m still looking forward to getting to read this.

Between the two of them, they’re eating up all of my time. I’m enjoying every bit of it though :)
So far, I’m halfway through “what’s wrong with the world?” and just got started with “beyond good and evil” a couple of days ago.

For those of you interested, Project Gutenberg has some of their books available for download.

Happy reading!

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?” — Friedrich Nietzsche

i’ve been reading beyond good and evil, next i want to read thus spoke zarathustra. i’m markin git done though =) but it’ll be ongoing.