I whole-heartedly agree.
The only thing that Nietzsche proposed that I am contentious with is his resorting to subjective forms of human-ness (i.e., will to power), despite their subjectivity, as a foundation upon which to build purpose. To me, even that assertion, a Nietzschean assertion (!), is too rigid.
Just call me Dr. Kevorkian Jr.
I don’t think it is fair to Nietzsche to say that he was trying to build purpose, Provalone. He would be the last to deny the Wisdom of Silenus, Tragic Knowledge, nihilism. But he sought to find solace through embracing nihilism as a divine way of life, through glorifying all that exists. To celebrate life in its infinite absurdity. That’s not purpose, but merely a nihilism of strength as opposed to a nihilism of despair.
I will not call you Dr. Kevorkian Jr., you do not deserve the title. Kervorkian killed those who desired to die. Those who were willing. You speak of complete annihilaltion, including those that desire the very opposite, to live! Once again, an inductive fallacy, arguing from the particular, from your understanding of the world, to the universal, everyone’s understanding of the world. And what would a true nihilist have a need for the destruction of other people, what purpose would that serve? (Note how you answer the question, any answer refutes your position as a nihilist.) I hope you don’t think you will be doing something beneficial to the world, that is, something valuable! Not that it is even meaningful to talk about the world without a subject, as without a subject there is no world (Schopenhauer).
I wonder if it would surprise people to learn that I have never read a sentence of Nietzsche…? 
Eternal truths are only a part of it.
Rubbish. Postmodern philosophy is the never-ending critique of modernity. That is why I call Nietzsche postmodern, for his critique of modern man is both far-reaching and devastating. In fact, he’s about as postmodern as they come. To suggest that Nietzsche’s project was misguided for the reasons you do misses the point entirely. For a start, Nietzsche has no system. If there is consistency, it’s because truth is always consistent with truth.
To me, that sounds a lot more like Camus than Nietzsche. Existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre certainly used nihilism as premises to their conclusions, conclusions they deemed to be authentic, but if they truly embraced nihilism and absurdity, as did Camus, they wouldn’t have put forth notions of will to power and/or freedom and/or responsibility. I understand that they themselves recognized the reducibility of these notions, but near the ends of their lives, it seems they clung quite tightly to them.
It seems, particularly on this forum, that people throw around the term will to power quite frivolously. This gives it a very absolute quality which, whether Nietzsche intended it or not, contradicts the initial nihilism that birthed it. So, it could be said that Nietzsche himself wasn’t necessarily wrong, but rather the way in which people have constantly reiterated his ideas. It just seems every time a problem is brought up, a Nietzsche-ite comes along and refers to his grand will to power schema to provide an answer.
Nieztsche may not have intended for there to be purpose erected from his conclusions, but modern day readers have done a good job doing it for him.
Beneficial? True nihilist? Universal? Oh yeah, those are all very absurd concepts. Honestly, I don’t wish for man’s overall self-destruction, I don’t even ‘predict’ it–to me, mankind is too vain to obliterate itself–it just seems to me to be a shortcut to an inevitable destiny. If our species goes on, spreading throughout the galaxy and even the Universe, reducing the limitation in our perspective so that we can see all angles of all things at all times, we ourselves will be reduced to the very matter we’d be observing. It’ll take us thousands, even millions of years to accomplish for our overarching species what we accomplish at the moment of death on an individual level.
Haha, I do suggest it, it’ll give some good insight to where a lot of people are coming from. Plus, the man’s ideas are absolutely crucial to philosophy.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an okay read if you’re into quirky Bible-prose books, but to get the concepts that Zarathustra asserts in nonfiction form, just read Beyond Good & Evil.
I get the gist of him and I imagine I’d like him–I’ll get around to it someday. 
Nietzsche does have a system: he has a methodology for tracing the genealogy of words. Some 20th century philosophers adopt his methods, I believe Derrida was one of them, but I won’t venture to guess for anyone else (perhaps someone here may fill the board in).
