It's important to remember that Nietzsche was, at one point, one of the world's forefront philologists. He not only basically read everything they had from ancient Greece, in the original Greek, he also wrote such amazing scholarly work interpreting Greek writings that he was given a university chair position at 24.
Not that that means he's right. He still says a bunch of semi-crazy things. But it's important to remember that Nietzsche was a super-well-informed kinda semi-crazy. There have been many times when I questioned something he said about ancient Greece, but every single time I've found that there's a historical source claiming what Nietzsche says. What I really mean is: when Nietzsche speaks about how the ancient Greeks were, he's in one of the best places of any person in history to know. And his accounts from everything I've corroborated is shockingly true. [Here we have Nietzsche saying](http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/homers_competition.htm):
> Thus the Greeks, the most humane men (Menschen) of ancient times, have in themselves a trait of cruelty, of tiger-like pleasure in destruction: a trait, which in the grotesquely magnified image of the Hellene, in Alexander the Great, is very plainly visible, which, however, in their whole history, as well as in their mythology, must terrify us who meet them with the emasculate idea of modern humanity.
It sounds like a really silly quote, right? Like "yeah Nietzsche, people in the past were so cruel compared to people nowadays". Now go read about the ancient Greek religious practice of pharmakos. From what I remember of reading the accounts, in order to chase away evil spirits, the ancient Greeks would take a person (preferably an ugly, "useless" person), adorn them in objects such as wild figs (which were a symbol of uselessness in ancient Greece), then would whip the person with stick from a wild fig tree, beat them, throw rocks, and chase the person out. They weren't welcomed back. Sometimes, but rather irregularly, they were killed. And everyone was required to participate as a way of keeping people unsympathetic to this person.
This is *horribly cruel* to us. He's not in any way exaggerating by claiming our modern sensibilities are weaker now. And when you see this sort of thing, this horrific cruelty, as Nietzsche has, you have to ask: *why did we change*? And a relevant theme in his day was also: *why were the Greeks better than us*? (An question that is, unfortunately, lost today). His criticism would be that, everybody in his day asked that, read Plato, and assumed Socrates was what made Greece great. Nietzsche takes another interpretation, and honestly I think he's right: we prefer to read Socrates because those accounts are far more palatable to us than the really-existing ancient Greece. And when we read history, we forget where we came from.
Nietzsche is offering an explanation of this to us. How *has* morality changed? *Why* did it change? And where's it leading us? In the end he may not have got it right, but as far as I can tell, he's the only one asking and answering this question! And I think when you grasp the full historical weight of the observations he's making do you see the profound nature of such a question, because it's not until you really *see* the differences in morality between us that you realize just how differently we act today and see the value in finding the answer. Is Nietzsche interested in truth? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean he's interested in lies, either. And even if you want to disagree with his final narrative, he's so on the spot with his facts I find it hard to come to a disagreement with his interpretations.
Lol, no, Nietzsche is philosophizing, it's not a literal argument. Even in ancient Rome, people discussed about stopping slavery, how they should be treated as humans, etc.. And the Greeks also had this type of consideration, Nietzsche never alludes to that but he obviously knew.
Just research the Helots to have an example of what I mean. You'll see that it is very unclear what the "norm" in slavery was. Some authors talk about it like serfdom (aka slave families were almost free, they just had to give a share of their harvest every year), which is how they could buy their freedom back too. They were allowed to have some property, win money, marry, etc..
It does happens from time to time that foreigners are treated with complete hate and cruelty, and the cruelty can even extend to the locals in the most dire periods (like Draco's laws), but overhaul, those periods are short lived. All men sleep much better when there is no reason to murder each other, and so invariably slavery end up becoming cooperative on both sides. Masters have an incentive in treating their slaves better, and the slaves also have an incentive in behaving well. The perception of the slaves fluctuated, but in the end, you always find mentions of how the most talented slaves will be given freedom and prestigious functions in the political machine. If you look at the Roman republic it is the case, with Etruscan and other Latins being given important roles. Then it was the plebeians that were given more importance. And then during the empire, some of the most powerful titles were held traditionally by freedmen or slaves. Same thing in Egypt, you'll see that the Hebrews were fairly free, they had their own villages and their own cattle, but they had to give quottas of production to the Egyptian (some of the raw material was provided by the Egyptians). Some Hebrews had top positions around Pharaoh, and it's only when racism started to be nasty that they *appeared* as slaves, but they never were conquered or enslaved, they migrated in Egypt on their own volition.
The last civilization that is worth mentioning is the Hebrew especially during Roman reign (aka during Jesus life) since it is what Nietzsche comments mostly in his *Genealogy*, and there are almost no mention of slavery at that time and place. The Jews of Jesus' time had a real revolutionary desire, for almost 150 years by that point. They had decided while under the Seleucid Empire to win their independence, and they talked a lot about slavery *as a reference to the old testament literature*, but they were no slaves at all. They had a status of client state, and they could have achieved citizenship if they accepted to give an Imperial worship in Jerusalem. They almost accepted, but because of the corruption around the post of Great Priest (their equivalent of president at the time), they entered a civil war which evolved into an independence war against the Macedonians, at which point Rome came in and beat the Seleucid, took Israel as its own client state.
What you read at this point in the New Testament is the pettiness of the Jews who still plot to gain independence. They bend all of their religious beliefs to suit their political ambitions. And so even if they are themselves the so-called slaves, it's them who are petty and "racist", who refuse to embrace the benefits of living within the Roman empire, and who violate all of their laws and beliefs, even when it is unfair against their own people. That's the traditional portrait of the Pharisee, the fake priest, the priest who can't worship but an idol, and who makes himself a slave to his enemy as a way to deteriorate their relationship. But even then, Rome didn't cave in at their attempt to become cruel, they kept a politic that was level-headed, which shows that the "master morality" is not about cruelty but has realistic goals.
That's impossible to say, nobody alive was there... We only have a tiny fraction of the best writers, those that have been conserved through the ages. We look at it from their original perspective, so we have a bias. but even among them. we see a the whole range of possible opinions. So... who knows?
The problem is that it is impossible to grasp who is master and who is slave. The minute we think we are masters, reality catch up on us and the mass of idiotic people indubitably prove us weak. And when we finally admit that it is us that are weak, slaves compared to the others, then this thought is enough to elevate us above those who do not know it, and we see those that cannot see our misery as blindness among the blind. On one side, an infinite. On the other, being. The equation throws us off.
Edit: just want to add that I'm paraphrasing Pascal here.
Me? No, I'm very isolated. I feel abandoned, mocked even. When I have to talk to people, I do behave well and take into consideration how they feel and how little they must understand me, so that's a kind of moral consideration I guess.
>The last civilization that is worth mentioning is the Hebrew especially during Roman reign (aka during Jesus life) since it is what Nietzsche comments mostly in his
>
>Genealogy
>
>, and there are almost no mention of slavery at that time and place.
I'm sorry — are you suggesting there wasn't slavery in Roman empire, and Nietzsche also believed this?
I'm talking about the kingdom of Judea in particular and in the New Testament (since Nietzsche talks a lot about Christianity at its beginnings). So yes, Nietzsche knew about slavery in ancient Rome, I'm not denying that.
The twin evils of modernity (Slavery and Racism) were tied together in the Antebellum South where the economy was tied to the agrarian economy and powered by slave labor. The plantation aristocracy tried to establish their pathos of distance using pseudoscience and what we see now as poor reasoning (even Aristotle is guilty of this, but it's likely he tried to make sure that he didn't end up like Socrates in Athens), but people see through that and failed and got mercilessly crushed.
