Jesus. :lol:

The most popular way the Overman is interpreted by contemporary Nietzsche fans is post human , particularly the post human god.

Take it up with Banno; the term was not introduced by me — Janus

No.

The fact that snow is white, snow being white, is a fact or state of affairs, not a proposition. What is stated in the sentence "snow is white" is the proposition that snow is white. — Janus

Material equivalence is just for propositions.

Best if you don't pay any attention to my posts. — Banno

Oh dear.

I can't do what? — Banno

You said deflationary truth is where there's a material equivalence between a true sentence and a fact.

This is not the case. It says there's a material equivalence between "P" is true, and P.

You're just wrong.

@Banno

You've got the proposition that snow is white being materially equivalent to the proposition that snow is white. ? — Tate

You can't do that.

There is a sentence which expresses the proposition that snow is white and there is the fact that snow is white. — Janus

It appears to be the same proposition. If not, how are they different?

This isn't the T-schema, as I'm sure you're aware.

That's: "Snow is white" is true IFF snow is white.

You've got the proposition that snow is white being materially equivalent to the proposition that snow is white. ?

There is a material equivalence between "snow is white" and the fact that snow is white. We can also say there is a correspondence. — Janus

There aren't actually two propositions there. It's one sentence. Have you modified the idea of material equivalence?

Material equivalence is usually thought of as obtaining between two propositions, or not. If two propositions have the same truth values on every row of a truth tables. It's another way of saying "correspondence". — Janus

That's not truth deflation and most definitely not correspondence theory.

The deflationary view here unpacks "corresponds" as material equivalence between a fact and a true sentence. — Banno

It isn't clear what this means. What's a material equivalence? Why not just an equivalence?

And why not call it an equivalence theory of truth if that's what you mean?

Unusual for Tate to hand out such compliments.

Any honest regard of He of the Great Moustache must accept that his ideas, rightly or wrongly, are used by nazis and icels and other nasty folk.

It just will not do to ignore the nasty interpretation, or to pretend that it is not to be found in the corpus. — Banno

I agree. Nevertheless, he's one of the most important and influential thinkers of his time. Not everyone's cup of tea, though.

Hey, you guys can continue on at whatever speed you like. I'm reading an essay about the eternal return, so I'll be doing my own thing. Thanks for your generous participation.

This video explains how I feel about that, but you have to watch the whole thing.

Or overlook. What I've read reads like the work of a very smart incel. — Tom Storm

That's says more about you than it does about Nietzsche, I'm afraid.

The irony is, those who praise Nietzsche are pushing against his spirit. — Banno

Nietzsche is a conundrum. In some ways he's amazing. But then he says things I can't forgive, like that a large portion of the human population is superfluous. It's a bad idea to try to white wash that. It can be taken as food for thought, though. Nietzsche is himself something to overcome.

You work hard to find an easy way out. It was you, not the prevailing interpretation of Nietzsche, that made this claim — Fooloso4

There is actually quite a bit of academic work examining the connection between Nietzsche and eugenics. He spoke of breeding experiments. He suggested that women should be valued according to their contribution to creating great humans.

I'm not all that interested in proving it to you when all you have to do is look it up. :grin:

I'm on the verge of leaving this pop stand anyways.

Based on what you have cited this is not about Nietzsche, it is about a questionable interpretation of Nietzsche that attempts to combine Nietzsche and eugenics. — Fooloso4

I think this is where I agree with postmodernism. At the point that eugenics became wildly popular in the UK and the US, it was obvious to people that Nietzsche supported it.

Since eugenics is anathema to us, specifically because of Nazism, we don't think of Nietzsche as favoring it.

Every generation is going to have its own Nietzsche. If you don't accept this, that's fine. Just take the point that if the prevailing interpretation of Nietzsche in the early 20th Century pointed to eugenics, then you can't say that's nonsense. You can say it's wrong, but not nonsense. Let's reserve the word "nonsense" for that which truly makes no sense, ok?

I think it is important to note that Nietzsche's ideas are potentially explosive.

