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Friedrich Nietzsche - Polish or German ?


newage - | 2
22 Jan 2012 #61
I would rather consider Shopenhauer as being polish, because He lived in polish city Gdansk for all his life
Harry
22 Jan 2012 #62
^ Back in his day, it was a German city called Danzig.
Des Essientes 7 | 1,288
22 Jan 2012 #63
I would rather consider Shopenhauer as being polish, because He lived in polish city Gdansk for all his life

Schopenhauer ws born there, and lived there as a youth, but his father movd the family to Hamburg when he saw that the city was going over into Prussian hands, because he knew that the Prussians would tax and constrain his business far more than the Poles had and he didn't want the hassle.
JonnyM 11 | 2,611
22 Jan 2012 #64
I would rather consider Shopenhauer as being polish, because He lived in polish city Gdansk for all his life

He didn't identify as Polish. Less even than Kafka saw himself as Czech.

F. Nietzsche

He had some Polish roots and wrote about that, but saw himself as German.
Des Essientes 7 | 1,288
22 Jan 2012 #65
He had some Polish roots and wrote about that, but saw himself as German.

He saw himself as both Polish and German but he felt that the Polish part of his being was the most important.
JonnyM 11 | 2,611
22 Jan 2012 #66
Read some or ask someone to explain it to you - he had high opinions of Slavs, Jews and Chinese people and identified with certain ideals. But he was German. If I remember, we had this discussion before, sources and all.

Of course, anything Nietsche said has to be weighed against his mental illnesses and the fantasies they brought forth...
Des Essientes 7 | 1,288
22 Jan 2012 #67
Read some or ask someone to explain it to you - he had high opinions of Slavs, Jews and Chinese people and identified with certain ideals. But he was German. If I remember, we had this discussion before, sources and all.

You should read his autoiography and realize that you are wrong. Nietzsche disdained most Germans as boring clodhoppers and claimed that what nobility Germans do have is the result of them having Slavic blood. He considered his own brilliance to be the result of him being the atavistic reoccurance of a Polish nobleman. He and his father were very proud of their family's suppossed roots in the Polish nobility. So much so that the latter had their family classified as "non-German" with the Prussian authorities.

Nietzsche is a great counter-example to all the Western-European crud we read on this forum that denigrates Poles. Nietzsche knew better.
JonnyM 11 | 2,611
22 Jan 2012 #68
You should read his autoiography

I have. Several times.

you are wrong.

No. For the following reasons, among many:

most Germans as boring clodhoppers

i.e himself, and most people around him.

He considered his own brilliance to be the result of him being the atavistic reoccurance of a Polish nobleman

His abstracted fantasies - a kind of displacement not uncommon among self-haters.

So much so that the latter had their family classified as "non-German" with the Prussian authorities.

During a period of documented mental illness.

Nietsche was one of those people who are deeply unhappy with who they are, who fail to engage with those around them, who just don't fit in and psychologically compensate for that in two ways - by pretending to themselves that they are somehow superior to those around them and by seizing on something like their ancestry from generations ago with which they don't have any contact except by DNA. Know anyone like that?
Des Essientes 7 | 1,288
22 Jan 2012 #69
Nietzsche was supremely happy with who he was- one of the most brilliant minds to ever grace this Earth. He was superior to those around him. As for your lame attempt to provoke me it just shows, like so many other of your posts, that it is you who are insecure and thus you lash out at others in a sad attempt to feel better about yourself.
JonnyM 11 | 2,611
22 Jan 2012 #70
Amusing, but quite untrue. Nietsche was intelligent, but intelligence is only brilliant if one achieves something more than intellectual onanism. Nietsche didn't. For all his eclat, there's an absence of elan, and the pain of a troubled (and mentally ill) mind.
Harry
22 Jan 2012 #71
^ He is fundamentally unsound.
modafinil - | 416
22 Jan 2012 #72
intellectual onanism

That's the problem with becoming a Superman. Once you find yourself surrounded by apes, one may just as well whisper into the ears of horses.
chichimera 1 | 186
22 Jan 2012 #73
And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: it is owing to them that I have so much race instinct in my blood-who knows? perhaps even the liberum veto.

:) That is one of my favourite quotes of all times, it's a definition of being Polish to me - that "liberum veto" boiling in your blood - with all the beautiful and all the ugly connotations of it


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