"There are no moral facts, only moral interpretations of facts"

Not really.
His framework is inherently nihilistic, but he rejects the common conclusions reached by his fellow nihilists (mainly the new brand of Schopenhauerian nihilism that became extremely relevant in Germany in the '60s), reaching instead a life-affirming, but not blindly hedonistic one.

Nietzsche always believed that the meaning we can associate to things are just made up, but at the same time he thought that the fact we despise them only because they're not true is a prejudice too (in which we value "truth" more than "falsehood", even when it will hurt hs in the long run). To prove that he does something new: he rethinks from scratch the human existence, using the phisiological aspect of living as the basis for his thought. Keep in mind that, in his mind, all he says is still pure speculation with NO basis. He takes it seriously, but with a smile on his face, always ready to destroy it, reshape it and eventually overcome it.

He is a actual nihilst who not only rejects the fact that all meanings are false, but also the fact that this falsehood is, ultimately, insignificant, fictional, and from then on he build a new system based on entirely arbitrary principles, while being honest about said arbitrariety: it's what every other philosopher, scientist and artist have done so far, after all.

His stance is anti-nihilistic but he doesn't manage to solve anything.

Nihilism won.

>His framework is inherently nihilistic

No it's not. He just has his own idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes nihilism.

Traditional nihilism would say that life has no intrinsic value, but Nietzsche argues that nihilism are actually values that are life-denying and otherwordly, because nihilism is the direct consequence of the historical evolution of Christian slave morality to the present day.

When Nietzsche talks about nihilism, he is talking about people being gripped by one perspective out of a million and not that it is actually true.

He says in the Gay Science that having a shitty life, getting sick, or all manner of other suffering need not necessitate nihilism in the individual because there are people who live shitty lives but they don't turn nihilistic.

So what's the difference then between the actual nihilist and the person who lives a shit life but doesn't succumb to nihilism?

The difference really is perspective.

People in this thread actually saying that nihilism won. Nietzsche was right. He was a prophet. He won.

>Traditional nihilism would say that life has no intrinsic value
Isn't that existentialism?

he was a very conflicted man, a christian by belief and a nihilist rationally.

>a christian by belief
fucking how

>He just has his own idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes nihilism.

Nihilism is the belief in the absence of meaning: Nietzsche does not believe that meaning exist.
The fact that he still choses to assign meanings and values to certain things, events and phenomena does not change this framework: while doing so he is not postulating the existence of any of these things!

>but Nietzsche argues that nihilism are actually values that are life-denying and otherwordly
You're talking about traditional nihilism. I've already explicited the difference between these 2 school of thoughts: this point of yours is moot.
The nihilistic framework is the same for both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, what is different is the consequences that emerges from nihilism itself: in Nietzsche case the consequences are lively, ecstatic, aristocratic and life-affirming... still no trace of the existence of actual meaning.

>When Nietzsche talks about nihilism, he is talking about people being gripped by one perspective out of a million and not that it is actually true.

Yeah, I've told you so: he is talking about pessimists, and he was doing so because he lived in the second half or the XIX century in Germany. You're adopting an arbitrary definition for nihilism that makes sense only if you were to live in that historic period. Since we're living in the XXI century we can easily use the term without mistaking with some of its major proponents. Nihilism does NOT imply pessimism.

>He says in the Gay Science that having a shitty life, getting sick, or all manner of other suffering need not necessitate nihilism in the individual because there are people who live shitty lives but they don't turn nihilistic. So what's the difference then between the actual nihilist and the person who lives a shit life but doesn't succumb to nihilism?

Have you even read my post?

How can something that is life-affirming claim that life has no meaning. The act of affirmation means the asignment of positive value.

because he maintained christian values. You can sense through each single word how much he laments what he writes.

>Nihilism is the belief in the absence of meaning: Nietzsche does not believe that meaning exist.

How you can claim this beyond the illusion of originality is beyond me

How can you claim that meaning DOES exist?

Does life or the universe have any objective meaning?

You can express a preference for something without saying that it has value in a cosmic sense. Hell, many Christians will admit to having a preference for things that are sinful and have the opposite of cosmic value.

Life can be affirmed without having objective value.

You're gonna need to expand on that. He does indeed seem to have positive values, but those are grounded much more in the Greco-Roman tradition than the Judeo-christian.

