Ressentiment is the enduring psychological state of resentment in which resentment is behind one's creative force for valuation — Vaskane

"Resentment (in French) is the enduring psychological state of resentment". Interesting.

I am complete skeptic when it comes to Plato

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Said one skeptic about another. Both must be read skeptically, and this in the original Greek sense of skeptis. In light of their irony and esotericism.

Do you expect the “real” reasons for these developments to be available outside of all culturally influenced interpretation?

No. I'm actually quite a fan of speculative history.

What I am saying is that the method is easy to do poorly, and in some respects Nietzsche does it very poorly indeed. His Plato is almost a gnostic, and it is indeed hard to see why he would have become so influential — Count Timothy von Icarus

I confess to being an ignoramus when it comes to Classical history, as well as Greek philosophy. I always skip past Nietzsche’s writings on the Greeks, so I’ll take your word for it that his account doesnt donthat period justice.
What I’m interested in is not whether Nietzsche gets the content of historical events ‘right’, however one wants to define that, but, as you put it, the formal structure of historical change. Speculative history is grounded in one kind of formal account. Nietzsche’s formal approach constitutes a critique of speculative dialectics, leading to genealogical forms of analysis, like those of Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. I suppose my question would be why you prefer speculative dialectics over this alternative path.

Deleuze destroys Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Deleuze is very well versed in Nietzsche. — Vaskane

My favorite section of Anti-Oedipus:

Melanie Klein herself writes: "The first time Dick came to me ... he manifested no sort of affect when his nurse handed him over to me. When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called them 'Daddy-train' and 'Dick-train.' Thereupon he picked up the train I called 'Dick' and made it roll to the window and said 'Station.' I explained: 'The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy.' He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shutting himself in, saying 'dark,' and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him: 'It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.' Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way: 'Nurse?' . . . As his analysis progressed . . . Dick had also discovered the wash-basin as symbolizing the mother's body, and he displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water." Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face. The
psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: "Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won't you?" Instead he screams: "Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein.

Oy. Your cardiovascular system may not be too thrilled with that routine. — Joshs

Feh! What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

I need to rest up now. And I need to do something about the orange dust on my keyboard. But that can wait. I just don't seem to have the energy now.

Yes, as with worship of other philosophers, I am not debating Nietzsche on his own terms, because I don't agree with his terms.

That's like saying, "Debate Donald Trump using only arguments that Donald Trump would use". Of course, that is a bad example because he has no actual beliefs other than narcissism, but you get my point.

Your version of the Ubermensch is beyond strawman, to the point of I know you've never read Nietzsche level of stupid. — Vaskane

Yet you haven't said so. Don't worry when you flesh out your "radically different version based on the REAL Nietzsche" I will just show how it is indeed what I described. But go ahead, shit or get off the pot. Go read Schopenhauer then. I can say to go read anyone.

Eternal Recurrence for Nietzsche is more of a thought experiment for "The Heaviest Burden." Obviously you wouldn't understand that cause you've not read Nietzsche's Gay Science. — Vaskane

Same with this.. Go tell me what the REAL Nietzschean expert knows about this idea, and then I will probably just see that it is indeed the same as I characterized. There is a difference between KNOWING something and then EVALUATING that something. A lot of posters on this forum think that simply KNOWING what someone said confers that one must ACCEPT THE TRUTH of what is said. That is not the case.

Freudian Psychoanalysis is based off Oedipalizing Family Structures and doesn't know shit about the Apollonian and Dionysian. Deleuze destroys Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Deleuze is very well versed in Nietzsche. — Vaskane

I don't confer any Truth (capital letter T) to Freud, I only see that his general ideas are more on the mark than Nietzsche's notions.

You can make the following moves.. ]
Nietzsche is all ID I claim..
You can say

No he isn't! He believes in TEMPERED enthusiasm for life.

I say:
Then he is an Ayn Rand

You say NO He's not, he believes in a more generalized overcoming to be an ubermensch etc. etc.

It's all the same thing in circles.

