A biographical clue, possibly, to Nietzsche being shaped by his own resentiment.

The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time, Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses. — Marianne Cowan, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Yeah, it's hard to expunge the criticism of selective reading when reading him.

Is this thread a sort of public reply to our discussion since you quote from basically one book, plus one quote from a work you Said you have never even read? Shall I counter-post with quotes from the bible?

Is this thread a sort of public reply to our discussion? Shall I counter-post with quotes from the bible? — Beebert

No it has nothing to do with our discussion it has to do with my discussion with Erik which you can read here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/92719#Post_92719

But by all means to feel free to join the discussion :)

Okay I see. Well to start with, Nietzsche wasn't precisely the ubermensch he proclaimed just as Kierkegaard wasn't the Knight of faith he proclaimed

plus one quote from a work you Said you have never even read? — Beebert

I've never read the Will to Power but I did give it a brief look after you told me to look into it, and skipped through its contents here and there to gather what it's about. It's quite long.

Well to start with, Nietzsche wasn't precisely the ubermensch he proclaimed just as Kierkegaard wasn't the Knight of faith he proclaimed — Beebert

Hmmmm sure. Though Kierkegaard did live through the motions of the knight of faith in his life with Regine Olsen - did he not believe, absurdly, that he would marry her, even though he had rejected her earlier and she married another?

I thinked he hoped it but he admitted in the end that he didnt have what he would call faith. He was one with high demands on what it means to be christian (sell all you have etc.)... I just read an expansive work that went through all of Kierkegaard 's writings and his journals etc. And it seems quite obvious that he had such great insights in the difference between Faith and despair etc. Because he knew himself to have almost grasped Faith, but in the end, he didnt receive Regine back... And well, he never became this man of action and inwardness that he thought a Christian must be.

I see... Well even though I still firmly hold fast to Nietzsche's greatness, there is no doubt he went too far sometimes. But he often also said that he didnt want people to always agree with him, and I also Believe that many of the quotes you listed, tries to reveal the in many eyes hideous truth about man and his inner wants etc. Mostly an overstatement and provocative tour the force in order to establish New values so that nihilism would be overcome.

As Bentley Hart, the orthodox Christian theologian said: "Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. "

I thinked he hoped it but he admitted in the end that he didnt have what he would call faith — Beebert

Yes, at least not in a Christian sense. He also said he aspires to be a Christian and greatly desires to be one, but avoided calling himself one.

Because he knew himself to have almost grasped Faith, but in the end, he didnt receive Regine back... And well, he never became this man of action and inwardness that he thought a Christian must be. — Beebert

If you read Works of Love (which in my opinion is his best work - also one of the few that he wrote under his own name) you will understand that when one has Faith, one doesn't only have faith only with regards to temporal existence, but also with regards to eternity. Indeed, in time he has lost Regine, but he will regain her in eternity. That would be the position. Whether he had made this movement of faith, and really believed unto his dying moments, I do not know.

I will have to reply to the other messages tomorrow, as I'm now going to sleep.

Nietzsche just as Dostoevsky was an exceptional psychologist and a great diagnostic of the times. Nietzsche's famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who mentions God’s death is not precisely a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists to whom he addresses his terrifying proclamation. In their moral lazyness and weak sensibility though, he sees that they do not despair over the death of God... This is almost prophetic, because look at our culture today and the last 90 years or so. God's death as a cultural thing has been quite true... And concerning the madman in Gay Science: The atheists that the madman talks to are we today, must of us, the indifferent once who has lost the sense of the sacred: Look at the atheists in this fable: They grasp not that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation is gone and has left us with only our own resources, with which we can only helplessly try to combat the complete meaninglessness that the universe now appears to be...

Yes I know but I am quite sure he didnt regard himself as having true Faith, even though he did Believe christisnity to be true

The Agu/Beebert battle commences once again. >:O

"Yes, at least not in a Christian sense. He also said he aspires to be a Christian and greatly desires to be one, but avoided calling himself one."

Exactly. He was quite likely also a universalist ;)

What if I didn't fear you? What if I believed in your innate, surpluses of benevolence? Do you think that a truly malevolent person needs your permissions, your justifications? To live in the world is to impose, obstruct, destroy, dominant, or to be imposed upon, be obstructed, be destroyed, dominated. People's bodies express this in the very ways that they move. People, and animals shrink, take up less space, move more quietly, and whisper as to not draw attention when they are submissive. They spread out, take up more space, thrash a move and make loud noises when they aren't afraid.

