Nietzsche
#1
Here we may talk about Hitler's favourite.

Everyone seems to have a different idea about what he really believed and particularly who/what makes an 'Ubermensch' as a term for someone who embodies his values.

The criteria given by many is someone who strives for and achieves power in the political sense, leading to claims that champions of protected classes are the true Nietzscheans. If the Will to Power simply meant boosting your own social status, then yes perhaps trannies and lib strivers would embody this concept. However I've always interpreted 'Power' in a more spiritual sense, not so much in grifter self improvement but artistic sensibility.

With the exception of Napoleon I cannot think of a single politician/statesman whom Nietzsche has ever commended, yet he frequently celebrated artists in music and literature. To name a few: Chopin, Wagner and Liszt. Heine, Stendhal and Shakespeare. He had much more praise to give for these gentlemen than for Bismarck, so I completely fail to see whatever stamp of approval would be given to the elites of today.

To me, being Nietzschean requires first and foremost a rejection of the moral order a one finds themself in and replacing it with a new value system that promotes becoming 'Stronger, more evil, and more profound; also more beautiful.' The cultivation of artistic taste and taking on of grand endeavours.

There is also more to be said on the 'Nietzschean Right' associated with BAP as he promotes something similar to the above. I don't feel like doing that at the moment.


Sidenote - Due to how seldom I've seen the term 'Superman' used in his writings, I almost see it as a tell for a pseud, doubly so for any mention of 'Death of God', given how frequently associated they are. Though of course, reading his wikipedia (from what I remember) one would think he was first and foremost an activist for the ADL.
#2
Quote:The criteria given by many is someone who strives for and achieves power in the political sense, leading to claims that champions of protected classes are the true Nietzscheans. If the Will to Power simply meant boosting your own social status, then yes perhaps trannies and lib strivers would embody this concept. However I've always interpreted 'Power' in a more spiritual sense, not so much in grifter self improvement but artistic sensibility.

Anyone trying to convince you of a political ideology based on Nietzche's writings is either a moron or thinks you are. In some cases (Ayn Rand comes to mind) it's both.

Quote:To me, being Nietzschean requires first and foremost a rejection of the moral order a one finds themself in and replacing it with a new value system that promotes becoming 'Stronger, more evil, and more profound; also more beautiful.' The cultivation of artistic taste and taking on of grand endeavours.

You have to be very careful when Nietzsche makes these sorts of statements: he's usually doing so at least partly in jest. "The weak and ill-constituted must perish!" means something rather different when you remember it was written by a crippling shy and permanently sickly man who spent his waking hours engrossed in literature.

Quote:To name a few: Chopin, Wagner and Liszt. Heine, Stendhal and Shakespeare.
Or, most prominently: Dostoevsky. But that doesn't really line up very well with the emerging consensus among idiots who think he was some type of proto-Nazi.
#3
^This is just countersignaling Rand and Nietzsche. No citations, no mathematics, no intellectual rigor.
#4
I apologize Billy, I've taken what you said into consideration and made some adjustments:

