I think we can distinguish between Nietzsche’s ethic (I’m not sure morality is the right word) and his metaethics, his theory of what morality is.
His metaethics is that morality, like all psychological phenomena, is an outgrowth of the “will to power”, the one true psychological universal. All beings seek power—he counts even the capacity to move and to act upon the environment, as examples of the power that living organisms seek—and the morality of a society or a people is just whatever helps that society flourish, reified into a set of values that are treated as objective good.
Nietzsche certainly respected individual greatness, but I believe his highest respect was reserved for the creators of new value systems, and the leaders and conquerors who made those value systems into the basis of a successful religion or civilization. And this is where we can discern what his own “morality” actually was. He saw himself as a philosopher who had imbibed the moral emptiness of a universe of warring wills to power, and summoned up from his own will to power, a new tablet of values.
The central symbol of the new values is “the superman”, and the superman is a new human being who looks with joy upon the “eternal return”. What is the eternal return? It is a belief that all the events of our lives, will repeat eternally. Nietzsche thought this was an emerging implication of the scientific worldview, and he thought that it would cause a vast spiritual crisis in the openly atheist Europe of the future. He envisaged masses of people committing suicide because they could not bear the thought of their unhappy lives repeating eternally.
The superman is a human being who is elevated, rather than crushed, by the idea of their life and their world being immortalized in this way. Nietzsche aspired to be the prophet of a future culture in which that life-affirming superman is the ideal, and he seems to have thought that a kind of eugenic aristocracy would be the best political order in which to cultivate and propagate that ideal, and to have viewed a hedonistic steady-state socialism as the chief rival ideology, once the era of religion had truly passed.
He never completed a work in which all of this is articulated, but you can find it in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and in the unfinished notes that were later assembled as “The Will to Power”.
The Übermensch is discussed as an ideal kind of higher man only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and disappears afterward. Zarathustra is often especially obscure and the Übermensch’s importance in understanding Nietzsche is overstated in popular culture compared to the broader higher type of person exemplified by actual persons like Goethe.
He envisaged masses of people committing suicide because they could not bear the thought of their unhappy lives repeating eternally.
Wait, does this even makes sense? If life repeats eternally, then suicide is a restart of the cycle.
Killing yourself (if you believe in the eternal return, but are otherwise rational) is not about how happy or unhappy you are, but whether you expect the following years to be better or worse than your life until now. So the people killing themselves should be exactly the ones whom Nietzsche admires, when they feel they have already passed their peak creative genius.
Nietzsche certainly respected individual greatness, but I believe his highest respect was reserved for the creators of new value systems, and the leaders and conquerors who made those value systems into the basis of a successful religion or civilization. (...) He saw himself as a philosopher who had imbibed the moral emptiness of a universe of warring wills to power, and summoned up from his own will to power, a new tablet of values.
Guy designed a new moral system putting himself on the top; news at 11.
Nietzsche is popularly associated with Nazism (...) he was also popular among the left-anarchists and the Left generally (...) “if you meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean” (whatever that means). Common sense demands that some of these people are misreading him.
Alternative explanation: all these people understand Nietzsche more or less correctly as saying that geniuses are so awesome that nothing else matters, and all of them think of themselves as geniuses.
The central symbol of the new values is “the superman”, and the superman is a new human being who looks with joy upon the “eternal return”. What is the eternal return? It is a belief that all the events of our lives, will repeat eternally. Nietzsche thought this was an emerging implication of the scientific worldview, and he thought that it would cause a vast spiritual crisis in the openly atheist Europe of the future. He envisaged masses of people committing suicide because they could not bear the thought of their unhappy lives repeating eternally.
Just wanted to flag that to me this sounds at best disputed and really just not accurate.
The Ubermensch and the eternal recurrence both might be more literary devices than genuine things Nietzsche believes in. On the eternal recurrence, I think most people agree the main point of it is to serve as a kind of litmus test for a person’s constitution. There’s an attempted proof of the idea in the Nachlass but I don’t think most scholars think Nietzsche literally endorsed it. On the Ubermensch, there are not many references to the character outside of Zarathustra, and most of the external references are about TSZ, and within TSZ there’s a reading that the Ubermensch is itself an idea that needs to be overcome. Happy to elaborate but note that the Ubermensch is already mentioned as Z’s ideal prior to his encountering the idea of the eternal recurrence, and it doesn’t seem like the idea is part of his convalescence. I also think you can read Part IV as being about overcoming the idea, or anyway not taking it quite so seriously.
I don’t know where you are getting the thing about mass suicides. Maybe it’s true, but I’ve never heard anyone say that before.
For a scholarly argument that Nietzsche expected humanity to literally be divided between those who could bear the eternal return, and those who couldn’t, apparently Paul Loeb is the person to read.
I think there was a great effort to bury political readings of Nietzsche, after his science-fictional musings about future humanity being culled by the thought of the eternal return, were subsumed into Nazi ideology. Thus the modern emphasis on literary and individualist interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself was a mild-mannered loner who never actually published a political program, so one is free to focus on his completed works as containing the true Nietzsche, and to regard his fleeting futurology as symbolism or madness that was appropriated and amplified by fascists.
