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- Funnily enough, iirc Foucault viewed a large part of his work as extending the style of investigation Neitzsche initiated in Genealogy of Morals.
I think Nietzsche is great. His prose is a breath of fresh air and he's arguably the greatest literary stylist among philosophers since the Greeks. Sartre was pretty good too, likely thanks to his ability as a novelist. Some later continental philosophers would have really benefited from reading his aphorism that good writers write to be understood.
- Power according to Hobbes is the ability to get what you want.
One of the forms of power is success power, another is riches (more here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2...)
By showing you can afford lavish things, you are demonstrating success power and riches. This makes people do whatever you want, or at least tilt the scale closer into your favor.
I think Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, then reading Will To Power would very much get you up to speed. Other authors, Hobbes, Machiavelli, maybe Stirner, maybe skip to Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Even ChatGPT can probably get you started on Nietzsche.
- Growing up I was a pretty reserved, depressed kid. Culturally Christian background but I was a pretty staunch agnostic. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to work, but I did always strive to be as rational as I could in how I approached life. It was very much naturally my coping mechanism.
If faced with being wronged, "They're just a biological machine, how could I be mad at a tree that grew the wrong way?", personal failures, "I am just a biological machine, this is just where I am at at the moment", "Whats it matter what I accomplish? Were all dead in the end anyway", faced with some accident, "Well something was bound to happen at some point. Its nothing unexpected that it happened now", a loss of love, "It happens to everybody, things just didn't coincide".
Its all very calming, and can make you resilient to what's going on, but I came to realize that what I am really doing is disassociating from every aspect of my life. Instead of feeling/processing my emotions, I was simply just not caring about any of it. I read Nietzche's Genealogy of Morals, and it was such a derailment from my natural philosophy, and yet it felt he was saying everything that I wanted personally. You're human, be angry if you're angry, be sad if you're sad, do what you want to be doing, have and enforce YOUR will for life.
Yes I agree this line of thinking is definitely needed and can be extremely helpful to someone with the opposite problems, but as with all things in life, its complicated and in truth there is a fine balance that's always difficult to know in advance.
- Read Nietzsche for the first time this year. Genealogy of Morals transfixed me with its brilliance and settled lifelong questions. A singular intellect cutting through time like hot knife through butter.
- My field of study (what I really like to think and learn about) isn't my field of work, but I like the question so I'll spill some thoughts.
I spend a lot of time thinking about philosophical-ish stuff, so here are some books that have had the strongest residual effects (whether that's changing how I think, changing what I think about, changing my values, or simply getting the thought ball rolling faster):
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)
1984 (George Orwell)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter)
The Republic [imp. "the allegory of the cave"] (Plato)
The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Social Construction of Reality (Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (L. Wittgenstein)
Dissemination [imp. "The Pharmakon"] (Jacques Derrida)
The Quest for Reality (Barry Stroud)
Languages of Art (Nelson Goodman)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)
Concepts (Jerry Fodor)
The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra)
Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
Naming and Necessity (Saul Kripke)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
There are others, and a lot of essays (by thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Carl Hempel, Hilary Putnam, WVO Quine, Karl Popper, Alfred Tarski, Gottlob Frege, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakunin, CS Peirce, and David Hume, among many others), but these seem apropos as they most readily came to mind.
- Nietzsche wrote a fascinating book about this - The Genealogy of Morals.
If I remember correctly, he uses the ancient city of Rome as a symbol of the pre-Abrahamic, natural han ethic. Power is good, sex is good, wealth is good, strength is good, competence is good.
This contrasts with the Jerusalem ethic where an almighty god is worshipped, not perched on a mountain or a cloud, but while nailed to a cross. So now self-sacrifice is good, and the whole story revolves around the weak, the poor, the downtrodden.
We’re still in the Jerusalem phase, despite having replaced the church with the state. Perhaps one day, in a few millennia, the wheel will turn back around.
It’s a good book!
