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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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You should read Nietzsche. It would give you a more nuanced way of thinking about these sorts of issues.

Start with Twilight of the Idols:

But Socrates suspected even more. He looked behind his noble Athenians; he understood that his case, his idiosyncrasy of a case was not an exception any more. The same type of degeneration was quietly gaining ground everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end. - And Socrates understood that the world needed him, - his method, his cure, his personal strategy for self-preservation . . . Everywhere, instincts were in anarchy; everywhere, people were five steps away from excess [...] When people need reason to act as a tyrant, which was the case with Socrates, the danger cannot be small that something else might start acting as a tyrant. Rationality was seen as the saviour, neither Socrates nor his 'patients' had any choice about being rational, - it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all of Greek thought threw itself on rationality shows that there was a crisis: people were in danger, they had only one option: be destroyed or - be absurdly rational . . . The moralism of Greek philosophers from Plato onwards is pathologically conditioned; the same is true for the value they give to dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness only means: you have to imitate Socrates and establish a permanent state of daylight against all dark desires - the daylight of reason. You have to be clever, clear, and bright at any cost: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards . . .

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