Help With Nietzsche??
One of my personal reading projects this spring has been to try to read (and understand) some of Nietzsche. I am almost finished my philosophy undergrad and I am ashamed to admit I have barely read much of his work, let alone understand him (I know his infamous quote like "God is dead" and I read some Thus Spoke Zarathrustra in class). I feel like he is a philosopher I will really find interesting-unfortunately, after reading most of Ecce Homo and making it to about halfway through of
If anyone knows a lot about Nietzsche, or at the very least can highlight some of his key points (particularly regarding Beyond Good and Evil) I would be extraordinarily thankful. Even if you can point me in the direction of some great resources, or online guides...I'm pretty disappointed in myself to be honest-and there's no one else I can ask for help.
Beyond Good and EvilI'm still not really sure what's going on. Even the wikipedia or encyclopaedia summaries of his work make it a bit difficult for me to understand, especially line by line of his work.
If anyone knows a lot about Nietzsche, or at the very least can highlight some of his key points (particularly regarding Beyond Good and Evil) I would be extraordinarily thankful. Even if you can point me in the direction of some great resources, or online guides...I'm pretty disappointed in myself to be honest-and there's no one else I can ask for help.
Comments (93)
They will not know his ideas from women in Ecce Homo could have resulted from his failed attempt to seduce Wagner's wife. It has remained controversial by those who know about it, but generally, it's accepted that some romantic affair between the two was more than likely.
About 0.01% of Americans, about 3,000 total in the USA, would be able to tell you that 'Beyond Good and Evil' advocated that some human spirits are superior and not subject to the moral judgments or moral restrictions which they rightfully impose on others. However, and this is important: unlike those who conceive it as proof of there being a Master Race, he states the superiority is individualistic and the result of better knowledge and reasoning, which any person may acquire, the same way Neitzsche did for himself.
Then of those, there might be one in ten, as many as 300 in the USA, who could tell you that 'Beyond Good and Evil' could have entirely been the product of a subconscious desire to justify his attempted seduction of Wagner's wife. Nietzsche would protest otherwise, but he would not have been able to protest very much, as he writes himself in the same book:
Which of course applies to Nietzsche himself, for whatever else he claims or not, he most definitely claims to have created a great philosophy. Yet putting aside the motive for his work, he made it most clear that he was not speaking of some kind of genetic superiority, but rather of a personal super-awareness that only some possessed through their own pursuits, again, see Nietzsche's own work, "The Case against Wagner," for example.
Then there is the black view, which started with followers of the Black Panther Movement in the 1960s, which has made Nietzsche somewhat of an underground pop culture icon, who was right because Black Power Rules. Also, there is a tiny minority of whites who believe the same thing the other way around. Nietzsche as underground pop culture icon is far more pervasive than any person who knows it would admit to others not in his perceived peer group.
He was certainly a serious force of nature. People don’t drop his name for nothing.
I wouldn’t recommend ANY guides until you’ve read more of his work. You’ve probably been conditioned at uni to read what others say about him, but I’d resist that tendency if you can for this guy more than any other or you may be led down the ‘wrong’ path by taking one interpretation as sacred.
https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=56
But also, only 32% of Americans have undergraduate degrees.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/08/rick-santorum/70-americans-dont-have-college-degree-rick-santoru/
So the overall percentage of Americans with a BA in philosophy is 0.18%.
Of those, about half will not have needed to read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for class. With current reading levels, we may assume incidental readers to be virtually zero. The number who were required to know something about 'Beyond Good and Evil' is therefore 0.09%. Of those, maybe one in ten would be interested enough in him as a person to read any biographical about him as well, and therefore would otherwise not know about his affair with Wagner's wife, leading to less than 0.001%, or about one in a hundred thousand, who would perceive the above quote from Nietzsche as ironic. The USA contains about 300 million adults, so that's about 300 people.
One thing that you find if you read enough Nietzsche, is that almost everything he writes, he contradicts somewhere else.
He leaves himself wide open to interpretation. But he was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, and it is easy to see how many of his ideas were derived therefrom.
I would agree with I like sushi. Imo, every substantial contribution that he made to philosophy can be tied back into the Dionysian/Apollonian, which first appeared in BoT.
Being one who was led out the garden path, I would agree, because almost all the rest of N. is moral philosophy in some regard or other, but none of it really passes Hume's Guillotine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
If I were to offer one recommendation it would be to start with a different work actually: the Genealogy. I think it's one of the more gentle of Nietzsche's works, and it's composition - three interlinked essays - are alot easier to follow a thread of thinking though. Alternatively, try The Antichrist or the Twilight of Idols (you can find both books together sometimes), which are slimmer and also quite accessible and funny(!), good reads. If you're going to stick to BGE, read it with the above in mind: why do philosophers do as they do, what are they 'hiding' or afraid of when they construct their edifies? These are the kinds of questions Nietzsche puts to philosophy, and then answers for it.
