What kind of people like nietzsche

The fact that the ideologies that claimed to replace Christianity have failed one after the other does not provide convincing evidence of the strength of Christianity, but only of the weakness of its opponents. When I speak of the weakness of Christianity, I have in mind Christianity as a force shaping society, not Christianity as the faith of an individual. Sokol: I began to read Nietzsche only as an adult, but at first sight it was clear to me that he is speaking from horror and dismay.

Such a terrible sentence — and all act as if nothing has happened. Albeit, lacking these, all the religious and pseudo-religious ideologies would lack their main ingredient — malleable human material. Thiele: Nietzsche offers us two choices: we can pursue an active nihilism, or we can accept a passive nihilism.

You took revenge upon this witness. Once he is tried and convicted, Nietzsche hopes to elevate in his stead the active, creative nihilist. This life-affirming nihilist manages to confront worldly suffering without slandering worldly life. To explain away suffering as punishment for sins committed, or as a promissory note to be redeemed for happiness in an afterlife is, effectively, to deprecate life.

Life is growth, and growth is self-overcoming. Shedding old skin is not painless. Nietzsche did not claim responsibility for the death of God, but he showed us how to celebrate the wake. The Nietzschean project was to establish a passion for growth and greatness in a world without gods. That project requires us to engage in the art of judgment. It requires judgment in the absence of final adjudicators sporting white beards. The question Nietzsche posed but often failed to exemplify himself is how do we cultivate the art of judgment while simultaneously counteracting the resentment, projections, fears, and ego-investments that make us morally judgmental?

Yes, this challenging project of cultivating judgment is particularly necessary today, in an age of rising fundamentalism and intolerance. How do we learn to judge well without undermining our gratitude for worldly life? No small feat. One worthy of the gods. Do you think that it commits him to moral and cultural nihilism?

We do not need a revolution in our moral thinking. We have been making great moral progress in recent centuries by piecemeal reforms. To further such reform is our best hope for the future. Nietzsche was a psychoanalyst. He immersed himself in the human interior. In contrast to them, he attempted to establish his true values: the morality of the master. I think that this does not place him in a position of moral and cultural nihilism. He established his own philosophy.

It is possible to speak of nihilism only from the point of view of the old world-view, which he really endeavoured to entirely demolish. Bergmann: Nietzsche was the culture hero of modernism, a cultural revolution comparable to the Reformation or the Enlightenment. His critique of herd values is reflected in the posture of the avant-garde: elitist to the present, democratic to the future.

Nietzsche exalted the superman who scorned the mass, but he also played the role of a Zarathustra bringing the flock a new gospel affirming life. If we look at the work of any important nineteenth century thinker, we find criticism of herd values, of pseudo-individualism, of levelling or of alienation. What needs to be noted here is that criticism of herd values should not turn into an expression of resentment on the part of those who regard themselves as the representatives of a higher culture.

Even Christianity is participating in this revaluation. In spite of its real or supposed conservatism, even the Catholic Church is different, very different, from what it was in the nineteenth century. For Nietzsche, nihilism is the problem not the solution. He actually has no solution. What he considers as a solution — the idea of the superman — is actually a phantom, an illusion. Sokol: To regard Nietzsche as a nihilist is a mistake, an unobservant reading.

He was rather an excessively sensitive person horrified by a world where nothing has rules and stands for nothing. It is also true today that only what is rare, difficult, risky and demanding has value, and we all avoid these things.

We prefer to wait for how things turn out. In one matter Nietzsche, like Heidegger, may be mistaken. For a person to dare to do this, he needs at least the hope that failure will not mean personal catastrophe. But in the realms of morality and of personal evaluation, the person has lost, together with Christianity, such concepts as repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. Without them, it is difficult to risk losing — especially when, as Pascal says, we do not lack much.

The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd — but not reach out beyond it. When Nietzsche re-evaluates our moral habits, he underlines how they become obstacles to freedom when they serve as final destinations. But that is not to reject their uses and benefits. They can be well exploited as stepping stones. The highest in rank give evidence of a constant striving for excellence. This striving produces endemic change in the individual who is involved in the project of overcoming himself.

Just as there is a role for personal habits, and for a need to go beyond them in all self-overcoming, so there is a need for herd values, and a need to go beyond them. Herd values, which I understand to be moral habits conducive to a common life, are precious achievements that contribute to our personal and social constitutions.

