This guy is currently kicking my existential ass

Reading TSZ was like having a guy telling me in a very accurate way why and how I'm such a piece of shit, would say it changed me for better, at least a little. That doesnt mean I think I understand his thought completly, at all. Currently waiting for birth of the tragedy to arrive at my mail desu
ffs why cant things go right for once

>Currently waiting for birth of the tragedy to arrive at my mail desu
That's a whole different Nietzsche, when he was pretty much still a Schopenhauerian.

>Fred had no answer to nihilism

I didn't know it was possible to be this dense

Could you tell me what his answer was in a straight forward and non-obscurantist manner?

I want to go chronologically

>he hasn't realized the role Nietzsche has had in revitalizing Christianity
>he doesn't realize the sun was made to rise for him

I understand, I did the same myself.

I got the most out of The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morality and Twilight of the Idols myself. Nevertheless the stuff leading up to it is still interesting and very much worth reading.

Reading some of his correspondence is a good idea too by the way for that all too human aspect.

Make your own values

I found some aspects of BG&E to be inspiring and insightful. The one thing I'd really taken from it over the years, and this quote is burned into my head, paraphrasing here, "One must be careful fighting monsters lest they themselves become a monster. And if thou gaze into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

I found the whole "let nihilism forge you" thing to be lackluster; I'm much more partial too a sort of Kierkegaardian perspective wherein objective dogma brunts the blow of nihilism in lieu of the individual becoming the poet of their morality. This is not to say that Christian dogma is more correct than Nietzschean moral poetry, but it is to say that I think the former is a better cure to nihilism if indeed one hasn't already killed God.

I also thought Nietzsche too eagerly castigated Christian morality as slave morality, that there's great virtues to be found in Christian morality, and that his proposed system would lend itself to a too uncaring ethic, one that maybe wasn't conducive to the progress of a civilization.

Moreover, and perhaps more important that any of this: Nietzsche himself recognized that when God died, one could not make themselves believe again. Yet he went on to posit that one should will themselves into believing in their own moral poetry. This I find paradoxical.

I see nihilism as a permanent condition, not one that can necessarily forge an individual. I think the cure is faith, which, when gone, is gone forever for a lot of people. Nietzsche himself wrote later in life that one would have to be mad to truly live by his system, and that few men could ever do it.

"all superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad"

I am not an ubermensch, but I'm pretty happy about it.

That's what I got out of it as well, just make some shit up.

I didn't find it satisfying and it neglects that values are not something an individual chooses to have but are part of a larger social and cultural framework. People can't just decide to sincerely adopt a set of brand new beliefs.

I think Nietzsche realised this as well though.

>it neglects that values are not something an individual chooses to have but are part of a larger social and cultural framework

they indeed are, but is it not exactly the task of the ubermensch to free himself from this?

>People can't just decide to sincerely adopt a set of brand new beliefs

The genealogy is supposed to be the first step to being able to do just this

This guy gets it

Your rebuttal is very social constructionist though, and pretty much missed Freddy's point because of it

He talks about it in the Geneaology and BGE. Also when he wrote Ecce Homo he still did not know anything about his impending death. He wrote it between 1887 and 1888, and he started getting scared for his lifemonly in the mid 1889.

Even in his last years, when he was still writing all day long new books, he still thought thay his philosophy was complete with Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

>they indeed are, but is it not exactly the task of the ubermensch to free himself from this?
I think it's an impossibility. People simply aren't self-made, they don't exist outside of causality and context.

>Your rebuttal is very social constructionist though, and pretty much missed Freddy's point because of it
I don't think I've missed it as much as I simply disagree.

If you're coming from a perspective that necessarily says that values are societal in nature then that is an ideological disagreement

Nietzsche argues that values can (emphasis on the can) be created on an individual level

Hence the ubermensch as far as Nietzsche is concerned

And hell look at the history of philosophy, its filled with people creating ideas and values as rebuttal to other's ideas (see Rationalism v. Empricism)

Seems like a silly way to look at things is all, maybe clarify if I'm missing a point?

>decent conversation on Veeky Forums
This is actually quite insightful.

