I'm a PhD candidate whose been at it for like 7 years now...

Not mine, although they have recently implemented this rule where if you go above 10 years without a PhD, you start losing the credits you have earned, and so you have to retake those coursework classes you first took.

Get a PhD only if you've first determined that you need it to get at wherever it is you want to go. Don't do it because you want to prolong your adolescence, and because you don't know what to do with your life, like I and most others in my program.

how do you see a PhD for someone who don't know what they want to do (so don't necessarily need it for their future), but want to continue the path of learning?
Like I really like learning and being in an academic setting and learning that way, but don't know what I want to do for a career. Is a PhD a good idea then?

Also how different are Graduate classes vs undergrad classes?

I'd be interested in some specific stories about your interactions with analytic philosophers and grad students

Also, at any point did you doubt that you made the right choice studying Nietzsche rather than something else, something analytic?

How many phd candidates are drug addicts/alcoholics due to unfulfillment, stress and disappointment?

I pursued a PhD because I'm a sperglord who didn't know what else to do with his life, and also because I could play that game well (papers, arguments, research, etc). There was no giant philosophy factory waiting for me after I made the mistake of getting a BA in it, so I went onto the next thing.

On some level I think it's a mistake, but when I think of it in a different way, it's not. Let me put it this way. I put this thought experiment to my students.

I tell them this. Suppose Bill Gates or whoever the fuck offered you 1 billion dollars in exchange for you eliminating all memories of whatever it is that you specialized in in college. Would you do it. Chances are if people specialized in nursing, or computer science, or whatever the fuck, they would take that offer, because they became specialized to make money, even if they have a passion for whatever it is that they want to do.

If I was offered 1 Billion dollars to forget what I know of Plato, and Heraclitus, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoy and so no, I would honestly say I wouldn't take it. This "knowledge" I've acquired is part and parcel of who I am and it determines how I live, and so on. To forget that stuff means to become part of the unwashed masses, the hoy polloy, das man, to essentially die. And so, in this sense, it's all been worth it.

Yet, I'm getting old now. I'm starting a family. My parents are getting old. They need to be taken care of. I need money...and that makes me think I made a mistake.

THese are all things you need to take into consideration if you want to go for a PhD.

>Also, at any point did you doubt that you made the right choice studying Nietzsche rather than something else, something analytic?

why did my sides ever do to deserve this

Is your room clean?

>Also how different are Graduate classes vs undergrad classes?
Not him, but what subject?

I'm getting a Masters in English Lit. Is it a bad thing if I'm one year in and haven't started on my language requirement yet?

Life has many stages. You may not know what to do with your life at this point, and nobody may depend on you either, so you it makes sense. But soon enough you'll want a family, and as I've said before, your parents will need to be taken care of. Also, you'll grow tired of eating ramel all fucking day, fairly quickly.

I'd recommend living in "real life" for a while, before you enter into a PhD program. As I said before, you need to think of the PhD program as a segway into something else. In your head, it has to be FOR something...not a place to loitter around. The latter is a recipe for disaster, because you'll get into debt, and you might find that what you want to do doesn't need a PhD, or you might just run out of steam. I've seen it plenty of times.

Live in real life. Find out what you want to do before going into phd program. Go in it only if you know it to be necessary to get to where you want to go.

My masters was strictly limited to one year full time. Are you doing it part time?

asides from becoming a professor (which i know is very hard because of limited spots), how does one make a living with a PhD or even a BA in philosophy?

Yes. My university says as a part-time student I have like five years. I figure I'll just go hard on the language at some point in the next few semesters.

I went to an analytic undergrad program. I excelled at it--fun little sudoku argument games, but even more inconsequential than sudoku games as far as real world is concerned--but it wasn't what I thought philosophy was, and it certainly wasn't why I went into philosophy.