I've no clue what ernestm is on about, and suggest you - and anyone else in this thread - ignore him entirely.
Quoting StreetlightX
Nietzsche cannot escape from his own criticisms of others that equally apply to himself. He himself erects one of these Apollonian constructs that he so frequently condemns in others, most notably in Thus Spake Zarathustra, which also happens to be twice as long than his other works.
Guttenberg:
[*] Dionysios, 66KB, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52446
[/list]
Nothing passes Hume's guillotine, that's what makes it so cool.
Speaking of Hume's guillotine, I feel like Nietzsche invented a guillotine of his own in "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense". In that work, he irrevocably severs the correspondence between perception and concept.
You have the advantage of me, sir, I have not read that work. Perhaps you would be so kind as to elucidate further your insights on it? You see my problem is, the Wikipedia currently says:
So as I understand it, his sister gathered material for the common 3-page essay of this title after she started assembling 'Ecce Homo,' and originally included it in another book now called 'Early Greek Philosophy and other essays.' She expanded the original essay with another 9 pages from his lecture notes, which was finally published in English long after, in 1911. So at least some of this material was written while he was still working as a University professor. The book is here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51548/51548-h/51548-h.htm
That book contains the full text of the expanded essay "On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense" as the concluding section 6, pages 171 to 193. Excerpts appear in other places as the original essay.
And maybe I'll also note two important idea's of Nietzsche, the one following the other, sort of...
He believes Plato, and all subsequent philosophers that were inspired by Plato's work, got it backwards with his forms. That is basicly the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil. For Nietzsche the world is not a mere shadow of the Forms which are prior to that world and more real metaphysically... but conversely forms and idea come out this world, out of humans. Or to put in an other way, the highest abstractions are not 'high' because they are prior and more real than lower abstractions, but because they are more abstracted away from the world we observe... and so more empty (of information).
This brings him to the method he is going to use for his inquiry, which is discussed a bit further in the beginning of Beyond and Evil. Since he doesn't believe we have this direct access to something metaphysically real like Plato's Forms, what are philosophers actually talking about when they talk about things like the Truth? For Nietzsche these ideas do not come from some pure unbiased dialectic (as they would probably have it), but spring from the instincts and drives of the particular individual that came up with them. So his goal is not necessarily to engage with the truthvalue of those idea, but to look for what motivated those ideas in the first place, like a psychologist... That is basicly his main method of inquiry.
And I'll throw in a third point, the thing you need to understand is that he's a moral philosopher. Although still quite wide, his domain of inquiry is specifically morality. Where do moral ideas come from, what is the value of morality in general, what about some of the more specific incarnations of morality like Christianity etc etc...
Nietzsche would be disgusted to hear recommendations for Plato's Republic.
N. typically starts with such vulgar rhetoric, eg:
By starting in a vulgar tone, he makes his subsequent intellectual scorn seem less boring to his audience, whom, as he makes perfectly clear, he does not respect either.
I gather the author of the OP will already be familiar enough with those that is why I’d recommend Nietzsche’s debut work (his self criticism of this work is also a nice insight).
I feel that this essay is his only attempt of presenting the Dionysian/Apollonian scientifically. And I'm no expert, but it seems his later (relevant) works took note of the necessary conclusions at which he arrived in this essay, and I believe he was attempting to reflect them in his peculiar style of philosophizing - like a crazed prophet with his innane ramblings.
Historically speaking, I would say this essay is arguably the first appearance of postmodernist thought in the philosophical tradition since it essentially lays out some the most fundamental tenets of postmodernism. For example, he says: "Every concept arrises from the equation of unequal things."
It definitely plays as a major factor in his reputation as a nihilist (which I find debatable), nevertheless it served a devastating blow to the phenomenological perspective that was prevalent at the time. This not only led directly to the slippery slope of fatuous postmodernist blather, but also opened the door for analytical philosophy to take prominence with its soulless robotic ossification.
I feel Nietzsche was getting at something much deeper, which has never been recognized by his philosophical successors. There is more to the fact that he presented his ideas so as to be wide open to interpretation. But that is my interpretation, and it is only one of many.
I believe his debut work to be invaluable in interpreting his overall philosophy. In "ecce homo", he triples down on his commitment to the Dionysian. That says enough for me.
