Philosafa (Vinit Srivastava)

Rangamahal temple, Ajaigarh, circa 11-12th century, Chandela dynasty.

Nietzsche wrote halfway between metaphor and fact. And if you don't understand that, you'll misread everything he ever said. Most philosophers write in one of two modes: they deal in pure concepts, or they traffic in images and stories. Nietzsche did neither. He operated in the charged territory between them. And according to J. P. Stern, that is the key to understanding him. Stern uses one of Nietzsche's most famous themes as his example: the 19th century's loss of religious faith. What Nietzsche called, with characteristic drama, the death of God. Here is how Nietzsche described what would follow: "Rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition, men will continue to seek their shattered God and for his sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among his ruins." Stern's point is that this passage is doing two things at once. Words like loneliness and condition are abstract, the vocabulary of philosophy and argument. But serpents in the ruins of a shattered God is pure image, vivid and almost mythological. Neither mode cancels out the other. They coexist in the same sentence, doing different work. It is a deliberate style. One that Stern argues is unique to Nietzsche and easy to misread if you come to him expecting conventional philosophy. If you take the metaphors literally, you get mysticism. If you strip them away and read only the concepts, you lose the emotional truth the images are carrying. The method only works if you hold both registers in mind simultaneously.

> No kids So? > No legacy Obviously false. You're talking about him 126 years after his death. > Atheist Oversimplification. Nietzsche was beyond being concerned with the reality or unreality of God. He had moved on to grappling with the cultural ramifications of God's death. > 120 IQ (at best) Well, first of all, 120 IQ is around the 91st percentile, so as an insult that is already embarrassingly stupid. “Wow, Nietzsche was only smarter than 9 out of 10 people.” Second of all, when exactly did you give Nietzsche an IQ test? Be real: Reducing Nietzsche to a made-up IQ number is just a cope for people too mentally flimsy to wrestle with his actual ideas. But if we were to entertain this silly idea of trying to retroactively assign an IQ score to Nietzsche, it would almost certainly be in excess of 120, which is why he was appointed to a professorship at a shockingly young age, possessed extraordinary command of language and abstraction, and produced work so conceptually disruptive that people are still arguing over it more than a century later. > Died poor A lot of history’s great minds died poor. That says a lot more about what societies reward than it does about what is valuable. > Hated Christianity This is truly the proof that you have not, despite your claims, read Nietzsche. Because if you had, you would know that Nietzsche fucking hated EVERYONE. > Rejected by women What does this even mean? He was rejected by a woman that we know of, but we have very little knowledge of his sex life beyond that. Even if he was rejected left and right, what does that have to do with fucking anything? He's a philosopher, dipshit. He's not running for prom king. > Encouraged Pride 1. So? 2. Did he? Because if you actually read him, he did not tell people to just feel good about themselves as they are like some modern day self-help guru. He demanded that higher human beings create themselves, discipline themselves, overcome themselves, and refuse the morality of the herd. Which is not really the same thing. --- You want to critique Nietzsche? Fine. Go ahead. I have my criticisms. But these criticisms are about as shallow as a puddle of piss. You basically just said "Nietzsche was a gaywad," and expected people to be impressed, as if you made some kind of actual argument. You didn't. You just said some out of pocket gibberish with no semblance of intellect and absolutely no indication that you're even passingly familiar with Nietzsche. You sound like a fucking moron.

Aquinas was a midwit whose entire body of scholasticism and rational proofs for God was something the Navya-Naiyayika logicians of the Udayana school had produced a few centuries before him. Catholic theology barely is as good as Nyaya, forget the crown jewel of Vedanta which is Advaita. Polytheism > Henotheism > Monotheism > Monism. Christians are a mix of the 1st and 3rd. Muslims are 3rd. None is remotely close to the truth of one-ness and non-duality.

Aquinas was a midwit whose entire body of scholasticism and rational proofs for God was something the Navya-Naiyayika logicians of the Udayana school had produced a few centuries before him. Catholic theology barely is as good as Nyaya, forget the crown jewel of Vedanta which is Advaita. Polytheism > Henotheism > Monotheism > Monism. Christians are a mix of the 1st and 3rd. Muslims are 3rd. None is remotely close to the truth of one-ness and non-duality.