I'm driving, but I'll get your first comment now, the rest later. You never read much of Nietzsche imo, that aside, you've also never read Nietzsche from Nietzsche's perspective so you'll never know Nietzsche. — Vaskane

Be careful! But also, you should write a book called "Nietzsche on Nietzsche" and have Nietzsche explain himself to himself.

“Say that it's Oedipus, or you'll get a slap in the face”.
Classic

What philosopher before Deleuze ever began a work this way:

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times,
at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.

Eternal Recurrence for Nietzsche is more of a thought experiment — Vaskane

I would say that it is more than a thought experiment. The eternal return is a riddle. One key to reading that riddle the problem of creation. If all is eternal return then there can be no creation, but above all Zarathustra wants to create are creators. This is why the child is an essential part of the metamorphosis of the spirit:

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

There are some passages that seem to affirm the eternal return and others that seem to deny it.

I don't confer any Truth (capital letter T) to Freud, I only see that his general ideas are more on the mark than Nietzsche's notions — schopenhauer1

If on the mark means more objective, then that gets to the heart of the difference between Freud and Nietzsche.

As Daniel Berthold puts it:

In keeping with Freud’s idea of science, with its goals of objectivity and impartiality, he ‘fights for truth’ through rea­soned discourse. Again, for Freud, ‘reason is the only truly unifying influence’, so that reasoned discourse alone makes the achievement of a scientific community possible. But in keeping with Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘gay science’ that scorns ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ as myths and that is committed rather to radical perspectivism and the ideal of nobility as solitude, his style of authorship displaces the expectation of agreement, openness, cer­tainty and truth – Freud’s ideals – with a persistent deferral of direct communication. More strongly, Nietzsche deliberately invites misunderstanding: ‘Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood’

However strange and wicked Freud’s own project may be in the way it unsettles and shocks us – recall his warning to the audience of his lectures on psychoanalysis at Vienna, that he ‘will show … how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought’ will be challenged – he addresses an audience he seeks to convince through values he believes we all share: the value of the search for truth, the commonality of our
faculty of reason, and the shared space of our reality. Nietzsche, though, questions those very values and hence renounces the pretext that what he has to say can be grounded in a shared set of assumptions.

Obviously you're a dope when it comes to Nietzsche — Vaskane

Isn't that almost everybody? :grin:

Of course, that is a bad example because he has no actual beliefs other than narcissism, but you get my point. — schopenhauer1

What about being a sexy, most intelligent, exuberant, successful orange billionaire?

Just like ↪Lionino thought he was being smart by not using Nietzsche's perspective in his attempt to poke me — Vaskane

I was not poking you — in fact I haven't really followed the thread. I was poking fun at a horrible translation practice. Derrida's différance is another one, but since it is not a proper term of the French language it does not require translation.

↪Joshs I'm curious and forgive the awkward wording - is it hard to get a useful reading of Nietzsche? How often do you think his work is taken into 'bad reading' territory? — Tom Storm

I think there are many useful readings of Nietzsche, but as is the case with any notable philosopher, these often conflict strongly with each other. The existentialist readers of Nietzsche seem to have nothing in common with his postmodernist interpreters. I say choose the reading you find the most daring and interesting.

and eating Cheetos to moving to the recliner watching cartoons and eating potato chips. — Fooloso4

Given your background in the classics, I recommend you swap these for figs and dates. The cartoons are less problematic, Looney Tunes and Rocky and Bullwinkle, say, might well pass for philosophy in some parts.

I don't give a fig about dates. I do eat Froot Loops though. My education in philosophy is solely through cartoons, but I don't limit myself to the classics such as Looney Tunes and Rocky and Bullwinkle.

That's because a child hasn't formed decisions yet which decide (kill off) all other outcomes. — Vaskane

But given the eternal return all those outcomes have played out a countless number of times.

And given the eternal return there is nothing new in the revaluation of values. All have occurred countless times before. All that elevates man will in time drag him down. All values are ephemeral, transitory, changing. All are of equal value so why the "sacred yes' to these and not others when in time the sacred yes must become a sacred no?

