god is dead .. and noone cares.. n.i.n.
it is kinda difficult to know what nietzche actually said, but that isn’t what is so important. it is who people thought he was and what he said that is important and had and has still impact. it was the dramatis personae not the thinking. he was a twit in a world of twits.
Friedrich Nietzche born 1844 near Leipzig in a Prussian village to Lutheran parents. was good at classics and became appointed as a Basel university philology professor (at the age of 24 which is really wierd.) he retired in 1879 from professorship on health grounds and spent the next 10 years writing in Switzerland , france and italy. he is said to have really flipped out in 1889 and at 45 went into the care of his sister and mother till he departed this world in 1900.
his most influtential works are thus spake zarathusra 1883-85, beyond good and evil 1886, and the will to power .. a collection of thoughts published variously by his sister, 1901. the will to power became a cult doctrine in an unprepared world .
his writings evidence what they call nihilism--(belief in nothing.) and go something like this..
western culture has based its values on an inferior morality of (neo-plationic) Christianity that has been discredited. god is dead. as a substitute there is need to rethink the nature of appearance and reality. one could avoid the world of illusion (appearance) with a hidden world but there is really no such thing ( nihilism),.. there is however creative transformation (will to power) which requires destruction of preconceptions of the world (weak morality).. all desires are basically a will to power though weak morality pretends otherwise..……
its not just a popularization of Kantianism (I think it is accurate to say) cast in an aphoristic ‘lyrical’ style. there is way more to it. he actually had some very profound ideas (maybe a partial view of some great truth of philosophy.. in fact i heard something similar in some non-vedic hindu philosophy.)… but that is not really the point.. it was the presentation/image that made the eclat.
he was closely involved in the wagner-schopenhauer cult from an early age and though he strongly opposed fascist elitism and nationalism he became closely associated with the nazi movement that struck such a deep chord at the time.. in that particular locale…. as it has/does elsewhere…
his popularity/influence grew with the mystery of his madness. in the popular imagination he was seen as the sage Zarathustra himself.. abandoning the fetters of morality to become an Übermench in a new world order.. add a few features (hitler, Versailles1919, industrialization, rabid nationalism etc ) and it is really like a terrible series of coincidences coming together where he played a role in providing a (pseudo-)intellectual frame of reference for the monsterous march to power of european fascism but 100 years ago. (it is not so long when you think about it.)
of course in the last decades of the 19th century there was yet to be such a development. but it seems that he let a genie out of a certain bottle.. it sent him insane but that was only the beginning of the havok it wreaked.
my feeling is that he was victim of his time way out of his depth and not totally to blame.. he deserves pity more than anything.. why I choose to focus on him is that we are in a period when the ideas of such a twit could easily gain currency. so far as I know that particular genie hasn’t been put back.
tejas fu
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