Atheist Friedrich Nietzsche

The most important points he made are the following.
He declared that God is dead, and later he developed out
of this, that he himself would be the Anti-Christ and he
would be Satan. His aim was to wipe out Christianity and
all values associated with it. He, because God is dead,
declared that man is not the image of God, but man has to
be an aesthetic beast. He continued to rewrite history in
emphasizing, not the classical highpoints of history, the
classical Greek or the Renaissance, but rather Dionysian
ecstasy, Bacchanalian masses walking, marching drunken
through the streets, doped up. He emphasized the
flagellants in the Middle Ages, and in his ugly book he declared: Am I understood? It is Dionysos
against the crucified.

Maybe the most misunderstood mind in Western history. As this thread will prove all over again.

I consider myself a Christian, and Nietzsche was a brilliant, beautiful soul.

I agree. His writings are pretty amazing stuff. I'm a big fan of Kierkegaard as well.

Nietzsche was a brilliant man...can't get much better than Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Actually Nietzsche believed that man's spirit was influenced by the Dionysian (debauchery) AND the Apollonian (virtues). He believed that historically man tended to focus and cultivate his Apollonian only side.

Re. religion, if you read Nietzsche closely God is dead is more like religion is dead. The uebermensch would create his morality rather than have it handed to him by someone else. This didn't omit the possibility that through meditation and communication to a higher spirit he could arrive at THE morality. He just didn't like the idea of people being led by the nose by other without arriving at their own inner enlightenment.

Recent Nietzsche enthusiasts tend to ignore Nietzsche's own solution to the problems of modernity. Instead, they ironically take heart from the very nihilism described with horror by Nietzsche. This nihilism is then used in the service of many other things that Nietzsche despised, like socialism, democracy, and the valorization of the common man.

Of course, when the Left demands "true" democracy, what they really want is a political dictatorship run by themselves -- which is why Fidel Castro is still their idol. Nietzsche would not have been displeased with the naked power of a Stalin, and possibly even would have admired the cynicism of the empty Leftist rhetoric that he used to seize power. These ironies or paradoxes are discussed below. Before that, I will consider the embarrassing details of Nietzsche's own solution to nihilism.

First of all, Nietzsche's racism is unmistakable. The best way to approach this is to let Nietzsche speak for himself. In the quotes that follow, I will simply offer examples from The Genealogy of Morals alone, as translated by Francis Golffing (in the footnotes I have been adding some passages from Beyond Good and Evil for comparison).


The Latin malus ["bad"] (beside which I place melas [Greek for "black"]) might designate the common man as dark, especially black-haired ("hic niger est"), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distiguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color. At any rate, the Gaelic presented me with an exactly analogous case: fin, as in the name Fingal, the characteristic term for nobility, eventually the good, noble, pure, originally the fair-haired as opposed to the dark, black-haired native population.

The Celts, by the way, were definitely a fair-haired race; and it is a mistake to try to relate the area of dark-haired people found on ethnographic maps of Germany to Celtic bloodlines, as Virchow does. These are the last vestiges of the pre-Aryan population of Germany. (The subject races are seen to prevail once more, throughout almost all of Europe; in color, shortness of skull, perhaps also in intellectual and social instincts.

Who knows whether modern democracy, the even more fashionable anarchism, and especially that preference for the commune, the most primitive of all social forms, which is now shared by all European socialists -- whether all these do not represent a throwback, and whether, even physiologically, the Aryan race of conquerors is not doomed?) [The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p.164, boldface added, note]
Here we have an unmistakable racism: the good, noble, and blond Aryans, contrasted with the dark and primitive indigenes of Europe. While Nietzsche's thought is often defended as unrelated to the racism of the Nazis, there does not seem to be much difference from the evidence of this passage.

One difference might be Nietzsche's characterization of the "commune" as "the most primitive of all social forms." Nazi ideology was totalitarian and "social," denigrating individualism. Nietzsche would not have gone for this -- and the small, dark Hitler is certainly no Aryan -- but then many defenders of Nietzsche these days also tend to prefer a communitarian democracy, which means they might have more in common with the Nazis, despite their usual anti-racism, than Nietzsche himself.

This is characteristic of the confusion of contemporary politics, let alone Nietzsche apologetics. The passage above, at least, provides as much aid and comfort for the Nazis as for any other interpretation or appropriation of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's racism might be excused as typical of its age, and criticism of it anachronistic. However, the racism of Thomas Jefferson, a century earlier, involved an explicit denial that physical or intellectual differences between the races (about which Jefferson expressed no certainty) compromised the rights of the inferior races. To Nietzsche, however, the "subject races" have no "rights"; and domination, not to mention all the forms of "oppression" excoriated by the trendy Left, are positive and desirable goods.


