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Something to keep in mind with Nietzsche is that he made enemies out of both Christianity and egalitarian ideology. A lot of the criticisms of him come from these two crowds, and a lot of it is an ad hominem attack on his character
Why do these folks dislike him so much? Because no one saw their flaws and latched onto them as viciously as he did
It's one thing to point out his own fragility and the obvious contrast with his writing, but he never intended to wholly embody the ideals that he wrote about. His goal was to pave the way for others to free themselves from the sickness of the sad passions that these belief sets so eagerly try to cultivate. A sickness from which he himself was not immune
Christians call him a nihilist, when it is Christianity that is nihilistic - denial of everything carnal for the ideal of post-death salvation.
I don’t understand his underlying premise. Life doesn’t need meaning, just existence is blissful. In fact meaning is this context is meaningless.
“What is the meaning of life?” is a nonsensical question/sentence.
>just existence is blissful
Erm.. citation needed. I'd say all the existential angst in the first world disproves that.
When people do not embody the values they possess, how can they be happy?
I’m speaking for myself.
Then saying "MY existance is blissful" would be more precise.
Though it would boil your comment down to "My existance is blissful, I don't need a meaning of life", in which case, good for you. Other people may differ though.
Call it a guide rail.
What should you orient yourself towards during your life?
Your question presupposes that you should orient yourself towards something in particular.
Yes, indeed.
* Do you believe that you (personally) have some kind of freedom?
* If so, you would have to decide how to use that freedom. Otherwise, it's not really freedom, is it?
* Finally, in order to make any decision you have to put yourself in some coordinates, orient yourself. Otherwise, it's not a decision, but a random choice. Remember that avoiding coming up with any decision is also a decision.
I'm not sure how we can tell whether we do have freedom or if it's illusory. It's not clear how much we are biologically and socially determined. Imagine being in a river with a strong current. Everything you do is still subject to the current. You can't stop the river. You can't swim upstream. The bigger problem is that we can't see the river until we've been in it for a while. It seems we're mostly swimming blindly.
The concept of freedom is one of the major philosophical questions.
However, if we look at our own personal (subjective) experience, it becomes obvious that everyone actually behaves like we do have some sort of freedom. No healthy individual thinks that they are just a dead rock in a river.
> He devised [eternal recurrence] in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket.
That doesn't sound comforting to me. Wow my life sucks right now but at least I'll be able to relive it exactly as it is again-and-again forever.
I always read 'eternal return' as a sort of decision making procedure. Is the thing you are about to do such that you wouldn't mind doing it forever as time repeats?
In contrast with Christianity, where this life is to be "endured" for the promise of afterlife, "eternal return" is exactly the opposite - "enduring" this life is the worst possible decision, as you'll just have to "endure" it again and again for eternity. In context of "eternal return", good decisions are those that make life worth living for the sake of itself - embracing life completely and doing whatever you can to enhance your will to power (which Nietzsche sees as the source of all that which is good).
This was not meant to be salvation, rather a reason to love one's own fate "Amor fati."
It's meant to be a rejection of the inherent nihilism he found in Christianity.
The interesting thing about Nietzsche's eternal return of the same is that he must have known that there is no choice if loving, hating and thinking itself is part of the return.
The moment you decide will have have been over and over again and will be over and over again and your decision will always be the same.
But without a choice, there is no heroic stoicism.
It's philosophical predestination doctrine without God.
Why Nietzche's ideas can be so dangerous without the aid of proper context and perspective. They are very seductive to a certain type of young man. But the reality of human fallibility leads to terminal ressentiment in the end for anyone fixed in that philosophy. It is a total dead end.
> But the reality of human fallibility leads to terminal ressentiment in the end for anyone fixed in that philosophy. It is a total dead end.
Could you elaborate a little bit? If you're going to disregard his thought with a broad stroke, you might as well
>Could you elaborate a little bit? If you're going to disregard his thought with a broad stroke, you might as well
I'm certainly not disregarding him. His work was (and is) important. But the reason it lives on is to serve as a cautionary tale. It saves you from taking a turn down that road which can be so appealing to precocious young minds who aren't aware of its' logical conclusions.
