2 Nietzsche Questions

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Can anyone elaborate on what is meant when Nietzsche said, “Prayer to men.-- “Forgive us our virtues” – thus one should pray to men.” And also this one: “Not their love of men but the impotence of their love of men keeps the Christians of today from – burning us.”

I have no idea on the first one. The second one he seems to be saying something about Christians lack of love for people that keeps them from killing us. If that’s even close to what he means, he doesn’t elaborate as to how he came to this conclusion.There is a footnote in my book about it that says basically that if Christians were concerned for the salvation of others they would still burn those whose heresies lead legions into eternal damnation. I don’t get what Nietzsche is getting at here…

If he is saying that Christians should kill those who lead legions to hell, in order to save those people being led because they are commanded to love them, I must say I disagree. Why would they do that when the Bible strictly condemns these kinds of actions? Instead they should try and save those people and keep them from being led astray.

Basically, Christians shouldn’t kill those who are leading legions into hell. Not doing so doesn’t mean they don’t love those people being led into hell. Instead, they should try to save those people in a peaceful manner, just as God commanded. Am I missing his point or what?

2

Er, yes, because Nietzsche did not believe in hell. To understand these maxims, you must have an Antichristian outlook (or be able to imagine such an outlook).

In any case, you have put these maxims in the right order. Let us first try to understand the first-mentioned.

There is a hint in the word “virtue”: for even though Nietzsche used the German word Tugend, he was really thinking of the Italian word virtù: in his own words, this means “fitness (virtue in the Renaissance style, moraline-free virtue)”.

The word “virtue” derives from the Latin word vir, “male human being”, cognate with vis, “force” (whence violentia). The virtue that Nietzsche means is therefore manliness, e.g., pride (Satan’s deadly sin, according to Christianity). The manly man, being uncommon, must hope to be forgiven by the common run of men who lack this manliness - this is the meaning of the first maxim.

As for the second: the vis of the manly man is prone to violate the numbers of rather unmanly men. The Christian, therefore, if he really loves men, should sacrifice great men at the stake for the sake of a greater number of lesser men. For the Christian loves all men equally: and should therefore sacrifice one man if he can save the lives of multiple others thereby. So it is the impotence of their love of men that keeps Christians from burning men like Nietzsche, who, in his own words, was “the man of calamity”:

“For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of.”
[Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I Am a Destiny, 1.]

3

I can’t speak for Nietzsche as Sauwelios does, but in the second quote “love,” should probably be understood in the Christian sense of loving Man as a creation of God. Thus burning heretics to purify them and bring them to God would be an act of love.

I’m pretty sure there is expressed approval of burning heretics in the Bible.

4

It’s hard to tell what exactly this means without the context, perhaps you could provide the book and page that is found on. With that being said, it is important to understand that Nietzsche can mean one of two things when he says “virtue”. He can mean the Christian definition of virtue, which includes things like compassion and temperance, basically altruism. This for him, is an inverted type of virtue, where what is weakness in humanity is lauded as virtue through the domination of the reactive man. The other way he uses “virtue”, is to describe all that he veiws as being good in man, man as creator rather than the Christian virtue of man as creature. This would be the virtue of the “higher type”, which would include self-mastery, individual ethic, and sublimation. Without the context of the quote, I can only surmise that “forgive us our virtues” is in regards to the Christian definition of virtue, where virtue is actually weakness and self-refuting.

Assuming there is a strong relationship between this quote and the first one. We must keep in mind, that, for Nietzsche, Christian virtue is decadent and everything that is weak in man. So when he says Christians love man, he means that Christians love all that is weak in man, man qua reactive. Which in his terms, means that Christians don’t love man at all, but actually hate man, as they want to keep man weak and impotent. However, for Nietzsche, love in man entails many horrible things. It entails man as creator, which can be read to promote such things as suffering and harship. Given that “man of today” has pretty much totally accepted the inverted Christian virtue as virtue, this means that man of today is dispicable, weak, and understood as man as creature. Which means, if Christians truly loved man, understanding man as Nietzsche does, as strong and enduring and creative, then the Christian would seek to overturn the current state of affairs of impotence and fake altruism, in favor of a radical turn in valuation only achieved by the very suffering and hardships that the man of today is so afriad of.

Again, it is impossible to tell what exactly is meant from these quotes without their context. No-One above gave a perfectly adequate understanding of the quote, given a certain context. My explination is assuming a different context.

I would also point out that the “higher man”, and “inferior man” are the result of very complex thought processes, and you will be doing yourself a diservise, if you take the symptoms of the two types as being what makes them “higher” or “inferior”. As that involves active and reactive forces, in relation to the will to power, and a complex ontology.

