I find the idea of a self-destructive god interesting but do not think it represents a serious challenge unless the rational theist is one who holds that the only function of god was to create the world.

I don't live in America, but is the question as to why children (or in this case a young adult) are committing mass murders ever raised? — Tzeentch

Two contributing factors are the availability of high power semiautomatic weapons and the idea that guns are the solution to a host of problems ranging from bullying to lack of acceptance to feelings of loneliness and helplessness. Those feelings have always been around, but knowing that others are acting on it in this way makes it seem like a more viable option.

I don't think it's likely that someone would start shooting if he knew that everyone else would start shooting back. — NOS4A2

It is not a question of what a potential murdered would do but of what others think he will do.

To create literally out of nothing is logically impossible because “nothing” is the absence of anything that has any trace of “being”. — spirit-salamander

Is your god constrained by logic?

Do you agree or disagree with ex nihilo nihil fit? — spirit-salamander

The question itself is without basis. The question can only be asked by something that exists in a world of things that exist.

If not, what are the basic thinking rules you follow when you philosophize?

This misses my earlier point:
— spirit-salamander

The universe need not conform to our limited understanding. — Fooloso4

One of the basic rules of thinking I follow is not to draw conclusions about things we can know nothing of.

What clumsy side step dance? I don't understand what you mean. — spirit-salamander

The question which has long been debated is, how could God create something ex nihilo? The question grew out of an interpretation of Genesis. He created the world out of himself was put forth as a solution. The whole thing is clumsy because it rests on questionable assumptions.

I am not trying to interpret Genesis. — spirit-salamander

It is not about your interpretation. The issue predates us.

You should rather stick to the mere structure of argumentation. — spirit-salamander

A variation of ex nihilo nihil fit: out of an argument based on nothing comes nothing. What follows from a premise may be valid but not sound.

What knowledge do you have of a transcendent substance and what it is capable of?
— Fooloso4

If ... — spirit-salamander

You have not answered the question. I asked what knowledge you have of this transcended substance, not what follows from it and other questionable assumptions about creation and beginnings.

It is, I would argue, at least prima facie intuitively plausible. — spirit-salamander

What follows from implausible premises is not plausible.

If you don't believe in a theistic god — spirit-salamander

It is not a question of what I believe but of whether you accomplished what you set out to do in the title of the OP. You did not.

I think murderers and criminals will think twice about harming others if they know everyone is packing. — NOS4A2

I think it far more likely that the collateral damage might become great enough for you to rethink the whole thing. No one would be safe. You cannot protect against a hail of bullets coming from every direction with a gun.

What about with dynamite or with tanks or with fighter jets? — Michael

It stands to reason. Protecting yourself against guns with guns is not effective. Arming our children with guns won't work. At a minimum they need their own tank.

Everyone should carry a weapon as soon as they are competent enough to do so, in my opinion. — NOS4A2

So, you do think that children should be sent to school carrying guns as long as they are competent to do so! What kind of hell do you wish to live in?

If someone has the motive and desire to run people over people they will do so. — NOS4A2

But the fact of the matter is that the frequency and extent of damage is nowhere near comparable.

Guns and cars don’t just go out and start killing people. — NOS4A2

Most people with cars do not just go out and start killing people, but it has become distressingly evident that more and more people with guns are going out to do just that.

There is a continuing effort to make cars safer for all involved. Can the same be said for guns? The evidence all points in the opposite direction, to increase the capacity to harm or kill.

There should be armed guards at schools in the US ... — NOS4A2

But schools are not the only place where this happens. Should there be armed guards everywhere? Should there be armed guards protecting every church? Every grocery store? Every playground? Every beach? Is this how you want to live?

An armed guard may decrease the number of people murdered but what is the acceptable number? Not allowing guns in public places would help, but that is regarded as a gross violation of the sacred right to carry.

Before that it was car accidents. Maybe we should ban cars. — NOS4A2

A faulty argument. The purpose of cars is not to protect us. If cars were not a viable means of transportation we would not have them. If guns If guns are not a viable means of protecting our children then why still cling to them? The simple reason is that they give us the illusion of power, of being in control. Is there a point at which it would become clear that we need to protect ourselves from the very thing that is supposed to protect us?

@NOS4A2 Can the claim that we have a right to defend ourselves be squared with the fact that the leading cause of death of children in the US is guns? Does the right to defend yourself take precedence over children's right to life? Or is the answer to arm the children? Send them to school with semiautomatic rifles?

