Yet...here we are

Interestingly, the same kinds of quips were employed by me back when I began writing. However on re-reading my work I felt such cringe, that I forced them out of my style.

Indeed a bed of roses you've gifted, Nietzsche. Indeed you have given hugs to horses like me. Unlike Socrates (who is only capable of gifting castration and whips)

You probably know someone who went through something really bad. For a while they’re not themselves. Then one day you see them and you just know: he’s back. Same guy. But something came with him.

I keep coming back to that when I read Zarathustra.

Ten years alone on the mountain. He has the sun, his eagle, his snake. They carry him but none of them can leave and none of them can see him. Then he goes down. Nietzsche calls it his Untergang.

First person he meets is the old hermit in the forest, and the hermit recognizes him right away. Zarathustra has changed, he says.

And Zarathustra just walks on. Because he didn’t come down to be seen. He came down to bring something. Man is something that has to be overcome. Man is a rope to the overman, a bridge, not a goal. So going down was only a means.

I think he had it backwards. Coming back is not the road to the answer. Coming back is the answer.

People recognize you because you’re the same, not because you became something else. What you bring back from a real fall is not a teaching. It’s knowing you are there. You can’t preach that. Somebody has to see it on you. That’s why Zarathustra needs a market and a man who comes back only needs one person.

And it matters how you come back. Come back as a hero and you set a bar, everybody else has to overcome too. Come back as a man and everybody gets to stay human.

This comes from my own fall, not from a library. Somebody stayed when they could have left. I don’t know if that’s a good reading of Nietzsche. I do know it’s what got me out.

So my question: is the Untergang just a step to the overman, or did Nietzsche write the answer on the first page and miss it?

On and off again, I've lurked around spaces like this. And I've casually orbited around Nietzsche's works... only becoming familiar to the extent that a few YouTube videos or an out-of-context quote on social media can manage.

My understanding: some of Nietzsche's works take nihilism so seriously, entertaining them so effectively (perhaps even steel-manning), that a reader who isn't careful can conclude Nietzsche is a proponent of nihilism (as we understand the term "nihilism" today). These readers do not make it far enough to the *overcoming* part.

Is my understanding, again as someone who hasn't truly just sat down and read Nietzsche, in the right ballpark?

I have been unable to pull the trigger on reading Nietzsche for a variety of reasons (including "you need to go spend a decade learning German bro" and I'm terrible at learning languages); the biggest reason is that I thought he was asserting a dark worldview lost in utter arbitrary, utterly thoroughly relativistic meaninglessness. As a depressed person I don't want to read someone like that...

If you are shocked at how I could think that, and that turns out to be painfully wrong, you can thank pop-culture for that. Because in pop-culture Nietzsche is either the guy who inspired the Hugo Boss Brigade of the 1940s, or you'll read him and want to commit sewerslide. As if he's some kind of cognito hazard.

tl;dr if Nietzsche didn't scoff at / completely denounce concepts like HAPPINESS, meaning, purpose, values (or the act of valuing something itself), then why on earth is he constantly made out to be the Supreme Doomer?

A person who does not know how to discipline their soul—rather than living their life as the whim of the moment dictates—would be better off finding peace for their soul and not living at all. But if they absolutely must live, then it is better for them to do so not as such a free person, but by entrusting the helm of their mind to another—someone who knows the art of governing people. Socrates, in my opinion, you are a priceless gem for someone who has not yet been inspired to walk the path of virtue, but for someone who has been inspired, you are practically a hindrance to reaching the ultimate goal of virtue and finding happiness.

I've read thus spoke zarathustra but I did not take a note and a little bit forgot about it so I need a help for refences

In some sense it’s an affirmation of life because it disobeys conventional rules, but also it’s kinda meek because it shows you consume mass-market crap and eschew more important things like going on hikes and writing about the literacy crisis.

When people point to the Nietzschean aspects of Deleuze, they often point to his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, in which he works with the concept of the eternal return to develop active verses reactive forces. But I would argue that Nietzsche never stops shaping Deleuze's work, and continues to permeate his thought well into his collaborations with Guattari. This section of Beyond Good and Evil seems highly informative on D&G's work in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, in which they start from Nietzsche's critique of the cogito and move towards a social and materialist socioanalysis of subjectivity and thought (among other things). The claim that it is not the self that thinks, but rather that "thought happens" is deeply Deleuzoguattarian, and serves to illustrate the extent to which Nietzsche influenced Deleuze throughout his life.

Hi everyone,
I'm new to philosophy and want to start reading Nietzsche, but I don't want to go in blind and misread him. I'm currently reading through Dostoevsky, which is what got me interested in these questions (faith, morality, suffering, meaning).

I also plan to read some Plato and Homer beforehand, since I understand Nietzsche is reacting to them.

Edit
Hesiod → Iliad → Odyssey → Plato (early dialogues, Symposium, Republic) → Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics → a Gospel and Augustine → Descartes → Nietzsche

We are shipwrecked. We have seriously failed in different aspects. We are not there yet. We are not, perhaps yet, where we would like to be.

We seek different ways to comfort ourselves. Different ways to be met with understanding and fundamental acceptance, but we are not sure where our arena is in life.

We are by nature hard, we want to live as creators, not as the created.

We remember what Nietzsche said (Will to Power 910):

The type of my disciples. – "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures."

We are still on the way, still somewhere on the path to somewhere. We are not entirely sure what shall become of it all.

There are things we regret in our life. Things we would wish were different. Amor fati is one thing, but another is to look at the actual things and the trouble that they have caused us or will cause us.

Or when Nietzsche says (TSZ, The Higher Man, 6):

Ye higher men, think ye that I am here to put right what ye have put wrong?

Or that I wished henceforth to make snugger couches for you sufferers? Or show you restless, miswandering, misclimbing ones, new and easier footpaths?

Nay! Nay! Three times Nay! Always more, always better ones of your type shall succumb,—for ye shall always have it worse and harder. Thus only—

—Thus only groweth man aloft to the height where the lightning striketh and shattereth him: high enough for the lightning!

Towards the few, the long, the remote go forth my soul and my seeking: of what account to me are your many little, short miseries!

Ye do not yet suffer enough for me! For ye suffer from yourselves, ye have not yet suffered FROM MAN. Ye would lie if ye spake otherwise! None of you suffereth from what I have suffered.—

Still, we have to be comforting towards ourselves, we have to find some comfort in life when life otherwise is so empty of it.

We do love it when someone finds something heroic or noble in our life. Too many reject the whole and therein the parts.

All in all, the only thing we can say is that we are still on the way somewhere, still wandering through life, with a goal not exactly clear enough for us yet. Other than we would like to give something to the world, make some kind of name for ourselves. As Nietzsche says, the philosopher usually makes his name endure in something other than children.

We would just like a bit of comfort, but our nature is also just as much against it.

The main point is that we are still on the way, still wandering, still going somewhere. Still on a path, if not on a rainbow. We do still have much to give, but are not sure how to give it.

We want the comfort of pity, its benevolence, but do not want to be pitied creatures. We are more than others' pity, we do still believe, we still have a hope.

What is important to us most of all, is that we overcome life. That we overcome what it means to be human and man, that we set our goal somewhere in a distant future.

Perhaps we are failures, perhaps we will only be failures. It is still entirely possible. But we are on the way, we do have hope, we are not completely eliminated yet.

​

1. Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht is the desire for a material change from ideology.

2. That desire runs through ideology, and ideology needs to act on material.

3. Acting on material has social implications: who is interacting with whom, and the narrative.

4. Social implications lead to valuations and interactions between wills.

5. All wills are co-wills. No will acts alone.

6. Therefore the fullest form of will is a meta-will (the same thing as the co-will but behaves universally with other co-wills). It works on a dimension like the superego, but it does not come solely from society. It mixes the phenomenological with species-level biology.

7. Even the simplest act already carries narrative weight. Example: I move my hand into something.

◦ "My hand": it feels like me, but there is no me in my hand.

◦ "Decide": the decision to move is not cleanly a decision of whether I can move it or not.

◦ "Into something": this is where will to power comes in. I desire a material change based on a primitive ideology.

1. Asking why the hand moved yields countless reasons, and several can be true at once.

2. The meta-will's direction is to separate and/or confuse idea, action, and material, the way an artist or a piece of art is treated. It is an attempt to step away from any particular thing.

3. Not doing something is not power in itself, just as atheism is not exactly a belief, but a disbelief.

4. But actively refraining is willing.

5. Therefore the meta-will's stepping away is itself will: active, not mere absence.

• Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §16–17 (the "I" in "I will" as a habit of grammar) and §19 (willing as a commonwealth of drives)

• Nietzsche, Gay Science §354 (consciousness as a herd and communication need)

• Nietzsche, Genealogy II §12 (interpretation as will to power); III §6 (against Kant's disinterested spectator, for the artist's view); III §12 (perspectivism); III §28 (willing nothingness rather than not willing)

• Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "The Four Great Errors" (imaginary causes) and "What the Germans Lack" §6 (not reacting immediately as strength)

• Freud / Althusser: overdetermination

• Kant: aesthetic disinterestedness

would he be pro abortion? (rejecting cultural/religious norms that say you can’t get one, freedom of choice, etc.) or would he be against it

lmk your thoughts

I am not too far into Beyond good and Evil and almost done with the first episode of the Nietzsche podcasts guide for it but I'm understanding more than a year ago.

I am studying PPE( Politics ,Philosophy and economics ) and this year we covered the platonic tradition. Last year when opposite values were brought up I saw it very simply for example there is good and bad , left and right and that's it.

But now it means universal truths such as good coming from a place above the material world and bad coming from the material world filled with lust and other bad things ect. Also the change from humans coming from above and being special to humans being products of biology and other things.

People saying dive straight into Nietzsche you don't need a Philosophical background is wrong and I'm excited to understand more after reading Spinoza , Kent, Schopenhauer ect.

I've been down a Nietzsche rabbit hole lately and something keeps bugging me. Everyone calls him "the nihilist guy," but the more I read, the more it feels like he was the one sounding the alarm.

When he says "God is dead," it doesn't read like a victory lap. It's more like: we've removed the foundation our values stood on, and we haven't realized what that means yet. Without that anchor, everything we thought was objectively meaningful starts to wobble. That's the nihilism he was worried about.

But he doesn't stop there. He splits it into passive nihilism (giving up, numbing out, "nothing matters so why bother") and active nihilism (tearing down old values that no longer work). Then comes the real challenge: building your own meaning from the wreckage.

That's where it overlaps with existentialism for me. Sartre and Camus pick up the same problem. There's no built-in meaning, so now what? Camus says live in revolt against the absurd. Sartre says you're condemned to be free and have to define yourself. Nietzsche's answer is amor fati, and the eternal recurrence thought experiment: could you live this exact life again, forever, and say yes to it?

Honestly, that hits harder than any "find your purpose" advice. It's not about finding meaning, it's about becoming someone who can affirm life without any guarantee.

Curious how others read this. Is Nietzsche a nihilist, an existentialist, or neither? And has anyone actually lived by amor fati, or does it sound better than it works?

I've been down a Nietzsche rabbit hole lately and something keeps bugging me. Everyone calls him "the nihilist guy," but the more I read, the more it feels like he was the one sounding the alarm.

When he says "God is dead," it doesn't read like a victory lap. It's more like: we've removed the foundation our values stood on, and we haven't realized what that means yet. Without that anchor, everything we thought was objectively meaningful starts to wobble. That's the nihilism he was worried about.

But he doesn't stop there. He splits it into passive nihilism (giving up, numbing out, "nothing matters so why bother") and active nihilism (tearing down old values that no longer work). Then comes the real challenge: building your own meaning from the wreckage.

That's where it overlaps with existentialism for me. Sartre and Camus pick up the same problem. There's no built-in meaning, so now what? Camus says live in revolt against the absurd. Sartre says you're condemned to be free and have to define yourself. Nietzsche's answer is amor fati, and the eternal recurrence thought experiment: could you live this exact life again, forever, and say yes to it?

Honestly, that hits harder than any "find your purpose" advice. It's not about finding meaning, it's about becoming someone who can affirm life without any guarantee.

Curious how others read this. Is Nietzsche a nihilist, an existentialist, or neither? And has anyone actually lived by amor fati, or does it sound better than it works?

You may be interested in this essay in Substack, which has the following excerpt:

The Dionysian worldview is of a continually transforming, dynamic reality. Reality isn’t a spectator sport; it’s participatory. Beauty isn’t experienced just through calm contemplation. You allow your bodily, emotional and transcendent energies to move you to acts and states of being that can reach ecstasy and joy. In the Dionysian worldview, as explored by Nietzsche from his study of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, the world is not related to as static “Being,” mere appearance, objects that can be mechanically operated and manipulated, but as the affirmation of “becoming”, i.e., the incessant coming to be and passing away in the cosmic process, without any resolved stasis of being.

https://possibilitiesofbeauty.substack.com/p/dionysian-spirit-in-the-art-of-living

Pretty much the title but what if someone has lived very long with a moralistic framework they are increasingly feeling alienated with but embracing their true nature comes with fear and unease. Is that even a thing.

Thus, as once I saw him conquering and dying: the friend, who threw divine moments and lightning into my dark youth,

sportive and profound, storming forward for joy even in the storm of battle, forward in bloody pain, and where the chosen flags of the enemy neared,

among the dying the most cheerful, among the victors the gravest, reflective, calculating, standing on his fate—trembling about it, laughing about it, that he triumphed dying,

commanding while he died:—and he commanded that one destroy and not be sparing.

Here's a thought experiment, read Thus Spake Zarathustra first, take notes on what you think Nietzsche means, then read all the main books, and re-read it, and take new notes, and compare how much has changed, list your assumptions and whether you agree with Nietzsche on both reads, and see how you've changed as a person

I see the Death of God all over Nolan's The Odyssey. I was wondering if anyone else see that or has any thoughts?

I've tried to put together something better and with some luck, which has nothing do with it, I might do that someday. In the meantime I'm just doing this kind of high level overview (rambling) without much detail and glossing over some stuff that confuses me. But it has been on my mind for a long time. But basically it's god dies, people get lost, this very distant event starts approaching that's going to be the end of everything.

• Death of God: In Nolan's The Odyssey what is holiest and mightiest is Zeus's Law. Breaking that law leads to the murder of the goddess Athena.
  
• Great Catastrophe: Breaking that law leads to the downfall of their civilization. N said "how much must collapse because it was built on this faith, leaned on it, had grown into it — for example, our entire European morality." I do believe they used the word "collapse" in the movie to mention that the bronze age was ending.
• Temples Become Tombs: God dies again in the temple of Athena. In Homer's The Odyssey Mentor is literally Athena. In the movie Mentor (Athena) is murdered in a temple of Athena. N said "What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"
• In the movie Odysseus arrives back home after a long long journey along with lightning and thunder to bring news of the death of God. N said "Lightning and thunder need time".
• Just like the madman who brings news of the death of God Odysseus comes to bring news of the end of their civilization. The madman is mocked at the marketplace by unbelievers and people at the palace mock Odysseus. The people in the marketplace don't believe in God anymore that Antinous believes that the beggar Odysseus could be a god or goddess in disguise. And they mock the madman and Odysseus
• Odysseus looks like a God at the end of the movie. Maybe like Zeus or the old testament God. In the book he's described as god like pretty early on I think but it's not until the end of the movie that he looks like a god. Big beard and all muscular. "Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?" Right before that quote N mentions "holy games" and it's a game the god like Odysseus is about to play with the suitors.
• Not that there are real gods, goddesses or monsters in Nolan's Odyssey - it's an "age of apparent magic" as the opening line reads so the magical stuff is all fake (Odysseus was just high on lotus as he tells a story about magical creatures). But N didn't believe God was an actual living thing either. Need to look up more stuff about N talking about origin of Gods. I think somewhere he talks about gods being invented to deal with guilt and other places about them being lovers of cruelty.
• After killing God Odysseus mentions that they are lost several times - in Hades, after escaping the Laestrygonians, maybe other times. They're lost after the death of God. "Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions?"
• After the death of God "the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an 'open sea'." The movie ends with an open sea
• Eternal Recurrence: The movies last line is: "A new dawn will break over the darkened world… And our mistakes will once again be forgotten." The Gay Science also talks about a new dawn after the death of God. But the words "our mistakes will once again be forgotten" means it's happened before, happened now, and will happen again.