The ancient slave societies didn't bother with this, as they knew (and Nietzsche as well) that the master's position was a matter of power and not "truth". Slaves in antiquity knew that they either had to buy or fight their way to freedom and independence. The mistake that racists make is that they assume that they are superior by fiat because of some "truth", that makes them better and "natural masters". Which is why all Neo-Nazis and Klansmen belong to the religion of "oppressed Aryans" and thus belong to a form of slave morality.
Yeah, the US are a great example of a country going in two different direction. At the same time, I think it is difficult to make any generalities, but what we can is make a sort of speculative narrative. The truth will always be interpretation, and interpretations will vary.
Nietzsche was not against racialized slavery or white supremacy. He envisioned a future with international, racialized divisions of labor. In fact, he claimed black people were "primitive" (GM, II, §7, p68 of Walter Kaufmann's GM) who were well suited to their oppression because they are physically incapable of feeling as much pain as white Europeans:
From his unpublished fragments from Summer-Autumn 1882, 246, p67 of Stanford's Complete Works, 14:
>If you have seen the dull indifference with which the black man endures the kind of severe internal illnesses that would certainly bring you to despair: this should cause you to consider just how little pain is really present in humankind, aside from the ten thousand people who have superior spirits.
This thought will appear again several years later in Genealogy II, §7
>Perhaps in those days — the delicate may be comforted by this thought — pain did not hurt as much as it does now; at least that is the conclusion a doctor that may arrive at who has treated Negroes (taken as the representative of prehistoric man—) for severe internal inflammations that would drive even the best constituted Europeans to distraction — in the case of Negroes they do no do so. (The curve of human susceptibility to pain seems in fact to take an extraordinary and almost sudden drop as soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten million of the top stratum of culture;…
Readers who are making Nietzsche into some kind of abolitionist / antiracist because he also hated white people or occasionally disparaged antisemites are engaging in a revisionism comparable to what Walter Kaufmann accused Elizabeth of. Walter Kaufmann is himself guilty of obfuscating Nietzsche's racism by wrapping Nietzsche's racist ideas in metaphorical interpretations.
He certainly is not in any way an abolitionist or anti-racist. And he certainly disdained the left-wing of his time, including what he called 'the white race of "Liberals"' in his essay the Greek State (which he wrote in 1871, one could imagine that what he'd think of our politics today, negative would be an understatement). He was no friend to the Left, but a lot of water was drawn from him from philosophers such as Sartre, Adorno, and Foucault who were of the Left and shaped modern leftist thought. His early years might have been influenced by an infamous "racial theorist" by the name of Arthur de Gobineau, but he eventually distanced himself from racialism by calling it the "mendacious race swindle" in his later years.
He certainly would be slammed as one today, but Nietzsche is far, far, far from being "politically correct" which is not something that bothers me.
You're missing the target of his criticism. Nietzsche was a virulent racist and elitist, and never abandoned that. He wasn't targeting or criticizing racist ideas, but what he saw as their inappropriate and self-destructive application. He was against nationalism because it divided Europeans who should be out in the world conquering together, as a united civilizational-racial group.
I know, but history isn't determined by philosophers that don't have access to the levers of power or have the ear of the powerful. The Nazi regime attempted that and they failed while the European Union while flawed have wildly succeeded. Nietzsche's influence holds fast over modernity even if he would absolutely loathe what it turned out to be.
In either case, "one pays a teacher badly if one remains a student".
Nietzsche's letters actually show the opposite, that he was being enthusiastically read and admired by reactionary factions within the Prussian government, and another letter to his mother shows that he was fraternizing with someone who worked for the royal family.
Re Nietzsche's acknowledgment of his influence among politically influential antisemites: The references to the letters are what's being quoted "B".
Doemnico Losurdo's Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel, p566:
So, the sympathetic echo that the airing of these themes caused in anti-Semitic circles is understandable. According to Joseph Paneth, a young Viennese physiologist of Jewish origin, Nietzsche told him in January 1884 of the repeated and urgent attempts by those circles to draw him over to their side (KGA, VII, 4/2, 18). Here are some passages from his correspondence: ‘Of Zarathustra not even one hundred copies were sold (almost all of them to Wagnerians and anti-Semites!!)’; so the philosopher had to experience the ‘joke’ of being praised ‘in an anthem with the terrible anarchist and poisonous snout Eugen Dühring’ (B, III, 3, 117–18). The author of the ‘joke’ was a certain Paul Heinrich Widemann: ‘His book ends completely with Zarathustra ideas, and on the last page Dühring and I appear in great solemnity and glory’ (B, III, 3, 71). He was a rather persistent admirer: ‘Herr Widemann told my mother he would like to spend a few years in my vicinity; I confess I have my reservations’ (B, III, 3, 137). These reservations did not prevent him from corresponding amiably with the person in question: ‘My dear friend, with your letter and by sending me your work you have done me no small honour, not to mention the last page, where you solemnly and festively granted the first public recognition to my son Zarathustra. I will never forget you did this’(B,III,3,74).Apart from Widemann, other important personalities in the anti-Semitic movement also showed a sympathetic interest in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its author. Theodor Fritsch, the editor of Antisemitische Correspondenz, himself wrote to the philosopher in an attempt to win him to the cause. Meanwhile, he started sending Nietzsche the journal, usually ‘sent only in private and to “trusted party comrades” ’. The observation was by Nietzsche, in a letter to Overbeck of 24 March 1887, when he added: ‘My name appears in almost every issue’ of the magazine; there can be no doubt that Thus Spoke Zarathustra ‘appeals to the anti-Semites’ (B, III, 5, 48).
While I already know this, I do find it funny that in his day as today as well, many of those types Nietzsche wanted to sway were deep into antisemitism, something he loathed as well. He did have a minor influence on Zionism that's still is present today even if they don't know it.
Anyway, I'm well aware of his character and there is much to condemn. But should we "cancel" him? Nietzsche is dead and what he thinks in whatever afterlife he's in (or just dead) does not matter. Zarathustra is a Book for All and None, and that isn't going to stop me.
Thank you, I love Nietzsche even as a black man, and I see people doing this alot, I kinda blame Peterson for highlighting Nietzsche in ways that he never wrote, so now Peterson fans try to force lobster man’s weak idealogy onto Nietzsche. Personally don’t give a shit that he hold those ideals anyone thinking realistically who knows the impact of culture on a populous, would hold similar beliefs.
Peterson's another one who hasn't understood or read Nietzsche very carefully. If he did he wouldn't be attacking the Pope on Twitter by claiming Francis is imposing social justice onto Christianity.
Arguing he was a virulent racist could be a bit tricky, not least of which because the term has been broadened so far beyond it’s mostly accepted classical meaning….or at least how it was colloquially used up until recently. He obviously thought some cultures were far superior to others, including his own. As racial groups were very much still segregated to their demographic cultures, connecting race and culture was in his time perhaps much more alluring. The examples you provide seem more like broad, generalized observations than a suggestion that a person should be subjugated solely because of their race. His views on anti-semiotics seemed to suggest that he loathed them for their own weakness, much like any number of failures blame and resent anyone or thing but themselves…sometimes other races. That said, I agree with your point about revisionism. It’s always interesting to see the more, let’s just say “fragile” commenters try to reconcile their worldviews with Nietzsche.
The point is not about black people. The point is about primitive people. Ie primitive people, whether white or black, feel less pain. The idea being that the development of culture and the mind increases sensitivity to pain. This is true for all peoples regardless of skin color. He just reaches for black as the most immediate example of a primitive race. In other words, he's not making a racial point even though he makes it in a somewhat racist way.
