Otto Dix, Nietzsche, and the Great War (2019)

30 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by samizdis
(historytoday.com)

15 Comments

jaynetics

an hour ago

While the topic of this text is very interesting, it ultimately remains a bit unconvincing.

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-...

mykowebhn

4 hours ago

Before I really started studying philosophy, I was still interested in philosophy, but as a novice. During this time, Nietzsche was my favorite philosopher and I read several of his books. I also read a lot of literature, and Nietzsche figured in a lot of the literary texts I enjoyed.

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.

keiferski

4 hours ago

Nietzsche is referenced constantly:

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.

mikert89

4 hours ago

I had a similar experience, but I think a lot of other modern philosophy is really pedantic and builds upon a thousand years of writings. So its very hard to follow without proper academic study or understanding what its in response to.

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

pglevy

3 hours ago

> paragraphs that could be studied and independently

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.

mikert89

2 hours ago

yeah a lot of uneducated analysis was off, but it was still very thought provoking and jarring to my earlier world view.

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

chermi

3 hours ago

1) not true 2) guilt by association? A lot of non-physicists talk about Einstein. I still take his work very seriously.

junior44660

4 hours ago

But Nietzsche has more impact on minds of people. In 100 years I am sure Bronze Age Pervert will be seen as more influential than some random philosophist from random university.

mykowebhn

2 hours ago

I agree with you. My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers (someone included a link to philpapers.org and all I saw were various editions of books written BY Nietzsche, I'm not sure what their point was with that link). Is he widely read by non-philosophers and has he had an impact with this same group? I think he has.

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.

tucnak

17 minutes ago

> 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.

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.

phainopepla2

4 hours ago

I think he's probably seen as more influential now, given that it's widely believed that he's been read by nearly all of the young staffers in the Trump admin.

(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)

chermi

3 hours ago

I'm not sure I understand your point? Are you trying to equate the two without saying it directly?

junior44660

3 hours ago

He will be seen more like Evola than Nietzsche. So not an exact parallel.

cmrdporcupine

4 hours ago

I mean, when I studied continental philosophy in the 90s, there was plenty of Nietzsche discussed. But I'd say, perhaps, more in his influence elsewhere than as primary text. E.g. I did a term studying Heidegger and Nietzsche played into that. Same prof had a 4th year class purely about Nietzsche. (What a great prof, too, my daughter is going to the same school starting next week and I really wish he hadn't retired...)

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.

senderista

2 hours ago

I think Nietszche's anti-egalitarianism makes many otherwise sympathetic modern readers deeply uncomfortable.