I'll admit, I'm a little fascinated by the Nietzschean worldview; mainly because of how it proliferates in spite of quite obvious errors about the course of world history. Nietzsche's premise is very similar to Marxism in that it portrays history as a struggle of a resentful, oppressed underclass against its masters. The "master morality" of Antiquity was corrupted by Christian "slave morality" by the end which led to (after only a brief eighteen centuries) to Liberalism and Socialism. Yet it was the Pagan Greeks who invented democracy and in Christendom it was wholly nonexistent until the Classicizing influence of the Renaissance and Enlightenment destroyed Medieval culture to bring it back. The features of "slave morality" that we are told should be most prominent at the height of Church authority in the Middle Ages simply did not manifest, not even after the passage of a thousand years. This is an error of such an incredible magnitude that it cannot be called anything short of rank historical illiteracy.
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His philosophy was more against nihilism than anything else.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nietzsche_the_thinkers
He spoke out against the ill social effects of nihilism while actually promoting the anti-metaphysical foundation that caused them in the first place. It's not really up for debate that he was a nihilist, the "subjective" nature of truth and morality is a key point in his worldview.
His worldview can be summed up in the two phrases “might makes right”, and “the weak should fear the strong”. So he was morally bankrupt and in regards to metaphysics, he was a midwit at best.
Yeah it's not really Philosophy because that was a way a life based on contemplation which lead to moral perfection. 19th century kraut schizobabble was more like a downs syndrome replacement for Philosophy.
Most of it yeah, but German Idealism isn’t all bad. Schopenhauer was generally a midwit and said some moronic shit because he was a Chud, but his metaphysics aren’t terrible. Nietzsche could be said to be his spiritual successor in some sensez Schopenhauer’s philosophy expounded in Will and Representation could be described as a “Will to Life”. In the Nietzschean metaphysics, this would become the “Will to Power”, and later in the early 20th century, Aleister Crowley would develop on both of their ideas in his spiritual philosophy of Thelema (Greek for “will”), which describes reality as a “Will to Love”.
>slave morality bad!
>it just is! Ok?
Well I don't contest that slave morality actually was a problem in Nietzsche's time, but it just was not a driving force in Ancient or Medieval history at all, it was instead a product of the Enlightenment which he himself believed in. His whole historical framework is just a projection of his own time into the past, it doesn't stand up under the slightest scrutiny.
1. Greek democracy was rule by the male portion of the soldier caste. It is irrelevant to modern democracy.
2. The otherwordliness, Platonism in particular, that permeates Christianity was a Greek influence on the israeli cult. The slavelike poor projected their aspirations onto an imaginary world, the afterlife, and this pacified them - they could not love their actual fates so they made up ones they could live with. Humanism and the march of science, the impetus to change this world here and now, dissolved much of the sedative but this left us with a secularized Christian impetus - the meek shall inherit the actual earth, rather than the kingdom of God.
>Greek democracy was rule by the male portion of the soldier caste. It is irrelevant to modern democracy.
I wouldn't say irrelevant. Universal suffrage of the male citizen body may not be the same as letting immigrants and women vote, but it's still a noticeable step down from aristocratic elitism.
>The slavelike poor projected their aspirations onto an imaginary world, the afterlife
This is just gibberish. Belief in the hereafter is just a normative part of human society, it existed pretty much universally in every corner of the Earth, it wasn't some peasant imposition that suddenly arrived. People have always been focused on the next life and how our actions here affect what we get there. Again, this is what I'm talking about. This is just reality-denial on the level you would typically expect from a Marxist where the obvious has to be erased to make way for ideological assumptions. Such obvious lies would not be taken seriously in a functional civilization.
>Humanism and the march of science, the impetus to change this world here and now
Again, you're just repeating your ideology without substantiating anything. This simply never happened, as a cursory look at history would attest. Charlemagne was a man of action and relentless energy who only slept a few hours a day so he could spend as much time as possible changing the world, and yet he was a pious man who fought to eradicate Paganism. He wasn't an exception, he was the norm. You don't exactly strike me as an articulate or level-headed person, Nietzcheans are as demented as their Marxist intellectual cousins.
>but it's still a noticeable step down from aristocratic elitism.
The majority of the population was slaves.
>Belief in the hereafter is just a normative part of human society
Belief that the poor and their allies would be favored in the afterlife was not normative. Afterlifes were generally undesirable, or priviliged mighty heroes and the wealthy and high ranking.
