This is very important. I also write often. And much of it is simply hidden from everyone; others I would only show to my children, and others could easily be put up for sale in a store (perhaps I’ll finally get around to that point).
And here are those notes that are not for anyone: what if, for example, my sister had published them after my death? It would have radically changed the perception of me, which was formed by the things I myself would have wanted to publish.
Nietzsche was treated unfairly. But hiding what he wrote “for himself” would have been a crime.
I find value in the posthumous notebooks but agree with @Arne that the inclusions in a published work are important decisions made by the author that cannot be replicated by interpretation of privately written notes.
There was a lot of debate on the old site about Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche. A lot of it involved disparities between published statements and Heidegger’s interpretation.
Are you saying that you give priority to Nietzsche scholars who treat the posthumous stuff with less seriousness than those who give it equal weight with respect to his published work?
My favorite Nietzsche interpreters (Deleuze, Klossowski) fall into the latter camp. I think they would argue that there is no substitute for making one’s own determination concerning Nietzsche’s motives for choosing not to publish certain writings, the value of that work on its one terms and how it relates to the published work.
I am saying that giving credence to the “posthumous stuff” for the purpose of particular arguments is different than Heidegger’s speaking of the book that was “meant to be written.”
I don’t think the issue is simple because the examples of difference cannot be broken down to “what is said” versus “what is thought.” Take the evidence for what Nietzsche said about Spinoza. Letters show him giving respect in places where the books trash the guy.
Hello Prsut, Nietzsche is, by far and wide, one of the greatest philosophers to ever live. Members like MCogito and Amadeus are simply lacking in the wherewithal to actually persist and comprehend Nietzsche.
For example:
It’s quite clear from AC 24 that Christianity is merely the copy of Judaism.
Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung—it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews…
What MCogito failed the comprehend while reading Nietzsche was that Jesus fits the description of what Nietzsche calls a “Free Spirit,” aka a Higher/Noble type which we can see he details this notion in AC 32-39. Whereas he details a completely different type of “Christianity” that sprung up through the Disciples of Christ, which reified the teachings of Christ through the Judaic lens.
From AC: 32
One might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth , whatever is established killeth . The idea of “life” as an experience , as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
From there, we can see in AC 33 Nietzsche detailing more about the PSYCHOLOGY behind the FREE SPIRIT:
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life—and so was his death… He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the “glad tidings.”
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith…
Skipping ahead to AC 39 to close out this partial detailing of the Higher Type:
—I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “Gospels” died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the “Gospels” was the very reverse of what he had lived: “bad tidings,” a Dysangelium . It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in “faith,” and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life , the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian… To this day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages… Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state of being … States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true…
What MCogito failed to comprehend though was the connection here with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy Section 9. In BoT §9 Nietzsche contrasts the Aryan Prometheus myth with the Semitic Fall. For the Greeks, man’s crime (Prometheus stealing fire) is a proud, tragic transgression—culture born through bold defiance of the gods. By contrast, the Semitic Fall locates the origin of evil not in man’s daring but in woman’s seduction: curiosity, wantonness, beguilement. Sin is feminized; woman is cast as corrupter. Here Nietzsche sees the beginning of the Judeo-Christian attack on the Dionysian: noble crime transformed into moralized sin, creative defiance replaced by narratives of female weakness and corruption.
From Birth of Tragedy 9:
The best and highest that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and must now in their turn take upon themselves its consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended celestials must visit the nobly aspiring race of man: a bitter reflection, which, by the dignity it confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity, beguilement, seducibility, wantonness,—in short, a whole series of pre-eminently feminine passions,—were regarded as the origin of evil.
And further more, if we revisit the part about Speaking in Signs … from AC32 … We can see this is what he details of Heraclitus in his Pre-Platonic Philosophers (He also details himself in this manner in Birth of Tragedy 2) In the same section where he details Heraclitus as an Ubermenschlich, aka A Higher-Type.