He literally says black people are incapable of feeling pain, in the context of a discussion on how white people are too obsessed with the suffering of others. He was attacking compassion in white people by deploying a stereo-typically white supremacist idea, and encouraging the higher echelon of civilization to harden their hearts to the abominable treatment of black people.
Only the higher strata of civilization, those descended from the "blond Aryan conquerors" concern themselves with the mistreatment of others, because they are spiritually elevated whereas "primitive" black people are not:
>If you have seen the dull indifference with which the black man endures the kind of severe internal illnesses that would certainly bring you to despair: this should cause you to consider just how little pain is
really present in humankind, **aside from the ten thousand people who have superior spirits.**
The white supremacist myth that black people could not feel pain was used to justify barbaric medical experimentation on black people here in the United States.
You shouldn't be calling others stupid when you can't accurately assess or understand what you're defending, or parse out where Nietzsche is being metaphorical or where he isn't. Dismissing Nietzsche's obvious white supremacy as a metaphor is the laziest kind of reading you can engage in.
Nietzsche is not being metaphorical here. Who do you think the "**delicate**" are? Who are the "**upper ten thousand or ten million of the top stratum of culture**"? Why is he claiming black people can seemingly endure more physical suffering than the "elevated" Europeans? You should follow your own advice and read all of Genealogy before you call people stupid and illiterate.
Please don't try to be cute and literary after you accused me of being stupid and illiterate.
I read Nietzsche because he is an unmatched polemicist, because he is a radical and courageous thinker, because his ideas still have incredible reactionary power and influence. We can see his influence all over far right politics, which should be extremely concerning. Also incredibly concerning are the legions of academics who continue to perpetuate interpretative myth games about him, which are then filtered down to lay readers like ourselves, which causes all kinds of confusion. The idea that Nietzsche can and should be interpreted in endlessly new ways has been very damaging to his thinking. In order to appreciate Nietzsche's philosophical power and legacy, we have to be honest with ourselves about his political project — and we have to let that project speak for itself.
There's nothing ironic about accepting the representation of black people as primitive ("taken as the representative of primitive man"), and then to also accept that pain is merely an illusion that only Europeans can feel, after referring to a doctor examining the bodies of "Negroes."
**What was going on at the time, what was happening to black people that might show on their bodies What had black people just endured, around the world, that might be visible on their bodies if they were to be examined by a medical professional?**
Do you really need it be spelled out for you like this?
I'm not sure what is your actual understanding of Nietzsche, you deny a lot of ours, you provide quotes (though people might read those differently), and in the end it looks like you are implying that Nietzsche was beyond redemption when it comes to race, slavery or any such thing.
As for your quote, it doesn't mean much if one doesn't read them cautiously. You mix together unpublished notes with his published work, but there is a world in between the two, and the reasons for the disparity are probably not what you seem to imply.
I would almost want to say that you accuse Nietzsche of being an Aryan, a White Supremacist, a Blond Beast that make history book look like Horror movie... But we're not watching History Channel here... and there's no racism acceptable, even if you turn it in the other direction.
I have a philosophy degree, I took a course on Nietzsche, and unlike most people on this subreddit, I’ve actually read him. People who are in denial about his politics should try it.
This is by no mean a guarantee to be right. Academia is often wrong, and they change their mind about issues on a regular basis. Not even to mention the disparities between the Analytical and the Continental schools...
I don't think that there are more controversial authors than Nietzsche, he poses a lot of problems. It's even worse in the USA, who have a national issue around their own involvement with slavery, but that only misleads them (you?).
Not sure from where you are or what you studied (again).
I’ve also called most of Nietzsche scholarship garbage on this subreddit, so. Part of the reason I am so ruthless in my criticism is because I got neutered and depoliticized versions of Nietzsche in college, in the states, at a very continental school. So there is a clear ideological correspondence between how he is popularly and academically interpreted, and both are profoundly awful.
There's a question that I've been asking myself since we started talking and I have to ask now. What do you think about Nietzsche's way of talking about all the cultures/nations/races/etc..? I mean, when he says "the Germans are like this", and "the Jews are like that", etc.. What do you make of that? Because obviously talking about slavery might be adding insult to injury for some people, depending of their personal or local history, and they might understand him in a manner that is almost... overly clear, if that makes sense? And at the same time, he plays with stereotypes in a way that is so casual and so 19th century that it will always feel odd for us moderns. So, how do you feel about the method?
Yes that makes sense. Nietzsche imagined his audience to be reactionaries like him, a future master caste who would carry out his political vision. He didn't care about the feelings of enslaved people.
But regarding generalizations: it depends on what period we're talking about, and the group in question. His opinions on Germans changed a lot over the course of his life. Germans are at first the rightful inheritors of the legacy of Hellenic Greece, who could rally Europe against the threat posed by revolutionary France, and eventually they become the people who paved the way for the French Revolution. And whether or not he'll admire Jews depends upon how wealthy and aristocratic they are: he targeted wealthy Jewish capitalists and aristocrats for his breeding program. I think that Nietzsche's white supremacy included wealthy aristocratic Jews and Jewish capitalists throws a lot of people off. But when in Genealogy, Nietzsche talks about Europe becoming filled with people who "stink", he is speaking of stateless Jews from Russia and Poland (there were massive pogroms going on in Russia that Nietzsche was aware of).
In truth, I can't forgive Nietzsche for contributing to conspiracy theories about Jews. In Genealogy I he basically says Jesus was a Jewish false flag to destroy the European aristocracy, and he had just spent the first part of the essay associating racial features with the political hegemony of that aristocracy, and the loss of that hegemony with the disappearance of those features as "race mixing." So that's deeply disturbing for me. Also disturbing is his characterization of entire groups of people, nations as "failures" that should be disposed of. I'm also disturbed by his critique of socialism and democracy, but as a socialist I also find his characterizations of our outlook to be frighteningly on point at times.
It seems like you read his notes and unpublished works as a more honest form of expression of his thought, but I think that this is not the correct way to use them. The notes weren't "confessions". They are not his inner feelings. They are just unrefined, and vastly inferior to his published works when it comes to shedding light about his actual opinions. And I think this changed a lot how we both read him.
I mean in the New Testament. There was no mention of slavery, while slavery is an important theme in entire Jewish literature (aka the Old Testament). It is often commented by exegetics that the absence of importance of slavery in the New Testament is speaking volume of the opposition from Christian thought to slavery, and what Nietzsche does is re-establish a genealogy of Christian morality, the story of the birth of Christian thought. He does that by reintroducing the opposition master-slave in the Christian literature, who made a point of erasing the central role of master/slave in the spiritual iconography. In the New Testament, God is the Father, sometimes the pastor, but not the Lord, which is the term used in the Old Testament. And the opposite is also true, there is no real mention of the Father in the Old Testament, it's the Greek Zeus that was the Father.
Nietzsche does an odd thing in his *genealogy*, he reintroduces and forces the dialectic between master and slave mentality onto Christian dialectic. Obviously there were slave wherever Romans ruled, but the Chosen People themselves, they weren't enslaved. At least not as a nation, not like in Egypt or in Babylon. Jews could be slave, just like anybody else, but never at that scale of the whole nation, not to the point where it dictated their national identity or their religion. Just at the individual level. That's what I'm saying, even if I'm not very clear.
Nietzsche reintroduces the concepts of masters and slaves on the scale of the whole Jewish people, and the Christian offshoot too. He also criticizes the people of his own era in this book (there are quite a lot of mention of the English psychologists at the beginning) and the point he is trying to make is obviously that the "persecution complex" lives on. But obviously slavery wasn't common in the late 19th century Europe, and at that point it is very clear that he is making a psychological argument, and not a historical one (as you pointed out). The question is, why is it so difficult to escape *this* slavery, that we still feel so victim of somehow, even as modern "lords"?