Did you read the rest of my post? I said you need read it to understand what he is critiquing, not because I think, or Nietzsche thinks, it is a particularly good work of philosophy.
Well there's two problems. First, N. thought Plato was boring.
Second, if you don't find Plato boring and read as far as Republic VII, you'd find the metaphor of the cave. N. rejected it as a stupid metaphor, at possibly the high point of of his epistemological work, in 'Truth and Lies.' The strange thing is, he himself claims to be the alienated Light of Truth, LoT, lamenting his own persecution. That's exactly what Plato said happens to people like N. in the Republic.
So reading Plato actually makes Nietzsche seem more insane than anything else. I think, if you are trying to find something out of him that's more durable than a vulgar two fingers, you have to go into his Dionysian thing, he was very poetic about it.
Platoism was one of the prime examples that Nietschze used to illustrate the Apollonian. In fact, in BoT, Platonism is represented as the first relevant manifestation or creation of the Apollonian, in a world historic context. Christianity represents yet another.
Boring or not, if you don't know anything about the thing someone is a critiquing, how can you possibly evaluate that critique?
And I doubt you will understand a lot of what is Nietzsche is saying about the dionysian, if you don't get what it meant in the Greek society, and how Plato was a product of things going the wrong way in Greek culture.
Because, if you are after understanding Nietzsche, and you want to understand his influences, it is better to study Schopenhauer first.
I don't know about Platonism being the first manifestation of the Apollonian, it's been a while since i've read BoT, but wasn't the tragic a fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The problem with platonism was that it was 'only' Apollonian.
Sure, reading him will help your understanding too, in particular how Nietsche got his idea about the importance of the will, and how his idea of it differs from Schopenhauers... but still Plato is the start of the whole thing, the rest being footnotes and all that.
Well thats where we definitely differ. Wagner humiliated the guy with better mythology, so he had to prove he was a better philosopher, but he still didn't seduce Wagner's wife. Good try, but still did not amount to much more than intellectual masturbation. Western philosophers still look to Russell instead. No one else cares much except racists.
When he says 'God is dead, and we have killed him', he's talking about a con - how God has been killed, through misrepresentation; like the poisoned apple from Sneewittchen.
:confused:
I think BoT had a heavy dose of phenomenology overshadowing it. And because of that assumption, I think the world historic is steadily implied therein.
But you are correct. The Apollonian is not something that came into existence. It is fundamental to the Dionysian.
So, let me restate it: in BoT, Plato represented the first world historic creation that was 'only' Apollonian
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Good point. The return of the Apollonian to the Dionysian is best represented in the death of the tragic hero. This I believe is at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy and ethics. It gets lost in the irrationality of his aphoristic style. Yet I think the unintelligibilty of his style was actually the medium in which he intended to illustrate the interplay of the Dionysian-Apollonian.
I could seduce Wagner's slutty wife. :grin: .
Now that's a good question:
Who would win in a fight, Nietzsche or Russell?
Yes it would seem hard to convincingly scathe the Apollonian in a long structured and systematic treatise :-)
Interesting...
Could you elaborate?
That is a great description of what the postmodernist/Deconstructionists seem to be attempting. :smile:
I don't know. Nietzsche has more black-light posters in opium dens. Russell has more unicorns.
We'll call it a draw.
Then, who can out drink the other?
Russell was a pacifist, so presumably he would have to let himself get beat up by Nietzsche if he wants to stay true to his philosophy.
:lol:
And Nietzsche was filled with disdain. He would have absolutely despised Russell. A tragic beatdown indeed.
The Catholic Church is pagan. There was no trinity proposed by Jesus or his disciples and he certainly didn't ask for temples to be built in his name.
Early Christian tradition holds to, like the other two aforementioned, that man himself is the temple of God - and should worship in spirit.
John 4:24 "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."
The last supper was not an indoctrination and baptism does not involve being dunked in a pool of water.
These two traditions are pagan, since the days of yore.
And when Nietzsche rants off against Christianity, he does so against the Catholic Church and it's influence in everyday life. Hence my previous comment.
And why is his Übermensch, the same as Proudhon's?
"I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government."
That's why.
I always felt that Nietschze borrowed heavily from other thinkers he was acquainted with.
But I also think he usually added a unique touch. I know he regarded the Ubermensch ethically. But he also regarded it epistemologically, in that it not only appropriates it's own morality, but also constructs it's own conceptual reality. It is a rebellion against all pertinent modes of tradition. A conscious movement toward the Dionysian.
