New to Nietzsche

I have just started reading Nietzsche; I was told that the guy was a pessimist and mad man. I don’t see that, I see the opposite, he seems to be for life and for reevaluating ideals. I see that many of his ideas can explain many things that we see today.

So, Can someone please give me some guidance on how people have interpreted him as mad and a pessimist?

Is it a misunderstanding? He does spend a great deal of time critiquing humanity and specifically Christianity in broad sweeping polemics. If you miss the fact that he is critiquing to make it possible to move past our shortcomings and create something better, then he’s pretty pessimistic. Or, if your a Christian or a dogmatist then he is not only a pessimist, but he is also a mad man.

Consider what he is doing, he’s tearing down the edifices of human values, and building up something that isn’t nearly as grounded. Going from divine command theory to a flux. He is claiming that all philosophy and religion since Plato has been an inversion so that what is worthless has been thought valuable, and what is valuable has been thought worthless. He is further claiming that suffering and everything that is “evil” about the world is actually part of what makes the world great. If you’ve been taught that the whole point of existence is to bow down to a divine being so that you can eventually escape suffering, and someone comes and tells you that you cannot escape suffering, then you’ll be pretty upset. However, if someone comes in a tells you not only that you cannot escape suffering, but that you should embrace it, you’ll probably find it so radical that it is the incomprehensible ramblings of a dangerous madman.

Truly understanding Nietzsche is harder than cracking the enigma code.

Nietzsche is easy to read and impossible to fully understand. I don’t often speak greatly of people but he influences so much of our society and particularly philosophy. Enjoy him in small doses. Love him for opening your ability to critically think.

Thanks for the replies…

sittlichkeit,

That’s what I was thinking. I was just wanted some reassurance for myself I guess.

I have not read much, but I can see him becoming one of my favourite philosophers. For me I can see the biggest problem in thinking I understand but not really getting the depth of the meaning. I have been use up until now to more straightforward texts.

He follows in the footsteps of some noted nihilistic pessimists; Schopenhauer, Pascal, and Doestoevsky to name a few. As a rule they disparage this life, and seek to minimize it’s travails. Nietzsche considers himself a “pessimist of strength”, that is he tries not to blink in the face of life’s problematic nature, and affirms it’s all too painful character. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Schopenhauer, in particular advises one to cut oneself off from as much pain as possible, and maintain a sort of Buddhistic withdrawal from the world.

Madness to the young is never recognized because the young are all mad; but for that very reason the find in NIetzsche a kindred spirit… You do know that he actually went mad; don’t you??? I think he was always tippy…

Well Ya; But show me the philosophers who were not cut off by their inability to form relationships, you know, the ones that matter, that demand ones constant care and attention: Love…I am better than a whole flock of philosophers at relationships, and for that I still consider myself a complete failure at what most people take for granted, and think little of… I hate to reveal too much about myself, but I went for many years not even seeing women as real human beings until I was fortunate enough to insert a certain part of my ego into them… That was all it took; go to bed with me and suddenly you become a person, and I can relate… Guys are still only dangerous objects in life, kind of like brick walls or speed bumps… I had to deal with them, and I didn’t have to sleep with them for them to be real…They were always real- ESSholes… And I was one of them…No; the hard part for these philosophers is not withdrawal, but relationships… Look at Nietzsche… He had a relationship with his sister, and a platonic relationship with Wagner’s girl, and a financial relationship with a couple of prostitutes… He talks like he knows women…He didn’t know shet… I don’t know shet, but it is after much close examination that I know I don’t know shet; because women have nothing in common except their biology, and after that they are all different…All the time I was sleeping around I thought they were all the same, and it was me being all the same as all the other essholes… If the past were any closer I’d slap it…