There is no such thing as "objective". Those Christians you are talking about are just a bunch of hyporites. The cosmic values that they espouse are just traditional morality that he rejected. This morality is derived from external sources but it is not "objective" in the traditional sense.

Nietzsche didn't promote hedonism and the will to power is not hedonism at all - if anything it's anti-hedonist.

The will to power means self-overcoming. If you just give in to your sensual desires at every opportunity you are not overcoming anything. He also straight up once said "Man does not live for pleasure. Only an Englishman does that" in reference to utilitarianism, but it's also applicable to hedonism.

I don't think people on an IB are going to find cracks in Nietzsche thought
let's be real guys, he is very well respected for having consistency on all of his ideas and it's generally accepted that he was against nihilism.

Even if his life was shit, that's not the point. He had an illness and was very frail. What people discuss are his ideas, his framework, not the person.

Yes. If anything The Last Man is a hedonist.

>There are no facts.

Is this not simply a hyperbolic iteration of his more sensible idea that there are no BARE facts?

Also, Nietzsche is not a nihilist. He articulated the possibility of a nihilistic culture/society arising out of trends he saw in history. He defied people to be radically creative in the face of this possibility. He awaited new myths.

true, but in the utilitarian way

you'd never see the last man doing blow and bareback fucking teenage girls to electronic music, their instinct for conservation is too strong

I'm the last man and I do all those things.

nobody is the last man, we haven't arrived there yet

Aren't you confusing Christianity with spirituality in general? Christians aren't the only ones entitled to be nice persons.

Not that user, but, no, I wouldn't think so. You're probably thinking of the proposition "existence precedes essence", which simply put is the idea that man shapes his own essence out of existence. There is some crossover, but I still think your statement is dodgy.

>drops his lantern
>"I come too soon"

And we never will.

The Ubermensch is here, and his name is Lil B.

he's not talking about the last man there though

the name last man means exactly what it sounds like, it's the last man, who is so spiritually degenerated but simultaneously clever that nothing else can come from him because he became too comfy to ever leave that state

when you get there it's too late to fix it

I do not claim this. I claim that YOUR claim that Nietzsche did not believe in meaning is wrong. If there is anything unequivocally obvious from his writing, then it's that.

Simply put doesn't this mean that value is subjective because things have no objective value.
While nihilism would be more like if things have no objective value they we can't say they have value at all.
I.e. existentialism is more individualistic because it acknowledges subjective value.

>How can something that is life-affirming claim that life has no meaning.
All meanings we attribute to life are made up and, as far as we know, they don't refer to anything real at all (this is something Nietzsche said in all of his books, finding proofs for this is easy, there are 2 of them in the quotes OP mentioned), still, for some reason, pessimists still find themselves unable of defeating one of the final prejudices: that one should always strive for "truth" and that every belief should be rooted in objectivity.

Nietzsche says that the fact that all meanings may as well be false (he was skeptic of his own skepticism) does not mean that they are necessarily "bad", in fact there is no such thing as "bad" per-se.
On this premise, which is that the pursuit for truth and goodness of the Western philosophers was entirely arbitrary, he builds his new philosophical system, which is arbitrary from its first step, and which always recognizes his own arbitrariety (there is no trace of dogmatism in Nietzsche's thought but the only arbitrary premises he choses: the Will to Power).
It's a extremely nuanced take on nihilism. Of course, when it comes to define Nietzsche as a nihilist, one should not associate this word to its agents (the nihilist movements in our history), instead he should associate this word with the abstract stance linked to it: the belief of the non-existence of meaning.

>The act of affirmation means the asignment of positive value.
This is a prejudice, Nietzsche would call ut a "extra-moral" interpretation. The non-existence of value bears in itself no consequence: it is neither a positive or a negative thing, and it can be approached with any sort of mood and outlook. Nietzsche assigning values to certain things (and this judgement, as you already know, entirely depends on the will and the criteria or excellence of every individual) does not mean that he believes that these values actually exist in a other-wordly, metaphysical dimension.

Finding proofs for this nihilistic framework in Nietzsche's system is trivial, finding examples of the contrary is borderline impossible. Nietzsche's nihilism (look above to see what nihilism actually means, since you guys are all conflatic this epistemological stance with the works of 19th century pessimists) is present in literally everyone of his works, I honestly can't see how you did miss that.

