r/Nietzsche

How life denying philosophies and religions are becoming successful? How Christianity is so popular? Despite the fact that it has little proof, you need to love your enemies etc? Because it offers love and salvation. Why Nihilism tempts so many today despite the fact it offers no hope and that everything is meaningless?

Why people embrace Stoicism despite the fact that they tyrannize themselves with such philosophy of emotional repression? Because it offers self discipline and tools to deal with an unjust world.

Why people embrace Communism despite the fact that humans are supposedly greedy and competitive in their nature? Because it offers an utopia and justice against those in power. Why Gnosticism so popular? Because it offers salvation and knowledge to overcome an unjust world.

Maybe all the these philosophies aren't so bad and Nietzsche's elitist-individualistic kind of philosophy ain't the best one there's? How would the world look like if most were Nietzscheans? The world is not perfect. It's ugly, bloody and humans need to work together to make it better or seek another planet to live at.

For Nietzsche, modern Christianity is slavery, yet would Nietzsche approve Gnosticism over Christianity? Gnosticism is all about seeking secret knowledge, yet it also says that world is corrupted and created by an evil being called the demiurge, yet it actually gives a rational answer why the real world is full with so much suffering, that the real God the Monad doesn't wants worship, it just exists outside of anything a human can comprehend. Everyone have divine spark within to liberate oneself, Jesus was sent to the world to give knowledge, not a religion of 'Thou shalt' which Nietzsche calls the great dragon in his Zarathustra. That dragon is ironically the demiurge, the God of the Christians.

I think it’s fair to say that God was replaced (or atleast an attempt was made) in large part in the 20th Century with ideologies: be they socialism or facism. These of course failed.

So, the question turns to, what replaced them?

A happy one, a true one, a reasonable one. But madness and wisdom in one.

An ideal, a most well-constituted man (also visually), something beyond good and evil.

Not something that everyone can become, but something that a few are born to, if they are reared rightly, and they probably only know themselves what this "rightly" is in their case.

Not someone who works and drudgingly works the ranks, but rather someone that "abuses" society to climb up, like Nietzsche says, like the Sipo Matador.

Something that many may strive for, but only a few will reach. As a mode of life, a way of being, a type in society.

A ruler, a commander, a lawgiver. Not just someone existing in his own world without contact with the real society, but rather someone engaged in society in his very own way.

A lucky case, he knows he is lucky, he knows that he is too overrich, that he is superfluous. He longs for equals, but finds none.

Something really beyond "normal life", someone who does not cower from frightful and questionable paths, who knows that he cannot be repeated or copied.

He must become the meaning of life and society, he must replace God, he must inspire the higher men around him.

Some will say that it is not something you can become, it is not some real men, it it just a way of life and an ideal superposed beyond us and in TSZ, a figure that Nietzsche uses as a caricature of what should be striven for, but I believe that Nietzsche intended for his concept to describe real men, to describe real lives, to describe real goals.

It is a goal that might be realized in the near future, it is not thousand of years hence, it is something that we might soon see in society.

Once this Übermensch comes we will all feel him as superhuman (to us), we will agree that he is an Übermensch, we will know his legacy once he is dead.

He stands so far away from the masses and the last man that it will seem, like Nietzsche says, like an involuntary parody, that is only with him that the real seriousness begins.

How would you describe the Übermensch?

Sorry i have just read Friedrich Nietzsche!

Hello!! First of all, I am aware that a question like this is a bit naive: technically anyone can understand anything if given the right tools, but alas. I've seen a lot of folks qualifying this book as a very tough read and it's got me scared 🥲 I'm not really interested in Nietzsche per se, but I'm a Classics student with a soft spot for tragedy and I'm eager to learn about the Apollonian vs Dyonisiyan.

So, realistically, could I read and understand this work as someone with limited knowledge on the topic and not a lot of life experience? If positive, I'm not planning on diving in without a proper reading guide, so if anyone could recommend one..

In a Nietzschean perspective "Modesty" is merely a value invented by weak men to stifle the morale of strong women through resentment.