This anxiety or distemper may be due to a variety of causes. It may result from a crossing of races too dissimilar (or of classes too dissimilar. Class distinctions are always indicative of genetic and racial differences: the European Weltschmerz and the pessimism of the nineteenth century were both essentially the results of an abrupt and senseless mixing of classes)... [p.267, boldface added, note]

In the litany of political sins identified by the Left, "racism, classism, and homophobia" are the holy trinity -- with "classism," of course, as a codeword for the hated capitalism. Here we see that for Nietzsche racism and "classism" are identical: the "subject races" form the subject classes. This is good and noble. We also get another aspect of the matter, the "mixing" of races and classes is "senseless" and productive of the pessimism and social problems of modern society. In these terms, Nietzsche can only have approved of the Nazis laws against marriage or even sex between Aryans and Untermenschen.

The lack of rights for the dark underclasses brings us to the principal theme of The Genealogy of Morals: The morality of "good and evil" has been invented out of hatred and resentment by the defeated and subjugated races, especially the Jews. People who love Nietzsche for his celebration of creativity and his dismissal of the moralism of traditional religion, mainly meaning Christianity, usually seem to think of going "beyond good and evil" as merely legitimizing homosexuality, drugs, abortion, prostitution, pornography, and the other desiderata of progressive thinking.

They don't seem to understand that Nietzsche wasn't particularly interested in things like that, but, more to the point, legitimizing rape, murder, torture, pillage, domination, and political oppression by the strong. The only honest Nietzschean graduate student I ever met frankly stated, "To be creative, you must be evil." We get something similar in the recent Sandra Bullock movie, Murder by Numbers [2002], where the young Nietzschean student simply says, "Freedom is crime." The story of the movie is more or less that of Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago teenagers who in 1924 murdered a young boy (Bobby Franks) to prove that they were "beyond good and evil." Leopold and Loeb understood their Nietzsche far better than most of his academic apologists.

OP, why do you have an obsession with this?? JEEZ. Get over it. You've started several threads on the subject. Go to bed, you have to go to church tomorrow.

LOL

re. the people who commit crimes to show that they are beyond good and evil, Nietzsche would probably have called them a dumb**s.

"beyond good and evil" means you go beyond the definition of good and evil. One society says charging interest is evil another says it is good. The enlightened "beyond good and evil" being would make his own judgement of right and wrong, independent of the definitions fed to him, whether by religion or by the new religion, society and political correctness.

Nietzschean philosophy, was the
ethic of the inner core of the SS and the Nazis! Which would explain why they hated Christianity.

I never thought a satanists would be classed as a "beautiful soul".

But, one might think, violence and oppression are unjust! How could any progressive person not see that expoitation and abuse are wrong! We have Nietzsche's answer:


No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically "unjust," since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive and cannot be conceived otherwise. Even more disturbingly, we have to admit that from the biological [i.e. Darwinian] point of view legal conditions are necessarily exceptional conditions, since they limit the radical life-will bent on power and must finally subserve, as means, life's collective purpose, which is to create greater power constellations.

To accept any legal system as sovereign and universal -- to accept it, not merely as an instrument in the struggle of power complexes, but as a weapon against struggle (in the sense of Dühring's communist cliché that every will must regard every other will as its equal) -- is an anti-vital principle which can only bring about man's utter demoralization and, indirectly, a reign of nothingness. [p.208, boldface added]

Nietzsche is certainly life affirming, but then violence, rape, exploitation, and destruction are intrinsic to his view of life. Attempts to protect the weak, see that justice is done, and mitigate suffering are "anti-vital" projects that, being adverse to life itself, actually tend towards "a reign of nothingness." Thus, if we actually care about others and are not just interested in asserting power over them and using them for our own pleasure, then we can look forward to extinction.

I love you Heidi...even when you feel threatened and ban me.

Did you lift the ban yet?

Lift what ban? Obviously you aren't banned.

Obviously Im getting through another way. I will go check though.

It is truely a miracle!

Thanks

:)

Nietzschean philosophy, was NOT the core of the SS and the Nazi nor any other totalitatirian regime whose interest it is to have mindless lambs in manageable groups under them. It might have been the core of the individual leader or a very small number of leaders but otherwise Nazism is very much Hegelian, in other words, the group mind egregore in which we presently live.

Nietzsche was a natural reaction against Hegel whom he suceeded as Germany's most well-known philosopher, the individual within us revolting against the groupmind that tries to stomp us out. However, it is obvious that Nietzsche's philosophy never got the foothold in society that Hegel's did, for reasons that GLP readers know only too well.

Alfred Baumler, one of the leading Nazi philosophical ideologues, wrote in 1937 that "when we see German youth marching today under the sign of the swastika . . . and when we call out to them 'Heil Hitler!' we greet at the same time, with the same cry, Friedrich Nietzsche!"

What the shit?

Fighting against nihilism was Nietzsche's whole life. For him, Christianity itself was the purest form of nihilism. He despised nihilists of all sorts.

He was clinically insane. Not only that he was criminally insane.
He was a psychopath.

Oh, was he.

And you are? I'm guessing, a door-to-door jehovah witnessing bible thumper?

Last Edited by electronnie on 12/10/2018 03:06 AM

I was thinking WTF?! Finally an informative GLP thread

...and then I saw the date of the post.

Atheism and Communism goes hand and hand. Was Friedrich Nietzsche a Communist?

Yea he was a Freemason too.

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