Nietzsche got into the University of Basel by getting a 630 on the Arbitur at the age of 12. The claim is that they were picking people with 1/10,000 g, or 3.719 SD. This is an uncritical, unjustified, totally retarded claim. But let's take it for granted. That Arbitur test correlated with IQ at about r = 0.80. So to get his 12 yo IQ, we do 3.719 * 0.8 = 2.97. But there is regression to the mean from childhood to adulthood due to things like different developmental speeds. From 12 to adulthood it's about 0.80. So we do 2.97*.8 to estimate his adult IQ: 2.37, about 135 or 1/100. This is all assuming that his score on the Arbitur was truly 1/10,000 for 12 year olds. But we have no reason to think this was the case. As far as I have seen, the Basel people never justified their numbers -- it was pulled out of their asses, and they have been known to write letters of rec for participants. It's a status laundering scheme, one where Poles are way overrepresented even adjusting for their mean IQ of 110. On the test he took, a score of 700 was only 2.32 SD, or 1/100 for 15-16 year olds. The data I have seen suggests 12 yos have an average IQ of 85 in adult terms, so if we are super charitable we add an SD to 2.32 to account for Nietzche's age. And remember, Nietzsche only needed to score a 630 to qualify, not a 700. So a starting score of 3.32 is a better estimate than 3.719. Now we correct for g loading and age regression to the mean and get 2.12, or 131 IQ. About 1/70. This is a maximally charitable estimate. If in reality he had a 1/1000 score for 12 yos on the Arbitur we'd get 3 * .64 = 1.92 = 129 IQ, so upper 120s. This is exactly where an objective judge would place him given his writing, so the data and the judgement are convergent. This is not a coincidence.
#5
'You have to be very careful when Nietzsche makes these sorts of statements: he's usually doing so at least partly in jest. "The weak and ill-constituted must perish!" means something rather different when you remember it was written by a crippling shy and permanently sickly man who spent his waking hours engrossed in literature.'



I take evil here to mean immoral, unfettered. Evil to Christian Germany. As such, it's not out of place. Also weakness of spirit (pity, meekness) rather than physical illness (Pascal he loved as well of course, before November 23, 1654). Besides, falling short of one's ideal doesn't negate it.
#6
Nietzsche is a poet, not a philosopher. Apparently he is a good poet, because those who imbibe his ideas often come out with the "correct worldview". Thus his writings are apparently good propaganda.

An enlightened individual like myself has no need for it, though. He provides no arguments. His thoughts are unclear. He writes in such a way as to intimate a certain "vibe", the vibe of a philosophy that he is not skilled or autistic enough to prove. He uses the right combination of words to evoke the right feelings, to cause the right thought patterns.

As such, "what is the ubermensch?" Nietzsche cannot be expected to give a clear answer on this. The ubermensch is your ubermensch, after you take his ill-formed ideas and adapt them to your own purposes. In truth the idea of a "superior ideal man" is in no way revolutionary, but his poetry caused this idea to occupy your thoughts, to reshape your worldview sans argument, proof, reason, didn't it?

More people should read Nietzsche.
#7
A few stray remarks...
  • It is a philosophy of movement, dance, friendship, and laughter. German seriousness is a sickness, and it is a Christian sickness. Look what it did to Schopenahur.
  • Zarathustra is his most honest work, and the gay science his most deeply felt.
  • 'The Ubermensch' is a telos, not a person/class/race. There will never be an Ubermensch. Any other reading is purposefully manipulative. He is clear on this, but people still ignore him, a century a half later.
  • Circularity: The thesis produces the antithesis which produces the thesis --- synthesis is only cosmic: ....untruth begets truth which begets untruth.... the overman brings the last man who brings the overman....
  • Will to Power should always be read esoterically, rather than literally. Like eternal recurrence, it is more akin to a law of nature. In WW2, it would simultaneously affirm Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt. It would affirm feminism, gay rights, and trannies. It affirms the universality of all spirits inclined towards conquest over resentment. Will to Power is beyond immediate moralization, and as a framework, it condemns only those whose will has been corrupted into sterile resentment. The condemnation is not moral, but natural, for those corrupted are fated perish... yet see favorably how he speaks of those who willingly go under. The Will to Power the precondition and context for selection.
  • Nietzsche's conception of beauty was at once physical and metaphysical. The beautiful could be ugly (women) and the ugly could be raised to beauty by spirit alone.
  • Master morality is not innately superior to slave morality - both constantly create and recreate each other. Circularity again.
  • Nietzsche had no politics but the politics of nature -- Yet he might favor liberalism, if only because its defense necessitated the opposite (illiberalism) and was richer for it.
  • Antisemitism is inherently Jewish and neurotic and should be condemned for that reason alone. This does not absolve the Jews, as much as it condemns Christians.
  • Amor fati was the endpoint of Zarathustra, and also of Nietzsche. It is the only non-nihilistic answer to Eternal Recurrence. His philosophy traced the path of his soul, and only escapes circularity by unconditionally embracing and affirming it.
#8
(12-22-2022, 05:24 PM)The_Author Wrote: Nietzsche is a poet, not a philosopher. Apparently he is a good poet, because those who imbibe his ideas often come out with the "correct worldview". Thus his writings are apparently good propaganda.

