/lit/ - Literature

His main basis for saying that Christianity is a religion of ressentiment is providing more plausible psychological explanations for its supernatural claims.

To get on board with anything Nietzsche is doing, you NEED to accept the premise that peoples' values are rooted ultimately in their psychology and their experiences in the world. Nietzsche never proved this premise but for a fairly committed atheist it is somewhat self evidence.

Start from premise A: Sometimes people conceal their real, hostile intentions with sugar coating appearances of kindness or of "better worlds."

Add premise B: Assuming they ARE trying to preach a 'gospel of love', the writers of the bible drop their masks pretty damned often; apocalypse of John, all the lake of fire stuff, that quote by Jesus where he says virtue will lead to wealth being "added on to you."

Nietzsche provides textual bases for all of these and I think it's quite damning to the claim that Christianity is a religion of love per se

To be fair, Christ never really claimed to be preaching a gospel of love in the simple sense. He was clear that he was bringing war of some kind. But the "religion of love" thing is a huge part of Christianity's "marketing campaign" shall we say and to the extent that he has provided plausible, less seemly motives for Christians behaving as they do, he has succeeded in casting doubt on that.

This reminds me. I recently finished On the Genealogy of Morality and in it Nietzsche quotes Aquinas in the Summa Theologica saying that people in heaven will witness the punishments of the damned to make heaven more enjoyable. Was that legit?

>>6743065
I have a hard time believing it's not considering the parable of the wealthy man and his servant and the debt.

>>6743085
That was Tertullian, not Aquinas

>>6743092
I must be confusing things.

>>6743097
That's the quote I'm referencing in the OP

>>6743106
Yea I realized that now. Fuck I'm stupid.

>>6743097
you don't

>>6743092
the latin paragraphs after that aquinas quote were from tertullian

>>6743065
I think Nietzsche simplifies human beings to people driven by fear

I know that I personally do actions not out of fear, or a desire for power (power which N thinks helps to remove fear), but just out of the desire to help others.

N never seems to address the possibility that there can be a motive other than fear

>>6743110
So it was Aquinas?

>>6743123
are you really this much of a shallow thinker dude? you like helping others because you're excersizing power over them...duh

>>6743127
do I need to spell out everything for you? yes

>>6743123
Kek what Nietzsche did you read

>>6743110
Yes, those are the ones actually describing taking sadistic pleasure. The quote from Aquinas is part of a paragraph where Aquinas is just saying people in heaven will be thankful they're there rather than hell. Augustine says God continues to love those in hell, and part of the hell is their inability to love him back.

>>6743133
Beyond Good and Evil
Genealogy of Morals

>>6743130
Nietzsche likes to simplify it like that sure, he might even argue that acts of "pure goodwill" are merely vestigal. the remnants of acts out of self-interest that we've deluded ourselves into believing they are out of goodwill.

but its not satisfactory for me. even at my very core i feel that i would rather others not feel pain etc. even if it has nothing to do with me. maybe N would say I haven't gone deep enough into my soul to examine the true root of my actions, but that seems hollow and weak

>>6743134
I might add the idea of a fiery pit for the immoral was common enough with the Greeks too, and Aristotle says the idea was popularized by Pythagoras.

>>6743123
>I think Nietzsche simplifies human beings to people driven by fear
Link to specific aphorisms, I've never read that in Nietzsche.

>just out of the desire to help others.
There is no "desire-to-help-others-in-itself".

>N never seems to address the possibility that there can be a motive other than fear
u fkn w0ttt m88

>>6743146
>even at my very core i feel that i would rather others not feel pain etc. even if it has nothing to do with me.

Their pain pains you. It's self interest to fix their problems.

>>6743123
Yeah, that's what Milbank's criticism of Nietzsche is (and all secular thought). That it ultimately revolves around an ontology of violence introduced by Hobbes (Machiavelli's was an ontology of "fortune"). There was also an ontology of Mammon introduced, and then one of sex (or seduction). But he says secular thought can't escape these ontologies no matter how hard it tries.

>>6743151
Except the Greeks already had hell, where everyone went. Achilles says in the Odyssey he would "rather have been on earth, the slave of a day-laborer without ressources, that amongst these consumed shadows" --- their hell wasn't chill at all.

