Why kant why?

Hey there :-D

Yeah, Kant's a pain; very dense stuff. I recall Locke as being tough, too (it's been a while since I read 'em).

Hi, Boss, welcome to the monkey house . . .

The Critique of Pure Reason is awefully damned abitious of you. It is bound to be difficult, given the necessary bases for discussion.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is a piece of crap, in my never humble opinion. A good way to start with ol' Freddy is to begin at the beginning: The Birth of Tragedy. He was a philologist, properly speaking, which means he studied the origins and meanings of words, and the origins of meanings. Kaufmann's The Portable Nietzsche is worth having, if you have a real interest. Nietzsche, unfortunately, tended to write aphoristically, which makes his work as susceptible to wierdo interpretaton as the the Bible. Kaufman does a good, balanced job. I would also highly recommend to you Ecce Homo and Beyond Good and Evil.

Good luck, Boss--your reading list makes you look like a glutton for punishment.

(P.S.: Zarathustra was his attempt at writing something popular, in a literary style. I personally feel it was a miserable failure.)

Re: Why kant why?
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is incredibly difficult; people are still trying to figure it out more than 200 years after Kant wrote it. On the other hand, it is arguably the seminal philosophical text since Aristotle, so if you're serious about philosophy you must, eventually, attempt to tackle it.

Kant is easier if you have a grounding in Hume, since it was reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that "woke Kant from his philosophic slumbers." Also, you should have some familiarity with Descartes and Berkeley.

On the other hand, I find Nietzsche to be comparatively easy. Granted, Thus Spake Zarathustra is rather mystical (I have a higher opinion of it than does Setanta, but it's still fairly opaque); you'll get a much better sense of his philosophy in his Geneology of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil.

thanks for the tips guys, I know Critique of Pure Reason is very significant so I will have to tackel it, and I probably should have read some of nietszche's other works before zarathustra.


- and can someone define a priori for me :O

A useful site for definitions of philosophical terms.

Are you reading them in the original German, or in translation?

I read the Critique of Pure Reason in intro (yes, in English). It was rather convoluted, but not incredibly difficult. It was easier than my stats at any rate.

A priori means knowledge without experience

truth
By all means, read and digest all of Nietzsche BEFORE Thus Spake Zarathustra.

I like the Critique of Pure Reason, but it mirrored some things I'd been thinking about previously, so it was a little easier for that reason. It was also much more interesting than most of the crap I was reading for my other intro classes.

Yep, I am finding Kant and Nietzsche hard to understand. Maybe the language is hard to understand. Maybe I have to give the books a few reads to understand the metaphors and language.

Kant never gets easier...the best course is just to read a portion (or book) of Kant and then reread. The second, or third, etc. pass is always easier and better. Whatever your current, or ultimate, opinion of Kant the writer, Kant the thinker is the invaluable source of almost all of modern philosophy. Even when he is pronounced wrong, he is important (ie, it is important why he is wrong.)

Zarathustra is a terrible intro to Nietzsche. It is an almost entirely allegorical work. Personally, I think the best intro to Nietzsche is Twilight of the Idols, but a good early work of Nietzsche to start with is The Dawn. The most conventional collection of essays that he ever published is Beyond Good and Evil, and that is not a bad place to start either. Avoid Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and the notebooks collected as the Will to Power until you've read everything else. The Birth of Tragedy is a decent book, and it is his first, but it's a poor introduction to the rest of his work. The Schopenhaurian/Wagnerian overtones of that text are later dispensed with, and his personal critique of philosophy counters some of the ideas present in it.

edit: holy ****, i just realized how old the OP was...I feel shame...immeasurable shame...

Time makes no difference,Razzleg. That was excellent advice. My wife and I have read all of Nietzsche together, but not Zarathustra...just bits and pieces over the years. Our plan is to have a satifying interpretation of it before we die. We love the secondary literature, especially Walter Kaufman and Lawrence Hatab--but don't be mislead by Arthur Danto. Nietzsche was a "positivist" for only a very short period of time (his so-called Middle Period). I call it his insanity before his insanity.

Thank you, JLN, for the comforting words. Both Kant and Nietzsche are long term interests of mine, and i appreciate that my approach to both thinkers does not seem totally ridiculous to other long-term readers of them. In general, it seems to me that Kant seems inaccessible because of the specificity of his approach; while Nietzsche's polemical style makes him seem accessible, but conceals the more intricate turns in his thought's processes.

i've long enjoyed Kaufman's commentaries on N, but i'm unfamiliar with Hatab's...i'll have to search them out. Danto's book on Nietzsche has one of the most daring titles of all time, but i left it feeling pretty cheated. i finished it with the sense that both the reader and the authors' time had been wasted. It's not that it is a horribly written book, but i think that the spirit behind it is totally un-copacetic with the original author's intent. Sometimes that can be fruitful, but this time i think not.

Personally, i think that Friedrich never had a "middle period. i think that the "periodization" of his work is wishful thinking. All of his writing took place in so few years that cutting it up into segments seems largely superfluous. His decline into madness can be traced in The Case Against Wagner (his most personal cause, and thus the most important to get out of the way), then Twilight (which is perhaps his most lucid collection of aphorisms), then the Antichrist (perhaps his most vital [hehe] philosophical message), and then Ecce Homo (his [perhaps prophetic] reinterpretation of his past works in an apocalyptic vein), and finally Contra (a return to his resentful obsession). Lined up like that, and considering that they were all written in the same year, those four books seem like a desperate attempt to settle all his accounts before losing his capacity to render his thoughts "rationally".

*Sigh* i apologize for ranting at you; these days, it's a rare thing for me to encounter someone else interested in the subject. It's strange, although i first read N in a classroom environment, no one ever tried to break him down in a particularly useful way. Perhaps i am compensating for that.