Epiphany
I get it now. I get Nietzsche's appeal.
Check it out.
This is why Nietzsche is popular among faux-transgressive youths and other miscreants. "God is dead" is all they know about him, and they like it. That that revelation (taking it to be true merely arguendo) makes life incredibly more difficult and calls for action profounder than wearing droll Nietzsche-themed garments doesn't seem to daunt or even occur to most of his fans. And I am just sure that few seriously study and reflect on his other bits of philosophical insight.
I'm not bashing Nietzsche, just people who don't get Nietzsche but want to hang out with the cool kids anyway.
3 Comments:
As the creator of the shirt I can honestly say I think 'Thus Spake' (and it's famous quotation) is probably my least favorite work (yeah I know, the quote appeared earlier, but even people who like to read Nietzsche often skip GS).
Sure it was apparently a cathartic explosion of emotion and certainly his most, ahem, flowery work, but quite frankly that is the opposite of his appeal for me. I think his first work that really made me think was 'On the Genealogy of Morality' in its dry unsentimental prose and unflinching focus but that was a lot harder to work into a t-shirt =)
Philosophers-on-t-shirts is very hit-or-miss (ugh hyphens). I've seen no good Kant on t-shirts, just quotations that are either trivial, incoherent out of context, or enormous (and thus out of place on someone's chest). I think the Nietzsche shirt was clever, but that most of the people who would wear it wouldn't be smart enough to pull it off.
I happen to think the "I think I understand Hegel" shirt is awesome, for reasons some of you know.
Not to worry; work on my Msgr. Georges Lemaitre shirt proceeds apace. It's safe to say that it will redefine the field.
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