Analytic peeps are not wise. They are not the sort anyone would look up to, and look at for advice. In my experience they're halfway autists, and more often than not, complete scumbags you should not trust with anything. They wield logic around only to justify whatever bullshit vices they're unwilling to part with, and to rationalize shitty behaviors.

I have no doubts about studying Nietzsche. I've thoroughly drank the coolaid so to speak. I think the man is a genius, not of the same caliber as Plato, mind you, but for whatever reason, a better physician of culture, because I think he has both identified the illness that has befallen the west, and prescribed a remedy that actually works.

philosophy mostly, but i guess in general im just wondering

What is the remedy, O sage?

Yes, though I remain unsorted.

You might be able to get a pass by contacting a professor proficient in a language, and having him assign you some pages to translate within some time period.

What is your relationship with your dissertation adviser? Is he cool with you being a candidate for 7 years?

the pia fraus known as eternal return. It's not for you though, nor for any would be immigrant into that world-view.

err... how not what

He's not, but he's had his own problems. He doesn't give me much trouble, though, because frankly, I think he knows I know more about the subject than he does.

Maybe I'm a bit full of myself, though. Truth is he does a different Nietzsche than I do. I do more of a...literary criticism of Nietzsche type thing, and he does more of a traditional "philosophical" Nietzsche, i.e., looking at the arguments, the metaphysical underpinnings of N's thought, etc.

why are so many departments god damn analytic?

i just want some really good continental departments, or anyhting else asides from analytic

How do I tap undergraduate females as a graduate TA? I see them looking at me with dem eyes and dem smiles

>tfw scared to ask your advisor questions or email him

You should think of N as more of a psychologist, i.e., a doctor of the soul/psyche, than a traditional philosopher, i.e., someone who looks at concepts as abstract things divorced from minds and whatever motivations they may have for thinking them. His thinking is oriented towards ideas as symptoms of a pathos.

Having said that, a better question may be what does N think of those people who believe in Free will, or what does he think of those people who believe in determinism. What does it say about someone that they have to believe in freedom? Or that they have to believe in determinism. For an answer to this question, look at BGE 21.

I am not OP but I am a PhD and drug addiction due to stress, bad habits, and the neverending lure of that fucking carrot.

Because, as N would say, after the fall of religion as the sole monopoly on knowledge, in the battle between Science and Philosophy for this role, science won. As he says in BGE 204, "

"Science is thriving these days, its good conscience shines in its face; meanwhile whatever state recent philosophy has gradually sunk to, whatever is left of philosophy today, inspires mistrust and displeasure, if not ridicule and pity. A philosophy reduced to “epistemology,” which is really no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence; a philosophy that does not even get over the threshold and scrupulously denies itself the right of entry – that is a philosophy in its last gasps, an end, an agony, something to be pitied. How could such a philosophy – dominate?"

In order to remain relevant in light of science's definitive victory, philosophy has had to either pretend to be scientific, i.e., to scrutinize concepts in much the same way that science scrutinizes samples in a petri dish with certain pre-determined methods, or to relegate itself to the role of "handmaiden" of science, i.e., to clarifies some concepts for science, or defines some terms that science can't via it's own methods.

Analytic philosophy is just a job in the university. There's nothing good or useful about it. Schopie has a good short little essay on Philosophy in Universities about this, if you're interested.

try talking to them

Most TAs tap undergrads. Nothing wrong with it. This ain't high school. Females do it, too. Just don't do it while they're your students, and make sure it's not someone who might take your class in the future.

You don't want your balls in that vice.

what are the links between N. + schoppenhauer and the hinduism + buddhism

are there still any good continental philo programs in the states or even world?

also are you pretty well read in every major philosopher to get to where you are or just kinda well read and then really well read on your thesis topic?