B 1. Creation from nothing is impossible. — spirit-salamander

I would argue that it is simply impossible for us to conceive. The universe need not conform to our limited understanding.

He produces from His Own eternal nature — spirit-salamander

A clumsy side step dance attempting to avoid the problem of ex nihilo nihil fit that arises from the assumption that:

A 1. The universe began to exist a finite time ago. — spirit-salamander

and a questionable interpretation of Genesis 1.1.

B 2. However, the transformation of a transcendent substance into mundane things is possible. — spirit-salamander

What knowledge do you have of a transcendent substance and what it is capable of?

You are using a sledge hammer in your attempt to sever religion and faith.

The concept of 'faith', empty of content, is empty.

Guns are now the leading cause of death of children in the US.

Woody Allen's Joke–he wasn't afraid of dying, he just didn't want to be there when it happened — BC

When I was teaching philosophy I thought about teaching a class based on his jokes.

I can understand that. What kind of philosopher talks this way? How many will read this and toss the book aside? It is as if he wants to antagonize the reader. As if he does not want to be read. But why?

Z. says he does not want idle readers, but as Kaufman noted, he is easy to read. Nothing here of the formidable language of Kant or Hegel. Socrates says he does not write because if he did then anyone and everyone could read what he said, and by not speaking directly with them there is no chance to clear up misunderstandings. Plato developed a way of writing that attempts to minimize that problem. It was not until quite recently that it became unacceptable for philosophers to guard their words from the general public.

Nietzsche, like Dionysus, wears masks. His bombastic style is a mask. What we see is not Nietzsche but the masks he chooses to wear.

Do you personally find the idea of eternal recurrence compelling? — Tom Storm

I don't.

One thing that may not have been made clear is that with Christianity's self-overcoming,
the eternal return, with its philosopher-god Dionysus, is to serve as the new earth bound and philosophically grounded religion. There is an ancient contest between philosophy and religion. Christian theologians regard philosophy as the handmaid of religion. Nietzsche reverses that order, which is to say returns to an older order. He intends for religion to serve as the handmaid of a philosophy in the service of life.

"easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” — Tom Storm

I think his writing is deliberately and deceptively easy to read. This should give you some sense why.

... in essence what is Nietzsche hoping his readers will gain from ER? — Tom Storm

I don't think that he hopes that there is anything in essence the reader will gain. In the section of TSZ entitled "Reading and Writing" he says:

He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader.

He leaves his readers to their own devices. There are different kinds of readers. What they get is up to them.

Zarathustra is another name for Zoroaster. In Zoroastrianism there is a constant battle between the forces of good and evil that will come to an end with the victory of the force of good over evil. In Christianity there is also the final victory of good over evil with the kingdom of God or Heaven on earth.

There is an ancient opposing idea, the eternal return.

Rather than being opposite poles there is a continual overcoming and reversal of what is held to be good or evil throughout history. There is no fixed nature, including no fixed human nature. In the Uses and Abuses of History for Life Nietzsche says:

...first nature was at one time or another once a second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature.

A cycle but not, as the dwarf would have it, a circle.

In the section of The Gay Science entitled “What I Owe the Ancients” Nietzsche says:

For only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian condition, does the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct express itself—its “will to life.” What did the Hellene procure in these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and made sacred in the past; the triumphant yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective survival through reproduction, through the mysteries of sexuality. (90)

...

And thus I touch again upon the spot from which I first set out—The Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: thus I take my stand again upon the ground from which grows my willing, my being able—I, the final follower of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence . . . (91)

Dionysus, the god who philosophizes. What is the significance of this? According to Socrates the gods are wise. The philosopher desires wisdom but remains ignorant. He questions but does not have answers to his questions. There is no final word as to why things are as they or to what will be. The same holds true of a god who philosophizes. We all, men and gods, remain ignorant.

In an endnote to his introduction to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols Tracy Strong points out:

15. Nietzsche in fact projected a major work to be called “The Eternal Return of the Same,” the divisions of which would be examinations of various aspects of embodiment (Einverleibung). WKG V2 p. 392.

In TSZ the battle between good and evil occurs on the human scale. The question of whether it occurs on the cosmological scale raises the question of the connection between what is human and life itself. In Dionysus' teaching, a teaching that has returned once again, the modern objective scientific separation of knower and known does not hold. The cosmology of eternal return is not about something that is apart from us. But it is not limited to us. Quite the opposite, it is about the infinite unknown.

