Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
Good evening to all!
I am doing a presentation on Nietzche at college and I was wondering if any of you had any views or information on his influence on Hitler. I am to understand that Hitler had a great interest in his writings but just how far was Nietzches work hijacked and used to justify the Nazi regime?
I am doing a presentation on Nietzche at college and I was wondering if any of you had any views or information on his influence on Hitler. I am to understand that Hitler had a great interest in his writings but just how far was Nietzches work hijacked and used to justify the Nazi regime?
Comments (97)
Nietzsche's sister helped make the work a thing for the Nazis.
Not to say that one can remove him from the larger question of German philosophy.
You might start by spelling his name correctly.
"Elaborating the concept in The Antichrist, Nietzsche asserts that Christianity, not merely as a religion but also as the predominant moral system of the Western world, inverts nature, and is "hostile to life". As "the religion of pity", it elevates the weak over the strong, exalting that which is "ill-constituted and weak" at the expense of that which is full of life and vitality." (wikipedia: transvaluation of values.)
What Nietzsche didn't know is that, for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, human beings were hunter gatherers - living in tribal groups, headed by an alpha male and his one or two lieutenants. The earliest human societies only date back around 15,000 years or so; while evidence of a truly human intellect as evidenced in art and artifacts, improved tools and burial of the dead dates back around 50,000 years. Thus, for around 30,000 years - intelligent human beings lived as hunter gatherers - a fact that requires some explanation. Why did society not occur earlier?
In my view, the difficulty was the aforementioned naturally occurring hierarchy, and this is where Nietzsche's ideas enter the picture, but not in the way he thought. His claim was that naturalistic morality was overthrown as a consequence of the weak fooling the strong with religious morality. That's a misunderstanding. Religious morality is actually social morality necessary for hunter gatherer tribes to join together.
Imagine, two tribes both headed by alpha males, trying to join together to form a society. Any dispute over food or mating opportunities would likely lead to violence, and split the society into its tribal components. What was needed was an objective authority for moral law, and God served as that objective authority for an explicit set of moral laws (see Moses, and his tablets) that would apply equally to all.
Thus, Nietzsche identified a real phenomenon - but misunderstood it, and passed that misunderstanding onto the Nazis. The 'transvaluation of values' occurred not because the strong were fooled by the weak - but rather, because both tribes agreed to an explicit set of moral laws justified by the authority of God, to overcome tribalism and form multi-tribal society.
One might therefore speculate that, Nietzsche declaring "God is dead" undermined moral values justified by divine authority, and thereby allowed for the 'uncivilized' behaviors of the Nazis. World war II and the holocaust are thus understood as man taking divine authority unto himself - an idea you'll find explored in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, where the protagonist, Raskalinkov - imagines himself above the herd morality, and in his own mind justifies the killing of an old woman pawnbroker and her sister with an axe.
Raskalinkov gets away with it, but eventually breaks down under the weight of his own troubled conscience - and this is psychologically accurate, and true to the facts of evolutionary history, for in fact - morality is a sense, ingrained into the human organism by evolution in a tribal context. The idea of evolution as survival of the fittest - where fittest means brutally violent is also mistaken. Rather, both the moral individual within the tribe, and the tribe made up of moral individuals, would tend to prosper relative to a tribe of selfish individuals, because the moral individual would share food and fight for the tribe, unlike the selfish individual. Thus a tendency to morality would be promoted through sex and survival.
Nietzsche, and the Nazis assumed that evolution implied natural morality was merely brutal and selfish, but when you consider that they brought children into the world, protected mother and child through a prolonged gestation period, and raised children through to adolescence, that's obviously false. Human beings are moral creatures, but that ingrained moral sense can be perverted by ideas, to justify both the good, i.e. society, and unimaginable evil with considerable equanimity.
That two philosophies match is no indication that one is a derivative of the other. Hitler could've thought of Nazi philosophy, if we could call it one, and discovered a common vein with Nietzschean thought. Since Nietzsche is a ''great'' philosopher it must've presented the perfect opportunity to associate Nazism with a well-known sage.
Propaganda!
I appreciate the time you have all taken to reply to my question.
Just to clarify...I am currently studying an ACCESS course to go on to study Philosophy at university. So I am very new to all of this. We have just finished lesson two of Philosophy at college so you may want to go a little easy on me. Yes I understand Nietzsche is one of the hardest Philosphers to read and understand and congrats to all of you for you impeccable knowledge but some of you do come across as quite brash to someone who is just starting out. I am a mature student who has only recently been granted full use of her eyes over these last two years and I have a thirst for knowledge on the subject of Philosophy. I have chosen Nietzsche because I feel for what I have read so far that he is very misunderstood. I have ordered ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ and ‘The Will to Power’ and I will not allow anyone to try and make me feel as though I am in over my head with wanting to read his works. He fascinates me. He challenges a lot of my own thoughts and beliefs and that is exactly what I am looking for with wanting to study Philosophy. As for offending anyone with my question about Hitler’s interest in his work, I was simply putting forth a discussion which took place in my classroom and turned into somewhat of a debate and thought this would be the best place to come for clarity after googling “Philosophy forums” and selecting what I thought would be the best bet. I apologise for offending anyone with Mis-spelling his name or the mention of Hitler. But we all have to start somewhere and I thought this would be a good place. My presentation is a mere five minutes long and I do not intend on bringing in Hitler as it is not something that can possibly be covered in that space of time but it did spark an interest in me.
Again, I thank you all for your time.
Forgive my ignorance.
Adolph Hitler did not invent antisemitism -- it was in the European air, more here, less there; encouraged here, tolerated there, suppressed elsewhere. Antisemitism is a key piece of Nazi thinking; how does it figure in Nietzsche's thinking?
Hitler doesn't compare well to Nietzsche as a thinker. I don't know a lot about Nietzsche; I know more about Hitler, and I wouldn't describe him as any sort of systematic thinker.
One of the reasons why the Nazis decided to kill all the Jews was a critical food shortage. The Jews were characterized as "useless eaters". Getting rid of several million of the "useless eaters" helped ease up the food situation for a while.
Germany suffered a severe labor shortage, and they needed to pressgang several million workers from other countries in Europe to meet production goals, and these extra laborers had to be fed if they were going to work. Did it make sense to be killing several million Jews, many of whom could have worked in factories, to save food while importing several million workers who needed to be fed? No. It's completely irrational.
Hitler, as the embodiment of the fuhrer principle, wasn't the only decision maker, but his decisions carried more weight than anybody else's. In order to compare Hitler and Nietzsche, you would need to isolate Hitler the man and thinker (such as he was) from Hitler-and-the-Nazi-party. That would be a difficult and time-consuming project.
Remember, your audience is probably not as interested in Nietzsche as you are, so what is it about Nietzsche that makes him a "hot property" -- or a philosopher who is likely to stay on the shelf past his sell-by date, depending on your view of him?
God luck and enjoy the study.
I am one of those who misunderstood Nietzsche. I am still not attracted to his works despite the enthusiasm of others. So think of me as an interested part of your audience - persuade me if you can that he is worth my effort and time.
I found an interesting article about the myths surrounding him:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/06/exploding-nietzsche-myths-need-dynamiting
Quoting Helen G
You were right to visit a philosophy forum to discover views. This is the best, most informative one in my experience.
Not all forums are equal - just as posters and tutors vary in helpfulness.
So if your presentation is 5 minutes long, I guess marks will be allocated for different aspects.
Including Introduction, Main body and Conclusion. Hopefully you will have been given guidance on this.
No matter how passionate you are about Nietzsche or Philosophy - the important thing is to pass this course. If you haven't already, find out the marking criteria for content and ability to choose and present key information etc.
A good resource for you might be:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
Good Luck !
However, given the political climate, I think the general idea of discussing the roots of fascism is a good one.
