Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

[Anonymouse]

I am at my second time around reading Thus Spot Zarathustra, by Freidrich Nietzsche, and it goes to show you how much I love and adore this book, and this philosopher, and how much of a lasting impression he has left on me. As such, I take it upon myself to introduce you to Nietzsche if you aren't familiar with him by quoting various passages which are both important to understanding Nietzsche, as well as ones I happen to just like because I just do.

================================================== ==========

And life itself confided this secret to me: "Behold," it said, "I am that which must always be overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this is one, and one secret.

The bite on which I gagged the most is not the knowledge that life itself requires hostility and death and torture-crosses - but once I asked, and I was almost choked by my question: What? does life require even the rabble? Are poisoned wells required, and stinking fires and soiled dreams and maggots in the bread of life?

Not my hatred but my nausea gnawed hungrily at my life. Alas, I often grew weary of the spirit when I found that even the rabble had esprit. And I turned my back on those who rule when I saw what they now call ruling: higgling and haggling for power - with the rabble.

And then again there are such as love gestures and think that virtue is some kind of gesture. Their knees always adore, and their hands are hymns to virtue, but their heart knows nothing about it.

And then again there are such as consider it virtue to say, "Virtue is necessary"; but at the bottom they believe only that the police is necessary.

And some who cannot see what is high in man call it virtue that they see all-too-closely what is low in man: thus they call their evil eye virtue.

And some want to be edified and elevated, and they call that virtue, while others want to be bowled over, and they call that virtue too.

And thus almost all believe that they have a share in virtue; and at the very least everyone wants to be an expert on good and evil.

Many die too late, and a few die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: "Die at the right time!"

[Oso]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

Wow, those are some good stuff.

[Anonymouse]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

I walk among men as among the fragments of the future - that future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a creator and guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents?

To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it' - that alone should I call redemption. Will - that is the name of the liberator and joy-bringer; thus I taught you, my friends. But now learn this too: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? 'It was' - that is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time's covetousness, that is the will's loneliest melancholy.

And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.

A will to the thinkability of all beings: this I call your will. You want to make all being thinkable, for you doubt with well-founded suspicion that it is already thinkable. But it shall yield and bend for you. Thus your will wants it. It shall become smooth and serve the spirit as its mirror and reflection. That is your whole will, you who are wisest: a will to power - when you speak of good and evil too, and of valuations. You still want to create the world before which you can kneel: that is your ultimate hope and intoxication.

I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality. For, to me justice speaks thus: "Men are not equal." Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke otherwise?

Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers. Life wants to climb and to overcome itself climbing.

Too long have I longed and looked into the distance. Too long have I belonged to loneliness; thus I have forgotten how to be silent. Mouth have I become through and through, and the roaring of a stream from towering cliffs: I want to plunge my speech down into the valleys. Let the river of my love plunge where there is no way! How could a river fail to find its way to the sea? Indeed, a lake is within me, solitary and self-sufficient; but the river of my love carries it along, down to the sea.New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do - back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

Behold I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.

[TomServo]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

Pity Nietzsche went mad.

[Anonymouse]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

Pity Nietzsche went mad.

I don't expect anyone who can write as sublime as he, to not go mad.

[axel]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

After the twilight of the "idols", could there be some room left for Nietzsche idolatry?

Not to turn this into a depreciation thread...

But if one is to take Nietzsche's "active nihilism" to its actual consequences, one has to negate Nietzsche himself

(which could explain why his "sublime" thoughts and writings which are nothing less than the celebration of man-god (divinised man) as opposed to God-man (Christ) led him to his tragic end, prefigured in Icarus' fall)



(Icarus legs appear in the bottom right of Brueghel's painting)

His constant obsession with Übermensch and willpower and overcoming... (that is so flattering to (and dangerous for) some readers who identify themselves with the superior and "differentiated man" (the same holds true for part of Evola's writings)) could very well be the compensation of a very weak nature that came to be subjugated by the personality of one of his contemporaries. Richard Wagner immediately comes to mind. And the fact Nietzsche waited for the composer's death to write "Der Fall Wagner" (hoping to settle the score with him and to free himself of his influence) is quite telling of the feebleness of his own personality, he attempted to hide (to others and to himself) behind "sublime" yet empty words (I believe I already wrote something along these lines).

In the light of this observation, one could hypothesize that this weak personality got crushed by the active nihilism it first initiated (in the very hope of overcoming its own shortcomings). The latter created an overwhelming existential tension, devouring what remained of the spiritual and intellectual "Lebensraum" it had sprung out of. And the poor soul drowned into madness.

PS: Sorry if I spoiled the thread. Shnorhavor nor dari yev Soorp Dznoont. I switch back to hibernation mode.

[Thai-Samurai]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

now im gonna burn his books, and laugh, like the overman.

[Anonymouse]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

After the twilight of the "idols", could there be some room left for Nietzsche idolatry?

Not to turn this into a depreciation thread...

That's amusing.

On a more lighter note, Nietzsche would definitely not disagree that one must be a breaker of values, even if it would mean negating Nietzsche, so you're shadow boxing there.

[Siamanto]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

now im gonna burn his books, and laugh, like the overman.

Something from my past:

"Oh nihilist, do you really think that books shed no light on the world that surrounds us? Burn one and you will see."

[Siamanto]

Re: Nietzsche Appreciation Thread

After the twilight of the "idols", could there be some room left for Nietzsche idolatry?

Not to turn this into a depreciation thread...

But if one is to take Nietzsche's "active nihilism" to its actual consequences, one has to negate Nietzsche himself

(which could explain why his "sublime" thoughts and writings which are nothing less than the celebration of man-god (divinised man) as opposed to God-man (Christ) led him to his tragic end, prefigured in Icarus' fall)



His constant obsession with Übermensch and willpower and overcoming... (that is so flattering to (and dangerous for) some readers who identify themselves with the superior and "differentiated man" (the same holds true for part of Evola's writings)) could very well be the compensation of a very weak nature that came to be subjugated by the personality of one of his contemporaries. Richard Wagner immediately comes to mind. And the fact Nietzsche waited for the composer's death to write "Der Fall Wagner" (hoping to settle the score with him and to free himself of his influence) is quite telling of the feebleness of his own personality, he attempted to hide (to others and to himself) behind "sublime" yet empty words (I believe I already wrote something along these lines).

In the light of this observation, one could hypothesize that this weak personality got crushed by the active nihilism it first initiated (in the very hope of overcoming its own shortcomings). The latter created an overwhelming existential tension, devouring what remained of the spiritual and intellectual "Lebensraum" it had sprung out of. And the poor soul drowned into madness.

PS: Sorry if I spoiled the thread. Shnorhavor nor dari yev Soorp Dznoont. I switch back to hibernation mode

.

Just curious,
1- Why and how "active nihilism" - as defined by Nietzsche - would necessarily "negate Nietzsche himself?"
2- What "negation of Nietzsche" would mean?
3- How do you understand the "Overman," "Willpower," and "Active Nihilism?"

Nietzsche was very lucid about his ideas and thinking. The most beautiful expression of it is a posthumous
dithyramb called something like "Nothing But a Poet, Nothing But a Buffoon" where he describes a "truth seeker" as a poet, a buffoon condemned to wander from one view to another and lie.
Also, the concept of the "simulacre," exhaustively analyzed by Klossowski.