I’m surprised. I’d heard Nietzsche was not a nice person, but had also heard good things about him… huh. I’ll have to read his work, now. I wonder if the library has some.
Niezsche’s sister was an anti-semite and a German nationalist. After Nietzsche’s death, she edited his works into something that became an intellectual foundation for Nazism. Thus, he got a terrible reputation in the English speaking world.
It’s tolerable clear from a reading of his unabridged works that Nietzsche would have hated Nazism. But he would not have identified himself as Christian (at least as measured by a typical American today). He went mad before he died, and the apocryphal tale is that the last thing he did before being institutionalize was to see a horse being beaten on the street and moving to protect it.
To see his moral thought, you could read Thus Spake Zarathustra. To see why he isn’t exactly Christian, you can look at The Geneology of Morals. Actually, you might also like Kierkegaard because he expresses somewhat similar thoughts, but within a Christian framework.
To really see why he isn’t Christian, read The Antichrist.
The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth… God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God—the formula for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about the “beyond”! God—the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!
As with what he wrote in Genealogy of Morals, it is unclear how tongue-in-cheek/intentional provocative Nietzsche is being. I’m honestly not sure whether Nietzsche thought the “master morality” was better or worse than the “slave morality.”
The sense I get—but note that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read any substantial amount of Nietzsche—is that he treats master morality as more honest, and perhaps what we could call psychologically healthier, than slave morality, but does not advocate that the former be adopted over the latter by people living now; the transition between the two is usually explained in terms of historical changes. The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it’s not I don’t have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it’s not I don’t have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
That’s because the superman, by definition, invents his own morality. If you read a book telling you the positive content of morality and implement it because the eminent philosopher says so, you ain’t superman.
I wouldn’t call him a fully sane person, especially in his later work (he suffered in later life from mental problems most often attributed to neurosyphilis, and it shows), but he has a much worse reputation than I think he really deserves. I’d recommend Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science; they’re both laid out a bit more clearly than the works he’s most famous for, which tend to be heavily aphoristic and a little scattershot.
I’m surprised. I’d heard Nietzsche was not a nice person, but had also heard good things about him… huh. I’ll have to read his work, now. I wonder if the library has some.
Niezsche’s sister was an anti-semite and a German nationalist. After Nietzsche’s death, she edited his works into something that became an intellectual foundation for Nazism. Thus, he got a terrible reputation in the English speaking world.
It’s tolerable clear from a reading of his unabridged works that Nietzsche would have hated Nazism. But he would not have identified himself as Christian (at least as measured by a typical American today). He went mad before he died, and the apocryphal tale is that the last thing he did before being institutionalize was to see a horse being beaten on the street and moving to protect it.
To see his moral thought, you could read Thus Spake Zarathustra. To see why he isn’t exactly Christian, you can look at The Geneology of Morals. Actually, you might also like Kierkegaard because he expresses somewhat similar thoughts, but within a Christian framework.
To really see why he isn’t Christian, read The Antichrist.
As with what he wrote in Genealogy of Morals, it is unclear how tongue-in-cheek/intentional provocative Nietzsche is being. I’m honestly not sure whether Nietzsche thought the “master morality” was better or worse than the “slave morality.”
The sense I get—but note that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read any substantial amount of Nietzsche—is that he treats master morality as more honest, and perhaps what we could call psychologically healthier, than slave morality, but does not advocate that the former be adopted over the latter by people living now; the transition between the two is usually explained in terms of historical changes. The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it’s not I don’t have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
That’s because the superman, by definition, invents his own morality. If you read a book telling you the positive content of morality and implement it because the eminent philosopher says so, you ain’t superman.
I wouldn’t call him a fully sane person, especially in his later work (he suffered in later life from mental problems most often attributed to neurosyphilis, and it shows), but he has a much worse reputation than I think he really deserves. I’d recommend Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science; they’re both laid out a bit more clearly than the works he’s most famous for, which tend to be heavily aphoristic and a little scattershot.