I will leave it there. I am going to return to the eternal return.

Warning others away from the risk of creativity ? — green flag

Not at all.

But are you not just as concerned about such a role itself being boring ? — green flag

Some might find it boring, I do not.

Could not a bot be assigned to this task ? — green flag

Not very well, but that may change. But even if it could, for me careful reading and interpretation is a way of thinking, and requires creativity to do well.

Here's Emerson's version of idle talk and its opposite. — green flag

Why are you reading Emerson? Do you equate interpretation with idle talk?

This is one of those books that looks good on a shelf but is not to be believed and acted upon, for that would not be respectable, not nearly as respectable as the safely dead and famous name. — green flag

I hope it does not come as a shock to you but Emerson is safely dead and his too is a famous name.

I will need a bit more time to answer this. For now I will say that I think there is more to it than a test. I don't think he would have introduced this ancient belief simply as the backdrop for a test.

is it not somehow questionable to kneel and crawl before those who themselves refused to kneel and crawl ? — green flag

It is not only questionable, it is not something I would do or recommend.

The strong poet does violence to his precursors, and it's fight for his life as a distinct voice. We must do as they do and for just that reason avoid saying as they say. — green flag

Why must we do as they do? How many distinct voices are there that are worth hearing in place of the philosophers, and here again I use the term philosophy in Nietzsche's sense of an exclusive club with very few members. By avoiding saying as they say we do not thereby have something of worth to say in their stead.

We hide behind the authorial avatar. — green flag

Perhaps some do, but reading need not passive. It is a way of thinking. A way of engaging with an author. An opportunity to be guided by and learn from them.

A frankly violent and shameless interpretation has the virtue of honesty. — green flag

.

I don't think so. As I see it, we would benefit more from being honest with ourselves and admit that there are those who have far more interesting and important things to say than we do. But perhaps I am wrong and there will be books and seminars and classes devoted to studying green flag.

It's not the gossip about the matter ... — green flag

Gossip? Is this an example of frankly violent and shameless interpretation?

From time to time I think about starting a thread, but keeping it short while ranging over a wide terrain is difficult.

An interesting quote from Wittgenstein; not quite sure what the implications there are. — Janus

Quite a few but this thread is not the place to get into it, but has to do with thinking and seeing and saying.

The figurative style of “The vision and the riddle” allows us to avoid literal and direct approaches to the problem of time. — Number2018

As a work of literature we enter this world and from within this world attend to what we find in it, as what is literal within this world. The dwarf says all that is straight lies, that all truth is crooked, and concludes that time is a circle. Is this the crooked truth? Does it become a lie if we attempt to straighten it out? But straight and circle are not the only alternatives. The fact that the dwarf says this, and not Nietzsche and not Z. should be taken literally because it prompts us to identify the dwarf and the problem of the spirit of gravity. What is at issue is not the question of time in abstraction but Z.'s struggle with life in time.

But he does not assert a comprehensive unity, an eternity with an ontological status of a transcendent external Reality, or a universal and unequivocal model of truth or time. — Number2018

Nietzsche, like Plato, wears a mask. Just as Plato never speaks in the dialogue, Nietzsche does not appear in TSZ. What he might have believed about the eternal return is something he keeps from us. But if we take the infinity of roads literally it does not seem possible that anyone can know that there is an eternal return because we cannot traverse an infinite distance in the finite time of our existence.

Here, Zarathustra-Nietzsche utilizes various arguments in favor of the
Eternal Return of the same. — Number2018

From the moment, the gateway, we have a limited view of the past and no view of the future. This is why Z. calls it an abyss. But there is an argument which has been made independently of Nietzsche and the eternal return that in an infinite amount of time everything that can happen has happened. I don't know if Nietzsche accepts this but Z. accepted something like it, and is deeply troubled. Nietzsche on the other hand, as @Paine quoted him says:

there is nothing more awesome than infinity. — ibid. 124

Yet, he immediately contests this fragment as a mirage — Number2018

He says:

Where was now the dwarf? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Had I dreamt? Had I awakened? ‘Twixt rugged rocks did I suddenly stand alone, dreary in the dreariest moonlight.

Rather than contest, he questions himself and what he had seen and what he is now seeing. Was the discussion of eternal return a dream he had awakened from or was it seeing the man the dream that he has awakened? We are told that after biting off the head of the snake the man is transfigured. Is this part of Z's own transfiguration? Had he awakened to laughter, to levity?

