
The Invigorating Strangeness of Friedrich Nietzsche - apollinaire
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-invigorating-strangeness-of-friedrich-nietzsche
======
andreilys
Reading Nietzsche is like breathing in cold mountain air. Some people can
handle the cold, others can't. He's not for everyone, as he makes it
intentionally clear.

He was a stark individualist that put into question a lot of the building
blocks of liberal democracy, such as the notion that all men are equal. I
don't agree with all of what he puts forth but he is without a doubt one of
the most dynamic and influential thinkers of the 19th century and still
relevant to read even today.

If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and
Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of
his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All
Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

~~~
joe_the_user
_He was a stark individualist_

Nietzsche is by no means an individualist. He had no interest in any current
of thought talking of "individualism". Moreover, while he was no doubt
interested in certain individuals, he made it clear that the individuals he
was interested were the product of entire cultures - the most refined possible
people.

Nietzsche also essentially produced a position that was impossible to realize.
Indeed, no one can practically agree with Nietzsche on everything. He wanted
an elite but wanted that elite to be aesthetic and removed from ugly character
of politics as usual. He hated antisemites and militarists yet these were the
most common type to take up his name.

Still, I'd certainly agree Nietzsche is interesting and worth reading.

Edit: Also important is the way Nietzsche refuted the certainties of
philosophy yet did not consider himself a philosopher. He called himself a
"psychologist" early on and his discussion of philosophy was often "what
character would cause a person to believe such a thing".

~~~
andreilys
Yes sorry when I say individualist, I didn't mean in the philosophical sense
but more referring to a person who is independent and self-reliant (something
that he advocates others become as well with the whole self-overcoming)

~~~
joe_the_user
Nietzsche formed his ideas independently. "Self-reliant" is relative - he
spent most of his life disabled, living on a pension in Italy.

Moreover, I don't think Nietzsche advocated that everyone think independently.
Following the "order of rank" logic, he _might_ advocate that those of a
higher order think for themselves (but even he's concerned with what is
healthy for the individual, not what opens the person's mind the most). He'd
not want free thinking for those of a lower order of rank (something that
indeed doesn't paint ole Fred in the best light).

~~~
hutzlibu
"He'd not want free thinking for those of a lower order of rank "

Do you recall where he wrote that? I only read Zarathustra and I do not recall
those thoughts in there.

------
rdlecler1
It's hard not to see Nietzche's "slave morality" in today's successful
backlash against "toxic masculinity" and the "white man".

~~~
AntiTechTechie
Can you explain what you mean by this?

~~~
cannonedhamster
Seems to me the OP is claiming that people who attack white men are weak
willed and only seek to subvert the strong willed white man. Not sure how else
one would read that as only white men are strong willed and think like masters
and everyone else is a weak willed slave.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality)

~~~
rdlecler1
What a fantastic misrepresentation of my comment and it shows very little
understanding of Nietzche. Maybe try reading his work rather than relying on
Wikipedia and throwing up a straw man argument. Ironically your response is
exactly what Nietzche would have predicted.

------
armitron
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of
something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound
collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything
that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am
dynamite.”

Ecce Homo

~~~
tim333
Fairly prophetic that. He (and his anti semitic sister) were kind of popular
with the Nazis.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Fri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche#Nietzsche_and_fascism)

~~~
armitron
Some read this quote as a harbinger of WW2. I think it fits the current
zeitgeist much better and is part of what Nietzsche called the age of the last
man: The destruction of religion and the complete lack of meaning in modern
western societies, leading to consumerism, surrogate activities and finally
nihilism [1]. Before the cyberpunk dystopias described by William Gibson and
Philip K. Dick, before Aldous Huxley, before George Orwell, there was
Nietzsche.

A true genius and like Schopenhauer before him, a powerful initiator in the
human condition.

[1]
[https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/nietzsches-...](https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/nietzsches-
message-beyond-nihilism/)

