The Nietzsche Talk

[cats]

Puts forward no arguments while accusing others of not putting forward arguments. Evades while accusing others of evading. Says "I accept your concession" when in actual fact I conceded nothing. You are a subroutine programmed by that Finnish ogre Bleppsama. You will respond to this with "not an argument" because that is what Übermarnites who think you're an idiot used to say in 2021.

[Ricky23]

To people of the requisite biological and spiritual composition to understand Nietzsche, telling themselves that they are a retarded ugly slave in a sewer with other retarded ugly slaves who all must bow before YHWH for a chance to get out is not only an assault against their dignity, but a totally illogical lie. They possess a special ability which allows them to determine that niggers are bad because they look and smell like shit (based off subjective, idealized constructs of European beauty which are actually transcendental truths, dumb libtard moralist), not just because they commit lots of crime and are a drain on the economy.

This isn't an argument. You don't get to just say "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and therefore incorrect" because that's an ad hominem and doesn't adress a single argument that Author made.

[Guest]

You don't get to just say "everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and therefore incorrect" because that's an ad hominem and doesn't adress a single argument that Author made.

9,100

The author openly admits that his arguments are in bad faith, so why should cats address them?

[Guest]

Cats i believe is right in this altercation. If you read Green Groyper's post above, you can tell that he was fundamentally unable to understand the point cats was making, that being that a truly Aryan specimen would understand innately why affirming the world is good, and only the lower need good reason for needing to affirm it. The actual argument cats made is definitely not bulletproof, but the fact that GG wasn't able to understand it is a sort of QRD that proves cats right on needing great intelligence to infer the points Nietzsche makes.

[The_Author]

The author openly admits that his arguments are in bad faith, so why should cats address them?

All you have to do is stop crying about "bad faith" and etc. and make a counterpoint concerning an assertion. And please not concerning anything under the "emotive argument" heading.

Example:

Author: The moral of the story in Passing By is worse than the common sense view of behavior regarding things that one does not love. It is not wise. The wisdom is cloaked in literature.

Guest: "where one does not love, there should one PASS BY!" is better than the common sense view of behavior regarding things one does not love. One sees people all the time who fail to relinquish attachments to things, such as drugs, that they really dislike and know to be harmful.

What you prefer instead: You DIDN'T INTERPRET THAT YOURSELF!

This is what tells me, if you are the same person, that good faith i.e reasonable arguments are not your concern, but rather arguments that imply personal repute are what you prefer to deal in. I am, in fact, a professor at the university of Oxford, and I have studied Zarathustra so extensively that I no longer need to remember the meaning of each passage, because I remember that each passage is without meaning.

[Guest]

The author openly admits that his arguments are in bad faith, so why should cats address them?

This is what tells me, if you are the same person, that good faith i.e reasonable arguments are not your concern, but rather arguments that imply personal repute are what you prefer to deal in. I am, in fact, a professor at the university of Oxford, and I have studied Zarathustra so extensively that I no longer need to remember the meaning of each passage, because I remember that each passage is without meaning.

There's nothing wrong with using heuristics. Someone who reads Nietzsche will notice he's right about many things and grant him benefit of the doubt where he's difficult to follow. Even when he's wrong, he's generally enjoyable to read. When I first encountered you and Templism, I wasn't on board but thought parts of it were interesting and possibly of value. Fifty inane cries for attention later, I assume whatever you say is wrong and primarily motivated by a desire for clout.

[Guest]

This is a way of reiterating the problem, but you're doing it with a positive intonation. Intonations aside, Zarathustra is meaningless and designed to evoke emotive responses. If you want to read that kind of material, fine, but Nietzsche characterizes it as a work of unparalleled truth and complexity. His followers believe it, and so they consider it to be emblematic of the rest of his philosophy, and to them vague parables about "going down" or whatever stupid mouth-froth become philosophical justifications for follow-on stupidity.

