Nietzsche

I hope I don’t offend any Nietzsche fans, but I really don’t get him. In all of ‘The Gay Science’, it is possible to see where Nietzsche is coming from, and the reasoning he uses, but at the same time, I think he generalises a bit too much, making jumps that sometimes doesn’t make sense unless you understand his reasoning in other areas. But it’s not hard to be somehow sympathetic with his view of the good life because of the tempting picture of free will. On the other, hand sometimes I think that he can turn the concept of the good life into a type of fight for independence, looking to abolish all sorts of authority without considering the possibility that perhaps they are needed for life as we know it, and that they are here because, through free will, we allowed them to become a part of us, tools to ultimately lead us to the good life, and not to keep us from it.

If Christianity is as hollow as Nietzsche seems to think it was, because how can there be a God-fearing religion without a God?, then all that was happening since the beginning centuries ago, was the use of free will and basically common sense. Seriously, take away the faiths, all authorities, and all accepted European morals. We are liberated; we can choose what is right for ourselves. But does that make the thought of killing another over nothing any less wrong in our own minds, even if there is no authority to force a punishment on your free will? Sure there would be no sense of liberation by those who had never encountered those prior perceptions, but Nietzsche is talking to and about people who have consciousness shaped and influenced by European life, whether faith influenced or not. There can be liberation from the concept of the Christian faith, but for people like Nietzsche there is no escaping what they know for themselves, beyond any outside ‘Thou shalt’ influence is right or wrong. Liberating for our commitments? Sure, it would eradicate a commitment to the church, but what would replace it? Perhaps for Nietzsche it is a commitment to ourselves, but the structure of a combined commitment is what held Nietzsche’s society together in the first place. And maybe Nietzsche through this drive for individualism, he is really bringing everyone’s commitments and belief’s together into a single body that grounds society’s morals. I just think that Nietzsche overestimates the influence of the Christian faith as a foundation of today’s morals and the extent to which it is an influence.

Any thoughts about what he’s trying to say?

uh oh German philosophy, wait til white lotus finds out. He’ll haul his ass in here and start insulting you, me, the Turks, everybody. Then he’ll start saying “Shickelgruber is a Catholic name dammit!!!”

as for Nietzsche, respect your monkey nature, my friend.

Nietzche is very complex and very easy to misinterpret, but I’ll give it a shot. I don’t think Nietzsche is trying to attack the concept of authority itself so much as blindly submitting to authority without thinking or questioning.

From what I’ve been taught about Nietzche, he had a serious problem with Christian moralizing and people following a code of conduct out of fear of social reprocussions, guilt, and/or fear of hell. Nietzche believed in authenticity and emancipation through honesty and self-overcomming. If you are doing something out of fear of the consequences or desire for reward you are being pragmatic, but not authentic. Motivation to live a good life comes from within, from self-examination and self-reflection, not out of fear that some authority from on high will punish you or that after you die you will receive some great reward. A good life is itself its own reward. He thought that the individual who had mastered/or overcome himself/herself would have no need for morals and thus no need for institutionalized religion. Over the course of history, religion has been used countless times to manipulate the hearts and minds of people, to justify mass slaughter and descrimination, as a means to gain political and economic power. If you destroy religion you destroy the prejudices that come with it, you free yourself from the burden of having to measure up to a perfect god with all the guilt complexes involved. With the elimination of guilt, prejudice, hate etc. you have all this energy left over to persue excelence not because someone says you must, but for self-actualization this is what take the place of religion. You also destroy the barriers that people put up which prevent from sympathizing and relating with one another for the common good of all.

It is also good to recall that Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms, and frequently left off a thought in one place only to resume it in another. To really understand the man you have to read more than one of his books and for some subjects (like epistemology) it is even necessary to delve into his notebooks. With Nietzsche, as Aleema alluded to, the text is always slipping beneath the interpretation. Nietzsche forces the reader to think for himself by offering many different viewpoints of the same phenomena in a metaphorical, often cryptic, manner. Perhaps he is the only philosopher who was also truly an artist, not to mention a great writer.