I usually argue this for the reaction (specifically claiming him to be a literary critic) but he's much more than that. As far as Nietzsche sounds as if he's stating the obvious: its because he was the most influential thinker of his time (culturally) and his major ideas have largely been absorbed into the cultural ether in one way or another.

Quote:As such, "what is the ubermensch?" Nietzsche cannot be expected to give a clear answer on this. The ubermensch is your ubermensch, after you take his ill-formed ideas and adapt them to your own purposes. In truth the idea of a "superior ideal man" is in no way revolutionary, but his poetry caused this idea to occupy your thoughts, to reshape your worldview sans argument, proof, reason, didn't it?

Nietzsche's central dogma is a refutation of the concept of human evolution; not on some sort of scientific basis: but on principle.

Your grandfather wasn't a monkey. You aren't descended from apes. You're descended from a man who might have once been ape. The development of consciousness wasn't an accident of fate but a willful act by a primitive ancestor. In other words: the fire of Prometheus burnt in his heart before he gave it to the world.


Quote:A man must have a fire burning inside his heart to give birth to a dancing star
[And] I would never believe in a God that did not dance









If we accept that culture, custom, art, and most importantly morality were created by men that it stands we can create our own value systems that are radically different if we choose. This is the solution to the crisis of nihilism brought on by what he perceives to be the inherent contradictions in Christian morality. As these systems would be necessity be radically different than those of the dominant culture they would not be adopted by all but a small group of men who possessed powers akin to that of those who would have created said morality in the first place. This is what the Superman is: it's not actually that esoteric when you break it down.





Quote:
  • It is a philosophy of movement, dance, friendship, and laughter. German seriousness is a sickness, and it is a Christian sickness. Look what it did to Schopenahur.
It's the philosophy of a deeply cynical misanthrope as he attempts to find joy as he descends into madness. The character of Zarathustra isn't much deeper than the wish-fulfillment of memes of "Chad Thundercock." It's (some of) what he has Zarathustra say which is interesting.



Quote:[*]Will to Power should always be read esoterically, rather than literally.
[*]The only way appropriate way to read Will to Power is with extreme skepticism as it was edited by his sister who had an agenda completely separate from his. There's a reason a lot of his notes contradict his publications (somehow even moreso than his published works contradict each other): he didn't expect them to be published.





Quote:[*]Nietzsche had no politics but the politics of nature -- Yet he might favor liberalism, if only because its defense necessitated the opposite (illiberalism) and was richer for it.


[*]Antisemitism is inherently Jewish and neurotic and should be condemned for that reason alone. This does not absolve the Jews, as much as it condemns Christians.
[*]If we are to take his notes as his true thoughts than he felt strongly the wave of anti-semitic politicians in the Germanic world at the time should've been shot. This isn't due to anything inherently having to do with anti-semitism (by any reasonable use of the modern term he certainly was, he despised Judaism and it's influence on European culture), but that it was a political strategy adopted by populists at the time and place in which he lived. As far as Nietzsche possessed political beliefs, he despised populism
#9
The Eternal Recurrence, Overman, and Will to Power are really physical things, not parables or ideals or “metaphysical” nonsense which he does not believe in.
#10
Nietzsche was a political thinker in the broad sense and his status as one is clear. Leo Strauss even called him the most fruitful one of modernity alongside Rousseau. 

