Why Was Friedrich Nietzsche Important? Quotes, Books, Biography, Philosophy (2000)
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Channel: The Film Archives
Views: 479,799
Rating: 4.6339731 out of 5
Keywords: Friedrich Nietzsche (Author), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Book, Watch, Read, Books, Reading, Description, Library, Comic, Please, Read Description, Must, Writer (Profession), Info, Writing, Must Watch, Novel, Audio, Update, Please Watch, Trailer, Letters, Trailer (Musical Album), Clive, Story
Id: A8O0KMQXPr8
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Length: 167min 35sec (10055 seconds)
Published: Thu Feb 12 2015
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25 mins in and it's quite interesting, a podcast version of this would be amazing though
It was largely timing. His criticisms came during a time when people were becoming free enough to entertain them, but weren't absolutely exhausted by cynicism. Were he born a hundred years earlier or later, we never would have heard of him.
The other reason is that his work resonates on a very basic level. Some philosophers succeed because they come up with devastating responses to the work of other thinkers. This was not Neitzche. He rarely argued - rather, he'd lay out a description of the world, and count on it touching the reader on an emotional level. This was helped by his writing style - which is naturally compelling.
Weird seeing actual philosophy on this sub.
Just trying to understand one concept like structualism can take months
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As someone who has studied and read all of Nietzsche's book (philosophy major), I was really disappointed in this video. Not because of the content, but because I saw it was over two hours long and Stan only talked for ~1 hour. I could listen to him all day. Would love to have been one of his students. Time to find the Plato interview :). Thanks for sharing.
I've thought about this topic myself, being an avid Nietzsche fan and having spoken to many others who feel the same way I do about the Nietz and many others who feel the opposite.
Nietzsche is a bit of a mystery.
His influence is vague, diffuse, and hard to trace.
We can point to Nietzsche's influence in the writings of other philosophers, in pop culture references, in certain "attitudes" of his that have become prevalent in radical movements of all types... But though we can dig in this well indefinitely, we'll never come to even one "authoritative" idea. Nietzsche isn't rubber stamped with any one, clear, timeless idea the way Freud or Darwin is. His influence is always in the spirit rather than the specifics of what he wrote.
One clue as to Nietzsche's reception may lie in an apparent weakness of his philosophy:
Nietzsche never really stated any of his positions too clearly, they were always stated tentatively with a huge disclaimer--"This MAY be the case"--hanging over them.
Simplistic people would see this as a weakness but I really see it as the biggest strength of his project. Nietzsche was a philosopher who knew the weaknesses of philosophy. He knew that philosophy could never develop a "system" the way the sciences could (see, e.g., "the will to a system is a lack of integrity"). He knew all too well philosophy's tendency to present idealistic fairy tales as definitive truths, and he did a good job of avoiding this in his own work. The "penalty" of course, was that he couldn't lay claim to having the definitive answer to anything. But in doing this, he more than made up for what he lost: in all its admitted non-authoritativeness, Nietzsche's project "cuts to the heart of matters" in a way that few others do. He doesn't have "the answers," but boy oh boy, does he know how to ask the right questions, and provide fruitful suggestions as to how they MIGHT be answered.
And I think this explains why Nietzsche has had such a great reception in all the "Sexy" projects in the 20th century. Psychoanalysis, objectivism, postmodernism, the Frankfurt school--say what you will about these movements, they had an energy and a vivacity that those 20th century projects without a Nietzschean touch couldn't match. And I think the explanation is just that Nietzschean influence; like Nietzsche, they weren't afraid to ask the "deep" questions even if it meant sacrificing a certain "rigor" or "certainty."