Dudebro, I wasn't being all that serious with you. I'm sure your Nietzsche chops are just fine, worry not. Stop pretending we're having a conversation.

>according to my personal definition of nihilism Nietzsche is a nihilist
So much for objective values.

I'm not sure how to reply to what you've said here. I would say that comparing nihilism to existentialism is problematic in more straightforward ways. Firstly, existentialism is a far broader term than nihilism. In fact, it's mostly used to categorize a certain strain of philosophy than it is to denote a way of life.

Nihilism, on the other, especially in terms of Nietzsche's use of the word, characterizes a certain response (or lack thereof) to life.

I just feel that comparing them so directly treats them like it's comparing, say, 'pear' to 'apple', when in fact it's more like comparing 'vegetation' to 'apple'.

He's a nihilist anti-nihilist

o-okay

That is literally the definition of nihilism, I was just trying to separate the term "nihilism" from the idea you've got in your head about nihilist philosophers you've read.

this
he was a sore, delusional loser
and his philosophy is for delusional losers

Let me get this straight.
If I believe that objects exists but that they have no inherent value outside of the one perceived by the subject does that make me a nihilist.
Because if so I think a lot of people are nihilists.

>If I believe that objects exists but that they have no inherent value outside of the one perceived by the subject does that make me a nihilist.

Yes: you don't believe in the existence of neither value or meaning.

>Because if so I think a lot of people are nihilists.
Duh?
Still, I'd say that most people don't even know about this question at all: not many people ask themselves metaphysical questions of this caliber. If this was the case philosophers would be some of the richest individuals in every nation.

The little I read about him makes him seem like an autist user. Is there any recommended (neutral) biography on him?

>I'd say that most people don't even know about this question at all
It's just about intuitive perception of the world. If you asked the average person just really simple questions like that they could have answered them relatively easily without thinking too much.
For example I don't think that anyone who was honest would have answered "No" to the questions "Does the world exist?", "Do you exist?" or "Is being alive good?", but few people would be so edgy as to say "What is good for me is automatically good for other people." or "What is bad for me is automatically bad for other people." outside of a complete strawman situation.
Which means that most people with common sense will acknowledge that values are subjective. Which means that most people with common sense are in fact nihilists.
Am I wrong?

He actually had lots of friends in tons of different cities, and apparently everyone considered him extremely charming and well-mannered.
He just had to spend in isolation cause of his sickness, intense studying and creative purposes.
Hell, this guy, while still a nobody, managed to charme Wagner at the top of its fame (which was monumental, he was one of the most famous and celebrated artists in the West).

Also became a professor at like 24. They didn't even have him write a thesis.

>It's just about intuitive perception of the world.

Yet this is not a universal condition: in more religious times, like the ones in which Nietzsche lived, there was an actual, collective faith in concepts such as "God", "good" and "truth". Our history of philosophy is, after all, a proof of this phenomenon, unless you want to speculate that none of the great metaphysician of our tradition actually believed in what they were writing.

>For example I don't think that anyone who was honest would have answered "No" to the questions "Does the world exist?", "Do you exist?" or "Is being alive good?", but few people would be so edgy as to say "What is good for me is automatically good for other people." or "What is bad for me is automatically bad for other people." outside of a complete strawman situation.

I was not implying that they do not think this way, my implication instead was that very few people have actually analyzed the nature of their belief: my grandma, a very nice, uneducated person, will surely tell you that something that appear to her as good is good, yet she probably won't have strong arguments for such a judgement.
This is why I think these people are not even nihilist: most people never really analyze and dissect what "good" actually means to them, and what its related belief implies (and more in general how his belief operates).

>but few people would be so edgy as to say "What is good for me is automatically good for other people." or "What is bad for me is automatically bad for other people." outside of a complete strawman situation.
Do we live in the same world? These beliefs are held and shown costantly, in different spectrums: some people are dogmatic and have a rigid outlook on how a life should be lived, others instead have just some objections (don't ever try meth!), usually based on their common sense, which is not something based on anything objective.

>Which means that most people with common sense will acknowledge that values are subjective. Which means that most people with common sense are in fact nihilists.
Not true, most people will assign to certain exagerated acts a value that they won't ever question.
Something like casual sex would be seen as some sort of neutral territory, killing innocent people instead will be categorically defined as wrong by most people, and if you get them to examine this belief chances are that rather than saying "this belief is arbitrary" they'll end up developing systems to justify and crystallize this belief in the collective consciousness.
After all, to this day, most academic philosophers still believe in the existence of a metaphysical world, and most people, globally, are still religious to some degree.