All values are ephemeral, transitory, changing. All are of equal value so why the "sacred yes' to these and not others when in time the sacred yes must become a sacred no? — Fooloso4

All are not of equal value during the period of time when one is working one’s way through a particular value system. One doesn’t live in all values, any more that one lives within all ecological systems, but in one particular way of life at any given time. Eventually, that way of life will come to seem intolerably repressive, and the value system that replaces it will at the same time reject it and be conditioned by it.

I agree.

From The Three Metamorphoses”.

Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: ITS OWN will, willeth now the spirit; HIS OWN world winneth the world’s outcast.

I think part of the answer to the riddle or enigma of the eternal return is "the moment", the "gateway", the "abyss". Whatever was and will be we stand at the moment of the abyss. We have limited knowledge of what was and limited or no knowledge of what will be. Here, now, we must decide, we must act, we must move toward what will be. For us now it is all new.

Still all seems like a thought experiment to allow a certain amount of freedom to the person who understands it. — Vaskane

Describing it as a thought experiment seems too detached. It is without the struggle:

Courage also slays dizziness at the abyss; and where do human beings not stand at the abyss? Is seeing itself not – seeing the abyss?

Courage is the best slayer; courage slays even pity. But pity is the deepest abyss, and as deeply as human beings look into life, so deeply too they look into suffering.

I think our disagreement is mostly a matter of terminology. As I understand it, a thought experiment is hypothetical. Something that can be entertained while one sits comfortably in his armchair. Your quote is from aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, "The Heaviest Burden". It begins:

What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you ...

Although this is a hypothetical: "what if ...", what the demon says is not posed as a hypothetical, but as something existential. Something that speaks into your loneliest loneliness. It is the thought that acquires power over you, the thought that transforms you. I do not think a thought experiment has this power. We think about if from a safe distance. I don't think as a hypothetical it has this power over us.

However strange and wicked Freud’s own project may be in the way it unsettles and shocks us – recall his warning to the audience of his lectures on psychoanalysis at Vienna, that he ‘will show … how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought’ will be challenged – he addresses an audience he seeks to convince through values he believes we all share: the value of the search for truth, the commonality of our
faculty of reason, and the shared space of our reality. Nietzsche, though, questions those very values and hence renounces the pretext that what he has to say can be grounded in a shared set of assumptions.

Well, I think you are trying to show difference in form, and I'm just trying to show some similar ideas that were tackled better with Freud's ID, Ego, Superego.. I see these all as basically folk psychology, but can be useful. Nietzsche's transformative Apollonian is kind of ID-like. But ID on its own burns out. It is just instinctual drive for pleasure. It is tempered by society's expectation's in development, (Superego), until one forms a sense of balance between one's own interests, and that of living in a society (Ego).

Anything that tempers Nietzsche just starts looking technocratic and I don't think a Nietzschean would want that. So I brought up throw away burnout culture.. Punks, traveling with all that money you have accumulated, living on the road like a glorified Jack Kerouac.. I mean hell, RV culture for retired folk might be considered Nietzschean then.. But I don't think it's that either.. Pursuing your interests to the best of your ability was better stated within Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs anyways. So I don't know what to make of Nietzsche except as a sort of jumping off point for other people who made similar articulations but more systematically. I don't know what a systematic Nietzschean philosophy looks like since it's a hodgepodge of ideas that are roughly related, and have much to do with pursuing one's interests aggressively and not being meek.

Still all seems like a thought experiment to allow a certain amount of freedom to the person who understands it.

341

The Heaviest Burden. What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: "This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence - and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!" - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: "You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: "Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favourably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?
— Nietzsche, Gay Science

If not already the sweetest concept, what must you begin doing at this moment to make reliving your life, infinitely more times, exactly as it is, the sweetest concept to your ears?

As Nietzsche details, this is the heaviest burden at the core of the essence of Eternal Return.