Morality is used as condemnation, as self-righteous justification to oppress, and destroy, and is based in the emotions of disgust. Societies with high levels of infectious diseases, and lack of sanitation have the highest disgust sensitivity, and most draconian moral impositions.

Is what he's saying disgusting? Yes, of course it is. Life and the world is not pristine, and I see a lot more evil in attempting to render it so than in embracing being disgusting creatures ourselves. Monstrous creatures ourselves.

The point is not that we ought to be cruel, exploitative, rapacious -- it's that we already are, and the only thing that will truly transform that benevolent nature into something malevolent is when we decide that we are not, and it is you instead. The disgust, distaste for it... the value of life in quantity over quality, and the turning away from nature in favor of the ideal. This is where the truly evil lies. It isn't in life or nature, but in its opposition, that the true will to complete annihilation surfaces.

This is the Christian irony. Both the religious wills to truth, and to morality turn in on themselves. Implode. All higher values devalue themselves. The Christian will to truth renders belief in God, and myths untenable. The will to morality, an immaculate state renders God and nature themselves immoral.

Out of all of Nietzsche's works, my favorite seems to be his very first, the Birth of Tragedy. The later Nietzsche seems like a power-crazed insane man quite often. Not to mention that I find pretty much his entire GM to be pathetic, even intellectually - the first two parts for sure. — Agustino

I'm less well read of Nietzsche, but from my limited knowledge of him, I'd say I agree. The early Nietzsche is the most interesting, in my opinion, because that's when he was most influenced by, complimentary of, and in agreement with Schopenhauer. The Nietzsche that simply reverses Schopenhauer's ethics and berates his mentor is rather insufferable.

Speaking of biographical anecdotes, here's something I dug up some time ago but never shared that you might find interesting, as I feel it's a propos some of our previous discussions (taken from The American Catholic Quarterly Review from 1916):

One of [Nietzsche's] friends, who had come under the influence of Schopenhauer, was a Dr. Romundt. To quote his sister in the matter: "Now, strange to say," she declares, "his profound study of Schopenhauer had made Dr. Romundt decide to become a Catholic priest. My brother was beside himself in anger, for he was very fond of Dr. Romundt. He could not in the least understand how a philosopher who had learnt to value freedom of thought could possibly intend to take up a position which, from an intellectual standpoint, was so terribly confined on all sides. And the fact that a friend, after having frequented his company for eight years, could thus secretly have planned such a coup against the freedom of his own spirit made him thoroughly unhappy. After lengthy discussion, however, Dr. Romundt did at last decide to return to his earlier calling as a teacher."

This is important, as it brings to our attention what Nietzsche's idea was concerning Catholicism. It is evident that Dr. Romundt, like Nietzsche's sister, interpreted Schopenhauer in quite a different way from his friend. "My brother," says Frau-Förster-Nietzsche, "understood perfectly well that as a Christian my understanding of Schopenhauer was very different from his; for instance, I scarcely realized Schopenhauer's atheism at all." As for Dr. Romundt, Schopenhauer had simply impressed him with a sense of pessimism that had not gone so far as to make him the materialist and atheist that it had made of Nietzsche, but had brought home to this truth-seeking soul the fact that he was a pilgrim in this "valley of tears." Naturally enough, he turned his thoughts heavenward and did not seek to find on earth true and lasting happiness, but looked towards the Catholic Church for the haven where he might anchor safely after wandering about in a sea of doubt. The freedom of spirit which he sought would find its realization in the conserver of a true faith, based upon a satisfying certainty of true knowledge. It was to be confined only in the sense that it was to be determined by certainty of truth. But he did not realize the logical necessity of faith based upon right thinking, and so he once more turned in his weakness back to his scoffing companion and did not appreciate fully the true meaning of the step he had taken. The greatest of all truths and the only satisfying truth neither he nor Nietzsche had arrived at, namely, that truth is one, so that in its essence it cannot be uncertain and indetermined and that the conclusions that Nietzsche had arrived at were but disordered emanations and illogical calculations of the real truths. He could but wander forever in a circle that led him to rest only in restricted declarations of false premises that were not correctly based upon real truths. Beyond the simple truths that were clear to the minds of even such great pagan philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche thought he saw still greater truths and more subtle ones, which in reality were but contradictories and which led him into sophistry. And this he mistook for freer and higher thought, and so he drifted into a mysticism which was pure madness.

For Nietzsche, there is no 'beyond'. For Schopenhauer, there is - he might describe himself as atheist (in which case, then, I am also) - but he recognises the possibility of transcending the Will. Schopenhauer's atheism really comprised the rejection of ecclesiastical religion; but unlike Nietzsche, he would not declare the Universe devoid of meaning.