Humans will rationalize the statements of their leaders ad absurdum. So to write a novel and to characterize that novel as philosophically important is irresponsible. Nietzsche clearly considered Zarathustra to be a part of his larger "work", not a literary side project.

Zarathustra is more meaningful than your blog post. Words, in general, are not very meaningful. Only math is. Nietzsche was right about philosophy, it's just a bunch of rationalization and projection and reading is dumb.

[Drusus]

Nietzsche doesn’t lay out all his arguments because he assumes the reader is familiar with a number of them already, in particular the modern tradition in philosophy from Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Spinoza to Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Rather than go over these arguments again, Nietzsche assumes you’ve absorbed them and picks up from there. Given Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena, Nietzsche’s polemics against the thing-in-itself make perfect sense, even in aphorisms. All philosophers do this, even if they don’t adopt Nietzsche’s method of speaking. Aquinas doesn’t spend the first part of the Summa arguing for the validity of Aristotle’s categories; he assumes you agree with them and moves on. Nietzsche’s other stylistic concern is cultural. A brief, commanding style is the hallmark of an aristocratic philosophy, a philosophy that announces what it sees instead of trying to persuade. Read Heraclitus for an example of this attitude. Again, given the right background knowledge, this is not obscure, at least not usually. Nietzsche is not systematic, but he certainly has a system, that is, a self-consistent worldview with strong reasons in support. He frequently provides the arguments for or against certain positions, although these are sometimes dense enough that you, the reader, have to work through them over time.

Discussions of Boolean vs Aristotelian logic are beside the point when talking about Nietzsche’s skepticism. He isn’t a skeptic in that way. Nietzsche is not an irrationalist; he isn’t trying to defend some kind of fideistic, Choose Your Own Adventure epistemology. He’s very much a man of the Enlightenment. He admires science as a superior tool for understanding the world as it appears to us and criticizes thinkers like Emerson, whom he otherwise admires, insofar as they lack a good foundation in science. Skepticism comes in when we try to determine if the world as it appears to us is how the world really is, in itself. If you could escape a human point of view, if you could look at the universe through the eyes of an impartial observer — God — would it appear as we perceive it? The answer of modern philosophy since Kant — who is himself responding to earlier thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Spinoza — is “There’s no way to know.” Our knowledge is so entirely conditioned, not only by the senses, but also by our reasoning faculties, which always structure our perceptions in certain consistent ways (this is Kant’s point about a priori knowledge), that we cannot know whether we are correctly representing the world in our minds. It’s an argument against, not physics, but a Platonic ideal of Truth as absolute or transcendent certainty. Jibes about the ubermensch being able to fly (because gravity is only a matter of perspective) betray a misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s thought. He isn’t trying to question a scientific understanding of the world, so long as that understanding is aware of what it can and can’t do. To be fair, the misunderstanding of Nietzsche-as-absolute-relativist is widespread because of people like Kaufman, Deleuze, and Foucault, who have twisted his ideas into forms better suited for their own projects (respectively, twee 20th-century liberalism, a defense of schizophrenia, and fucking little Tunisian boys.)

To understand Nietzsche, you have to understand Schopenhauer, especially his notion of the world as Will and Representation. Look at your hand. You can consider it objectively, by observing it, noting its form, perceiving it as though it were external to you, or subjectively, as a collection of sensations, a bundle of feelings, instincts, drives. That is, you can consider it as Representation (externally) or as Will (internally). For Schopenhauer, this is true of the whole world. Considered as Representation, it has order, structure, harmony between its parts. My reason can comprehend it, at least partially. But considered internally, the world is a chaotic profusion of irrational instincts. A spider-web is beautiful, and just by looking at it you’d think the creature that made it was intelligent and purposeful. In reality, it didn’t know what it was doing: it was moved by a series of blind impulses. What’s true of the spider is true, for Schopenhauer, of everything, including man. When I move my fingers, I don’t first form an intention and then consciously manipulate them. My conscious “intention” — my self-conscious “act of free will” — always lags behind my instinctive drives: the fingers were already starting to move by the time I formed an “intention” to move them. For Schopenhauer, the impulses that drive existence, the instincts and forces which move all events, are aimless, meaningless, and unending. He is a pessimist. Faced with such a world, he believes the best thing to do is to crucify the will, to attain, through asceticism or aesthetic contemplation, a state of detached indifference. Schopenhauer arrives at something like Vedic Hinduism through the Western, scientific approach, as did people like Einstein and Oppenheimer. Like a Brahmin, Schopenhauer preaches extinction of the Will.