Unfortunately it's not nonsense.

"The old tablets of morality are broken, and the new ones are only half-written.’ With these words Alexander Tille ended his book, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche (1895), ushering in a process, which still continues, of making use of Nietzsche both to diagnose a modern condition of godlessness, and to find something to fill the gap left by God's death. It would probably be true to say that the new tablets of the law are still only half written, if they are even that much written (and perhaps postmodernism means accepting, even celebrating that fact), but in the first decades of the twentieth century interpretations of Nietzsche combined with the new science of eugenics to form a potent attempt to formulate a new code of morals. Why this combination came about, how it was articulated, and what were its results, are the subjects of this chapter."
-- Nietzsche and Eugenics: Breeding Superman

I see Charlton Heston with his wild, white woolly hair and beard as Moses in the Ten Commandments! — Amity

That's exactly the right image because Zarathustra is handing them a set of values. These values are in opposition to the Christian other-worldly framework, and they're opposed to the moral vacuum left by the death of God.

What exactly these new values are is a little foggy. It has something to do with love of life, but as a goal for humanity, there's a distinct dark side to it. If we erase the distinction between soul (psyche) and body, the quest for the Ubermensch implies eugenics.

I teach you the overman..." ( note 3)

What on earth must he have looked or sounded like? — Amity

The scene is dream-like to me. They think he's talking about the tight-rope walker: the over man.

Why would the saint have heard any news? And how would Z have, being isolated? — Amity

True, that doesn't make much sense.

What is the meaning of "God is Dead"?
An idea in the mind of Z? Or a feeling in his heart/soul? — Amity

Good question. I'm not really sure.

Good. Because if it were another forum you would be gone by now, and would need to re-enter using yet another alias. — skyblack

You're mistaken.

See if you can stay away from this kind of infantile behavior. — skyblack

I'll try.

In doing so, however, we do not enter into the original conversation, but create a new one for ourselves.” — Joshs

How would you know this had happened unless you're capable of entering the original conversation to see that it's different from the one you created?

:up: I'm reading an essay about how the Overman relates to the eternal return. It's good.

It occurs to me that this issue is mostly about non-philosophical discussions. If I just stay away from those, I probably won't see as much infantile behavior from mods or members. :up:

The next section introduces the Superman. I'm sure everyone will have their own notion of what that is.

Recall that the exchange with the Saint sets up this introduction. The world is full of suffering. Humans are ever afflicted and the idea of God made it more bearable. God cared. God was testing us, or we were paying for sins, or it was the devil and God could make things right. We were caught up in a really important cosmic drama and it was worthwhile to stick it out and see how the novel ended.

But now God is dead.

I'm sure you're right. I don't care at this point.

I think we beat the saint to death, poor guy. Let's move on.

That's a fascinating quote, and I totally agree with it, but I don't see how it relates.

Right. By the time he writes TSZ, he no longer approves of the Saint's isolation. In TSZ, the Saint refers to both himself and Z as anchorites, which is a religious hermit. He says people don't trust anchorites, which is mentioned in GoM.

Z, of course, proceeds on down to the world of humans. From now on, I'll say "human" instead of "men" because I think it's clearer.

But from where do you see the process being about 'producing great human beings?' — Paine

That's early Nietzsche in Schopenhauer as Educator.

Per McPherson:
"According to Nietzsche in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, what is needed in order to justify our existence is to provide suffering with a higher purpose or meaning sufficient to make life worth living. However, doing so requires that human beings transcend their animality, since for animals as mere animals all suffering must remain ‘senseless suffering’ without any higher significance.Footnote6 What is distinctive about being human is precisely the capacity to transcend our animality and ‘turn the thorn of suffering against itself’ by providing it with a higher sense of significance.Footnote7 Above all, Nietzsche claims, this higher sense of significance is provided by those true human beings who ‘are no longer animal’: viz., the philosopher, the artist, and the saint.Footnote8 These three figures stand as the highest human exemplars precisely because of the ways in which they are able to utilize suffering for the sake of great achievements that go far beyond what is possible for non-human animals. In doing so they provide suffering with a ‘higher significance’ as well as a perspective from which life in the world can be justified. Thus Nietzsche contends: ‘It is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of nature’.Footnote9 Likewise, he says: ‘Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men – that and nothing else is its task. […] How can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance? […] Certainly only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars’.Footnote10"

