Was it all just 26-D chess?

[Anonymous No.11564052]

I've heard that you're not supposed to take Nietzsche at face value, that much like Plato his work is supposed to help you come to your own conclusions rather than just blindly accept whatever he writes. Is this true? I want to know how serious Nietzsche was about his philosophy. Did he REALLY think of Christianity as decadent, pity as a weakener, life as something to be affirmed, the Overman as a goal, ressentiment as the biggest plague of them all, comfort-seekers as a bunch of Letzer Mensch, Vikings as cool and Socrates as degenerate, etc etc etc etc etc? Or have I just been bamboozled?

[Anonymous No.11564180]

>>11564052
I think he did more or less think those things. But each of his critical pronouncements is usually complicated by some counterbalancing praise. Yes, Christianity is based on slave morality and is the force most responsible for cultivating the obedient thoughtless empiricist herd of modern “good Europeans”; but it was also a system under which man’s spirituality was brought to new heights because of the repression’s and subsequent sublimations it enabled. Christianity made the European spirit more subtle and complex than it would have been without it, though it did weaken it in a lot of ways.

Same sort of complication can be found regarding his views of just about everything. He views the same thing from a multiplicity of perspectives, and tries to understand it like a psychologist of the world spirit as opposed to like a moralizing systematizing philosopher.

[Anonymous No.11564226]

>>11564180
Interesting. The more I read of him the more interesting it gets

[Anonymous No.11564248]

>>11564180
This. Interestingly enough, Nietzsche has more similarities with someone Eastern philosophy than you’d think at a first glance. Much like Taoists, for instance, he emphasizes the importance of duality and things being conditioned and shaped by their opposites: no inside without an outside, no light without darkness to contrast it against. Christianity, for Nietzsche, may be decadent and life-denying, but it’s a necessary and beautiful convolution in history to fight against, something to pit oneself against to be more conscious. Without obstacles to struggle against, without things and ideas to overcome and resist, there can be no Ubermensch. This is most clearly shown in his famous idea of amor fati.

I don’t entirely agree with all of Nietzsche’s views, by the way, but I think many of his points were brilliant and worth considering. For instance, I think he underrates the merits of compassion, pity, and fellow-feeling. Sure, there can be insincere and life-draining versions of these, but in their sincere manifestation, they should be hallowed and appreciated.

The way I think Nietzsche is most misinterpreted is that people view him as someone positing what he thinks are objective truths, instead of someone positing psychological interpretations and bombastic speculations to further his sense of will to power. He says everything should be the will to power, that what is good is what makes one feel more powerful. Thus why he is always criticizing so many things and fighting with so many philosophers: to heighten his will to power. Nietzsche’s philosophy is extremely combative and even sophistical at times (but deliberately so). He says some stuff and ponders about some stuff not strictly rationally, but just to be offensive, to shake up the reader’s complacent morality and ideas about reality, and so on. In some respects, he’s more of a poet, a psychologist, and an essayist than he is a strict philosopher. So basically the same as the poster I responded to said.

[Anonymous No.11564450]

>>11564052
Yes, yes, yes, no, maybe, yes, probably and yes but it's more complicated than that

[Anonymous No.11564755]

>>11564052

It is increasingly apparent to me that the philosopher, who is necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day after, has in every age found and had to find himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy every time was the ideal of the day. Up to now all these extraordinary promoters of humanity whom we call philosophers and who themselves seldom felt that they were friends of wisdom but rather embarrassing fools and dangerous question marks have found their work, their hard, unsought for, inescapable task - but finally the greatness of their work - was for them to be the bad consciences of their age. By applying the knife of vivisection to the chest of the virtues of the day, they revealed what their own secret was - to know a new greatness for man, to know a new untrodden path to increasing his greatness. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, laziness, letting oneself go, letting oneself fall, how many lies lay hidden under the most highly honoured type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was out of date; every time they said, "We must go there, out there, where you nowadays are least at home." Faced with a world of "modern ideas" which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of "greatness," on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity. He would even determine value and rank according to how much and how many different things one could endure and take upon oneself, how far one could extend one's own responsibility. Today contemporary taste and virtue weaken and dilute the will; nothing is as topical as the weakness of the will. Thus, in the ideal of the philosopher it is precisely the strength of will, the hardness and ability to make long-range decisions that must be part of the idea "greatness" - with just as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a stupid, denying, humble, selfless humanity was appropriate to an opposite age, one which suffered, like the sixteenth century, from the bottled up energy of its will and the wildest waters and storm tides of selfishness. At the time of Socrates, among nothing but men of exhausted instincts, among conservative old Athenians, who allowed themselves to go "for happiness," as they said, and for pleasure, as they did, and who, in the process, still kept mouthing the old splendid words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, perhaps irony was essential for greatness in the soul, that malicious Socratic confidence of the old doctor and member of the rabble, who sliced ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble man," with a look which spoke intelligibly enough "Don't play act in front of me! Here - we are the same!"