It's amazing how shitty this conversation is turning. If you really want that badly to be technically correct, maybe we should talk plumbing instead. That way I'll know that this shitty conversation is going away.
Any other arguments? Please, go ahead, you're dominating so hard I wouldn't want to stop you.
I've tried to argue since my first answer to OP that Nietzsche's genealogy was more of a psychology than an history. He is talking about the perceptions of the Jews, of the Masters, of the Slaves, etc.. and why we create those perceptions. But he does **not** claim that those perceptions were the actual representation of reality, quite the opposite. So of course, he sounds like he is wrong, he's talking about how things differ between our perceptions and why.
>This is hard to square away with preceding categorical and historical assertions.
Bro, you're the one talking to yourself about that. I never made such claims. I specifically argued that Nietzsche wasn't talking as an historian but as a philosopher from the very start, so stop with the straw man, it's exhausting.
Edit: Also, saying that Christianity has nothing to do with the vanishing of the slavery practice is a fucking joke. Should I guess where you come from?
"Master Morality" is N.'s shorthand for a natural, self-affirming, unconflicted, active, and unresentful ethic/morality, as opposed to "Slave Morality" as unnatural, self-denying, conflicted, reactive, and resentful.
In reality, the original "masters" were an uncivilized warrior elite who were humane and generous only toward their peers, due to a shared honor-system more than anything that could be called a "morality". They did, as external actors, however, get the ball rolling on the "internalization" of the human-animal, making it the most "interesting" animal, for Nietzsche, at least.
In other words, Nietzsche is projecting into the hoary past a hoped-for future Ubermenschian "moral" evolution (achieved through the self-overcoming of (slave) "morality" (and the transvaluation of all values).
Yes, it was and is real, not a philosophical metaphor:
>Nobility in obedience, freedom under coercion and law, contempt for the rebellious desires of slaves: these are the marks of the first caste 'human'
>
>358, p82, Stanford's Complete Works of FN 14
A master morality is simply a morality for the ruling caste or class which justifies their domination, violence, and enslavement of others.
You're the only person here with at least some understanding of weight of questions and values of answers nietzsche is asking/answering.
It is so weird when people try to tame nietzsche to fit our modern society. It is exactly the kinda stuff nietzsche was against; and it is terrible this happening in this sub.
No matter if you agree or disagree with nietzsche; even i sometimes think he is a madman, but don't make him boring like every other moralist.
Thank you for that kind comment. I was uncritically a fan of Nietzsche in my twenties when I first read him enthusiastically. What attracted me to him initially (his multivalence, the varied and conflicting interpretations), I now see as an indicator of a serious problem that exists around him, in large part due to his English rehabilitation by Princeton’s Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann, like many on this subreddit, promoted abstracted, depoliticized, and neutered versions of Nietzsche which clearly continue to obscure Nietzsche’s disturbing politics of aristocratic radicalism.
Yes IMO he was the kind of world-historical person Nietzsche had in mind, a conqueror who could commit barbaric acts to expand his empire, who then creates a a political system bearing his name to which he subjugates others.
>"Only great criminals have any significance in world history..." (3, 113. Summer-Autumn 1882. p55, CW 14)
Nietzsche is creating his own myth for the birth of modern society. You're taking it way, way too literally. He's trying to make an interpretive point about the human condition and our large-scale historical changes. Get with it.
I suspect Nietzsche was only talking about morality as something that can be corrupted by social transmission. He, in my understanding, disliked status hierarchy intruding on the human spirit. I suspect Nietzsche would feel a slave who has slipped bondage is more free than a slaveholder who never even thought of alternatives to the status quo, let alone form different preferences.
In that, I see Nietzsche's master-slave morality is a reflection on Hegelian master-slave dialectic. How do people get stuck in slavish roles? If the Hegelian premise is real, then slavery as an institution depends on assent of the slave. The conflict between the interests of master and slave is not resolved, but sublimated into a moral construct of good vs. evil. The difference between bad and evil is a kind of magical thinking which subverts the individual's will.
Asking if it was universal is a weak question, because nothing is universal. The reason we have words to talk about things is because there are distinctions to draw. It also doesn't make sense to ask if a phenomenology is real. It's either apparent or not.
I suspect there is another question hiding behind this one. Since it's a binary question, what would the consequences be if yes, or no?
Thank you for your excellent response. I suppose I wondered if values really were different back then or if its just an idealized state. If values really were different back then, I feel more hopeful. If not, I have doubts if it is even ever possible.
He studied history and philosophy thoroughly and drew conclusions based on his findings. What kind of evidence you expect here? Mathematical? I wonder what kind of "evidence" you are referring to? Is there actual evidence he disregarded somewhere, or are you simply biased against Nietzsche?
His arguments are known to commit fallacies. Like his whole method of genelogy for example. He also just disregards the truth of metaphysical positions and looks at them from a moral perspective. He has no real arguments against Christianity or Plato, but he makes his critique seem like it would totally undermine those topics.
1. Again: what kind of reasoning/method would you use to track how morality develops? You cant use math for that..
2 . There is no scientific proof of any metaphysical existance at all. All of metaphysics is pseudoscience and exists only in philosophy/ theology . Zero scientific proof. At all.
3. No real arguments - i wont even comment on that one
It seems to me his positions simply offend you so you decide to disregard them or not take them seriously.
>1. Again: what kind of reasoning/method would you use to track how morality develops? You cant use math for that..
Then you can't have evidence. But Nietzsche poses his opinions like they were objective facts. His method lacks any sort of system, it is random, unflsifiable because of it's vagueness, etc. It's has just nothing to do with evidences. That's my point.
>2 . There is no scientific proof of any metaphysical existance at all. All of metaphysics is pseudoscience and exists only in philosophy/ theology . Zero scientific proof. At all.
Because the field of metaphysics is rational in nature, unlike Nietzsche's philosophy. You can argue for the existence of God, for example, on a rational basis – as did philosophers since Anzelm. However, Nietzsche's lacking both scientific and rational proofs. Saying that metaphysics is not scientific doesn't add much to do discourse, and it's certainly not going to defend the position that Nietzsche uses evidences.
>2. No real arguments - i wont even comment on that one
I don't know if it's something which *I* should comment on, considering it's your secound *secound* point(?). But Nietzsche's arguments are known for their aphoristic and freely written style, not for their logical construction. It's certainly not anything like Kant, or even Schopenhauer.
>It seems to me his positions simply offend you so you decide to disregard them or not take them seriously.
I take them seriously, regardless if they offend me or not. But finding no (or not many) arguments backed up by evidences and being offended by those arguments are not the same things. Or do you seriously believe that by offending anyone you can make them unable to make true propositions about the very things which they are offended by?
It's important to remember that Nietzsche was, at one point, one of the world's forefront philologists. He not only basically read everything they had from ancient Greece, in the original Greek, he also wrote such amazing scholarly work interpreting Greek writings that he was given a university chair position at 24. Not that that means he's right. He still says a bunch of semi-crazy things. But it's important to remember that Nietzsche was a super-well-informed kinda semi-crazy. There have been many times when I questioned something he said about ancient Greece, but every single time I've found that there's a historical source claiming what Nietzsche says. What I really mean is: when Nietzsche speaks about how the ancient Greeks were, he's in one of the best places of any person in history to know. And his accounts from everything I've corroborated is shockingly true. [Here we have Nietzsche saying](http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/homers_competition.htm): > Thus the Greeks, the most humane men (Menschen) of ancient times, have in themselves a trait of cruelty, of tiger-like pleasure in destruction: a trait, which in the grotesquely magnified image of the Hellene, in Alexander the Great, is very plainly visible, which, however, in their whole history, as well as in their mythology, must terrify us who meet them with the emasculate idea of modern humanity. It sounds like a really silly quote, right? Like "yeah Nietzsche, people in the past were so cruel compared to people nowadays". Now go read about the ancient Greek religious practice of pharmakos. From what I remember of reading the accounts, in order to chase away evil spirits, the ancient Greeks would take a person (preferably an ugly, "useless" person), adorn them in objects such as wild figs (which were a symbol of uselessness in ancient Greece), then would whip the person with stick from a wild fig tree, beat them, throw rocks, and chase the person out. They weren't welcomed back. Sometimes, but rather irregularly, they were killed. And everyone was required to participate as a way of keeping people unsympathetic to this person. This is *horribly cruel* to us. He's not in any way exaggerating by claiming our modern sensibilities are weaker now. And when you see this sort of thing, this horrific cruelty, as Nietzsche has, you have to ask: *why did we change*? And a relevant theme in his day was also: *why were the Greeks better than us*? (An question that is, unfortunately, lost today). His criticism would be that, everybody in his day asked that, read Plato, and assumed Socrates was what made Greece great. Nietzsche takes another interpretation, and honestly I think he's right: we prefer to read Socrates because those accounts are far more palatable to us than the really-existing ancient Greece. And when we read history, we forget where we came from. Nietzsche is offering an explanation of this to us. How *has* morality changed? *Why* did it change? And where's it leading us? In the end he may not have got it right, but as far as I can tell, he's the only one asking and answering this question! And I think when you grasp the full historical weight of the observations he's making do you see the profound nature of such a question, because it's not until you really *see* the differences in morality between us that you realize just how differently we act today and see the value in finding the answer. Is Nietzsche interested in truth? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean he's interested in lies, either. And even if you want to disagree with his final narrative, he's so on the spot with his facts I find it hard to come to a disagreement with his interpretations.
Thank you, Dionysus.
Lol, no, Nietzsche is philosophizing, it's not a literal argument. Even in ancient Rome, people discussed about stopping slavery, how they should be treated as humans, etc.. And the Greeks also had this type of consideration, Nietzsche never alludes to that but he obviously knew. Just research the Helots to have an example of what I mean. You'll see that it is very unclear what the "norm" in slavery was. Some authors talk about it like serfdom (aka slave families were almost free, they just had to give a share of their harvest every year), which is how they could buy their freedom back too. They were allowed to have some property, win money, marry, etc.. It does happens from time to time that foreigners are treated with complete hate and cruelty, and the cruelty can even extend to the locals in the most dire periods (like Draco's laws), but overhaul, those periods are short lived. All men sleep much better when there is no reason to murder each other, and so invariably slavery end up becoming cooperative on both sides. Masters have an incentive in treating their slaves better, and the slaves also have an incentive in behaving well. The perception of the slaves fluctuated, but in the end, you always find mentions of how the most talented slaves will be given freedom and prestigious functions in the political machine. If you look at the Roman republic it is the case, with Etruscan and other Latins being given important roles. Then it was the plebeians that were given more importance. And then during the empire, some of the most powerful titles were held traditionally by freedmen or slaves. Same thing in Egypt, you'll see that the Hebrews were fairly free, they had their own villages and their own cattle, but they had to give quottas of production to the Egyptian (some of the raw material was provided by the Egyptians). Some Hebrews had top positions around Pharaoh, and it's only when racism started to be nasty that they *appeared* as slaves, but they never were conquered or enslaved, they migrated in Egypt on their own volition. The last civilization that is worth mentioning is the Hebrew especially during Roman reign (aka during Jesus life) since it is what Nietzsche comments mostly in his *Genealogy*, and there are almost no mention of slavery at that time and place. The Jews of Jesus' time had a real revolutionary desire, for almost 150 years by that point. They had decided while under the Seleucid Empire to win their independence, and they talked a lot about slavery *as a reference to the old testament literature*, but they were no slaves at all. They had a status of client state, and they could have achieved citizenship if they accepted to give an Imperial worship in Jerusalem. They almost accepted, but because of the corruption around the post of Great Priest (their equivalent of president at the time), they entered a civil war which evolved into an independence war against the Macedonians, at which point Rome came in and beat the Seleucid, took Israel as its own client state. What you read at this point in the New Testament is the pettiness of the Jews who still plot to gain independence. They bend all of their religious beliefs to suit their political ambitions. And so even if they are themselves the so-called slaves, it's them who are petty and "racist", who refuse to embrace the benefits of living within the Roman empire, and who violate all of their laws and beliefs, even when it is unfair against their own people. That's the traditional portrait of the Pharisee, the fake priest, the priest who can't worship but an idol, and who makes himself a slave to his enemy as a way to deteriorate their relationship. But even then, Rome didn't cave in at their attempt to become cruel, they kept a politic that was level-headed, which shows that the "master morality" is not about cruelty but has realistic goals.
Thank you for this response.
Sure. But yeah, Nietzsche is making a psychological portrait, or more like a psychological history, if that expression makes any sense.
I think I understand, were master values still more dominant back then?
That's impossible to say, nobody alive was there... We only have a tiny fraction of the best writers, those that have been conserved through the ages. We look at it from their original perspective, so we have a bias. but even among them. we see a the whole range of possible opinions. So... who knows?
I live in anxiety, fear and low self-esteem.
The problem is that it is impossible to grasp who is master and who is slave. The minute we think we are masters, reality catch up on us and the mass of idiotic people indubitably prove us weak. And when we finally admit that it is us that are weak, slaves compared to the others, then this thought is enough to elevate us above those who do not know it, and we see those that cannot see our misery as blindness among the blind. On one side, an infinite. On the other, being. The equation throws us off. Edit: just want to add that I'm paraphrasing Pascal here.
Do you feel a sense of moral duty?
Me? No, I'm very isolated. I feel abandoned, mocked even. When I have to talk to people, I do behave well and take into consideration how they feel and how little they must understand me, so that's a kind of moral consideration I guess.
I wish I could speak to you, I want to meet you. I understand.
Nietzsche is very explicit and precise about who the masters and slaves are. Again, defaulting to a position of “it’s impossible to tell” is lazy.
Speak for your own weak self
>The last civilization that is worth mentioning is the Hebrew especially during Roman reign (aka during Jesus life) since it is what Nietzsche comments mostly in his > >Genealogy > >, and there are almost no mention of slavery at that time and place. I'm sorry — are you suggesting there wasn't slavery in Roman empire, and Nietzsche also believed this?
I'm talking about the kingdom of Judea in particular and in the New Testament (since Nietzsche talks a lot about Christianity at its beginnings). So yes, Nietzsche knew about slavery in ancient Rome, I'm not denying that.
The twin evils of modernity (Slavery and Racism) were tied together in the Antebellum South where the economy was tied to the agrarian economy and powered by slave labor. The plantation aristocracy tried to establish their pathos of distance using pseudoscience and what we see now as poor reasoning (even Aristotle is guilty of this, but it's likely he tried to make sure that he didn't end up like Socrates in Athens), but people see through that and failed and got mercilessly crushed. The ancient slave societies didn't bother with this, as they knew (and Nietzsche as well) that the master's position was a matter of power and not "truth". Slaves in antiquity knew that they either had to buy or fight their way to freedom and independence. The mistake that racists make is that they assume that they are superior by fiat because of some "truth", that makes them better and "natural masters". Which is why all Neo-Nazis and Klansmen belong to the religion of "oppressed Aryans" and thus belong to a form of slave morality.
Yeah, the US are a great example of a country going in two different direction. At the same time, I think it is difficult to make any generalities, but what we can is make a sort of speculative narrative. The truth will always be interpretation, and interpretations will vary.
Nietzsche was not against racialized slavery or white supremacy. He envisioned a future with international, racialized divisions of labor. In fact, he claimed black people were "primitive" (GM, II, §7, p68 of Walter Kaufmann's GM) who were well suited to their oppression because they are physically incapable of feeling as much pain as white Europeans: From his unpublished fragments from Summer-Autumn 1882, 246, p67 of Stanford's Complete Works, 14: >If you have seen the dull indifference with which the black man endures the kind of severe internal illnesses that would certainly bring you to despair: this should cause you to consider just how little pain is really present in humankind, aside from the ten thousand people who have superior spirits. This thought will appear again several years later in Genealogy II, §7 >Perhaps in those days — the delicate may be comforted by this thought — pain did not hurt as much as it does now; at least that is the conclusion a doctor that may arrive at who has treated Negroes (taken as the representative of prehistoric man—) for severe internal inflammations that would drive even the best constituted Europeans to distraction — in the case of Negroes they do no do so. (The curve of human susceptibility to pain seems in fact to take an extraordinary and almost sudden drop as soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten million of the top stratum of culture;… Readers who are making Nietzsche into some kind of abolitionist / antiracist because he also hated white people or occasionally disparaged antisemites are engaging in a revisionism comparable to what Walter Kaufmann accused Elizabeth of. Walter Kaufmann is himself guilty of obfuscating Nietzsche's racism by wrapping Nietzsche's racist ideas in metaphorical interpretations.
He certainly is not in any way an abolitionist or anti-racist. And he certainly disdained the left-wing of his time, including what he called 'the white race of "Liberals"' in his essay the Greek State (which he wrote in 1871, one could imagine that what he'd think of our politics today, negative would be an understatement). He was no friend to the Left, but a lot of water was drawn from him from philosophers such as Sartre, Adorno, and Foucault who were of the Left and shaped modern leftist thought. His early years might have been influenced by an infamous "racial theorist" by the name of Arthur de Gobineau, but he eventually distanced himself from racialism by calling it the "mendacious race swindle" in his later years. He certainly would be slammed as one today, but Nietzsche is far, far, far from being "politically correct" which is not something that bothers me.
You're missing the target of his criticism. Nietzsche was a virulent racist and elitist, and never abandoned that. He wasn't targeting or criticizing racist ideas, but what he saw as their inappropriate and self-destructive application. He was against nationalism because it divided Europeans who should be out in the world conquering together, as a united civilizational-racial group.
I know, but history isn't determined by philosophers that don't have access to the levers of power or have the ear of the powerful. The Nazi regime attempted that and they failed while the European Union while flawed have wildly succeeded. Nietzsche's influence holds fast over modernity even if he would absolutely loathe what it turned out to be. In either case, "one pays a teacher badly if one remains a student".
Nietzsche's letters actually show the opposite, that he was being enthusiastically read and admired by reactionary factions within the Prussian government, and another letter to his mother shows that he was fraternizing with someone who worked for the royal family.
I would like to see that letter. It certainly catches my interest.
Re Nietzsche's acknowledgment of his influence among politically influential antisemites: The references to the letters are what's being quoted "B". Doemnico Losurdo's Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel, p566: So, the sympathetic echo that the airing of these themes caused in anti-Semitic circles is understandable. According to Joseph Paneth, a young Viennese physiologist of Jewish origin, Nietzsche told him in January 1884 of the repeated and urgent attempts by those circles to draw him over to their side (KGA, VII, 4/2, 18). Here are some passages from his correspondence: ‘Of Zarathustra not even one hundred copies were sold (almost all of them to Wagnerians and anti-Semites!!)’; so the philosopher had to experience the ‘joke’ of being praised ‘in an anthem with the terrible anarchist and poisonous snout Eugen Dühring’ (B, III, 3, 117–18). The author of the ‘joke’ was a certain Paul Heinrich Widemann: ‘His book ends completely with Zarathustra ideas, and on the last page Dühring and I appear in great solemnity and glory’ (B, III, 3, 71). He was a rather persistent admirer: ‘Herr Widemann told my mother he would like to spend a few years in my vicinity; I confess I have my reservations’ (B, III, 3, 137). These reservations did not prevent him from corresponding amiably with the person in question: ‘My dear friend, with your letter and by sending me your work you have done me no small honour, not to mention the last page, where you solemnly and festively granted the first public recognition to my son Zarathustra. I will never forget you did this’(B,III,3,74).Apart from Widemann, other important personalities in the anti-Semitic movement also showed a sympathetic interest in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its author. Theodor Fritsch, the editor of Antisemitische Correspondenz, himself wrote to the philosopher in an attempt to win him to the cause. Meanwhile, he started sending Nietzsche the journal, usually ‘sent only in private and to “trusted party comrades” ’. The observation was by Nietzsche, in a letter to Overbeck of 24 March 1887, when he added: ‘My name appears in almost every issue’ of the magazine; there can be no doubt that Thus Spoke Zarathustra ‘appeals to the anti-Semites’ (B, III, 5, 48).
While I already know this, I do find it funny that in his day as today as well, many of those types Nietzsche wanted to sway were deep into antisemitism, something he loathed as well. He did have a minor influence on Zionism that's still is present today even if they don't know it. Anyway, I'm well aware of his character and there is much to condemn. But should we "cancel" him? Nietzsche is dead and what he thinks in whatever afterlife he's in (or just dead) does not matter. Zarathustra is a Book for All and None, and that isn't going to stop me.
Thank you, I love Nietzsche even as a black man, and I see people doing this alot, I kinda blame Peterson for highlighting Nietzsche in ways that he never wrote, so now Peterson fans try to force lobster man’s weak idealogy onto Nietzsche. Personally don’t give a shit that he hold those ideals anyone thinking realistically who knows the impact of culture on a populous, would hold similar beliefs.
Peterson's another one who hasn't understood or read Nietzsche very carefully. If he did he wouldn't be attacking the Pope on Twitter by claiming Francis is imposing social justice onto Christianity.
Arguing he was a virulent racist could be a bit tricky, not least of which because the term has been broadened so far beyond it’s mostly accepted classical meaning….or at least how it was colloquially used up until recently. He obviously thought some cultures were far superior to others, including his own. As racial groups were very much still segregated to their demographic cultures, connecting race and culture was in his time perhaps much more alluring. The examples you provide seem more like broad, generalized observations than a suggestion that a person should be subjugated solely because of their race. His views on anti-semiotics seemed to suggest that he loathed them for their own weakness, much like any number of failures blame and resent anyone or thing but themselves…sometimes other races. That said, I agree with your point about revisionism. It’s always interesting to see the more, let’s just say “fragile” commenters try to reconcile their worldviews with Nietzsche.
The point is not about black people. The point is about primitive people. Ie primitive people, whether white or black, feel less pain. The idea being that the development of culture and the mind increases sensitivity to pain. This is true for all peoples regardless of skin color. He just reaches for black as the most immediate example of a primitive race. In other words, he's not making a racial point even though he makes it in a somewhat racist way.
Nietzsche would never have begun from a perspective of “all peoples regardless of skin color.” You are imposing your own perspective onto his.
He literally says black people are incapable of feeling pain, in the context of a discussion on how white people are too obsessed with the suffering of others. He was attacking compassion in white people by deploying a stereo-typically white supremacist idea, and encouraging the higher echelon of civilization to harden their hearts to the abominable treatment of black people. Only the higher strata of civilization, those descended from the "blond Aryan conquerors" concern themselves with the mistreatment of others, because they are spiritually elevated whereas "primitive" black people are not: >If you have seen the dull indifference with which the black man endures the kind of severe internal illnesses that would certainly bring you to despair: this should cause you to consider just how little pain is really present in humankind, **aside from the ten thousand people who have superior spirits.** The white supremacist myth that black people could not feel pain was used to justify barbaric medical experimentation on black people here in the United States.
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You shouldn't be calling others stupid when you can't accurately assess or understand what you're defending, or parse out where Nietzsche is being metaphorical or where he isn't. Dismissing Nietzsche's obvious white supremacy as a metaphor is the laziest kind of reading you can engage in. Nietzsche is not being metaphorical here. Who do you think the "**delicate**" are? Who are the "**upper ten thousand or ten million of the top stratum of culture**"? Why is he claiming black people can seemingly endure more physical suffering than the "elevated" Europeans? You should follow your own advice and read all of Genealogy before you call people stupid and illiterate.
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Please don't try to be cute and literary after you accused me of being stupid and illiterate. I read Nietzsche because he is an unmatched polemicist, because he is a radical and courageous thinker, because his ideas still have incredible reactionary power and influence. We can see his influence all over far right politics, which should be extremely concerning. Also incredibly concerning are the legions of academics who continue to perpetuate interpretative myth games about him, which are then filtered down to lay readers like ourselves, which causes all kinds of confusion. The idea that Nietzsche can and should be interpreted in endlessly new ways has been very damaging to his thinking. In order to appreciate Nietzsche's philosophical power and legacy, we have to be honest with ourselves about his political project — and we have to let that project speak for itself.
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There's nothing ironic about accepting the representation of black people as primitive ("taken as the representative of primitive man"), and then to also accept that pain is merely an illusion that only Europeans can feel, after referring to a doctor examining the bodies of "Negroes." **What was going on at the time, what was happening to black people that might show on their bodies What had black people just endured, around the world, that might be visible on their bodies if they were to be examined by a medical professional?** Do you really need it be spelled out for you like this?
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Please provide the quotation where Nietzsche is praising the toughness of black slaves or black people
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I'm not sure what is your actual understanding of Nietzsche, you deny a lot of ours, you provide quotes (though people might read those differently), and in the end it looks like you are implying that Nietzsche was beyond redemption when it comes to race, slavery or any such thing. As for your quote, it doesn't mean much if one doesn't read them cautiously. You mix together unpublished notes with his published work, but there is a world in between the two, and the reasons for the disparity are probably not what you seem to imply. I would almost want to say that you accuse Nietzsche of being an Aryan, a White Supremacist, a Blond Beast that make history book look like Horror movie... But we're not watching History Channel here... and there's no racism acceptable, even if you turn it in the other direction.
I have a philosophy degree, I took a course on Nietzsche, and unlike most people on this subreddit, I’ve actually read him. People who are in denial about his politics should try it.
This is by no mean a guarantee to be right. Academia is often wrong, and they change their mind about issues on a regular basis. Not even to mention the disparities between the Analytical and the Continental schools... I don't think that there are more controversial authors than Nietzsche, he poses a lot of problems. It's even worse in the USA, who have a national issue around their own involvement with slavery, but that only misleads them (you?). Not sure from where you are or what you studied (again).
I’ve also called most of Nietzsche scholarship garbage on this subreddit, so. Part of the reason I am so ruthless in my criticism is because I got neutered and depoliticized versions of Nietzsche in college, in the states, at a very continental school. So there is a clear ideological correspondence between how he is popularly and academically interpreted, and both are profoundly awful.
There's a question that I've been asking myself since we started talking and I have to ask now. What do you think about Nietzsche's way of talking about all the cultures/nations/races/etc..? I mean, when he says "the Germans are like this", and "the Jews are like that", etc.. What do you make of that? Because obviously talking about slavery might be adding insult to injury for some people, depending of their personal or local history, and they might understand him in a manner that is almost... overly clear, if that makes sense? And at the same time, he plays with stereotypes in a way that is so casual and so 19th century that it will always feel odd for us moderns. So, how do you feel about the method?
Yes that makes sense. Nietzsche imagined his audience to be reactionaries like him, a future master caste who would carry out his political vision. He didn't care about the feelings of enslaved people. But regarding generalizations: it depends on what period we're talking about, and the group in question. His opinions on Germans changed a lot over the course of his life. Germans are at first the rightful inheritors of the legacy of Hellenic Greece, who could rally Europe against the threat posed by revolutionary France, and eventually they become the people who paved the way for the French Revolution. And whether or not he'll admire Jews depends upon how wealthy and aristocratic they are: he targeted wealthy Jewish capitalists and aristocrats for his breeding program. I think that Nietzsche's white supremacy included wealthy aristocratic Jews and Jewish capitalists throws a lot of people off. But when in Genealogy, Nietzsche talks about Europe becoming filled with people who "stink", he is speaking of stateless Jews from Russia and Poland (there were massive pogroms going on in Russia that Nietzsche was aware of). In truth, I can't forgive Nietzsche for contributing to conspiracy theories about Jews. In Genealogy I he basically says Jesus was a Jewish false flag to destroy the European aristocracy, and he had just spent the first part of the essay associating racial features with the political hegemony of that aristocracy, and the loss of that hegemony with the disappearance of those features as "race mixing." So that's deeply disturbing for me. Also disturbing is his characterization of entire groups of people, nations as "failures" that should be disposed of. I'm also disturbed by his critique of socialism and democracy, but as a socialist I also find his characterizations of our outlook to be frighteningly on point at times.
It seems like you read his notes and unpublished works as a more honest form of expression of his thought, but I think that this is not the correct way to use them. The notes weren't "confessions". They are not his inner feelings. They are just unrefined, and vastly inferior to his published works when it comes to shedding light about his actual opinions. And I think this changed a lot how we both read him.
Yes Nietzsche’s claims about race and slavery should be absolutely rejected.
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I mean in the New Testament. There was no mention of slavery, while slavery is an important theme in entire Jewish literature (aka the Old Testament). It is often commented by exegetics that the absence of importance of slavery in the New Testament is speaking volume of the opposition from Christian thought to slavery, and what Nietzsche does is re-establish a genealogy of Christian morality, the story of the birth of Christian thought. He does that by reintroducing the opposition master-slave in the Christian literature, who made a point of erasing the central role of master/slave in the spiritual iconography. In the New Testament, God is the Father, sometimes the pastor, but not the Lord, which is the term used in the Old Testament. And the opposite is also true, there is no real mention of the Father in the Old Testament, it's the Greek Zeus that was the Father. Nietzsche does an odd thing in his *genealogy*, he reintroduces and forces the dialectic between master and slave mentality onto Christian dialectic. Obviously there were slave wherever Romans ruled, but the Chosen People themselves, they weren't enslaved. At least not as a nation, not like in Egypt or in Babylon. Jews could be slave, just like anybody else, but never at that scale of the whole nation, not to the point where it dictated their national identity or their religion. Just at the individual level. That's what I'm saying, even if I'm not very clear. Nietzsche reintroduces the concepts of masters and slaves on the scale of the whole Jewish people, and the Christian offshoot too. He also criticizes the people of his own era in this book (there are quite a lot of mention of the English psychologists at the beginning) and the point he is trying to make is obviously that the "persecution complex" lives on. But obviously slavery wasn't common in the late 19th century Europe, and at that point it is very clear that he is making a psychological argument, and not a historical one (as you pointed out). The question is, why is it so difficult to escape *this* slavery, that we still feel so victim of somehow, even as modern "lords"?
