I've read quite a lot of Nietzsche, but over the years I've found his philosophy to be less and less defensible, despite protestations to the contrary. Sure, you can find gold in some of Nietzsche's aphorisms - taken apart from everything else he has said. But if you look at his "system" (if you can even call it that), then it is profoundly repugnant, and has no sense of ethics or morality. Indeed, if I - or anyone else - were to say similar things to the things Nietzsche wrote, I'm sure as hell we'd get banned from this forum.But perhaps we can discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of Nietzsche's thinking somewhere else?
Like start a new topic or something. :) — Erik
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [...] Without cruelty there is no festival. — Genealogy of Morality
...it should be clearly understood that in the days when people were unashamed of their cruelty life was a great deal more enjoyable than it is now in the heyday of pessimism... the bog of morbid finickiness and moralistic drivel which has alienated man from his natural instincts... Nowadays, when suffering is invariably quoted as the chief argument against existence, it might be well to recall the days when matters were judged from the opposite point of view; when people would not have missed for anything the pleasure of inflicting suffering, in which they saw a powerful agent, the principal inducement to living. By way of comfort to the milksops, I would also venture the suggestion that in those days pain did not hurt as much as it does today; at all events, such is the opinion of a doctor who has treated Negroes for complicated internal inflammations which would have driven the most stoical Europeans to distraction -- the assumption here being that the negro represents an earlier phase of human development ... For my part, I am convinced that, compared with one night's pain endured by a hysterical bluestocking, all the suffering of all the animals that have been used to date for scientific experiments is as nothing. — GM
No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically "unjust," since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive and cannot be conceived otherwise. Even more disturbingly, we have to admit that from the biological point of view legal conditions are necessarily exceptional conditions, since they limit the radical life-will bent on power and must finally subserve, as means, life's collective purpose, which is to create greater power constellations. To accept any legal system as sovereign and universal -- to accept it, not merely as an instrument in the struggle of power complexes, but as a weapon against struggle (in the sense of Dühring's communist cliché that every will must regard every other will as its equal) -- is an anti-vital principle which can only bring about man's utter demoralization and, indirectly, a reign of nothingness. — GM
For these same men who, amongst themselves, are so strictly constrained by custom, worship, ritual, gratitude, and by mutual surveillance and jealousy, who are so resourceful in consideration, tenderness, loyalty, pride and friendship, when once they step outside their circle become little better than uncaged beasts of prey. Once abroad in the wilderness, they revel in the freedom from social constraint and compensate for their long confinement in the quietude of their own community. They revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise. Deep within all the noble races there lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest. This hidden urge has to be satisfied from time to time, the beast let loose in the wilderness.This goes as well for the Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility as for the Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings. The noble races have everywhere left in their wake the catchword "barbarian." ... their utter indifference to safety and comfort, their terrible pleasure in destruction, their taste for cruelty -- all these traits are embodied by their victims in the image of the "barbarian," and "evil enemy," the Goth or the Vandal. The profound and icy suspicion which the German arouses as soon as he assumes power — GM
The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and a fullness into things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and joy in life...three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication and cruelty - all belonging to the oldest festal joys. — Will to Power
The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time, Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses. — Marianne Cowan, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
No it has nothing to do with our discussion it has to do with my discussion with Erik which you can read here:Is this thread a sort of public reply to our discussion? Shall I counter-post with quotes from the bible? — Beebert
I've never read the Will to Power but I did give it a brief look after you told me to look into it, and skipped through its contents here and there to gather what it's about. It's quite long.plus one quote from a work you Said you have never even read? — Beebert
Hmmmm sure. Though Kierkegaard did live through the motions of the knight of faith in his life with Regine Olsen - did he not believe, absurdly, that he would marry her, even though he had rejected her earlier and she married another?Well to start with, Nietzsche wasn't precisely the ubermensch he proclaimed just as Kierkegaard wasn't the Knight of faith he proclaimed — Beebert
Yes, at least not in a Christian sense. He also said he aspires to be a Christian and greatly desires to be one, but avoided calling himself one.I thinked he hoped it but he admitted in the end that he didnt have what he would call faith — Beebert
If you read Works of Love (which in my opinion is his best work - also one of the few that he wrote under his own name) you will understand that when one has Faith, one doesn't only have faith only with regards to temporal existence, but also with regards to eternity. Indeed, in time he has lost Regine, but he will regain her in eternity. That would be the position. Whether he had made this movement of faith, and really believed unto his dying moments, I do not know.Because he knew himself to have almost grasped Faith, but in the end, he didnt receive Regine back... And well, he never became this man of action and inwardness that he thought a Christian must be. — Beebert
Out of all of Nietzsche's works, my favorite seems to be his very first, the Birth of Tragedy. The later Nietzsche seems like a power-crazed insane man quite often. Not to mention that I find pretty much his entire GM to be pathetic, even intellectually - the first two parts for sure. — Agustino
One of [Nietzsche's] friends, who had come under the influence of Schopenhauer, was a Dr. Romundt. To quote his sister in the matter: "Now, strange to say," she declares, "his profound study of Schopenhauer had made Dr. Romundt decide to become a Catholic priest. My brother was beside himself in anger, for he was very fond of Dr. Romundt. He could not in the least understand how a philosopher who had learnt to value freedom of thought could possibly intend to take up a position which, from an intellectual standpoint, was so terribly confined on all sides. And the fact that a friend, after having frequented his company for eight years, could thus secretly have planned such a coup against the freedom of his own spirit made him thoroughly unhappy. After lengthy discussion, however, Dr. Romundt did at last decide to return to his earlier calling as a teacher."