Though Nietzsche is often read as advocating their wholesale abandonment, I believe he understood the need to build upon them. But, in the end, the goal is to live with oneself, including all those personal and social habits that make one a unique individual and human being. The purpose of human life is not the establishment of a utopia in which the victorious forces of radical individualism and free spiritedness have eliminated all herd values and personal habits.

Life has no purpose but itself. The battle between individual spirit and herd-like habits is not a prelude to some future state of tensionless existence. The good life is a life of daily struggle with the habitual and herd-like in each of us, a struggle that does not deprecate what it seeks to surpass. Such deprecation would constitute a defamation of life. Likewise, the psycho-spiritual self-overcoming that he charts with such acuity in his writings, find their models in worldly power struggles.

So, my claim here is that the order of rank that Nietzsche celebrates is meant to be achieved first and foremost within ones own soul.

In this internal constitution, Nietzsche acknowledges, herd values have their place. Like personal habits, they serve as stable foundations that allow for the flight of free spirit.

Take away the tarmac, and you never get off the ground. Nationalism is a very bad thing, but we learn what is dangerous about it by studying history, not through philosophical reflection.

With a little ill-will, we can see in this the origin of Nazism; or rather, the Nazis could also adopt this idea and call themselves the master race. Bergmann: Nietzsche invoked the good European at the nadir of European cosmopolitanism. Today we understand better his thesis that nations are not fixed natural phenomena, but human creations. On the other hand, it seems to me that he very much under-estimated nationalism and regarded it with contempt.

He did not worry about where it was actually going and what it was expressing, why it was so strong in precisely his period. Therefore, we do not get very far with Nietzsche in this area.

Rorty: Nietzsche never let himself be bothered by the facts, so a resuscitated Nietzsche probably would not have been willing to listen to people pointing out that democracy has done pretty well in the century since his death. Democracy is a way of ordering human affairs — the best way so far invented.

But this way of ordering affairs does not presuppose, nor does it create, a particular kind of human being. Patton: Nietzsche would be highly critical of the manner in which liberal democracy has evolved into a form of government of the many by the few on the basis of fear, moral panic and crude forms of economic self-interest.

He might even argue that the egalitarian approach to ends and ways of life serves a political purpose in helping to maintain a predominantly passive and compliant population.

But whatever the limits of this egalitarianism, it sustains forms of political freedom that allow for the development of critical responses. There are signs that liberal democracy too will evolve in ways that encourage more active and responsible citizenship. To the extent that liberal democracy allows for the further evolution of the human animal along with its cultural and political forms, there are grounds for optimism about the future. Or, he would re-emphasize the importance of personalities of the past he considered to be great and strong, such as Napoleon, Cesare Borgia and others.

At the same time, Nietzsche might consider that democracy also enables the growth of great personalities. This would come about as a result of natural selection. Liberal democracy also respects the natural inequality in the abilities of individuals. But it does so on the basis of entirely different assumptions than those accepted by Nietzsche. Schrift: Here I have to repeat my earlier point: the fact that Hitler was popularly elected in Germany, or the fact that George W. We live in a post-Nietzschean century.

When we look more closely at his texts — which, at least nominally, relate to his time — we find that they are mostly variations of ancient texts. These are constructs cooked up by human beings and later enshrined as eternal truths.

Nietzsche says the world is in constant flux, that there is no capital-T truth. He hated moral and social conventions because he thought they stifled the individual. In one of his most famous essays, The Genealogy of Morality , which Spencer credits with inspiring his awakening, Nietzsche tears down the intellectual justifications for Christian morality.

There is, of course, much more to Nietzsche than this. There is something punk rock about his philosophy. In her recent book about the rise of the alt-right, Irish academic Angela Nagle discusses their obsession with civilizational decay. Nietzsche made these same arguments more than years ago. The story he tells in The Genealogy of Morality is that Christianity overturned classical Roman values like strength, will, and nobility of spirit. These were replaced with egalitarianism, community, humility, charity, and pity.

Nietzsche saw this shift as the beginning of a grand democratic movement in Western civilization, one that championed the weak over the strong, the mass over the individual. They have no interest in the teachings of Christ, but they see the whole edifice of white European civilization as built on a framework of Christian beliefs. From their perspective, Christendom united the European continent and forged white identity. The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.

Nietzsche accepted that Christianity was central to the development of Western civilization, but his whole philosophy was focused on convincing people that the West had to move beyond Christianity.

So his point was that we had to reckon with a world in which there is no foundation for our highest values. The alt-right renounces Christianity but insists on defending Christendom against nonwhites. Nietzsche was interested in ideas, in freedom of thought.