How do you relate these commentaries to the clear rejection of Christian belief put forward by Nietzsche? — Paine

I think Nietzsche enjoyed the position of anthropologist. In that role, he was free to take whatever beliefs and values a society holds as mythology, which was in line with his epistemology. In this, he was the forerunner of people like Jung and Joseph Campbell, who sought to go beyond rejecting Christianity to placing it in a psycho-historical framework.

In other words, yes, he rejected Christianity. He condemned Christians. But then, he condemned just about everyone at some time or another.

The ideal of the saint is not strictly about Christianity. It's more in line with some kind of esoteric mysticism.

Do you have a set of quotes by Nietzsche that supports these ideas? — Paine

? My last post had two quotes from him. One from Schopenhauer as Educator, and one from GoM.

Can you provide a textual reference? — Fooloso4

" In a remarkable passage from ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, Nietzsche describes his understanding of the saint in the following terms:

"And so nature at last needs the saint, in whom the ego is completely melted away and whose life of suffering is no longer felt as his own life – or is hardly so felt – but as a profound feeling of oneness and identity with all living things: the saint in whom there appears that miracle of transformation which the game of becoming never hits upon, that final and supreme becoming-human after which all nature presses and urges for its redemption from itself. It is incontestable that we are all related and allied to the saint, just as we are related to the philosopher and artist; there are moments and as it were bright sparks of the fire of love in whose light we cease to understand the word ‘I’, there lies something beyond our being which at these moments moves across into it, and we are thus possessed of a heartfelt longing for bridges between here and there.Footnote1"
-- McPherson 2015

By the Geneology of Morals, his view of the Saint has changed. He now says:

"So far the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation. Why did they bow? In him – and as it were behind the question mark of his fragile and miserable appearance – they sensed the superior force that sought to test itself in such conquest, the strength of the will in which they recognized and honored their own strength and delight in dominion: they honored something in themselves when they honored the saint. Moreover, the sight of the saint awakened a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for nothing, they said to and asked themselves. There may be a reason for it, some very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors, might have inside information. In short, the powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy – it was the “will to power” that made them stop before the saint.Footnote16" -GoM

As interesting as all this is, can I ask that the thread sticks to the title and OP, TSZ: Reading?
If you want to talk about N, possibly start another thread? — Amity

The Prologue to TSZ has been described as "thick." There are lot of ideas in there. This is just to explain why the saint declares that he's a "bear among bears." Nietzsche is referring to the spiritual stature of the saint, though this is not strictly a Christian spirituality.

In Schopenhauer as Educator?

The Saint doesn't represent Christianity in general. For N, the Saint is a person who has experienced some sort of ego death and has blended with all life.

Early on when N was suggesting that humanity should be bent toward creating great human beings, the Saint was at the top of his list. That changed over time. He began to see the Saint as as one who abandons earthly life, so the taint of Christianity is on him, but he's still not representative of the whole religion.

You mischaracterized the exchange. I wasn't involved. My interest is that Xtrix has done this before and Jamal said at that time that there is an unspoken rule that mods don't delete comments in discussions they're participating in.

Your view is apparently different.

Anyhow, that's all I have to say about it. No need to spend pages discussing a single removed post, I'm sure you'll agree.

However, it's the implications I find worrying. — Tzeentch

Fine.

yeeted — fdrake

"Yeet" is American slang for "throw."

that was what actually happened, it would not be okay. — fdrake

Xtrix was condescending and insulting for pages to another poster named "God must be an atheist',then Tzeentch interjected one joke.

I really think you're diminishing your own site by allowing this.

And it's ok for Xtrix to insult people, but no one may respond?