Strauss's "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's _BGE_", § 35.

Not necessarily. Great is not always better than small. A great lack, for instance.

Sure, in such a trivial sense. But have you even stopped to wonder what Strauss might have meant by “greatness”?

No, congratulations to you for finally grasping that Strauss is talking about human suffering and inequality.

It’s no such thing. Aufheben, after all, means preserving as well as lifting up and canceling.

No, since “the highest achievement, as all earlier high achievements, is in the last analysis not the work of reason but of nature” (Strauss, ibid.).

What Zarathustra says in “Of Redemption” is this:

“All ‘It was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a gruesome accident—until the creating Will saith thereto: ‘but thus I willed it!’
—Until the creating Will saith thereto: ‘But thus I will it! Thus shall I will it!’”

Volam!

Does this mean, then, that the “creating Will” is the complementary man; the Master; the Philosopher; or the god whose ‘death’ N. mourned? It’s interesting (to me) that N. capitalized the ‘w’ in ‘will’ and not the ‘c’ in ‘creating.’ Otherwise, the phrase would sound very religious–as in, God willed it and it was done–or God, the Creative Power. Is N. envisioning a future wherein a new species of homo sapien, a species ‘ruled’ by philosophy, becomes dominant?

Nietzsche wrote in German, my dear. This makes your comment about capitalisation nonsensical.

The creating will is the will that creates—in this case creates nature, the eternity of nature, by postulating the eternal recurrence (see the first post in this thread). In this case, therefore, it is the will of the complementary man.

On a different note, I find it interesting how Zarathustra phrases what he says. For it shows that the creative will says “thus I willed it” by saying “thus I will it, thus shall I will it”; only by avowing that it wills it now and promising that it will will it in the future does it ground its assertion that it willed it in the past: for the present is the past of the future. And:

“To redeem what is past, and to transform [i.e., by transforming] every ‘It was’ into 'Thus I willed it!”—that only do I call redemption!" (ibid.)

No, it doesn’t sau. By using the upper case for ‘will’, N. made the word a noun rather than a verb. (All nouns are capitalized in German, which is why I thought it interesting.) As a noun, it borders on being religious. I’m surprised that Strauss wrote “complementary man” with man in the lower case, for this reason. Although Strauss was German, he wrote his essay in English, and yet he capitalized ‘will.’

About the ‘complementary man:’ Is he a mirror-image of the true Philosopher, or does he add to the Philosopher in order to make the Philosopher a whole person?

In your OP, you wrote, “The highest, the most difficult problem is that people are abolishing the prerequisites of human greatness—suffering and inequality—and there are no assignable limits to that abolition.” But, it seems to me, you’re only paraphrasing Strauss’s essay when he says, “…at the summit of the hierarchy is the complementary man. His supremacy is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem…” which, for N. is nature in all it’s forms. Science, in N.'s time, was starting to unravel the ‘secrets’ of nature through medicine, for example, which relieves suffering, and technology, with automation, which started to ‘equalize’ people.

Nietzsche wanted philosophy to be ascendant over science, so he proposed the ‘eternal return’ of everything in Nature in what seems to me to be a coil-like structure, if it were to be diagrammed, rather than a cyclic recurrence. If N. envisioned eternal, cyclic, recurrences in nature, I think he was in error. It’s impossible to abolish knowledge and start all over again from scratch, so to speak. Nature, as in flora and fauna, also evolves. But N. seems very wary of science.

As for any religiosity in Nietzsche, I think it’s there. Nietzsche said the god of Christianity was no longer needed by Western philosophy, which was primarily German. But people have a psychological need for something. Nietzsche gave them the Ubermensch, which Germans didn’t understand and, instead, interpreted as Germany and the Germanic races as superior to all Mankind. The world, therefore, saw the Third Reich emerging in the 1930s and being crushed in the 1940s.

Was Nietzsche nationalistic? From what I’ve read–yes.

Er, no, Strauss didn’t do that, the translator Thomas Common did.