>He wasn't an exception, he was the norm.
This seems unsubstantiated. Who knows how cynical or idealist most men were; for sure, there were political benefits for adopting Christianity.
>Afterlifes were generally undesirable, or priviliged mighty heroes and the wealthy and high ranking.
I'll add that mortalism seems more common the farther back in time you go, with cultures believing destruction of the body meant destruction of the soul.
With regard to the wealth bit, consider traditions of burying/burning people with treasure, sometimes slaves, plus the wealth transfers from the living though libations, burnt offerings and even "hell money".
>The majority of the population was slaves.
Surely you have some sort of source material to back up this bald-faced bullshit.
Pardon, I conflated Spartan hellots with Athenian slaves. I do re-affirm that it was a tiny minority of men, the conscriptable and veteran population that had the vote.
>The majority of the population was slaves.
Maybe a quarter in Athens, I think. But this is irrelevant to what I said because expanding the franchise to the free common men is still not aristocratic, but democratic, hence the name.
>Belief that the poor and their allies would be favored in the afterlife was not normative. Afterlifes were generally undesirable, or priviliged mighty heroes and the wealthy and high ranking.
You're drawing a distinction between Christianity and other religions that does not exist. The Sheol/Hades spoken of in the Bible is the same Underworld found in every other religion. The notion that being poor by itself grants you special status is not Christian doctrine, you're just making stuff up. Being an ascetic (being poor in a virtuous way) certainly does in Christianity, but that's common to other religions as well.
>This seems unsubstantiated. Who knows how cynical or idealist most men were; for sure
You just admitted total defeat. Suddenly you don't know if the Nietzchean slave morality infiltration narrative is true at all. Incredible. Some early kings like Clovis certainly converted, in all likelihood, for practical concerns but if you think faith wasn't taken seriously by rulers in the Middle Ages you're simply an idiot who is once again demonstrating your total lack of familiarity with any books on the period at all.
>The Sheol/Hades spoken of in the Bible is the same Underworld found in every other religion.
What are you, a perennialist? It just isn't true. Lots of people believe in reincarnation instead and that would include some of the ancient Greeks. At times Mesopotamians and Egyptians didn't even believe it was guaranteed and some people were just anhilated as when their corpses were burned.
>that being poor by itself grants you special status is not Christian doctrine,
Christianity was different from Roman-Greek religion in that gentle, meek people went to at-least as good a place as the Emperors or war heroes. Older religions still like the Egyptian or Sumerians believed wealth carried over. Similar beliefs survived outside the Med area concurrent with Christianity.
I don't know exactly what you mean. Do you think "every Christian was unambitious" is a sane reading when the applicability of the inversion of values (poor people good) was obviously bought by the masses?
>It just isn't true
It is. Sheol was the place "under" the Earth where all of the dead went to live a gloomy life. I'm not trying to draw comparisons with Christianity that are unwarranted because I am Christian myself and believe in its superiority, but the similarities shouldn't be glossed over either.
>Lots of people believe in reincarnation instead and that would include some of the ancient Greeks
If the perennialists (Evola, Guenon) did get anything right, it was to downplay the importance of reincarnation in the ancient world, which was never the default position outside of India, and even there wasn't always taken for granted.
>At times Mesopotamians and Egyptians didn't even believe it was guaranteed and some people were just anhilated as when their corpses were burned
Yes. Atheistic materialism becomes common in the decadent phase of civilizations. Some Egyptians came to view their gods as merely metaphorical near the end while the Greeks were producing filth like Epicureanism.
>Christianity was different from Roman-Greek religion in that gentle, meek people went to at-least as good a place as the Emperors or war heroes. Older religions still like the Egyptian or Sumerians believed wealth carried over. Similar beliefs survived outside the Med area concurrent with Christianity.
Christian Saints embody strength and were cherished for that, that much is not up for debate. The word in Matthew 5:5 which is commonly translated as "meek," πραεῖς refers not to craven behavior but more like the discipline to exercise God's power under His control. I don't contest the fact that some Pagans (just like many Christians) were prideful rulers more concerned with Earthly glory than spiritual virtue, but the notion that the Christian virtue of πραεῖς was nowhere to be found in Paganism is also taking things too far. The Gita is a remarkably proto-Christian work in this respect, being entirely about a life of selfless service to the One and others.