We observe the entirely different form of a superhuman [ubermenschlich] selfglorification with Pythagoras and Heraclitus: the former certainly considered himself an incarnation of Apollo and acted with religious dignity, as Empedocles records. The self-glorification of Heraclitus contains nothing religious; he sees outside himself only error, illusion, an absence of knowledge-but no bridge leads him to his fellow man, no overpowering [ubermachtig] feeling of sympathetic stirring binds them to him. We can only with difficulty imagine the feelings of loneliness that tore through him: perhaps his style makes this most obvious, since he himself [uses language that] resembles the oracular
proverbs and the language of the Sibyls.
The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs. The Sibyl with raving mouth utters solemn, unadorned, unlovely words, but she reaches out over a thousand years with her voice because of the god within her.
There is an awesome footnote here produced by Nietzsche on the Heraclitus Fragment 93:
The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs.
And this is the problem with Nietzsche, he writes in fragments that are all over place and it’s up to you to chain them together … Why the above matters is as we can see from The Will to Power 809 on the Aesthetic State:
The æsthetic state represents an overflow of means of communication as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is the zenith of communion and transmission between living creatures; it is the source of languages. In it, languages, whether of signs, sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our abilities are subtilised forms of richer abilities. But even to-day we still listen with our muscles, we even read with our muscles.
And when we compare the above passage to Birth of Tragedy 2: We can see there is even a special way to EXPERIENCE Thus Spoke Zarathustra because Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a Dithyramb
In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the highest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance—the annihilation of the veil of Mâyâ, Oneness as genius of the race, ay, of nature. The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; a new world of symbols is required; for once the entire symbolism of the body, not only the symbolism of the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing which sets all the members into rhythmical motion. Thereupon the other symbolic powers, those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony, suddenly become impetuous. To comprehend this collective discharge of all the symbolic powers, a man must have already attained that height of self-abnegation, which wills to express itself symbolically through these powers: the Dithyrambic votary of Dionysus (Nietzsche himself) is therefore understood only by those like himself!
And how do I know that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a Dithyramb? Because Nietzsche details that in Ecce Homo…
What language will such a spirit speak, when he speaks unto his soul? The language of the dithyramb. I am the inventor of the dithyramb. Hearken unto the manner in which Zarathustra speaks to his soul…
The whole of my Zarathustra is a dithyramb in honour of solitude, or, if I have been understood, in honour of purity. Thank Heaven, it is not in honour of “pure foolery”! He who has an eye for colour will call him a diamond. The loathing of mankind, of the rabble, was always my greatest danger… Would you hearken to the words spoken by Zarathustra concerning deliverance from loathing?
So you see, Nietzsche is a tricky philosopher to read, and it’s why he demands the most discerning of readers. But also … I almost forgot … So MCogito for example isn’t terribly discerning when it comes to Nietzsche because he doesn’t realize the Nietzsche’s attack on NON-Primitive Christianity is that it attempts to EXTIRPATE out HALF OF HUMAN NATURE aka THE DIONSYIAN Forces … Which started with Judaism, Not Jesus. As shown above. This extirpation of our own nature, rather than subjugating our destructive drives through creative means like art is what Nietzsche details as that which has made mankind sick.
But if you ever wish to discuss Nietzsche away from the blockheads, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
I’ve not been able to make sense any of Nietzsche’s published writings. I didn’t know there were also unpublished ones. Are they more or less accessible? What are the primary themes of this work?
For me, the value of creativity, self-overcoming, and the affirmation of life. I think they are the perhaps the real foundation of meaning. Religion is fundamentally nihilistic.
Thanks. yes I have read enough about Nietzsche to get a sense of his ideas and I have read a fair amount form 3 of his books. They just didn’t speak to me and I retained nothing much of use from them. I consider that to be on me not on Freddy. Just curious if his notes are different. I’m attracted to antifoundationalist perspectival frames.
Well, Nietzsche developed modern psychology, which was continued par excellence via Deleuze (Shoot I can even point to the passage from Will to Power that influenced Deleuze and Guattari to create Anti-Oedipus. Various other concepts like killing off the concept of the thing in itself / causa sui has progressed psychological understanding on various fronts.
