/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3764217]

Nietzsche was a misanthrope and reading him with ardor engenders misanthropy in your heart.

Nietzsche found sanction for his misanthropy in the classical misanthrope Heraclitus, who was much more misanthropic than Diogenes the Cynic, as the latter only hated the pretensions and hypocrisies in society that cause men to lose what nobility they might have had, whereas the former believed human beings to have an inherently inferior nature, without the corruptions of society, "a laughingstock, a painful embarrassment".

[Anonymous No.3764255]

>>3764217
I agree that old Heraclitus was a grim one (he seems like an angry Greek counterpart to Laozi really) but I don't think you could call Nietzsche a misanthrope. He was more like Diogenes in that sense, he saw the great potential. Note:

"Nothing offends the philosopher's taste more than man, insofar as man desires. If he sees man in action, even if he sees this most courageous, most cunning, most enduring animal lost in labyrinthian distress — how admirable man appears to him! He still likes him. But the philosopher despises the desiring man, also the "desirable" man — and altogether all desirabilities, all ideals of man." - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

"He used likewise to say, "that when in the course of his life he beheld pilots, and physicians, and philosophers, he thought man the wisest of all animals; but when again he beheld interpreters of dreams, and soothsayers, and those who listened to them, and men puffed up with glory or riches, then he thought that there was not a more foolish animal than man." Diogenes, as quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius.

Both loved man and had hope for man. That why they spend their lives railing against what they deemed ugly in man, while Heraclitus wrote a few riddles and went into the mountains to live as a Hermit.

[Anonymous No.3764266]

>>3764255
>while Heraclitus wrote a few riddles and went into the mountains to live as a Hermit.

hahahaha, but that's such an apt description for Nietzsche too. He literally went into the mountains to live as a Hermit.

[Anonymous No.3764340]

>>3764266
That's true, but he continued to be fully occupied with humanity and its fate. He was a bit of a hybrid really, reclusive in reality but raging on paper, like a shut-in with a blog.