He saw himself as a prophet in competition with Christ. He wanted a complete overthrow of the value system that (most) Europeans have been living by for the past 2000 years, replacing it with his own which in short emphasized fitness, strength, creativity and in general eschewed or inverted the moral principles of Christianity.

He despised democracy, liberalism (‘the herd animalization of man’) and socialism. He wanted the ‘botched’ to perish. He thought pity for the lower man was the great obstacle to overcome in cultivating a higher man. Thanks to the work of leftists like Domenico Losurdo the left is starting to understand (again) that Nietzsche is not one of their own, after all the confusion the postmodernists caused in portraying him as a mere playful and ironic critic to be deconstructed in the classroom.

Nietzsche saw himself as a taxonomist of man. Man for him is as an abundance of radically differing types, and there is an ‘order of rank’ to these types which he establishes mostly via psychological analysis. His central work Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be thought of as a tour through all these types. The most well known example of this is in the master/slave type dichotomy. In Will to Power, he says “strange as it may sound, the strong must be protected from the weak”: the low are numbered like mosquitoes whereas what is great is rare and lives perilously. They are susceptible to being corrupted by the sickness the low man calls morality.

As for the Ubermensch idea, the confusion around it has mostly been due to (deliberate) obfuscation by postwar academics like Kaufmann. The concept mostly appears in Zarathustra. In part four of that work, all the ‘higher men’ (the representatives of the best of mankind) are surveyed, and the perspective we survey them from, which can be thought of as Zarathustra’s or Nietzsche’s or even the overman’s, shows them all to be buffoons. The point of this lampooning is that Nietzsche/Zarathustra want to go beyond what humanity thus far has had to offer. The Ubermensch represents this ambition: a new genus. Though maybe he never explicitly says it, if you look at the eugenics passages from Will to Power and everything else, I think the only really sensible way to think of the overman is as an eugenic project. Many centuries of culling, discipline and breeding will get us to what Nietzsche envisaged, or at least close.
#11
(12-23-2022, 01:04 AM)Quinlan Wrote: Nietzsche was a political thinker in the broad sense and his status as one is clear. Leo Strauss even called him the most fruitful one of modernity alongside Rousseau. 

He saw himself as a prophet in competition with Christ. He wanted a complete overthrow of the value system that (most) Europeans have been living by for the past 2000 years, replacing it with his own which in short emphasized fitness, strength, creativity and in general eschewed or inverted the moral principles of Christianity.

He despised democracy, liberalism (‘the herd animalization of man’) and socialism. He wanted the ‘botched’ to perish. He thought pity for the lower man was the great obstacle to overcome in cultivating a higher man. Thanks to the work of leftists like Domenico Losurdo the left is starting to understand (again) that Nietzsche is not one of their own, after all the confusion the postmodernists caused in portraying him as a mere playful and ironic critic to be deconstructed in the classroom.

Nietzsche saw himself as a taxonomist of man. Man for him is as an abundance of radically differing types, and there is an ‘order of rank’ to these types which he establishes mostly via psychological analysis. His central work Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be thought of as a tour through all these types. The most well known example of this is in the master/slave type dichotomy. In Will to Power, he says “strange as it may sound, the strong must be protected from the weak”: the low are numbered like mosquitoes whereas what is great is rare and lives perilously. They are susceptible to being corrupted by the sickness the low man calls morality.

As for the Ubermensch idea, the confusion around it has mostly been due to (deliberate) obfuscation by postwar academics like Kaufmann. The concept mostly appears in Zarathustra. In part four of that work, all the ‘higher men’ (the representatives of the best of mankind) are surveyed, and the perspective we survey them from, which can be thought of as Zarathustra’s or Nietzsche’s or even the overman’s, shows them all to be buffoons. The point of this lampooning is that Nietzsche/Zarathustra want to go beyond what humanity thus far has had to offer. The Ubermensch represents this ambition: a new genus. Though maybe he never explicitly says it, if you look at the eugenics passages from Will to Power and everything else, I think the only really sensible way to think of the overman is as an eugenic project. Many centuries of culling, discipline and breeding will get us to what Nietzsche envisaged, or at least close.