>>6743159
>Memebank

>>6743160
they had levels of hell..........

and achilles saying that was because he hated that action was meaningless in hell, not because he was burning or in great pain (beyond the anguish of being meaningless in hell)

>>6743159
>all those voluntary misreadings

>>6743157
ok......

so this is just the dumb argument that because everything good you do is done BY YOU it must in some way be FOR YOU (if there was another option which you preferred you BY DEFINITION would have taken it). ok i accept that, if thats N's argument, good for him. he didnt accomplish very much.......

>>6743160
That's Hades, very different from what I'm talking about, which is closer to Tartarus. Except Pythagoras didn't call it that, and conceived of it as an actual fiery pit that a lot of people go to, instead of just some particular bad seeds in mythology.

>>6743165
Christian "hells" (as there are many versions) do not necessarily include fire, --- especially not as the same punishment.

Achilles' version of hell could fit pretty well in one of Dante's contrapassi.

>>6743174
He's just demonstrating that altruism is a myth.

>>6743167
Milbank is actually coming from an argument that Nietzsche has been intentionally misread a lot in mainstream to dull his right-wing tendency. I'd say Milbank's reading is far from delusional. even though Milbank was quite influenced by Nietzsche, and employs genealogical method with secularism, capitalism and liberalism.

>>6743174
Read him, instead of posting worthless tripe.

>>6743177
Achilles went to the hell of lust the Divine Comedy, but the Hades he's in in the Odyssey most closely resembles Dante's Limbo where virtuous non Christians go, including the Muslims and pagans.

>>6743183
I don't know about Millbanks at all, but trying to boil Nietzsche down to an ontology of violence does not appears to me as demonstrating more probity than Heidegger seeing Nietzsche as the ultimate metaphysician.

>>6743160
it wasn't hell because there is no heaven to compare it against...it was just the afterlife. you must have read some really pathetic christianity infused translation if you thought that was "hell"

>>6743183
I'd agree with his claim about the intentional misreadings in the mainstream; but that has been the case with Nietzsche since the BoT and HTH, when he was already being misread on purpose, by anarchists and socialists...

People can't digest the whole of his thought, and would rather pretend they haven't read something like the third aphorism from The Antichrist than actually consider it, and think on it.

Tallis do you disagree with Nietzsche on any topic?

none of that irrelevant shit either, do you disagree on anything significant?

>>6743192
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium
pls read

>>6743206
which is where Achilles was

>>6743208
Not in the Odyssey :^)

>>6743190
Milbank also thinks Heidegger's right-wing tendencies are inextricably linked with his philosophy, and that too was muddled by thinkers who wanted to excise the politics.

Milbank's major contention is that Nietzsche only conceived of power through strength, and Nietzsche's idea of strength is fixated with capacity for violence. Milbank actually sees merit in Nietzsche's ideas on power, but thinks Nietzsche's conception of power is rather limited by secularism.

>Because he conceived of a new sort of ‘giving’ virtue that acted nonreactively out of the plenitude of power, St Paul, as Alain Badiou has pointed out, was already more Nietzschean than Nietzsche. He refused the idea that goodness begins in a weak ‘resistance’ to evil (this is why, for him, nomos cannot redeem), whereas Nietzsche failed to see that even the affirmation of the strong over the hordes of the weak was a mode of ‘weak’ resistance to weakness. St Paul also realized that a true metaphysics of power must entail a primacy of unthreatened peace, and of the collective over the individual, since only a reciprocal ‘weak’ receptivity will build a real, shared strength.

>>6743211
he is the first ruler of the dead after Hades

he rules over heracles, ajax etc.

it was elysium

>>6743218
>Nietzsche's idea of strength is fixated with capacity for violence

Holy shit, that is completely wrong.

>>6743218
>only conceived of power through strength, and Nietzsche's idea of strength is fixated with capacity for violence.

A "will to power is a will to be-able-to; that is, that all life exists as an effect on its surroundings, and that the capacity of producing an effect on your environment is power, and the will to power, the most intimate essence of being, means to further affirm your existence.