Good lord this post

Continental philosophy was a mistake

Is asian philosophy compatible with ideas of Nietzsche?

well, n was on schopie's dick for about a decade. his early works are heavily influenced by him. later on, N didn't see schopie as anything special...just one of plato's minions rehashing the same decadent world-view in modern garb.

as far as hinduism is concerned, n was somewhat of a fan of laws of manu, his caste system as a eugenics program, and that eugenics program as being in service of what he calls a "morality of breeding" which he thought was better than our morality, which he called a "morality of taming."

N was a fan of Plato's attempt to make philosophers king, and so he admired the hindu caste system which placed the Brahmans at the helm of society. Look at bge 61-62 for some stuff on this.

Apart from that, what comes to mind is the idea of eternal return in hinduism. it's not of the same, but by possessing such a cosmology and not leaving a way out of this circle speaks loads to their strength and love of life for him. Buddhists, on the other hand, for him, are his antipodes. They recognized eternal return, but elevated the man who could escape from such a circle as the highest and noblest human being, and you know, that's like the complete opposite of the highest and noblest human being for Nietzsche.

I'm alright when it comes to a lot of philosophers. I've had several courses on stuff other than what i specialize in, but I'm not proficient in anything but Nietzsche, and Plato to a lesser degree.

I don't think radical individualism is really a thing in asian philosophy

it depends on what you have in mind. buddhism is certainly not. see Nietzsche's fears for europe is that it would decline into such a sad state of affairs that it would embrace a kind of european buddhism. having said that, i must point out that N did say that buddhism is 100 times more honest and truthful than christianity, but that doesn't mean that their RESPONSE to their praiseworthy "beyond good and evil" understanding of the world, i.e., their ability to look at reality without a moral lens, was healthy or praiseworthy. in fact, they seek to escape life upon seeing it for what it is, and N does not think too highly of them for that reason.

Why do you want a phd in a useless field?

and what is your reaction to the eternal return?
what is the reaction of your adviser?

N was not an advocate of radical individualism. he saw it as a symptom of decadence, of fragmentation, of a culture that was dying...of the "atomic individual."

individuality was for him not an ideal for the unwashed masses. it was the unfortunate fate of a Promethean character, a "genius of the species," who creates a new world-view, who shapes the most "noble clay," viz., human beings. Someone like Moses, or Mohammed, Buddha, or Plato, Jesus, etc. These are necessarily solitary and suffering individuals, for him, but they are 1 in 4 trillion. Nietzsche loved these figures, and he thought of himself as one among them, but he should not be understood to be advocating that anyone can be one like them. That's ridiculous.

For N, there's those who create a new video game, complete with new world, and some kind of point system, and then there's those who play those games and try to win all the points or whatever. There's only a handful of such game creators, and they're great, and they're truly individuals. The great masses of men are merely players within such systems. They're "camels," so to speak. They load themselves up with whatever is heaviest WITHIN a game.

There's Lycurgus, the founder of Sparta. He is an individual, so to speak, and then there's Leonidas, one who plays and wins in Lycurgus' game.

Do you really think N wants recalcitrant clay? He absolutely despises democracies, anarchy, communism, libertarianism, and all such political systems that want nothing but, essentially, what he calls "the autonomous herd." See BGE 202.

>"the hoy polloy"
>the "the people"
>the the
>doesn't know greek but thinks he's not part of unwashed masses

Just being a dick, you seem cool.

Why do you constantly say that academia is not your "real life?" About this I am very curious.

my reaction is that i can't fathom it in much the same way and for much the same reason that i can't truly fathom my own death.

Have you read any famous secondary literature on Nietzsche? (Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Jaspers, etc.) If so, what did you think about it?

Yeah no shit loser, I didn't say anything you're disagreeing with. Don't read bullshit into my fucking post as an excuse to vomit a bunch of overwrought trash rhetoric on my goddam board.

...

How do you decide which philosopher to focus on?

Another PhD candidate reporting in. In a Philosophy-related field.