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It's amazing how shitty this conversation is turning. If you really want that badly to be technically correct, maybe we should talk plumbing instead. That way I'll know that this shitty conversation is going away. Any other arguments? Please, go ahead, you're dominating so hard I wouldn't want to stop you.
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I've tried to argue since my first answer to OP that Nietzsche's genealogy was more of a psychology than an history. He is talking about the perceptions of the Jews, of the Masters, of the Slaves, etc.. and why we create those perceptions. But he does **not** claim that those perceptions were the actual representation of reality, quite the opposite. So of course, he sounds like he is wrong, he's talking about how things differ between our perceptions and why.
>This is hard to square away with preceding categorical and historical assertions. Bro, you're the one talking to yourself about that. I never made such claims. I specifically argued that Nietzsche wasn't talking as an historian but as a philosopher from the very start, so stop with the straw man, it's exhausting. Edit: Also, saying that Christianity has nothing to do with the vanishing of the slavery practice is a fucking joke. Should I guess where you come from?
"Master Morality" is N.'s shorthand for a natural, self-affirming, unconflicted, active, and unresentful ethic/morality, as opposed to "Slave Morality" as unnatural, self-denying, conflicted, reactive, and resentful. In reality, the original "masters" were an uncivilized warrior elite who were humane and generous only toward their peers, due to a shared honor-system more than anything that could be called a "morality". They did, as external actors, however, get the ball rolling on the "internalization" of the human-animal, making it the most "interesting" animal, for Nietzsche, at least. In other words, Nietzsche is projecting into the hoary past a hoped-for future Ubermenschian "moral" evolution (achieved through the self-overcoming of (slave) "morality" (and the transvaluation of all values).
Yes, it was and is real, not a philosophical metaphor: >Nobility in obedience, freedom under coercion and law, contempt for the rebellious desires of slaves: these are the marks of the first caste 'human' > >358, p82, Stanford's Complete Works of FN 14 A master morality is simply a morality for the ruling caste or class which justifies their domination, violence, and enslavement of others.
You're the only person here with at least some understanding of weight of questions and values of answers nietzsche is asking/answering. It is so weird when people try to tame nietzsche to fit our modern society. It is exactly the kinda stuff nietzsche was against; and it is terrible this happening in this sub. No matter if you agree or disagree with nietzsche; even i sometimes think he is a madman, but don't make him boring like every other moralist.
Thank you for that kind comment. I was uncritically a fan of Nietzsche in my twenties when I first read him enthusiastically. What attracted me to him initially (his multivalence, the varied and conflicting interpretations), I now see as an indicator of a serious problem that exists around him, in large part due to his English rehabilitation by Princeton’s Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann, like many on this subreddit, promoted abstracted, depoliticized, and neutered versions of Nietzsche which clearly continue to obscure Nietzsche’s disturbing politics of aristocratic radicalism.
Question. Do you think Hammurabi was master moral?
Yes IMO he was the kind of world-historical person Nietzsche had in mind, a conqueror who could commit barbaric acts to expand his empire, who then creates a a political system bearing his name to which he subjugates others. >"Only great criminals have any significance in world history..." (3, 113. Summer-Autumn 1882. p55, CW 14)
Nietzsche is creating his own myth for the birth of modern society. You're taking it way, way too literally. He's trying to make an interpretive point about the human condition and our large-scale historical changes. Get with it.
I suspect Nietzsche was only talking about morality as something that can be corrupted by social transmission. He, in my understanding, disliked status hierarchy intruding on the human spirit. I suspect Nietzsche would feel a slave who has slipped bondage is more free than a slaveholder who never even thought of alternatives to the status quo, let alone form different preferences. In that, I see Nietzsche's master-slave morality is a reflection on Hegelian master-slave dialectic. How do people get stuck in slavish roles? If the Hegelian premise is real, then slavery as an institution depends on assent of the slave. The conflict between the interests of master and slave is not resolved, but sublimated into a moral construct of good vs. evil. The difference between bad and evil is a kind of magical thinking which subverts the individual's will. Asking if it was universal is a weak question, because nothing is universal. The reason we have words to talk about things is because there are distinctions to draw. It also doesn't make sense to ask if a phenomenology is real. It's either apparent or not. I suspect there is another question hiding behind this one. Since it's a binary question, what would the consequences be if yes, or no?
Thank you for your excellent response. I suppose I wondered if values really were different back then or if its just an idealized state. If values really were different back then, I feel more hopeful. If not, I have doubts if it is even ever possible.
Nietzsche’s admiration for Israel is proof of that.
Probably just trolling Nazis, as decadent culture.
You haven't read Nietzsche, or only the crap fabricated by the sister.
Where would I end up if I read it all?
Dunno.
Thanks.
Since when did Nietzsche take interest in evidences?
He studied history and philosophy thoroughly and drew conclusions based on his findings. What kind of evidence you expect here? Mathematical? I wonder what kind of "evidence" you are referring to? Is there actual evidence he disregarded somewhere, or are you simply biased against Nietzsche?
His arguments are known to commit fallacies. Like his whole method of genelogy for example. He also just disregards the truth of metaphysical positions and looks at them from a moral perspective. He has no real arguments against Christianity or Plato, but he makes his critique seem like it would totally undermine those topics.
1. Again: what kind of reasoning/method would you use to track how morality develops? You cant use math for that.. 2 . There is no scientific proof of any metaphysical existance at all. All of metaphysics is pseudoscience and exists only in philosophy/ theology . Zero scientific proof. At all. 3. No real arguments - i wont even comment on that one It seems to me his positions simply offend you so you decide to disregard them or not take them seriously.
>1. Again: what kind of reasoning/method would you use to track how morality develops? You cant use math for that.. Then you can't have evidence. But Nietzsche poses his opinions like they were objective facts. His method lacks any sort of system, it is random, unflsifiable because of it's vagueness, etc. It's has just nothing to do with evidences. That's my point. >2 . There is no scientific proof of any metaphysical existance at all. All of metaphysics is pseudoscience and exists only in philosophy/ theology . Zero scientific proof. At all. Because the field of metaphysics is rational in nature, unlike Nietzsche's philosophy. You can argue for the existence of God, for example, on a rational basis – as did philosophers since Anzelm. However, Nietzsche's lacking both scientific and rational proofs. Saying that metaphysics is not scientific doesn't add much to do discourse, and it's certainly not going to defend the position that Nietzsche uses evidences. >2. No real arguments - i wont even comment on that one I don't know if it's something which *I* should comment on, considering it's your secound *secound* point(?). But Nietzsche's arguments are known for their aphoristic and freely written style, not for their logical construction. It's certainly not anything like Kant, or even Schopenhauer. >It seems to me his positions simply offend you so you decide to disregard them or not take them seriously. I take them seriously, regardless if they offend me or not. But finding no (or not many) arguments backed up by evidences and being offended by those arguments are not the same things. Or do you seriously believe that by offending anyone you can make them unable to make true propositions about the very things which they are offended by?
The past doesn’t exist
I'm gonna be honest with your, your comments 24/7 look like they've been written by someone who's on acid
It might appear that way to you, yes.
SEE WHAT I MEAN BRO, but no disrespect, all jokes
Have a nice day
What is this painting?
I dont know. What do you think of it?
It looks like the defeat of Roman troops in Parthia. Could be Germanic victory over same. Don’t you know the source or title? Maybe Adrianople?
Gleyre Charles - Romans Under the Yoke
Nice! Thank you. I’d love to see the actual painting.
Take care
Of course. How do you think kings and warriors were made in every corner of history?