This reading of Nietzsche is strictly "physical" --- as in physical violence --- and only consider the possible political applications of his thought, not the core of what power meant to Nietzsche.

>>6743229
"will to power"*
only considers*

>>6743218
As to the rest of this stuff, as in

>Nietzsche failed to see that even the affirmation of the strong over the hordes of the weak was a mode of ‘weak’ resistance to weakness

This kind of shit is just language games, literally some of the greatest lack of intellectual probity I've ever seen.

>>6743229
No, an "ontology of violence" is far more than physical violence, it means force in general

>from the outset the secular is complicit with an ‘ontology of violence’, a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter-force. Secular reason has continued to make this ontology seem coterminous with the discovery of the human construction of the cultural world; I seek to demonstrate that the latter is a distinct thesis and that human construction does not necessarily mark out an autonomous human space. It was made to do so by Hobbes, but other early modern thinkers construe human making as an opening to transcendence, so inaugurating a kind of ‘counter-modernity’ which later, through the writings of Vico, Hamann, Herder, Coleridge, Kierkegaard and Blondel, continues to shadow actual, secular modernity.

>>6743237
But that's not language games at all. Nietzsche doesn't make weakness a quality of "bad", but makes it "bad" itself/. Nietzsche doesn't transform the struggle from good vs. evil to good vs. bad, so much as strong vs. weak, and positions strong as fighting a losing battle and eventually succumbing to weak.

>>6743242
Continuing this, strong becomes and underdog which must fight against the weak dominating it, though it is too weak to do so.

>>6743242
It is useless to attempt to understand Nietzsche in a systematic way like this; the only result is that you will always have someone to bring up an aphorism that destroys your argument, --- when your man says the affirmation of the strong over the weak is a weak resistance, he implies Nietzsche ever talked about resistance; yet I could link (and I shall) you to the 51st chapter of Zarathustra.

Thus spake Zarathustra. Then did he look on the great city and sighed, and was long silent. At last he spake thus:

I loathe also this great city, and not only this fool. Here and there—there is nothing to better, nothing to worsen.

Woe to this great city!—And I would that I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed!

For such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. But this hath its time and its own fate.—

This precept, however, give I unto thee, in parting, thou fool: Where one can no longer love, there should one—pass by!—

Thus spake Zarathustra, and passed by the fool and the great city.

>>6743252
Nietzsche didn't mention resistance, yet that is exactly where Nietzsche is coming from with the concept of going under.

>>6743257
What? The Untergang?

Nietzsche there is literally saying Zarathustra has to descend amongst men, where he will try to spread his thought, --- yet Zarathustra goes back to his mountain!

And what is the cry of the Superior Men (Part 4), if not the exact refutation of your man's argument; Zarathustra refuses to endorse the war of the strong against the weak, and decides to be solitary, and celebrate himself.

>>6743252
Then does he say anything definitive at all?

Every thread on Nietzsche is like this. Every time someone criticizes him, someone else says that the criticizer has misread him. Everyone asserts that 'what Nietzsche really said' can't be subjected to the criticism of the false reading.

So in that case, here's my criticism: if Nietzsche is so easily misread, he's useless. He should be ejected from the lineage of philosophers and grouped in with the poets and the mystics, like Spenser and John of the Cross.

>>6743263
But that's not an ultimate end for Nietzsche, it is simply a place for transformation, as per Genealogy. The end is to transform one's world in accordance with one's values.

>>6743267
Nietzsche is a Bible without a Church. Nietzsche has become the Protestantism of philosophy.

>>6743267

>>6743274
This

>>6743274
And then you make this bitch move, saying that not understanding him is the point. Unbelievable. I'm calling you and every other Nietzsche adherent out. This is BULLSHIT. If you're not meant to understand him, then he has effectively said nothing.

>>6743274
He's literally just being silly. He also said people who are actually deep strive for clarity, it's those who aren't who seek to obscure their waters.

>>6743274
Nietzsche confirmed for inventing PoMo. Lacan is his true heir.

>>6743278
Heh, that's just what we want you to think friendo. ;)

Nietzsche is propped up by a bunch of french dudes who were able to use him to justify being intentionally obscure and writing poetic 'aphorisms' rather than using some sort of system or criterion to posit an argument.

