Virtue presentation/Is reading Nietzsche dangerous?

AGENDA

1. Presentation
2. Module 4 -- the big picture
3. Reading Nietzsche
4. Note: more books will be at SMU bookstore Monday...a link to the PDF is in Canvas

Presentation--trying out Stoicism

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Module 4

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900 (German)

KNEE-CHA

Watch up to 1:52

THE GAY [i.e. cheerful] SCIENCE (published in 1882)

Nietzsche's writing style

381 (para 1)

• exhorting, like a preacher
• ranting
• aphorisms--short paragraphs, memorable sentences
  
• deliberately opaque--hard to understand

Topics

1. The nature of morality
2. God, religion
3. How we should live

Is reading Nietzsche dangerous?

• Leopold and Loeb murder (1924)
• University of Chicago students
• had been reading Nietzsche
• Nietzsche would have felt like a recent writer (only as remote as a 1980s author is for us)

Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) -- full movie on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, etc.

• Philip and Brandon are holding a party and they murder the first guest and stuff him in a chest in the middle of the living room
• Rupert, their philosophy teacher, comes to the party (played by Jimmy Stewart)
• Lots of other party guests arrive and chat happily about various topics
• Rupert figures it out

• Brandon's Nietzschean defense of murder: 2:45-3:46 of first clip; 2:49-3:28 of second clip
• To what extent does Nietzsche have the ideas used to defend this crime?