I wish your assertions had some substance to analyze or understand what you're thinking about.
> its' logical conclusions
such as?
>To regard Nietzsche as a self-help author, writing primarily for himself, helps to put his least convincing idea – eternal recurrence – into perspective. This is the idea that we will live our lives again and again, ad infinitum. For an anti-metaphysician who suggested that we can strive to be higher, better beings, this fatalistic notion of eternal recurrence seems jarring. He devised it in 1881, at a time of personal crisis and romantic rejection, and one must conclude that it was a consolatory comfort blanket. It could be put more prosaically thus: shit happens.
This is actually a terrible take and you should not listen to this person at all.
Nietzsche's thoughts on Eternal Return is, at a theoretical level, an attempt to reconcile an ethical framework that is completely atheistic and non-idealist (non-idealistic, so not tied to any notions of the "end of history" or "right side of history", notions of providence generally), with the understanding of physics modern to his time.
The Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell Pearson is one of the foremost researchers around Nietzsche's grounding of his philosophy in the physics and biology of the 19th century, which was a tumultuous period, and you can read Nietzsche himself attempt to elaborate Eternal Return more concretely in one his fragments, the Time Atom Theory fragment[0].
The idea that the universe is a kind of infinite loop with no begin or end, which therefore defies human narration since we very uncomfortable with a thing that has no origin, is even entertained by serious contemporary physicists such as Brian Cox. Nietzsche simply thinks this must be the foundation for an ethics that is resilient to idealism and theism, and therefore, necessarily _tragic_; his first book was an attempt to retrieve a sense of tragedy from Greek literature that had been overruled and trampled upon by the last 1800 years of Christian asceticism in the West (though the asceticism of Christianity isn't exclusive to the West as he points out).
It is against the backdrop of Eternal Return that Nietzsche wants to develop his idea of "double affirmation" as found in _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_: that I not only accept contingency in the outcomes of my actions and external events ("shit happens") , but _desire_ it too and without resentment and sadness but love (hence: Amor Fati).
This is why Good and Evil are to be surpassed and disastrous axioms to base real ethics on: not only because, for Nietzsche they presume a normalized psychology, but because both fascism and its opposite are both refusals of the essential role of contingency and for that reason breed their own antagonist; only understanding the tragic can get us on the way to a path beyond Good and Evil, and Eternal Return and Double Affirmation are his contributions to furthering that journey.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb is also aware of the thematic adjacency of his work on non-fragility with Nietzsche's ideas. That's more the direction Nietzsche would have had in mind.
I'm condensing and simplifying _a lot_ of stuff, there is an entire scholarship dedicated to researching his ideas as he understood them, but reducing all of that down to "his life sucked and so he needed tell himself 'shit happens'" is an outright assassination attempt meant to terminate thinking.
Edit: As an aside, there is this strong tendency from liberal/progressive writers to neutralize, if not dismiss, the notion of the "Death of the Author". This value of this neutralization is to be able to neutralize the value of a person's ideas because of their biography. The point of "Death of the Author" is that the human relationship to its own symbolic practices is not a proprietary one, at least not exhaustively proprietary; in some ways, it is the human being being inscribed upon rather than the human being inscribing 'their ideas' (this is something Michel Foucault spent a lot of time and effort elaborating). Early 20th century fascism was not founded by some specific origin, but was the outcome of a miasma of anonymous forces and specific consequences. The game of 'telephone' is a sort of concrete example of what is meant by this non-ownership.
> This is actually a terrible take and you should not listen to this person at all.
Please keep this sort of internet name-calling and swipes of HN. We're trying for a different quality of discussion here. Both of those things are in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I only skimmed the rest of your comment but it looks like it would be fine without that bit.
Apologies, I had too strong an emotional reaction
It happens!
As any article confusing life with literature (or philosophy), ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage. Live your life, read Nietzsche (or whoever else): does it make sense to you? That matters. As Wittgenstein put it, philosophy is like stairs. Once you reach a certain height, you can throw them away.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
That's not what I did. Read better. I state that it's garbage because the very first thing you learn when analysing literature is separating men from their ideas. This article doesn't do that and proceeds to find meaningless conclusions.