When Nietzsche says that the will to power is the basic substrate of existence, he’s modifying Schopenhauer in a crucial way. A will, says Nietzsche, is never blind: it always aims at something. Nietzsche believes that all existing things, all organisms, all forces, aim at power: that is, growth, expansion, increase, discharge of their energies, assimilation of foreign objects. An amoeba stretches out to absorb another amoeba. Why? Not for pleasure — it doesn’t have faculties to feel hunger or to achieve satisfaction. Not simply to live, either, as Darwin would say. What the amoeba “wants” isn’t just to go on existing, but to become more. According to Nietzsche, that drive is the fundamental motor behind all phenomena. It is to his philosophy what water is to Thales or fire to Heraclitus or the One to Plato: a single principle that explains and orders everything else (philosophy itself being the search for such a principle). The world is the Will-to-Power. 

Nietzsche’s ethics flow from this conviction:

“What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.”

Someone upthread asked why we should take an affirmative stance toward existence. Yes, says Nietzsche, but not simply “because the Greeks did it.” Any stance toward the world as such is necessarily irrational because it’s the judgment of a part on the whole: one could never have enough information to justify that position. The judgment of the part can say nothing True about the whole. But it makes an enormous difference to the part which stance it takes. For Schopenhauer to condemn existence as meaningless and evil is an act of weakness on the part of an otherwise great man. It’s a failure of courage that, taken to its ultimate conclusion, would have given him an effeminate longing for peace, for an end to the struggle of life. (Of course, Nietzsche thinks that Schopenhauer’s manly nature asserted itself against the enervating effects of his own philosophy.) In Wagner, who was not as strong as Schopenhauer, it led to the maudlin resignation that characterizes Parcival, which Nietzsche despised. To take another example, Pascal, the great mathematician, the man of reason, the man capable of all the joy and power of thought, becomes, under the influence of Port-Royalism, a cringing wretch, lamenting his sins, shrinking back in fear from the silence of the cosmos, casting aspersions on the very reasoning faculties that are the source of his greatness. A negative stance toward existence poisons life, when such a stance isn’t simply the expression of a form of life that has already been poisoned. (Pascal could have been “saved,” could have become even more than he already was; the apostle Paul was botched from the start — at best, he could have found relief from his sufferings through asceticism and detachment.) Which isn’t to say we should be facile optimists. The task, to Nietzsche, is to combine Schopenhauer’s clear-eyed perception of the world with all its strife and suffering with a “joyous fatalism.” This attitude, which Nietzsche calls Dionysian or tragic, leads to the maximum of power. (There’s much more to be said here but I’ll leave it be for now.)

I’ve written too much already, but I’ll conclude by saying that the genealogical method, which several users have criticized, isn’t meant to prove the truth or untruth of certain propositions (what CS Lewis called “Bulverism”, which Green, I think, referenced near the beginning). Nietzsche isn’t trying to approach a person who’s neutral on, say, Christianity, and prove to them through the genealogical method that Christianity is false. He assumes that you, a late 19th century reader, already believe Christianity is false. But you probably also believe that Christianity, while untrue, is morally good. Liberalism, democracy, socialism — these are all attempts by apostates or atheists to save the ethical core of Christianity when its doctrine has been abandoned. By investigating the psychological origins of Christianity, Nietzsche wants to demonstrate, not that Christianity is false, but that it’s bad, the product of envy and a venomous hatred for the good and beautiful.

