It does seem that Nietzsche's idea of consciousness was about greater depth of knowledge and awareness, rather than about being governed by instincts and emotions blindly. His ideas came before the development of psychoanalysis, but, like Freud, a central aspect of his approach to life seems similar to Freud with an emphasis on the will to live as a driving force.

Do you know if Nietzsche actually looked at the God question? That is because from the reading which I have done, it doesn't seem particularly clear what he thought. However, theism and atheism were probably framed in a different way at the time because asking about the existence of God was less common place.

I agree even at the dots.

Do you know if Nietzsche actually looked at the God question? That is because from the reading which I have done, it doesn't seem particularly clear what he thought. — Jack Cummins

He's a pioneering anti-foundationalist - the question of god/s or not has no intrinsic meaning/value, it is but one of infinite possible perspectives (with no objective reality), which people hold in whatever value systems they adhere to. And by the way, I'm fairly sure FN would also have hated the current pop-atheists for their ostentatious foundational positioning of atheism and concomitant secularism and enlightenment values.


I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers — at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! (Ecce Homo 'Why I Am So Clever' §1)

"God", "immortality of the soul", "redemption", "beyond" -- Without exception, concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?

I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers - at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think! — Ecce Homo

In other words, Freddy's gedankenexperiment 'predicts' that the übermensch is born ("bred") to pass the existential (or meta-psychological) test[ of "the eternal recurrence of the same" as proposed in The Gay Science (§341) – — 180 Proof

Re: Freddy's "existential (or meta-psychological)" challenge ... which he suggests (later in TSZ) only 'Übermenchen' can/will endure:

"The greatest weight -- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you [ ... ] Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?" — The Gay Science (§341)

I think the question "if Nietzsche was atheist?" is same as asking if Sky is blue. If Nietzsche wasn't atheist then no one was/is.

In other words, Freddy's gedankenexperiment 'predicts' that the übermensch is born ("bred") to pass the existential (or meta-psychological) test[ of "the eternal recurrence of the same" as proposed in The Gay Science (§341) — 180 Proof

Nice.

Thanks for the quotes from 'Ecce Homo'. I thought that he had probably suggested his thoughts on the issue of existence of God somewhere in his writings.

My impression from FN calling eternal recurrence a doctrine is that he meant it to be an antidote to the idea of an eternal life that turns our time in this cosmos into a waiting room for death. In that context, it is sharply against seeing one's existence as a cycle through generations. Whatever we can give to future generations is only possible through what we give to ourselves as ourselves.

The waiting room for death is more nihilistic than the death of God as the judge of good and evil.

My impression from FN calling eternal recurrence a doctrine is that he meant it to be an antidote to the idea of an eternal life that turns our time in this cosmos into a waiting room for death. — Paine

:up:

This fits in well with the motif of going up and down, ascent and descent, higher and lower. Rather than the movement from this world to the eternal heavenly afterword, the circular movement may be seen from one perspective as moving up but from another as moving down. There is no final resting point.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.

I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. — Zarathustra Prologue

. Rather than the movement from this world to the eternal heavenly afterword, the circular movement may be seen from one perspective as moving up but from another as moving down. There is no final resting point. — Fooloso4

And neither is there any repetition of the past. In this sense the eternal return of the same is a misnomer. It is, fundamentally, the eternal return of difference.

And neither is there any repetition of the past. — Joshs

In the section "The Vision and the Enigma" in Zarathustra:

“Observe,” continued I, “This Moment! From the gateway, This Moment, there runneth a long eternal lane BACKWARDS: behind us lieth an eternity.

Must not whatever CAN run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever CAN happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?

And if everything have already existed, what thinkest thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also—have already existed?

And are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? CONSEQUENTLY—itself also?

For whatever CAN run its course of all things, also in this long lane OUTWARD—MUST it once more run!—

And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have already existed?

—And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?”—

And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have already existed?

