Subject: Re: Nietzsche and the Philosophes
From: Joshua Stott (jstott@bigplanet.net)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 18:02:34 GMT
Read "Fear and Trembling" by Kierkegaard.
Read "Practice in Christianity" by Kierkegaard (followed by "Purity of
Heart" and "Sickness Unto Death").
These two are bridgable by any educated reader, and will give a good
foundation to any other K. I think that Kierkegaard is one of the most
readable authors/philosophers I've ever seen. It helps a philosopher
greatly to be able to actually articulate his thoughts, and K. is the
master.
Heideggar seems to think that you should be able to pick up Being and
Time and start from scratch, reading it all and mostly understanding
it... and maybe you can. It is very phenomenological and intuitive,
but... without at least a decent understanding of Husserl, it's hard to
see why he thinks some things are important. I wouldn't recommend
Husserl even as a cruel joke. So, if you want Heideggar basics, you can
just dive right in. If you want to really understand... brave a class
in Husserl and/or Heideggar.
After that, I'm afraid that any Levinas, Heideggar, even Sartre, I could
recommend is almost out of reach without more intense study/backgroud
reading.
The way I see philosophy, the more you know, the better you'll
understand whatever else you'll read. In fact, I'd say that this axiom
is generally applicable to the world, but especially philosophy... So
if you read any Kant, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Augustine, Hegel,
Aquinas, you'll be getting a good background. After Descartes, Kant,
and Hegel, you're entering into very much more specialized philosophies
that will draw on these common backgrounds, but sometimes are radical
and very-non-intuitively-connected (to use a Heideggarish
connect-my-ideas-by-a-string-of-hyphenated-terms) to the classics.
So my overall recommendation is: if you're interested in Philosophy,
read all you can. There's a lot to wade through, and a lot to learn,
and a lot to discern as truth or false, but it's all worth it if you
love it. Find someone that you trust who is interested or hopefully
working in similar things that you enjoy and take him on as your mentor.
Josh
Gene wrote:
>
> Hi Josh:)
> Well, I've never taken a philosophy class (except for
> my english critical thinking class that is considered
> the equivelent of philosophy 114 at my school), so a
> lot of this is new to me and I'm no expert on all
> this.
> My western civ. class is the one that got me to go out
> and read books by people like Machiavelli, Nietzsche,
> Plato, etc... and so far I'm really enjoying all these
> books. People like Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Heideggar
> are names I've heard, but don't know too much about
> yet(any suggestions for which books to start with?),
> and I barely know about Hegel, Kant, and of course
> there's Dostoevsky, Kafka, etc... and I've read some
> Sophocles and Freud too. I've also read a little
> Voltaire, and find him interesting too. Other people I
> intend to read someday are Darwin and Karl Marx.
>
> That's a really good point that Nietzsche owes a lot
> to the views of Socrates, Hegel, and others. So maybe
> it's more of a symbiotic relationship, or just a sign
> of the changing times? My mom seems to think that
> Nietzsche wasn't as big of an athiest as people paint
> him to be(he did know the Bible better than most
> people in his days).
>
> From reading my one book by Plato, I was shocked to
> find out that Socrates was brought to trial and
> sentenced to death, at the age of 70(which makes sense
> since Nietzsche called him a corrupter of youth; as he
> was also called at his trial). I always thought he was
> some aristocratic national icon that died of old age
> and natural causes. I think one of Nietzsche's attacks
> that really had an impact on me is when he called
> Socrates a nihilist that'd rather die for an uncertain
> nothing.
>
> ON RELIGION: Some really cool books I've discovered
> are "A Buddhist Bible"(a sort of anthology of Buddhist
> texts, this book would later greatly influence Jack
> Kerouac), The Koran, D.T. Suzuki's books on Zen
> Buddhism, "The Tao of Physics"(it compares/explains
> physics through comparison with Eastern thought),
> James Baldwin("Go Tell it on the Mountain", "Notes of
> a Native Son", "The Fire Next Time", "Nobody Knows My
> Name", etc...), "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"(I've
> also read the famous speech and letter from Jail by
> Martin Luther King Jr.), "The Other Bible"(this
> contains translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnostic
> texts, Jewish and Christian Apocryhpa texts, Pagan
> texts, and other religious manuscripts that were
> supposedly edited out of the current, modern Bible),
> "Sacred Origin of Profound Things"(by Charles Panati,
> a former physicist and science editor for "Newsweek"
> magazine. This book takes a pretty good objective
> look, with a slightly admitted Catholic bias, on the
> history, customs, and changes of various world
> religions), and "The Dead Sea Scrolls
> Deception"(compiled by Michael Baigent and Richard
> Leight, this book chronicles the archeological search
> and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It shows who
> was putting up the money for this research and various
> organizations, both religious and political, that
> wanted a monopoly on this information),. lol, some of
> these books are still on my "to-finish-reading" list,
> but I have finished some of them.
>
> Another book that I loved was Iris Chang's "The Rape
> of Nanking": it shows the events surrounding Japan's
> occupation of Chinese cities in World War II from the
> perspetive of the Chinese, the Japanese, missionaries
> that were in China at the time, and John Rabe(a Nazi
> living in China who would later be called the "Oskar
> Schindler" of Nanking), and the aftermath of this
> event that would be called "The Forgotten Holocaust".
>
> Gene:)
>
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