To the extent that he knocked down the taboos of his day, it was to free up the creative powers of the individual.

He was influenced intellectually by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and emotionally by the artist Richard Wagner. This text also included a Wagnerian precept for cultural flourishing: society must cultivate and promote its most elevated and creative types—the artistic genius.

It is a work of acerbic cultural criticism, encomia to Schopenhauer and Wagner, and an unexpectedly idiosyncratic analysis of the newly developing historical consciousness. A fifth meditation on the discipline of philology is prepared but left unpublished. Plagued by poor health, Nietzsche is released from teaching duties in February his affiliation with the university officially ends in and he is granted a small pension.

A peculiar kind of meaningfulness is thus gained by the retrograde step: it yields a purpose for existence, but in an ironic form, perhaps esoterically and without ground; it is transparently nihilistic to the man with insight, but suitable for most; susceptible to all sorts of suspicion, it is nonetheless necessary and for that reason enforced by institutional powers.

Nietzsche transitions into a new period with the conclusion of The Gay Science Book IV and his next published work, the novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, produced in four parts between and Also in he returns to philosophical writing with Beyond Good and Evil. In he attempts to consolidate his inquiries through self-criticism in Prefaces written for the earlier published works, and he writes a fifth book for The Gay Science.

In he writes On the Genealogy of Morality. In , with failing health, he produces several texts, including The Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, and two works concerning his prior relationship with Wagner. During this period, as with the earlier ones, Nietzsche produces an abundance of materials not published during his lifetime.

For years this material has been published piecemeal in Germany and translated to English in various collections. Philosophically, during this period, Nietzsche continues his explorations on morality, truth, aesthetics, history, power, language and identity. The intent here seems to be an overcoming or dissolution of metaphysics. And, some will even deny that he achieves nor even attempts the overcoming described above. Despite such complaints, interpreters of Nietzsche continue to reference these ineffable concepts.

Although it would not be illogical to say that Nietzsche mistrusted philosophical systems, while nevertheless building one of his own, some commentators point out two important qualifications. Yet, earlier in that same text, Nietzsche claimed that all philosophical interpretations of nature are acts of will power BGE 9 and that his interpretations are subject to the same critique BGE At the very least, we can say that Nietzsche does not intend it to establish a strong and unmovable absolute, a negative-system, from which dogma may be drawn.

Perhaps it is a discredit to Nietzsche as a philosopher that he did not elaborate his position more carefully within this tension; or, perhaps such uncertainty has its own ground. For a second cautionary note, many commentators will argue along with Richard Schacht that, instead of building a system, Nietzsche is concerned only with the exploration of problems, and that his kind of philosophy is limited to the interpretation and evaluation of cultural inheritances Why is this so?

All beginnings and ends, for Nietzsche, are thus lost in a flood of indeterminacy. How then shall they be understood? The existence of a value presupposes a value-positing perspective, and values are created by human beings and perhaps other value-positing agents as aids for survival and growth. Because values are important for the well being of the human animal, because belief in them is essential to our existence, we oftentimes prefer to forget that values are our own creations and to live through them as if they were absolute.

For these reasons, social institutions enforcing adherence to inherited values are permitted to create self-serving economies of power, so long as individuals living through them are thereby made more secure and their possibilities for life enhanced. Nevertheless, from time to time the values we inherit are deemed no longer suitable and the continued enforcement of them no longer stands in the service of life. To maintain allegiance to such values, even when they no longer seem practicable, turns what once served the advantage to individuals to a disadvantage, and what was once the prudent deployment of values into a life denying abuse of power.

When this happens the human being must reactivate its creative, value-positing capacities and construct new values. Commentators will differ on the question of whether nihilism for Nietzsche refers specifically to a state of affairs characterizing specific historical moments, in which inherited values have been exposed as superstition and have thus become outdated, or whether Nietzsche means something more than this.

It is, at the very least, accurate to say that for Nietzsche nihilism has become a problem by the nineteenth century. The scientific, technological, and political revolutions of the previous two hundred years put an enormous amount of pressure on the old world order. In this environment, old value systems were being dismantled under the weight of newly discovered grounds for doubt.