Based on his Truth and lying essay in a non-moral (or extra-moral, depending on translation) sense, a work that he never published, and only wrote a year after the Birth of Tragedy, it is evident how Nietzsche’s views on language, can be construed as postmodern. The problem is that this is not the culmination of Nietzsche’s thoughts, and we cannot simply exonerate him from the rest of his philosophical output.
Nietzsche’s views on “Nature” is antithetical to postmodern thought.
Provalone,
I just came back from a wonderful walk by the water and I was thinking that what I wrote does sound very much like Camus, only to come back to the computer and find you refrencing him. The question in my mind is whether or not Camus misinterpreted Nietzsche, as his work is full of direct refrences to him.
For tuesday I have the first fourty-five sections of Beyond Good and Evil due, which may give me better insight as to whether or not Nietzsche still ventures to apply a telological aspect to the world (nature, particularly, human nature). In Birth of Tragedy he adoped the view of an artistic theodicy, which he moved away from rather quickly.
Then stop throwing atomic bombs at the world. I see nothing wrong with a little vanity, nor with an end to civilization, or individual death, as an inevitability–for this very end gives value to how our ephemeral time is spent. One may argue that since death is an inevitability it does not matter whether one chooses choice A B or C, but if A can help you laugh, enjoy, embrace life more than B or C, it has more value than B or C, if embracing life, joy, happiness is what one deems valuable. It’s a relative value, of course, but so what? Laughing in the face of absurdity surly beats psychological resignation. Nietzsche wrote that the overman is the man who is able to laugh. To laugh!
I’m not sure this is possible; I’m still mired under the oppression of a transcendental ego, an observer that alters the observation through the process of observing. Phenomena as conditioned by cognition. But granting that the evolution of the mind can reach such a breakthrough of disindividuation (I guess an evolution of the principle of individuation), then so what? Isn’t that simply a monist idealism? It’s all representation. It sounds like Schopenhauerian idealism (calling everything materialism, that is, the mind reduced to materialism, or the opposite, material as merely phenomenal representation [as ideal] does not alter anything as everything is on the same ontological plane). It sounds like phenomenology broken free of the principle of individuation (Principium Individuationis).
Provalone: Quit dissing Nietzsche and start acting like you’ve got a clue. Just 'cos your truth doesn’t make the grade, doesn’t mean Nietzsche was dodgy.
How ironic? I must say, of the existentialists, my favorite is Camus. Then again I have said the same thing while reading Sartre, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. I find Camus to be quite postmodern as well, even if it was unintentional on his part; The Myth of Sisyphus is lathered in Baudrillardian concepts of consumerism and repetitive copies. What really makes him different is his insistence on hopelessness. I feel that Sartre portrayed a similar mentality in Nausea, but I think his political leanings made him draw newer conclusions in his later works.
I should probably brush up on Nietzsche as well, I haven’t read him in forever. I might add that it was my personal interpretation of BG&E that spurred my OP’s ideas. Like I said, they are still quite loose.
I haven’t read the Birth of Tragedy and I am curious with regards to Nietzsche’s concepts of aesthetics (a much ignored field of many philosophers); does it pertain to such things?
That’s actually what I’m criticizing of Nietzsche. He says that we ought to abut our actions with the reasons that actually matter, ones that are free from semantics and sociological complication. A is better than B or C. To a complete nihilist (a nonexistent entity, mind you), one action is not preferred over another; it requires an extensive set of rules beyond nihilism, considering that nihilism asserts nothing, to determine preferences. After all, the question of the day here is preferences and what determines them. I think Nietzsche, at first had a very minimalistic approach to determinants of preference, but over time they solidified into the will to power, etc.; that is, him telling others what they ought to prefer on the basis of his personal frame of reference. If the overman laughs, fine, so be it. That doesn’t necessarily convince me why I should be one.
It reminds me of utilitarianism and its attempt to somehow quantify happiness into preference. Sometimes A and B exude no clear departure in level of preference. Nietzsche’s model certainly doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t even crack, all I’m detecting are a few blemishes.
The way I see it, we are the Universe in the act of observing itself. It’s as if space-time, in all its infiniteness, were pinched into points of individual finite consciousness. After all, all consciousness is is finiteness. Matter is infinite, consciousness is finite; consciousness is just trying to catch up with matter. It usually does at death but eventually consciousness will find a way to deter death’s arrival through technology, putting off an inevitability.