We can take the example of mens who says :

"Waaah, they use their beauty without modesty on OnlyFans and earning thousands of euros"

"Waaah, they're prostitutes on Instagram"

You see this kind of powerless talk? Well, that's what I'm criticizing

This morality of strong women consists of expressing their will to power through the force of their seductive beauty, and impotent men hate it.

We can also take the example of radical sunni islam who hate women who shows their beauty to give the control to mens

>Sahih Sunan Tirmidhi According to Abu Huraira, the Prophet said: "If I had ordered anyone to prostrate to someone else, I would have ordered the wife to prostrate to her husband"

Anyway strong womens use their beauty and weak mens create "modesty" value to criticize women who use their power

For the majority of my intermediate journey into philosophy, I largely dismissed Nietzsche. He was infamous and I knew it, but I didn't actually invest myself into any of his works. I instead started with the likes of Socrates (and by extension Plato), and with a foundational understanding of Hegelian dialectics. I think that there was a certain fondness when I delved into these other legendary philosophers. That is, the Platonian forms, which exemplify the "good virtues" in of themselves, and the absolute of Hegel's dialectic which seeks to reconcile the various antagonisms of the world. There was a certain fantastical aspect of these concepts, as if they had sprung from ancient, idyllic texts for lack of a better phrase. Plato was exalting the good of men, and Hegel was resolving their differences. Then came Nietzsche. "Why I am So Clever", "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am A Fatality", how conceit! When I arrived at Nietzsche, he was wholly profane, unconcerned and skeptic. He denounced Plato, even worse he rejected him as a "decadent" and the same with Hegel. How uncomfortable, unfond. His dismissal of these presumably established metaphysics was entirely repulsive to me. It seemed that as they had brought me closer, Nietzsche had pushed me further away. With his perspectivism, will to power, etc. With Nietzsche, there was no longer an "elevation" of life, that is beyond it's bounds themselves.

Yet, in that epiphany, Nietzsche's philosophy became something fond to me. There were no longer transcendent forms to inherit, nor dialectics to resolve. In Nietzsche, man is fondest. He is tethered to the indifferent realm which allows him to exist, and which will also kill him. So he must rise against it, not in an act of denial but in radical acceptance and adoration. This is to say that man is temporal, then so is the metaphysics. How Clever Nietzsche! How Wise Nietzsche! How Fatal! I am thoroughly fond of him now, in a way more than Plato and Hegel, and I intend to seek him out further.

P.S.

If there are any inconsistencies in my understanding of Nietzsche and those mentioned please correct me rightfully, I'm only a novice and I'd like to know as closely as possible.

Suppose you’re in the lion phase of the Three Metamophoses and you are rejecting and deconstructing (if that’s the right word to use) every moral value society has taught you. What if at the end of this deconstructing period, you still hold onto some of those values.

Let’s take civil rights for an example. You think, “Should everyone have equal protection under the law regardless of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, etc?” You look at all the arguments both for and against civil rights, but at the end you realize, “Yes, everyone should have equal protection under the law!”

Does that mean you didn’t do it right, or is it fine because you came to that conclusion by yourself instead of automatically believing it because someone told you it’s right?

I'm quite new to Nietzsche and have been thinking about section 21 in Beyond Good and Evil. In this section, as far as I understand it, Nietzsche rejects the idea of free will and identifies a desire for freedom of will with the desire to bear the sole responsibility for one's actions. But he also diagnoses the opposite position - the belief in an unfree will - as stemming from a desire to absolve oneself of responsibility.

These understandings of each position make sense to me on their own - and I found them very revealing personally. But, my question is; if there is no freedom of will, but a belief in an unfree will is the desire to absolve oneself of responsibility - what is the alternative?

It seems to me that Nietzsche is getting at the possibility of avoiding the nihilism that comes with determinism but without conceding to any sort of belief in free will - but how?

Thanks!

Obviously Nietzsche speaks against Christianity quite often, so I wonder what people find to be the best responses theyve seen that attempt to take down his claims, be it in a paper, book, video, or what have you.