PhD students really fall into two types, in my experience. There are the people who are just good at writing papers in undergrad, and who treat it like a job, and there are the people who are passionate about a subject and weird enough to want to study it at all costs. Both groups have relatively high rates of stress and all the things that go with that, but for different reasons.

The first group gets stressed because the work becomes unrewarding and tedious quickly, if you are treating it like a day job. Even if you're a workaholic grade-grubber, it just feels like a job after a while, and gets harder with each passing year for tedious, unchallenging reasons (endless grant applications are not your scholarly passion). Often, the kind of social life you have in grad school is fundamentally based around coping with this endless schedule of busywork, so it involves drinking and shallow partying.

It's easy to get into a spiral where you just want to have time to relax, so you do what you absolutely have to do and then you watch Netflix with your fat girlfriend for 3 days. But that traps you in grad school for longer, because you never finish your dissertation. Working on your dissertation isn't something you can pencil in time for, it's something you have to be at peak form for and raring to go. Then people have kids, because they still want to live a meaningful adult life despite being a 34 year old glorified intern, and they're fucked.

The second group is just nuts to begin with. Plenty of burnouts and depression cases who only went into it because normie life is horrific for them to begin with. The problem is, grad school is filled with normies and unimaginative jobbers from Group #1, and it's structured around assuming those people will treat it like a job for ten years. So even if you're in group #2, you're forced to do meaningless busywork shit for 5+ years, and the cocktail of inspiration and drive and depression that made you go to grad school in the first place has a lot of opportunities to sputter out, or terminate in a drug problem, or whatever.

Grad school is full of a lot of busted normies and a lot of busted non-normies.

Do you have any thoughts or experiences with the work of Max Stirner?

Why don't you go into the industry instead? Sure, it may not be as sexy but those seven figures are worth it, I'd say.

Why do professors insist on overexposing Nietzsche?

The same reason Mishima gets a hard on from St. Sebastian. He epitomizes the mad intellectual who went crazy from going too near the "truth" (whatever that is lmao).

wow that sounds horrible.

how about the people that break through all of that? what type of people are they and what do they do in school to achieve that?

Wat

Are most PhD students really normies? Is this just restricted to philosophy or all around?

This is hilariously optimistic, you didn't even mention whoring yourself out both figuratively and literally at every opportunity.

op here. in my experience, people who are grounded--which typically means people who are married and have kids--tend to do well in grad school. They treat grad school like a job, and the PhD as necessary for an actual job. They come to campus with their lunch box, with their reading done, sit through the seminar, and turn their paper in.

The professor tells them to read this author and to take their point into consideration, and they do that. They're told to take some sort of stand on some issue, and they do that.

They don't make the mistake that a lot of other grad students make, namely, they don't treat their dissertation as their magnum opus. They see it for what it is: something you have to write which your advisers will have to approve.

They don't drink, they don't party, they don't try to get laid, they don't get mixed up in the department drama, don't protest, don't try to change the world. They mingle for a couple of hours before or after classes, and you can see that even when they mingle, they're just trying to fish as many fun stories to bring home to their families. The center of gravity in their life is not the program, it's their home life.

They might have a passion for what they're studying, but their primary focus is their life outside of academia. Academia is a job, or a pathway to a job. Some people get up in the morning and go work in a factory. Others, the successful type of grad student and academic, gets up and goes to the department.

>"Segway"

It's "segue". I'm in a STEM PhD and even I know that.

that's actually good life advice

>the PhD as necessary for an actual job
>Academia is a job, or a pathway to a job
Then, after finishing their postdoc reality kicks in; your adjunct professorship barely pays rent, you can't afford that avocado toast any more, dread is really starting to eat you up now, the university just made a entire department redundant because administration redirected their funding to the gender studies department, your teaching at a party college and the guy your competing with for tenure graduated from Harvard, is Evergreen hiring?