Same with this.. Go tell me what the REAL Nietzschean expert knows about this idea, and then I will probably just see that it is indeed the same as I characterized. There is a difference between KNOWING something and then EVALUATING that something. A lot of posters on this forum think that simply KNOWING what someone said confers that one must ACCEPT THE TRUTH of what is said. That is not the case.
— schopenhauer1

First -- get it straight, I am a real Nietzschean expert. Which is why when you say stuff like this:

Eternal Reoccurrence:
Again, Schopenhauer dealt with these issues in a more nuanced and informative way. This can easily be co-opted by fitness instructors and company gurus.. Rand types actually, who want to make sure that everyone is living the best moment they can over and over, embracing the "suck". Nope, the suck just sucks, and you are not a pussy for acknowledging this. It is just life. It's juvenile to think that at every moment one is calculating the best way to live that. Why? Because if you lived to the extreme at all moments, you end up burning out, becoming homeless, dying, suffering more. But then if you claim that it requires structure as well, it just starts looking like a Randian industrialist, artist, inventor, and the like. You become exactly sublimating in the way that is conducive to society. Besides which Freud got to these ideas better with his ideas of the Id, Ego, and Superego. You can't just live as an Id.
— schopenhauer1

Just makes me laugh about the fact you're not even talking about Nietzschean philosophy and psychology, but just some fantasy of it, your own personal fantasy. Just like how the Father and Mother Oedipalize the child with their own personal fantasies about their child via psychoanalysis. — Vaskane

Ok so let's compare here:

schopenhauer1 said:
Nope, the suck just sucks, and you are not a pussy for acknowledging this. It is just life. It's juvenile to think that at every moment one is calculating the best way to live that. Why? Because if you lived to the extreme at all moments, you end up burning out, becoming homeless, dying, suffering more. But then if you claim that it requires structure as well, it just starts looking like a Randian industrialist, artist, inventor, and the like. You become exactly sublimating in the way that is conducive to society. Besides which Freud got to these ideas better with his ideas of the Id, Ego, and Superego. You can't just live as an Id.

You quoted Nietzsche saying:
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: "You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over you as you are, it would transform you, and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to all and everything: "Do you want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon your activity! Or, how would you have to become favourably inclined to yourself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?

I don't see how that diverges much from my interpretation. Again, he is pretty abstract here and up for interpretation. I take him as meaning that we should live a life where we would say "yes!" to life over and over.. Sometimes you have to wait at the post office (aka Satan's asshole) for hours, or visit someone you dearly love in a hospital, or deal with terrible tragedies, and these are not things one would want over and over again.

And then the next move is to say "NO You fool!! HE means that you must EMBRACE the SUCK!"

Well, suck just sucks.

Take a look at these! :snicker:

I don't see how that diverges much from my interpretation. Again, he is pretty abstract here and up for interpretation. I take him as meaning that we should live a life where we would say "yes!" to life over and over.. Sometimes you have to wait at the post office (aka Satan's asshole) for hours, or visit someone you dearly love in a hospital, or deal with terrible tragedies, and these are not things one would want over and over again — schopenhauer1

That cartoon is funny. But there’s a reason it’s a cartoon. It collects all the misguided cliches about Nietzsche, i.e. that he’s just promulgating a self-aggrandizing form of existentialism, that he’s all about the supremacy of the autonomously willing subject, that he replaces God with Man. One of the many issues that needs to be addressed is Nietzsche’s split with Schopenhauer over the unity of the Will. For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative.

For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing. Will is equal parts determinism and freedom. The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of
being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative. — Joshs

It is an interesting and affirmative but incomplete perspective on the implications of the theory of a will to power. There is a need to clarify what kind of ethics can be conceived beyond the Nietzschean fictions of the world comprised of precarious objective truths, illusory identities, and morally acting subjects. For Habermas, Nietzsche has become a founder of the aesthetic Dionysian program based on self-dissolving and self-oblivion: “What Nietzsche calls the ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ is disclosed in the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from everyday conventions of perceiving and acting. Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. (Habermas, ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,’ p 93). How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion?

What Nietzsche calls the ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ is disclosed in the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from everyday conventions of perceiving and acting. Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. — Number2018

I wonder what that looks like outside of a paragraph - how does one do this in life?