Only good post in this thread, Zed touched on some things but gave non answers, i plan to expand on this post with appropriate passages and with a description of the concept of The Will to Power, what it means to "create new values", why the artist is a central theme in his philosophy why the accumulation of power through breeding is what gets us there(the transfiguration that comes out of abundance, or why races and individuals that represent a greater sum in will to power seem to produce different valuations), on this last part i imediately recommend reading the end of the Twilight of the Idols where he describes Dionysus as "too much energy", and how that excess in energy allows one to deify pain itself(unveiling a new meaning to a thing that seemed to be just bad, with this i already kinda gave the answer, certain types are capable because of their accumulated strength to survey greater lengths and horizons to see necessities where others see mere chaos and disarray). I will also speak of the task of the philospher who understands this idea and has the Ubermensch(breeding of a superior type, to overcome current humanity in it's current valuations) as his ideal. I had planned to answer this thread way earlier but with the way things are going IRL i will only be able to in a few days.
#12
Quote:
Quote:"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' "Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?"

Quote:My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it

Quote:For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed

Quote:Amor fati: this is the very core of my being—And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it!—To it, I owe even my philosophy.… Only great suffering is the ultimate emancipator of spirit, for it teaches one that vast suspiciousness which makes an X out of every U, a genuine and proper X, i.e., the antepenultimate letter. Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time—forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths, and to let go of all trustfulness, all good-nature, all whittling-down, all mildness, all mediocrity,—on which things we had formerly staked our humanity.


Contra Billy, I do believe eternal recurrence was metaphysical to Nietzsche. But it was not so much an ideal - but a fundamental question to be posed, where the only answer came via a fully lived life. It's a question that Spengler and Evola latter struggled with, to different ends. And long before Nietzsche, it was foundational to the Kalachakra  - something that Nietzsche was acutely aware of. It's true that there is very much a sense of 'reality' to eternal recurrence. Mathematically, say in the infinite monkey theorem -  and in the (quasi-)periodicity that is ubiquitous in the natural world. It is felt too by those who have experienced intense psychedelic experiences, at the moment of ego death, as eternity and consciousness collapse beneath carnivalesque drumbeats. Yet in the formulation given above - none of that matters. To love the totality of life, in beauty and suffering, and abandon any will towards higher salvation - this would allow eyes to once more focus upon the stars. Amor Fati was the distillation of this awareness into a prescription, to treat Christianity and those sons of Europe most ill-affected by it.

Much is made of Nietzsche seeing himself as a prophet, but it would be more appropriate to describe him as a harbinger. He sought to open doors for those of the future. If nothing else, the conclusion of the arc of Zarathustra is a complete rejection of himself as a singular prophet and acceptance that his truth could only be corrupted in evangelization - thus Zarathustra returned to the mountains, and Nietzsche embraced his solitude until the hours of his madness came. Prophets brought revelations, and Nietzsche shared only humble forgotten truths - ones he regarded as obvious as the color of the sky. 

Amor fati, like the rest of his overture, are not truths for some future overman. The overman - if he ever came (and I would argue against that reading) - would have no need for such work. His corpus of work for those sick and weary of modernity, for those who - like Nietzsche - have borne most heavily the burden of lonliness.  It is those spirits he most wished to rise.

For a TL;DR of Amor Fati, one could do worse than this video - 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1zHpD475EQ
#13
An Old Mikka post:

Well what Nietzsche essentially cares about is the preservation of genius, genius for N is the creator of culture: and as Hegel said culture requires alienation - both in the practical subservience of a vast mass of talentless people to the creative elite, and in a basic deceptiveness concerning human nature. The moment humans "know themselves" to the extent they can formulate any all-encompassing philosophical answer to the questions of their nature, authentic Art must cease, for there is nothing Art has left to tell us about humanity. Show's over; its all finished. Eventually we reach a point where everything has been done and everything has been said and there's simply nothing new left to create. It does not help that this process has a nasty side-effect of emancipating all those talentless people to slaughter the great value-creating Masters as well.

