ยป Vote Nietzsche
Simon sent me this campaign ad:
Quick summary of Kantianism:
- Everything you perceive is filtered through your senses.
- Good ethical rules apply in all circumstances.
- Stuff is pretty because you don’t get it.*
I’ll leave it to Alex to give similarly curt summaries of Nietzsche’s responses…
* I’m a little iffy on Kant’s aesthetics – can you tell?
Actually, I think I’ve only read enough to summarize Nietzsche’s ethics. I’m reading Tarantino and Philosophy right now and, strangely, just read an essay about deontological ethics and Kant.
I like the classical idea of ethics, that I’m sure is also Nietzschean, that we should judge people and not their actions. That’s maybe the most accessible way to state Nietzsche’s ethical position.
Without, that is, resorting to phrases like, “slave/master morality” and the “will to power”. But passing those pearls before laymen-swine, to use the biblical phrase, just makes you sound like a fascist lunatic.
Seriously, when someone asks you what Watchmen is “about” — answer carefully
Jack
21 Dec 07 at 11:07 am
Actually, in Watchmen you might be able to think of the various characters as philosophies personified:
The other characters, like the new Nite Owl, seem too wishy-washy to be direct personifications. I suppose you could argue that Nite Owl is going through the process of becoming a Nietzschean and that he fully realizes this philosophy in the final chapter. Indeed you can see this in his essay on ornithology — that raw analysis must not replace the poetry of birds, or in other words that Apollonian thought is incomplete without Dionysian. Nietzsche would approve.
But in the end, the final frame, in the editorial office of the right-wing paper, Moore shows us deep sympathy for Rorschach’s Manecheanism. Living without compromise turns out to be the highest ideal, and we judge Rorschach as a character, instead of by his actions. Definitely an ambiguous ending, both literally and figuratively.
Jack
21 Dec 07 at 11:59 am
(After a bit of reading:) Oh, right. Nietzsche’s philosophy doesn’t really draw a strong distinction among metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. They’re kind of wrapped up in each other.
My version of his response to Jared’s summary of Kant might be:
Jared mentioned the summary would be curt. Mine is probably over-simplistic.
Jack
21 Dec 07 at 1:03 pm
One of the few things I really liked about Objectivist ethics is Rand’s dismissal of “life boat morality” – that is, ethical systems designed or judged on the basis of atypical hypothetical situations.
By this interjection into your dialogue, I am not attempting to elevate Ayn Rand to the level of Kant or Nietzsche.
Don
21 Dec 07 at 4:05 pm
Don raises a good point, and it’s sort of touched on in the video above: deontological ethics are extremely hypothetical. I find Nietzschean ethics practically applicable.
The idea to “choose what you would do if you had to make the same choice infinitely many times” is why I’m a video game programmer today instead of an accountant. One lunch I was sitting in a cafe and really didn’t want to go back to work. So I remembered my Nietzsche and didn’t.
Jack
21 Dec 07 at 4:19 pm
[...] theory. It has been said that late modern and postmodern philosophy is all “footnotes to Kant“. It turns out that Kant laid the foundation for what I consider postmodern [...]
OMG I Was Wrong, It Was Kant All Along! | MentalPolyphonics
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