You can lower the ambition of your question by asking a question such as how Nietzsche was interpreted by the Nazi's; i.e. focus on some key ideas that the Nazis saw as either coming from or being supported by Nietzsche, in a broader theme that philosophy is a dangerous thing and can give rise to philosophies that want to "make reality" instead of understanding it much less justify their interactions with it.
If the germ of this project is to connect the present Trump Administration to the Bush Administration to various intermediate stages back to Nazi Germany and then broader European fascism and the philosophical roots of that, you need but one tug on a single thread:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'"
-- Suskind; In a 2004 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine.
Well, one thing Nietzsche is not is clear and consistent, which is why just about every scholar of Nietzsche thinks that he is misunderstood by someone (or even everyone) else. So, you are in a good company.
Some quotes from Nietzsche compiled by Arthur M. Melzer Nietzsche on Reading Nietzsche (and Some Others) that may help in reading him and why there is so little agreement regarding the interpretation of his work. Like Plato he was a master ironist. Nothing should be taken at face value. But we must all begin from where we are. Don’t let anyone dissuade you from reading him. Whether or not you have understood him properly is secondary at this point to what you may find of value in what you read.
Also the 614 comments so far responding below the line !
Totalitarism or the idea that the individual is the problem (nazism, fascism, socialism, separatism) is something that happened and it´s still happening (under the new guises of islamism and multiculturalism) to the Civilized soul, and to reduce its spiritual causes to what was going on in individual minds living in the period and their private readings is misleading. it´s a "History of great philosophers" approach that is not realistic and misses the broader picture.
Wow, Karl, that was a good post, most excellent. Seriously, well done!
I've been pondering this topic in general for some time (minus Nietzsche) but was wary of diving in to it as the mods seem somewhat allergic to Nazi discussion, which is very understandable.
I don't view this subject through the lens of famous philosophers (I don't know a lot about them) but rather through the lens of my own chosen authority, nature. As example, the environmental movement has taught us that we must understand and respect how nature works, that we aren't above nature but rather subject to it, and can't just make up our own rules to please ourselves.
The comparison we are making here is between 1) a "big fish eat the little fish" system of managing life that has been successful for a billion years, and 2) a human invention, Judeo-Christian morality, which at best is only 5,000 years old and more idealistic utopian theory than reality.
Hitler was right that the big fish eat the little fish. The only thing he was wrong about was that he was not the big fish. Almost, but close earns one no cigar, so say the laws of nature.
The big fish are still eating the little fish today. A tiny fraction of humanity owns almost all the wealth, leaving the majority of humans to live in squalor and disease. More to the point, we are rich largely because of our success at dominating the poor. You know, we are rich because the people making most of our stuff are being paid very very little.
What we can appreciate about Hitler as a philosopher is that he was fully committed to betting everything on his philosophy. He didn't just write some books and give some speeches like "real" philosophers, he didn't just theorize in highly abstract inaccessible language, but instead implemented his clear minded philosophy in the real world to the greatest degree possible with all an consuming unhesitating commitment. Hitler was an authentic wolf, a true child of nature, fully loyal to the laws which have ruled life on this planet since the first very day, and which continue to rule it to this day.
There are endless generations of Catholic DNA up my family tree, so I am not a Nazi, not capable of being one, nor am I'm selling Nazism. I hope that's clear. However, I seem to be happy to participate in a global economic system which funnels resources up the social ladder from the weak to the strong, because I was lucky enough to be born among the strong.
When we sweep all the Judeo-Christian delusions aside, we are the big fish, and we are eating the little fish. We just aren't doing so with the clarity and honesty which Hitler possessed. We aren't capable of overturning evolution, but capable only of pretending that we are doing so.
During WWII we Americans were fully convinced beyond doubt that we were the good guys and the Nazis were the bad guys. We were outraged by Nazi racial policy.
At the very same time we were thinking all this we were ruthlessly repressing blacks in the American south, and treating them like second class citizens across the rest of the country, based solely on their race.
It was only a generation before the rise of Hitler that we Americans finished our century long ruthless genocide of native peoples across an entire continent, based solely on their race, and the fact that they were sitting on land we wished to steal.
And we're still at it today. There's nothing stopping us from returning the property we stole from native peoples. There's nothing stopping us from trying to make things right by flooding native communities with cash. But we like the land we stole, we like the cash that has flowed from it, and so the subject never comes up.
Is this a Nietzschean influence on Hitler, or is it an influence of the ideology of the time, in part determined by freemasons in London, through Darwin´s books, on both Nietzsche and Hitler (who read Darwin, like millions of European did)?
Freemason ideas, as they are related to Gnostic and Luciferian concepts, consider that the real purpose of History (including Natural History) is to create humans and turn humans into god-like beings. In the Victorian Era, they were able to impose these occultic dogmas on Natural Sciences, particularly Biology, that still suffers a lot from this historical diversion from proper science.
Erasmus Darwin, C.Darwin´s grandad, who belonged to the Lodge of Cannongate Kilwinning of Scotland; was very acquainted with the development of a new science in its time in France, called "Evolution" (A word that Charles Darwin was later adviced to include in the fourth edition of "The Origin of Species").
French naturalists discovered that geology and fossilized shells and bones allowed us to experimentally study the changes of Life through time, that in Aristotle´s time could only be considered speculatively and the occasional fossil. The idea that all living beings are part of a single process, in which what we now call complexity and memory is passed on from previous forms to more advanced forms through natural mechanisms, resonated in this mason as something he could reconcile with his Luciferian mindset, by which matter is awakened, freed and allowed to become divine. Erasmus wrote about all this in prose and poetry, and linked it with this mason teachings of the arrival of a "god-like" man. For example, in Zoonomia: “The world has been evolved, not created: it has arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come into being at an almighty word.”
It seems to ignore the fact that we are evolving, from ignorance into knowledge over time - from a state of nature to become civilized beings, from agrarian to industrial, from local to global and so on. You therefore omit that different systems of government and economics developed in isolation of eachother, grew and came into conflict - to thereby imply that we choose to practice a big fish eat little fish ethos, where we might not.
Power dynamics naturally exist, but the larger part of religious, moral, legal and political philosophy is dedicated to defining the legitimate limits of power, and that's only possible insofar as ideas have jurisdiction - which is far from global. Economics also naturally exists - it can be applied to the way in which troops of chimpanzees groom eachother and share food, and they remember who is selfish, and then refuse to reciprocate. Practicing economics within and between the limited jurisdictions described has the consequence that little fish are eaten by the big fish, but it is not something we choose in every moment, as Hitler chose it - based on Nietzsche's philosophy. It is a developmental problem.
Overwhelmingly, in the west - economic outcomes are defined by the random distribution of talents by nature, and industriousness. Certainly, there are questions of equality of opportunity that follow from the socio-economic class status one happens to be born into - but we do not, for example, have the racial hierarchy policies that Hitler adopted, and that persist in some parts of the world. We have developed beyond that, even if many would argue there's still a long way to go.
All that said, it is in my opinion a mistake, and counter productive to project backward in time - the moral values we have developed in the present, to earlier stages of development - or, in denial of those claims of injustice, choose the big fish eat little fish ethos that Hitler chose.
I’m just going to read all these comments!! Again thank you for this amazing response!!! I really appreciate it!!
I will be back soon once I have read them all!!
Good posts, but...
Quoting karl stone
I don't think he said or meant religious morality unspecified, I think he meant Jewish morality. He didn't necessarily have a problem with religion in general, but with Christianity. Usually he was talking about European Culture only. So I don't think your point really follows :
Quoting karl stone
Quoting karl stone
Nietzsche didn't declare 'God is dead' himself, it was a description of what had allready happened at that time... but people generally didn't fully realise the ramifications of it yet. If the cornerstone 'God' falls, so must the morality that is build on it eventually, it's a package deal of sorts. Scientific inquiry killed God, or in other words the search for truth killed God.... or ultimately, Christianity killed God itself because truth was one of it's core values.