But this is only possible if there is an ultimate direction of all knowledge, and thus a linear path towards this knowledge in which all the Great Epochs in Culture are steps; "Progress". The grand and Machiavellian solution you can see arising is to simply do away with any "Progress" at all, culture simply exists for and by itself as a perpetual state of suspended alienation. The Eternal Return is the key here as it gets rid of any 'future' from which Utopia can come, mankind reaches and strives and dreams after absolutely nothing, he has gone, he will go, he shall be as such forever and ever. All of reality conspired to create you as you are in this moment as the sovereign purpose of existence. There is nothing flawed with your current state, and it shall not and cannot be embarrassed by the hateful condescension of posterity as a watermark of 'historical circumstance' or 'social forces'. This is also useful because running alongside this 'humanistic' narrative I've spun out here there is the logical, philosophical problem of determinism which the Eternal Return solves; you're actions cannot be 'determined' by nature if they've already happened and you have by your affirmation of it 'Willed' them all to be.

Ofc this is all maddeningly self-destructive as if everything will only recur as it is forever and ever 'culture' dies anyway because nothing new is actually created and there is no 'history' in which legacy can dwell. Nietzsche says many will rebel against this sorry state of affairs and attempt some grand conspiracy to reclaim their status as historical actors, and they will have to be exterminated in the literal sense. But such is life in the #BASEDworld.
#14
(12-23-2022, 08:35 PM)Zed Wrote: Prophets brought revelations, and Nietzsche shared only humble forgotten truths - ones he regarded as obvious as the color of the sky. 

I feel like you’re just making stuff up. Nietzsche didn’t win the attention and admiration of many of the greatest philosophers, scholars, and artists of the 20th century by rehashing the wholesome lindy wisdom of nonna’s kitchen. One of the chapters of Ecce Homo is entitled ‘Why I Am a Destiny’: he thought his Zarathustra transcended Goethe and Shakespeare and shared a plane only with the great religious texts.

(12-24-2022, 09:04 AM)Oldblood Wrote: All of reality conspired to create you as you are in this moment as the sovereign purpose of existence. There is nothing flawed with your current state, and it shall not and cannot be embarrassed by the hateful condescension of posterity as a watermark of 'historical circumstance' or 'social forces'.

This part is nice. I think with the eternal return Nietzsche meant to counter both vulgar utopianism and religious notions of another immaterial world; instead we just have the earth and its finitude of types repeating forever. Only a true lover of life, purified of resentment, can embrace this.
#15
(12-24-2022, 01:54 PM)Quinlan Wrote: I feel like you’re just making stuff up. Nietzsche didn’t win the attention and admiration of many of the greatest philosophers, scholars, and artists of the 20th century by rehashing the wholesome lindy wisdom of nonna’s kitchen. One of the chapters of Ecce Homo is entitled ‘Why I Am a Destiny’: he thought his Zarathustra transcended Goethe and Shakespeare and shared a plane only with the great religious texts.

Ecce Homo shouldn't be taken fully seriously. He was two years out from claiming that he actually was Shakespeare, Goethe, and the one hung on the cross. Also that he was in fact 'the noble pole'.
#16
Reread a bit of Ecce Homo today, apparently the Polish claim was already present there. 


Quote:I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, — it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille.


Perhaps consider renaming the thread to "Nietzky"? As a matter of his personal national pride. 

[Image: 1200px-Rembrandt_van_Rijn_-_A_Polish_nobleman.jpg]
#17
Nietzsche's concept of the slave revolt in morals is descriptively useful, but LARPing will not bring back the economic conditions that allowed master morality to emerge in the first place, so the LARP will never support its own weight. What made the masters noble was the personal power they safeguarded and made use of, not their moral outlook.