Painful to read and as easy to see through as clean glass… He reminds me of a madman a girl friend of mine saw in New York… She was trickin and waiting for john in a cab; and in the middle of the winter this middle aged guy was running around without a stitch of clothes on… And the door man outside of the hotel where the john was, and everybody was so upset, trying to cover this guy with their coats, and blankets… He must have been thinking if he was thinking that: I’m the naked man and you can’t catch me… He was the crazy one and they were going crazy with him… No one can look at madness or any disease without suffering some pain…It is for that reason that we so quickly lose our patience with the maimed and injured… It is hard to care; but when you realize the damage this man’s warped ideas caused, how over man became the Nazi superman, it is hard to not be appalled…Every mass movement for some reason needs its philosophy…You can’t kill and you can’t injure and you can’t enslave or change the world without the lofty justification of philosophy… So what??? You can only see how bad any philosophy is when some one tries to make something of it…And then it is too late…

man has done precisely the same thing with Jesus

on an even greater scale, over a much longer period

he misinterprets and misunderstands

selectively for the sake of power

Nietzsche’s philosophy - that is another matter

Yeah, personally I like to mix my Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Nietzsche teaches me how to live my life individually, how to approach personal problems, how to cope with death and existential angst. However, Schopenhauer is the main drive behind my political beliefs and overall attitude toward society; I’m very socialistic and a huge proponent of civil rights, ideals I can imagine Nietzsche must’ve despised.

I have my reasons for this ‘mixing’ of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I could explain it if you’d like.

I’ve read load’s of Nietzsche, and it’s never made me want to kill anyone, quite the contrary.

btw, Anymore colorful descriptions of unfortunate insane people?

But doesn’t he say that in a time when everyone is the same the individuals will go voluntarily to the asylum? I wouldn’t class either someone running around naked, mad. Couldn’t the argument be flipped, that all young people are sane, how would we ever know what insanity is anyway?

I know he went mad, but didn’t his dad too? I thought he went mad because he had syphilis or it was some genetic thing.

To me Nietzsche is not mad but someone who critically analysed morality and people of his day.

I think there is an open question of whether he had syphillus. It did not show up on one exam, and a book I am reading now, called Nietzsche in Turin says he had a scar on on his unit.
Next; I hold with the guy in the Republic who described youth as madness… But where everyone is insane it is the sane who seem insane, so from the perspective of youth which by itself kills so many, they are normal, and they are, normally insane… Only when you get a little older do you see that all the testosterone, the energy, and the ignorance of youth always drives people to extremes of behavior, wild love, wild hate, mruder, drunkeness, carelessness, thoughtlessness, cruelty, prejudice and incontinence… People ency the young, but only if they were not freee to be stupid like their fellows… I did every insane thing as others, and count myself lucky to survive, and don’t count anyone getting through that period of life as happy… For example: What Nietzsche said; that what does not kill me makes me stronger is false and stupid on its face… Most of us die of small injuries that sieze us up until the rest of us makes us stronger… If what he said was true, nothing but what did kill you out right would kill you at all… It is the mountain of aches and pains that take the fun out of life, and if you live with abandon, and if you grab life with your arms and lags for a wild love fest you will have many aches to think about later… And I don’t expect youth to change; but they would stand a better chance of survival without nietzsche

Juggernaut,

How are you defining youth? If you mean youth in the biological sense then I would say that you’re wrong. At least in my town, many older people 50+ indulge in “drunkeness, carelessness, thoughtlessness, cruelty, prejudice and incontinence” and so this is not the folly of youth in a biological sense. Doesn’t Nietzsche predict this kind of thing too, in a godless world?

[quote]
for example: What Nietzsche said; that what does not kill me makes me stronger is false and stupid/quote]

I understood this to mean that there’s a lot to be learnt from suffering and a person can learn from mistakes, reflecting on one’s situation etc… I don’t understand it to mean in the physical sense, like being shot and then living to tell the tale.

If Nietzsche is not talking about the physical world; in what world does one die??. If he had said people learn from their mistakes; that is debatable… As you point out; some people never learn… What some people from the military have said is also true; that 2% Never get it. It is part of of his style, to paint with bold colors and a broad brush… It is just like youth to follow anyone who talks with confidence, but some times they are the biggest nuts on the planet…

You do not understand him, so you put words in his mouth, or rather you take his fine strokes and make them broad. If you entirely miss the idea behind a simple sentence of his, I can’t imagine what you do to his philosophy.

