The Twilight of Nietzsche

Something to keep in mind with Nietzsche is that he made enemies out of both Christianity and egalitarian ideology. A lot of the criticisms of him come from these two crowds, and a lot of it is an ad hominem attack on his character

Why do these folks dislike him so much? Because no one saw their flaws and latched onto them as viciously as he did

It's one thing to point out his own fragility and the obvious contrast with his writing, but he never intended to wholly embody the ideals that he wrote about. His goal was to pave the way for others to free themselves from the sickness of the sad passions that these belief sets so eagerly try to cultivate. A sickness from which he himself was not immune

I don’t understand his underlying premise. Life doesn’t need meaning, just existence is blissful. In fact meaning is this context is meaningless.

“What is the meaning of life?” is a nonsensical question/sentence.

> He devised [eternal recurrence] in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket.

That doesn't sound comforting to me. Wow my life sucks right now but at least I'll be able to relive it exactly as it is again-and-again forever.

The interesting thing about Nietzsche's eternal return of the same is that he must have known that there is no choice if loving, hating and thinking itself is part of the return. The moment you decide will have have been over and over again and will be over and over again and your decision will always be the same. But without a choice, there is no heroic stoicism. It's philosophical predestination doctrine without God.

Why Nietzche's ideas can be so dangerous without the aid of proper context and perspective. They are very seductive to a certain type of young man. But the reality of human fallibility leads to terminal ressentiment in the end for anyone fixed in that philosophy. It is a total dead end.

>To regard Nietzsche as a self-help author, writing primarily for himself, helps to put his least convincing idea – eternal recurrence – into perspective. This is the idea that we will live our lives again and again, ad infinitum. For an anti-metaphysician who suggested that we can strive to be higher, better beings, this fatalistic notion of eternal recurrence seems jarring. He devised it in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket. It could be put more prosaically thus: shit happens.

This is actually a terrible take and you should not listen to this person at all.

Nietzsche's thoughts on Eternal Return is, at a theoretical level, an attempt to reconcile an ethical framework that is completely atheistic and non-idealist (non-idealistic, so not tied to any notions of the "end of history" or "right side of history", notions of providence generally), with the understanding of physics modern to his time.

The Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell Pearson is one of the foremost researchers around Nietzsche's grounding of his philosophy in the physics and biology of the 19th century, which was a tumultuous period, and you can read Nietzsche himself attempt to elaborate Eternal Return more concretely in one his fragments, the Time Atom Theory fragment[0].

The idea that the universe is a kind of infinite loop with no begin or end, which therefore defies human narration since we very uncomfortable with a thing that has no origin, is even entertained by serious contemporary physicists such as Brian Cox. Nietzsche simply thinks this must be the foundation for an ethics that is resilient to idealism and theism, and therefore, necessarily _tragic_; his first book was an attempt to retrieve a sense of tragedy from Greek literature that had been overruled and trampled upon by the last 1800 years of Christian asceticism in the West (though the asceticism of Christianity isn't exclusive to the West as he points out).

It is against the backdrop of Eternal Return that Nietzsche wants to develop his idea of "double affirmation" as found in _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_: that I not only accept contingency in the outcomes of my actions and external events ("shit happens") , but _desire_ it too and without resentment and sadness but love (hence: Amor Fati).

This is why Good and Evil are to be surpassed and disastrous axioms to base real ethics on: not only because, for Nietzsche they presume a normalized psychology, but because both fascism and its opposite are both refusals of the essential role of contingency and for that reason breed their own antagonist; only understanding the tragic can get us on the way to a path beyond Good and Evil, and Eternal Return and Double Affirmation are his contributions to furthering that journey.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is also aware of the thematic adjacency of his work on non-fragility with Nietzsche's ideas. That's more the direction Nietzsche would have had in mind.

I'm condensing and simplifying _a lot_ of stuff, there is an entire scholarship dedicated to researching his ideas as he understood them, but reducing all of that down to "his life sucked and so he needed tell himself 'shit happens'" is an outright assassination attempt meant to terminate thinking.

Edit: As an aside, there is this strong tendency from liberal/progressive writers to neutralize, if not dismiss, the notion of the "Death of the Author". This value of this neutralization is to be able to neutralize the value of a person's ideas because of their biography. The point of "Death of the Author" is that the human relationship to its own symbolic practices is not a proprietary one, at least not exhaustively proprietary; in some ways, it is the human being being inscribed upon rather than the human being inscribing 'their ideas' (this is something Michel Foucault spent a lot of time and effort elaborating). Early 20th century fascism was not founded by some specific origin, but was the outcome of a miasma of anonymous forces and specific consequences. The game of 'telephone' is a sort of concrete example of what is meant by this non-ownership.

[0]https://www.jstor.org/stable/20717742

As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.