Another thing to consider is that Nietzsche is rhetorical in his arguments. Originality is not the important point, it is the individual will to create values or follow their own values that is important to living and rejecting nhilism, even if you don't become an ubermensch.

>I think it's an impossibility. People simply aren't self-made, they don't exist outside of causality and context.

In the Geneaology of Morals Nietzsche aknowledge this (the segment is in the second part of his treatise on the ascetic ideal), and states that most likely his point of view is a direct consequence of his society too.

>The genealogy is supposed to be the first step to being able to do just this

Read what I've wrote above. His geneaologies are nothing more than a speculation: the point of GoM is that ideals and concepts that may seem natural can be deconstructed, showing that there may be hidden, never examined motives behind them. He doesn't think that what he is saying is necessarily true: in this case the geneaological method is the real subject, the conclusions he reqches through this method is just a way to show to the reader to what extent something as natural as "guilt" can be analyzed genealogically.

This by the way is what most of Nietzsche's works are about: he justifies his thoughts and reasoning, but he never implies that there is an actual metaphysical foundation for said arguments: what is important is that these arguments can still be made even if you're at heart a nihilist (because he was, at heart, a skeptic nihilist), and that it is still worth doing so.

Seems to me that the Ubermensch is just a thought experiment, not really something that a person could expect to become but rather strive to be as though they could be

That or the ubermensch is just a masturbatory thing for Freddy, and its best to not take it seriously but rather look at his other arguments more seriously

Meant for this post

In GoM he specifically states that everyone is sick and that no one can be a ubermensch yet. It's also a big point in TSZ: in Nietzsche's opinion, who's not a ubermensch (the undesirables) should still strive for the creation of the first ubermensch, instead of drowning themselves in ressentiment.
Nietzsche's never thought that he was a Ubermensch, but he still thought he could imagine him.

he thought all nonscientific consensus is contingent and arbitrarily frozen, according to an unpublished essay at least.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Truth_and_Lies_in_a_Nonmoral_Sense

>"A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

>These ideas about truth and its relation to human language have been particularly influential among postmodern theorists, and "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" is one of the works most responsible for Nietzsche's reputation (albeit a contentious one) as "the godfather of postmodernism."

>His geneaologies are nothing more than a speculation

Nietzsche is quite clear that his genealogy of morality is not fictional. If you do not take his statements on the topic literally, you should argue why.

> the conclusions he reqches through this method is just a way to show to the reader to what extent something as natural as "guilt" can be analyzed genealogically

how would this be convincing if his GoM would be fictional?

>Nietzsche is quite clear that his genealogy of morality is not fictional. If you do not take his statements on the topic literally, you should argue why.

He literally states at the end of the third treatise that he doesn't really trust his point of view on the matter, nor he trusts the point of view of any other living psychologist, but he still sees the inherent, revealing value of the genealogical method.
Also at the beginning of the third treatise he states that all he said was, ultimately, a speculation. Later on I'll search the actual quotes for you.

>how would this be convincing if his GoM would be fictional?
The point is that he believed in his conclusions, but he has really no way to justify it, nor does he think that there is a objective way to do so.
It may be anti-philosophical to some other anons, but Nietzsche still trusts his reader to understand and value this informations even if the informations themselves are not confined in a strict system (not that his reasoning is volatile, but it's not Kantian either, which is relevant, considering that he was living through a age dominated by both positivism and Idealism).
Also at the beginning of GoM he states that this analysis should only be seen as a starting point for future psychologists more than a finishing point.
You're suspect towards his method is directly inquired in the part about sciences in the ascetic ideal section.

>And hell look at the history of philosophy, its filled with people creating ideas and values as rebuttal to other's ideas (see Rationalism v. Empricism)
I would say that is illustrative of the fact that individuals can not create their own meaning. It's like a pebble bouncing off a rock and saying it has created its own momentum. Repulsion is no less conditioned by circumstance than attraction.

I think that in the development of ideas and values the individual is almost irrelevant, a mere particle, and that the actual shifts take place on a level beyond the control of any specific individual, just like a school of fish changes direction without any one fish choosing said direction.