(italics mine)

On the contrary, Nietzsche knew that lies and illusions were a necessary part of life, and as far as authority goes, Nietzsche abhorred the idea of the ignorant masses taking over. He thought that authority belonged to the aristocratic, the noble, not those full of ressentiment (Nietzsche used the French word for resentment). And if one remembers that the man hurled insults and philosophized with a hammer, shattering idols at will, one should also remember that he acknowledged his predecessors to an unprecedented degree. In one passage alone he mentions no less than 8 previous writers and thinkers that he “…sacrificed many a black sheep to…”. In addition, Nietzsche was a psychologist par excellence who sniffed out the secret motives behind many accepted social mores such as Christianity.

For Nietzsche Chrsitianity was the nihilistic system that would devalue itself. The first book of his “will to power” is entitled European Nihilism, in which he goes into the nihilistic ways of Chrsitianity and the ensuing death of god. Although it was compiled by his sister from his notes, it is a wonderful place to look to, to answer your questions. While we can give you ideas of what Nietzsche thought, and we can tell you our interpretation, nothing is substitute for the real thing. I am suprised by your understanding of Nietzsche, assuming that you have only read “The Gay Science”. Instead of searching for answers from the work, you are able to recognize that there is something that is left to be desired by this book and yet you are able to pinpoint many of the ideas that Nietzsche presents. While I agree that it appears that Nietzsche assumes many things, I think he has the right to assume whatever he wants. Most of which is explained in other writings and at other times. The wonderful thing about Nietzsche, is that there are connections and understandings to be had from the interconnections of his books. It is impossible to obtain a truely accurate understanding of any one of his ideas untill you have read all his books, and as someone else noted, it may even be required that you read his notes. It gets even better though. Because as you read more and more Nietzsche you begin to understand his writing style, and the ever present use of a kind of sarcasm and playfulness. Once you fully understand this, you will want to go back and read the books that you read prior to understanding this. And concequently if you do read them again, they will make much more sense and you will be able to relate them to other books, and know when Nietzsche is being serious and when he is being playful.

While I think I understand what you mean by “good life”, I would warn you against using it in the context of Nietzsche. As the road to Nietzsches “good life” is quite different from what would be considered a “good life”. Infact Nietzsche denies the european view of the “good life”, as nothing more than stagnation.

I also think that you conclusions about Neitzsches re-evaluation of values and the ensuing “good life” are fundamentally flawed. I would recoment Thus Spoke Zarathustra if you are interested about this topic.

If we learn else from Nietzsche, we should learn that a “society’s morals” is exactly what we should avoid. Infact morality all together should be questioned and even overcome. Instead a Nihilism of sorts should be encouraged. In which we have values because we require them, but we put no value in our values.

This is one of the first times here that someone has alluded to Nietzsche’s ‘playfulness’. His play on words, his puns, his allusions to laughing, dancing, his sacred ‘yes’ to life even though his own days were often fraught with pain. The fact that he rejected the pessimism of his early mentor Schopenhauer is remarkable.

I just got through reading both the R.J. Hollindale and Walter Kaufmann translations of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. It strikes me that Hollingdale’s is much more beautiful.

I’m suprised to hear that, I always thought that Kaufmann was the Scholar of all Nietzsche Scholars when it came to translations and other nonsense. Now I’m gonna have to go check that out, and read TSZ once again .

I think this is absolutely correct. I also think that this view has to do with Nietzsche’s obsession with religion (his father was a priest, wasn’t he?).

That people will be less moral without religion is also a common view of the general public, both believers and non-believers. But at least in Europe we’ve had an atheist majority for quite a long time now, and I can see no signs of a general moral breakdown. The only area where we’ve seen a massive change due to the fall of religion is sex, and that change has been, in my opinion, mostly for the better.

I also think that Freud makes a stronger case against Christianity in Civilization and its Discontents, much more sober and argumentative. By the way, Freud had great respect for Nietzsche’s psychological insights.

These two sentences are not coherent.

‘Less moral’ is NOT equivalent to ‘a general moral breakdown’.

Furthermore, remember that morality depends on perspective. Is it X’s idea of morality, or Y’s idea of morality? There is no commonly agreed system.

Have we? OR do you mean the sexualisation of the media? Look back through the centuries. All the sexual habits you see around you today have been present in them.

