I can’t decide.
I know he began a devoted follower of Schopenhauer but then traded places.
Please explain to me?
He was very optimistic about being pessimistic, “Order will rise from nihilistic chaos … I hope”. 
Schopenhauer was a pessimist in that he taught that the evil outweighed the good. Nietzsche thought the same thing, but revalued good and evil to bad and good, respectively. So Nietzsche was an optimist in the sense of good as opposed to bad. He understood that everything was relatively good (strong), that there was no absolute bad (weakness). In terms of the question “Is the glass half empty or half full?”, then, Nietzsche’s position is that the container (the glass), which consists of solid-state energy, is filled half with liquid-state energy and half with gaseous-state energy; in other words, that there’s a whole lot of energy and nothing to contain it!
[size=95]“Against the theory that an ‘in-itself of things’ must necessarily be good [as opposed to evil], blessed, true, and one, Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the ‘in-itself’ as will was an essential step; but he did not understand how to deify this will: he remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 1005.)
“This world: a monster of energy […]; a firm, iron magnitude of force […]; enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary […]: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my ‘beyond good and evil’ […] This world is the will to power–and nothing besides!” (op.cit., section 1067.)[/size]
After his break with Wagner, he fought his recurring doubt over Faust’s redemption, with mystical naturalism, which tried to overcome this difficulty on imposing value on nature. The deterministic-Spinozan world imposed on him the ultimate effect the existential reduction. This post war reduction, may have alluded to this doubt over the reality of the effect fallen idols’ had and affirmed this position.Nietzche’s foreshadowing of this must have put a damper on his overabundant optimism.
The point is, this doubt could have brought out the dichotomy of the problems with the naturalistic fallacy, even including that of the ontological/ontic differentiation between the Dionysian and the Appolonian approaches.
I am equivocating state of mind intra persona, with textual implications inter personae. Why not? There is a connection there, whether expressly indicated, or, inferred.
Neither one. Nietzsche was tragic.
The ancient Greeks , N believed, in their tragedies were trying to deal with pessimism. Their pessimism of the Appolonian , and the Dionysian optimism were mixed.
However later , during the enlightenment’s day of bringing forth the old tragic themes, Nietzsche himself was unable to sustain this unity, which has effectively ceased with the passing of Sophocles and other ancient dramatists. After that, it was this disconnect which caused the imbalance. Therefore to say Nietzsche was neither, was incorrect. He wanted to resurrect that sense of tragedy, but was sidelined, as described above.
I agree with both of James and Sauwelios in general.
Contrary to taking religion and morality as an initial guiding force, N said that let the morality stem out naturally from the process of the survial of the life.
with love,
sanjay
Hi Zinnat,
What about agreeing with them specifically? And really, is not agreement superfluous here, sine N would decry either agreement or disagreement, for it would imply a stance similar to the one before his overcoming the concerning the distinction between good and evil?
I cannot agree completely because of the lacking of the details. Having said that, i agree with the underlying direction.
N does not care much about discerning between good and evil. He says that the will to power would automatically take care of that, thus, one should not burden his WTP with predifined morality. That is why he was against Christianity in general.
I do not know whether N or the scholars realized that or not, that N was not proposing any new thing. Mankind has been gone through that phase of amorality that he was trying to reestablish. Morality took thousands of years to evolve through religions and philosopy. He wanted the mankind to push back again to find the new moral premises, which would revolve around WTP than empathy and justice.
But, i do not think he ever realized that morality use to start evolving always from the question of the mere survival of an individual, which is described as WTP by him. But, As things develop and an individual’s WTP has to confront with many others WTP, the general consesous stems out from that confrontation.
And, that is precisely what morality is; Consensous evolved from confrontation.
with love,
sanjay
But, obe, if you want to stick strictly to the question of pessimism and optimism in the context of N, i would say that he was an optimist, even though his optimism was unconventional.
with love,
sanjay
Sanjay due to time limitations will answer adequately later thank You
Sanjay,
If You want to emphasize the affect of his will, then it could be argued that his aim or desired effect was to liberate man from his determined state. One could view pessimism and pessimism on a spectrum of continuous changing feeling , paralleling a similar continuum ranging from totally determined to totally undetermined states. This could be descriptive of his overcoming the perceived antithesis between good and evil. In N’s time religious dogma prevented anyone being able to view morality as anything else as absolute contradictions between good and evil, and i sense his overcoming was of similar makeup. But relativism was still far in the future.
I think , he may have intuited this coming relativism.
-N