The mere possibility of individualism seems to me like a temporary illusion created by a tiny window in societal development, the place between the industrial revolution and the information age where a city person could feel just atomical enough to feel separate from society and not connected enough to realise that humanity is as intertwined as ever.

I guess from my perspective Nietzsche is very much a product of his time in that regard.

I should add that in just typing this I feel like I don't do Freddy justice since he's such a multifaceted lad that developed much throughout his career as a thinker/writer.

It just never feels right to pin him down as subscribing to this or that in any strong and meaningful way.

I recall parts of his work where he would seem to be in agreement with what I just said, for example, but in others he takes a more individualist perspective.

Nietzsche failed at the solving the problems he identified. I'm not sure that it affected him as deeply as to cause his breakdown, but I think he did see that himself towards the end. The last man was always our destiny, maybe even always was who we really are.

The Birth of Tragedy is severely underrated, though I can totally see how the viewpoint that the greeks were conflicted pessimists was and still is suppressed.

Honestly I think Kierkgaard is more interesting and Stirner just way better.

>I would say that is illustrative of the fact that individuals can not create their own meaning.

>The mere possibility of individualism seems to me like a temporary illusion created by a tiny window in societal development, the place between the industrial revolution and the information age where a city person could feel just atomical enough to feel separate from society and not connected enough to realise that humanity is as intertwined as ever.

I, too, am an advocate for neoreactionary traditionalist theocratic fascism

Reminds me of what Camus said:

>Stirner laughs in his blind alley; Nietzsche beats his head against the wall.

That's really fucking poignant.

So much pomp in this thread.

Who cares if it looks pompous, as long as it's actually an interesting, civil conversation.

>He read Nietzsche before Schopp

All smoke and no heat imo.

>nietszche
>existential

So...

Where do I start with Nietzsche?

Have some working knowledge of the greeks, then I'd just start with pic related and go with what seems interesting from there.

I mean where do I start with the author Nietzsche

Not the same guy, but Nietzsche can be rather dense and his work compartmentalized. Before I started him, and this was years ago, I read myriad books about him from other authors.

Some people want to read him chronologically, and I find nothing wrong with that, but, and as the other guy pointed out, some rudimentary knowledge of the Greeks will help you along with that.

I personally started at Thus Spoke Zarathustra and enjoyed it quite a lot, though without my prior readings I would've been lost.

A lot of people on here will tell you to speed read philosophy while not consulting any outside sources and playing chess. I think this is just a dick-measuring-contest type thing, but definitely don't listen to anyone who says to jump right into BG&E with no prior knowledge of Nietzsche and his ideas and start speed reading the thing (if that's even possible).

Isn't beyond good and evil his most accessible work?

Also, what's a "working knowledge of the Greeks"?

That's actually really funny.

Whatever you do don't start with Will to Power

Feels dense man

The last decade of his life was spend drooling in a corner, mate.

It's his best, for sure.

Of course for "his last years" I meant "his last years of sanity"

>No, I mean The Revaluation of All Values. The magnum opus he announced multiple times that never came to be.

Nietzsche wanted to try to reevaluate all values, but he did not think that he had a actual shot ij doing so (I don't know if this is the right translation, but the actual title was meant to be "ATTEMPT at reevaluation of all values". He did not want to be a prophet, he just wanted to show us how to be one, but this process was already presented and explained in his TSZ, meaning that RoaV, just like every other Nietzsche's post-TSZ books, was nothing more than a appendix, a footnote to it.

>Zarathustra is just something that was championed in retrospect because he could not deliver.
This is objectively false. Stop lying, he championed it until he lost his mind. There are literally zero occasions in which he doubt about the infinite value of that book.

>There's a reason why Nietzsche is generally associated with nihilism more than with an answer to it. He didn't have one.
That's a shallow interpretation, even if you're right (the anons who doubted you are even more pseud than you). What I'm saying is that, although your saying a correct thing, your phrasing and wording shows that you have not really got what Nietzsche was saying. It would be like saying "Dostoevskij? He thought that if there is no God anything goes!". It's not wrong, but such a sentence just shows a lack of nuance that proves that who said it was obviously uncapable of grasping to its full extent what the author/philosopher was trying to say.