—And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?”—

I follow Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche:

“Repetition in the eternal return never means continuation, perpetuation or prolongation, nor even the dis­continuous return of something which would at least be able to be pro­longed in a partial cycle (an identity, an I, a Self) but, on the contrary, the reprise of pre-individual singularities which, in order that it can be grasped as repetition, presupposes the dissolution of all prior identities.”( Difference and Repetition)

Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche was influential for both Deleuze and Heidegger:

“The way in which Dionysian Entriickung or rapture characterizes each phase of time and hence subverts every attempt to uncover a unified and stable horizon for time finds a parallel in Pierre Klossow­ski's interpretation of eternal return. Heidegger interprets the eternity of the moment as decision, understanding decision as the authentic appropriation of being-a-self. Yet if the self that thinks eternal return is a ceaseless going-over and going-under, how lucid can it be to itself?

Can anything like an "appropriation" occur in its thinking? Klossowski emphasizes the "ecstatic character" of Nietzsche's experi­ence of eternal recurrence. The dilemma such an experience confronts us with is that it seems as if the thought can never have occurred to us before; the one who experiences eternal return appears to attain an insight that was hitherto closed to him or her. A forgetting and remem­bering, and anamnesis, thus appear to be "the very source and indis­pensable condition" of the thought of recurrence. Riddling at the riddle of how one can stand in the moment of recurrence each mo­ment anew, Klossowski suggests that the ecstatic thinking of return must transform-if not abolish-the very identity of the thinker. " ...

I learn that I was other than I am now for having forgotten this truth, and thus I have become another by learning it. ... The accent must be placed on the loss of a given identity" . Not even the act of willing can salvage the ruined self: to will myself again implies that in all willing "nothing ever gets constituted in a single sense, once and for all". To will the eternal recurrence of the same is to don the masks of "a multitude of gods," the masks of Dionysos fragmented, "under the sign of the divine vicious circle" (102). Klossowski con­cludes as follows (I 07):

Re-willing is pure adherence to the vicious circle. To re-will the entire series one more time-to re-will every experience, all one's acts, but this time not as mine: it is precisely this possessiveness that no longer has any meaning, nor does it represent a goal. Meaning and goal are liquidated by the circle­whence the silence of Zarathustra, the interruption of his message. Unless
this interruption is a burst of laughter that bears all its own bitterness.”

So yeah I do find it extremely crucial as for us to be developed more. — dimosthenis9

Developed in what way and to what end? There are all sorts of wills, such as:

• Will to truth (philosophy)
• Will to pleasure (utilitarian)
• Will to meaning (religion)
• Etc.

If will to power is the one will to rule them all (and in the darkness bind them), then just like in Lord of the Rings, will to power is the will that needs to be taken to the forge from whence it came, the fires of Mount Doom, and destroyed in order for us to be free. But, unlike Tolkien’s story, will to power is held to be the fountain of all life so to destroy it is to destroy life, and that would be rather counterproductive.

If will to power is the one will to rule them all (and in the darkness bind them), then just like in Lord of the Rings, will to power is the will that needs to be taken to forge from whence it came, the fires of Mount Doom, and destroyed in order for us to be free. — praxis

An aside - is the idea of a will to power an example of foundational thinking which FN purports to blow up?

I follow Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche — Joshs

It should be kept in mind that reading Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche is reading Deleuze not Nietzsche.

Developed in what way and to what end? There are all sorts of wills, such as: — praxis

There is no end in development. It's a constant procedure.

Will to Power is one of the most debatable concepts about Nietzsche's ideas. That and the one of the "Eternal Return".There are many interpretations of what he actually supported . And one of the most" famous " one(the most laughable one also ) is what Nazis used.

Mine is that Will to Power refers to ourselves. To power over our drives. To become the absolute Creators of our New Self. A higher spiritual-intellectual self. That way, the" Ubermensch" won't even need to spend any effort to rule over anyone. Others would want to be "ruled" by him willingly. There is a good chance also though that he wouldn't even care to rule them or lead them or whatever. Again I repeat that's my interpretation of Nietzsche's Will to Power. I don't know for sure if it's the right one.