Thus He Spake. And Zarathustra was so much more impressive than Der Ring des Nibelungen, especially when lit by black lights in an opium den. I don't think he cared enough about unicorns to despise Russell for creating them as non-Platonic forms.
The übermensch being a sort of anarchist is a bit of a hard sell I think. Above the law yes, but more as a Napoleon or a Ceasar, than as an anarchist.
I always defined paganism as immanency, in that divinity exists directly in nature, or the objects of our immediate perception. Whereas the the early Christian, Buddhist and Taoist traditions placed divinity in the individual subject. I could be wrong, it's a terrible tragedy.
I think it is very reasonable. In the strict sense of being Dionysian, there is nothing that the Ubermensch is not justified to do.
And even if Nietzsche was speaking of the Ubermensch as some higher order of being for the self fulfilled individual, his logic cannot selectively restrict outright anarchic violence without imploding the whole basis "of being Dionysian". That is the the failure of his philosophy, and the problem postmodernism has been dealing with ever since. Terrible consequences.
The thing about Christanity, Buddhism and Toasism is that they tend to the universal, trying to transcent particular traditions of peoples, Völker... and in that proces loose what anchors them to their particular context.
In greece, you had the oral Homeric tradition wherein the greek culture was perpetuated. Plato was also such a step in the direction of an universalism with his metaphysical 'contextless' Forms. He riled against poetry for a reason.
The idea of the Übermensch is not new.
Sure, I won't argue it sounds like a stretch. But the point of the Übermensch is one unbound from a creed - which is by definition the Anarchist.
I don't see the Caesar as one such. If I'm missing something, feel free to point it out.
Paganism is ritual. It's all about having, rather than being.
The creed of the Catholic Church and Wicca is the same creed; go and make a comparison for yourself.
This is how a Shaman operates: Substance, sacrifice, communication, achievement.
You get some milk, you add some stuff to the milk to ferment it, you taste the fermented milk and then you sell it as yogurt.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that science is pagan, if you've read any of the creation stories where the 'gods' teach men to read and write and craft.
Science might have some elements of paganism. But where it differs is that Paganism has soul, whereas science has a near infinitude of old crusty pages filled with obsolescence.
Well I think both, the anarchist and the Napoleon/Ceasar, are 'above a creed'. The difference is, I think, that anarchism implies some sort of idealism for a world wherein laws and such don't exist or could be abolished... whereas a Ceasar or a Napoleon didn't believe that was a possibility or ideal to be achieved, but rather made use of that reality.
You are right in that Ceasar or a Napoleon were more appropriate examples of the Ubermensch. But if we apply it logically, as in everyone is a Napolean or Ceasar, it is nothing other than anarchy.
When I look at the Caesar, I see the pillar of a community; as such, I don't see how one anchored down to his community, which is mainly commoners, is the Übermensch.
Unless I've misread - Caesar is the rope between the Barbarian and the Übermensch; being still tied down to a creed.
Which going back to Anarchy, means the Anarchist is dysfunctional as Anarchy is a creed.
It's ironic, but evident in Proudhon's writing, like in that of the 'atheist' that he didn't crave Anarchy despite purportedly denying everything. He wants a specific order, but an order nonetheless.
So, you'd be right that in practice the Übermensch is a God-King, rather than an Anarchist.
But it's ironic, because there's no difference - as neither is above the law, even if it's just because they constitute it.
Nietzsche is known to make biblical references on occasion. Is is possible that the Ubermensch relates to a the man preceding the tower of Babel, perhaps a reference to a pre-Appolonian time.
What is new? Tell me that, and you win the trophy for most original philosopher on TPF. :monkey:
That's where he derived Nihilism from, anyway.
Mind you Buddha means awake.
Ironic, with the 'woke' buzzword flying around, don't you think?
On the side, where do you lay the cornerstone of the Apollonian time, to consider what is pre and post Apollonian?
Maybe you're right, don't have time to respond now, I'll come back to it later...
Never heard of it. Sounds retarded.
It is a mythological period, an allegory for something that cannot be accounted for in the scientific criterion of the present age.
As such, the construction of the tower of babel would represent the initiation of the Apolonian (in it's most basic mode). It is similar to how eating from the tree of good and evil is an allegory for the awaking to an ethical existence.
Maybe experientially yes. There is the Freudian explanation that Wagner actually caught N. having sex with his wife, and this was N. defending himself. He was entitled to have sex with Wagner's wife
because he was a philosophical superman. I'm sure there are some to this day who find that entitlement appealing for their own purposes, but me, no I'm not interested in Wagner's wife, sorry.
I am, she was probably a super hot babe (intellectually speaking, of course :wink: :up: )
What is its etymology?
And here's a wacky suggestion, what if the Fruit of Good and Evil was just mutagen?
What if they gulped down vials of DNA and the sort?
Think about it, how different is it from telling your infant child to not put its fingers in the electricity socket, to not eat detergent, to not drink 'dad's special water'?
I feel you are being a little too ad hommed about Nietzsche. Even if he is as despicable as Hitler, you cannot discount his historic contribution to the philosophic tradition.
They aren't supposed to do that? Oops. :yikes:
Quoting Shamshir
I don't know. Tell me please.
Quoting Shamshir
That is hard to swallow. But, I cannot help but think that everything is the result of a mutagen. I love whacky suggestions
POLON means pillar; figure out the rest. :victory:
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
That's what the theory of evolution is, right?
That some random fish mutated in to humans.
And then, enters the fool, voicing out - that it was due to the mutagen they ate, as described in the Bible.
Well, that just sounds ridiculous. But there is some type of aesthetic metaphor that has irrational meaning that is valuable to the human psyche. For anything that cannot be accounted for in scientific, logical, systematic terms, there is no other way of understanding it than with some type of illustrative allegory.
And that's the point of the Übermensch, an artificial mutation - like the cyborg, free from his human limitations.
How am I discounting it? You praise him for heralding post modernism, and in the best tradition of post modernism I am admiring his marvelous example of post-climax rapture. 'Birth or a Tragedy' was his proposal to create a bastard with another man's wife. 'Of Wagner' was him saying thank you God for being dead. And everything after that, including insanity, was his tribute to her cockoldry. What more could you possibly ask for in a post-modernist thinker.
Right, I think it's important to figure out what 'unbound by a creed' means in practice? I don't think that could just mean unbound by any sort of personal 'values or ideas based on those', because that would just be random stupidity. What I take it to mean is that you are able to transcend the specific values and norms you were raise with and transform them in something that is more your own, based on your own character and instincts.
So... on the one hand Nietzsche admired Jesus Christ because he was able to withstand the societal norms he was raised with, and came up with his own, because of his 'transvaluation of values'. But on the other hand he derided him in the anti-christ because of his particular psychological make-up that gave rise to that transvaluation. Nietzsche argues that it was because of his "extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation", because of his "instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all
bounds and distances in feeling" that he came to his particular transvaluation of values, the doctrine of the saviour. I'd argue that this psychological archetype is similar to that of the anarchist. Indeed if you take the stories about the life of Jesus Christ at face value, on could argue that he was actually very akin to a sort of anarchist, in that he was constantly in conflict with the rule of Jewish priests and Roman Authority. He was 'unbound by a creed', but that was the result, if you buy into Nietzsche psychological analysis, of a weakness.
I'd agree that Napoleon and Ceasar could be viewed ultimately as 'pilars' of their respective communities, but not before they had fundamentally transformed them by imposing their values on rules on the entire community. Ceasar organised the Roman republic into a de facto monarchy and created a ton of new laws, after decades of civil war and disorder. And Napoleon cleaned up after the fall of the Ancien Regime and the revolution, and came up with for instance a code of civil law that is still the basis of the current continental European legal system. I'd argue they were not merely anchored to their communities as a sort of passive reciever, but rather they transformed them into something else, based on their personal valuesystems. And I think one cannot really transform societal values if one is really 'bound by a creed'.
The difference in those transformation is then I think, for Nietzsche, that the one comes from weakness, idealism and a denial of the world, and the other from strength, mastery and an intimate knowledge of that world.
What's missing here is that that for Nietzsche the transvaluation of all values only begins as a rejection of the conventions that one received from one's cultural heritage. But it should lead to a total revaluation that ends not with the embrace of an alterantive set of values but with the rejection of the idea that there is a right or superior value system (Napoleon and Caesar can be argued to reject one set of values in favor of their preferred alternative). Will to Power expresses the notion that life in its essence is value positing for its own sake. Each value system is on the way to its own destruction the minute it is affirmed,as part of an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Attempting to hold onto any normative way of being is a weakness for Nietzsche.
That's imposing value systems on N.
Will to Power is central to his position, but for N., the true overmind does not acknowledge any value system. It just responds to situations, like Trump in fact, appearing unpredictable to others because there is no reason or rationale to the choice of actions, they just arise from a 'superior intuition.'
If there has ever been an embodiment of will to power in political office, it is Trump.
After all, all progress is simply the little bit of anarchy or perhaps better said 'rule-breaking' between two periods.
As to: Can one change values if bound by a creed? Indeed, one can.
Like you said, one can and I'd even add must impose a creed to change values.
Like how a stairway is the same repeated action and object - but it entails change.
As for Nietzsche and his Übermensch, I see it as the equivalent to a teenager's rebellion against authority, rather than a surpassing of authority - as the real Úbermensch, I think, is a hermit or in your own thought, a shepherd amongst sheep.
Adding to that last bit - your idea of the Ûbermensch may be more in line with Nietzsche's - who doesn't want The Good Shepherd, merely The Shepherd, in relation to Jesus Christ.
That's not how N. saw it. He posed Zarathustra as an ideal model, and Z. did not rebel, he just did what he wanted without any concern what authority said at all. Z. had no value system of his own. He just acted intuitively.
Heidegger explains that for Nietzsche the replacement of old Christian values with new secular ones ones is an 'incomplete nihiism'.
"The now-empty authoritative realm of the suprasensory and the ideal world can still be adhered to.
What is more, the empty place demands to be occupied anew and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by something else. New ideals are set up. That happens, according to Nietzsche's conception (Will to Power, Aph. 1021, 1887), through doctrines regarding world happiness, through socialism, and equally through Wagnerian music, i.e., everywhere where "dogmatic Christendom" has "become bankrupt." Thus does "incomplete nihilism" come to prevail. Nietzsche says about the latter :
"Incomplete nihilism : its forms : we live in the midst of it. Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluing our values so far they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute" (Will to Power, Aph. 28, 1 887) ."
"Incomplete nihilism does indeed replace the former values with others, but it still posits the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory. Completed nihilism, however, must in addition do away even with the place of value itself, with the suprasensory as a realm, and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently.
From this it becomes clear that the "revaluing of all previous values" does indeed belong to complete, consummated, and therefore classical nihilism, but the revaluing does not merely replace the old values with new. Revaluing becomes the overturning of the nature and manner of valuing. The positing of values requires a new principle, i.e., a new principle from which it may proceed and within which it may maintain itself."
For Nietzsche the essence of being is an endless becoming without ultimate direction. Valuing is mere perspective-taking, a point of view, without anchoring in ultimate truth.
Nietzsche says "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.
I think the opposite is true. Trump is about as far removed as anyone i can imagine from realizing Will to Power.People say Trump is capricious and unpredictable. Not to his base. And why is that? Because Trump's worldview is consistent with Republicanism of the early 20th century. What makes him dangerous isn't unpredictability , it's his regressive worldview.
There's a palpable metaphysics driving the Orange One. It may be muddled in its articulation, but its there.
'Quoting ernestm
Everyone operates on the basis of a frame of reference, perspective, point of view. Nietzsche's Overman doesn't do away with perspective-taking and value positing, only suprasensory values.
It's not a value SYSTEM. He has ideas of good and bad, but there is no SYSTEM of them. It's just intuitive reaction.
We may be saying the same thing. There are a priori metaphysical systems , which is a suprasensory value system. And there are post-metaphysical value structures, which have a certain schematic consistency to them, as Foucault showed. In this sense, there is still a certain systematicity to post-metaphysical perspective-taking. It's a pragmatic sort of structuration, designed to further our goals of life-enhancement.
Not quite. the Will to Power is not a conscious drive either. It's all instinctive. Like an animal responding to stimuli, the external observer could perhaps deduce rules, but there is no reason or cognition in the process for the overmind.
Since you asked about Beyond Good and Evil let me give you are example. From the Preface:
When Nietzsche talks about women we should not assume he is talking always talking about women, that is, the female of the human species. When he goes on to say:
he is talking about truth:
We must pay attention to Nietzsche's women, they include in addition to truth, wisdom, and life. We must also pay attention to what he says about women and how the are to be treated.
Quoting ernestm
Yes, as for Freud, the instinctual drives are unconscious. But the Will tp Power must imply forms of cognition, as Heidegger shows:
"Nietzsche says in a note (1887-88) what he understands by
value : "The point-of-view of 'value' is the point-of-view constituting
the preservation-enhancement conditions with respect to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming" (Will to Power, Aph. 715) .10
"The essence of value lies in its being a point-of-view. Value means that upon which the eye is fixed. Value means that which is in view for a seeing that aims at something or that, as we say,
reckons upon something and therewith must reckon with something else. Value stands in intimate relation to a so-much, to quantity and number. Hence values are related to a "numerical
and mensural scale" (Will to Power, Aph. 710, 1888) .
