Re: Nietzsche and the Philosophes


Subject: Re: Nietzsche and the Philosophes
From: Gene (pariah1980@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 17:16:35 GMT


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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