[The_Author]

Nietzsche believes that all existing things, all organisms, all forces, aim at power: that is, growth, expansion, increase, discharge of their energies, assimilation of foreign objects. An amoeba stretches out to absorb another amoeba. Why? Not for pleasure — it doesn’t have faculties to feel hunger or to achieve satisfaction. Not simply to live, either, as Darwin would say. What the amoeba “wants” isn’t just to go on existing, but to become more. According to Nietzsche, that drive is the fundamental motor behind all phenomena.

Give argument or evidence for this idea. He doesn't. You can call that "aristocratic" or I can call it un-aristocratic, or I can call it soft, or hard, or flimsy or proletarian, but it is not convincing unless evidence is provided for it. There is not any.

[Drusus]

I did provide arguments. I considered two possible explanations for the amoeba’s actions — the desire for pleasure or a drive for mere survival — then concluded that another explanation, the will to power, better fit the case. Really, Nietzsche considered these explanations and I’m simply summarizing his reasoning. He starts with those three possible motives — hunger / pleasure, will to survive, will to power — because those are motives in human beings that seem relevant by analogy. If a man were in that situation, these are explanations we would consider to explain his behavior. Without access to the inner state of an amoeba, this is the only type of reasoning possible when one wants to move beyond mechanical explanations of how it moves to an understanding of why it moves. This type of argument can’t achieve the same level of certainty as one dealing strictly with matters of fact or mathematics. One evaluates it according to how well it explains the observable phenomena — in Aristotle’s terms, how well it “saves appearances.” Additional considerations might include: is the explanation simple? Does it cohere with other things we know? Does it introduce unnecessary complications, entities, or leaps in reasoning? (Every argument of this kind will have some leap in reasoning.) Is it elegant? Is the analogy (in this case between amoeba and man) sound?

You don’t like will to power as an explanation of why an amoeba assimilates foreign bodies into itself. Fine. Do you have an alternative explanation that better fits the case? Is there something in WTP as an explanation that’s lacking? Do you disagree with the idea of using analogical reasoning to draw conclusions about the world — in other words, with the ancient or medieval notion that man is a microcosm of creation?The amoeba is also just an example. Nietzsche is looking for a single principle behind phenomena. Do you prefer a different one? Do you reject that attempt in its entirety? If so, why?

[The Green Groyper]

Cats i believe is right in this altercation. If you read Green Groyper's post above, you can tell that he was fundamentally unable to understand the point cats was making, that being that a truly Aryan specimen would understand innately why affirming the world is good, and only the lower need good reason for needing to affirm it. The actual argument cats made is definitely not bulletproof, but the fact that GG wasn't able to understand it is a sort of QRD that proves cats right on needing great intelligence to infer the points Nietzsche makes.

That’s such a nonsensical argument I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like saying only a Scotsman could appreciate bagpipe music, or only an Amerindian could appreciate buffalo migration patterns.

Understanding being limited to one arbitrary category is completely removed from enlightenment thought. There’s no reason why a peasant should understand quantum physics any less than an aristocrat.

“But only those with the mystical quality of the blood get it!” Isn’t rational, it’s an inherently occulting or esoteric mystical form of reasoning.

[The Green Groyper]

I’ve written too much already, but I’ll conclude by saying that the genealogical method, which several users have criticized, isn’t meant to prove the truth or untruth of certain propositions (what CS Lewis called “Bulverism”, which Green, I think, referenced near the beginning). Nietzsche isn’t trying to approach a person who’s neutral on, say, Christianity, and prove to them through the genealogical method that Christianity is false. He assumes that you, a late 19th century reader, already believe Christianity is false.“

Bulverism is dismissing an argument by claiming it’s believed or your opponent believes it due to some psychological or emotional handicap or disorder. “You are only racist because black men make you sexually insecure” or “you only believe in conspiracy theories because you have a deep emotional need to believe the world is orderly”.