Only when the subject loses itself, when it sheers off from pragmatic experience in space and time, and when the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed- only then does the world of the unforeseen and the astonishing become open”. (Habermas, ‘The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,’ p 93). How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion? — Number2018

Well, I don’t think following Habermas’s Kantian modernist path is the answer.

How can we abandon firm and stable grounds of self-nurturing while avoiding the pitfalls of self-oblivion?
— Number2018

Well, I don’t think following Habermas’s Kantian modernist path is the answer. — Joshs

Then what is the answer?

For Nietzsche the self is a community, divided within itself, made of competing drives. We dont decide to will what we will . We find ourselves willing...


The implication of this is that Nietzsche wasn’t advocating self-actualization, as if we can choose a path or value system and stay the course. We fall into these paths, and then fall out of them into other values. What we can do is choose not to deny or repress the fact that whatever we want and prefer will end up morphing in directions we can’t predict or control, and we just make things worse by embracing moral or empirical notions of truth that pretend that there are firm grounds ( objective scientific and ethical verities) to attach ourselves to. There is much more suffering attached to this way of thinking than there is to rejecting the idea of a self-determining ego and an objective worldly order in favor of being receptive to the creative possibilities wrapped up within what we first encounter as the unpredictable, the painful and negative.

If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace moral or empirical notions of truth? It seems like we have some capacity for truth and self-determination or we don't, and if we don't, then books about self-overcoming are useless. And why the focus on being controlled by bad ideas?

It always seemed to me that Nietzsche's fatalism was more about attitude, and left plenty of room for self-determination. Maybe "self-actualization" is the wrong term, but I always took him as advocating for something at least similar.

...I do not think that one can read Nietzsche at any phase of his career without being swamped with the impression that, as my students would put it, "he tells us how to really live!" Of course, my students are also stymied by the question, "What is Nietzsche telling us about how to live?" as are we more seasoned commentators. But the seeming lack of specificity in Nietzsche's proposals... does not mean that his is not first and foremost an existential, one might even say moralistic, philosophy.

As for his fatalism:

One powerful argument in favor of Nietzsche's strong sense of responsibility, quite apart from any thesis regarding free will, is his heavy use of what I call the blaming perspective, according to which people are held accountable as the authors or agents of their actions. Of course, their actions can also be praised and they can be forgiven, but I think "blame" best captures the essence of this perspective, both as Nietzsche pursues it and, admittedly, as he sometimes exemplifies it as well. The blaming perspective presupposes a robust sense of agency. It thus tends to emphasize responsibility and be suspicious of excuses. To be sure, in On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche urges us both to get "beyond good and evil" (Essay I) and to get over our felt need to judge, to blame, and to punish (Book II). But it would be difficult to read virtually any of Nietzsche's writing without noticing the harsh denunciations that permeate his style...

Nietzsche professes disgust with the blaming perspective, but he nevertheless exemplifies it more than any other philosopher. He holds people responsible for what they do, but as exemplary of their "natures" and their virtues and not only because of their choices and decisions.


...Nietzsche's fatalism is clearly not a metaphysical thesis. It rather harks back to his beloved pre-Socratic Greek tragedians. It is an aesthetic thesis, one that has more to do with literary narrative than with scientific truth. In this sense, fatalism has little to do with determinism. There need be no specifiable causal chain. There is only the notion of a necessary outcome and the narrative in which that necessity becomes evident. Thus Oedipus was "fated" to do what he did, whatever causal chain he pursued...


...his "fatalism" consists almost entirely of his intimate and enthusiastic engagement with what Leiter calls "classical fatalism," where this must be understood as not only the fatalism of the ancients (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Heraclitus) but as a rich way of viewing our lives in which we are neither victims of chance and contingency nor Sartrian "captains of our fate." One might even say, alluding to one of Nietzsche's better-known bits of euphoria, that we are more like the oarsmen of our fate, capable of heroic self-movement but also swept along in an often cruel but glorious sea.