The way the Nietzschean LARP functions is by peddling "disregard pity and seek power to become a noble Nietzschean ubermensch" to mass audiences often consisting of lesser races, providing a high-minded rationalization for their existing ignoble instinct to cheat and squabble over scraps of wealth and status. They reject slave morality, but remain slaves. When you have little personal power (almost everyone nowadays) and little to be proud of, pretending to have pride and honor is indistinguishable from petty third-world narcissism. If these urgings were actually taken seriously rather than being mostly LARP we would see antisocial low trust behavior with no wider social benefit, because the average wage slave has a lot of desire and few responsibilities. Even most so-called elites who are wealthy and hold high socioeconomic positions barely have any individual power to influence our highly interconnected world. Only a small number of billionaires might be exempted from this, and perhaps they could be well-served in applying Nietzsche's master morality to their lives.

The main conceit here is to conflate the appearance of virtue with virtue. This is true both with respect to the Nietzschean moral aesthetics these strivers appropriate, and the ways they put them into practice by pretending to possess virtue. Their primary goal is to exaggerate their own aesthetic attributes to falsely signal innate merit, without actually doing anything productive. Creating real value is harder than it has ever been and not very fruitful, a fact of the times. Virtues such as literacy, intelligence and strength used to signal an individual's potential to produce value for society, but this is barely true any more. Now, economic and social reward is allocated on the basis of highly speculative investment in small differences of value in individuals, dubiously backed by real world skills that have increasingly marginal relevance in our automated and systematized world. You really were lucky to get that job. Nietzsche's interest in aesthetics such as beauty often enchanted them with inherent value they do not possess, something which is also used to justify the virtue LARP.

Jews also love Nietzsche because he was fond of drawing connections between obscure concepts and of semitic wordplay, both of which are ripe for opportunities to wow goyim. They also enjoy using him to attack Christianity, overlooking that he identifies Jews as the origin of the slave revolt in morals in Beyond Good and Evil:

Quote:195. The Jews—a people "born for slavery," as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations," as they themselves say and believe—the Jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums. Their prophets fused into one the expressions "rich," "godless," "wicked," "violent," "sensual," and for the first time coined the word "world" as a term of reproach. In this inversion of valuations (in which is also included the use of the word "poor" as synonymous with "saint" and "friend") the significance of the Jewish people is to be found; it is with THEM that the SLAVE-INSURRECTION IN MORALS commences.
#18
(09-12-2023, 05:59 AM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: Nietzsche's concept of the slave revolt in morals is descriptively useful, but LARPing will not bring back the economic conditions that allowed master morality to emerge in the first place, so the LARP will never support its own weight. What made the masters noble was the personal power they safeguarded and made use of, not their moral outlook.
I am confused about this post. Do you mean to say that Nietzsche himself poses a return to master morality, or that it is Nietzsche's reception that has resulted in people LARPing about master morality? If you're saying the latter, then I will be bolstering your claims with quotations. If you're saying the former, then maybe this post will be persuasive in changing your mind. I'm going to make a preemptive apology because an excessive amount of quotes will be used.

For one thing, Nietzsche's project of detailing the slave and the master is historical, or (to use a lifeless academic phrase) a contribution to the "sociology of knowledge". I never found that when reading Genealogy or BG&E that he was ever meaning this to be applicable for us today. We are too submerged by the centuries of these slave thoughts to fully extricate ourselves, and Nietzsche certainly made his attempts at combating it in Daybreak. "All actions may be traced to valuations, all evaluations are either original or adopted — the latter being by far the most common" (§104, Daybreak). The original valuation is reserved for the few, and it remains clear that there can be little faith in any reformation of the Greek spirit. This may have inspired Spengler to eventually say that we are "necessarily alien to the Classical". Here is a good line to use from The Gay Science:

Quote:That several attempts to found new Greek religions have failed testifies to the higher culture of the Greeks even in rather early times; it indicates that even early in Greece, there must have been many diverse individuals whose diverse plights could not be disposed of with a single prescription of faith and hope. -- §149, Book Three, "On the Failure of Reformations".

