General

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

Bert — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:34:14 GMT

Whoa, I looked up section 260 in Beyond G&E and see this:

A morality of the ruling group, however, is most alien and embarrassing to the present taste in the severity of its principle that one has duties only to one's peers; that against beings of a lower rank, against everything alien [...]

This may fit in with the idea of worker's alienation.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

Bert — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:15:28 GMT

It's more so private production alienates the worker/laborer from his work/labor, thus someone owns a business or factory and hires people to make widgets, the workers make the widgets but have no ownership or influence over the widgets themselves, they are disconnected from "owning" their work.

The belief is based on that capitalism is an unnatural heirarchy, as where the worker works, those who manage the workers don't work as they do, and the privilege and income starts from the top down. The owners of the resources reap the income of the workers making widgets, of which they have no authority over. Generally those who hold this view see the manager as unnecessary and generally association or ownership by contract irrelevant and void.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

banned — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 06:21:10 GMT

No this is true. But in the Marxian fiction it must be understood that wages alienate workers from their humanity. Labor is not seen as a commodity in Marxism, it is seen as an expression of individuality. So to commodify is as an intermediate good is to violate the laborer's individuality (afaik). Capitalism alienates persons from their productivity. That's why wage labor is inauthentic.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

Bert — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 07:28:29 GMT

3) H.L. Mencken was influenced by Nietzsche, and did some of the first US translations of his works.

I want to say Benjamin Tucker and Josiah Warren did some of the first US translations of Nietzsche, and I want to say they translated Stirner as well, but of course whatever translations they did were not in wide circulation.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

NonAntiAnarchist — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 06:27:18 GMT

But I thought we don't have an "essence.".. For me to say working for a wage is "inauthentic," wouldn't I have to hold some conception of how man should lead his life? And yet to have preconceptions stating how man should lead his life seems to define, or give man an essence, something which seems contradictory to basic tenents of existentialism.

Warning: I only remember vague details about Existentialist thought from a philosophy class.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

Neodoxy — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 06:27:17 GMT

On the Menken/Nietzsche thing:

I quite recommend this book. While he certainly gets some things wrong in terms of what Nietzsche actually meant, I believe that what he does write about wherever he differs from Nietzsche is ultimately a good Nietzschean philosophy.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

banned — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 06:02:14 GMT

NonAntiAnarchist:

How the hell do you take existentialist premises and come to a Marxist conclusion?

Because authenticity is an important concept within existentialism. And Marxism, in the social sense, deals quite extensively in critiquing the capitalist economy for alienating labor from people's true purposes.

So in other words, working for a wage is inauthentic. It is work not for the sake of producing something you want, but to earn something that can be exchanged for what you really want. Of course, Sartre was not looking at wage labor from a praxeological understanding so this conclusion is, i suppose, understandable. It is this type of thinking that leads me to understand that most social marxists think society should evolve into a collective of hobbiests. I'm not too well read on this though, so maybe I'm off base.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

vive la insurrection — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 05:17:09 GMT

Wow interesting, I just looked in the back of twilight of the Idols (penguin edition) under the index of subjects, and it states exactly the same thing I said , that the two are very similar.

Anywho, I got most of my impression from BGE: 260. In it you can kind of see how N navigates between two modes of thought (even though he creates only a dichotomy - which in itself may be a big deal) and states his case, and also argues against "utility".

As for te whole Sartre tangent:

1) be careful with the word existentialist (I may be wrong, but it is possible Sartre kind of coined the term and started labeling people "existentialist" to show a point) it's a tricky word.

2) yes the French are loopy, and more fashionable - which in and of itself ought to show a certain type of "correctness" over the "serious Germans" who people are only going to take so far before they water them down. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

3) H.L. Mencken was influenced by Nietzsche, and did some of the first US translations of his works.

4) In relation to tangent #2, I do think it is possible for Stirner, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc to be compatible and a "metaphysical backbone" to "non scientism-progressive" forms of leftism, this may actually include Marxism to some degree (the concerns with "laws" of history, social vs asocial behavior and the factors that determine them, and other things could work in some ways I guess).

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

SkepticalMetal — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:33:35 GMT

I guess you could call H. L. Mencken an existentialist, right? I'd like to read his works.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

NonAntiAnarchist — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:17:23 GMT

Fuck Sartre. How the hell do you take existentialist premises and come to a Marxist conclusion?

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

triknighted — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:10:14 GMT

SkepticalMetal:

The relationship between existentialism and libertarianism seems kind of complicated. The early existentialist works match up with it quite nicely - the later ones (Sartre) don't agree as much.

I'd say that they are completely compatible! Existentialism, or choosing your essence, is synonymous with choosing your destiny in a free market, no doubt, brutha.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

Bert — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:05:19 GMT

Going back through Sartre's stuff I wouldn't mind reading the Critique and Situation essays.

In the Critique Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with a leading leftist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

SkepticalMetal — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:47:37 GMT

No doubt.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

Bert — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:37:40 GMT

Well, Sartre was a Marxist.

Re: The Magnanimous man and the Übermensch.

SkepticalMetal — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 18:19:03 GMT

The relationship between existentialism and libertarianism seems kind of complicated. The early existentialist works match up with it quite nicely - the later ones (Sartre) don't agree as much.