"This seeing is at any given time a seeing on behalf of a view-to-life that rules completely in everything that lives. In that it posits the aims that are in view for whatever is alive, life, in its essence, proves to be value-positing (d. Will to Power, Aph.556, 1 885-86).
Within becoming, life-L e., aliveness-shapes itself into centers of the will to power particularized
in time. These centers are, accordingly, ruling configurations. Such Nietzsche understands art, the state, religion, science, society, to be. Therefore Nietzsche can also say : "Value is essentially the point-of-view for the increasing or decreasing of these dominating centers"(that is, with regard to their ruling character) (Will to Power, Aph. 715, 1887-88)."
It's hard to maintain such centers without calculative cognition, which Nietzsche doesn't deny. He just argues that they are in service of, and get their meaning from, the drives.
Nietzsche wasn't posting a psychological behaviorism)stimulus-response). His approach was in some respects compatible with Freud's understanding of the relation between ego and id.
But I don't think, and I don't think N. did either, that Ceasar or Napoleon believed that there was a right or superior value system... at least in any objective or metaphysical sense.
Quoting Joshs
As you put it quite nicely here, it cannot mean the total rejection of any value positing. So I don't see how Napoleon or Ceasar positing their own would necessarily be contrary to the idea of the overman.
Then I come back the question of what 'unbound by a creed' could possibly mean in practice. Since I believe, with Joshs, that everybody necessarily posits at least their own values (if they don't follow someone elses) and thus 'has a creed', the frase 'unbound by a creed' doesn't seem to mean anything, it's an empty set then.
I tend to side with post-structuralists and Heideggerian readings of Nietzsche. Deleuze, for instance, treats the overman as something very different from a chosen valuative perspective, or a a will
which wants and seeks power.
"We should not think of Nietzsche's overman as simply a raising of the stakes: he differs in nature from man, from the ego. The overman is defined by a new way of feeling: he is a different subject from man, something other than the human type. A new way of thinking. A new way of evaluating: not a change
of values, not an abstract transposition nor a dialectical reversal, but a change and reversal in the element from which the value of values derives, a "transvaluation"."
"We can thus see how the eternal return is linked,not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resists it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation. And this is the sole content of the Overman; he is the joint product of the will to power and the eternal return, Dionysus and
Ariadne. This is why Nietzsche says that the will to power is not wanting, coveting or seeking power, but only "giving" or "creating". This book sets out, primarily, to analyse what Nietzsche calls becoming."
But I think we may both agree, Nietzsche does not seek dissolution - rather domination; may we?
Are we all in agreement that The Birth of Tragedy is essential reading to understand Nietzsche in regards to Dionysus and and Apollo? One thing that struck me, maybe more than most due to my interests, was the comments on Greek ‘plays’ and further study of Aristotle and the social importance of ‘plays’ in ancient Greece - as well as in other societies; although in differing forms and differing attachments to ‘ritual’ and communal celebration. The meaning of “chorus” really hit home for me.
Overall Nietzsche’s journey begins with this reverence for the clash of Apolline and Dyonysiac traditions culminating in the performed rituals of comedy and tragedy stemming from epic and brought to the general public as a means to see humanity as a force unto itself full of fear and loathing, full of stupidity and delusions.
In the Geneaology of Morals Nietzsche makes explicit the delusion of ‘value’ being “Good and Evil” and instead drives home that there is “Good and Bad”.
His view of “Good” is summed up as being claimed by the public as some watered down ethical law that mist be abided by. He clearly sets out the will of the individual as moral and the will of the masses as ‘mentality ill’. The necessary clash of the individual will set upon the communal grounds of societal interaction makes humans human. We’re torn between our inner sense of being and our outer sense of being - being an individual, yet an individual necessarily a part of a group of others and ONLY an individual because of this.
He quite blatantly opposes the religious ideal and the idea of dissipating the ego for the so-called betterment of human society. He seemed to understand that such would mean the destruction of humanity not its liberation.
The general message I hear (and I understand it as MY message; strange as it seems) is that social ideals regarding how we should behave morally are vicious ideals no one in their right mind should adhere to. Hence the ‘mental illness’ of society. We see this ‘illness’, and I’ve shown revealed this myself in posts about hypothetical scenarios, in the manner in which people refuse to face up to impossible problems preferring the comfort of social conformity and essentially a willingness to remain blind to themselves for the so-called, self-professed nonsense, of the ‘good of all’ - this equates to nothing more than the death throes of humanity within an individual life (may they perish and may people understand the comedy AND the tragedy of their journey into the abyss!)
His doctoral thesis on the Philology of Dionysus and Apollo is still regarded as a masterpiece. This work has always given him plenty of kudos.