O my brethren, I heard a laughter which was no human laughter,—and now gnaweth a thirst at me, a longing that is never allayed.

My longing for that laughter gnaweth at me: oh, how can I still endure to live! And how could I endure to die at present!—

Something ultimately new appears ... — Number2018

This too is part of the riddle. How can there be something new if everything has happened before? I discuss this and some of the other things you touched on above.

A specific example:

Christianity and Latin terminology stood between us and Plato and Aristotle. But that need no longer be the case. We can now stand closer to them than we could in the past. We can understand their terms in a way that is much closer to their use than was possible ever since they were translated into Latin. We can strip away Christian imposition.

In simplest terms, we need to look beyond ourselves. We can and do change our perspective. We can broaden it. We can change the direction we are looking in. We can consider concerns that are not our own and may find compelling reasons to make them our own.

In doing so we still do not see things as an author's contemporaries might, but we may come to understand an author better than his contemporaries did. Philosophers, using the term in a way, as Nietzsche did, that is reserved for only a few, do not simply think within their time but against it. Do we have a better understanding of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger than we did a hundred years ago or just a different understanding? Are we not able to answer the question because we are delimited and informed within an intersubjective matrix?

I feel sorry for the Trump faithful. They must be suffering from whiplash. First he tells them he is going to be arrested and is ready to put on a show for the cameras and prepares them to protest, and now, less than a week later tells them the case is going to be dropped. Of course neither scenario is backed by facts. But then again, in Trump world facts don't matter because there are always "alternative facts".

At his rally yesterday he said he was an example of why the "weaponization of law enforcement" was the biggest problem the U.S. faces — and told the crowd: "They're coming after you." (Axios)

Translation: whoever is against me is the enemy we must fight against. Now someone might want to dismiss this as mere words without consequence, but as comforting as that may be it is dangerously disingenuous.

If our philosophical framework is postmodernist , we are likely to recognize Nietzsche’s work as postmodern, but if we don’t grasp postmodern concepts, we will
never see these ideas in his work no matter how closely we try to hew to the author’s own terms. — Joshs

If the only tool in the toolbox is a hammer ...

Although I accept the idea that we are historically situated, I do not think it necessary to impose postmodernist theories on Nietzsche. But if your claim is that he is postmodern then the framework and concepts of his work itself, in its own situatedness, should be essential and sufficient in our attempt to understand him, but essential.

The reader’s perspective isn’t superior to the author’s , but it is inextricable from how an author’s work comes across to us. — Joshs

I see this as the condition and starting point, not the jumping off point. How an author comes across to me, my perspective, is not fixed, it can change as I learn from him, and must change if I am to learn from him.

In any discussion of a philosopher’s work, what is just as important as what they ‘actually’ said is what we would like them to mean. — Joshs

Here we see a fundamental hermeneutical difference. On the one hand, the attempt to understand an author on his own terms, on the other, the attempt to find one's own interests in an author. The former requires a kind of humility and the idea that certain authors are worthy of being read because they have something to teach us that is not easy to understand. The latter, the superiority of the reader. But not every reader is superior to the writer, and if one picks carefully, very few if any are.

My own experience of thinking seems to show me that thought without language is not a shapeless and indistinct mass. — Janus

Spatial thinking supports this. From geometry, to rearranging the furniture, to packing the car, to getting from one place to another.

I once read somewhere that a geometrical figure, with the words "Look at this", serves as a proof for certain Indian mathematicians.

(Wittgenstein, Zettel 461)

Didn't see anything that inspired me to comment. — frank

I suppose that being shown that you are wrong about his "theory of truth", being a Kantian, and the eternal return does not inspire comment.

A significant part of the problem is, as you should be aware, given that you quoted it:

They won't remember what you said, they won't remember what you did, but they'll never forget the way you made them feel.

Although you were addressing me, it was others who said your response as "contemptuous" and commented o your behavior. I was willing to give you the opportunity to explain, but more of the same.

It was only after dismissively suggesting more than once that I read Nietzsche that you mentioned that you were "waiting for a gunshot wound to the chest". Without mentioning that you work in an ER, this can mean something quite different. More along the lines of, I need that like I need a hole in my head.

The fact is, despite your claim:

I also explained to you that I work in an emergency room and I was waiting for a trauma at the time I was discussing Nietzsche with you. I explained that this is why I was brief. So maybe you could see your way clear to cutting me some slack. — frank

you did not explain that you work in an ER at any point and did not explain that this is why you were so brief, in the prior exchanges. A simple explanation would have gone a long way.