Let alone one develops an artistic ability even, as reading and writing are also done with muscle memory and Nietzsche’s frolicking wisdom is transferred from the will of the artist through the affect upon the reader. Which means, you take in a bit of Nietzsche’s own Will to Power through interpretation and digestion. One also learns the importance of the process of interpretive retrojection, where one fallaciously details history such that all events hitherto were a necessity for one’s current and future emergence.
Nietzsche’s Dithyramb is transformative in nature. You don’t READ it, you experience it like theater, like art, like music, via the Dionysian oneness, being transported into the scene, you as the character EXPERIENCE. Nietzsche calls this style of communication experience the aesthetic state.
@Kit: No Christ, no Christianity. Period. End of discussion.
But you are obviously a philologist of Nietzsche, so you have to talk, and quote, and talk some more. I am a metaphysician, I establish structural causalities that, when unfolded, map perfectly onto Reality and the blindingly obvious. And the obvious fact here is: no Christ, no Christianity. Is that too complex to grasp? The absolute root causality of Christianity is Christ himself.
Now, if you want to know why Christ is actually the ultimate, optimized version of the monotheistic God—why Yahweh was merely a buggy, non-working beta version of Christ—I can prove that with 100% certainty but Jamal will censor it anyway and I’ll have a permanent ban.
Let me just give you a glimpse of this causal track: The very first thing Christians did, acting as mindless zombies of this new monotheistic fork of Judaism, was to eradicate all alternative European pagan religions. They successfully executed the exact totalitarian exclusivity originally demanded by the Old Testament, they’ve done what Yahweh as God couldn’t do by itself: Christ did it, Christ realized the demands of the Old Testament and it say it! I’m here to accomplish the scriptures.
A little deeper: Stemming from this inverted moral framework, Christ simply mutated the old exclusionary tribalgenocidaldogma into “universalLove.”: can you see the inversion here? Everything remains entirely within the original monotheistic absolutism, just cloaked in a covert, universalist Trojan horse.
That is exactly why I call Christians “monotheized zombies.” This diagnosis is two orders of magnitude deeper than whatever crossed the confused mind of that poor, suffering little creature called Nietzsche.
Aye, Nietzsche’s not for everyone, and that doesn’t mean you’re not capable of being great just because you don’t understand Nietzsche. Most great people aren’t philosophers period. Perhaps they may become some style of philosopher of their own arts/creations/works but that generally comes after they’ve mastered their craft. And you don’t even have to worry about being great if it’s not a part of your will to power.
The biggest thing Nietzsche advises is “The Long Obedience in the same direction” which eventually transfigures your life into something worth living for. It is that/those activity/ies which is/are the cultivation of your own garden, so to say.
How well your garden grows depends on how good your digestion is at producing the right kind of “shit” (“true” or “false”), for fertilization.
So here be cheers to the cultivation of your own Garden of Eden, whether that be through the occultation of the world, or, as a heathen.
Moving to ‘Cogito, ergo’… ( oh what fun art and philosophy are together! )
I couldn’t care much about your ressentiment towards Christianity. My thanks for keeping that discussion short.
Again, my thanks, that’s much like how Nietzsche became a philologist. Activity is after all how one becomes what one is.
I am a frontworlder who lives in the experience of reality. I need no Idealism to map onto the reality of multiplicity and becoming.
Well of course, you’re a metaphysician, you can only hold things in an antithesis of values. Hence why you cannot understand Nietzsche. BGE 2…
“HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own—in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself—THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!”
—This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this “belief” of theirs, they exert themselves for their “knowledge,” for something that is in the end solemnly christened “the Truth.” The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES
That’s detailed in the Gospels, I don’t need metaphysics to detail the psychological reality of Christ. The account of his life is all that’s needed.