One might therefore speculate that, Nietzsche declaring "God is dead" undermined moral values justified by divine authority, and thereby allowed for the 'uncivilized' behaviors of the Nazis.
— karl stone
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Reasonable remarks overall there CM, but of course - declaring God is dead only had the effect it did, insofar as Nietzsche's philosophy influenced Nazism. No-one is suggesting Nietzsche was the sole factor responsible for the Nazis, nor that the conflict between science and religion began and ended with Nietzsche. Arguably, it began with Galileo's imprisonment and trail for heresy in 1634 - which somewhat contradicts your assertion that truth is a core Christian value. If you think Christianity is truth then sure, it's a core value. But it moves!
Quoting karl stone
Technologically this is of course true. Morally the situation seems more complicated. As example, nuclear weapons are essentially a cave man's club. Technically they are far superior to the cave man's club, but our relationship with nukes is not that different than our relationship with the club. Nukes are just a bigger club, that's all.
I'm proposing that the state of nature still exists in human affairs, but our well intentioned attempts to impose a plan of our own invention (Judeo-Christian) upon a much larger natural plan results in a loss of clarity. We think we are evolving morally, when the truth is that we casually accept that we may recklessly crash modern society at any moment.
What I'm appreciating about the Nazis is that they seem to have escaped all this self delusion by aligning themselves squarely with a natural order far larger than anything we humans can invent. I'm evaluating them in this particular discussion not through the lens of Judeo-Christian morality, but through the lens of philosophy, where a reach for clarity seems a fundamental value.
And, I'm pointing to the honesty which arose from that clarity. The Nazis used lies tactically of course, but their overall philosophy was pretty clear to all, "we are the wolf, and you are the sheep". This is abhorrent when viewed through Judeo-Christian ethics, but Judeo-Christian culture is doing essentially the same thing, we just aren't as clear minded and honest about it.
What Judeo-Christian culture did in North America is really little different than what Hitler had planned for Eastern Europe. We fool ourselves in to thinking this is all part of the past we can do nothing about, but of course we could give the land we stole back, we could flood native communities with cash. We could at least try to make this historic crime right, but we can't be bothered. We can't be bothered to even think about it. We have the land. We have the cash. And we're keeping it, thus making ourselves party to the crime.
Judeo-Christian culture continues to relentlessly funnel power and money from the lower classes to the upper classes. The big fish still eat the little fish, but the wolves have become far more clever in crafting how this story is told.
That was perhaps Hitler's big mistake. By being so forthright about his plans, by so perfectly playing the role of villain, he helped his enemies mobilize their populations against him. As example, when Hitler invaded the Ukraine his troops were at first welcomed as liberators from the ruthless rule of the Soviets. Hitler wasn't smart enough to embrace that role long enough to conquer the rest of the Soviet Union.
Ok, so those humans who came together in larger groups out competed the smaller groups, and we saw tribes become villages become cities become nations. Religions and morality do seem to be part of this unifying process, though probably not the only factor.
So we see that the Soviet Union, a larger nation, defeated Germany, a smaller nation. But, how did the Soviet Union become a larger nation? Through the application of the law of the jungle. Same thing with America. Same thing with the British Empire. All these larger powers were built through a sustained campaign of ruthless conquest. Today, the world's largest nation China is held together by the application of centralized systematic fear. The United States was held together in the 19th century by a horrific war imposed upon those who wished to leave the union.
Maybe it wasn't morality which held the primitive societies together, but rather fear of neighboring societies? Maybe the alpha male problem was solved by killing off competing alpha males, just as has been the pattern in nature for a billion years?
It seems to me the Nazis were pretty realistic about how the human realm and the natural world it arises from actually works. Perhaps they were unrealistic in not grasping the important role the illusion of morality plays?
You know, the Nazis would likely have been more successful if they had played the game and pretended that they were, for example, courageously liberating the captive nations of the Soviet Union. They could have played the game and embraced the Jews, until their conquest was complete. As example, America claimed to be "civilizing" the natives, while we ruthlessly slaughtered them. This farce helped keep the project from generating a lot of internal division within itself.
The larger point beyond Nazis is, how far can we stray from the laws of nature?
Quoting Helen G
I just want to point out that The Will to Power is a collection made from notebooks. It is useful as a companion to his finished works. But it is precisely this volume that was published by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche after Friedrich's death and which many (including Nazis) read instead of his actual books.
The order of reading I recommend is Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
I don't think I agree with this. We were long past running arround naked with sharp sticks when Judeo-christian morality came arround. Or I probably should say when judeo-christian morality became the dominant religion. Judaism and christianity were marginal cults well into the later years of the Roman Empire. A lot of historians even cite the rise of Christianity as one of the main causes of the downfall of the empire... so at least in that historical case, it seems it was a source of anti-civilization rather then the opposite. I think Nietzsche understood this very well, he started out as a classical philologist, he certainly knew his history (one of the things he accused other philosophers, of being a-historical).
And as far as I can tell, history really was a story of cultures with a more war-like morality conquering other more cultured/peacefull civilizations, and then they often kept their power by forming a small ruling class who controlled the military. Oligarchies, which is what most systems seem to naturally (d)evolve into...
Yeah sure, it's not that straightforward. The bible was the truth, and disaggreement with that was heresy. Still the value of truthfullness was generally important for Christanity, even if we would not consider their idea of the truth what we now would consider the truth. Look at all of the scholastics and their endless attempts at proving God. Why go through all the trouble of proving God if mere faith in God could suffice? Nietzsches idea is that these mental gymnastics of the scholastics helped to prepare the scientific revolution by increasing the tension of the 'logic' bow... so it could be discharged to aim at something further, scientific truth.
Those are indisputable historical facts, but like I said earlier, we are developing from animal ignorance into human knowledge over time. Social morality as religion was invented, causing the 'transvaluation of values' Nietzsche identified - but misunderstood, and biological evolution trails behind intellectual and social evolution, and furthermore, that ingrained moral sense can be perverted by ideas, to justify both the good, i.e. society, and unimaginable evil with considerable equanimity.
Then, you have to consider the jurisdiction issue, and the fact that our religious morality is not their religious morality. Both are inward looking, self congratulatory, soft constraints, that justify us relative to them. We demonize them, because they are not us - and we're right, such that therefore, they must be wrong and undeserving of moral consideration. It's not wrong to kill them - even while it would be murder to kill one of us.
Quoting Jake
But human beings are moral creatures. They must have been to raise children. The same in group / out group moral dynamics that applied to nations going to war with eachother, is the same hunter gatherer tribal morality played out on a much larger scale - in relation to ideas like religion, nation, and economic ideology. Inward looking moral systems that make us good, and them bad.
With regard to your other question, it doesn't scan. I don't doubt there was inter-tribal conflict - but the idea that society and civilization was achieved through murdering the men and taking the women of other tribes fails economically. Consider the burden it would create, to guard against enemies from within and without. We watch the borders and trust those at our backs - and that's how it had to occur, and did occur. If it hadn't, then why the 'transvaluation of values' Nietzsche identified - but misunderstood?
Hunter gatherer tribes joined together by adopting in common, God as an objective authority for social morality. That's the transvaluation, and the only way it works economically; that is, with regard to the resources they had, including human resources - to perform the roles necessary to a functioning and developing society. And because we know that all primitive civilizations developed art, architecture, jewelry, pottery, agriculture, clothing - all the same things, all the world over, but in culturally distinct ways, it's safe to assume God as objective authority for social morality is also a universal.