>Do we live in the same world?
Yeah. That is why I said "outside of a strawman situation". It's only natural that nobody will say "Oh, well. Killing people is ok. Just not my sort of thing." But no one will say "Ice-cream is the best. Death for anyone who doesn't like ice-cream." unless they really, really like ice-cream in an intimate sort of way. What I mean to say is that people get pretty touchy about moral values in particular for reasons that I kind of intuitively understand but that might be outside of the scope of our current discussion. Or are they?

Also, I don't see why people need to have arguments to give an opinion. Why does it matter if people realize they are nihilists or not if that is what they are in effect?

Not that I agree with your definition of nihilism.
So if nihilism is the rejection of objective values, how do you call the rejection of subjective values?

>and apparently everyone considered him extremely charming and well-mannered.

Was the story about him visiting a brothel where he too autist to engage in the activities and he just played the piano there instead true?

Didn't he also have a negative /r9k/-style view of women?

>most people never really analyze and dissect what "good" actually means to them
Oh, and on a side note, how do you analyze what "good" means. It's just a visceral feeling. It has no inherent meaning. It can be explained from biological perspective but that's about all.

Why didn't he have gf?

>Didn't he also have a negative /r9k/-style view of women?
Not really but in some ways. For one thing he doesn't share /r9k/'s views on sex and wouldn't have seen anything wrong with women just having loads and loads of sex with the best men available whilst the rest get nothing. He would rightly identify the lions share of /r9k/'s misogyny as being pure resentment.

But at the same time as far as he was concerned women were just inferior and only really fit to be baby-making machines/sexual playthings for men.

Why didn't Newton have a gf?
Why didn't Kant have a gf?

Not everyone gets aroused by sex

>Not everyone gets aroused by sex
So much for objective values.

Nietzsche clearly did though on the count he died of syphilis and tried to pursue a romantic relationship at one point.

Stop. Nietzsche is pure.

I remember reading somewhere that Newton was at least a little disappointed in not being laid (and not having a significant other).

Don't know about Kant.

You write like you never read a book in your life and watch booktubers like an idiot.

>Why didn't he have gf?

tfw too intelligent to have gf

Kant was 5'0/152cm.

Can plebs stop talking about Nietzsche? Nihilism is not a belief system, it is the decisive event of modernity. Whether or not people believe in anything is irrelevant, as he says in WTP #2, the highest values devalue themselves. The foundation for nihilism was prepared in the creation of values, the only thing we can do is recognize the decline of values and respond to it passively or actively.

Shut up, faggot

Your first quote touches more on relativism than nihilism

>But no one will say "Ice-cream is the best. Death for anyone who doesn't like ice-cream." unless they really, really like ice-cream in an intimate sort of way.

So? That was my point: people being arbitrary does not mean that they're arbitrary about everything, I've eves said it in this passage:

>some people are dogmatic and have a rigid outlook on how a life should be lived, others instead have just some objections (don't ever try meth!), usually based on their common sense, which is not something based on anything objective.
Trivial preferencea are not held to any sort of scrutiny by most people: it's not in these cases that they will force their worldview on you.

>What I mean to say is that people get pretty touchy about moral values in particular for reasons that I kind of intuitively understand but that might be outside of the scope of our current discussion. Or are they?
They are, and this discussion is rarely approached. This is why I said most people don't even know if they're nihilists.

>Also, I don't see why people need to have arguments to give an opinion. Why does it matter if people realize they are nihilists or not if that is what they are in effect?
I haven't said that everyone has to have this conversation, I was just responding to a question of yours on wether most people are nihilist or not.

>Not that I agree with your definition of nihilism.
You don't think that nihilism is the belief on non-existence of meaning?

>So if nihilism is the rejection of objective values, how do you call the rejection of subjective values?
A rejection of your subjective values implies a rejection of objective ones, or at the very least implies that said objective values are not available to your knowledge, which is either nihilism, in the former case, or extreme skepticism, in the latter.

>can you stop equating the word nihilism woth its actual definition? Can you start equating with the idea of nihilism I've got from reading other nihilist thinkers?
No, of course.

