Two of My Favourite Philosophers

Let’s talk about philosophy, well philosophers to be more precise.

Who are your favourites?

Of the ones currently well known, my favourites are Marx and Nietzsche. They may seem diametrically opposed on many issues, but they tend to balance each other out when one assesses their main points.

Let’s discuss Marx’s virtues and oversights first. Marx provided a teleological meta-narrative of social justice culminating in his Communist Manifesto, co-authored with his comrade Engels. His best idea is vying for real change in world (not just philosophical interpretation), through edifying a left/social justice political party based on the praxis of social and political emancipation. These sentiments are highly relevant and virtuous. His oversights include the aim of the possible dissolution of the nuclear family (families with two parents), and an end of history, arguably without leaving room for ongoing social evolution.

Let’s now discuss Nietzsche’s virtues and oversights. I love Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and his desire to ‘philosophize with a hammer’, against uncritical idolization in society. Unlike Marx, Nietzsche withdrew from politics and didn’t help to craft how we could emancipate ourselves in politics and political institutions. Nietzsche only expressed anti-socialist sentiments and was an anti anti-Semite. Nietzsche on gender is a troubling question. Against the current homogenizing aspects to gendered thought on women and men, Nietzsche attempted to ‘philosophize with a hammer’ on gender. I disagree that emancipating women and men women would entail segregated gender roles where women would labour in the home and men in the job/employment marketplace. What I like about Nietzsche’s gender politics, is leaving room for men and women to be different and enjoy their differences together. Nietzsche pointed to immutable gender tensions between women and men, when the point is to continually mitigate these tensions, through better gendered practice and praxis, in everyday life and in institutions. Nietzsche lacked a structural gender analysis. He was a product of the times in many ways, yet not entirely nugatory. He was certainly wrong that women were the weaker sex (or was this merely a brand of quasi-transient subjectivist gender knowledge/formulation, with Nietzsche’s post-modern prerogative of understanding or experiencing truth on one’s own terms?). Women have displayed greater empathic virtues, have faster brain pruning and maturation, the ability to carry their own offspring and the consequent annulling of maternal angst, reproductive power, and aesthetic virtues.

Both Nietzsche and Marx had in common atheism, materialism, and a love for philosophy. They both studied other philosophers’ work. Nietzsche was passionate about the ancient Greek classical texts, with his formal study of them in his professorship as a philologist. Marx was particularly influenced by Hegel’s work, and how people want equals, and to be mutually recognized as such.

Being inspired by their good points, I have used Nietzsche’s post-modern aphoristic style in combination with Marx’s great insights for needing a political party (or parties) to be the vanguard of social justice. My publications, in many instances utilizing a ‘post-modern’ aphoristic style, are designed for social justice activists and social justice scholars to help inform the democratic base and its influence on political praxis in social justice parties political organizing and on their policies and the political process(es). Helping to refine and cultivate individual and collective morality is also a strong focus of my work(s): both Marx and Nietzsche were concerned with this prerogative, albeit with a radically different focus.