Quoting Jake
I just think they didn't really understand Darwinism. We still use the idea of "survival of the fittest" today, but what Nietzsche and the Nazis thought that meant was brutal, selfish and violent behavior was natural - and therefore moral. That's wrong - and just couldn't have been the case - because hunter gatherers raised children, and because the economics doesn't work. Human beings are moral creatures - like chimpanzees groom eachother and share food within the tribe, and remember who reciprocates and who doesn't. There's a naturally occurring inward looking morality - that was built upon by agreeing a common idea of God, essentially, the alpha male, or Ubermensch in the sky - to whom both tribes agreed to bow, eventually forging a common identity, that as they grew, then came into conflict with other such religious, political and economic identities - and off we go again.
Back to Nietzsche, and the Nazis - essentially they killed the Ubermensch in the sky, and took divine authority unto themselves. But they didn't understand the implication from the Darwinian tree of life, that all organisms are related, that all human beings are members of the same species - and virtually identical in evolutionary terms. It's said that if the whole of evolutionary history were mapped onto your wingspan, human history would be a but shaving from a fingernail. The idea of racial differences is thus in truth, an idea that can only occur within a single frame, at 16 frames a second, from a movie that lasts all week. So to imagine that survival of the fittest implied total warfare and racial eugenics is factually wrong; an erroneous belief that perverted the naturally occurring moral sense to justify unimaginable evil.
Here - you may recall from the other thread, I would cite the significance of recognizing a scientific understanding of reality in common. But that's another argument, and I'm not going to hijack this thread merely to explain again - "how to save the world."
— karl stone
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Great point CM. It suggests you really understood the argument. Judeo Christian morality occurred quite a long time after hunter gatherers first discovered God as an objective authority, to allow them to overcome the alpha male problem and join together. The first religions were not Judeo Christian morality, but created a template for how civilization works. This template was applied and reapplied, reworked and re-developed over and over again. It's important to note that this says nothing about the existence of God, but it does tell us a great deal about religion's role as the foundation of societies and civilizations.
If hunter gatherers had not discovered God, and appointed him as an objective authority for social morality - such that, tribes could overcome their natural tribal hierarchies without slaughtering eachother, the civilization that gave rise to the Nazis could not have occurred, and we'd still be running around in the forest with sharp sticks. This seems absurd, but human evolutionary history is millions of years, and civilization is but a few thousand years. It could easily have been the case. Thus, the Nazis essentially sawed off the tree branch upon which they were perched.
It's awfully rude - and I mean no disrespect, but can I please direct your attention to my response to Jake above. I would have to reproduce everything I've just written to him, to answer the points you raise, and while it's an imposition upon you, I know - if you revise your questions and beat Jake to the punch, I'll do the same to him next time! Or not - but it does make sense on this occasion. I was fairly definitive in my response to Jake, and I have nothing more to say than I said there.
Quoting karl stone
Well, brutal, selfish and violent behavior is normal. That's how nature works. And that's how most of the human world is ruled to this day, Russia and China come to mind.
The economics do work. We stole North America from native peoples with ruthless force, and now we are prospering from the stolen bounty, while native peoples typically live in poverty. If the economics of conquest don't work, why did the British Empire dominate the world for hundreds of years? Why did the Romans dominate for so long in their time?
Really? Have you read any anthropology, zoology, ecology... basically anything on the subject ever? The natural world is absolutely abundant with cooperative behaviour and intra specific murder remains relatively rare. Are you suggesting that wolves have found God too?
Yes, I have read extensively. No, I don't think wolves have found God. Thank you for your post.
Is it? I go outside, and I don't see that. I see millions of people getting through almost everyday without killing anyone, or even having a fight. If the episodes you describe were grounded in human nature - it's not universally evident. If however, those behaviors are grounded in beliefs, that justify us, while dehumanizing the other, it might explain why the Conquistadors, for example - were entirely civilized on one side of the Atlantic, yet somewhat less so on the other.
It's simply indisputable that in nature the big fish eat the little fish. In human affairs as well we can see that the big people typically dominate the little people.
Judeo-Christian ethics attempts to establish another rule book in which the weak are protected by the strong. How far can this new paradigm be taken before it collides with long standing natural law which is beyond our ability to edit?
The Nazis are just an example of one group of people who concluded that Judeo-Christian ethics are an idealistic fantasy in conflict with the laws of nature. The Nazis just did what all the other great powers were doing, without the Christian and Marxist rationalizations layered on top.
We are the predator, and you the prey. No bullshit involved.
Please explain. What is the pragmatic necessity for an individual described as ubermensch in Nietzsche's philosophy, to spend the vast personal and economic resources to raise the young? Particularly in a state of nature it would seem entirely counter productive. One easily imagines the crying infant attracting predators, and hampering defense - as well as requiring food and many years of patient tutelage. What's the overriding pragmatic necessity?
Zeus or Ra were sacred, but not moral. If you go to West African gods or Mesoamerican gods, you will notice that this amoral condition was even more obvious. There is no point in appeasing and sacrificing to moral and good gods; you make sacrifices to daemonic entities that are hungry and need to be tamed or kept satisfied.
We don´t have evidence of deities with moral atributions prior to the Axial age.
It depends on what you think the fundamental law of nature is. If you think it's "big fish eat little fish" - then you run into your problem, but it isn't. It doesn't explain very much at all. The fundamental law of nature is truth.
Consider the structure of DNA - a twisted ladder that splits down the middle, to attract matching chemical elements from the environment to replicate.
Now consider the fact that a bird build's a nest before it lays eggs, not because it knows and plans ahead - but because the behaviour is ingrained into the organism by the necessity of being correct to reality, (in this case a temporal dynamic), or be rendered extinct.
Now consider humankind, who reject a scientific understanding of reality in favour of religious, political and economic ideological conventions - in relation to the theoretical possibility, that we could accept science is true, apply technology on the basis of scientific merit, and overcome global scale threats - caused by acting on the basis of ideological conventions, and that currently appear intractable for ideological reasons.
Clearly, the fundamental law of nature is truth - physiological, behavioural and intellectual. The observation that "big fish eat little fish" is necessarily subsequent in the order condescendi, and unnecessary to a valid relation to reality.
Quoting Jake
Spoken like a true Judeo Christian farmer, but Gods of hunting and war were not demonic. Their "morality" fed and defended primitive societies. What's immoral about that? Let's not do theology here. I'm not trying to analyse the myth by adopting its dogma. Rather, given the fact of evolutionary development, it follows that such ideas occurred in the course of the evolutionary and intellectual development - from animal ignorance into human knowledge over time, and served useful social purposes. Or perhaps frivolous ones. After all - what's life without a little whimsy?
Gotta be honest here Karl, I'm growing weary of reading this in every post you share. Everything in all of time and space can not be shoehorned in to this pet theory of yours.
Then don't read it, or suffer weariness. My philosophy. Your choice. But my philosophy knocks Nietzsche's into a cocked hat.
I'm delighted to hear that. My philosophy is also consistent with a sustainable future. I discussed it at some length with Jake in my thread 'How to Save the World' on this forum.
No, I did not say demonic but daemonic, as in the Greek meaning as used by Greek philosophers. I did not use immoral either, but amoral. These deities were symbolic aprehensions of the laws of Nature, as they are manifested in socio-natural phenomena. The idea of moral and immoral or Good and Evil as "natural laws" with their corresponding deities on the contrary, is known from the late Iron Age onwards, the last centuries of the Age of Aries.
I must bow to your superior knowledge of Ancient myths. I assume only they served useful social purposes in the evolutionary development of humankind. It is perhaps for someone learned like yourself, to seek to understand what these purposes were.
My core philosophy addresses one main useful purpose - that of uniting hunter gatherer tribes. I sought to explain the 35,000 year gap between evidence of a truly human intellect, and the earliest civilizations. It was clearly very difficult for hunter gatherer tribes to join together, and adopting common religious symbolism - I argue, is how it eventually happened, and is consistent with the occurrence of religion as a foundation of civilizations, developed in isolation of eachother all the world over. It also explains the 'transvaluation of values' in other terms, and Galileo's arrest and imprisonment for heresy, and our mistaken relation to scientific truth, that prevents us from applying technologies we have available.
