I've always thought Nietzsche was the only funny (hilarious more than strange) modern philosopher. Compared to dullards like Kierkegaard, he's a barrel of laughs. I also think he's also the perfect example of the old saw "all modern philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle."
One of my professors gave a very learned exposition of Nietzsche as the philosophical forbear of Nazism. It was pretty convincing, frankly, and I still think of Nietzsche as fundamentally evil. Funny, but evil. The exposition took days of his lecture time, so I won't try to recreate it here, but lightly dismissing that charge by laying it all at the feet of his sister is a mistake. The playful disassembling of Western philosophy that Nietzsche indulged in had real consequences in the actions of those who studied his works.
He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us understood his lessons, we would be less susceptible to being manipulated and used for evil. I think he was so far ahead of his time that he's even ahead of us in the present. Have we gone beyond good and evil yet? Have we learned how weak those concepts make us? How easily they permit us to be controlled? Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad." How could such a modern people be so ignorant of the forces that shape their lives, even when we have such great teachers?
I disagree. Sure, power rules the world, everyone knows it and knew it before Nietzsche, "good" and "bad" are the results of the choice of people to tune up or down their desire for individualistic power over other's people good. I fail to see how Nietzsche is innovative on our understanding of this, I mean that's even the core teaching of christian philosophy.
What's original in Nietszche thought is not that power rules the world and that people are longing for it, it is the challenge of the western and christian values that power and individualism is "bad".
It wasn't that he just talked about power ruling the world, that wasn't his main thing, he critiqued what people use it for and what the ultimate aim of it should be. He deepened our understanding of what power IS. For Nietzsche, most people possess a fake type of power, they simply use it to maintain "wretched complacency." I think the ultimate conclusion he made was that the most noble goal we can have is to overcome ourselves, and when power is used for that purpose, it is great. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge, not an end." If you are satisfied with complacency, with pleasure seeking modern society, you will hate him.
Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real "delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to escape.
Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.
As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that anyone else read something else into him.
Now consider quotes like these:
"The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men."
"Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative."
"I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all!"
"Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?"
Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both can be and have been used to justify atrocities.
I mean, he was a poetic philosopher. Do you read poetry literally? Also, you can't just pluck quotes out of their context. Notice how he talks about pain, but doesn't say things like "you should kill the weak." Inflicting pain in order to improve things is a necessity. Ever heard things like "pain is weakness leaving the body?" That's how he meant it.
I'd like to remind you that even Jesus has been used to justify atrocities. It's not the words of men that justify things, it's the authority others give them and those who distort their words for their own purposes. Don't blame the messengers, blame yourself, blame us, blame our weaknesses for falling for the same thing over and over again.
In other words, "Anyone who reads something into him that I don't like, doesn't understand him properly."
Which is a well-known logical fallacy. Look up, "No true Scotsman."
Back in the real world, people who read him, thought they understood him, and didn't agree with your interpretation, proceeded to literally kill people by the millions. Justifying it by what they understood him to be saying.
I have no particular reason to trust your interpretation over theirs. And when it comes to my best judgment, I find him wrong again and again. So I don't really care which interpretation I'd find more palatable.
My good fellow, I am merely suggesting that if you wish to critique his work, you should study it yourself -- which would be almost impossible now because you will just look for excuses to mold these works to your expectations of them. If you had told me you read his work and rejected it, then this would be a different discussion. We'd have to get into our conflicting interpretations. Right now, however, it just seems like you are dismissing him because the actions and critiques of others. Also, I don't really think this is an issue of "wrong" or "right." A philosophy of life is more in the domain of art than logic or the sciences. Is a painting wrong? Upon what ground do you critique a painting from? How one judges a philosophy of life is more a matter of the aesthetics of the vision than the correctness of it. I know you mean "wrong" in the sense that it disagrees with your view of life, but this obscures the fact that we are talking about aesthetics, not logical conclusions.
Being hard to understand is not a virtue, and maybe it's overthinking to claim that someone saying "The great majority of men have no right to existence" somehow means something other than what that sentence quite plainly implies.
So far, I haven't seen a clear exposition of what Nietzschd meant by these phrases, if not the obvious thing. The guy quite clearly had an obsession with concepts of "great men".
People have thought that some people are more fundamentally valuable than others in some moral is-ought sense for most of existence, there's nothing new or enigmatic about it and most reasonable people are done with it.
You don't understand his philosophy of life, so of course these statements seem peculiar (i.e. why he placed such a value on greatness). With a great age of complacency coming upon us, I think you'll witness first hand what happens when weak people rule and excellence is abandoned for equality.
Excellence is often used as by the vicious to hide their atrocities. Power is not simply the application of power, it's about knowing when to apply the appropriate power. Equality of opportunity is not weakness. Equality of outcome is not guaranteed. The finest line is that those with the power are expected to be responsible for those who have yet to achieve that power. Naked selfishness is weakness as much as naked reliance. He himself created a teacher in Zarathustra and shared his writings with the world. I think you've misunderstood a great deal of what he wrote.
Who, then, understands his philosophy of life? I've tried looking up various interpretations and they all seem to range from "gross" to "really gross", and are just rehashings of might makes right, which is the least imaginative and most ancient philosophy in existence.
Please point me to the correct interpretation of Nietzsche, because I'm apparently failing to find it.