[Anonymous No.11564762]

>>11564755

By contrast, today, when the herd animal in Europe is the only one who attains and distributes honours, when "equality of rights" all too easily can get turned around into equality of wrongs - what I mean is into a common war against everything rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative fullness of power and mastery - these days the sense of being noble, of willing to be for oneself, of being able to be different, of standing alone, and of having to live by one's own initiative - these are part of the idea "greatness," and the philosopher will reveal something of his own ideal if he proposes "The man who is to be the greatest is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will - this is simply what greatness is to be called: capable of being as much a totality as something multifaceted, as wide as it is full." And to ask the question again: today - is greatness possible?

- Beyond Good and Evil


Nietzsche was a wordy bastard sometimes but the point he seems to be making here making here, that you cannot divorce the philosopher from his time, is probably useful for understanding him.

[Anonymous No.11564785]

>>11564052
i think he did. i think he was an intellectual who understood how completely useless intellectualism was.

maybe he would have just wanted you to live like james bond. can you really say that's such a bad thing? live a glamorous, dangerous life, eat good food, have beautiful romances, and so on. this is a stupid and reductive reading, but nietzsche's one of those guys who makes me think also that excessive depth is also pretty stupid.

[Anonymous No.11564795]

>>11564785
I think excessive depth isn’t much of a choice. You’re either drawn by it or not. If living like janes bond is satisfying to you or not, is not up to you.

[Anonymous No.11564798]

>>11564180
wrong

[Anonymous No.11564807]

Nietzsche was a conservative

[Anonymous No.11564875]

>>11564807

[Anonymous No.11564901]

>>11564798
Interesting interpretation thanks anon

[Anonymous No.11564948]

>>11564052
>that much like Plato his work is supposed to help you come to your own conclusions rather than just blindly accept whatever he writes.
It's neither of those things. Nietzsche explains most of what he writes, and most of what he didn't explain he just didn't get enough time to be able to. All that's left are things like commentary about social norms or his personal acquaintances during his lifetime that we only have so much historical data to verify.

>Did he REALLY think of Christianity as decadent
Anyone trying to tell you that he didn't think that is a complete buffoon. He wrote massive walls of text psychoanalyzing Christianity and the Bible from so many directions and provides a map for understanding his philosophy which very clearly stands opposed to the religion that you'd have to be in the deepest denial humanly possible to think he was just trolling regarding it.

[Anonymous No.11564976]

>>11564807
your so dum

[Anonymous No.11564995]

>>11564948
That’s true but the worst interpretation of Nietzsche is believing that just because he shitted on Christianity by inference he supported complete material reductionism. True is his overman rejects both, looking neither to the next world nor reducing his view of himself in this one.

[Anonymous No.11565031]

>>11564995
>his overman rejects both, looking neither to the next world nor reducing his view of himself in this one.
Sure. And it's rare, but he does write positively about Christianity too. Namely, when he acknowledges the significant role it played in developing the sciences and consequently his philosophy as well. The difference between Nietzsche and many other philosophers is that he recognizes that the moon has an equal value to the sun.

[Anonymous No.11565894]

everyone here is wrong

[Anonymous No.11566426]

>>11565894
W-whoa, so this is will-to-power condensed into one 4chan post.

[Anonymous No.11566455]

>>11566426
Its a spook mate

[Anonymous No.11566472]

>there is no moral facts, there is only moral interpretations

based nihilist. OUR GUY

[Anonymous No.11566505]

>>11566472
not all interpretations are of equal value

[Anonymous No.11566506]

"Role of 'consciousness': It's essential that one makes no mistake about the role of ' consciousness': what developed it is our relationship with the 'external world'. In contrast, the administration, or the care and protection accorded the coordination of the bodily functions, does not enter our consciousness; just as little as does the mental sorting and storing. There can be no doubt that a highest authority exists for these processes: a kind of managing committee where the various chief desires assert their votes and power. 'Pleasure', 'unpleasure' are hints from that sphere ... likewise the act of will. Likewise ideas In sum: what becomes conscious is subject to causal relations entirely concealed from us - the succession of thoughts, feelings, ideas in consciousness tells us nothing about whether this succession is a causal one: but it gives the illusion of being so, in the highest degree. Upon this illusion we have founded our whole notion of mind, reason, logic, etc. (none of these exist: they are fictitious syntheses and unities) ... And these, in turn, we have projected into things, behind things! Usually one takes consciousness itself to be the total sensorium and highest authority: yet it is only a means for communicability: it has developed in the course of interaction and with respect to the interests of interaction ... 'interaction' here also understood from the point of view of the influences of the external world and the reactions they require of us, as well as of our influences on the external world. Consciousness is not the management but an organ of the management"

>freud discovered the unconscious
Your whole course is a lie.

[troglomongos No.11566829]

>>11564807

more like a cumsorbative

[Anonymous No.11566841]

>>11566505

Cool interpretation, noob.

[Anonymous No.11566852]

>>11566841
Yes, of course it is an interpretation. Did you think you were going to blow my mind with this observation? "Oh ho ho ho, I'm gonna fucking BTFO anon!!!" LOL. FYI, it is a very valuable interpretation. Now go back to living life in your democratic egalitarian utopia, last man.