Contrasting and comparing with Nietzsche - with whom I have some familiarity, has caused me to go beyond my core arguments, and now you tempt me further beyond my knowledge base. I cannot follow.
I'd push that back a lot further - to explain how hunter gatherer tribes joined together. It's not merely an intuition, but an informed guess at an event lost in the mists. It occurs to me that the idea of God must have had a first occurrence. So, really - we are asking when that idea first occurred, and what the consequences were. I'd like to place it right at the dawn of a truly human intellect, but that seems a bit ambitious - even for God. At some point though - it seems likely to me, that some primitive human being - making a stone hand axe, wondered who made him, and who made the world? How long that occurred before hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form societies and civilizations - is open to conjecture, but I cannot imagine cities occurred first, and religion came after.
My informed guess is based on study of chimpanzee social hierarchy and 'morality' - not an explicit moral code, but an ingrained sense, promoted by the reciprocal sharing of food, grooming, and defense of the troop. The troop is naturally ruled by an alpha male and his lieutenants, a dynamic that projected onto human tribal arrangements suggests it would be very difficult for two such tribes to join together. Any dispute over food or mating opportunities leads to the division of the multi-tribal, fledgling society. Only by outsourcing moral authority to God, could the two smaller hierarchical triangles exist within the larger hierarchical triangle of a multi-tribal society - where all were subject to laws attributed to the authority of God. This then might suggest that pyramids are representations of society - and go some way to explaining why both Egyptians and Aztecs (?) built them. Pyramids both represented society, and demonstrated the awesome power of social cooperation.
Because social cooperation was necessary to build in this manner, and given the nature of naturally occurring tribal hierarchy, it seems impossible to me that cities came first and religion afterward, and impossible that multi-tribal society could have occurred without knowledge of God. Then you can relate all this back to Nietzsche and the transvaluation of values, God is dead, the ubermensch, and the Nazis sawing off the tree branch on which they unwittingly perched.
How the coming together happened is that the smaller tribes were vulnerable, so they joined bigger tribes to be safer.
Decent conjecture, but if so, why didn't civilization happen earlier, given that evidence of a truly human intellect - as evidenced in cave art, burial of the dead, improved tools, jewelry - can be found in a 'creative explosion' dated to about 50,000 years ago? (according to Phieffer) But civilization only occurs from 15-20,000 years ago at most. That gap requires explanation - and bunching together for safety doesn't suffice.
The small tribes were either absorbed by the larger tribes, or annihilated by the larger tribes.
Please look at the history of North America, a well documented historical event not lost in the mists of time. The larger more powerful tribe of Europeans annihilated the less numerous and less powerful native peoples, and then absorbed the few natives that remained once the invasion was complete. The native Americans did much the same thing among themselves before the Europeans arrived. The big fish ate the little fish.
The question I'm hoping might be addressed is...
Can any human invented philosophy which conflicts too much with the laws of nature survive?
Before Karl argues too much, please note you've made essentially this same point all over the forum.
Given that I've argued above that the fundamental law of nature is truth, and that we need to accept a scientific understanding of reality in common as a basis to address global scale threats like climate change, no!
However, at the same time - we are who we are, and have to 'get there' from here. This is where the principle of 'existential necessity' is such a vitally important limit upon, and justification of, science as truth. We need to accept that science is true, but limit the implications to matters of existential necessity.
For isntance, caring for something smaller and weaker doesn't threaten us, thereby allowing us to validate our own competence an worth. Isnt this what the unconditional and utterly dependent love of a child for the parent accomplish? The fufllment of selfish needs presupposes and requires social life, not just in terms of pragmatic survival, but for emotional fulfillment. Doubtless, ther are parents with no particular love for their children, in which case those children are either dicarded or kept as financial investments until they are old enough to help maintain a farm or other family business. Larger families were crucial to economic survival in previous eras.
Bear in mind please that the modern ideas of God are recent, and we can not assume at all that they were equivalent to what people believed tens of thousands years ago. The concepts of divinity have changed over time as human social phenomena changed; it is true as you say that Heaven is in correspondence with social hierarchies, and helps to legitimate these structures. But the God that Nietzsche declared dead was his society´s traditional God; when people become atheist, they are atheist of the god of their parents, and assume that all of the other gods are false or are different images of the god of their parents.
Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, who was a Spanish general born in Colombia, answered in this way when asked if had considered becoming a Protestant: “No creo en la religión católica, que es la verdadera, menos voy a creer en las musarañas de los protestantes” (If I don´t believe in the Catholic religion, that is the true one, how could I believe in the Protestant nonsense?).
Nietzsche was a sort of prophet, and followed the tradition of Zoroaster, Buddha, Majavira or Paul, that is, to become atheist to the God or gods you are brough into; a sort of Freudian "Primordial Murder" necessary to contribute your own personal aprehension of celestial matters. However, this enlightenment is not so original, but a mere product of what some sensitive members of our species do with the zeitgeist of their time. Nietzsche lived in a time where his ideas were in the air, he was just more receptive to them than the common folk.
Nietzsche slayed a lot of Gods, not just the God of Augustine or even Descarte's pineal-gland mediated trancdendendency. He demolished a whole platoon of atheistic Gods. He also slayed Sartre's atheitistic Cartesian consciousness, and the metaphysical logic of cause-effect that the natural sciences depend on. He slayed the teleological undeprinings of Marxist atheistic dialectical materialism, and the bliss of nothingness in zen mindfullness . He dismantled the scientistic worship of scientific method among prominent media atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dan Dennett.
Quoting Joshs
The goalposts keep moving look. Before it was pragmatic necessity, now it's selfish agents can act altruistically. Neitzsche's arguments are very difficult to read - it's quite possible he said both, in which case I would urge you to take the matter up with him, only "Nietzsche is dead" (God.)
Nietzsche, like Dewy and James see aims and goals as relative to contingent worlds that we bring into being and which change via our interactions with it. Altruistic agents act altruisticlly becasue that altruism is motivated by a selfish need that simultaneously benefits the self and the other, but in different ways. This is also the basis of cooperation.
Imagine if, instead of arrest and trial for heresy - the Church of Rome had welcomed Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God as made manifest in Creation, and thereafter - scientific knowledge were pursued as a sacred trust and integrated into religion, politics and economics - such that our politics bridged the divide between Hume's ought and is. The role of politicians would simply be to know what's true, and do what's right in terms of what's true. Had that occurred, Nietzsche's philosophical campaign against Judeo-Christian morality would not have occurred.
To my mind, science has nothing to say on the existence of God. It remains a mystery even while the earth most certainly does orbit the sun in contradiction of religious orthodoxy. This is consistent with the development of knowledge over time, from less to more, and worse to better - and would not imply, religious political and economic ideologies unable to recognize climate change as a fact, nor apply technologies we have available to combat it.
Clearly, therefore Nietzsche was as wrong as is Richard Dawkins to conflate religion and God. They are not the same thing. I don't know if God exists or not, but I do know the Bible says the earth is fixed in the heavens and it isn't. It's actually spiralling through space.
Quoting Joshs
Metaphysics is tosh.
If philosophy doesn't begin with epistemology, then it's basically intellectual masturbation. Take Heidegger and his obsession with being, from which people such as he are able to construe endless - perhaps socially useful, but more often socially destructive implications.
Why is being fundamental - and by what rules does he proceed? Truth is not his guide, facts are either adduced or cast aside to suit his argument. Maybe there's some loose logic, or process of reason to string things together - but based on some insubstantial concept that more likely arises from language than reality. It's tosh, designed to paper over the mistake of suppressing science as truth for 400 years.
