The primordial and barbaric world of ancient tribalism is vital in the Nietzschian sense. It runs on death and mayhem, and may seem a strange thing to aspire to for the modern man. But, nature is aligned with that type of life, giving health and strength to such peoples. Nietzsche considered what we have sacrificed for our modern age of reason, and realized that it was life itself. Civilization is taking the rich bank of life force built up by generations of suffering and simply living off it in comfort as, divorced from nature, we oh so comfortably descend to become lesser forms of life. So comfortably. Like a frog in warm water.
I’m currently reading Stephen RC Hicks, “Explaining Postmodernism,” and his interpretation of Nietzsche is summed up as follows, “What Nietzsche meant with his passionate exhortations to be true of oneself, is to break out of the artificial and constraining categories of reason. Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflicted reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in. What we need to bring out the best possible in us is “the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts.” The yeasayer - the man of the future - will not be tempted to play word-games but will embrace conflict. He will tap into his deepest drives, his will to power, and channel all of his instinctual energies in a vital new direction.”
I can see how this may sound like a compelling call to action, but without Reason, the a “new direction” will lead us over a cliff. Evidenced by the situation we are in today.
Hicks is not wholly correct in his reading of Nietzsche on this and many other points. Nietzsche did not detest reason, he detested slavery to reason, recognizing formal logic as a closed system that is a prisoner to the foundational assumptions. Logic can help you discover what you already know, and to argue for it powerfully--it does not create new knowledge or integrate knowledge into understanding. For that, you need other tools.
Nietzsche replaced relying on reason with relying on Will. But the problem with that is who's to say that your Will is (better?) than theirs? You say Nietzsche is only for the isolated few, but why are you one of those 'few' and they aren't? Having denied the existence of any constraint on the Will, you have nothing left to appeal to, except maybe physical force.
Yes, and physical force has settled more issues and questions across the breadth of history than any other single mechanism. That appeal has always been at least implicit in Nietzsche's thought.
Too little too late. Most of what passes off as “philosophy” today is hopelessly mediocre. Nietzsche is merely one (among many) who are casualties moreso by “accident” than anything else.
I remember some years back (2015 I think?) trying to do a custom order for some books via the University of Toronto Bookstore. It was mostly titles from the University of Minnesota Press’ “Theory and History of Literature” that was first compiled in the early 80s (the final volume was #88, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, if I am remembering it properly).
Not only did they not have most of what I was looking for, but I was informed that most of the 88 volumes (save for a few of the more well known names like Sloterdijk and others) was discontinued long ago (I think the lady told me it was 1998?).
So this is just the endgame. Enjoy it while you can folks; because the Nuclear Bonfires and the Demons and Demonlords are next!
Well, I guess I'm not a Nietzsche-ist in any sense whatsoever. Not the post left sense or the woke sense or the anti-woke sense or in the sense of the people who are really into Nietzsche. I'm not a "rare flame" who believes she is among the "ubermensch" who "defy convention." Good to know.
Everybody who is successful ends up having imitators, followers, groupies, what have you, who are less sophisticated, less intelligent, less knowledgeable, who are picking up on the buzz and not the substance, missing the point, and following the crowd. This always happens. Everybody wants to be cool, and part of the in crowd. But if the people and things the scenesters like when they are niche are good enough, or capable of mass appeal, they expand beyond the cool kids, and once they do, the image and the vibe get diluted, even if the substance is still good, and all the groovy people move onto the next thing. This is just how it works, every time. BAP is one of countless examples.
I read Beyond Good and Evil in 1984. I got an A on my paper. I was as Nietzschean as I will ever be then, and have been ever since. Before the Internet. Before memes. Right about the time of the appearance of desktop computers. Perhaps unusually, BGAE was one of several literary and intellectual milestones on my path back to Catholicism. So, I am grateful to him for that.
Amongst certain people, those who never paid much attention to the herd mentality that is Western civilization, Nietzsche always echoed. It is with some amusement that he is surfing through the waves of mediocre thought today, like a flash of light in a vast darkness.
Clearly, he came perilously close to remembering the old gods, who laughed as their warriors smashed the legions in Teutoburger Wald, and forever halted Roman expansion.
Just as clearly, he was hampered in his understanding by the victory of the Abrahamics, those paragons of God's will who erased all opposition through book burning and mass murder. Unavailable to him were the revelations of Nag Hammadi, or the memories of the Platonists.