Some currently-fashionable methods of literary analysis deliberately ignore author biography, but I don't think most people who favor those would claim there's never any reason for or value in examining the biographies of authors. I don't think they'd suggest people, say, entirely ignore the biography of an author forever and in all cases. Besides, it's common for one person to apply multiple approaches for a really deep analysis of a work, whether independently or together.
Plus, this is a review of a biography, so it's not the reviewer's fault the book is concerned with biography.
Erroring out at the first detail that contradicts a generic principle is a classic type of shallow dismissal.
I think diving into his personal life can be very useful with Nietzsche. I can't say the same with every philosopher though. Wonderful Wittgenstein quote, btw.
Nietzsche's almost constant sickness helps explain concepts like the eternal return and will-to-power. Always keep an eye out for "health", "cure", and "convalescence" in his writing (great example: the preface to The Gay Science).
Nietzsche's romantic failures also color his works. I skip large chunks because I can't stomach his sexism.
It doesn't explain the concepts, it explains how the concepts may (big may!) have been originated. It's way, way better to read about what texts Nietzsche read and which didn't.
>ultimately, confusing the author personal life with his ideas, or reaching conclusions between the two, this is mainly garbage
Hard disagree. You cannot truly understand a person’s thought without understanding the person’s life.
Even a hardcore logician like Russell, you know he was an academic during such and such a period of history which influenced his worldview and that which he found important.
Maybe I’m just outing myself as a PoMo, but thought is life and living begets thought. Philosophers are interpreters of the grand drama in which they have a part.
Hard disagree, PoMo. The work stands alone. "No man is a hero to his valet" is the truism that springs to mind. Reducing everything to the times & the man is just a way to bring it all down to our own pedestrian level so we can feel equal. The goal of every great artist is to transcend their humanity.
We know nothing about Homer, or even if there was such a person, but The Iliad and The Odyssey have been read for 3,000 years.
It's like arguing whether a mountain ought to be experienced from a distance, so you can see it, or from the top, so you can see from it.
Both!
OK w/me
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”
-- F. Nietzsche
that's very different from saying that biography can improve or disprove something! As a matter of facts, Nietzsche writes here about moral purpose of philosophy. "Autobiography" here is a trick; confirming that you must separate author life from texts. In German, Nietzsche uses the word "mémoires", which are an author own recollections of experiences. The "Auto" part in the translations, coming from the Greek autòs, meaning self, is the key part here. A description of Nietzsche's sickness made by someone else is hardly an autobiography.
There can be value in understanding where a thought came from: the problem is reducing all of the thought to its provenance. Nietzsche was sick, hence you must restate the validity of his arguments. This argument is garbage. Try to prove it, you will fail. You can disagree with Nietzsche: do so in the realm of philosophy, not in that of biography. Otherwise, your thoughts too will be just what you had for breakfast
> You can disagree with Nietzsche: do so in the realm of philosophy, not in that of biography
What you’re implying is that considering the circumstances of life is ad hominem, which I do not agree with.
I’d argue that you cannot truly understand the philosophy without the context, it’s baked in. So you need to know the context to truly disagree with the correct thing, but yes the disagreement should be specifically with the idea, not with the person.
Eg not “Nietzsche had a privileged life therefore he was wrong” more like “Nietzsche’s approach to and thoughts on the will to power only really apply when considering the monomania spurred by his father’s early demise and his deep interest in philology. A 21st century approach to nietzschean thought would doubtlessly look very different since material, literary and spiritual conditions have changed somewhat”
This I agree with. Context is a thing, saying as the article did things along the line of "Nietzsche was sick so this explains x" is another
Case in point: Russell’s views on Nietzsche.
Right on. I really enjoy Stoic philosophy, Nietzsche, and Buddhism. I actually consider this my "serious" reading, not like fun reading of sci-fy, etc.
I like to read things that allow me to reevaluate my behaviors and beliefs.
Is that from w first era that he changed his mind? The language divide is not that exact and stair in fact cannot be throw away. As there could be a stair?