The complementary man is complementary in that he complements the rest of existence. I identify him with the true philosopher.

You mean, start over again from one-celled organisms? That’s quite unlikely, yes. But cataclysms like the one mythologised in the story of Noah’s Ark and the like are possible and have probably actually happened (and have not Christianity and Islam also been cataclysms in that sense?).

Only in the early days.

Leo Strauss wrote an essay “A Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.” Are you saying he wrote it in German, even though he was living in the US at the time and meant it for publication here?

It really doesn’t matter. I only pointed it out because it reinforces N.'s use of the word ‘will’ as an active ‘thing.’ This explains a Nietzschean concept to me in my continued attempts to understand him–and he did leave a lot up to individual interpretation, didn’t he.

You continue to define words using the same word–“The complementary man is complementary in that he complements the rest of existence.” Okay. What does ‘complement’ mean?

By the way, Google has listed some of your quotes about N.

I hope you don’t mind me jumping in here, but if you want to understand Nietzsche, wouldn’t you be better off reading what he said, rather than critiquing someone’s critique of Strauss’ critique of what he said? It would in any case seem like a more efficient way to go about things, and a good place to start. It just seems like you’re trying to learn how to knit by unstitching a sweater, this way around.

If you want to specifically understand his conception of will, you might want to read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation too. It’s not a light read, but it clarifies a lot about the metaphysical Will-with-a-capital-W that Nietzsche’s talking about - it’s Freddie’s starting point. In any case, it’s not “an active thing”. It’s more the fundamental nature of all things.

I’m trying to read N., humean, I’m also trying to read as much as I can about him in order to give me some sort of insight into N. as a poet, philosopher, and man within his time. Along with that, I’m trying to overcome a learned negative response to his philosophy. It takes time, so I ask others for their interpretations. Sometimes, I understand their interpretation; sometimes, I don’t. I’m the low level wattage in a three level bulb.

There is a deep ambiguity in Nietzsches concept of Will. But to understand it at all you have to know that he did not believe that will can be anything else than will-to-power. This is an “active thing” in the sense that it is meant to denote the subject. But it is also a “nature of things” in that it means to describe “the World”.

I believe that it describes neither the subject nor “the World” but rather the conditions by which the subjects exist in / form worlds. Nietzsche did not distinguish between the collectivity of subjects and the structure/nature of a subject itself.

A subject wills-to-power over other subjects, it wills to assert itself to itself as itself. Nietzsche defines happiness in these terms - the feeling of the power to assert oneself as oneself, to not succumb to circumstances, to not have to compromise, to not feel overpowered, imprisoned, disabled. But all this speaks to a sense of identity that Nietzsche nowhere addresses as phenomenologically as he addresses its conditions.

The best way to read Nietzsche is to start at the beginning, at the Birth of Tragedy. Here he deals explicitly and logically with Schopenhauers phenomenology of the subject (principium individuationis) in terms of the Apollonian. He then adds to this a layer both below and on top of it it by introducing the titanic Dionysian and the tragic Dionysian. He encloses the subject in its conditions. He appears to have identified the entire subject. But since these conditions to the subject can only be understood as conditioned by the subject… there is a circularity which’ logical, core level is avoided, and allowed to exist only on a poetic level in the form of the Eternal Recurrence.

Hence, “the ER must be affirmed” – the logical circularity implicit in the reflection on the subject has to be incorporated into some aspect of the philosophy, but this is done without logically addressing it, the circularity has to be made into a “cosmic ring”. This signifies that Nietzsche had not yet abandoned the idea of objectivity altogether, had not embraced perspectivism as a true ontological ground. Perhaps because this would have undone the work of presenting the will-to-power as God, as an omni-present entity, as a great mother-like being in which all are enclosed.

No, I’m saying you’ve mixed up the quotes (I always provide the source, so just read back and you should see your error).

Certainly. But TSZ is very poetic, so you shouldn’t take the fact that the creative will speaks too literally.