~~~
AlexCoventry
In what sense did other societies have meaning, that modern societies lack?

~~~
narag
They believed in meaning, we don't.

(please, take that in the spirit of "a little imprecision saves tons of
explanation")

------
0db532a0
For those into Nietzsche, it’s worth reading The Ego and its Own by Max
Stirner:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own)

~~~
totemandtoken
Interesting recommendation. Looking forward to checking this out. I usually
hear Schopenhauer or Zapffe as a similar recommendation.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
You can read everything of Zapffe's that's ever been translated into English
tonight[1]! If you want more pure pessimism you shouldn't leave out Ligotti's
"Conspiracy Against the Human Race", which also cover's Zapffe a bit. Ligotti
is not a traditional philosopher but he makes some great observations about
the relative rarity of true pessimism in Western philosophy.

It's worth noting that Nietzsche's real work was to find a solution to the
inevitable pessimism and nihilism that he feared would inevitably threaten
Western culture. Schopenhauer and Zapffe go straight off into pessimistic view
of human existence (Schopenhauer deriving some humanistic "we're all in this
together" ethics at moments and Zapffe saying we should stop breeding and let
the flame burn out). Nietzsche still ultimately rejects nihilism.

[1]
[https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah](https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah)

------
rv-de
Nietzsche is probably the most overrated philosopher who ever lived. He was a
manic who instead of learning from the world withdrew into a fantasy version
built from well-phrased sound bites (or "aphorisms" \- which sounds nicer).
His ideas primarily serve the purpose of confirming elitist and Darwinian
perspectives predominantly popular among people who hold a grudge against
society because they didn't get a large enough chunk from the big cake.

~~~
eternalban
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Andreas-
Salom%C3%A9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Andreas-Salom%C3%A9)

I wonder if there ever have been prolific male philosophers that had a fully
satisfying sexual and romantic life ..

~~~
HNLurker2
Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard all died unmarried and
childless

~~~
eternalban
Aristotle, ever practical, however tied the knot on the Isle of Lesbos.

[left something for you here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597916)]

------
Pimpus
Isn't this all common knowledge? I don't think anyone has considered Nietzsche
a Nazi for a long time. I certainly didn't learn anything new and I have only
a cursory familiarity with Nietzsche and his works. This review(?) doesn't
even mention some of the more interesting aspects of his life, and the snide
comment about Zarathustra was just... strange. I'm sure the biography is
great, this review doesn't sell it very well at all.

~~~
narag
_I don 't think anyone has considered Nietzsche a Nazi for a long time._

He was hated by all my high school teachers, both the communists and the
religion teacher. I bet that he will be called a nazi while there are
communists and christians.

I think what they hated most about him is that he likened both groups.

~~~
freedomben
Indeed. Nietzsche provided powerful arguments to explain the origin of
religion (particularly Christianity) and even attempted to write his own
Bible-style text with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His explanations include
brilliant insights on human psychology, and do a pretty good number on faith.
I can understand why the religion teacher didn't like him :-)

------
kingkawn
That Nietzsche’s public life ended with him sobbing in empathy for a horse who
he saw whipped always felt to me to nullify all his previous philosophical
argument.

In other words; His worldview builds until it breaks through recognition of
the Other.

~~~
gnulinux
It's interesting that this is a scene from Dostoevsky's novel _Crime and
Punishment_. I always wondered if it's a bizarre coincidence or some sort of
influence went into the novel, or reports about Nietzche's life.

------
sverige
I've always thought Nietzsche was the only funny (hilarious more than strange)
modern philosopher. Compared to dullards like Kierkegaard, he's a barrel of
laughs. I also think he's also the perfect example of the old saw "all modern
philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle."

