In the lotus Sutra, the buddha says about , perhaps all moral teachings, are decieving, in order to save humanity. The parable goes like this:
A rich man who has many children, one day the rich man came home and saw his house burning and the children was in there occupy with their toys. The rich man tell them to get out, but the children will not listen.
So the rich man decides to decieve his children by lying and telling them he has many fablous toys outside. And the children came out. "
I read Nietchze but it is hard to understand, for he says in order to live a good life one must learn how to be immoral.
First Nietzcshe is very hard to understand since in the end he didn’t even understand himself and in fact he went crazy. I guess the point is that he thought we had no way to really measure anything, good or bad, right or wrong or anything else. He did not believe in the GOOD life because it was equal to any other life and since all is equal you can assign an infinite value even to a turd.
Maybe god is a deceiver because he didn’t want Eve to know the difference between good and bad, he wanted all of us to live like free little hippies having fun all day long, like little children, absolute innocence. But then he gives us the bible and says DON’T READ IT, and people then read it and become REPRESSIVE and god gets pissed off and actually we deceived god for reading his crappy bible full of sinful thoughts.
Quick side note, Nietzsche only went crazy after he was attempting to save a horse from being whipped by its owner. He stepped in front of the whip while the owner was whipping the horse and got hit in the head. THEN proceeded to go crazy.
This doesn’t surprise me; actually, i take it as abit of an affirmation. Nietzche is in a bad way; he’ll be diced to pieces for centuries; he shouldn’t have said it.
I don’t think you could say it applies to all moral teachings; after all, some of them are the house. You could say it about Nietzche’s moral teachings.
I would say that it is even more radical then that. He doubts the very act of judgment and hence even all and any logical structures the mind uses. You reach a point of infinite power and the possibility to truly be God by just assigning-inventing yourself as such. Of course here we are truly at the borders of experience (or total delusion ?) .
I don’t draw any relation between the quote here and the parable you mentioned. The burning house scenario is an attempt to justify the lie for a greater good, similiar to the exception that Socrates formed to justify theft in his dialogues: if my friend is drunk and waving a weapon around, is it appropriate to take the weapon away from him without his consent? It would seem so.
Anyway, the quote by Nietzsche, I believe, is not dealing with the issue of “lying” and its “moral” consequences; Nietzsche isn’t giving a direct order to lie for the sake of breaking morals. He is instead suggesting indirectly that we remember that morals are often repressive to the individual and that, complimentary to the formula of moral relativism, morals are individual anyway and therefore subject to revaluation. When he says that one should be “immoral,” he is perhaps only saying sarcastically that any morals other than one’s own are going to be broken. However one can never truely be “immoral” because all acts are moral…instead there are “new” morals which by their very nature are deviant to old morals. The “masses” are only an abstraction in which individual powers and morals compete and evolve; there are as many moralities as there are individuals. What passes as the moral norm is merely a matter of consensus.
When Nietzsche says playfully “man must become more evil,” he is saying "although there is no such thing as “evil,” it is possible for individual morals to be contrary to moral norms and therefore described as “evil” by a morality described as “good.”
He is making a mockery of the seriousness in which morality is treated. Teasing morality and poking at it.