You can much more dissimilar afterlives, as with the Norse or Atztek, the farther you get from Med because the coincidences in afterlives are evidently due to mutual contact rather than an inate human very particular spirituality.
>Reincarnation
Would need to see numbers there. Several unrelated pagan traditions in Europe, Siberia, New World, Africa, etc.
>Atheistic materialism becomes common in the decadent phase of civilizations.
These weren't beliefs during "atheistic materialist" phases when the afterlives and gods were taken as metaphorical, they were older traditions that treated the afterlife and gods as extremely real, present concerns: you *had* to hoard treasure or be a pauper in the next world, you *had* to preserve your corpse or you wouldn't exist, you *had* to get relatives to pour you drinks or you'd thirst forever, etc.
>The Gita is a remarkably proto-Christian work in this respect, being entirely about a life of selfless service to the One and others.
This is unrelated to Nietzsche's point on Christianity. He didn't argue that Christians were specially selfless or loving, just that spun their relative weakness (including their propensity to get prosecuted and beaten) as meritous. Regardless, Nietzsche's thesis on moral geneology is eurocentric and doesn't ponder the parallel developments all over the world.
>because I am Christian myself
Kek, and there it is. Every Nietzsche hate thread is either 2 iq morons unable to understand anything or the eternal christcuck seethe
Athenian democracy was an oligarchical alliance that never professed to universality.
Being a citizen was deliberately limited to the few, not the many.
Most classical afterlives were not Paradises.
They were variably, basically just this life again but maybe slightly better or worse, a grey waste, a place for warriors and the strong, or ideally a state of non-existence.
The idea of a Paradise after death was a fairly late development in Judaism and spread into the other two major Abrahamic religions from it.
>2.
Cringe and bluepilled.
I haven't read Nietzsche enough but does he ever explain why exactly humans have a drive for self-renunciation and sacrifice in the first place? This appears to be the most important trait in humans that led us to our current world and in his eyes it began in antiquity with the decline of Greece and the popularity of Socratic rationalism, but why do humans do this? Why do we sacrifice, become rational, honor the ideal of compassion, etc?
In his book "On the Genealogy of Morals" he somewhat touches on this. You have to remember Charles Darwin released his "On the Origins of Species" some 30 years back when Nietzsche wrote "Genealogy." Basically the idea is that humans evolved (he doesn't use that word) out of a behavior of being very violent by forming society and laws. These societal laws are our remembrance of of a time where we didn't have them. We may even forget about why we have the laws but we will remember the laws exist to protect us.
He backs up the point that humans are violent in nature by pointing out the ingenuity of methods of execution throughout history and noting that public executions were basically entertainment for the public. He also discusses at length the concept of debt and how basically most things can be tied to the paying of a debt. Punishments for crimes are a payment of debt basically and the punishment isn't really for the criminal but for the person/entity that was wronged (creditor).
"To witness suffering does one good, to inflict suffering does one even better - this is a harsh sentiment, but nonetheless a fundamental one, ancient, strong and human, all-too-human, one, moreover, which perhaps even the apes would share, for it is said that in inventing bizarre cruelties they anticipated man, and, as it were, played 'prelude' to humanity." - Nietzsche
Deviating from Nietzsche a bit, I tend to take what Nietzsche is saying and layer it on top of naturalism. Basically morals (like what you are mentioning with sacrifice and compassion) are an evolved trait to help with mankinds survival.
I read only Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist and Human All Too Human. I'll definitely have to check out Genealogy of Morals
Marxism and Nietzscheanism are both psychologically comforting because they both completely lack a nuanced view of the world.
Nietzsche brought to light aspects of life and humanity that went against the grain of a predominantly Christian worldview by analyzing problems through an actual "proper" philosophical lens rather than the usual philosophy of just rambling about fantasies that usually just boil down to "I have an idea that sounds neat". One of the most accurate representations of Nietzsche and his work is to describe him as one of the first modern psychologists who tried to understand what truly drives people without reducing it (or projecting it rather) to pure metaphysics and spiritual beliefs.
It's especially funny when people will view someone like Carl Jung in high regard but Nietzsche with scorn despite the fact that many of Jung's most famous ideas and discoveries where either heavily inspired through Nietzsche or were outright taken from Nietzsche and given a different coat of paint i.e. Nietzsche was already talking about things such as "spirits within you" and something analogous to the collective unconscious. - Jung also had a bit of a hate boner for Nietzsche later on in his work and a lot of rumors about Nietzsche can actually have their lineage traced back to Jung just shit talking about him. Him [Nietzsche] being a closeted homosexual is one of them. Both men are great, but they're also both human, human all too human.