Nietzhe’s entire broadside against Christianity and by extension its successor ideologies(however historically accurate that genealogy is) is this. No one believes Christianity or socialism because well they actually believe in it, but because they are motivated by spite or envy. This doesn’t address these things on their actual claims, but simply psychologizes their supporters as mentally unbalanced or having some irrational fixation.

[Guest]

That’s such a nonsensical argument I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like saying only a Scotsman could appreciate bagpipe music, or only an Amerindian could appreciate buffalo migration patterns.

Understanding being limited to one arbitrary category is completely removed from enlightenment thought. There’s no reason why a peasant should understand quantum physics any less than an aristocrat.

“But only those with the mystical quality of the blood get it!” Isn’t rational, it’s an inherently occulting or esoteric mystical form of reasoning.

This is a sound rebuttal to cats argument, but sadly you only made it after you were told what cats argument was. This essentially proves him right, and makes you a lesser individual who is to be relegated to the depths of the Brimstonebund.

[The Green Groyper]

I haven’t been following this thread except intermittently. So forgive me if I’m not keeping up with every detail. Much less keeping track of guest posts.

And I’m familiar with the argument presented-the notion that knowledge or special kinds of knowledge is something only some special category of man can understand or appreciate.

If you want to argue “only White men understand Faustian teleologies of adventure” or whatever, fine but don’t claim that’s a systematic or “enlightenment” line of reasoning. It’s inherently mystical.

And yes I did understand cats’ argument. I just didn’t respond to it because I had other points to make.

[Guest]

Has The_Author ever posted anything interesting? Is there any concrete topic that he has some novel insight on? I can't check for myself because reading his prose makes me feel queasy

[Zed]

This will be my last post in this horrid thread. I'm going to give my reading of the essential elements of Nietzsche. I don't claim correctness, only a reading. -

1. Eternal recurrence: Everything that has happened before will happen again. The arguments we have here are iterations of arguments that were had four millennia ago, and it will happen four millennia from now. Repetition is a cosmic law, as essential to the dynamics of humanity as it is to the orbit of a moon about it's planet - and the orbit of the planet about it's sun. You can autism pick at this, because this thread is full of autists who hate poetry - but the universe is poetic. Nietzsche understood this - he felt it intuitively. Either you also feel that - or you do not - and no further conversation can be had. But for those who are bound to such cosmic autism: Consider that sometime, in a future after all life is extinguished from the universe - things will again happen. And once more, in a future even further than that, there will be a people somewhere, both different from us, but also similar - who will have this conversation again on a forum similar to this.
   
2. The question of God has no answer. Everything of merit that humanity has done happened because a man had the strength and capacity to exert his will on the world around him. Thus, the great works of religion (or, of 'god') were factually the great works of men. Hence: Jesus was a great man. Even Nietzsche acknowledged that - but his greatness came from the exertion of his will on the world around him, in laying the framework the make those around him better - and to shape and cultivate them according to his will. Could a God operate through this process? Sure. But you cannot know of it even if so. Whatever else Christianity is or isn't, it was the result of prodigious wills. In either case, if you are obsessed with the idea of a Real Dad Moral Lawgiver - Nietzsche is not for you. Read literally, the Old Testament is farcical and inconsistent with innumerable historical and scientific observations. Worse, it portrays a petty, insecure, and human God. Of course, Nietzsche didn't need or want to make this argument, because he assumed his readers were intelligent enough to have made it for themselves. If you're upset that Nietzsche didn't debunk Christianity, you should probably go read Dawkins - Nietzsche assumed far more of his readers.
   
3. The Untermensch gives rise to the Ubermensch and vice versa. This too is eternal recurrence, and it is the tragedy of Zarathustra. In the gay language of old /pol/ memes: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. What the mundane meme misses, and what Nietzsche understood, was the intense nihilism that lies in the heart of acceptance of this truth - to live in that face of an eternally promised decline? How does one become well disposed to this?  How does one evade the nihilism that hides behind the essence of cyclicity? Thus Spoke Zarathustra was his answer to this - and it was his greatest work. It was written as it was over the course of two weeks after the only women he ever loved (and respected) rejected him.
   