One of my professors gave a very learned exposition of Nietzsche as the
philosophical forbear of Nazism. It was pretty convincing, frankly, and I
still think of Nietzsche as fundamentally evil. Funny, but evil. The
exposition took days of his lecture time, so I won't try to recreate it here,
but lightly dismissing that charge by laying it all at the feet of his sister
is a mistake. The playful disassembling of Western philosophy that Nietzsche
indulged in had real consequences in the actions of those who studied his
works.

~~~
BucketSort
He's only evil when you see the world as a delusional butterfly. Most of what
he talked about, power, is what truly rules the world. I think if all of us
understood his lessons, we would be less susceptible to being manipulated and
used for evil. I think he was so far ahead of his time that he's even ahead of
us in the present. Have we gone beyond good and evil yet? Have we learned how
weak those concepts make us? How easily they permit us to be controlled? Just
look at how zealous people have become because they are the "good" and others
are the "bad." How could such a modern people be so ignorant of the forces
that shape their lives, even when we have such great teachers?

~~~
btilly
Given the long-standing decline in violence over recent centuries, the real
"delusional butterflies" are the ones who think that their ideas shouldn't be
called evil because might inevitably makes right, and therefore everything
from slavery to genocide is simply the natural order that we shouldn't try to
escape.

~~~
BucketSort
Where did Nietzsche advocate slavery and genocide? Just because someone points
out that our nature tends towards complete domination of others doesn't mean
one advocates it! He hated what we are! This is the greatest misconception of
Nietzsche. People find him contemptuous because they derive all their power
from the binds he sought to liberate people from. They also read him way to
literally. He was a poet philosopher. He wrote in a way meant to invoke an
intellectual experience, rather than lay out a systematic dogma.

~~~
btilly
As soon as you take the step of saying don't read him literally, you can read
anything you want into him. And have given up your right to complain that
anyone else read something else into him.

Now consider quotes like these:

"The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to
higher men." "Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race
with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to
have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative." "I welcome all signs
that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to
courage above all!" "Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in
himself the force and will to inflict great pain?"

Read this as poetry for your own enjoyment if you wish. But these "poems" both
can be and have been used to justify atrocities.

~~~
BucketSort
I mean, he was a poetic philosopher. Do you read poetry literally? Also, you
can't just pluck quotes out of their context. Notice how he talks about pain,
but doesn't say things like "you should kill the weak." Inflicting pain in
order to improve things is a necessity. Ever heard things like "pain is
weakness leaving the body?" That's how he meant it.

I'd like to remind you that even Jesus has been used to justify atrocities.
It's not the words of men that justify things, it's the authority others give
them and those who distort their words for their own purposes. Don't blame the
messengers, blame yourself, blame us, blame our weaknesses for falling for the
same thing over and over again.

~~~
btilly
In other words, "Anyone who reads something into him that I don't like,
doesn't understand him properly."

Which is a well-known logical fallacy. Look up, "No true Scotsman."

Back in the real world, people who read him, thought they understood him, and
didn't agree with your interpretation, proceeded to literally kill people by
the millions. Justifying it by what they understood him to be saying.

I have no particular reason to trust your interpretation over theirs. And when
it comes to my best judgment, I find him wrong again and again. So I don't
really care which interpretation I'd find more palatable.

~~~
BucketSort
My good fellow, I am merely suggesting that if you wish to critique his work,
you should study it yourself -- which would be almost impossible now because
you will just look for excuses to mold these works to your expectations of
them. If you had told me you read his work and rejected it, then this would be
a different discussion. We'd have to get into our conflicting interpretations.
Right now, however, it just seems like you are dismissing him because the
actions and critiques of others. Also, I don't really think this is an issue
of "wrong" or "right." A philosophy of life is more in the domain of art than
logic or the sciences. Is a painting wrong? Upon what ground do you critique a
painting from? How one judges a philosophy of life is more a matter of the
aesthetics of the vision than the correctness of it. I know you mean "wrong"
in the sense that it disagrees with your view of life, but this obscures the
fact that we are talking about aesthetics, not logical conclusions.

------
leoc
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaXigSu72A4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaXigSu72A4)

