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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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