The possibility arises, then, that nihilism for Nietzsche is merely a temporary stage in the refinement of true belief. Reason is not a value, in this reading, but rather the means by which human beings examine their metaphysical presuppositions and explore new avenues to truth. But to relegate nihilism to that situation, according to Heidegger, leaves our thinking of it incomplete. That the highest values devalue themselves. According to Nietzsche, the conceptual framework known as Western metaphysics was first articulated by Plato, who had pieced together remnants of a declining worldview, borrowing elements from predecessors such as Anaximander, Parmenides, and especially Socrates, in order to overturn a cosmology that had been in play from the days of Homer and which found its fullest and last expression in the thought of Heraclitus.

Values most responsible for the scientific revolution, however, are also crucial to the metaphysical system that modern science is destroying. Such values are threatening, then, to bring about the destruction of their own foundations. Thus, the highest values are devaluing themselves at the core. Most importantly, the values of honesty, probity, and courage in the search for truth no longer seem compatible with the guarantee, the bestowal, and the bestowing agent of an absolute value.

What philosophical ground, after all, could support revaluation if this interpretation were accurate? If, indeed, a workable epistemology may be derived from reading specific passages, and good reasons can be given for prioritizing those passages, then consistent grounds may exist for Nietzsche having leveled a critique of morality.

But, Nietzsche insisted, in an intellectual climate that demands honesty in the search for truth and proof as a condition for belief, the absence of foundations has already been laid bare. The dawn of a new day had broken, and shadows now cast, though long, were receding by the minute.

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche claims that the logic of an existence lacking inherent meaning demands, from an organizational standpoint, a value-creating response, however weak this response might initially be in comparison to how its values are then taken when enforced by social institutions aphorisms Nihilism stands not only for that apparently inevitable process by which the highest values devalue themselves.

It also stands for that moment of recognition in which human existence appears, ultimately, to be in vain. How, and for how long, did the values here serve the living? What form of redemption was sought here, and was this form indicative of a healthy life? What may one learn about the creation of values by surveying such cultures? Emphasis is laid on the one who faces the problem of nihilism. The problem of value-positing concerns the one who posits values, and this one must be examined, along with a corresponding evaluation of relative strengths and weaknesses.

Here was evidence, Nietzsche believed, that humanity could face the dreadful truth of existence without becoming paralyzed. The strength of Greek culture is evident in the gods, the tragic art, and the philosophical concepts and personalities created by the Greeks themselves.

Comparing the creativity of the Greeks to the intellectual work of modernity, the tragic, affirmative thought of Heraclitus to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche highlights a number of qualitative differences. Both types are marked by the appearance of nihilism, having been drawn into the inevitable logic of value-positing and what it would seem to indicate.

The Greek type nevertheless demonstrates the characteristics of strength by activating and re-intensifying the capacity to create, by overcoming paralysis, by willing a new truth, and by affirming the will.

The work to overcome pessimism is tragic in a two-fold sense: it maintains a feeling for the absence of ground, while responding to this absence with the creation of something meaningful. Hence, a pessimism of weakness and an incomplete form of nihilism prevail in the modern epoch. Redemption in this life is denied, while an uncompleted form of nihilism remains the fundamental condition of humanity.

Why, then, this failure? What does modernity lack? How and why do nihilism and the pessimism of weakness prevail in modernity? Again, from the notebook of Will to Power, aphorism 27 , we find two conditions for this situation:.

In this way the whole of existence is vulgarized: insofar as the mass is dominant it bullies the exceptions, so they lose their faith in themselves and become nihilists. The hope for an overman figure to appear would seem to be permissible for one individual, many, or even a social ideal, depending on the culture within which it appears. Although Nietzsche never lays out a precise political program from these ideas, it is at least clear that theoretical justifications for complacency or passivity are antithetical to his philosophy.

What, then, may be said about Nietzsche as political thinker? Nor are they socialist or Marxist. Such hostilities are born out of ressentiment and inherited from Judeo-Christian moral value systems.

The distinction between the good man of active power and the other type also points to ambiguity in the concept of freedom. Nietzsche frequently points to such exceptions as they have appeared throughout history—Napoleon is one of his favorite examples. In modernity, the emergence of such figures seems possible only as an isolated event, as a flash of lightening from the dark cloud of humanity.

Was there ever a culture, in contrast to modernity, which saw these sorts of higher types emerge in congress as a matter of expectation and design? Such institutions thereby promoted the elevation of human exemplars. Later Nietzsche is also clear that his descriptions of the Greeks should not be taken programmatically as a political vision for the future see for example GS For this reason, none of these exemplars should be confused for the others.

The exemplar expresses hope not granted from metaphysical illusions. After sharpening the critique of art and genius during the positivistic period, Nietzsche seems more cautious about heaping praise upon specific historical figures and types, but even when he could no longer find an ideal exception, he nevertheless deemed it requisite to fabricate one in myth.