The total character of the world... is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has any meaning.

Thus, the denial of God has driven Nietzsche to deny science, the laws of nature, the existence of order and even of causality. There is no purpose in the world, only chaos.

Henry Bayman, Nietzsche, God and Doomsday.

What is this 'beyond', anyway? I say that wisdom comprises seeing through the illusion of the world, the illusion that the world is real in its own right, that it contains its own ground or cause. Nietzsche was never able to penetrate that - he sees the meaninglessness of physical existence, but nothing beyond it.

Nietzsche saw a progressive move away from nature, away from chaos creativity, and competition towards the last men. Imposed superfluous equality. The movement of the goal from the great to the normative. From the aesthetic to the measurable or justifiable set at a normative level, or the lowest common denominator. Lives aimed towards safety, longevity, security and comfort -- cowering from risk and tragedy. The stifling of all that is superior, original, and individually affirming.

This is a world without meaning, affirmation, or value. This is nihilism. The resentful denial of all that is superior, with the values of pity, and mediocrity being all that remain.

That essay of Bayman's says the N. was 'simultaneously the opponent, proponent and victim of the nihilism he foresaw.'

With the exception of the negro passage, what seems to be the issue? As it stands the OP is just a kind of extended 'I don't like this. Don't you not like this too?'.

Nietzsche's critique against Schopenhauer's final rejection of life had some very valid points. A pessimist is in the end a brother of the hedonist in that he values life baser on suffering. Suffering bad, opposite good. But the pessimist focuses on the bad and therefore rejects life. Nietzsche knew that Schopenhauer was correct in that life was suffering, and therefore Nietzsche hated hedonists. But Nietzsche also saw that suffering was needed in order for man to reach his creative heights

Here is Nietzsche on why christianity had for so long been the superior world view:

"What were the advantages of the Christian moral hypothesis?

1. It granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and
accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away.

2. It served the advocates of God insofar as it conceded to the world,
in spite of suffering and evil, the character of perfection-including
"freedom": evil appeared full of meaning.

3. It posited that man had a knowledge of absolute values and thus
adeguate knowledge precisely regarding what is most important.

4. It prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking sides
against life; from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of
preservation .

In sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and
theoretical nihilism. "

Nietzsche is filled with contradictory passages. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt as much as possible and try to assume he either changed his positions or that I'm not properly grasping his statement's meaning and that nothing else he said contradicts it.

But that sort of sums up Nietzsche and postmodernism. We can have different truths that do not cohere because everything is all pretty much constructed anyway. We're not in touch with any kind of thing-n-itself behind the vale of appearances

On the whole I tend to find that I think Nietzsche doesn't really value brute power. Sometimes he seems to, but he's often extremely critical of powerful dumb people.

I've heard people assume that Nietzsche is much more concerned with something along the lines of intellectual power than of political power.

Whether or not I buy that is dependent upon my mood. Today I give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he would hate Trump.

and to this one might add that christianity from the beginning tried to solve these problems But in the end its followers rejected suffering, rejected following Christ and became his admirers instead. I see one of the reasons to this in the Christian obsession with defining dogmas and doctrines that leads to a sense of security. Like defining predestination, election, justification etc. And a neurotic man who fears punishment suddenly says "I am justified and saved",and then lies back in his couch waiting for the rapture (Another false doctrine). That is Why I dislike Aquinas also, I believe he was one of those who most clearly caused this decline among the "great Christian teacherd" by sitting down trying to define dogmas all his life instead of following Christ in his suffering. And it culminated in Calvin and Luther who Only tried to find out exactly how one is saved and seeking to find security in it instead of living the gospel. Here christianity watered down and became nihilistic, and that is what Nietzsche observed. Of course the true enemies of Christ isnt a Nietzsche but rather a comfortable, Self-proclaimed saved man who avoids the challenges if the gospel because he is saved and elect already etc. is the true enemy of Truth (in the Christian Word, that is Christ)

I would say Nietzsche valued creative power

For an honest and good Christian view and standpoint on Nietzsche, I really recommend David Bentley Hart :

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

Read that article, he of course Believes Nietzsche was wrong in the end. But yet necessary, and correct in many of his diagnosis etc.

I believe Nietschze also believed that art has the power to transcend The Will. However, he depicted this rather grotesquely in the form of a master-slave relationship.

Maybe moralizing tout court is a mistake. Maybe there are inferiorities and superorities, and they have nothing to do with personal values, but innate and environmental deviations. One doesn't have to be mistaken in what others are doing wrong for them to be incapable of doing it right, or incapable of even understanding the criticism.