The difference is that when teh church/government frowned on a sexual activity, it wasn’t able to be publicised/ the idea of it wasn’t pushed around: instead, the world of sex slipped by without much notice.

Now, the opposite is true: all that has happened is that it has been discovered that sex is an effective marketing tool, so we see much more of it.

Returning to Nietzsche and the question of his apparent ‘obsession’ with religion, I have to take issue on one point.

For a long time in europe, the church was the pinnacle of the community, for the educated and uneducated, for better or worse. Nietzsche lived in an age where this was the case.

The Christian faith can hardly be underestimated in its importance for the morals of Nietzsche’s time. Churchmen were important figures in europe; community leaders, trusted by governments, invested with civil responsibilities and in control of sizeable estates. Furthermore, if the church disapproved of an individual in a community, the negative consequences for that individual could be horrendous.

Social exclusion, mockery, heckling and violence were the least and ordinary 19th century individual in a standard community could expect for falling on the wrong side of the church’s moral outlook.

In preceding centuries, this status quo was an even greater graphic reality. The church was the first stop, and usually the only stop when it came to moral authority and had been since the age of Constantine (at least in eastern europe) but also throughout most of the west, since Christian centralaistion around Rome.

In Nietzscge’s time, this had been the case for centuries, and the church’s stranglehold on people’s moral outlook had only recently begun to break down, with the advent of the industrial revolution, and the increasing availablity of information, and greater education and levels of wealth.

For Nietzsche, then, and for many in the 19th century, the question of the church’s stranglehodl on moral authority would have been very real, relevant and important; hence, his ‘obsession’.

You’re right, this was a bad piece of argumentation. What I should have said is that people think/thought that the fall of religion would lead to the fall of conventional moral (don’t steal, kill, go to work, love your children etc.). In Europe today most people however are atheists, and we have roughly the same moral codes as they had in the 19th century, apart from matters concerning sex.

“Morality” is an ambiguous word. I meant what I now called “conventional moral” , not “any moral system”. Possibly my usage is bad; however that is what I meant.

I think that people in general had very different views of things like premarital sex, homosexuality etc. in the 19 th century than they have nowadays. Surely such things existed, but they were no doubt frowned upon not only by the church/government but also by most people.

I think you’re right about Nietzsche’s “obsession” with religion: he had good reasons.

Kaufmann is the premiere English Nietzschean Scholar. Someone once said that a translation is like a woman, if she is beautiful she won’t be faithful, and if she is faithful, she can’t be beautiful. This may help to explain the difference.

About religion having a profound effect in Nietzsche’s time, i would have to agree. Nietzsche, then a professor of philology, was turned down for a chair in philosophy, probably because of his atheistic tendencies. Recall that Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ was the point at which Nietzsche broke ties with the composer.

Kaufmann is the #1 translator for Nietzsche these days, but i would DEFINITELY recommend seeking out some other (preferably older) translations to put a new spin on your reading of Nietzsche. The favorite book of my collection is an english translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra from 1899! and now when i read Kaufmann’s, its just not the same. more modern translations just seem so… dull.

i wish i had the time and patience to type the whole book out and provide it for you guys. you hardcore Nietzsche folks would seriously LOVE IT.

DarkMagus
I’ve just started to read Thus Spake Zarathustra, and all I can say is I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it, you really have to pay attention to understand it. I’m reading the Thomas Common translation which is a bit hard, but some of the more modern ones just ruin it, I think. I’m trying to find an online Hollingdale translation as well, but finding it a bit hard. Any sugestions?
Thanks everyone!

I don’t understand why you would want to read a transaltion that was written in almost an old english style. It’s quote obvious that Nietzsche didn’t speak or write in that fashion, so why would you want to read it in that fashion? It does nothing but adds to the pains of the book, why turn and arduous task into a horrendous task? No to mention the fact that Kauffmann sufficiently rips all previous translations in his interductions and authors notes. Is it not obvious that Kauffman’s is superior in reguards to mimicing the actual words of Nietzsche?

its an aesthetic thing. i’m simply not looking for “the perfect translation”… i’ve read kauffman and maybe one or two other translations… i already understand the book in a hundred possible ways, so the old-school translation is just pleasing to read. i don’t find it horrendous at all! are you jealous of my ancient relic?