[not OP]
Nietzsche does not believe in free will, but ultimately this does not matter considering that within the human frame of reference actions do not matter more or less even if we can't "really" control them. In this sense, the "responsibility" you fear is not in fact the expression of man's control over his own actions, but nonetheless the feeling of "responsibility" exists and has meaning. You won't avoid responsibility just because man doesn't "really" have the final decision in his actions.

Chapter 2 of Human All too Human elucidates this.

How have you coped with Rene Girard and Max Scheler's critiques of Nietzsche?

When I was in grad school the maths PhD people all got huge salaries working for banks afterwards, so I'd say do it.

>the one who succeeds at what Socrates had an opportunity for but failed (to be the first tragic philosopher)

How did Socrates fail at being a tragic philosopher? Surely he was tragic. His philosophy, though pure, ultimately killed him.

JUST

Please leave me in ignorance.

Not an argument, analcuck

>will i ever find
no

Jesus christ this faggot is insecure

>mfw #2 with enough of #1 that i can get by decently without real effort
>all effort i've put into busywork has been as a game and because i enjoy having things planned
>no fat girlfriend or normie friends so that means i can do whatever i want with my freetime
>carefully choose what i will enjoy in the offtime so that it aligns with my aims as a whole
>tfw you're not pushed or pushing

read birth of tragedy. for n, socrates killed tragedy with his faith in reason and disdain of the dionysian.

Who accepts a dissertation on Nietzsche these days, and who let's you write it for 7+ fucking years. Normally, you get in trouble after three, maximally four years.

look at courses offered in ivy league unis. look at any university worth its salt. chances are, they have a resident nietzschean, and they probably have a nietzsche seminar every year.

i don't think you understand how big nietzsche is nowadays.

Tell me about Nietzsche. I keep reading different things online about him. Some people say he's an atheist, basing it off his "God is dead" quote while others are saying he is a theist. Some say he was a nihilist while others say he went beyond that, and said you are free to create your own meaning after realizing that it's all bullshit. Others parrot quotes from his work in the name of Liberalism while others say the same for Conservatism. Even the nazis have used Nietzsche's works to promote their own agenda. I have come to the conclusion that none of these people had any idea what he was talking about, and neither do I. The only thing that I have gained by reading this thread was he was a eugenics sympathizer. Please, give it to me straight, what exactly did he stood for? What did he advocate? What did he condemn? What were his hopes for the human race? Please, summarize as best you can, and take as long as you need to answer.

how about reading, you idiot

Nietzsche was an advocate of philosophy, more so than a philosopher in the traditional sense. He was concerned with much of the same things Plato was concerned with, which is to say statesmanship, and the kind of thing statesmen are concerned with, namely what people think and how they think, and how one may give them something new to think in order to make them behave a certain way...THIS more so than whether particular ideas are true.

As I've mentioned before, N should not be read as holding or trying to advance positions with regard to the free will/determinism debate, or god's existence, or whatnot. He's first and foremost a psychologist (soul doctor) of sorts concerned with the pathos that is attracted to some kind of ideas and not others, and the way in which certain kinds of ideas--when they're bundled together to form a world-view--affect people, how they MOLD them, give them a character, a certain disposition towards the world and life.

Nietzsche advocated for life and those ideas which he thought life-affirming people are attracted to (when those ideas are bundled together to form a certain kind of world-view), and which if they became predominant would re-attune the world to possess a similar life-affirming virtue.

I'd keep going, but I'll leave it here and see where you might want to take it from here. I'm up until litecoin stabilizes and I figure out a good place to sell.

Is selling shitcoins the only way to make a living as a phil major?

yea, i also teach sometimes in between trading

Why not author some books that basically translate complex philosophical principles to normies to "change their lives" like to not be fat, unmotivated shits. The usual ham handed shit that people swallow up and pay heaps of cash for.