A bunch of failed poets calling themselves philosophers.

>>6743278
>saying that not understanding him is the point.
I said that not understanding him, is because you haven't read him enough, and you haven't put enough time into it.

>>6743279
He did. But this aphorism I just quoted is also repeated as seriously in Ecce Homo.

Can anyone explain to me what this passage from Beyond Good and Evil means?

8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery:

Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.
(Translation: The ass arrives, beautiful and most brave.)

>>6743288

2deep4ur autism?

>>6743303
Nietzsche was an anti-foundationalist. He criticized all past philosophy for founding itself on convictions that are believed though a sort of faith.

>>6743278

The way I see it, the quote speak pretty clearly about esoteric elitism - one makes his message purposefully obscure in order to communicate his ideas only to the brightest and leave the rest in ignorance.

To be honest, I think the opposite is more of the case when it comes to the truly enlightening stuff. In the West, there is this notion that every idea can be clearly communicated, given sufficient amoung of time (pages). However, this presupposes that A) language is a perfect boolean tool (which it is not) and B) humans operate on a singular level of consciousnes (which they do not). In the East, they have cultivated the idea of 'growing' someone towards understanding (e.g. koans), which again is an ungraspable concept if one isn't grown towards understanding it. And what's more - knowledge not understood (or rather 'understood' incorrectly) can often cause serious harm.

I think (and I might be just an ignorant asshole for saying this) that the true esotericism (both in West and East) isn't a matter of choice or pleasure - rather it is a painful act of necessity and abnegative goodwill.

>>6743278
Having plebs like you not understand him is the point, not obscurity in of itself. He was also a great critic of obscurantism.

>>6743242
good vs. bad IS strong vs. weak. Consider strength not as a muscular image but as a spiritual one (note: spirit derives from psyche, the principle of the life-animating force).

>>6743151
Pythagoras, as the mystical fueling of Plato, and one of the seats of Grecian proto christian world-weariness, is already covered in Nietzsche's world view.

>>6743033
Nietzsche reveals his lightweight thinking by cursing anything he doesn't agree with as ressentiment when, in almost all cases, it's the opposite. When he talks about the Parisian Communards, for example, he ignores that it is the upper class's sickly ressentiment that lead them to revolt against the noble morality of the Commune. But he also conflates Christian socialism with Scientific socialism because it's convenient for him to everything into a tidy little place where he can attack it.

>>6743371
>good vs. bad IS strong vs. weak. Consider strength not as a muscular image but as a spiritual one (note: spirit derives from psyche, the principle of the life-animating force).
Nietzsche doesn't believe in spiritual strength, only strength to affect the material . It doesn't have to be muscular (it could be the sort of power Stalin had), but it's not spiritual, regardless of Nietzsche preferring to call it that.

>Pythagoras, as the mystical fueling of Plato, and one of the seats of Grecian proto christian world-weariness, is already covered in Nietzsche's world view.
Pythagoras's outlook is largely shaped by Greek religious called Orphism, which places Dionysus as the supreme God.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphism_(religion)

>>6743469
spiritual strength does affect the material insofar as spiritual strength allows one to have more power over themselves and a stronger will. Gaze upon this passage from The Antichrist with which I shall prove you are objectively wrong:

>In every healthy society, there can be distinguished three types of man of divergent physiological tendency which mutually condition one another and each of which possesses its own hygiene, its own realm of work, its own sort of mastery and feeling of perfection. Nature, /not/ Manu, separates from one another the predominantly spiritual type, the predominantly muscular and temperamental type, and the third type distinguished neither in the one nor the other, the mediocre type -- the last as the great majority, the first as the elite. [...] "The world is perfect" -- thus speaks the instinct of the most spiritual, the affirmative instinct -- : 'imperfection, everything /beneath/ us, distance between man and man, the pathos of this distance, the Chandala themselves pertain to this perfection'. The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct. They consider the hard task a privilege, to play with vices which overwhelm others a recreation ... Knowledge -- a form of asceticism. -- They are the most venerable kind of human being: this does not exclude their being the most cheerful, the most amiable. They rule not because they want to but because the /are/; they are not free to be second in rank.

