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Comment by alexophile | Hacker News Reader

I like that comparison, he is kind of the troll of philosophical history. The interesting thing about Nietzsche, though (esepecially in Geneaology) is that he takes on so many different voices to address different existing philosophies such that you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-semitic (In fact, IIRC he seemed to dig the old testament Jews' style) or anti-christianity.

The difference between his adolescent jabs at Christianity, Judaism, the English, etc. and an ironic motivational poster is that he had a sort of overarching point to make. Among other things, he wanted to demonstrate that existing philosophy was essentially a really deep catalog of the personal biases of a bunch of well-spoken white dudes.

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you can't really say (although many have) that he's anti-christianity

He wrote a book called The Anti-Christian. What else can you say?

He wrote criticisms of just about every major western belief system - if you take into account his larger body of work, saying he was anti-this or anti-that just seems disingenuous. Much of what he wrote was criticism for its own sake because that's what leads to progress.

He wanted his critiques to hit hard; he wanted to be subversive. My reading, at least, is that he wanted to teach people to be critical of highly-regarded cultural norms and morals and his writings are essentially case-studies in exactly that.

He thought Judaism and Christianity kept the ubermensch down with their weakness (ironically). That's pretty clear.

He indeed had wide-ranging perspective but I think the one thing you can say is he was anti-Christian.

He even said a few good things about Christ but anything positive was along the lines that the Christians got him wrong.

>adolescent

Pointing out the hypocrisy and self-consuming nature of the greater moral system underlying western religion is scarcely adolescent and even in his day that took a good deal of courage to speak out like that.

He was provocative, but not for its own sake.

Adolescents are often courageous, but also sophomoric. I think the latter is what the poster referred to.

I wasn't trying to reduce his criticisms to adolescent jabs - I have great respect for his analysis. But he occasionally gets a little carried away and takes an unnecessary pot shot. They're symptomatic of his sort of unique brand of narcissism and, were he any less of an intellectual force, probably would have been edited out of the final versions.

You're right, but I think he's allowed the indulgence considering the kind of "peers" he had to deal with usually.

Besides that, the man just isn't given enough credit these days.

I don't really agree. He was provocative for its own sake and there's nothing wrong with being provocative for its own sake.

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