When you then go on to say:

engage in a friendly way, great. If all you want to do is launch an assault, save it. I'm not interested in that kind of discussion. — frank

I think that those reading along would think you should have been talking to and listening to yourself.

Next:

I have to say, I think it's sad that when asked on a philosophy forum what Nietzsche's eternal return means to you, you have nothing to say. — frank

I had already said quite a bit in the post I started the thread with. In addition, the fact that I had not yet posted something that I spent a good part of the day working on does not mean I have nothing to say. Contrary to your plea that you be cut some slack, you accuse me of having nothing to say. Is that your idea of engaging in a friendly way?

Now I find that you studied Nietzsche for years without understanding that he was a Kantian. — frank

It is because I have studied him for years that I know he is not a Kantian. To raise the problem of the concept of a thing in itself does not make one a Kantian. He is not a Kantian for the simple reason that he rejects the concept of noumenon. That we do not know the world as it is in distinction from how we are does not mean that he accepts the notion of a noumenal world.

No one has ever claimed that the "thing in itself" is a metaphor. No one. Ever. — frank

The point is, the claim that the concept of eternal return is metaphorical, like the concepts of original entities (which are not for Nietzsche things in themselves), does not mean that there is no eternal return in the same way it does not mean that there are no objects.

This is not contrary to my point. — frank

Your point is, as you said:

Seen in the light of his ideas about the nature of truth, it seems unlikely. — frank

Accordingly, the natural world seen in light of his ideas about the nature of truth, seems unlikely.

The Eternal Return is not cosmology. — frank

This begs the question of whether it is cosmological. Repeating it does not make it true.

Argue for it in the light of his Kantian views. Make it fit. — frank

Trying to make it fit your erroneous Kantian assumptions is part of the problem. It creates an unrecognizable distortion.

Scientists will insist methodologically that the natural world is quite apart from the "human world." This is the distinction surrounding the question of whether Nietzsche meant you to take the Eternal Return as a feature of a scientific view (cosmology) or not. — frank

There is a difference between a cosmological view and a scientific cosmological view. The idea of eternal return is an ancient cosmological opinion. It is simply wrong to assume that if Nietzsche held a cosmological view it would be "as a feature of a scientific view".

With regard to a scientific view, cosmology is highly speculative. There are in contemporary cosmology cyclical models

In the face of this, it seems fair for me to ask if Heidegger and Deleuze are asking for more "land' than Nietzsche was willing to put on the market. — Paine

It seems to me that Nietzsche is a skeptic in the Socratic sense of knowledge of ignorance. The metaphor of the ship, having left terra firma, and an infinite horizon, echoes the metaphor of the problem of navigating the ship in the Phaedo. The eternal return too is a matter of life and death, of the unknown, of the abyss.

I think I understand what you are getting at when @Joshs you say "more land". I take it to mean they talk as if we are still on terra firma, that things are more settled than they are, and that treating all this as a theoretical problem is to have, so to speak, missed the boat.

Thanks. An interesting essay, with lots to unpack. I will limit my comments to the problem of the eternal return.

Beginning with the title he has already made two distinctions: between truth and lies, and between the moral and nonmoral sense. All play a role in the question of the eternal return as discussed above, and make it clear why the gnomic "truths are metaphors" is at best inadequate and at worst misleading. But having furnished the essay, (which was like having to extract a tooth) we can move beyond that.

From the essay:

we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities… — frank

Original entities and what we say about them, our metaphors, are two different things. The entities are not metaphors.

...whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us." — frank

Here we get to the center of the problem. What you say about eternal return as metaphor:

It's probably not cosmological though — frank

must then be said of the natural world. But Nietzsche does not deny the natural world, only that we do not have epistemological access to it as a "thing in itself". Put differently, the natural world is the human world.

The cosmological question of the eternal return remains open. We know something of the concept (metaphor) but whether or not Nietzsche believed that all that is recurs has not been settled. In either case, like the natural world, it is not something apart from the human world.

The dwarf is the spirit of gravity. It calls Z. a "stone of wisdom. Hurling himself high but sentenced by himself to fall down.

What is the spirit of gravity? In the chapter "The Spirit of Gravity" he says:

Man is difficult to discover, and unto himself most difficult of all; often lieth the spirit concerning the soul. So causeth the spirit of gravity.

He, however, hath discovered himself who saith: This is my good and evil: therewith hath he silenced the mole and the dwarf, who say: "Good for all, evil for all.