Before anyone conjectures with "well I thought Nietzsche was against the ascetic", let me point to this: "in severity towards themselves >>and others<<". Nietzsche criticized the ascetic ideal in Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere because it affirms Truth over life and desire, not because it imbues harshness and teaches a man to work at his own perfection.

>Pythagoras's outlook is largely shaped by Greek religious called Orphism, which places Dionysus as the supreme God.
Read your own link:
>Orphic views and practices have parallels to elements of Pythagoreanism. There is, however, too little evidence to determine the extent to which one movement may have influenced the other.[14]

Pythagoras was about numbers being the absolute True world.

>>6743938
>Before anyone conjectures with "well I thought Nietzsche was against the ascetic", let me point to this: "in severity towards themselves >>and others<<". Nietzsche criticized the ascetic ideal in Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere because it affirms Truth over life and desire, not because it imbues harshness and teaches a man to work at his own perfection.
This is just about psychological strength, not spiritual strength. Pagans actually believed in an eternal spirit apart from the body, Nietzsche doesn't.

>Read your own link
The common shared elements of the Mysteries I'm referencing here, predates Pythagoras by about a thousand years. They are Thracian, and stem from them having Dionysus as an alternative master god as opposed to Zeus, but both gods ultimately stem back to the same Indo-European root god; the Greeks incorporated the Thracian god as a separate deity into their pantheon; the Greek hierarchy persisted in public worship, the Thracian one in the mysteries. The idea of eating and drinking the body of Dionysus---what you referred to as "proto-Christianity"--to gain eternal afterlife was there since before Greek civilization, and is inseparable from the Greek conception of Dionysus--who was, according to Macrobius, born on the 25th of December--Nietzsche was so fond of. The death and rebirth (in April) of Dionysus coincided with the vine season. So here Nietzsche is saying Plato and Pythagors and Christianity are extensions of the Apollonian tendencies, when in fact they were heavily influenced by Dionysus.

>Pythagoras was about numbers being the absolute True world.
He was about hieros (holy) logos being the true world, which is somewhat more sophisticated, since logos comes from word, not number (which is where reason comes from in Latin, ratio). Also important because logos is central to the philosophy of Heraclitus, which Nietzsche is infatuated with.

Let me just into Nietzsche at Birth of Tragedy: lets see here. Fuckin actors.

>>6743274
>mfw idiots think philosophers don't write esoterically

Really, how clearly must they spell it out?

>>6744354
esoteric is fine, usually because it allows for a higher degree of accuracy in what an idea is "not" as opposed to what it is.

However, the modern usage of esoteric is some kind of insult that people use to mean obfuscatory, or "pretentious".

esoteric writing is not obfuscatory writing, and its not necessarily bad. One criticize you can make of it is that sometimes authors want an audience hug-box when they write esoterically, but that does not speak to their ideas ultimately.

>>6743278
STEM-student Anglo detected.

Do you guys ever wonder whether whether you should give up your aggressive and overly competitive worldview and become a normalfag?

>>6744698
No

>>6744726
why not

>>6743167
What else would you expect from continental philosophy?

>>6743181
No one actually just values altruism, though. Everyone knows that already.

>>6744076
It's not simply psychological strength because the image of "spiritual" implies the liveliness of the whole body. Spiritual, not meaning the eternal soul as I've already said, is the perfect word. It would literally mean "more filled with life than others." Is that not Nietzsche's greatest value?

Just because they worshipped the word Dionysus doesn't mean they saw in it the same thing Nietzsche and Greek theater do.

It wouldn't be Apollonian, rather it'd be the third type, Socratic.

The logos of Heraclitus and the logos of Pythagoras are not at all the same

>>6743123
Everything you do is out of the will to power. There is not one possible action that isn't.

>>6743033

What's a good reading order for Nietzche? By date of publication?

What's a good translation?

Is Nietzsche a meme philosopher or is he worth reading?

>>6743271
more like Catholicism, Nietzsche is viciously explosive towards Protestantism in all forms.

>>6743033
Literally just read the New Testament.