That said, Nietzsche had a response to nihilism, and that response was a strong, shouted "yes".

I translated the entirety of Zarathustra into English while heavily intoxicated and without speaking much German. I began by composing a song by assigning notes to each of the articles that begin the chapter titles.
I would post it online, but I want to reserve it in case I ever become famous enough for it to be a saleable novelty. If you ever come across such a book, you will know it was I who wrote it.

post some notes, i'm interested

>How did your reading of Nietzsche translate into your everyday life? Did you even tried to let it change you?

It changed me a lot actually. I now see straight through politics. Everyone is just trying to manifest their will to power in the real world.

It also made me realize that my own previously strongly held values, e.g liberal values of tolerance and brotherhood, are literally just the specter of Christianity's slave morality.

I'm making a mistake starting with The Will to Power, aren't I

Not really. You can just read them in what order you want but I would recommend reading Thus Spake Zarathustra last.

Realize everything is meaningless. With that you choose we're you put meaning in things. An analogy I like to use is if a meteor his earth the universe would still exist. Do what ever you want, its a pretty freeing feeling.

The book I showed you has nothing in it (save for the introduction) not written by Nietzsche. Think of it like a "best of" thing for aphorisms.

bju,mo0

I already started reading it, thanks for the recommendation

Ooops... why not?

Why do you need a working knowledge of the Greeks in order to get into philosophy it always seems to be recommended

do those books called an XYZ Reader annoy anyone else? using reader as a noun is fucking obscure and sounds stupid. it just feels like you're a pseud walking about like "look at me I'm a NIETZCHE READER! soo edgy"

better to have a working knowledge of the hebrews if you want to get into nietzsche's major works t b h, only birth of tragedy really needs greek awareness

I've now accepted that every argument is based on the dualistic Apollonian Dionysus dichotomy and that everyone is wrong. I live my live accepting conflict, pretending to be a fool so that when I open up not simply being an idiot, it takes people aback and opens them up for further discussion.
I've now started to become more creative by writing down my thoughts and creating art.
I feel complete but it also feels like I've understood everything there needed to be known about life, and it leaves a weird taste. Like taking a helicopter ride to the top of the mountain while watching everyone trying to struggle upwards below you.

The revaluation of all values is simply life affirming, meaning that the basis of all values should not be on power or what is good for the whole community, but on your own life. The desire to live and to allow others to live their own life and not destroy it should be the new basis for our morality.
The problem is that questioning our values and face nihilism is often equated with accepting nihilism.

>I've now accepted that every argument is based on the dualistic Apollonian Dionysus dichotomy and that everyone is wrong
so you only read BoT? you might as well call yourself schopenhauerian.

>I feel complete but it also feels like I've understood everything there needed to be known about life
absolutely disgusting

>so you only read BoT
>thinking that the Apollonian Dionysus Dichotomy isn't a central part of his thought.
Nice dismissal.

accurate

no, it's only central to BoT, hence it's similarity to will(dionysian) and representation(apollinian). he disengaged from dualism and what reappears as dionysian drive later doesnt carry an antagonist princple with it.

Only because Shoppy viewed both as the same, which is Dionysian.

This is kind of the conclusion I came to a few years ago but it feels so unfulfilling and unstructured. It's scary.

Yeah it is scary.
That said, I have been apathetic these past months/years, and re-discovering Nietzsche bring me an energy I didn't know I still had.
I'll gladly take uncertainty if it goes with drive, cause I have been barely living lately.

transforming into each other and interlocked, but never the same. one of the points BoT tried to make was that greeks found the right combination of D&A unlike eastern or roman civilizations, which allowed greeks to make great art. the hope that such kind of balance could be retrieved again was a romantic consolation, similar to hope of german idealism, which nietzsche later hated about that book.