For instance, this from Putnam:
"Many thinkers have argued that the traditional dichotomy between
the world "in itself" and the concepts we use to think and talk about
it must be given up. To mention only the most recent examples,
Davidson has argued that the distinction between "scheme" and
"content" cannot be drawn, Goodman has argued that the distinction
between "world" and "versions" is untenable, and Quine has
defended "ontological relativity." Like the great pragmatists, these
thinkers have urged us to reject the spectator point of view in metaphysics
and epistemology. Quine has urged us to accept the existence
of abstract entities on the ground that these are indispensable in
mathematics, and of microparticles and spacetime points on the
ground that these are indispensable in physics; and what better justification
is there for accepting an ontology than its indispensability
in our scientific practice? he asks. Goodman has urged us to take
seriously the metaphors that artists use to restructure our worlds,
on the ground that these are an indispensable way of understanding
our experience. Davidson has rejected the idea that talk of propositional
attitudes is "second class," on similar grounds. These thinkers
have been somewhat hesitant to forthrightly extend the same
approach to our moral images of ourselves and the world. Yet what
can giving up the spectator view in philosophy mean if we don't
extend the pragmatic approach to the most indispensable "versions"
of ourselves and our world that we possess? Like William James
(and like my teacher Morton White) I propose to do exactly that.'
I'm tired and I'm going to bed. I got about three lines in when the irresistible droop of dog-tiredness hit me. Maybe it's a consequence of you throwing any old shite at me - to suggest I'm wrong. That could get very tiring, very quickly. If you're as energetic as you seem, might I suggest having a proper go at understanding what I'm actually saying, before insisting I'm wrong. Organisms effect the environment! No shit! What's your real problem?
Nietzsche is referring to a metaphysical God. “God is dead” doesn’t refers to the existence or even just to the death of a religious tradition in society. He is making a specific metaphysical point about our world and our place within it.
“God” refers to the metaphysical idea of our existence being constituted in something outside our world, in some transcendent force which defines who we are, gives us our meaning, from outside our own meaningless existence. When Nietzsche says ”God is dead.” he is referring to the realisation this transcendent account is impossible. He's not equating religion with God. He's pointing out a feature of many religious beliefs and making a metaphysical point about the realisation it's impossible.
Since we are of the world, there is no way something beyond it can define our existence or are meaning. God is dead because we realise the transcendent cannot be us or how we come to exist. The transcendent power of God cannot be how we exist, mean, live, etc., any claim suppose we are constituted or made by such a transcendence is shown to be necessarily false. We know that God cannot be a formal reason we exist or have meaning as existing beings.
What does this mean for the theistic God? Nothing in terms of whether a theistic being might exist or not. To say there cannot be a transcendent God doesn’t preclude any sort of casual entity in the world. One might, for example, have some sort of being who caused a universe to exist. Or a powerful dictatorial judge and jailer, who sends people to a land of plenty to a fiery jail. Since those are claims about what exists in the world, they have to be judged on the relevant claims and evidence.
But Nietzsche’s point does something even more powerful to the theistic God than denying its existence: it turns God into a mortal. Like any human, God becomes just another state of existence, a mere being of a large amount of power, who is subject to the possibility of death (all it would take is a state of existence in which God ceased) and is subject to rule of both logic and values. God ceases to be the special kind of being of infinite existence and infallible judgement. A command of God, for example, has no inherent superiority over a command of a human. A human may know or argue just as well as God. (Really, God is just one of many humans, one of the many rational denizens of the world).
This would seem difficult to do when one insists on ignoring readily available evidence from the real world.
"To say there cannot be a transcendent God doesn’t preclude any sort of casual unity in the world. One might, for example, have some sort of being who caused a universe to exist."
Nietzsche slayed a lot of Gods, not just the God of Augustine or even Descarte's pineal-gland mediated transcendency. He demolished a whole platoon of atheistic Gods. He also slayed Sartre's atheistic Cartesian consciousness, and the metaphysical logic of cause-effect that the natural sciences depend on. He slayed the teleological undepinnings of Marxist atheistic dialectical materialism, and the bliss of nothingness in zen mindfullness . He dismantled the scientistic worship of scientific method among prominent media atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dan Dennett.
I don't know. Nietzsche was pretty clear about what he opposed that happened in his time and before him. We can discuss his actual words toward that end. Many argue that it didn't hold together as a system. He was pretty darn persistent, nonetheless.
But forgive me if I don't place what he might have objected to in his future in the same category.
Let's start with the matter of whether the slaying of gods included "precluding any sort of causal unity in the world" as brought forward by TheWillowOfDarkness. Are you arguing that observation is incorrect?
What evidence, and who is ignoring it? I set out ideas I spent a lot of time and effort on - and this is my thanks, is it? Let me make myself quite clear. If you can't tell truth from a hole in the ground, then your entire silly species will end up in the hole. If you don't like that, think on how much future generations are going to despise you. Think on what they will suffer. It's all me, me, me with you people. Get a grip.
And I'm making a point about the role God served in civilization - as objective authority for moral law, not saying anything about whether God exists or not. I've stated plainly that I don't know, and no-one else knows either. Do you? Hold the front page of Time Magazine. Do you?
Obviously, a Darwinian explanation of the origins of man undermines religious conceptions of reality, but that is explained. The Church made a mistake when they imprisoned and tried Galileo for heresy. They should have embraced Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God as made manifest in Creation. If there's a Creator God, (as I suggest was first hit upon by some pre-historic homo sapien, fashioning a stone hand axe - when it occurred to him to ask, "if I made this, who made me, and who made the world?") and if, science is true, then science is the word of God.
Primitive homo sapiens went on to employ God as objective authority for moral law, to enable hunter gatherer tribes to join together, as the basis of society and civilization. This eventually led to Judeo Christian religious ideation, and Darwin, and Nietzsche's effect on society. But that's not what should have happened. The effect of imprisoning Galileo was immense - and still resounds unto this day. The Church effectively divorced science as an understanding of reality, from science as a cornucopia of endless bounty - upturned by industry in pursuit of profit from the 1700's.
Religious, political and economic ideological bases of civilization were protected, at the cost of using science as a tool, but ignoring science as a rule for the conduct of human affairs. We lent the power of science and technology to primitive ideologies, and the consequences persist. You may have noted, we have all the knowledge and technology we need to address climate change, deforestation, over-fishing, pollution and so on, but don't. Why? Because we apply technology as ideology dictates, not as scientific truth dictates. We have ignored 'the word of God' - as revealed by science!
What I meant was that Nietzsche attacked the presuppositions behind objective causal logic underpinning the natural sciences.
"Forgive me if I don't place what he might have objected to in his future in the same category."
I accept your reluctance. But I should just note that my claims concerning the deficiencies in the thinking of philosophers who came after Nietzsche with respect to his ideas are echoed and supported by writers such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty, If there is a causal unity in the world for Nietzsche it is that of Will to Power, which posits a radical perspectivalism and rejects any notion of science as progress toward truth or truth as correspondence with reality.
" It is no more than a moral prejudice that
the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world’s most
poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist
except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if,
with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone
wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming
you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth”
left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are
intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of
appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance
– different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn’t
the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But
doesn’t fiction belong with an author?” – couldn’t we shoot back: “Why?
Doesn’t this ‘belonging’ belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren’t we
allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate
and object? Shouldn’t philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?
With all due respect to governesses, isn’t it about time philosophy renounced
governess-beliefs?” –
The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on
the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as
a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967).
Will to Power."
"We should not erroneously objectify
“cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks
naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic
stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects”
something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts,
which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and
communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like
“causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There,
the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.”
We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity,
compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we
project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” then
this is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically."
That should have been "causal entity". (which I have now corrected).
What I meant is Nietzsche's argument about the death of God doesn't preclude the existence of a god as an existing being.
For example, we cannot preclude the existence of a being who does the actions of a Christian God on the grounds transcendence is impossible. If we want to say there isn't such a being, we need an empirical account which falsifies such a being.