To be a complement to, in the sense of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/complement noun 1 a.

You mean I’m getting famous?

Dear Sauwelios,

I wonder, does the vacuity of FixedCross’s sanctimonious label-juggling here ever remind you of the way I participated in KDH debates & the BGE studies with Bill Osborne?

-WL

Dear WL,

Are you asking me whether FixedCross now ever reminds me of you then? Only of you in the very beginning of those debates, and only vaguely, and only now that you mention it. You seemed to understand Nietzsche’s “superhuman being” as some kind of transhuman being back then. But you soon stopped clashing with Bill about your and his apparently incompatible interpretations, and became a student rather than a self-appointed teacher. It seems sanctimoniousness and self-appointed teacherhood go well together.

It definitely does often seem to me that the things you said back then about the entity or non-entity behind the pseudonym Fixed Cross are still quite applicable today.

Best regards,

Sauwelios

Thank you for commenting candidly, I consider it very educational to have that on record.
Behold, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same! New Osbornes are needed. New shock&awe studies of BGE.
Truly, to study philosophy is to meddle with a magic cauldron, as what you put into it is never what you think you had put in, and what you get out is never what you thought you got out.

Label-juggling does not survive contact with the witchbrew.

-WL

boo-ya

Sau, forgive me for again intruding, but I once again reread your OP. You give an excerpt from Leo Strauss’s essay, but don’t mention a translator. This led me to looking for the essay, because I found it helpful. I never found the essay itself–either in English or in German–and never found the name of a translator of Strauss’s essays, so I assumed it had been written in English.

So the Complementary Man completes Man. Does that then mean the Complementary Man is the Ubermensch? That’s certainly a lot easier to say than “der außergewöhnlicher Mann”–the extraordinary man. lol

I don’t know if being cited on Google means that you’re becoming famous, exactly–but–you never know! You may become known as Googley Goodone, Savant Sauwelios–but probably not.

FC, thank’s for your input. I’m okay with it up to your last sentence:

“Hence, “the ER must be affirmed” – the logical circularity implicit in the reflection on the subject has to be incorporated into some aspect of the philosophy, but this is done without logically addressing it, the circularity has to be made into a “cosmic ring”. This signifies that Nietzsche had not yet abandoned the idea of objectivity altogether, had not embraced perspectivism as a true ontological ground. Perhaps because this would have undone the work of presenting the will-to-power as God, as an omni-present entity, as a great mother-like being in which all are enclosed.”

Did N. present the will-to-power as God, or was that some one’s interpretation of N.?

Ah, Bill. Were it only that he could see this little reunion… he would surely weep!
I did sense that it was going to be like this. Back then I was already the only one who suspected that Nietzsche would have to be conquered, overcome by the very means he provided, in order to do justice to these means. But what do you peasants understand of this.

What is here?

The need for a commandment to affirm the given. This is all that could be acquired from the witchbrew?

You can’t possibly be serious.

Dear FixedCross,

The trouble is that F.Nietzsche refers to something using the words you and I both see. If somebody takes the words as the only matter at hand, then the witchbrew ingredients are denatured. It becomes well-mashed and shaken and stirred water, but water nonetheless. This is how I had come to imagine (in Nietzsche) the transhuman possibilities that intoxicate me, and how you deal today with the Recurrence. However, niether of those constructs was Nietzsche’s, but only yours and mine.

I refer to your omnipresent arguments of the form: “The philosopher claims he sees red. If red is a colour, then it is part of the rainbow, and therefore what concerned Nietzsche was atmospheric precipitation. Luckily today we have much better data on this. We may overcome Nietzsche using this data and my logics.” Meanwhile, the red may have been there as a sign of danger, or simply to agitate the bullheaded.

This note is to caution you against drawing semantic conclusions from the linguistic or logical behaviour of English labels.

-WL

The quote is from Strauss’s essay “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”, which was originally written in English. So far so good!

Not just man, the rest of existence.

I think so, yes.