Why is Nietche's work so popular right now?

Question

I thought he was crazy

Answer 1

Hi, J Russell, my name is Hank. Nietzsche's work is popular right now because people are searching for ways to get away from how our inept leaders are trying to shape our world into a Capitalist's dream.

There are too many people being left behind. People see their dream going up in the Capitalist's smokestacks. It hurts people to be relegated to the rolls of the less fortunate.

Nietzsche was a nihilist. He believed that the governments of the World were leaving so many people wanting that it wasn't worth having a World, government, at all.

I agree with him to a certain point. But instead of destroying the World, I believe we should fight, not physically, to get it back. A good example of what I'm positing is how the Boers of South Africa reclaimed what they had before the British took it away.

During the Boer War, the Boers (Dutchmen of South Africa) finally figured out they could not win with a physical war, so they started to take government jobs--sometimes,even, at the lowest level.

Soon, within a few years, they began to become more dominant in government that their ideas of what their part of the country should be--could, after a few more years, no longer be denied.

Nietzsche, was an absolute nihilist, and that is where his failure became so evident to others. Most sane people do believe Nietzsche was insane. I can't say one way or the other, myself. I didn't live during his life.

But, to just destroy everything just because you cannot participate civically, or have a say about the way the World is turning, is wrong.

We must take our world back by civic participation. If we do it any other way--someone else, with a new Nietzsche type idea, will come along and try to change it to what their idea of how the World should be.

Hank Feral

Answer 2

Friedrich Nietzsche was a nonconformist pessimist who was influenced by pessimist’s. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is antagonistic to the Judeo-Christian world-view
Nietzsche philosophizes from "the perspective of life" which he regards as "beyond good and evil," and challenges the deeply-entrenched moral idea that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction and appropriation are universally objectionable behaviors Between 1873 and 1876 wrote the Unfashionable Observations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen). These are four (of a projected, but never completed, thirteen) studies concerned with the quality of European, and especially German, culture during Nietzsche's time. They are unfashionable and nonconformist (or "untimely," or "unmodern"). We live in very pessimistic times so Friedrich Nietzsche will become popular because of the way the world is today.

Answer 3

In the 1900sish, there were a lot of babies being had after the war. They were called the Baby Boomers and there was a freakishly large amount of them. Now they're all middle-aged and have had their own kids. Their kids are about high-school age right now, and it is in high school where students study Nietzsche. There is a freakishly large number of us out here right now, on the internets. It seems like Nietzsche is only recently popular, but it really was all along and it just took a freakishly large number of people in a single generation to show it to us. (also we're more intelligent than before, surprisingly. (Maybe. Maybe not.))

Answer 4

Read him, he's highly rational-- and moreover a joy to read.

We read him now because he influenced so many writers, artists and philosophers. His interpretations apply to us in this post-modern era. He advocated perspectives and force mechanics (like our quantum physics today)... he was really ahead of his time. The existentialists all owe him, as much as Freud, pragmatism, Heidegger, critical theory, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari... too much to list.


*** Nietzsche wasn't a pessimist, Schopenhouer, who effected him was.. but he's deeply critical of pessimism AND nihilism. His fundamental concern is life, and coming to affirm it with the powerful aplomb of an artistic genius. He isn't complaining haha... and there are many passages where he refers to passive nihilism, which is the skeptic, the doubter, the cynic who hates this world, can accept nothing of value here and waits for death -- constructing an afterlife that is the epitome of non-life, sexless, sitting on clouds... active nihilism tears down ideas against life, for the purpose of life... what's killing us are our pessimistic ideas. He has much to offer, I suggest looking at the wikipedia article. It outlines his positive theories sufficiently.

Answer 5

who's that? and most people like to read stuff made by crazy people
remember Van Gogh?

Answer 6

he has always been popular because he was crazy

Answer 7

because people like to think that they can understand it and it makes them feel inteligent but when it comes down to it there are very few people that can actually read it and understand it,

Answer 8

only in your world.