Was thinking about making a youtube vid series...basically one general Nietzsche and Plato stuff with regard to nihilism and their thoughts of how to overcome it, and another a detailed one about specific Nietzsche books, e.g., 10 minute videos for each one of Zarathustra's sections. That way audience can read a section and then watch my video for clarification. I don't know that anyone'd care though, and frankly, I'm afraid doing that kind of thing would get be blacklisted in academia.

not OP but I would say the ultimate aim of Taoist philosophy is attainment of the Ultimate Man and what neitzche would call hatred of the body. I think they are almost diametrically opposed tbqh

>concerned with the pathos that is attracted to some kind of ideas and not others, and the way in which certain kinds of ideas--when they're bundled together to form a world-view--affect people, how they MOLD them, give them a character, a certain disposition towards the world and life.
>advocated for life and those ideas which he thought life-affirming people are attracted to (when those ideas are bundled together to form a certain kind of world-view), and which if they became predominant would re-attune the world to possess a similar life-affirming virtue.
Please, explain in more detail.

You could do it anonymously, I think it's too specific to focus on N and Plato however, in this day and age and since we're essentially talking about a stream of income you kind of need to, dare I say, "dumb it down" for the general population into more or less, life lessons inspired by philosophy that are 2-5 minutes. By anonymously I mean you could, yourself or with an associate, create subtitled animations rather than have yourself giving a lecture. That's the sort of thing that could gain traction and social media and inevitably lead people to your channel for subscriptions.

I'm thinking about doing a PhD... I'm applying to a few programs of varying backgrounds (Literature, American Studies, Philosophy, etc.) At the same time, I'd also like to have a relationship with someone, get married and maybe have a kid or two... I'm also 29. Is this possible?

What do?

p1.

Ok, let me give you the example of Anaximander from Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

He says in that book that what's important when looking at philosophers of the past is their PERSONALITY. What they thought, the content of their thinking, is not really important, or if it is, it's only important in that it reveals something about the personality. This is N's starting point, and had been from the beginning of his career. This is how he begins a book about the "pre-Platonic philosophers."

Let's take the case of Anaximander. What does N say about him? He says that Ana began with an inexplicable distaste for suffering in the world, and he correctly saw that suffering is the result of change. Things decay and then they perish. All things do that. So, in Nietzsche's analysis, Ana sought to explain why things change, how it is that anything that changes, perishes, could have a right to live. How could it be just, in other words, for things to perish. Certainly, Ana thought, if something had a right to live, to be, it would not cease to be. Hence, he thereafter reasoned, things that perish must not have a right to be.

But why do they perish? What is it that strips them of their right to exist? Ana's answer: qualities. Things posses qualities, or rather are possessed by qualities for a while, then the qualities leave and other qualities inhere. So a fig might have the quality of being green, then of being brown, then black and rotten. The perishing of the fig is due to these qualities coming and going. Qualities--which make something a definitive thing, a thing with shape and color and extension and so on--are what strips things that exist of their right to be.

Yet, how could it be that anything at all still exists? Shouldn't all that is have perished long ago? Everything is certainly in a state of decay at the moment, being that everything seems to have a definitive shape...due to qualities. This tumor on the world which Ana understood as qualities should have certainly put an end to the world at some point in the past. So why are things with a definitive shape (due to possessing qualities) still around, if decaying?

His answer is that the world of becoming, the world of definitive things possessing qualities comes to be anew and passes away in cycles. But how can it come to be anew? Does the world perish into nothing and then from nothing is born again anew? No. There must be something which is eternal which gives birth to the temporal. This eternal thing, however, cannot possess that which makes the termporal be temporal, i.e., it must not possess any quality at all...hence, Ana called it the "Apeiron," which means the Indefinite.

p2.

The Apeiron has a right to be, and it is consequently eternal, and Ana reasons that the reasons it is eternal is because it must not posses that world-tumor known as qualities. Hence it does not change, either. How could it, if all change is explained in terms of qualities coming and going?