But for one thing I m sure indeed. That Nietzsche's Will to Power had absolutely nothing to do with nazism. That's really ridiculous for anyone who has read even just one book of Nietzsche. I wrote it again and I will keep writing it, Nietzsche would spit Hitler on the face.
Nietzsche himself had almost predicted it, in some way when he said : "I really get scared when I think about the things that some people would think that they understood from my words"

It should be kept in mind that reading Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche is reading Deleuze not Nietzsche. — Fooloso4

Everyone is reading Nietzsche through someone else , whether that someone is themselves or another philosopher. We never have access to the ‘real’ Nietzsche. I always prefer direct quotes to secondary sources, but it is also helpful to recognize whose Nietzsche you’re embracing, either knowingly or not. Having said that , I am not simply aping Deleuze. I had developed my reading of Nietzsche before I read Deleuze. I am quoting Deleuze because he articulates well my representation of Nietzsche.
So whose Nietzsche are you reading him through? The existentialists like Kaufman?

There is no end in development. It's a constant procedure. — dimosthenis9

Rather it’s the futile eternal recurrence of a hamster wheel, right? No progress is possible.

Mine [interpretation] is that Will to Power refers to ourselves. To power over our drives. To become the absolute Creators of our New Self. A higher spiritual-intellectual self. — dimosthenis9

It seems to me that the point of a higher spiritual-intellectual self and “power over our drives” is, in a word, liberation. This would require that we defy will to power rather than bend to it. But Nietzsche doesn’t want to do that and promotes an inegalitarian ideology.

A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general perhaps after the communistic cliché of Dühring, that every will must consider every other will its equal—would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness. — On the Genealogy of Morals, FN

An aside - is the idea of a will to power an example of foundational thinking which FN purports to blow up? — Tom Storm

Given the above, I think it is.

An aside - is the idea of a will to power an example of foundational thinking which FN purports to blow up? — Tom Storm

It doesn’t have to be blown up. Will to Power is already self-immolating. Heidegger says "moving out beyond itself", the "opening up and supplementing" of possibilities belongs to the essence of the Will to Power.

“Everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated." (Geneology of Morality)

The problem is, at least from what you have provided, is that it does not solve the riddle of "The Vision and The Enigma". It does not respond to the question:

Must not whatever CAN happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?

To deny it does not give us the reason why Nietzsche denies it, if in fact he does.

Perhaps a first step in solving the riddle is to identify it. What are we to make of this "crooked truth", this truth that is not true, that is, not straight? Zarathustra begins with a model of an eternal past and an eternal future running in opposite directions. The two roads come together in the moment but no one has yet gone to the end of them. He then asks if one could follow the road further and further would they still be antithetical. The spirit of gravity answers: all truth is crooked, time is a circle.
If no one has “yet” followed further and further for an eternity and more then no one knows that the roads form a circle. The first problem with this is the “yet”. There can be no yet if all has occurred before, or if it can be then it is not true that whatever will happen has happened. The second problem is that if time is a circle does it only move in one direction?

When he hears the dog howl he asks whether he had ever heard a dog howl like this and answered that he had in his youth. But when he sees the shepherd he says he had never seen this before. If it is true that everything that happens has already happened then it would be false to say that he had never seen this before. After biting the head of the snake off, the transfigured being who was no longer a shepherd and no longer a man, laughed as no man on earth had ever laughed.

Zarathustra poses the problems this parable, this enigma: who is it that must come some day? Who is the shepherd? He does not ask about the snake. Is it the snake that bites its own tail, completing the circle? Having bit off its head is the circle broken? Is the laugh that no man has ever laughed something new? Has the one who must someday come come before or is it something that has yet to happen?

The eternal return is a riddle. One key to reading that riddle the problem of creation. If all is eternal return then there can be no creation, but above all Zarathustra wants to create are creators.

The greatest weight.--
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? — Gay Science Aphorism 341

The eternal return is a riddle. One key to reading that riddle the problem of creation. If all is eternal return then there can be no creation, but above all Zarathustra wants to create are creators — Fooloso4

You sound like you’re not certain what to make of Nietzsche, or at least his notion of the eternal return. So let me try and approach this discussion from the top down. Do you think that Nietzsche introduced revolutionary ideas , a ‘Copernican Revolution’, into philosophy with respect to predecessors like Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer? If so, what were his most radical ideas and why do they constitute a revolution? If not , what era or group of philosophers would you place him with?