Some call him a lover of all things Semitic, that he read into the old testament for the image his soul was searching for. This indeed is the mystery of Nietzsche, that he would claim to find in the hijacked tales of Sumer a notion, an idea, or a pulse that fit his iconoclast sensibilities.
Perhaps even in his individuated fire, he couldn't quite find the muscle to leap away from the comfortable apron of mommy church.
In the end, this unfortunate attachment may well be the root of the banal and uninteresting flocking to him today.
I don't think so at all. I'd say that wanabee leaders like Milo, Mike Cernovitch and people like that did more damage. BAP has been a net positive, and focuses more on philosophy and history than current politics.
Yes. I’ve heard all the anti-bap arguments. But if you’re anti-bap, you really have to be anti-ren, and now you’re anti the only interesting thing happening on the right outside of our fringe Substack community
You really seem to be into these Pagan strong men types for someone with a Christian username. Seems kind of odd, do you check out more wholesome stuff from people like the Distributist (Dave Greene here), Auron MacIntyre and I will even say Kruptos though he blocked me here.
I read a lot. I read Kruptos. I would say BAP is around 5% or less of my reading/listening time. But I know what young Christian men at church are like these days. The only ones in danger of being a slut are already gay, and the ones that aren’t are so socially and developmentally repressed that they would be terrified to enter a nightclub, much less be around anyone drinking alcohol. Much less ever enter a gym. But reading books and developing themselves mentally, well that’s all they do. That and video games. It’s a sad state.
Re: BAP being pagan, what is your reasoning behind this? He is not Christian, yes. Now The Golden One is pagan.
Ah gotcha. I actually appreciate him more as he isn't blowing smoke up people's asses about being a "philosopher" while posting closet queer photos of semi nude oiled beefcakes on Xer like BAP does.
BAP though has been a unique magnet to young men and has steered them away from bettering themselves intellectually and towards a focus on body building and being a promiscuous male slut.
Nothing wrong with being healthy of course, but it is a poor substitute for a a mature adult worldview.
As a young male body builder, neither I nor my friends who listen to BAP have felt any push towards being turned into a male slut. And his shows are quite intellectual. But ‘bettering yourself intellectually’ is over rated anyways. Why? Because we live in the physical world not the mental world, and intellectualism can lead to introversion which is far more damaging to young men than bodybuilding and ‘being a slut’.
Have you listened to his podcast? It feels like you're basing your whole view of him on a few twitter posts. He's spreading some fairly deep historical and philosophical knowledge on his audio show. I'd go as far as to say he's doing more for classics than many big names. He's not really into PUA type stuff at all, and aside from some funny but transparently over the top rants barely any mention of women or physical training is made. I'm not going to say that you need some kind of Straussian reading of his work, but the beach, muscles and yachts stuff is merely an aesthetic veneer.
His book didn't really go down that track either, being more of a spiritual exhortation to recapture a kind of Proto-Indo European piratical mindset as life inside the modern system - the "longhouse" as he coined it -offers no benefit or freedom.
I read maybe 20 pages of Bronze Age Mindset and it struck me as a pop culture popularization of Nietzsche for midwits without the ability to concentrate enough to actually read Nietzsche. My point is being a soldier and a body builder is not compatible with being a Christian and a contemplative philosopher, they are in fact antithetical.
I was into Nietzsche before it was cool.
- The Hipstermensche
The primordial and barbaric world of ancient tribalism is vital in the Nietzschian sense. It runs on death and mayhem, and may seem a strange thing to aspire to for the modern man. But, nature is aligned with that type of life, giving health and strength to such peoples. Nietzsche considered what we have sacrificed for our modern age of reason, and realized that it was life itself. Civilization is taking the rich bank of life force built up by generations of suffering and simply living off it in comfort as, divorced from nature, we oh so comfortably descend to become lesser forms of life. So comfortably. Like a frog in warm water.
What if you were into Nietzsche before it was cool, and then abandoned him as wholly unworthy for an adult world view? :-)
What if I was a unicorn?
Did you know I have a single horn growing out of my forehead?
I’m currently reading Stephen RC Hicks, “Explaining Postmodernism,” and his interpretation of Nietzsche is summed up as follows, “What Nietzsche meant with his passionate exhortations to be true of oneself, is to break out of the artificial and constraining categories of reason. Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflicted reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in. What we need to bring out the best possible in us is “the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts.” The yeasayer - the man of the future - will not be tempted to play word-games but will embrace conflict. He will tap into his deepest drives, his will to power, and channel all of his instinctual energies in a vital new direction.”
I can see how this may sound like a compelling call to action, but without Reason, the a “new direction” will lead us over a cliff. Evidenced by the situation we are in today.
Hicks is not wholly correct in his reading of Nietzsche on this and many other points. Nietzsche did not detest reason, he detested slavery to reason, recognizing formal logic as a closed system that is a prisoner to the foundational assumptions. Logic can help you discover what you already know, and to argue for it powerfully--it does not create new knowledge or integrate knowledge into understanding. For that, you need other tools.
Nietzsche replaced relying on reason with relying on Will. But the problem with that is who's to say that your Will is (better?) than theirs? You say Nietzsche is only for the isolated few, but why are you one of those 'few' and they aren't? Having denied the existence of any constraint on the Will, you have nothing left to appeal to, except maybe physical force.
Yes, and physical force has settled more issues and questions across the breadth of history than any other single mechanism. That appeal has always been at least implicit in Nietzsche's thought.
Yes, and effectively organizing physical force these days requires a great deal of reason, the very thing Nietzsche rejects.
To the contrary, judging by our current exercises in the application of force, apparently reason is the last thing being used.
Oh, it is. Granted not as well as it could be, but it is.
Not sure "better" is relevant, nor any other moral metric. I understood that Nietzsche discarded such notions.
Too little too late. Most of what passes off as “philosophy” today is hopelessly mediocre. Nietzsche is merely one (among many) who are casualties moreso by “accident” than anything else.
I remember some years back (2015 I think?) trying to do a custom order for some books via the University of Toronto Bookstore. It was mostly titles from the University of Minnesota Press’ “Theory and History of Literature” that was first compiled in the early 80s (the final volume was #88, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, if I am remembering it properly).
Not only did they not have most of what I was looking for, but I was informed that most of the 88 volumes (save for a few of the more well known names like Sloterdijk and others) was discontinued long ago (I think the lady told me it was 1998?).
So this is just the endgame. Enjoy it while you can folks; because the Nuclear Bonfires and the Demons and Demonlords are next!
Well, I guess I'm not a Nietzsche-ist in any sense whatsoever. Not the post left sense or the woke sense or the anti-woke sense or in the sense of the people who are really into Nietzsche. I'm not a "rare flame" who believes she is among the "ubermensch" who "defy convention." Good to know.
Hear hear!
Also, BAP has gotten lots of people to actually lift weights and get stronger, and that's good. And he's funny, which is unusual.
This is true. BAP is fine. His groupies… I think they need to go back.
Everybody who is successful ends up having imitators, followers, groupies, what have you, who are less sophisticated, less intelligent, less knowledgeable, who are picking up on the buzz and not the substance, missing the point, and following the crowd. This always happens. Everybody wants to be cool, and part of the in crowd. But if the people and things the scenesters like when they are niche are good enough, or capable of mass appeal, they expand beyond the cool kids, and once they do, the image and the vibe get diluted, even if the substance is still good, and all the groovy people move onto the next thing. This is just how it works, every time. BAP is one of countless examples.
You should write about this as an individual article. Either for my Substack or yours.
I’m too busy (lazy)!
The original British Mod scene is a good case study. See, Richard Barnes, Mods! (1979).
I've never managed to get my head around how you can be a leftist and Nietzschean.
Once you read Napoleon, you won’t need Nietzsche.
https://archive.org/details/napoleoninhisown00napo
And once you read Tolstoy, you won't need Napoleon.
Good point.
I read Beyond Good and Evil in 1984. I got an A on my paper. I was as Nietzschean as I will ever be then, and have been ever since. Before the Internet. Before memes. Right about the time of the appearance of desktop computers. Perhaps unusually, BGAE was one of several literary and intellectual milestones on my path back to Catholicism. So, I am grateful to him for that.
Amongst certain people, those who never paid much attention to the herd mentality that is Western civilization, Nietzsche always echoed. It is with some amusement that he is surfing through the waves of mediocre thought today, like a flash of light in a vast darkness.
Clearly, he came perilously close to remembering the old gods, who laughed as their warriors smashed the legions in Teutoburger Wald, and forever halted Roman expansion.
Just as clearly, he was hampered in his understanding by the victory of the Abrahamics, those paragons of God's will who erased all opposition through book burning and mass murder. Unavailable to him were the revelations of Nag Hammadi, or the memories of the Platonists.
Some call him a lover of all things Semitic, that he read into the old testament for the image his soul was searching for. This indeed is the mystery of Nietzsche, that he would claim to find in the hijacked tales of Sumer a notion, an idea, or a pulse that fit his iconoclast sensibilities.
Perhaps even in his individuated fire, he couldn't quite find the muscle to leap away from the comfortable apron of mommy church.
In the end, this unfortunate attachment may well be the root of the banal and uninteresting flocking to him today.
Wait a minute... Are you making fun of me for lifting weights or for being a racist?
BAP singlehandedly poisoned the alt/dissident/NrX right into the dumpster of pop culture. Piss on em’ anti-establishment is more interesting anyway.
I don't think so at all. I'd say that wanabee leaders like Milo, Mike Cernovitch and people like that did more damage. BAP has been a net positive, and focuses more on philosophy and history than current politics.
Yes. I’ve heard all the anti-bap arguments. But if you’re anti-bap, you really have to be anti-ren, and now you’re anti the only interesting thing happening on the right outside of our fringe Substack community
Who is "ren?"
Raw egg
You really seem to be into these Pagan strong men types for someone with a Christian username. Seems kind of odd, do you check out more wholesome stuff from people like the Distributist (Dave Greene here), Auron MacIntyre and I will even say Kruptos though he blocked me here.
I read a lot. I read Kruptos. I would say BAP is around 5% or less of my reading/listening time. But I know what young Christian men at church are like these days. The only ones in danger of being a slut are already gay, and the ones that aren’t are so socially and developmentally repressed that they would be terrified to enter a nightclub, much less be around anyone drinking alcohol. Much less ever enter a gym. But reading books and developing themselves mentally, well that’s all they do. That and video games. It’s a sad state.
Re: BAP being pagan, what is your reasoning behind this? He is not Christian, yes. Now The Golden One is pagan.
Why did Kruptos block you?
Ah gotcha. I actually appreciate him more as he isn't blowing smoke up people's asses about being a "philosopher" while posting closet queer photos of semi nude oiled beefcakes on Xer like BAP does.
BAP though has been a unique magnet to young men and has steered them away from bettering themselves intellectually and towards a focus on body building and being a promiscuous male slut.
Nothing wrong with being healthy of course, but it is a poor substitute for a a mature adult worldview.
As a young male body builder, neither I nor my friends who listen to BAP have felt any push towards being turned into a male slut. And his shows are quite intellectual. But ‘bettering yourself intellectually’ is over rated anyways. Why? Because we live in the physical world not the mental world, and intellectualism can lead to introversion which is far more damaging to young men than bodybuilding and ‘being a slut’.
Ah gotcha, you are part of the problem. I guess Heidegger, Schmidt, Evola and Junger are above your pay grade...
I think you've misinterpreted him utterly.
Bare assertion and ad hominem, care to flesh that out?
Have you listened to his podcast? It feels like you're basing your whole view of him on a few twitter posts. He's spreading some fairly deep historical and philosophical knowledge on his audio show. I'd go as far as to say he's doing more for classics than many big names. He's not really into PUA type stuff at all, and aside from some funny but transparently over the top rants barely any mention of women or physical training is made. I'm not going to say that you need some kind of Straussian reading of his work, but the beach, muscles and yachts stuff is merely an aesthetic veneer.
His book didn't really go down that track either, being more of a spiritual exhortation to recapture a kind of Proto-Indo European piratical mindset as life inside the modern system - the "longhouse" as he coined it -offers no benefit or freedom.
TL;DR?
Jesus is the Beatles, BAP is The Monkeys. Yes they both play music, you either get it, or you don't, shrug.
I read maybe 20 pages of Bronze Age Mindset and it struck me as a pop culture popularization of Nietzsche for midwits without the ability to concentrate enough to actually read Nietzsche. My point is being a soldier and a body builder is not compatible with being a Christian and a contemplative philosopher, they are in fact antithetical.
..but did he really?
Yes really level discourse.