Nietzsche seemed to think this way. His advice against the inclination to pity and save, his notion of only writing for a select few, or even single individual, while in no way devaluing others for being more chafe than wheat. It seems a poor leader that is disgusted, or even finds pitiful those that they lead. This would be misanthropy, which Nietzsche found to be exceedingly tempting at times, but was all the more vehemently opposed to for that very reason.

The equality, and elevation of everyone to the highest of heights conceivable is a mighty high value, but for it to be possible, the responsibility must be placed with the individual as to why they have not accomplished this, or some other alterable vicissitude.

All senses I can conceive of in which the "higher man" is valued not relationally, but absolutely in comparison to the "lower" leads to both of their destruction. Leads to moralizing, or eugenics, or whatever. The world needs plumbers like it needs leaders, perhaps even the former more so, but they aren't as sexy, aren't as prestigious.

It isn't that we should all constantly be attempting to subvert tradition and convention, because it is unequivocally less valuable than originality, and creativity -- it's more that it's transcended, rather than subverted. Climbed like a ladder, rather than demolished with resentment and self-aggrandizement.

Exactly. He was quite likely also a universalist ;) — Beebert

:s I doubt it. He does hope all will be saved, but that doesn't make him a universalist. You do have a tendency to brush off such distinctions :P

I also Believe that many of the quotes you listed, tries to reveal the in many eyes hideous truth about man and his inner wants etc. Mostly an overstatement and provocative tour the force in order to establish New values so that nihilism would be overcome. — Beebert

But this is precisely the point. We have to question whether those really are the inner wants of man as such, or they're only the inner wants of SOME men.

As Bentley Hart, the orthodox Christian theologian said: "Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. " — Beebert

Yes, which is why Nietzsche is deeper than Hume and his ilk :P

Nietzsche's famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who mentions God’s death is not precisely a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists to whom he addresses his terrifying proclamation. In their moral lazyness and weak sensibility though, he sees that they do not despair over the death of God... This is almost prophetic, because look at our culture today and the last 90 years or so. God's death as a cultural thing has been quite true... And concerning the madman in Gay Science: The atheists that the madman talks to are we today, must of us, the indifferent once who has lost the sense of the sacred: Look at the atheists in this fable: They grasp not that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation is gone and has left us with only our own resources, with which we can only helplessly try to combat the complete meaninglessness that the universe now appears to be... — Beebert

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed - and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!' Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. 'I come too early', he then said; 'my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars - and yet they have done it themselves!'” — Gay Science

Yes, I am aware that Nietzsche diagnosed the modern condition very well. He is right that God is dead - or rather appears dead - to us moderns - because we have killed (rejected) Him. Max Picard (a Jew/Catholic) in his book The Flight From God does read all of man's history as an attempt to run away from God, while God is in active pursuit. The forgetfulness of God of today's Western world does represent, as Nietzsche would say, the condition of the Last Man. There is no doubt that Nietzsche was right, that without God, there is no morality.

For an honest and good Christian view and standpoint on Nietzsche, I really recommend David Bentley Hart :

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/believe-it-or-not

Read that article, he of course Believes Nietzsche was wrong in the end. But yet necessary, and correct in many of his diagnosis etc. — Beebert

I've already read that article :P I'm quite a reader of the firstthings.com website lol This one is also really good:

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/02/a-philosopher-in-the-twilight

It's mostly about Heidegger, but there's stuff about Nietzsche as well.

Nietzsche's critique against Schopenhauer's final rejection of life had some very valid points. A pessimist is in the end a brother of the hedonist in that he values life baser on suffering. Suffering bad, opposite good. But the pessimist focuses on the bad and therefore rejects life. Nietzsche knew that Schopenhauer was correct in that life was suffering, and therefore Nietzsche hated hedonists. But Nietzsche also saw that suffering was needed in order for man to reach his creative heights — Beebert

I would read it differently. Schopenhauer did not reject life as such, he rejected what Nietzsche would call will-to-power. Why? Because he perceived, just as Nietzsche perceived, that will-to-power leads to cruelty, indifference to the suffering of your fellow men, and violence. But unlike Nietzsche, he did not admire these things. So he perceived something that is beyond will-to-power - a different way of existing, which he never much described positively, but just negatively - as denial of the will-to-power. As he says at the end of the first volume of WWR, what remains after the annihilation of the will appears like nothing to those still full of will - but the inverse is also true - for those in which the will has completely denied itself, this very real world appears as nothing.

I think Schopenhauer is in many ways more far-seeing than Nietzsche.