Now let us turn to the details of the slave and master morality. Here is what Nietzsche states in §260 in Beyond Good and Evil (using Cambridge translations because they are the most convenient ones to use at the moment):

Quote:There is a master morality and a slave morality; – I will immediately add that in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts to negotiate between these moralities also appear, although more frequently the two are confused and there are mutual misunderstandings. In fact, you sometimes find them sharply juxtaposed – inside the same person even, within a single soul.

This is why Nietzsche makes reference to blood-poisoning in The Genealogy of Morality, First Essay, §9.

Quote:“The Masters” are deposed; the morality of the common people has triumphed. You might take this victory for blood-poisoning (it did mix the races up) – I do not deny it; but undoubtedly this intoxication has succeeded.

And now back to §257 in Beyond Good and Evil.

Quote:Let us not be deceived about how every higher culture on earth has begun! Men whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible
sense of the word, predatory people who still possessed an unbroken strength of will and lust for power threw themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races of tradesmen perhaps, or cattle breeders; or on old and mellow cultures in which the very last life-force was flaring up in brilliant fireworks of spirit and corruption. The noble caste always started out as the barbarian caste. Their supremacy was in psychic, not physical strength, – they were more complete people (which at any level amounts to saying “more complete beasts” –).

So, in some ways, the dominance of the master comes from more than moral valuations, but Nietzsche would claim that this is still psychical, they are imbued with a spirit of domination that affects all other qualities. The elder moral valuations which occur after the successful domination are a manifest doctrine of this domination. For an incredible force of barbarism to yield the fruit of civilization, it required their psychical power for all other things to fall into place. It is from this starting point where people begin to be shaped, where the violence of born organizers, blond beasts, take over the base forms of life (as seen in the Second Essay of Genealogy, §17). But the prevalence of slave morality today makes the dispositions of people mixed. The blood of master and slave is mixed, and so the reign of valuations has become heterogeneous. It is an uncomfortable position for humanity to be in.

I find that Thus Spake Zarathustra transcends the matter of slave/master morality by overcoming humanity, which has become fully servile and fully mesmerized with the thought of resignation. Rather than attempt to revive the act of violence which inaugurated presiding masters, something perfect must be achieved (note: by the way, this does not mean that violence is uninvolved). This world is an experiment to invoke the true, pure commander.
Quote:Overcome these rulers of today for me, oh my brothers – these little people: they are the overman’s greatest danger! Overcome for me, you higher men, the little virtues, the little prudence, the sand-grain sized considerations, the detritus of swarming ants, the pitiful contentedness, the “happiness of the greatest number”! [Fourth and Final Part, On the Higher Man]

[...]

Let me be! Let me be! I am too pure for you. Do not touch me! Did my world not just become perfect? My skin is too pure for your hands. Let me be, you stupid, clumsy, stifling day! Is midnight not brighter? The purest shall be rulers of the earth, the least known, strongest, the midnight-souled, who are brighter and deeper than any day. [Fourth and Final Part, The Sleepwalker Song]
#19
My bad for not making it more clear: I was attacking the way Nietzsche's ideas are often applied, I found the concepts of master/slave morality palatable and they're largely historical commentary like you say, but I have come to distrust people who self-describe as Nietzschean online after a few encounters. Recognizing ourselves as mixtures of master/slave could be more accurate considering the freedoms we are afforded today despite a general lack of personal power. I haven't read Zarathustra yet so I should probably do so if that's the prescriptive part of his ideology. I didn't understand your comment or the quote for that part but it also intrigued me, although I wonder if it will be disappointing if this is the core of what "Nietzscheans" are putting into practice.



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