Nietzsche may be unclear about the extent to which character is agency and how character and specific actions are related, but he is very clear about the fact that we, whatever we are "given" in our natures, are responsible for cultivating our character. Not that this is easy. Nietzsche tells us, "Giving style to one's character—a great art. But whether rare or commonplace, whether limited to a few "higher men" or something that we all do, cultivating one's character goes hand in hand with Nietzsche's conception of fatalism.

...One becomes what one is. And if one believes—as I think anyone not blinded by ideology or an empty "humanism" must believe—that we are all talented and limited in different ways (including what we might call our meta-talents, such as self-discipline, which have to do with our ability to foster our talents), then it more or less follows that we are free to development our talents (free, that is, insofar as we have the talent). But we are not free regarding what talents we have and, therefore, what talents we might choose to develop. I say "more or less" here because of a number of pretty obvious qualifications: most people have more than one talent and are therefore free to choose among them, and the development of any talent can be thwarted by any number of external and internal factors, such as lack of opportunity, the absence of adequate role models or exemplars, a paucity of praise and encouragement or (worse) an excess of discouragement and even ridicule, or a debilitating mishap or accident.

Robert Solomon - Nietzsche on Fatalism and "Free Will"

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/24092#REF23

And I'm inclined to agree with Nietzsche in a lot of this. But the funny thing is that, pace Nietzsche and Solomon's article, there is a lot of this in Patristic thought (e.g., Saint Augustine's view of our status as pilgrims in the "earthly city.").

Maybe that's the part I dislike most about Nietzsche, the tendency to misrepresent and heap scorn on people only to recapitulate their positions. Aside from being an aesthetic problem, it leads to missing some important things. For instance, it seems obvious that, aside from different people having differing talents for self-control and discipline, that these can also be developed, and to some degree, taught. They can also be fostered or frustrated by the social environment.

This has relevance for Nietzsche's take on asceticism. I think he has some brilliant insights on the ways in which people dominate themselves in self-destructive ways to give themself a sense of control, to be tyrants over their corner of the universe. However, this is not true of all asceticism. The word itself comes from the routines of athletes, and where it is employed by thinkers like Saint John of the Cross, it serves a similar practical purpose vis-a-vis our meta talents. Such asceticism enhances our ability to "become who we are," (as well as a higher mystical purpose).

Plenty of philosophers have held that the self/person is a disordered, composite entity. This is key to Plato's anthropology. And yet we do have this limited, constrained capacity for self-direction. Where does this come from?

I tend to agree with Plato that rationality is the place to look. Nietzsche has a point that there is a problem with the tyranny of the intellect, a position he foists onto the Platonic/Christian tradition. But the actual tradition has both rationality and empathy/the aesthetic sense harmonizing the disordered self. I find this view compelling.

Plus, the entire idea of philosophy, particularly existentialism, as well as therapy, sort of falls apart if the intellect can't do anything to harmonize the person. If that was true, doing such philosophy would be like trying to reform a group of people by talking to someone none of them pay any attention to. Implicit in the act of writing this sort of stuff itself is a sort of concession to the idea that reason plays a crucial role in "becoming who we will be."

The other problem is when this fatalism is applied to the social sphere. It is very true that we have limited control over our environment. Yet, in the aggregate, institutions possess an emergent capability to have immense influence on the environment, and through that influence, individual character. The focus on the immutability of character for the individual, aside from being overblown in Nietzsche IMO, can become downright noxious when applied to the social sphere and towards people groups. E.g., Richard Hanania's white supremacism, which would be noxious even if he didn't apply his philosophy along racial lines.

And, IMO, a moral philosophy needs to translate up to the social sphere.

Well done. Plenty to think about.

Whether Heidegger was right or wrong to describe Nietzsche as producing the last metaphysic is a question here. Is the ground of personal being wrestled with here or are conditions not so easy to approach?

If we don't decide what we will, and if we can't choose our paths, and "fall into" our values, in what way can we choose to embrace or not embrace moral or empirical notions of truth? It seems like we have some capacity for truth and self-determination or we don't, and if we don't, then books about self-overcoming are useless. And why the focus on being controlled by bad ideas? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We already know we colloquially use and understand notions like ‘decision’, ‘choice’ and ‘will’ in different ways according for different philosophies. Cartesian desert-based approaches , which are assumed to arise from the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible subject, are harsher and more ‘blameful' in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control. The very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound arbitrariness to free will. We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign' social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus. Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community. Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order .If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior.