This will give me a better sense of where you are approaching his work from.

You sound like you’re not certain what to make of Nietzsche, or at least his notion of the eternal return. — Joshs

I would go further and say that anyone who is certain does not understand it.

Do you think that Nietzsche introduced revolutionary ideas — Joshs

Becoming without teleology. Perspectivism.

This will give me a better sense of where you are approaching his work from. — Joshs

My approach is to read him carefully, treating the text as a whole, under the assumption that it was carefully written as a whole. This means, that his style is integral. I take him to be a skeptic and ironist and so we need to put things together in order to make sense of the whole, that what he seems to be saying should not simply be taken at face value and that he can be deliberately misleading.

The topic of will does incorporate various meanings. It goes back to the idea of voluntarism which goes back to Kant. Schopenhauer on will is also important. However, there is a big debate over will in relation to the intellect. Here, the issue of will in relation to pleasure vs intellect is particularly important. I guess that the nature of the self is also important too, especially in the idea of ego in mediating the various aspects of will, ranging from truth, pleasure and meaning. The idea of ego is mostly associated with psychoanalysis nowadays but Nietzsche's ideas come prior to that. However, it is likely that the idea of will is sometimes vague in philosophy and psychology. The idea of 'will to power' may be extremely vague and that may be the basic problem which arises when trying to interpret his understanding of human motivation.

The eternal return is a riddle. One key to reading that riddle the problem of creation. If all is eternal return then there can be no creation, but above all Zarathustra wants to create are creators. — Fooloso4

Heidegger follows Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return from Zarathustra through his last writings and concludes that will to power , eternal return and transvaluation of value form an integrated configuration:

“…will to power and eternal return of the same cohere. With what right could Nietzsche otherwise substitute the one for the other? Yet what if the will to power, according to Nietzsche's most proper and intrinsic intentions, were in itself nothing else than willing back to that which was and a willing forward to everything that has to be? What if the eternal recur­rence of the same-as occurrence-were nothing other than the will to power.” (Nietzsche Vol I and II)

“The "momentary" character of creation is the es­sence of actual, actuating eternity, which achieves its greatest breadth and keenest edge as the moment of eternity in the return of the same. The recoining of what becomes into being-will to power in its su­preme configuration-is in its most profound essence something that occurs in the "glance of an eye" as eternal recurrence of the same. The will to power, as constitution of being, is as it is solely on the basis of the way to be which Nietzsche projects for being as a whole: Will to power, in its essence and according to its inner possibility, is eternal recurrence of the same.

The aptness of our interpretation is demonstrated unequivocally in that very fragment which bears the title "Recapitulation." After the statement we have already cited-"To stamp Becoming with the char­acter of Being-that is the supreme will to power''-we soon read the
following sentence: "That everything recurs is the closest approxima­tion of a world of Becoming to one of Being: peak of the meditation." It would scarcely be possible to say in a more lucid fashion, first, how and on what basis the stamping of Being on Becoming is meant to be
understood, and second, that the thought of eternal return of the same, even and precisely during the period when the thought of will to power appears to attain preeminence, remains the thought which Nietzsche's
philosophy thinks without cease. “

what were his most radical ideas — Joshs

"Art is life's metaphysical activity." (Will to Power; forget what section).

Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers, with Hegel, who actually understood what art is. He said an aesthetics of production is needed because people only talk about the aesthetics of reception.

He said an aesthetics of production is needed because people only talk about the aesthetics of reception. — Jackson

What does that mean?

What does that mean? — praxis

Making art is different from looking at it. Most aesthetics is about the finished product and ideas of beauty. Making art is more about making meaning. The artist is not trying to make a beautiful object, but produce something that says something about how the world is.

However, there is a big debate over will in relation to the intellect. Here, the issue of will in relation to pleasure vs intellect is particularly important. — Jack Cummins

Really? Contemporary cognitive neuroscience agrees with embodied cognition / enactivism in the philosophy of mind:

Will and intellect are one and the same thing. — Spinoza

https://benjamins.com/catalog/ce.4.2.07mor

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. — Nietzsche

Art for art’s sake, if that’s your meaning, predates FN.