My excuses for the hiatus, I've been awfully busy the last couple of days...
My point was that Nietzsche wasn't talking about God or religion in general, but about Christianity and the Christian God. So even if it were true that hunter gatherers united because of their discovery of God, which I doubt ( I think technology, agriculture was the primary cause and religion followed to 'keep' these new societies together), even then this isn't a counter argument to Nietzsches point. As I said, he was making a point about a specific occurrence in history, the reversal of values by Judaism and the consequent rise of Christianity over the values of ancient Greece and Rome.
Religion in general is not necessarily a reversal of values, but an extension and veneration of those values. Greek and Roman religion for instance had a whole pantheon of Gods with all kinds of values embodied in the different Gods. The relative novelty of Judeo-Christian religions was their monotheism (Zoroastrism went there before) and their ascetic denial of all that is human except for the moral good. Sure we have a sense of morality ingrained, but that is not all we are... Nietzsche view was that focusing only on this aspect of humanity, as Christian culture did, leads to an impoverished cultivation of the human being.
As for Nazism, it has little to do with Nietzsche's philosophy because he had nothing to say about politics. His philosophy was a kind of virtue ethics, aimed at the individual, he wasn't advocating any kind of socio-political organization. And Hitler was merely a politician, who used bits of random philosophy to make his political ideas appealing to the masses, as politicians do. I don't think it's even feasible to use the same argument to refute both Nietzsche's philosophy and Nazism.
For sure, but my point was claims about what God does/if God exists are empirical cliams. If someone stands up and says: "This being of God exists and cause this." it is not a transcendent claim at all. They might try to say its transcendent to escape empirical scrutiny, but that doesn't make it true.
I used "impossible" for this reason. The [I] existence [/i] of a transcendent being is an oxymoron. The catergory of things being claimed, existent transcendent beings, is incoherent and so they are impossible.
My point about the empirical is that this point doesn't give us reason to reject the empirical claims made about God. If someone says: "God was here yesterday. They spoke to me." or "God existed than and was a being who caused a flood.", we are actually dealing an empirical claim which isn't touched by Nietzsche's argument about transcendence.
The incoherence of transcendent doesn't mean there cannot be, for example, a being who takes an action to cause a planet or lifeform to exist. "God is dead" is not to say that a powerful being does not exist. It's just says they cannot be transcendent.
My argument is not that hunter gatherer tribes untied "because" of their discovery of God - they united because of the practical benefits you allude to. God is not the why, but the how. Specifically, how they overcame the 'alpha male' problem. They adopted a common understanding of reality, in which God served as objective authority for laws that applied equally to everyone. This created a template for how society was possible - and that template was reworked endlessly before we get to Judeo Christian morality.
Then there's a misunderstanding in Nietzsche - following from Darwin's survival of the fittest, actually not Darwin - but Darwin's bulldog, name of Huxely, I think - that natural morality was merely selfish and violent. I don't believe that's so - in part because of the fact they stuck together and raised children.
All that said, the "transvaluation of values" is a real phenomenon. It's the difference between tribal and multi-tribal morality, wherein the former, is the rule of the alpha male, and the latter, an explicit moral code justified with reference to the authority of God, applying equally to both tribes within the fledgling society. Nietzsche's misunderstanding of this phenomenon led him to God is dead, nihilism and the unermennsch. But he's wrong. Even the alpha male within the hunter gatherer tribe was not selfish, immoral and brutal. When that happens in chimpanzee society - the beta males join forces and drive him out or kill him.
This leads, oddly to Hobbe's Leviathan - and his observation that the King cannot simply behave tyrannically, because the cost is ultimately too great. These are natural laws mirrored in political philosophy. So please, feel free to disagree - but if you think my argument is that it was "because" of God - hunter gatherers joined together, and that's not just a careless form of words, I can only repeat what I've already said. Of course there were practical benefits of cooperation, but a cooperative multi-tribal society was difficult to maintain without an objective authority i.e. God.
Then, in regard to Nietzsche - you have another misunderstanding to contend with that revolves around Galileo's imprisonment and trial for heresy by the Church, for formulating scientific method in the first place, rather than recognizing that scientific truth is valid knowledge of Creation - and thus, effectively the word of God. So really, the Church set religion and science a collision course. Nietzsche plucked at these threads, but failed to understand, and drew all the wrong conclusions.
I don't know much about Nazis - as I said at the beginning. I have only the most cursory understanding of how Nietzsche plays into Nazism, and have shied away from comment on that matter. I'm more familiar with the idea of the ubermensch as it plays out in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. A great book, well worth reading - for it indicates, something else I believe follows from the evolutionary reality, and goes undiscovered and misunderstood by Nietzsche.
In my view, human beings are moral creatures. Chimpanzees are moral creatures in a primitive tribalistic sense. Raskalinkov kills two women because he thinks himself above herd morality - but that's not the seat of morality. It's in us, ingrained by evolution in a tribal context.
It only becomes explicit - where hunter gatherer tribes need to join together, and that's religion. Nietzsche didn't understand this, but Dostoevsky did, because Raskalinkov breaks down under the weight of his guilty conscience. He can't even spend the proceeds of the crime while he's starving. So, there is no ubermensch because human beings are possessed of an innate moral sensibility. Nietzsche is quite simply factually incorrect.
Ok, I agree with this. God as a way of giving morality it's authority...
Well I think for Nietzsche there wasn't a single 'natural' morality. Both were natural. He believed in types, with different moralities suitable for them. The problem he thought was the one came to dominate the other historically by the reversal of values, so that higher types also came to believe they had to adopt that morality. Even with a morality based on the idea of God, you still need someone to rule and make the laws, because 'the idea' of God doesn't create morals by itself...
As I allude to before, I think 'God is dead' and 'nihilism' were mere descriptions of what he saw happening allready (Believing God is dead leads to nihilism because people don't really believe in the values anymore). The 'ubermensch' was his attempt at revaluation of values.... after nihilism was a fact of current Christian culture.
It's also important to note I think that he didn't think that altruism and selfishness were opposites, the one flows from the other. Altruïsm he saw as an overflowing of strenght... The higher morality as Nietsche saw it also wasn't merely selfish, immoral and brutal, but more in line with traditional noble valuations, or a-moral classical Virtù as Machiavelli saw it.
I've read Crime and punishment... and Nietzsche also read at least some of Dostoevsky's books, as he compliments him on his great psychological,insights, and i agree with that. But I just don't think they were adressing entirely the same problem, or at least their solution was of a different type as Dostoevsky was thinking about how a society at large could function, and there religion plays a vital role. Nietzsche was only thinking about a way forward for a certain type of people, he was a virtu ethicist... a book for none and all.
The jury's still out I'd say... we have an innate moral sensibility, in the sense that we have an aptitute to devellop morals, but what kind of morals isn't set in stone, I don't think.
I think I agree with that, 'a-moral virtu', that is beyond 'good and evil' but not beyond 'good and bad'.
Karl stone, to illustrate my point further, what about for instance Hindoeism and its caste system? That civilization, and the religion it is build on, goes back even further than the Judeo-Christian traditions. Nietzsche at least thought that particular system was older and more sophisticated than Christianity. How would we know that one is more 'natural' than the other?
I think it is a mistake to take Nietzsche's objections to certain metaphysical ideas to be an abandonment of objective description or that nothing can be learned about the causes of events.
The premise of a book such as the On the Genealogy of Morality not only points to a shared experience but argues that the conditions are even narrower than one might realize if one takes the present evaluations as given. Nietzsche objected to the "English psychologists" because they assumed what was present to them in real time must be "natural." The need for a method of history is introduced:
Now as for that other element in punishment—that which is fluid, its “meaning”—in a very late state of culture (for example in present-day Europe), the concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents a single meaning at all but rather an entire synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its exploitation for the most diverse purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze and—one must emphasize—is completely and utterly undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for sure why we actually punish: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.)