>>6745218
>It's not simply psychological strength because the image of "spiritual" implies the liveliness of the whole body. Spiritual, not meaning the eternal soul as I've already said, is the perfect word. It would literally mean "more filled with life than others." Is that not Nietzsche's greatest value?
Nietzsche's conception of "lively" is modernist and secular, it's very different from the ancient's conception. To the ancients, lively meant to have a spiritual soul, that's why even the lively sea has countless gods in it. Nietzsche understanding of "spiritual" is purely clinical and modernist.


>Just because they worshipped the word Dionysus doesn't mean they saw in it the same thing Nietzsche and Greek theater do.
Greek theater literally came out of the mystery cults. They originally all wore masks of Dionysus, but then it evolved to wearing masks of different mythological characters and LARP'ing as them. That's where Greek theater comes from.

>It wouldn't be Apollonian, rather it'd be the third type, Socratic.
"Socratic", in Nietzschean terms, is theoretically just a perversion of Apollonian

>The logos of Heraclitus and the logos of Pythagoras are not at all the same
You don't know what you're talking about

>>6746073
How is Nietzsche like Catholicism just because he favors it? There is no Church of Nietzsche to give us orthodox understanding of him, it's just the text of Nietzsche and bunch of individuals constantly putting their own spin on it, from Nazis to anarchists to communists to capitalists to whatever else. This is like Protestantism because that is how the Bible works with Protestants, as opposed to how it works with Catholics, who have a relatively unified, orthodox understanding of the text provided by the Church.

>Seems like it got BTFO by Chesterton in Heretics.
>a slave moralist believed this near me
>mfw

>>6746386
Have you actually read Heretics?

>>6746395

Yes, it was horseshit

>>6746401
Except it's not. For all Nietzsche's adoration of love, as Chesterton points out, love was not a virtue to pagans. Gratitude wasn't as big of a deal to them either, and Nietzsche thinks that's the opposite of ressentiment.

>>6746419

Except it is. It's whining by an old man who can't accept that Christianity has lost much of its relevance in the modern world

Also, if you think love is a Christian invention, you're as much of a fucking idiot as Chesterton was

>>6746473
I think ἀγάπη, as a *virtue*, is surely a Christian invention.

>>6746483

Again, if you think naming is necessary for phenomenon to exist, you're an idiot

>>6746491
I think I'm right, and I think you're talking in maybes without actually backing up your opinion. I see zero evidence of ἀγάπη as a virtue before Christianity.

>>6746419
>love was not a virtue to pagans
Chesterton doesn't know what he's talking about.

>>6746500
No, he's quite right.

>>6746494

>what is Dāna

>>6746483
Confucianism, Mohism, Buddhism, Jainism, Shinto, and many others all had an identical concept of love as a virtue.

>>6746509
No, he's very wrong, and he is wrong so as to make a tired supremacist feeling of himself and his own culture.

>>6746510
Yeah, munificence isn't synonymous with agápē at all, especially in the context of Karma and conspicuous magnanimity.

>>6746516
No unless any of them see love as synonymous with God.

>>6746527

>'charity is a Christian invention'
>gets proven completely wrong
>'T-that's not the right type of charity! I win, bye!'

>>6746533
Agápē is a lot more than charity, unless by "charity" you mean it in the King James sense, which is caritas (Latin for agápē). which means a lot more than "charity" does in the liberal, modernist sense.

>>6746531
They do and all did it centuries before Christianity.

>>6746352
You can find this concept of the spirit in Aristotle tho

>Greek theater literally came out of the mystery cults
WOAAAH really dude?!!! I know, I repeat, just because the rites of the Pythagorean cult bore resemblance to Dionysian mysteries doesn't mean it's not a total inversion of their essence. Did the Pythagorean cult have orgies - the only important aspect of the Dionsyian mystery in relevance to Nietzsche (See the last chapter of Twilight of the Idols) - ?

Pythagorean worship of numbers isn't some Heraclitean belief of a sensible world consisting solely of opposing forces vying for power, it's literally the worship of numbers. Stop being confused by words: Logos in Pythagoras's mind compared to Heraclitus's is like the word "world" in Christ's mind compared to Nietzsche's.