Dude, I diss Nietzsche not. I simply question him the way he probably would have wanted it.
Fair enough. But if you did uncover something dodgy that Nietzsche did, I think he’d tweet. You’ve gotta break a few eggs to make a cake, you know?
Provalone, Nietzsche may not seem so wrong if you consider what the problem is with the reduction you describe. The question is: what does this reduction affront? What rebels against it?
Consider Joker’s reply, and Nietzsche famous statement:
“Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.”
Well, true nihilistic reduction affronts nothing, alluding to the word nihilism there. ‘Reduction’ reduces even itself by virtue of the fact that it is a finite word quantifying a concept into form and texture by which our minds can grasp.
The rebel of reduction, i.e. nihilism I’d assume would be finiteness. Of course Nietzsche was affirming a sort of ‘finity’, if you will, in the face of infinity. He wanted to deny the aspect of our brains that reduce things to ash and dust because that was death affirming, not life affirming. Life affirming was the will to power, the instinctual drive within us all to extend out into the world in attempt to homogenize it into our own individual categorizations. That was good and all, but it is my argument that such an attempt, as was his, is too late. We’ve crawled too far from our animalistic shells to retreat back into them; we’ve been tainted by reductive lucidity too much to forget meaninglessness.
To me, Nietzsche’s attempt is to close your eyes and ears, yelling “la-la-la-la!”, trying to ignoring those (natural) parts of our brains that refute our will to power. Evolution needed only a slight dose of reductive forces to give hominins an adaptive edge; the problem is it used too much and the reduction has now snowballed. We’ve reduced our evolutionary supremacy to mere existence. We’re all living in the Baudrillardian ‘Desert of the Real’, if you will; a place where everything is made of sand and can be blown away by the slightest gusts of reduction.
Wait…
How can we possibly refute our will to power???
The “rebel of reduction” (that is, against reduction) is not finiteness, but the will. Nietzsche called it “the will to power”. The member of these fora called Satyr might call it “the will to be something”. (See also The Will to Might.)
In any case, the will is teleological. But nihilism means all teloi, all ends, are meaningless. Nihilistic enlightenment therefore enflames the will, fanaticising it. The enflamed will’s responses to nihilism tend to be forms of radicalism: e.g., Muslim Fundamentalism (think Sayyid Qutb) and yes, aristocratic radicalism (as Brandes called Nietzsche’s philosophy).
I could go on about what it means to revert to the roots (Latin radices) of illiberalism, and I will if you’d like to discuss it, but I think it strays from the main topic. Though not unrelated, I would rather focus on one of Nietzsche’s definitions of philosophy:
“[W]hat formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,†to the causa prima.”
[BGE 9.]
Nietzsche understood that, after the death of God, a philosopher could not appeal to “eternal values” (as Plato, e.g., could); he had to create his world ex nihilo, by force of will alone. Thus the new philosopher is a kind of God - but not like the Biblical God, who, as Spinoza said, was supposed to act sub ratione boni:
“I confess that the theory which subjects all things to the will of an indifferent deity, and asserts that they are all dependent on his fiat, is less far from the truth than the theory of those, who maintain that God acts in all things with a view of promoting what is good. For these latter persons seem to set up something beyond God, which does not depend on God, but which God in acting looks to as an exemplar [compare Plato’s Idea of the Good], or which he aims at as a definite goal.”
[Spinoza, Ethics, I, 33, note 2.]
Now Nietzsche was not indifferent, either. But he could not, like Plato, set up an “Idea of the Good”. He had to take his good out of himself. Thus Nietzsche does not appeal to universal values, but only to deeply personal values: to taste:
“Here precisely is what has become a fatality for Europe—together with the fear of man we have also lost our love of him, our reverence for him, our hopes for him, even the will to him. The sight of man now makes us weary—what is nihilism today if it is not that?— We are weary of man.”
[GM I, 12.]
