The Invigorating Strangeness of Friedrich Nietzsche | Hacker News Reader

The Invigorating Strangeness of Friedrich Nietzsche

prospectmagazine.co.uk

137 pointsapollinaire111 comments

Reading Nietzsche is like breathing in cold mountain air. Some people can handle the cold, others can't. He's not for everyone, as he makes it intentionally clear.

He was a stark individualist that put into question a lot of the building blocks of liberal democracy, such as the notion that all men are equal. I don't agree with all of what he puts forth but he is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and influential thinkers of the 19th century and still relevant to read even today.

If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

He was a stark individualist

Nietzsche is by no means an individualist. He had no interest in any current of thought talking of "individualism". Moreover, while he was no doubt interested in certain individuals, he made it clear that the individuals he was interested were the product of entire cultures - the most refined possible people.

Nietzsche also essentially produced a position that was impossible to realize. Indeed, no one can practically agree with Nietzsche on everything. He wanted an elite but wanted that elite to be aesthetic and removed from ugly character of politics as usual. He hated antisemites and militarists yet these were the most common type to take up his name.

Still, I'd certainly agree Nietzsche is interesting and worth reading.

Edit: Also important is the way Nietzsche refuted the certainties of philosophy yet did not consider himself a philosopher. He called himself a "psychologist" early on and his discussion of philosophy was often "what character would cause a person to believe such a thing".

Nietzsche is by no means an individualist. He had no interest in any current of thought talking of "individualism".

He was an individualist and he wasn't interested in any current of thought, talking of individualism or not.

Nietzsche was extremely interested in the entire cannon of Western philosophy. He analysis of Socrates as a "decadent type" is crucial to his positions. All of Nietzsche's work was a debate around the ongoing questions of the philosophy, art, religion and so-forth of both Western and world civilizations (he was interested Buddhism for example - calling decadent but still appreciating it more than Christianity).

But the tendencies calling themselves "individualist" like Stirner, say, evoked only contempt in him (and basically little mention).

I mean that he was an individualist as a person, not that he had some individualism theory. Actually he said that he hadn't a methodology. He considered methods a lack of honesty (or something like that). Calling himself a psycologist instead of philosopher is part of that.

I don't think he had any preference for political systems, except, like you said, as a way to create interesting individuals.

Nietzsche was (arguably) a strong individual who formulated his positions without being beholden to any previous approach but he certainly form in his positions in the context of previous approaches (and had contempt for those who claimed to create ideas out of thin air - see his comments on British Empiricists).

Indeed, Nietzsche didn't even "believe in thinking for yourself" in the sense that he didn't think that random people should necessarily be encourage to do so.

While I, as I've said, I think no one can really embrace all of Nietzsche, I'm fond enough of some of him to want to point out how he denounced all those types that would love to evoke his name - the precursors of the NAZIs, anarchists and all philosophies glorifying "the individual" and so-forth. Not the Nietzsche would have embrace my own ideas but then again, I don't carry his "banner".

and had contempt for those who claimed to create ideas out of thin air - see his comments on British Empiricists

Do you remember where those comments are? Never heard of them.

While I, as I've said, I think no one can really embrace all of Nietzsche

Indeed. He seems more of a critic than a creator, still he had many original ideas, maybe because he didn't feel the need to create a coherent system, that would have forced him to discard some.

he denounced all those types that would love to evoke his name - the precursors of the NAZIs, anarchists and all philosophies glorifying "the individual" and so-forth

Were they sincerely individualists? First image that comes to mind when mentioning nazis is a bunch of uniformed people marching in perfect formation.

Regarding Nietzsche and the Empiricists, Reddit refreshed my memory of readings from times past:

"They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of “philosophy” for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant arose, and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understandably, “je méprise Locke” [I despise Locke]; in their fight against the English-mechanistic doltification of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (with Goethe)—these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only brothers wrong each other."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comments/a7btg5/nietzsche...

He argues against empiricism in the genealogy of morals, beyond good and evil, and some of what he wrote on history.

He does so because they fail to understand that language is something historical that is fought over and changes over time. Thus his aphorism that 'only that which has no history can be defined.'

Yes sorry when I say individualist, I didn't mean in the philosophical sense but more referring to a person who is independent and self-reliant (something that he advocates others become as well with the whole self-overcoming)

Nietzsche formed his ideas independently. "Self-reliant" is relative - he spent most of his life disabled, living on a pension in Italy.

Moreover, I don't think Nietzsche advocated that everyone think independently. Following the "order of rank" logic, he might advocate that those of a higher order think for themselves (but even he's concerned with what is healthy for the individual, not what opens the person's mind the most). He'd not want free thinking for those of a lower order of rank (something that indeed doesn't paint ole Fred in the best light).

"He'd not want free thinking for those of a lower order of rank "

Do you recall where he wrote that? I only read Zarathustra and I do not recall those thoughts in there.

"Outsider" might be closer.

Psychologist? Do you mean philologist?

'Psychologist' would be correct. There's a revisionist debate as to whether Nietzsche was a naturalist, i.e. whether he thought that the only valid knowledge was knowledge conforming to (weaker) or corroborated by (stronger) the natural scientific method. Many of Nietzsche's arguments are psychological in character, e.g. the role of resentment and guilt in the genealogy of morals. Others think that this is either overstated, or tracks only one (early) period of Nietzsche's writings.

Can you provide a source to where he references himself as a psychologist?

Preface to the Genealogy of Morals.

Though the interpretation doesn't hang on Nietzsche explicitly adopting the label 'psychologist', but in the substance of his philosophy.

No, psychologist. In that we cared for the internal psychological motives to explain people's actions (e.g. guilt, envy, etc), as opposed to some general idealistic principles.

Can you provide a source to where he references himself as a psychologist?

>Can you provide a source to where he references himself as a psychologist?

I can and I will, but why is a source needed?

This is a pretty well studied aspect of Nietzsche (lots of books, papers, critique of later philosophers on the matter etc), and it's evidently true even in parts of his works where he doesn't openly talk about psychology (ie. you don't need to openly name a thing to practice it).

If people have read Nietzsche, they would have witnessed his affinity for psychological examination of philosophy, morality etc. If they haven't, I don't see why would they need a pointer to such a source. What use would that be if they have not read the rest of Nietzsche?

I'm saying this because to me the request sounds like either "I know Nietzsche and don't believe you, where's the proof?", or "I couldn't be bothered to read Nietzsche, but don't believe you anyway, where's the proof", both of which I find problematic (the first because I don't believe someone can read Nietzsche and miss this aspect, and the second because it's a little lazy and insulting).

For me such a request would make sense if it was for a controversial and not well known aspect of someone's philosophy. E.g. "Where does Marx say socialism is possible in a non-industrialized country". But not something well known, like "Where does Marx say he is in favor of workers over capitalists?". If someone doesn't know the latter already, then a reference seems moot. They can just read a 101 on the subject.

In any case, here are some references from "Beyond Good and Evil" and "Ecce Homo":

"Never yet did a PROFOUNDER world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus "makes a sacrifice"—it is not the sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the contrary!—will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and equipment the other sciences exist. For psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems".

"In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust"

"Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays—and, if I gather rightly, no other religion is any longer preached—let the psychologist have his ears open through all the vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of SELF-CONTEMPT."

And in case in these it's not clear that he speaks of what he does and himself, because he frequently does so in the third person, even though the overal book and context makes it evident, here are some more:

"What man, before my time, had descended into the underground caverns from out of which the poisonous fumes of this ideal—of this slandering of the world—burst forth? What man had even dared to suppose that they were underground caverns? Was a single one of the philosophers who preceded me a psychologist at all, and not the very reverse of a psychologist—that is to say, a "superior swindler," an "Idealist"? Before my time there was no psychology. To be the first in this new realm may amount to a curse; at all events, it is a fatality: for one is also the first to despise".

Or how about a boast of being the biggest psychologist:

"The fact that the voice which speaks in my works is that of a psychologist who has not his peer, is perhaps the first conclusion at which a good reader will arrive".

That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings – this is perhaps the first insight gained by a good reader.” (Ecce Homo 3.5)

“Who among the philosophers before me was in any way a psychologist? Before me there simply was no psychology” (Ecce Homo page 93)

Cold mountain air, yes. Or, as he himself put it:

  Ice
  
  Yes! I manufacture ice:
  Ice may help you to digest.
  If you had much to digest,
  how you would enjoy my ice!

Nietzche's poetry is an underappreciated component of his philosophy.

>If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

What edition should I read? So I stayed true to the early thinkers that interpreted him (to not be fooled by thinkers like Steven Pinker who trash him).

Off topic: for a moment I considered learning German just to really understand this man.

I think Nietzsche is one of the writers where it really makes sense to read the German original side by side with your translation. He's a master with words, which you can appreciate a lot more if you understand his play with words. It's like watching the dubbed German version of a Netflix series, if you saw the original you cannot go back anymore.

The original source is always best. That said, I've read Hollingdale's translations since I don't know German. Amazon has a wide selection of translations so I'd start there to see which is the highest rated one.

> I don't agree with all of what he puts forth but he is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and influential thinkers of the 19th century and still relevant to read even today.

Considering a philosophical model a logically interconnected and consistent system of assumptions, rejecting some of the assumptions/propositions can be an indication that the entire model is to be rejected even if other assumptions seem acceptable.

He doesn't propose a philosophical model. He's more of a destroyer than a system builder, and explores a wide range of ideas (My favorite being eternal recurrence, beyond good/evil, overcoming oneself and creating meaning in a world where God is dead)

A philosophical model is not necessarily "a logically interconnected and consistent system of assumptions".

Even math couldn't be that, despite the efforts of Hilbert, Russel, and co.

In the case of Nietzsche in particular, he scoffs at philosophers pretending theirs to be one.

He offers observations, and individual ones, jumping from one to another, and doesn't pretend to offer a model.

But even for those philosophers that do think their work is a "logically interconnected and consistent system", you can still have perfectly good (or, perfectly useful) parts of their overall system, while others might be wrong.

It's hard not to see Nietzche's "slave morality" in today's successful backlash against "toxic masculinity" and the "white man".

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Seems to me the OP is claiming that people who attack white men are weak willed and only seek to subvert the strong willed white man. Not sure how else one would read that as only white men are strong willed and think like masters and everyone else is a weak willed slave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality

That is not a rare opinion on HN.

>people who attack white men are weak willed and only seek to subvert the strong willed white man

Well, the "people who attack white men" are usually other white men and women.

Minorities seldom play any role in this game, except as objects of pity and protection for the white people who promote guilt and signal their woke status. When minorities do play a role, they are more often than not, the unrepresentative privileged elites of those minorities (e.g. highly paid journalists, actors, and so on) and not the person on the street.

What a fantastic misrepresentation of my comment and it shows very little understanding of Nietzche. Maybe try reading his work rather than relying on Wikipedia and throwing up a straw man argument. Ironically your response is exactly what Nietzche would have predicted.

I believe that I know what he means.

Nietzsche compared the ethics of classical cultures (Greece, Rome) with Christianism that he called a slave morality, because in its first times it was adopted mostly by slaves.

The former admired strength, bravery and power. The later, summarized in the Beatitudes, was a subversion of those values. Nietzsche believed that Christianism weakened Rome and more or less caused its downfall in favour of barbarian invaders that had a morality more similar to the people that built the empire.

There are indeed many points in common with current situation. Despite their christian roots, current western nations, specially the USA, are based on capitalism, that values competition, strength, bravery, money, knowledge, power... much like classic Rome.

Then there are a number of social movements that attack powerful elites subverting all those values. Do all these movements necessarily weaken western civilization? I don't think so, but I'd say he has a point.

The struggle between slave/master morality is an infinite game. Any single one in excess is hazardous to the health of a society.

A world that is populated and led by the Last Man, who is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security is not a world I want to live in.

People could do worse than considering todays grievance politics in the light of Neitszche’s ideas about ressentiment.

Reading Nietzsche definitely changed how I think about the politics of guilt. But it would be unhelpful to apply Nietzsche's psychological narrative to real history.

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Ecce Homo

Fairly prophetic that. He (and his anti semitic sister) were kind of popular with the Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Fri...

Some read this quote as a harbinger of WW2. I think it fits the current zeitgeist much better and is part of what Nietzsche called the age of the last man: The destruction of religion and the complete lack of meaning in modern western societies, leading to consumerism, surrogate activities and finally nihilism [1]. Before the cyberpunk dystopias described by William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, before Aldous Huxley, before George Orwell, there was Nietzsche.

A true genius and like Schopenhauer before him, a powerful initiator in the human condition.

[1] https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/nietzsches-...

In what sense did other societies have meaning, that modern societies lack?

They believed in meaning, we don't.

(please, take that in the spirit of "a little imprecision saves tons of explanation")

he certainty of religion as an anchor for all other meaning

Modern society (unintentional influenced Ted Kaczynski anarchism incoming) makes us have less delayed gratification, makes us industrialized (buying as dealing with the symptoms of existential dread[1]).

[1] for example we have outsourced death: killing for food, putting our relatives in graves and etcetera. This alienates us from death and gives us death anxiety when we come to this realization. And death anxiety can give us the symptoms of depression. This also makes us more guilty on how we spend this one last chance of being alive that makes us even more depressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

There's a lot to this, multiple people have come to this idea from different angles.

Consider the baker. In times gone, he'd get his flour from the miller, he'd bake his bread in the early morning, and sell to his customers throughout the day. He would feel an important part of the community; without him, the miller would be poorer and the community would have less bread. His direct interactions with his supplier and customers would provide psychological sustenance, making him feel useful, and giving his life meaning.

Consider the (non-artisnal) baker today. He gets up early and goes into the factory where he schleps packaged inputs from the loading bay to the mixing tanks, twiddles knobs, observes and fixes things that break down in the automated sequence. And then he goes home. He doesn't meet his supplier - at best, he'll exchange a few grunts with a truck driver - and he certainly doesn't meet his customers. He might chat with his co-workers, but fundamentally he's a replaceable cog, and nobody outside the factory would notice if he was replaced. His community doesn't value him, just the product. He's a nobody.

"a crisis without equal on earth" fits quite well with WW2. The present Trump/Brexit stuff is more of a dumb farce.

The deal is that after he died, his sister compiled his unfinished work in a way to be coherent with Nazism, then sold it into the movement.

Not just his un-finished work, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche is said to have systematically falsified Nietzche's works.

[1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/70...

For sure, and really, all that was made inevitable after Will to Power. The biased editing provided the conceptual anchoring, then everything else got shaded by it, even before re-editing.

For those into Nietzsche, it’s worth reading The Ego and its Own by Max Stirner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own

I just wanted to second this. It's astounding that there continues to be a large dispute over the influence of Stirner on Nietzsche.

I personally like Nietzsche's ideas but really don't enjoy his style of writing. Stirner on the other hand touches on many of the same ideas that Nietzsche would later, but is both an easier and genuinely hilarious read. The Ego and its Own is an absolutely brilliant book, that should have at least the level of popularity that some of Nietzsche's works have.

I'm excited to read this - I similarly found Nietzsche somewhat excessively cryptic. Thanks for the recommendation.

Interesting recommendation. Looking forward to checking this out. I usually hear Schopenhauer or Zapffe as a similar recommendation.

You can read everything of Zapffe's that's ever been translated into English tonight[1]! If you want more pure pessimism you shouldn't leave out Ligotti's "Conspiracy Against the Human Race", which also cover's Zapffe a bit. Ligotti is not a traditional philosopher but he makes some great observations about the relative rarity of true pessimism in Western philosophy.

It's worth noting that Nietzsche's real work was to find a solution to the inevitable pessimism and nihilism that he feared would inevitably threaten Western culture. Schopenhauer and Zapffe go straight off into pessimistic view of human existence (Schopenhauer deriving some humanistic "we're all in this together" ethics at moments and Zapffe saying we should stop breeding and let the flame burn out). Nietzsche still ultimately rejects nihilism.

[1] https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah

Nietzsche is probably the most overrated philosopher who ever lived. He was a manic who instead of learning from the world withdrew into a fantasy version built from well-phrased sound bites (or "aphorisms" - which sounds nicer). His ideas primarily serve the purpose of confirming elitist and Darwinian perspectives predominantly popular among people who hold a grudge against society because they didn't get a large enough chunk from the big cake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Andreas-Salom%C3%A9

I wonder if there ever have been prolific male philosophers that had a fully satisfying sexual and romantic life ..

I wonder if there ever have been any men, that had a fully satisfying sexual and romantic life...

Touché! But consider, there is a whole lot of room between 0.0 and 1.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jadvt7CbH1o

Are we not men? /g

Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard all died unmarried and childless

Aristotle, ever practical, however tied the knot on the Isle of Lesbos.

[left something for you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597916]

I think that may be only partially fair: some people appreciate his writings because they question things which, at the time, (and possibly still now) would have been considered “true” or unquestionable (particularly stuff on moral). One may not like it but I think can still benefit from asking similar questions (while ignoring the answers which are, anyway, often somewhat cryptic). I personally enjoyed Thus spake Zarathustra for that reason, not so much the cake one.

That's an unfair characterization, and ignores the profound impact he's had on other intellectual giants such as Carl Jung, Herman Hesse and many others.

It seems like you're bone to pick with him is largely his elitist tone, which yes that's the whole point of his writing. He does not write for the masses, but for those striving to break out of herd mentality. To write him off as an elitist manic is to ignore who he was writing for and why.

> Nietzsche is probably the most overrated philosopher who ever lived.

But also an underrated poet.

Isn't this all common knowledge? I don't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time. I certainly didn't learn anything new and I have only a cursory familiarity with Nietzsche and his works. This review(?) doesn't even mention some of the more interesting aspects of his life, and the snide comment about Zarathustra was just... strange. I'm sure the biography is great, this review doesn't sell it very well at all.

I don't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time.

He was hated by all my high school teachers, both the communists and the religion teacher. I bet that he will be called a nazi while there are communists and christians.

I think what they hated most about him is that he likened both groups.

Indeed. Nietzsche provided powerful arguments to explain the origin of religion (particularly Christianity) and even attempted to write his own Bible-style text with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His explanations include brilliant insights on human psychology, and do a pretty good number on faith. I can understand why the religion teacher didn't like him :-)

>I think what they hated most about him is that he likened both groups

Or they read things influenced by early releases of his work, where his antisemitic German nationalist sister took significant liberties in the editing process.

> I don't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time.

A recent example would be Steven Pinker:

"It’s easy to see why his sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-right and neo-Nazi movements today."

https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/08/why-nietzsche-has-once-...

While Nietzsche wasn't actually a Nazi as he died 20 years before the party was formed he did have some handy quotes that proved popular with them eg.

"Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior, anything else is folly"

That may be the point of view of one of his characters rather than his personal belief but I'm not sure his Nazi follower types were that careful in their literary analysis.

Same with the modern alt-right see eg "The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too." https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-r...

That Nietzsche’s public life ended with him sobbing in empathy for a horse who he saw whipped always felt to me to nullify all his previous philosophical argument.

In other words; His worldview builds until it breaks through recognition of the Other.

It's interesting that this is a scene from Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment. I always wondered if it's a bizarre coincidence or some sort of influence went into the novel, or reports about Nietzche's life.

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?

Just look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others are the "bad."

Does this change if we instead consider ourselves "powerful" and "weak"?

"Good" and "evil" placate the mind, they encourage us to think less about the nuances of issues, they are traps.

I agree there.

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.

Cherry-picking sentences out of a famously enigmatic writer is a disservice to both his thought and your own.

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.

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.

Example: https://rafal.io/posts/nietzsche-slave-morality.html

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.

A serious reader of Nietzsche should, at a minimum, read Kaufmann's foundational book.

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10109.html

If you want a single source for a "correct interpretation" (a term that's hard to take seriously), read that book.

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.

Some people have trouble understanding. Some don't. I always felt he was the clearest philosopher of them all.

Right?! It makes me feel weird that people always say he's cryptic.

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.

I had the same experience and I have dyslexia as well. Hmm. It was because the musical rhythm he wrote with I think.

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.

So if he wasn’t born, would those people still kill?

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-...

[2] https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlight...

I used to see Pinker’s name and ideas around and thought he had something interesting to say, so I picked up this book.

What a complete waste of time. It feels like his knowledge of intellectual history comes from skimming Wikipedia articles.

Kierkegaard is pretty hilarious too tbqh

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.

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.

>kierkegaard isnt funny

“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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaXigSu72A4

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