>the only thing we can do is recognize the decline of values and respond to it passively or actively.
In BGE Nietzsche defines a healthy kind of nihilism (he uses Friedrich Wilhelm I as an example) and then openly states that philosophers should all adopt the same kind of skepticism (which is the one has always adopted). Read N. more, stop conflating the term "nihilism" with either pessimists or idiots on reddit.

>But at the same time as far as he was concerned women were just inferior and only really fit to be baby-making machines/sexual playthings for men.

You should make a distinction between the term "woman" and the term "female". When Nietzsche says that women who choose career over a having children are "manfunctioning", he means that they're choice goes directly against the "woman" construction: if you choose to do so you should find another model for yourself, since this comtradiction is impossible to resolve.
It's like wanting to be a mathematician but wanting to study only 20 minutes everyday: clearly your priorities are all messed up, and you're not taking the precautions necessary for you to realize your will.

Still people are not even equally rigorous about any of their values. People can also grow more or less rigorous about certain values depending on their experience.
Does this mean then that we can then argue that some values are more "objective" that others, or that a value can grow more or less "objective".
Our perception of something strenghtens with the intensity of our visceral reaction.
If I perceive an object as fully existing in reality independently of my conscious agency then I'd have no choice but to accept it's existance. If I became aware that other people don't perceive it as I do wouldn't change the subjective reality of my personal experience.
If I couldn't perceive color the conscious awareness that other people do woudn't make me less convinced of the reality of my personal experience or that my perception of the world is less valid or valuable than that of other people.
But why do you equate "existence" with "objectivity".
The fact that values are subjective doesn't mean that they don't "exist".

>Still people are not even equally rigorous about any of their values.
I've said it in my last 3 posts, with no exception...
>Does this mean then that we can then argue that some values are more "objective" that others, or that a value can grow more or less "objective"?

The virtual totality of Western philosophers in history argued for that. Still, that's beyond my point: my starting point (it was actually a deviation on a post of mine in which I explained why N. is a nihilist) was not that most people are nihilist or metaphysical realist, what I said was that most people don't ever come close to this question at all. You could say that none of them are nihilist, but would that be true? How many of them would end up saying, for example, that morals, ethics, epistemology, even history, are just made up concept with no relationship with the real world (like Nietzsche affirmed, costantly)? Very few people would hold such a position as an absolute: many middle grounds will be relegated to subjectivity, but certain actions will always be deemed as inherently unethical by virtually everyone you will ever meet (at least in Western countries). People are more dogmatic than you moght think, you just have to realise that dogmatism is not a flaw in itself.

>Our perception of something strenghtens with the intensity of our visceral reaction.
Again, this is just something you're saying, and in this belief it's implied the fact that you think that most philosophers in history simply lied about their theories. Too bad that people like Kant actually believed in what they were saying, and they were certainly not reducing it to a phisiological phenomenon, like you (and Nietzsche) are doing. Kant was not a nihilist, Nietzsche certainly was.

>If I couldn't perceive color the conscious awareness that other people do woudn't make me less convinced of the reality of my personal experience or that my perception of the world is less valid or valuable than that of other people.

This is a very flawed line of reasoning, which should not hold ground in any philosophical debate: you should not derive arbitrarily your epistemology from random people around you, and it's even worse when you do it with both morals and ethics. The collective moral and ethical system is way too vague for you to actually derive something from it, and even then, there is always the chance that those few things you can derive from your environment are actually wrong.
As we've seen earlier most people hold perfectly unexamined beliefs anyway.

>The fact that values are subjective doesn't mean that they don't "exist".
Do they refer to anything real, at all? If they're subjective, chances are that you're mistaking them with narratives, illusions and delusions.
And are you sure you have any grip on the concept of subject? Do you know enough about the subject to infer anything on the origin of said values? Nietzsche does not even believe in the existence of the subject, by the way.

>So... is Nietzsche a nihilist or not?

Pretty much.

>Nietzsche

Poor man's Stirner

Stirner is a poor man's Nietzsche.

He was. But where pessimists like Schopenhauer saw nothingness and despair, N-god saw the opportunity to create. Nihilistic freedom can be overpowering, you need strength to create and maintain belief knowing it is based on nothing but your own will. Life is a struggle, but stick to your guns and carry through.

based diego

No, he's not a Nihilist, learn what Nihilism is.

Ok, but really though. Nietzsche is a poor man's Stirner.

