Animavore wrote::scratch: I don't have a clue what you're talking about and i'm still trying to figure out if the earlier comment is a blatant, personal attack!
What is so difficult to understand with the claim that "Nietzsche's appeal stems chiefly from his aphorisms. Pithy and short pronouncements appeal to people who are too stupid or lazy to engage in sustained trains of thought. That would be the majority of humankind, including the majority of humankind that professes to be interested in philosophy."?
As for your perception of my comment as a blatant personal attack, none was intended, and I would like you to explain to me what makes you think it of it as one. To me the majority of humankind
is too stupid or lazy to engage in sustained trains of thought, and I supported that opinion with the fact that in Australia, for instance,
Dancing with the Stars gets ten times better ratings than
Four Corners. Similarly,
The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper in Sydney pitched at people who are mainly interested in sports results, sex scandals and like piffle, outsells
The Sydney Morning Herald by a similar magnitude. Surely, you can think of similar examples, like say, by how much Justin Bieber CDs outsold recordings of JS Bach this year.
I was not implying that
all people who regard Nietzsche are too stupid or lazy to engage in sustained trains of thought, and even less so that stupidity is genetic. In my experience, it just happens to be the case that the social strata that simply don't have the time to study things at length and systematically, because most of their waking hours are taken up with making ends meet, are more likely to think of Nietzsche as the bees knees of philosophical thinking, than those who have the luxury of a materially adequate existence to focus their attention on things beyond how the money to buy replacements for the shoes that John and Jane have outgrown three weeks ago can be procured.
Aphorisms, for which Nietzsche had considerable skills, can be very catchy, and don't usually require a systematic world view to be appreciated. That's why KR Popper's "We must make our mistakes as quickly as we can" is hardly known or understood at all. Without knowing what he says about epistemology, it just sounds like a silly, probably mistaken, platitude. That is why D Hume's "It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom." is not comprehensible without knowing what he said about inductivism, and usually disagreed with by the few people who actually heard it.