"One must learn to love oneself—thus do I teach—with a wholesome and healthy love: that one may endure to be with oneself, and not go roving about.

In TSZ. the dwarf is first said to be half mole. Z. is at odds with himself. He travels antithetical paths. He strives for what is high but like a mole digs down into himself. He says to himself:

… being at two in such a way truly makes one lonelier than being at one!

He begins the riddle and vision by saying:

I tell the riddle that I saw – the vision of the loneliest one.

He sees something:

the like of which I had never seen before. A young shepherd I saw; writhing, choking, twitching, his face distorted, with a thick black snake hanging from his mouth.

My hand tore at the snake and tore – in vain! It could not tear the snake from his throat. Then it cried out of me: “Bite down! Bite down!
Bite off the head! Bite down!” –

Z. interrupts his story:

Now guess me this riddle that I saw back then, now interpret me this vision of the loneliest one!
For it was a vision and a foreseeing: what did I see then as a parable? And who is it that must some day come? Who is the shepherd into whose throat the snake crawled this way? Who
is the human being into whose throat everything that is heaviest, blackest will crawl?

The shepherd bites the head off.

No longer shepherd, no longer human – a transformed, illuminated, laughing being! Never yet on earth had I heard a human being laugh as he laughed!

He overcomes the spirit of gravity. Transformed by the spirit of levity.

If all that is has been before then how is it that he had never heard a human being laugh as he laughed? He asks if he is dreaming, but wouldn’t it be that even our dreams have been dreamt before?

When his thoughts of eternal return became quieter and quieter he heard the howl of a dog. He asks if he had ever heard a howl like this.

Where now was the dwarf? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Was I dreaming? Was I waking? I stood all of a sudden among wild cliffs, alone, desolate, in the most desolate moonlight.

His thoughts race back to his childhood when he heard such a howl. Childhood is an important theme. The first chapter of the first part of Z. is titled “The Three Metamorphoses”. It too is about transformation. The last transformation is into a child.

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.

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.

Perhaps Z. forgot that he saw before what he sees now. If the child is innocence such forgetting cannot be a willful forgetting. And yet this may be what is necessary. Every Yea of the spirit in time becomes a Nay. Every creation of new values become old values to be overcome. This cycle repeats again and again. It is deeply troubling to think that what one holds to be of utmost, absolute, permanent, unchanging value is not.

The positive side of this is the idea that one need not carry the burden of imposed values, One can be free of the dwarf and mole who says: "Good for all, evil for all”.

The moment is the gateway of the eternal return. Whether or not this moment has occurred countless times does not matter because it is in this moment that one must decide:

But courage is the best slayer, courage that attacks; it slays even death,
for it says: “Was that life? Well then! One More Time!”

We are always at the moment:

where do human beings not stand at the abyss?

The choice is always there to be made. Do I choose this life? We cannot choose what has been but at this moment we can choose what will be. To choose wisely is to choose as if we are condemned to make the same choice over and over again. Has the choice already been made? It does not matter, for at this moment we can make a choice as to how we wish to live.

He does not have a theory of truth. He rejected fixed, unchanging truths. He does not put a high value on truth in all cases . Truth should serve life and so in some cases, as with Plato, lies are preferable. In On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life he lists three truths that are deadly:

... the doctrine of the sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all ideas, types, and styles, of the lack of all cardinal differences between man and animal.

In The Will to Power he says:

Belief that there is no truth at all, the nihilistic belief, is a great relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is ceaselessly fighting ugly truths. For truth is ugly.

(325)

This is not intended to represent the scope of the problem.

What may surprise some is that Leo Strauss sent some of his best students to study with Kojeve. They are very different but found common ground.

Sometimes names are used to give weight and authority to arguments that won't stand on their own

So I guess you were asking of Nietzsche's theory of truth undermines itself. — frank

I am asking for evidence that his "theory of truth" is that truths are metaphors and how we can make sense of that.

Nietzsche is on Wittgenstein's ladder and I think he was aware of that. — frank

This is a misunderstanding of both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

If all you want to do is launch an assault, save it. — frank

It is common philosophical practice to ask for an account and a defense of that account. That is not an assault.

I can't imagine how someone would fit that into the rest of Nietzsche's works — frank

There is an extensive literature on this.

In order not to repeat myself over and over, I will say it one more time and move on. Being or "beingess" is not an attribute of what is. Something must be in order to have attributes.