Whereas Pereboom and Nussbaum argue that moral blame is ‘irrational', postmodern approaches, defined in very broad terms, don't view blame in terms of a rational/irrational binary but rather in terms of pragmatic usefulness determined in relation to contextually changing inter-subjective practices.

Gergen’s postmodernist constructionism argues:

“In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right.” “ Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”

Enactivist writers such as Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela emphasize the beneficial ethical implications of the decentering of the Cartesian subject. They assert that a thoroughgoing understanding of the groundlessness of personhood reveals the mutual co-determination of subject and world. This realization can in turn lead, through the use of contemplative practice of mindfulness, to the awareness of universal empathy, compassion and benevolence.

‘In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”

It should be noted that In postmodernist accounts like that of Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze, a ‘personal’ point of view or perspective isnt eliminated from the participation in a social community. But in effect, this point of view is pre-personal, not the possession of a substance we call the self or the ego or the soul.

Nietzsche writes;

When I dissect the process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,' I get a whole set of bold claims that are difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish, – for instance, that I am the one who is thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that thinking is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is an ‘I,' and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by thinking, – that I know what thinking is.

I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore –.” Following the same basic scheme, the older atomism looked behind every “force” that produces effects for that little lump of matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects are produced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned how to make do without that bit of “residual earth,” and perhaps one day even logicians will get used to making do without this little “it” (into which the honest old I has disappeared).

We can say that someone chooses or wills, and mean that what they do is not simply a carbon copy of a pre-established social norm. But it also does not mean that choice and decision draw from an innner mental space that just sits there to be ultized. When we intend to mean something , to choose, we always mean something slightly other than what we intended. What we call volition is this unpredictability within the structure of choice. We are always slightly surprised by what we find ourselves willing.
So there is a loose internal coherence to volition, but it is not the rationality of propositional logic. Rather, it is a certain inferential compatibility between one moment of experience to the next that provides the glue of personal unity.

One powerful argument in favor of Nietzsche's strong sense of responsibility, quite apart from any thesis regarding free will, is his heavy use of what I call the blaming perspective, according to which people are held accountable as the authors or agents of their actions

Robert Solomon was an existentialist philosopher, and read Nietzsche through that lens. That’s fine , but his perspective has little to do with the Nietzsche I am discussing. I’m not saying Solomon is wrong, only that his work won’t provide any tools for dealing with the Nietzsche of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, which is the one I am representing. Solomon wants Nietzsche to be a philosopher of personal responsibility, like Sartre, Kierkegaard and other existentialists Solomon champions. But postmodern interpreters of Nietzsche argue this is precisely what Nietzsche’s notion of personhood critiques. More important than which interpretation is right is which reading is more promising from a psychological and ethical point of view.

Nietzsche's quotes are from BGE 17. On first reading it may seem that he is denying that there is an "I" or individual. He is not. What he is denying is an interpretation of what that is.

This is easier to understand if we look an earlier section:

Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that "stood fast" of the earth--the belief in "substance," in "matter," in the earth-residuum, and particle- atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical requirements": one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the SOUL- ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!

(BGE, 12)

But if we stop there we will not understand him. He continues:

Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses--as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the instincts and passions," want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust--it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT--and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.

(BGE 12)

What he is rejecting is the notion of a thinking substance. The soul is not something we have. In his refinement of the soul-hypothesis Nietzsche posits a “soul of subjective multiplicity”. This solves the problem of the seeming mystery of a thought that comes when it wishes rather than when I wish. It is not that the thought has some kind of independent existence and comes to me from elsewhere, but simply that there is not something within me, an “I” or “ego” or “little ‘one’” that is the agent of my thoughts. This is not a denial of agency, it is a denial of something within me, some substance or soul-atom that is the agent.