Nietzsche is depicted in an oversimplified way as a kind of tortured brute, and Otto Dix' late return to Christianity is rather exaggerated.
Dix remained interested in many topics until late in his life. While he radiates more empathy than Nietzsche, the one constant in Dix' art is that he never spared any feelings or aesthetic sensibilities. This urge to remain true to oneself and shed all masks is something he may have found reflected and elavated in Nietzsche's writing, even if he ultimately discovered that some of Nietzsche's admiration of fierceness was a peacetime naivety.
Dix' painting "Flandern", 1936:
https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/09/68/b1/9d/157856157-...
Now that I've read a lot more philosophical texts, I realize that both of the big philosophical camps--Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy--rarely mention Nietzsche. Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher that non-philosophers turn to and often cite.
https://philpapers.org/asearch.pl?strict=1&searchStr=Nietzsc...
Also, some pretty substantial continental philosophers wrote about Nietzsche. Heidegger wrote a ton about him. Foucault used his genealogical method. Deleuze, Derrida, etc. all wrote a lot.
Heck, half of the big Continental names wrote books on Nietzsche:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy
https://sunypress.edu/Books/O/On-Nietzsche
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo276199...
Analytic philosophy indeed didn't write much about Nietzsche, but I don't know why they would have. Very different subject matter and style.
Nietzsche has paragraphs that could be studied and independently thought about without even reading the rest of the book/chapter. You can crack open beyond good and evil and just start reading a random page.
I still would argue his thought is far more groundbreaking than any contemporaries
Yes, but after reading BGE, I felt like I had to read all his other books to really understand what he was saying (and others too, Kant, Spinoza, etc). And then re-read BGE.
Also Walter Kauffman's on him is very good. Working through that now.
it depends on which chapters/sections though, some are more accessible than others.
one book I enjoyed is:
"The Mask of Enlightenment" by stanley rosen. I read that along Zarathustra
If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. Nietzsche's writings I would label more as literature and not philosophy. When I reread BGE, standing on its own I find it entertaining, but his readings and understanding of past philosophers were quite wrong.
Anecdotally, in my eight years of studying texts with people who are professional philosophers and meeting regularly with them in discussions, I would say Nietzsche's name was mentioned maybe twice, and both times by individuals who were quite new to philosophy. Nietzsche is just not that interesting philosophically.
There's just this overwhelming trend the past few months to shit on Nietzsche because something something alt right. Your dislike seems to go back further so maybe I replied in the wrong place. I don't see how someone can reasonably believe he wasn't a deeply original thinker who got a shit ton right, if they actually read him and looked at the subsequent evolution of the west. My impression is that the opposition to him is mostly resistance to discomfort and he's not really judged on what he actually said (not withstanding his cluelessness on women and the resulting nonsense there).
By discomfort I don't mean the ubermensch and God is dead shit that people know. I mean the critique of the moral system we all hold dear(mostly still Christian), particularly elevation of the weaker. He predicted what would happen as we latched on to secular rationalism and lost humility wrt to our ability to perfectly reason things out and "derive" our own morals. And he was right. It's uncomfortable because it's calling out things we basically all believe.
Before you call me a Nazi eugenicist or something, I'm not even right wing. I don't agree with anything the new tech right takes from/attributes to him. I'm a huge fan of the enlightenment and liberalism. I'm merely saying that the think critiques of Nietzsche especially lately are not informed or substantive to a large extent. I think they are mostly guilt by association with people who don't understand him or intentionally misrepresent him and/or emotionally defensive responses to discomfort for those who have.
And that is not saying there aren't valid critiques of him. I just don't see anyone making them.
Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.
You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.
Try reading Parmenidean Ascent if you get a chance [1]. While not his main thesis, Michael Della Rocca argues why not treating "ancient" philosophy as philosophy proper is in error. Personally, I've studied Aristotle, and Plato, quite a bit and I couldn't disagree with you more.
> What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch.
That claim is contestable. I do agree that Frege, for one, was the first person to advance philosophical logic in 2000 years, with the previous advances made by Aristotle himself. Please study Aristotle's Organon. His singular advances in logic were astounding and not much else was done in logic until the likes of Frege appeared on the scene. What Heidegger did in philosophy was extraordinary, but it was built on the shoulders of previous philosophical giants. So what the "modernists" did was really not "from scratch".
This is how you really convinced me to read Della Rocca's treatment on history of philosophy that you linked to, even though I personally find the idea of great geneology spanning the greeks up to modern-day philosophy PhD students completely laughable. You said it yourself: Frege was not the result of iterative, standing on shoulders of Giants-esque improvement. He just "showed up." Clearly, developments in language and sciences opened the door to new line of inquiry which largely made whole swaths of the so-called philosophy (historically speaking) completely redundant. Wittgenstein knew this intuitively, and it's perhaps the biggest take-away from his body of work (contra logical positivism nonsensia)
I will concede that Aristotle on logic (specifically) is actually not a waste of time, but in general, all the time spent reading the Greeks, dialectics most of all, is the time I'm never getting back. I'm sorry, but the Greeks' command of language is simply too superfluous, or rather ill-equipped, for the purpose of philosophy. Regardless of translation. You could say they were too early... Which is another way to say they were "wrong." I won't go as far. It's kind of important to teach philosophy undergrad students some of it, because so much of their academic life will be spent performatively back-linking to Hellenic tradition to please their cargo-cultist professors. I know academic philosophy is full of this because I sometimes put myself through the pain of reading what they write. If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato? Did you just pick it up and go with it at some point, or was this a deliberate regression?
I am definitely no Plato expert, but two texts: Plato's Theaetetus and his Parmenides.
Questions of accurate translations aside, if one can focus on the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ideas presented and questions posed, I think one can spend the rest of one's life trying to understand these two texts. As an added incentive to whet your appetite, Wittgenstein was particularly interested in Theaetetus in his later years.
And if I had to recommend two texts from Aristotle, definitely his Physics and his Metaphysics. Here he's dealing with the really deep, and meaty, problems of philosophy.
These four texts definitely get me going, so to speak, although my talking about them bores my wife silly.
[EDIT] And you didn't ask for this, but here goes anyway: the three philosophers that "get me going" and whom I think are the three greatest philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (I know that last one will get me a lot of hate!)
(Hate to have to add this caveat and acquiesce to the Reddit-ification of HN, but: caveat lector, the above statement is not an endorsement)
I do think that maybe more recent work in continental schools (perhaps rightly) de-emphasize him as part of a larger turn away from the "postmodern" more broadly vs what was trendy in the 90s.
I don't think he is very deep. He is popular now among the alt-right because he thought Christianity was perverted because it glorified the weak instead of the strong.
Hegseth though is hiding on a military base instead of being at the front, so I guess he is weak ...
No one reads "Also sprach Zarathustra" in Germany. It is only famous because of Richard Staruss' symphonic poem, which ties into the point that others made: Nietzsche had various influences, but should not be used for policy decisions. Which is probably the reason this Dix article was published during the first Trump years.
