He seems to have a good bead on what makes one happy, happy, happy.
Posted on 08/30/2013 5:49:00 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
This morning, I saw with great sadness a little bit of the NBC TODAY show.
All four hosts were on, and the subject was "What makes you happy?"
The "wisdom" NBC offered viewers came from three thinker-philosophers of the past. Whom did Matt Lauer and Company recommend for advice on how to be happy?
Jean-Paul Sartre. Friedrich Nietzsche. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson, as I understand, was a theist who rejected a personal God.
One wonders if the young people making the content decisions for these tv programs REALLY know the history and implications of their worldview....Whether the answer is yes or no, it is disturbing.
Friedrich Nietzsche always struck me as being one seriously miserable SOB.
He is one of the last people who ever existed from whom I would take advice on how to be happy.
Any such list without Bob Marley is worthless.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya’
‘Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am”
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed!
They should have quoted Conan the Barbarian.
Being a broken, fatherless, lost and wandering culture, we seek the counsel of those who also were. And, being dead, the lost and wandering thinkers are now beatified.
What was the advice? What were the quotes?
If it’s from an atheist, are his lips moving? (dead atheists, “were his lips moving?”)
Happy, happy, happy.
This is at least debatable. The Fascists and Nazis made very selective use of his philosophy. If applied in full neither ideology will be able to hold up.
Among other things, he was notably anti-anti-Semitic.
I am not a fan, but his ideas are a great deal more complex and nuanced than the common notion that he was merely a pre-Nazi.
Why not quote Alister Crowley who’s motto because law for the Church of Satan? “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”.
Why not quote Saul Alinsky (who dedicated his book to Satan)?
However, his philosophy was bad and it provided a foundation for atheistic anything-goes politics. Forget the Nazi thing. Nietzsche's philosophy was behind some of the most heinous atrocities of the past 125 years.
Nice bit of poetry, that. Did you write it yourself?
What makes ME happy is my conscious contact with the God of my understanding. Wonder if NBC would like me on that panel?
It’s a Monty Python song.
"Y'know Nietzsche says that 'out of chaos comes order.'"
I think he stole it from some guys named Bruce.
According to wikipedia, he was not anti-semitic. His sister hijacked his writings and remolded them according to her husband’s views. And since I know squat about any of them, I will have to believe wiki. lol
Asterisks are mine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
As his caretaker, his sister assumed the roles of curator and editor of Nietzsche’s manuscripts. Förster-Nietzsche was married to a prominent German nationalist and antisemite, Bernhard Förster, and reworked Nietzsche’s unpublished writings to fit her husband’s ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche’s stated opinions, which were strongly and explicitly ****8opposed to antisemitism and nationalism***** (see Nietzsche’s criticism of antisemitism and nationalism). Through Förster-Nietzsche’s editions, Nietzsche’s name became associated with German militarism and Nazism, although later twentieth-century scholars have attempted to counteract this misconception of his ideas.
My brain hurts...
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