But didn't Nietzsche advocate a merging of Apollonian and Dionysian principles to become a Ubermensch?

he doesn't even talk about apollonian and dionysian shit that much after BoT, BoT was a one off

that would bring him back into array of domesticated traditional wise men. übermensch is all about muh dionysian drive and resistance against alexandrinian-socratic modern world (which isnt apollinian either) .

How is Alexandrinian socratic modern world not Apollonian? How is pure individualism not Apollonian?
Nietzsche disliked slave morality and preferred master morality so long as one did not go the entire way, ala Socrates.

the ultimate culmination of A was roman empire and its deification of the state and order. in BoT it was squashed by alexandrinian culture preoccupied with dialectics, science, welfare and so on.

You still haven't explained how it's not Apollonian.
The roman empire is the purest form of Apollonian, for sure, but how is science not Appolonian, or Socrates, which Nietzsche hated because he was a the furthest version of master morality to the point where he denied everything from existing.

in BoT model science=dialectics=new alien principle or defect independent of A&D.
slave morality is related to dialectics and progress of welfare state.

A is more individualist than D, but its top priority is still duty towards state.

I guess that's my issue, is the uncertainty.

I'm afraid of making the wrong choices in my life, and I just don't feel like I'll ever find my purpose or drive. I'm also so apathetic towards everything in my life, suicide just seems like almost a rational option, and that's scary in itself.

Uncertainty is an issue only if there is value to truth.
I'm realising I've spent my time in academia playing the game of interpretation according to established methods, while thinking deep down the world is infinitely complex, enough to give it various (maybe infinite) meanings. For me accepting uncertainty is less comfortable in some ways (some sort of loneliness in the choice of values; giving up some idea of being understood), much more in others (I can try and be true to myself, even if it is wrong to everyone) - and I haven't tried yet, so why not? It is still something worth doing before suicide/death.

>in BoT model science=dialectics=new alien principle or defect independent of A&D.
That can't be right. Science is purely Apollonian, a replication of reality to mold existence and dominate nature. Though that might just be the faulty BoT model view of science.

And Apollonian, in its purest form, I agree, is the duty to the state, but it should be ideally about the individual itself, without any duty.
The only duty it should hold is towards civilization to combat and maintain control over nature, not the state itself.

Unless I'm wrong, Apollonian represents our will over the world, our desire to be above nature and causality, while Dionysian represents nature and the fact that we are animals and nothing more, without volition.

that fits more with what's usually called promethean.
the romans were never good scientists but they had good engineers and architects. something like mathematics or theoretical physics belongs to a more dialectical sphere, it requires scepticism and aimless speculation that is simply incompatible with greek heroes. nietzsche's problem with science was that it built an own self-defeating momentum and that "certain people even prefer to lie down and die on a certain nothing than an uncertain something", viewing it as just a tool would be too naive.

Regardless, the dichotomy is that of reasons against instinct, and Nietzsche valued instinct more than reason while being life affirming.

Tfw Nietzsche wrote something along the lines of "when I read a few lines of Schopenhauer I knew I had to read it all", and then you know that feel because you have to read all of Nietzsche's work. Even the crazy letters.

The chance that the truth in any way corresponds to what people would like to hear is pretty slim, to be honest.

But Nietzsche himself considered untruth to be a necessary condition of life. Delusion is what makes us function.

>there's great virtues to be found in Christian morality

Strike One. There really isn't. He devotes a great amount of effort to taking every single Christian value to task, and indeed to pieces.

>his proposed system would lend itself to a too uncaring ethic

Strike Two. You really didn't understand him if you think that evil or apathy are a problem, never mind evil or apathetic people.

>wasn't conducive to the progress of a civilization.

Strike Three. See above.

Who cares? He was a virulent racist who died broke and alone.

I know this is bait but racism is scientifically correct.

Not really. People who have the capital to move to the USA are obviously not as stupid as the average person in their country. Read a fucking book.

He wasn't a racist at all. In fact I would argue that he was pretty exemplary on that topic compared to the rest of society at that time.

Yes he was. Have you even read him? He is /pol/'s first philosopher. There is no objective metric by which to judge a human life.

>what is the blank slate theory