5

-Imp

6

Yes, I wanted to ask him that. I think one should always provide sources - even if only out of courtesy. The maxim is entire, though: it is from Human, All Too Human, Mixed Opinions and Maxims: maxim # 405.

7

If practiced correctly I don’t think anyone could have beef with Christianity, the problem is most people practice it incorrectly. The religion itself is perfectly fine. Anything you think is wrong with it really doesn’t belong to it.

8

I am thinking of a similar quote: ‘It’s not religion but the lack of religion today that keeps them from - burning us.’ (Please tell me if I made this up myself.)

Now, for a Christian, burning someone at the stake is a supreme act of love; the whole point of it is to cause the condemned to repent and thus save his soul from eternal damnation in Hell (at least, that’s the orthodox view of things). They do not primarily burn people to save themselves.

9

Our virtues (those belonging to conquerers of the ideal) are a bother to normal men. Hence, we should pray to them that they forgive us our virtues.

10

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11

Even if the zealotry of Christianized barbarians of earlier times is a measure of the absoluteness of thier belief, it would be a stretch to think that burning higher men at the stake is really a good indication of the teachings of Jesus.

In general, Nietzsche had a tendancy of critisizing Christianity as a social convention in an age where people no longer really believed in it. Keeping up the appearance of being Christian, and actually believing are just not the same thing.

If nothing else, Nietzsche believed in passion. whereas most people critisize religionists for being too passionate in their beliefs, Nietzsche tended to criticize them for not being passionate enough.

I suppose the prime example would be the admiraton that he expresses for the Hebrew people of Old Testament times, as the text of the AntiChrist. wheereas most Christians today are slightly embarrassed by, for example, the zealotry of a people that would put an oath to Yaweh on a higher scale than the sacrafice of a young girl to maintain that oath, how could a passionate belief in the terrible God Yaweh, lead to anything but such a sacrafice?

I doubt though, that Nietzsche would find the zealotry of many of today’s many fundamentalist believers as truly authentic.
For how can anyone of any intelligenceor education at all not have real doubts in the today’s environment of scepticism? Zealotry is as much a mode of pyschological denial of such doubt, than it is of anything else.

12

Ok, first off, thanks for all the replies.

The two quotes are not related and are nowhere near each other in his books. I don’t have time to look them up right this second but they are not close together or even in the same book. Also, both are aphorisms. They have no context to give you, they are separate sayings appearing by themselves.

Thats the meaning I got out of the second one but it just doesn’t make sense. God condemns killing. Saying that Christians should kill the heretics makes no sense. It wouldn’t help the heretic and it wouldn’t help the Christian. A Christian would try and peacefully change the mind of the heretic as well as those he is leading to hell. Killing him would simply cause the Christian to sin and not save the heretic. You would try and convert the heretic, thus saving him as well as all those he was leading to hell. Nietzsche’s saying just doesn’t make any sense. If the Christian really loves man, he would try and show him the way of Christ as well as those who he was leading astray. That’s what I dont understand. He seems way off on this one to me… And I’m not even Christian.

13

I don’t know it, so either you made it up yourself or it is from the Nachlass.

The Wikipedia article on [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchhunt]witchhunts[/i] mentions no such thing. I don’t believe that is the orthodox view of things at all. Burning at the stake is not an act of exorcism. It is the immediate sending of the heretic to Hell.

14

I think the phrase “love of men” is ironic. Christians, in Nietzsche’s sense of the word, do not love men at all. They hate all life, indeed all existence. They only love imaginary things (e.g., “God”).

15

I have a habit of doing that. Like this one: ‘They went in search of a great man but all they found was the ape of a god’.

My apologies. What I described was not the official view of the Church. It is held by some people, however.

For clarification:

So, we have Paul explicitly endorsing the eternal damnation of heretics.

I guess if a person is going to spend eternity in Hell, burning them at the stake is no biggy.

16

I think we can safely say that the ‘love of men’ Nietzsche is referring to here is altogether different from Zarathustra’s love of man. Christianity is a religion of love, but of a certain kind of love - love of everything sick, ill-constituted and waiting to die.

To the ignorant person, witches really do appear guilty of the most terrible sin. A Christian whose love is not impotent would seek to rid the world of such evil for the benefit of his fellow man. Imagine a whole village seemingly afflicted by an evil sorcerer (such things did happen). Ignorance concludes that burning the evil sorcerer himself would end the suffering of many good people - and let’s not kid ourselves: it’s likely that sometimes that’s exactly what happened.