Atheists try to cope that their religion is nihilism with 2 ways.
The first one is ''traditionalism'', ie ''everyday I want a bureaucratic daddy to tell me what do to in his fascist republic while I am pretending to be wicca witch doing magikkk in my sparetime like Evola''.
Second, with the atheist called Nietzsche and his moronic idea to create and fight for your own values. You have to understand that Nietzsche is an atheist, a nihilist, a postmodernist which appeals to a lot of liberals and other deeply neurotic teenagers because Nietzsche is the achievement of the secular humanism which booted Christianity out of power. Nietzsche is overtly anti-christian, and it permits to all the atheist bug men to actually see themselves as the righteous resilient guy who create his own values.
In effect trannies are the best ubermen ever: they hate to see themselves as they really are, so they change both their neurotic spirit and also their body to match the narrative of the ubermen and even better, they impose their values to non-trannies. Same thing with feminists and all the idolized minorities in Humanism.
Naturally, the atheists cant know right from wrong, so their mental gymnastics about the uberman is flawed. The uberman is actually the last man: the uberman despises so much reality after seeing nihilism, that out of resentment for reality, the uberman CHOOSES to sink further in his delusion by building a narrative where he is not the last man, but actually the opposite, ie the uberman who creates his own values, ie cooming by living in own brain farts until he dies.
Oh and by the way only atheists take him seriously in the first place. Atheists love him because according to them, he found a way to be nihilistic without leading to suicide. In order to avoid being called a nihilist, friedrich PUSSY nietzsche re-defined nihilism to be 'not living in the present moment', which applies to christianity.
So now atheists dont say they are nihilistic, they say they are vitalist. And as a bonus they get to shit on christianity (their perpetual enemy that they defeated centuries ago, yet they still beat a dead horse to smugly fill up their days). You have to understand that atheists are braindead hypocrites so even when they say they are vitalist instead of nihilistic, they still remain 100% hedonistic and they still dont know what not do with their lives beyond making up self-aggrandizing narratives to feel justified for wanting to and actually doing coomming all day long.
Whoever takes Nietzsche or Evola seriously is completely lobotomized by atheism.
Nietzsche was in favor of democracy when he was younger. In Human, All Too Human he criticized it, yet also spoke positively of its development. In his unpublished notes, we also see him defending herd morality as "sacred" and considered the degenerate, the slave, the common, and the mediocre all necessary in the grand scheme, and especially essential for the development of the overman, who (per Zarathustra) wants to have "goblins" around him, not only because he has courage, but because it contributes to his own self-individuation.
Nietzsche is a very nuanced thinker, but he also got many of his ideas from the Greeks. His dissertation on the poet Theognis is how he became a professor at a young age, and this poet expressed many of the same views, but around 500 BC. Theognis was an aristocrat whose home was taken from him during a slave revolt. According to his words, the slaves were seen as a different species altogether. They were cheats and liars, impulsive, violent, and incapable of gentler passions and abstract thinking, and most importantly, they were physically uglier. Back then, it was (literally) the physically beautiful families that became nobles, defended by what Plato called "silver souls" and what Nietzsche called the "second in rank," individuals who were not beautiful nobles but physically strong and driven by a powerful sense of justice and admiration for the beautiful (betas, essentially). I honestly don't see what's wrong with this historical analysis since we can see the same process today.
Nietsche’s mistake was that he privileged the individual without justification. Yes, the Christian West had slave morality. That exact attitude led to the Wests overwhelming superiority in the battle between societies. On a societal level, the West is the strong. Similarly, the cells in your body slavishly serve your body as a whole, enabling your coherence as an individual, making you a power in the world.
His justification is that he likes non-conformists - free spirits - better.
"Free spirits" don't make stable, lasting societies.
Before this goes on: it isn't Nietzsche's position that Christians westerners are more or less individualistic/selfless/charitable/cooperative/etc than other extant peoples. I hope this is clear? Slave morality refers to the inversion of master morality, of what aristocrats value about themselves, the ressentiment of the opressed.
Anyway, there is no vision of a society of masters/aristocrats or supermen in Nietzsche; these live with the herd but are not of the herd.