His life in writing is a spectrum of less reason and more polemic as time passes. He also had the tendency to increasingly weird metaphors, which some have taken too literally. The worst was possibly the eternal return, or recurrance, where some think of it as an endorsement of re-incarnation; it is not. It is a moral lesson that we ought to live our lives as if this was the last of a fully mindful and considered whole.
His attacks on Christian morality bear the marks of personal experience, and seem too strident at times. But there is no way he can be held responsible for Hitler.
It's worth pointing out that his sister had a role in upgrading his works to appeal to fascism,
I will say I have a hard time envisioning what the quotes from Deleuze would actually entail... maybe I don't quite get the concept of the overman for that reason. But leaving the concept of the overman aside for a moment, I do agree that going with the flow, or dissolution is not what Nietzsche is after. Domination is maybe a bit of a loaded term, but the will to power yes... and then will to power not necessarily as 'worldy power', although it can entail that, but primary as an overarching drive that dominates and structures other instincts.
In a lot of instances Nietzsche talks about 'anarchy in the instinct' as the cause for the turn to reason as a tyrant (to subdue that anarchy), as in the case of Ancient Greece and Socrates... which only makes things worse in some ways. The point being here, that he clearly doesn't believe that no structure at all is the way to go, eventhough said structure might seem to be contrary to the dionysian and the concept of the overman.
Maybe there is some reconciliation to be found in his metaphore of the camel, lion and ultimately the child, in that the possibly and value of the child presicely lies in haven gone through these previous stages... one cannot really play with structures and tables of values and transcendent them, if they haven't been imprinted in some ways before.
The 'will to power' term finds its roots with The Book of Abramelin - where the practitioner is instructed to abate society and then proclaim dominance over all vices (unclean spirits) to assume contact with his higher/true self.
It in essence means divine will, where the will of the actor is unimpeded.
That's where Western European occultist tradition is derived from, and the idea of the Übermensch is nothing new to it. To it, the Übermensch is the destroyer of the Ego.
I'd go as far as to say that Nietzsche envisions his Übermensch as King Solomon - the wise, exuberant king; who is again at the core of the Abramelin Tradition.
Which going to back to...
Quoting Shamshir
Is what the story of Solomon entails.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
The Dionysian tradition is living in unison with nature, which is what the Anarchist craves.
The Anarchist is not without structure - his structure is the Animal Kingdom; that's the freedom the Anarchist craves.
I think it's important to consider the bureaucracy that surrounded Nietzsche, to see what his Übermensch is in practice.
And that is why I compare the Übermensch to both the Anarchist and The Shepherd (King Solomon).
Whilst the Anarchist entails the freedom from superfluous society, Nietzsche being a so-called philosopher, he would seek to elevate himself rather than dissolve - which is what society was to him, a dissolution of the individual.
The Shepherd in his dominance over the sheep, is free like the sheep - but it is not due to blissful ignorance, but a wise overcoming.
All Nietzsche is doing, is reflecting what he despises; it's reversed, but it's the same.
His Übermensch isn't beyond a creed, he is beyond The Creed of Man.
The Übermensch who is without a creed altogether, has to be neither Over nor a Man.
Try this: http://www.northamericannietzschesociety.com/uploads/7/3/2/5/73251013/nietzscheana9.pdf
Russell had the heart to win the fight while Nietzsche had a mental breakdown upon seeing a horse being beaten.
But Russell was good at seducing too and lived a vibrant married life.
Nevertheless the ideas of Nietzsche can be twisted and turn into nazi propaganda, so his ideas were way more powerful than Russell's. He was also an atheist who did not ramble on about disproving God all the time but also discussed the problems which will rise if society forgets God.Russell was too cocky to see any social problems,he was more on the autistic side when it came to philosophy.
At least it wasn't a dead horse. But still, not very Ubermensch, was it?
Quoting Wittgenstein
That is a good assessment.
Nietschze's philosophy was a lot more concerned with the ethical than Russell's. And I have always found ethical philosophy to be much more powerful than epistemology/metaphysics, given that it has direct application to life, whereas the latter is pretty much confined to thought/speculation.
Kaufmann is a good translator, but I prefer the poststructuralist readings of Nietzsche(Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida) .I think they understood the radical implications of his thought better than did Kaufmann.
I find that true of all the major continental philosophers, which is why there are so many competing camps of interpretation for all of them. It's helpful to use secondary literature in an initial foray into the work, but one should be careful not to rely on that interpretation. Kaufmann turns Nietzsche into a cross between Kierkegaard and Buber, but in my view misses what is most radical about Nietzsche.