No, there’s a way about it, that I’m pretty sure Jamal, the main man of an ongoing philosophy forum, would approve. But it’s certainly not through the lens of your ressentiment. In Judaism, the Jews are referred to as Goy Kadosh, due to the task “given to them by God” via revelations: to set themselves apart from others. Not out of some twisted shit genocidal agenda that you’re proposing because of your fallacy of retrojection of current events onto the past; which is your style of “slave-morality.”
The 12 Tribes of Israel came before Judaism, Kadosh is the banner under which Israel is gathered and distinguished as a whole, rather than fragmented disputing tribes. Further still, Goy Kadosh recognize other Goyim who are Kadosh. What Christ transfigures is the notion of Sin which tends to cause the Bad Conscience…
In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished—this is precisely the “glad tidings” [which died on the cross with Christ]. Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.
This psychological reality is, in part, the psychology Nietzsche details throughout his philosophy (which was always geared at Psychology vs Idealist Metaphysics).
The fact that the voice which speaks in my works is that of a psychologist who has not his peer, is perhaps the first conclusion at which a good reader will arrive—a reader such as I deserve, and one who reads me just as the good old philologists used to read their Horace.
The main difference between me and others who read Nietzsche is that I have found I am the MOST discerning of his readers, and my kadosh, mi familia, my brothers are that of the discerning ones.
I really enjoyed his work. Not because I agree with everything he is saying, but just because of how thought provoking his work is. I did my dissertation on Nihilism with a massive focus on his work in particular. His writing style is a little strange, and can feel at times all over the place, but it’s still engaging none the less, and you’ll come across the odd aphorism here and there that really grips you.
I highly recommend Writings from the Last Notebooks, which comprises the period from April 1885-August 1888. It deals with the themes that his published work from this era discusses, but in a looser and more speculative style.
I would say the approach to philosophy Nietzsche developed is more postmodern than modern, placing under critique (as Deleuze demonstrates) Freud, American Pragmatism (many consider William James the founder of modern psychology), and cognitivism.
Through Nietzsche’s works one can find several gradations upon which Eternal Recurrence works. Some occurrences are simple to understand, whereas others may take a DMT session through purge-tory to understand. Some of these gradations include, but not limited to: giving purpose, overcoming shame and guilt, character, psychological-physiological type (configuration of rank ordering of drives [this is probably the hardest notion to understand, but also the most fun aspect of Nietzsche; and is coincidentally why Zarathustra Spoke, not Nietzsche…). To give some detail:
Ecce Homo: Zarathustra; part 1
Auf diesen beiden Wegen fiel mir der ganze erste Zarathustra ein, vor Allem Zarathustra selber, als Typus: richtiger, er überfiel mich…
Along these two paths the whole of Zarathustra came to me, above all Zarathustra himself, as a Type; more correctly, he overcame me…
Ecce Homo: Zarathustra; part 3
If one had the smallest vestige of superstition left in one, it would hardly be possible completely to set aside the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation, in the sense that something which profoundly convulses and upsets one becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy—describes the simple fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, without faltering…
Ecce Homo: Fatality; part 3
…Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors,—morality; therefore he must be the first to expose it.
As I said above, this is why his magnus opus is titled “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Not out of some mystical communion but but because he is presenting the book as the speech of a Typus that overtook him.
A Typus being a configuration of the Will to Power based on a certain a relatively stable organization of forces in which an order of rank among drives, affects, instincts, and interpretive tendencies has taken shape.
We can see Nietzsche developing this notion in Gay Science 143, and further in Dawn 62, which aligns with Ecce Homo: Zarathustra; Part 3.
An understandable argument, though you’re discussing more of era, and I’m using more of a colloquial of a style of psychology before and after Nietzsche.
The new psychology in Nietzsche’s work is a way of freeing oneself from religious, metaphysical, and social ideologies that have previously provided readymade and inauthentic identities, to thereby attain a solid sense of selfhood and individual identity.
Nietzsche interpreters like Klossowski, Foucault and Deleuze read the Eternal Return as fragmenting the self, ego and ‘I’, along with the concept of identity.
oh what fun art and philosophy are together! 
)