This is important, as it brings to our attention what Nietzsche's idea was concerning Catholicism. It is evident that Dr. Romundt, like Nietzsche's sister, interpreted Schopenhauer in quite a different way from his friend. "My brother," says Frau-Förster-Nietzsche, "understood perfectly well that as a Christian my understanding of Schopenhauer was very different from his; for instance, I scarcely realized Schopenhauer's atheism at all." As for Dr. Romundt, Schopenhauer had simply impressed him with a sense of pessimism that had not gone so far as to make him the materialist and atheist that it had made of Nietzsche, but had brought home to this truth-seeking soul the fact that he was a pilgrim in this "valley of tears." Naturally enough, he turned his thoughts heavenward and did not seek to find on earth true and lasting happiness, but looked towards the Catholic Church for the haven where he might anchor safely after wandering about in a sea of doubt. The freedom of spirit which he sought would find its realization in the conserver of a true faith, based upon a satisfying certainty of true knowledge. It was to be confined only in the sense that it was to be determined by certainty of truth. But he did not realize the logical necessity of faith based upon right thinking, and so he once more turned in his weakness back to his scoffing companion and did not appreciate fully the true meaning of the step he had taken. The greatest of all truths and the only satisfying truth neither he nor Nietzsche had arrived at, namely, that truth is one, so that in its essence it cannot be uncertain and indetermined and that the conclusions that Nietzsche had arrived at were but disordered emanations and illogical calculations of the real truths. He could but wander forever in a circle that led him to rest only in restricted declarations of false premises that were not correctly based upon real truths. Beyond the simple truths that were clear to the minds of even such great pagan philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche thought he saw still greater truths and more subtle ones, which in reality were but contradictories and which led him into sophistry. And this he mistook for freer and higher thought, and so he drifted into a mysticism which was pure madness.
The total character of the world... is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has any meaning.
Thus, the denial of God has driven Nietzsche to deny science, the laws of nature, the existence of order and even of causality. There is no purpose in the world, only chaos.
:s I doubt it. He does hope all will be saved, but that doesn't make him a universalist. You do have a tendency to brush off such distinctions :PExactly. He was quite likely also a universalist ;) — Beebert
But this is precisely the point. We have to question whether those really are the inner wants of man as such, or they're only the inner wants of SOME men.I also Believe that many of the quotes you listed, tries to reveal the in many eyes hideous truth about man and his inner wants etc. Mostly an overstatement and provocative tour the force in order to establish New values so that nihilism would be overcome. — Beebert
Yes, which is why Nietzsche is deeper than Hume and his ilk :PAs Bentley Hart, the orthodox Christian theologian said: "Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. " — Beebert
Nietzsche's famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who mentions God’s death is not precisely a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists to whom he addresses his terrifying proclamation. In their moral lazyness and weak sensibility though, he sees that they do not despair over the death of God... This is almost prophetic, because look at our culture today and the last 90 years or so. God's death as a cultural thing has been quite true... And concerning the madman in Gay Science: The atheists that the madman talks to are we today, must of us, the indifferent once who has lost the sense of the sacred: Look at the atheists in this fable: They grasp not that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation is gone and has left us with only our own resources, with which we can only helplessly try to combat the complete meaninglessness that the universe now appears to be... — Beebert
Yes, I am aware that Nietzsche diagnosed the modern condition very well. He is right that God is dead - or rather appears dead - to us moderns - because we have killed (rejected) Him. Max Picard (a Jew/Catholic) in his book The Flight From God does read all of man's history as an attempt to run away from God, while God is in active pursuit. The forgetfulness of God of today's Western world does represent, as Nietzsche would say, the condition of the Last Man. There is no doubt that Nietzsche was right, that without God, there is no morality.“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed - and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!' Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. 'I come too early', he then said; 'my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars - and yet they have done it themselves!'” — Gay Science
I've already read that article :P I'm quite a reader of the firstthings.com website lol This one is also really good:For an honest and good Christian view and standpoint on Nietzsche, I really recommend David Bentley Hart :
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not
Read that article, he of course Believes Nietzsche was wrong in the end. But yet necessary, and correct in many of his diagnosis etc. — Beebert
I would read it differently. Schopenhauer did not reject life as such, he rejected what Nietzsche would call will-to-power. Why? Because he perceived, just as Nietzsche perceived, that will-to-power leads to cruelty, indifference to the suffering of your fellow men, and violence. But unlike Nietzsche, he did not admire these things. So he perceived something that is beyond will-to-power - a different way of existing, which he never much described positively, but just negatively - as denial of the will-to-power. As he says at the end of the first volume of WWR, what remains after the annihilation of the will appears like nothing to those still full of will - but the inverse is also true - for those in which the will has completely denied itself, this very real world appears as nothing.Nietzsche's critique against Schopenhauer's final rejection of life had some very valid points. A pessimist is in the end a brother of the hedonist in that he values life baser on suffering. Suffering bad, opposite good. But the pessimist focuses on the bad and therefore rejects life. Nietzsche knew that Schopenhauer was correct in that life was suffering, and therefore Nietzsche hated hedonists. But Nietzsche also saw that suffering was needed in order for man to reach his creative heights — Beebert
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