Work pursued in service of the future constitutes for Nietzsche an earthly form of redemption. Yet, exemplars of type, whether in the form of isolated individuals like Napoleon, or of whole cultures like the Greeks, are not caught up in petty historical politics or similar mundane endeavors. According to Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols , their regenerative powers are necessary for the work of interpreting the meaning and sequence of historical facts.

My Conception of the genius— Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and psychologically, that a protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving has preceded them—that there has been no explosion for a long time. Of what account then are circumstances, the epoch, the Zeitgeist, public opinion!

To what extent is Nietzsche entitled to such a vision? The great man and the great deed belong to a human destiny, one that emerges in situations of crisis and severe want. Psychologically, they are the effects of human energy stored and kept dormant for long periods of time in dark clouds of indifference. Primal energy gathers to a point before a cataclysmic event, like a chemical reaction with an electrical charge, unleashes some decisive, episodic force on all humanity.

From here, the logic unfolds categorically: all great events, having occurred, are possibilities. All possibilities become necessities, given an infinite amount of time. Perhaps understanding this logic marks a qualitative difference in the way existence is understood. Perhaps this qualitative difference will spark the revaluation of values. When a momentous event takes place, the exception bolts from the cloud of normalcy as a point of extreme difference.

Such commentators will maintain that Nietzsche either in no way intends to construct a new meta-theory, or if he does then such intentions are mistaken and in conflict with his more prescient insights. Indeed, much evidence exists to support each of these positions. Nevertheless, with this bit of moral psychology, a debate exists among commentators concerning whether Nietzsche intends to make dubious morality per se or whether he merely endeavors to expose those life-denying ways of moralizing inherited from the beginning of Western thought.

Nietzsche, at the very least, is not concerned with divining origins. He is interested, rather, in measuring the value of what is taken as true, if such a thing can be measured. For Nietzsche, a long, murky, and thereby misunderstood history has conditioned the human animal in response to physical, psychological, and social necessities GM II and in ways that have created additional needs, including primarily the need to believe in a purpose for its very existence GS 1.

This ultimate need may be uncritically engaged, as happens with the incomplete nihilism of those who wish to remain in the shadow of metaphysics and with the laisser aller of the last man who overcomes dogmatism by making humanity impotent BGE In the more critical engagement, Nietzsche attempts to transform the need for truth and reconstitute the truth drive in ways that are already incredulous towards the dogmatizing tendency of philosophy and thus able to withstand the new suspicions BGE 22 and Perhaps the radicalization of will to power in this way amounts to no more than an account of this world to the exclusion of any other.

Nietzsche thus attempts to bring forward precisely that kind of affirmation which exists in and through its own essence, insofar as will to power as a principle of affirmation is made possible by its own destructive modalities which pulls back the curtain on metaphysical illusions and dogma founded on them. How does the exceptional, for example, begin to take shape in the ordinary, or truth in untruth, reason in un-reason, social order and law in violence, a being in becoming?

The variation and formal emergence of each of these states must, according to Nietzsche, be understood as a possibility only within a presumed sphere of associated events. Indeed, the new cosmology must account for such a fate. Most importantly, the new cosmology must grant meaning to this eternal recurrence of emergence and disintegration without, however, taking vengeance upon it.

Chemistry of concepts and feelings. In almost all respects, philosophical problems today are again formulated as they were two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite….?

Until now, metaphysical philosophy has overcome this difficulty by denying the origin of the one from the other, and by assuming for the more highly valued things some miraculous origin…. Historical philosophy, on the other hand, the very youngest of all philosophical methods, which can no longer be even conceived of as separate from the natural sciences, has determined in isolated cases and will probably conclude in all of them that they are not opposites, only exaggerated to be so by the metaphysical view….

As historical philosophy explains it, there exists, strictly considered, neither a selfless act nor a completely disinterested observation: both are merely sublimations. In them the basic element appears to be virtually dispersed and proves to be present only to the most careful observer.

Human, All Too Human , 1. How is it dispersed so that only the careful observer can detect it? On the doctrine of the feeling of power. Whether benefiting or hurting others involves sacrifices for us does not affect the ultimate value of our actions. Even if we offer our lives, as martyrs do for their church, this is a sacrifice that is offered for our desire for power or for the purpose of preserving our feeling of power.

What is good? What is bad? What is happiness? No otherworldly measures exist, for Nietzsche.