Nietzsche thus set himself the task of creating men he might fear. Such men he would sometimes call “blond beasts”, sometimes “barbarians”, arguing that
“the splendid “animal” must be given first—what could any “humanization” matter otherwise!”
[The Will to Power, section 1045.]
Nietzsche’s aim was to turn the earth into a laboratory for the creation of such “animals”.
Now my point was: Nihilism matters only for the will. Will must have a telos. A telos is something that matters to one. As Harry Neumann says;
“So long as anything matters to anyone – especially to a superman!, god is not dead, thought remains footnotes to Plato.”
[Neumann, Liberalism, page 244.]
Nietzsche’s philosophy is essentially footnotes to Plato, as may be appreciated from a study of Nietzsche’s early essay, The Greek State. Of course one undervalues Nietzsche by calling it only “footnotes”: in many ways, it is a correction of Plato, a thinking through of Plato. Likewise, Nietzsche would, at the end of his career, begin to think through the Laws of Manu, saying
“even Plato seems to me in all the main points simply to have been well instructed by a Brahmin.”
[Nietzsche, Letter to Gast.]
I would also call it the Will to Will.
I see this current nihilism as one of mankind’s growing stages.
As a child realizes that it can no longer rely on the other or when his self-awareness and spirit reaches a degree of fullness and overflowing that it no longer wishes to be dependent on another, it discovers its own state of limbo in a sea of probabilities.
Sartre would call this a free-will that, upon discovery, fills the mind with terror.
But ‘free’ is the desirable, the absent, and so I would not agree with his conclusions totally.
It is at this point that the decision is made.
Do I become mature by pursuing my own completion and knowing that it will never be realized but only in degree and in relation to another?
Do I place my faith on my self, the relative known, and not upon the mysterious hypothetical, imagined unknown?
Do I accept the world as it is and my place within it, pursuing only my betterment within its premises?
Do I seek independence, even if this may fill me with dread because it goes against an evolutionary past and it is an acceptance of responsibility for one’s own becoming, a discriminating eye and taste and identity, accepting the price for such pursuits, or do I surrender to my vulnerabilities and succumb to suffering surrendering to oblivion and allowing myself to be an irresponsible automaton forever bound to another?
The thing about overcoming many fail to realize is that it entails a separation and a state of being that can no longer be characterized as human.
If I wish to overcome my past or any specific part of it like my sex or my race/heritage, I would have to cut myself away, by a force of will, from everything I identify with up to this point.
Is this even possible?
I cannot say that I wish to overcome, or I have overcome, my gender role or my sexual identity, for example, and still maintain the identity and the practices associated with this.
i cannot have sex and say I am beyond it.
(note the inserted word)
God ain’t dead everywhere, you know.
Also, when the state is supreme (ie when God is dead) one can always appeal to the supposed ‘values of the people’ that it espouses. It is the new idol, after all.
PS it’s pretty cool when they’re all cracked. 
Consciousness. Simple, really. The will to power is a conglomeration, if you will, of the motivating factors of our psyche, including the motivation to reduce. To clarify, I’d just like it to be known that what I mean by reduce is to, via observational methods and their outward extension through technology, reveal the component parts of systems. Since all component parts are in themselves systems, this eventually results in infinite reduction.
Now, all motivations at one time or another have served evolutionary purposes. These motivations are what animate us and drive every thought and action we partake in. The problem is that the motivation to reduce is cannibalistic, it reduces the parts of our brains into the meaninglessness we so avidly fear. The will to power is not homogeneous, it is just as heterogeneous as any other system; its extended motivations oppose one another quite often, especially the reductive ones versus the instinctual affirming ones.
So its not so much that we refute will to power, its that it refutes itself. Nietzsche clumped the will to power into two distinct features: Apollonian, the affirming of finite values, and Dionysian, the nihilistic spiral into infinity. He temporarily supported the Dionysian thought process to corrode away society’s Christian values. But it was after this destructive onset that he professed the settling in of an Ubermensch society wherein Apollonian affirmations permeate purely on an individual basis, a human basis, a basis put forth by Nietzsche as being the only firmly planted foundation we can set foot on in the midst of Dionysus.