4. Life - as such - is a tragedy.  Schopenhauer himself arrived there before Nietzsche, and embraced an ascetism so radically Christian as to reject life itself. Better to not be born! To reject this, Nietzsche had to understand the sublime beauty in life. In tragedy.  One can never understand this part of Nietzsche until one experiences this for themselves. But to experience it is to see transparently the spirit of his philosophy. 
   
5. The second corollary of eternal recurrence: Recall the words spoken between Krishna and Arjuna before the battle of kurukshetra:
   

6. Krishna: When they suffer, they ask, 'Why me?' When they prosper, they never ask 'Why me?'
   Arjun: How can I get the best out of life?
   Krishna: Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence. Prepare for the future without fear.
   Arjun: One last question. Sometimes I feel my prayers are not answered.
   Krishna: There are no unanswered prayers. Keep the faith and drop the fear. Life is a mystery to solve, not a problem to resolve. Trust me.

   
   
7. cont - This comes from the Bhagavad Gita, and one should read the whole dialogue. Likely, Nietzsche was not familiar with it - but eternal recurrence effectively necessitated his rediscovery of it. It for this reason that is rightful to regard him as a prophet. To face the eternal recurrence and to accept it requires an appreciation for life, beauty, pain, suffering, and death that allows meaning to transcend upon the eternal, to be bound to repetition. This is his well-disposed: Can you, Amarna-Forum poster, look in the mirror, and face an eternity of being born in this period of decline - over and over again - and find eternal happiness in that? Can you face it without regret? Can you look at your friendships, your love, and not imagine anything more perfect? That is the challenge he poses for you, and I - as his poor reader - reiterate.
   
8. Truth is in the blood, in instinct and intuition. To pursue truth (and one must always pursue it, and never obtain it), requires a rejection of that which the idols and false doctrines that enslave and bound the best spirits of humanity. Those spirits, who are bound to such, are twisted by their weight. To Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was such a tragedy. How could a man of such brilliance and insight fall into a nihilism so deep as to wish his own unbirth? Nietzsche writes to such spirits first and foremost. He did not write to save the world, but perhaps only save a few select souls whose spirits at least somewhat poorly reflect his own.
   
9. Will to Power, Genealogy of Morals, all of his philosophical autism was insignificant compared to his aphorisms on friendship, dancing, eternal recurrence, and love. He acknowledges this in Ecce Homo, along with the central place of Zarathustra in oeuvre. Better to see him as an aristocratic Polish mystic than a German philosopher. And - if you must see him as a philosopher - see him as a philosopher of dance. His work is best read first and then experienced. I first read him at 13, and return to his aphorisms still - in moments of intense pain - and find solace in them. I leave one aphorism, and I ask the reader to hold it in their heart until such a day comes when an understanding of it becomes most necessary:
   

“Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.”

[The_Author]

He starts with those three possible motives — hunger / pleasure, will to survive, will to power — because those are motives in human beings that seem relevant by analogy. If a man were in that situation, these are explanations we would consider to explain his behavior.

Will to power is not a psychological theory. It applies to amoebas, and all objects in general. Amoebas and all objects in general do not have psychologies. So it is irrelevant to compare this method to the method by which we find man's motives.

Without access to the inner state of an amoeba, this is the only type of reasoning possible when one wants to move beyond mechanical explanations of how it moves to an understanding of why it moves.

"This" type of reasoning refers to nothing in this case. What type of reasoning was previously mentioned? Making a random choice among three possible alternative theories? Yes indeed if this is all one can do to "access the inner state of an amoeba", that state, in fact, cannot be accessed and might not exist. One does not allow oneself to make random unfounded assertions upon anything that one cannot know.

One evaluates it according to how well it explains the observable phenomena — in Aristotle’s terms, how well it “saves appearances.” Additional considerations might include: is the explanation simple? Does it cohere with other things we know? Does it introduce unnecessary complications, entities, or leaps in reasoning? (Every argument of this kind will have some leap in reasoning.) Is it elegant? Is the analogy (in this case between amoeba and man) sound?

If this is the "type of reasoning" you are referring to, that is called: merely generating a plausible theory. It is a just-so story. I can give endless theories that explain the observable phenomenon of an amoeba, that are simple, that cohere with things we know, that do not introduce unnecessary complications, that contain minimal leaps in reasoning, that are elegant, that are sound. The alternative theories you mentioned: survival, hunger/pleasure, have these qualities also. The explanation that an amoeba "just simply is", though not an explanation, fits all of those requirements. The explanation that an amoeba is "animated by a parasite" fits all of those requirements. The explanation the amoeba is "animated by pure Will", assuming that you if you respect Schopenhauer find that to mean anything, would fit all of those requirements, at least as well as will to power.

But theories are not proven because they are plausible. They are proven when they are found in the world, and one can show that something is found in the world using reasoning or empirical evidence.

You don’t like will to power as an explanation of why an amoeba assimilates foreign bodies into itself. Fine. Do you have an alternative explanation that better fits the case?

I have something better than an explanation that "better fits the case". I have an explanation that is evidenced in the world. That is, that an amoeba is a biological entity that is descended from other biological entities. If its qualities do not further its own survival, it dies. Therefore nature selects qualities that allow the amoeba to survive. The qualities that allow an amoeba to survive, relative to whatever other organism the species started as, are such as to make it expand to capture other food sources, and the like.

Amoebas, anyway, do not expand indefinitely as though reaching to conquer infinite space. They expand in front and contract in back in order to move, to capture food. This behavior, for the amoeba, is demonstrably instrumental to survival. Without it, which is to say with some other quality, they would die, and dead qualities do not survive.

This is a mechanical explanation for which there is significant empirical evidence concerning all organisms. You can ask any further question under the sun, such as "why does natural selection exist, metaphysically? What is the underlying force behind it?" and, since such a question cannot admit of evidence, we don't know or there isn't any. As you said, for some reason with a positive intonation, that all we could do to such questions is make a number of plausible theories and select one arbitrarily. I'm not going to base my worldview upon arbitrary selections.

[The_Author]

Has The_Author ever posted anything interesting? Is there any concrete topic that he has some novel insight on? I can't check for myself because reading his prose makes me feel queasy

Yes but you are unable to read it so you will NGMI.

[Guest]

"So you will NGMI"
"..."

[Guest]

Has The_Author ever posted anything interesting? Is there any concrete topic that he has some novel insight on? I can't check for myself because reading his prose makes me feel queasy

Yes but you are unable to read it so you will NGMI.

Point me to your best, least self-indulgent post then.

Regarding the OP: Using CTRL+F, one can count over 120 pairs of quotation marks in your Nietzsche post on Substack, most of them around a single word or expression. This is obviously a stylistic problem, but I think that it also indicates a pathology in your thinking. I have to admit that the purpose of your post is not really clear to me. You spend a lot of time quibbling about the definitions of words and phrases to prove that Nietzsche's writings are "nonsense". What does this mean? The people who like Nietzsche obviously seem to get something out of his books at least in their subjective experience. If you have some concrete point to make about these people and their opinions, I must have missed it. With regards to Nietzsche himself, it seems like you mostly criticize his aphoristic work for consisting of aphorisms (a conscious stylistic choice on his part). He expresses some of his ideas more systematically in the Genealogy of Morals, a work that you have not engaged with as far as I have seen from skimming the thread. So, why are you posting this at all? Is it just to win some kind of Internet Debate Points by proving that the anonymous people you talk to don't adhere to some standard of rationality? Or did you have some actual point (about the concrete, material world or your subjective experience) to make before getting carried away with the semantics?