/lit/ - Literature

Can you be a Christian and a Nietzschean?

Do I have to read Kant to understand Nietzsche or can I jump straight in? I have Kaufman's portable Nietzsche library, a general background reading of Nietzsche's themes and ideas, reading of Evola and the works of Homer along with some other light philosophical backing

Or would it be more advisable to read the First Philosophers/Stirner/Carlyle/ Origin of the Species(Survival of the fittest) etc

>makes Stoics seethe
>makes Platonists seethe
>makes Christians seethe
>makes Zionists seethe
>makes anarchists seethe
>makes Russell seethe
>makes Chesterton seethe
>makes Girard seethe
>Hitler loved him
>Japan loves him
>Jesus would have loved him
Name a more based philosopher.

From Daybreak, aphorism 206.

1/3

>The impossible class.—Poverty, cheerfulness, and independence—it is possible to find these three qualities combined in one individual; poverty, cheerfulness, and slavery—this is likewise a possible combination: and I can say nothing better to the workmen who serve as factory slaves; presuming that it does not appear to them altogether to be a shameful thing to be utilised as they are, as the screws of a machine and the stopgaps, as it were, of the human spirit of invention. Fie on the thought that merely by means of higher wages the essential part of their misery, i.e. their impersonal enslavement, might be removed! Fie, that we should allow ourselves to be convinced that, by an increase of this impersonality within the mechanical working of a new society, the disgrace of slavery could be changed into a virtue! Fie, that there should be a regular price at which a man should cease to be a personality and become a screw instead! Are you accomplices in the present madness of nations which desire above all to produce as much as possible, and to be as rich as possible? Would it not be your duty to present a counter-claim to them, and to show them what large sums of internal value are wasted in the pursuit of such an external object?

>>15326526
>In contemporary society a great deal of consideration, of tact and forbearance, of good-natured respect for the rights of others, even for the claims of others, is quite widespread; even more, a certain benevolent instinctive estimation of human value in general, which finds expression in trustfulness and credit of all kinds. Respect for man—and not merely for virtuous men—is perhaps what divides us most sharply from a Christian evaluation. It seems to us ironic to a degree when we still hear morals preached; a man lowers himself in our eyes and becomes comical if he preaches morals. This moral liberality is one of the best signs of our age. When we discover cases in which it is noticeably lacking, this strikes us as a kind of sickness (the case of Carlyle in England, the case of Ibsen in Norway, the case of Schopenhauerian pessimism throughout Europe). If anything can reconcile us to our age, it is the great amount of immorality it permits itself without thinking any the worse of itself. On the contrary! What constitutes the superiority of culture over unculture? of the Renaissance over the Middle Ages, for example?—One thing alone: the great amount of admitted immorality. From this it follows of necessity what all the heights of human evolution must represent to the eye of the moral fanatic: the non plus ultra of corruption (—consider Savonarola's judgment of Florence, Plato's judgment of Periclean Athens, Luther's judgment of Rome, Rousseau's judgment of Voltaire's society, the German judgment contra Goethe).

>In great men, the specific qualities of life—injustice, falsehood, exploitation—are at their greatest. But in so far as they have had an overwhelming effect, their essence has been most misunderstood and interpreted as goodness. Type: Carlyle as interpreter.

From Will to Power.

Is there a more misinterpreted author out there? 100% of the people who have a problem with the things he wrote don't realize that he didn't intend to be read by anyone other than leading theorists (aka other philosophers) and 99% of the people who think he wrote for them lack the same realization.

How do you become what you are? What did Nietzsche mean by it?