If I had time to be an actual Nietzsche scholar, I might write something on the passage from the German Nietzsche of racial supremacy, to the French Nietzsche of critical theory, to the American Nietzsche of techno-optimism, and how they draw on different parts of his work.
The ”eternal recurrence” is surprisingly the most attractive picture of the ”afterlife”. The alternatives: the annihilation of the self or eternal life in heaven are both unattractive, for different reasons. Add to this that Nietzsche is right to say that the eternal recurrence is a view of the world which seems compatible with a scientific cosmology.
I think we can distinguish between Nietzsche’s ethic (I’m not sure morality is the right word) and his metaethics, his theory of what morality is.
His metaethics is that morality, like all psychological phenomena, is an outgrowth of the “will to power”, the one true psychological universal. All beings seek power—he counts even the capacity to move and to act upon the environment, as examples of the power that living organisms seek—and the morality of a society or a people is just whatever helps that society flourish, reified into a set of values that are treated as objective good.
Nietzsche certainly respected individual greatness, but I believe his highest respect was reserved for the creators of new value systems, and the leaders and conquerors who made those value systems into the basis of a successful religion or civilization. And this is where we can discern what his own “morality” actually was. He saw himself as a philosopher who had imbibed the moral emptiness of a universe of warring wills to power, and summoned up from his own will to power, a new tablet of values.
The central symbol of the new values is “the superman”, and the superman is a new human being who looks with joy upon the “eternal return”. What is the eternal return? It is a belief that all the events of our lives, will repeat eternally. Nietzsche thought this was an emerging implication of the scientific worldview, and he thought that it would cause a vast spiritual crisis in the openly atheist Europe of the future. He envisaged masses of people committing suicide because they could not bear the thought of their unhappy lives repeating eternally.
The superman is a human being who is elevated, rather than crushed, by the idea of their life and their world being immortalized in this way. Nietzsche aspired to be the prophet of a future culture in which that life-affirming superman is the ideal, and he seems to have thought that a kind of eugenic aristocracy would be the best political order in which to cultivate and propagate that ideal, and to have viewed a hedonistic steady-state socialism as the chief rival ideology, once the era of religion had truly passed.
He never completed a work in which all of this is articulated, but you can find it in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and in the unfinished notes that were later assembled as “The Will to Power”.
The Übermensch is discussed as an ideal kind of higher man only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and disappears afterward. Zarathustra is often especially obscure and the Übermensch’s importance in understanding Nietzsche is overstated in popular culture compared to the broader higher type of person exemplified by actual persons like Goethe.
Wait, does this even makes sense? If life repeats eternally, then suicide is a restart of the cycle.
Killing yourself (if you believe in the eternal return, but are otherwise rational) is not about how happy or unhappy you are, but whether you expect the following years to be better or worse than your life until now. So the people killing themselves should be exactly the ones whom Nietzsche admires, when they feel they have already passed their peak creative genius.
Guy designed a new moral system putting himself on the top; news at 11.
Alternative explanation: all these people understand Nietzsche more or less correctly as saying that geniuses are so awesome that nothing else matters, and all of them think of themselves as geniuses.
Ironically, eternal return is one step from many-world immortality, an even more mind-crushing idea
Just wanted to flag that to me this sounds at best disputed and really just not accurate.
The Ubermensch and the eternal recurrence both might be more literary devices than genuine things Nietzsche believes in. On the eternal recurrence, I think most people agree the main point of it is to serve as a kind of litmus test for a person’s constitution. There’s an attempted proof of the idea in the Nachlass but I don’t think most scholars think Nietzsche literally endorsed it. On the Ubermensch, there are not many references to the character outside of Zarathustra, and most of the external references are about TSZ, and within TSZ there’s a reading that the Ubermensch is itself an idea that needs to be overcome. Happy to elaborate but note that the Ubermensch is already mentioned as Z’s ideal prior to his encountering the idea of the eternal recurrence, and it doesn’t seem like the idea is part of his convalescence. I also think you can read Part IV as being about overcoming the idea, or anyway not taking it quite so seriously.
I don’t know where you are getting the thing about mass suicides. Maybe it’s true, but I’ve never heard anyone say that before.
For a scholarly argument that Nietzsche expected humanity to literally be divided between those who could bear the eternal return, and those who couldn’t, apparently Paul Loeb is the person to read.
I think there was a great effort to bury political readings of Nietzsche, after his science-fictional musings about future humanity being culled by the thought of the eternal return, were subsumed into Nazi ideology. Thus the modern emphasis on literary and individualist interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself was a mild-mannered loner who never actually published a political program, so one is free to focus on his completed works as containing the true Nietzsche, and to regard his fleeting futurology as symbolism or madness that was appropriated and amplified by fascists.
If I had time to be an actual Nietzsche scholar, I might write something on the passage from the German Nietzsche of racial supremacy, to the French Nietzsche of critical theory, to the American Nietzsche of techno-optimism, and how they draw on different parts of his work.
The ”eternal recurrence” is surprisingly the most attractive picture of the ”afterlife”. The alternatives: the annihilation of the self or eternal life in heaven are both unattractive, for different reasons. Add to this that Nietzsche is right to say that the eternal recurrence is a view of the world which seems compatible with a scientific cosmology.