He said, quote: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Where here does he mention anything about anyone else? Perhaps because he knew full well how few people are actually strong enough, refined enough, wise enough to embrace the necessity of suffering and take something from it.

Perhaps you yourself haven’t suffered enough to understand his point? Perhaps you think you can rid yourself of suffering by chasing joy and happiness?

Feel free to like or not like him on your own accord, for whatever mendacious and unfounded reasons you may have, but please do not make the mistake of thinking you understand what, who it is you so passionately criticize.

You attack what you do not understand.

This, in a nutshell, is pretty much it.
Those who have an intellectually clean conscience and accept this to be today’s reality, live a life of a terrible, and sometimes delightful, burden; one has to find meaning to their own life without the help of divine or quasi-Platonic theories of being.
This is what sorts out the strong human beings from the weak.

You do not understand him, so you put words in his mouth, or rather you take his fine strokes and make them broad. If you entirely miss the idea behind a simple sentence of his, I can’t imagine what you do to his philosophy.

He said, quote: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Where here does he mention anything about anyone else? Perhaps because he knew full well how few people are actually strong enough, refined enough, wise enough to embrace the necessity of suffering and take something from it.

Perhaps you yourself haven’t suffered enough to understand his point? Perhaps you think you can rid yourself of suffering by chasing joy and happiness?

Feel free to like or not like him on your own accord, for whatever mendacious and unfounded reasons you may have, but please do not make the mistake of thinking you understand what, who it is you so passionately criticize.

You attack what you do not understand.
[/quote]
Who reads Nietzsche??? Was he not talking to you, making an argument with his bold statements of fact??? When I Eighteen I thought Nietzsche was talking to me: Be the over man, nothing can kill you, Will to power…
Nietzsche was out of his mind… The reason he has such appeal the young is that he is peter pan, the boy who never grew up…Look at his view of both God and Superman… Is there not something of the father in each, like the stern German grandfather of so many American memories??? You are correct, that I have not suffered enough, but what is that to the super man??? Is the superman not aloof from both pleasure and pain??? Is he not incapable of pleasure, of drunkeness and dancing like a fool??? I have seen first hand the power of the human will… I have seen with my own eyes that people can survive what no one would think they could survive… I have seen such people and been such a person whose will was indomitable, who would let no impediment stand between myself or our common goal… Yes; I was an ironworker, and I know that iron is soft and people are hard, and for this reason iron does our will instead of we doing for Iron… But so many of Ironworkers are like Nietzsche’s overman, incapable of relationships, driven by their works like clocks ticking and tocking all through their days knowing not of love or of human kindness…The fact is, having seen much sufferng and endured no litle part of it, I can tell you that far more people are ruined by it than are made by it; and the fact that so much of it is self inflictd only makes the sight more pitiful… Those people who do survive great pain and deprivation do so because they have the essence of health, what we all need: the ability to relate… What Nietzsche dispised he had no part of, but he did not have any part of it -because- he dispised it… He could not relate, and so his distant, powerful overman- so like the father he never knew, that he could not love, nor reject as normal children do became his hero… But it is bunk…

If you want to read of some one quite similar to Nietzsche, and as powerful in his way, and as influencial; read Baudelaire, by Jean-Paul Sartre… What he said: When one has a child like me, one does not remarry…-Would have been good advice for his mother to take… You might consider all the powerful and influencial men raised by powerful mothers, alone or with fathers in the back ground… It is not a normal situation, and their sons are usually aberrations… Yet it points our what Ani Defranco said: That women learn to be women, and men learn to be men… Fathers cannot only be back ground figures… There needs to be a specific sort of dynamic relationship if a son will grow up normally; and if you want a son who is very good, or very bad, then ignore this dynamic…You might have a Bill Clinton, and you might have a Charlie Manson… That part you don’t get to decide…

:laughing:

ohhhkay Juggs :handgestures-thumbup: