Nietzsche: Eh.

I agree with much of his cynicism about human nature, but I want insight, I want to understand the origins of bad ideas more deeply, and I want to know the origin of GOOD ideas as well.  I agree with him that most people will never free their minds, but I freely choose to use my mind for some end that betters society, because I actually do believe in my endeavors, and in service.  I am not getting that from him 80 pages in.  I'm getting increasingly tedious prose.

The one point I really liked was when he noted that there are people who could free their minds but choose to follow the leveling impulse and pursue fuzzy egalitarian agendas.  I suppose I'm at a midpoint between him and them.  I'll never drink their kool-aid, but I do want to make things better.  I just want my eyes to be open as I do it, because I honestly believe that it will be better for other people, better for my sanity, and better for the bigger intellectual project that I actually care about.

The other point that I really liked, as noted in the previous post, was that all philosophies only contain what philosophers want them to contain.  I think the deeper point is that no idea can contain more than went into it.  This is something that I think about a lot in physics.  I still can't quite believe that the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, which gets us within an inch of quantum mechanics, is an inevitable consequence of Newtonian mechanics (with time reversibility made more explicit than Newton made it).  I need to think more deeply about this, and figure out where the hidden assumptions are.

So, auf wiedersehen, Herr Nietzsche.

"Beyond Good and Evil", chapter 1

Chapter 1 is a rant about what philosophers get wrong.  I don't have a lot of time, but he seems to make 2 big points, plus an ancillary one relevant to a hobby of mine:
1) Philosophers and scientists haven't really come to terms with the fact that humans and their brains are material things, operating by the rules of the material universe, and aren't really separate from the universe. So where do thoughts and sensations come from?  How do we separate our thoughts and sensations from the outside world?  How can we honestly consider thoughts as something of conscious volition?

2) A philosophy is what the philosopher wants it to be.  He might portray it as the inexorable consequence of some defensible assumptions, but those assumptions were chosen to give a particular conclusion.  If he didn't like the conclusion he would modify his assumptions.  Honestly, this sounds particularly post-modern.  "All ideas just reinforce your preferences in service to the power structure, man!"

3) He thinks the similarities between German, Greek, and Indian philosophies arise from grammatical similarities of Indo-European languages, and ventures that speakers of Uralic languages would philosophize differently.  That is an extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Very extreme.  Since linguistics is a minor hobby of mine (I have a dictionary of Indo-European root words) I am amused by this hypothesis.

Next book: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche.

My next read will be Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, largely because of a recent op-ed that I read, which argued that Nietzsche wrote about how people search for meaning in a world that has lost religion.  I think this has much relevance to academic life and the restlessness I see.