GM 2, 13 Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J Swensen
Another thing to consider when reading Nietzsche is that the topic of health and sickness is never treated as something outside of shared experience. As a provocateur, he was constantly crashing the party with questions about how healthy other people were. He also observed that we each have our own systems and that what is good for one may kill another. He never said that there was a point where the greater problem of sickness can be isolated from the one an individual confronts.
I'd say Nietzsche rejects that model of objectivity as correspondence between human representations and an external world. The kind of objectivity he upholds is a local one of perspectival descriptions that hold contingently within particular communities.
"It is no more than a moral prejudice that
the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world’s most
poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist
except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if,
with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone
wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming
you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth”
left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are
intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of
appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance
– different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn’t
the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But
doesn’t fiction belong with an author?” – couldn’t we shoot back: “Why?
Doesn’t this ‘belonging’ belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren’t we
allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate
and object? Shouldn’t philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?
With all due respect to governesses, isn’t it about time philosophy renounced
governess-beliefs?” –
The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on
the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as
a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967)."
My comment asked how you understand this quote from Nietzsche's notebook when placed side by side with the historical method developed in his published work. The purpose of the On the Genealogy of Morality is objective analysis. Are you suggesting he was just kidding when he purported to explain the origins of guilt,"bad conscience", and the ascetic ideal?
By the way, what edition of The Will to Power are you quoting from? My Kaufmann and Holingdale edition does not have your citation numbers.
He wasn't kidding . He was offering a 'useful fiction', His view of science is akin to(although more radical than) that of American pragmatists like Dewey and James, and the neo-pragmatist Rorty. 'Fiction' in this sense isnt a falsehood, it is an account that clarifies the world in relation to our drives. Of course, these 'post-truth' authors fill up 1000's of pages elaborating the details of their radically relativistic doctrines, Are they kidding? No, the way in which they think about the world has built into it
this implied contingency, it is self-reflexively contingent .
As for the citation from Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's genealogical method of historical analysis , which was taken up by Heidegger and Foucault, is not a causal explanation of history.
"Genealogy is a historical perspective and investigative method, which offers an
intrinsic critique of the present. It provides people with the critical skills for analysing
and uncovering the relationship between knowledge, power and the human subject in
modern society and the conceptual tools to understand how their being has been shaped by historical forces. Genealogy as method derives from German philosophy, particularly the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), but is most closely associated with French academic Michel Foucault (1926-24).
Michel Foucault’s genealogical analyses challenge traditional practices of history,
philosophical assumptions and established conceptions of knowledge, truth and
power. Genealogy displaces the primacy of the subject found in conventional history
and targets discourse, reason, rationality and certainty. Foucault’s analyses are against
the idea of universal necessities, the search for underlying laws and universal
explanatory systems, the inevitability of lines of development in human progress and the logic that we learn more about things and become better at dealing with them as time goes on. Instead, genealogy seeks to illuminate the contingency of what we take for granted, to denaturalise what seems immutable, to destabilise seemingly natural categories as constructs and confines articulated by words and discourse and to open up new possibilities for the future."
Úna Crowley
Nietzsche's pragmatism on display:
"We do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection to a judgment;
this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign.The
question is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how well it
preserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type. And we are fundamentally
inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include synthetic
judgments a priori) are the most indispensable to us, and that without accepting
the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly
invented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constant
falsification of the world through numbers, people could not live – that a
renunciation of false judgments would be a renunciation of life, a negation
of life. To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: this clearly means
resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner; and a philosophy
that risks such a thing would by that gesture alone place itself beyond
good and evil."
BTW, the quote you were asking about was from Beyond Good and Evil.
Which was my point. Nietzsche identifies any proposed God is just another mortal. "God is dead" doesn't refer to whether a being named "God"exists or not, but to a metaphysical point that dispenses with any being beyond the world or the finite. Even a God, if they existed as claimed, would not be God.
Maybe not. But it is an attempt to use history to claim something beyond fiction. It matters if Nietzsche is correct or not in his reasoning.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. That is exactly what Nietzsche said in the portion I quoted, including the part where he says "What can be defined, has no history." That points to a claim about what is the case for us. The critique of metaphysics is put forward to allow for a different kind of explanation. You seem more interested in the critique than the results of his investigation.
When quoting Nietzsche (or anyone), please point to where and what edition you are referring to. Or at least the translator.
Im interested in the method of his investigation, because the results are pre-figured in the method in the sense of how we are supposed to understand the groundedness of those results..
Could you tell me if you are familiar with Karl Popper and the difference between his approach to scientific truth and that of Thomas Kuhn?
The properties of ressentiment were "prefigured" by the limits of how ideas could be expressed after Nietzsche critisized Kantian metaphysics?
Sure, we could talk about other things. But what is wrong with what we were talking about before?
We read books and listen to how other people read the same books. Before we can disagree with each other about what is meant, there is this phase where we make sure we are reading the same book. There is very little evidence for me in this thread to suggest we are reading the same book. Or a group of them.
I don't think the ground for science is a straightforward matter. I acknowledge that Nietzsche's critique of objective "facts" would seem to undermine any project he chose to pursue toward the end of establishing some of his own. On the other hand, he does just that. Without apology, qualification, or explanation, he pursues the practice of psychology and places it above others:
All psychology so far has been stuck in moral prejudices and fears: it has not ventured into the depths. To grasp psychology as morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power, which is what I have done – nobody has ever come close to this, not even in thought: this, of course, to the extent that we are permitted to regard what has been written so far as a symptom of what has not been said until now. The power of moral prejudice has deeply affected the most spiritual world, which seems like the coldest world, the one most likely to be devoid of any presuppositions – and the effect has been manifestly harmful, hindering, dazzling, and distorting. A genuine physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious resistances in the heart of the researcher, it has “the heart” against it. Even a doctrine of the reciprocal dependence of the “good” and the “bad” drives will (as a refinedimmorality) cause distress and aversion in a strong and sturdy conscience – as will, to an even greater extent, a doctrine of the derivation of all the good drives from the bad. But suppose somebody considers even the affects of hatred, envy, greed, and power-lust as the conditioning affects of life, as elements that fundamentally and essentially need to be present in the total economy of life, and consequently need to be enhanced where life is enhanced, – this person will suffer from such a train of thought as if from sea-sickness. And yet even this hypothesis is far from being the most uncomfortable and unfamiliar in this enormous, practically untouched realm of dangerous knowledge: – and there are hundreds of good reasons for people to keep out of it, if they – can! On the other hand, if you are ever cast loose here with your ship, well now! come on! clench your teeth! open your eyes! and grab hold of the helm! – we are sailing straight over and away from morality; we are crushing and perhaps destroying the remnants of our own morality by daring to travel there – but what do we matter! Never before have intrepid voyagers and adventurers opened up a more profound world of insight: and the psychologist who “makes sacrifices” (they are not the sacrifizio dell’intelletto22 – to the contrary!) can at least demand in return that psychology again be recognized as queen of the sciences,23 and that the rest of the sciences exist to serve and prepare for it. Because, from now on, psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems.
Beyond Good and Evil, 23, Translated by Judith Norman
This juxtaposition of purposes is clearly intended to challenge the reader. He says as much in Ecce Homo where he delights in not helping people fill the gaps. The development of the argument in the On the Genealogy of Morality shows the two un-reconciled elements together where the "objective" arguments reveal some kind of limit to objectivity. The contradiction between the two are placed side by side with each other, as if seating the most contentious members of a family together at Sunday dinner.
I understand that Popper follows up on this topic for the purpose of establishing viable methods in science. He specifically objects to "historicism." Closer than Kuhn to Popper's objection comes from Strauss in his Natural Right and History. They have cogent arguments. I am not sure they would satisfy Nietzsche's criteria of good readers.