A Book to Make Nietzsche Weep

[Spice_Weasel]

Wow, I haven’t seen this warm a welcome of a new Doper since gabriela!

Seriously. Blushing all over the place here.

[BrainGlutton]

@olivesmarch4th

. . . Nietzsche was inherently against any mode of thinking that required folks to subjugate themselves.

Even to the Superman?

What is the Superman, anyway, if not an aristocrat lording it over the common horde?

Anyway, I’m reviving this thread because I finally found A History of Western Philosophy at the library. Here’s what Russell has to say about Nietzsche:

Nietzsche’s criticism of religions and philosophies is dominated entirely by ethical motives. He admires certain qualities which he believes (perhaps rightly) to be only possible for an aristocratic minority; the majority, in his opinion, should be only means to the exellence of the few, and should not be regarded as having any independent claim to happiness or well-being. He alludes habitually to ordinary human beings as the “bungled and botched,” and sees no objection to their suffering if it is necessary for the production of a great man. Thus the whole importance of the period from 1789 to 1815 is summed up in Napoleon: “The Revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. We ought to desire the anarchical collapse of the whole of our civilization if such a reward were to be its result. Napoleon made nationalism possible: that is the latter’s excuse.” Almost all of the higher hopes of this century, he says, are due to Napoleon.

<snip>

"I abhor [John Stuart Mill’s] vulgarity when he says ‘What is right for one man is right for another’; ‘Do not to others that which not that they should do unto you.’ Such principles would fain establish the whole of human traffic upon mutual services, so that every action would appear to be a cash payment for something done to us. The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine."

True virtue, as opposed to the conventional sort, is not for all, but should remain the characteristic of an aristocratic minority. It is not profitable or prudent; it isolates its possessor from other men; it is hostile to order, and does harm to inferiors. It is necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses, and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, for in all directions mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters. “Everything that pampers, that softens, and that brings the ‘people’ or ‘woman’ to the front, operates in favour of universal suffage – that is to say, the dominion of ‘inferior’ men.” The seducer was Rousseau, who made woman interesting; then came Harriet Beecher Stowe and the slaves; then the Socialists with their championship of workmen and the poor. All these are to be combated.

Nietzsche’s ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires strength of will above all things. "I test the power of a will," he says, “according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantagel I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.” He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated. “The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihiliation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before.” He prophesied with a certain glee an era of great wars; one wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

He is not, however, a worshipper of the State; far from it. He is a passionate individualist, a believer in the hero. The misery of a whole nation, he says, is of less importance than the suffering of a great individual: “The misfortunes of all these small folk do not together constitute a sum-total, except in the feelings of mighty men.”

Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: “a new vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years.”

Is this a fair assessment?

[OpalCat]

This is on the syllabus for my Lit class this semester. It’s sitting on my coffee table as we speak, though I won’t be reading it until later in the semester.

[BrainGlutton]

@OpalCat

This is on the syllabus for my Lit class this semester. It’s sitting on my coffee table as we speak, though I won’t be reading it until later in the semester.

A History of Western Philosophy, or something by Nietzsche?

[OpalCat]

When Nietzsche Wept.

[BrainGlutton]

@OpalCat

When Nietzsche Wept.

Oh, yeah . . . the book this thread’s about . . . right . . .

Never mind. Nietzsche is Pietzsche!

[Spice_Weasel]

What is the Superman, anyway, if not an aristocrat lording it over the common horde?

Ok, I’m extremely sleep-deprived, I can’t address all of this tonight. But your comment here deserves a temporary response at least.

There are generally two differing schools of thought about what Nietzsche meant by his whole hierarchy Superman-Man-Beast thing. They are called hard-Nietzscheans and soft-Nietzscheans. As you might well guess, hard Nietzscheans take his words to be a direct reflection of his opinions about government and social structure and fascism–Hitler would be a great example of a hard Nietzschean. Soft Nietzscheans (like myself, and the professor who taught me Nietzsche) look at the broader context – Nietzsche’s personal life as well as other things he has said. I really don’t see any clear evidence based on anything I’ve ever read (and that’s almost everything he’s ever written, except half of “The Gay Science” and “The Genealogy of Morals”, which is SHAMEFUL and I deserve to be flogged because they are crucial works)… uh, sentence… oh, right. So I don’t see any clear evidence based on what I know and have read that he would ever have supported any government regime. He’s stated many, many times that he hates government. There is also evidence to suggest he found actual physical subjugation appalling – his endless praise of the mighty Jews was a direct result of his view of them having overcome their own slave situation by inverting traditional morals to create a new religion (which weirdly enough, he hated.)… Nietzsche more or less saw social hierarchy such as government and class as the wrong kind of hierarchy… he was talking about MORAL order, about ethical/value hierarchy… to put it loosely, he was talking about the hierarchy of ideas, not people.

I will explain the whole superman thing later, because I’m exhausted, I have oral surgery tomorrow but the “superman” thing is REALLY important in relation to how he viewed the Jews’ inversion of morality as a good thing… he saw the Jews as ultimate supermen… to address all the shit Russell said, I’ll have to get some sleep first.