Thus, all that exists and perishes away deserves what's coming to it for having separated from the apeiron. To be indefinite is just, and to be torn apart from the indefinite, to thereby attain some qualities, to become a definite thing, is unjust. You pay for your injustice by suffering, by decaying, and eventually dying.

There are two worlds for Ana. The world of becoming, our world, the suffering world--the unjust world. And then there is the world of being, the world that IS, that does not change, the world that has a right to be--the just world.

---------------

Notice that in this telling of Anaximander, N's tries to explain how Ana coped with his attitude towards suffering. It was his attitude towards it--that there's something wrong with suffering--that spurred him on to create a whole world-view in order to justify, to make sense, of his initial reaction. His "blegh!" towards the suffering of the (changing) world becomes a reasoned thing, but his initial "blegh!" is responsible for his whole philosophy for Nietzsche.

Right after N says all this about Anaximander, he goes and tells the story of Heraclitus, because Heraclitus' initial reaction to the world of becoming--(and you should think of the world of becoming as a pre-theoretical perception of the world for N. You don't have to reason your way to understand that the world changes, and that there's suffering in this world that changes)--to suffering within that world is "Meh. It's fine." In other words, Heraclitus' initial tasting of the world found it fine. And so, N thinks, Heraclitus' psyche had no need to postulate and then reason for another, a second world, a better one than this.

No, Having found this world to his taste, Heraclitus goes on to construct a world-view in which this is the only world that exists, in which becoming is just, even passing away is just, in which everything that happens is just.

See what I'm talking about?! What's interesting to Nietzsche in these two cases (Ana and Heri) is how their pathos, their reaction to the world and to suffering within it, whether they say "yes" or "no" to the world initially, pre-philosophically, determines WHAT they say about the world philosophically. All that they say about the world is ultimately a perspective for Nietzsche, a reading of an inkblot test. He doesn't take the content seriously, nor does he try to argue against or for whatever it is that the psyche of a philosopher has come up with in order to cope, or justify, its initial reaction to the world, to suffering within it.

Do you hate yourself? Why are you pursuing a useless degree?

You contribute absolutely nothing to mankind or society.

p3.

Note that for N all construction of a second world (in Ana, in Parmenides, in Plato, in all the religions, in Kant, etc., are symptoms of a weak constitution, one that cannot stomach this world and the suffering that comes with it.

This drive to postulate a better world can be more refined, and can construct a second world IN this world, as in the case of the socialist idiots, who postulate a perfectly just world in the future of this world, not outside of it.

Agreed.

Now, it's not just whether one postulates a second world, that singular idea, that is symptomatic of a weakling's constitution. There's also other ideas which become serve as foundations of that second world cosmology.

And so, for example, since weaklings tend to see the suffering in the world as a form of punishment, they may need to find people culpable for what they do, which means that they need to postulate free will. People are free, therefore guilty for what they do, and hence, their suffering is their punishment.

Free will in this Nietzschean analysis is not scrutinized as a concept, but as a pathology's coping mechanism.

Starting my PhD soon, gonna note down this comment.

Not to distract away from a good thread with my blogpost but I'm looking for some advice.

I dropped out of high school due to a bad home life/bullying/emotional issues. After learning how to go outside and working a bit, I managed to slide into university through a bridging program. I fucked that up though, and got suspended for a year. I'm coming back this September to continue my first year at the age of 24.

Philosophy is my main passion and if all goes well, I intend on studying philosophy post grad. I wouldn't want to study phl unless it meant I would be continuing my education.

Alternatively, I could try to put my head down and work through a STEM degree. I'd finish at the undergrad level and get some finance-related job from there.

Do I have any real hope of making it to a phd candidacy, if I can barely make it through my first year? Should I try to pursue something else? Should I quit while i'm ahead?

Where do I start with Nietzsche? At The Birth of Tragedy and just read his works in order? I've read like ten of the Greek tragedies, lots of Plato, and Aristotle's NE, Poetics, and Physics.