What little he says was already said better by Stirner and even then the dumbass comes to spooked conclusions anyway.

Nietzsche is babby's first philosopher. There's a reason why shitty bookstories with a philosophy section will always have only self-help books and NEETzsche.

>reading continental "philosophy"
What do you expect? Clear consistency?

>and in this belief it's implied the fact that you think that most philosophers in history simply lied about their theories
In what way? I just think that everybody's line of logical reasoning starts at their intuitive perceptions of reality. Even if I choose to disagree with the validity of the interpretations of those perceptions I am not denying the reality of the perceptions themselves. I guess it's a bit more complicated from that because I have no way of knowing if their perceptions are similar to mine or not in order to criticize their interpretation but it's my intuitive understanding that they are to a significant degree. In order to be able of any sort of reasoning I need to make at least some axiomatic assumptions like that.
I don't think that way of thinking is that different from Kant's even though I am not an expert.

>and it's even worse when you do it with both morals and ethics
But ethics and "collective morals" are entirely based on our awareness of other people's conscious agency.

>chances are that you're mistaking them with narratives, illusions and delusions.
If those narratives and illusions are consistent with my intuitive understanding of what reality is then they are effectively real.

>morals, ethics, epistemology, even history, are just made up concept with no relationship with the real world like Nietzsche affirmed, constantly
>Nietzsche does not even believe in the existence of the subject
Those feel like exaggerated accounts of what he actually said but I could be wrong.

Nihilism
>There is no objective/intrinsic morality/meaning to anything.

How did neetszche contradict this.

I grew up reading Nietzsche and it took me years to see through his "philosophy". Lukacs, better than anyone else, sums up what's wrong about it:

marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm

Wouldn't this simply mean that we can't -as humans- surpass or transcend over the moral facts?

>marxists.org
This time, I'm going to shoot the messenger and all his family shall be sent to Siberian plains. We shall teach them; tomorrow is only a social construction. Enjoy your freedom.

Sam Harris is the last man.

Something is telling me you barely know what you're talking about.

>marxists.org

In the plains, the only difference between heaven and earth is a line. Alas, you can not cross it.
Tomorrow is a social construction, though. This is an undeniable fact. I want to take it from people. Then they should learn.

christcucks actually believe this

Left wrist Clinton (Swag)
Right Hand Clinton
Monica Lewinski (Lewinski)
Everybody love me (Swag)

I knew it was a /leftypol/ meme.

In a nutshell:

Nietzsche’s philosophy performed the ‘social task’ of ‘rescuing’ and ‘redeeming’ this type of bourgeois mind. It offered a road which avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the bourgeoisie. It was a road whereby the pleasant moral feeling of being a rebel could be sustained and even intensified, whilst a ‘more thorough’, ‘cosmic biological’ revolution was enticingly projected in contrast to the ‘superficial’, ‘external’ social revolution. A ‘revolution’, that is, which would fully preserve the bourgeoisie’s privileges, and would passionately defend the privileged existence of the parasitical and imperialist intelligentsia first and foremost.

>and would passionately defend the privileged existence of the parasitical and imperialist intelligentsia first and foremost.
sounds like pure resentment to me
thankfully the marxists all lost, because their ideology is for losers

>because their ideology is for losers
No, it's because their ideology is dysfunctional and against winners - like facts and God.

>against winners
same thing

it's the slave workers realizing they're all too personally inferior to make it to the top of the social ladder or to tear it down and make a new one, so they just throw out the concept of ladders altogether

Alexander Gordon Jahans is the Last Man

>2017
>Unironically linking to a ressentiment-ridden Leftie

A rivalry with a winner is winning. Competition, chivalry. That sort of thing. Too bad that's probably a social construct, ergo. a spook.

lunacharsky was a nietzscheboo and under his rule as cultural minister there was at least something resembling an avantgarde. lukacs' doctrines didnt contribute to anything worthwhile.

As Emerson says, "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Nietzsche's philosophy changed and shifted with time. He made many claims that he would eventually contradict. Again, one does not wake up one morning and decide to adopt nihilism, rather, as Heidegger argues, nihilism is the destination of the West. It is an event in which all values devalue themselves, regardless of what you believe. Nietzsche thinks that one must first confront it and accept it's weight, but then go beyond it and become forgetful, like a child, so that one may redeem one's freedom from metaphysics and nihilism.