Or maybe we all who are not fans of him understand what it seemed Nietzsche wanted to get at just fine and are not interested in sugar coating the consequences of such belief sets.
> I think you'll witness first hand what happens when weak people rule and excellence is abandoned for equality.
Question: do you consider Stalin a weak or a strong person in this context?
I honestly don't agree with the premise that you can just read someone's recap to understand him. He wasn't that type of philosopher. It's just like reading someone's interpretation of a poem -- you will get that person's perspective, not necessarily that of the author. I know this makes western minds ill, in the west we believe truth can be separated from the mind and put on a page, available for everyone to understand by merely downloading it. Some things you can only understand by experience -- something eastern philosophers are more open to. So Nietzsche is the correct interpretation of Nietzsche. Why would we ever believe a philosophy of life would be a logical argument anyway? Isn't purpose and perspective more in the realm of the arts? Again, I know this is highly unsatisfactory to sons of the west and moderns completely submerged in political correctness.
I don't consider people that terrorize others to be strong, that's what weak people do.
When reading Nietzche the next sentence was never hard to predict or digest. I didn't have to reread paragraphs out of confusion but simply because I marveled at how beautiful and clear it was expressed. I'm dyslexic and have ADD and have always thought in more abstract terms--more parallel than serial. Maybe that had something to do with it.
Long-standing decline in violence? What about world wars? Communist mass enslavements and murders? Genocidies which count their victims in millions? I’m no historian so I don’t have the data to do an informed comparison, but the 20th century certainly seems like a horror show to me.
If your moniker is anything to go by, you are Swedish, and should be able to read Kierkegaard in the original Danish.
You proabaly ought to if you believe him a dullard. He's funny alright, at times bordering on laugh out loud, but it possibly does take some localised context to quite get it.
His content is vapid nonsense, of course, but that's a different matter.
“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” - K
you've got no sense of humor if you think kierkegaard is a dullard. either/or is basically one long stand-up special, especially the bit about the trophonean cave
Failure in loving, failure in living from everyone's favourite pre-quantum either/or philosopher of the 0/1 binary. Let's give it up for Søren Kierkegaard!
Well I had a hard time finding those parts, but maybe I was too young when I read him in my late teens / early 20s. He seemed more dolorous than most to me at the time. Perhaps he's worth revisiting.
Can you explain how he's evil? Simply associating him with Nazism and then condemning him as evil is rather unenlightening and cliche. Zionists also liked Nietzche, my mother likes Nietzsche, &c. Are these people evil?
It has been at least twenty years since I read anything by him, so my cliche statement is based on the conclusions I came to over time (I had another period of reading him about 35 years ago) and the judgments I made about those conclusions.
I'm frankly unwilling to reread him at this stage of my life, so I don't have any details for you, but my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him, rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do), and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil.
Others here have said that violence has declined, which is ridiculous in light of the many genocides perpetrated over the last century. The two atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII likely killed more people in a couple of days than most despots did in a lifetime. And those barely register on the timeline of mass killings in the 20th century.
> my strong overall impression was that he essentially despised all that went before him,
He didn't think well of the state of European philosophy, but "despised all that went before him"? Not at all. He didn't think very highly of his contemporaries working in European philosophy (and politics), but was deeply embedded in classical philology.
> rejected Western values of good and evil (obviously, and as some here do)
That's a broad brush. To use a slightly narrower brush, he starts from the (by no means unique!) position that no God is the source of morality in the world.
> and left the reader with nothing beyond the essence of an Aleister Crowley "do what thou wilt" disregard for the idea of objective good and evil.
Sigh. At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical project are attempts to re-ground morality on something other than the crumbling foundations of 'Western values.' He gave you a dozen books with which you can think along with him and try to solve that problem.
If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.
> At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical project are attempts to re-ground morality on something other than the crumbling foundations of 'Western values.'
And in the process of doing so, he did a really good job of destroying what was left of traditional western values. The problem was, he didn't build anything adequate in their place. That doesn't necessarily make him evil. But it left the road wide open for those who were evil to use his destruction of values as their rationale for not having any (or rather, for having an evil set of values, and actions to match).
> If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.
It can be. He's not known for clarity. That's on him.
You can find a similar case against Nietzsche near the end of Enlightenment Now.
The key point being that Nietzsche believed that superior people should rule over inferior people, and should achieve that rule through violence and war. Which are uplifting activities for those who engage in it. And once it is established who is superior, what is done to the inferior doesn't matter.
This was an inspiration to the Nazis who, of course, decided that Germans were superior, should establish this through war, and inferior people should be killed or enslaved as the Germans saw fit.
That book contains so many outright falsehoods and misrepresentations that it belongs in a garbage bin. Even the guardian [1] thrashed it not to mention titans like John Gray [2].
It doesn't surprise me to learn that Pinker also manages to misrepresent and malign Nietzsche.
One of my professors gave a very learned exposition of Nietzsche as the philosophical forbear of Nazism. It was pretty convincing, frankly, and I still think of Nietzsche as fundamentally evil. Funny, but evil. The exposition took days of his lecture time, so I won't try to recreate it here, but lightly dismissing that charge by laying it all at the feet of his sister is a mistake. The playful disassembling of Western philosophy that Nietzsche indulged in had real consequences in the actions of those who studied his works.