Philosophy Now Forum

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 10:15 am
IC never rationalized it that way. He's incapable of being rational when it comes to Nietzsche no matter the amount of data you throw at him as has been consistently proven. He still insists that N was anti-Semitic; nothing and nobody after all the corrections offered will change his mind on that.

As for the Will to Power motive, consciousness itself is a manifestation of it and cannot exist without it. Consciousness is that which strives. One cannot strive without a will to enforce it....and since consciousness includes everything humans do in whatever capacity, the Will to Power is inherent in everyone...as much in the Hitler and Stalin types as it is in St.Francis and Jesus!

Spot on, brilliantly said.

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 10:15 am
IC never rationalized it that way. He's incapable of being rational when it comes to Nietzsche no matter the amount of data you throw at him as has been consistently proven. He still insists that N was anti-Semitic; nothing and nobody after all the corrections offered will change his mind on that.

As for the Will to Power motive, consciousness itself is a manifestation of it and cannot exist without it. Consciousness is that which strives. One cannot strive without a will to enforce it....and since consciousness includes everything humans do in whatever capacity, the Will to Power is inherent in everyone...as much in the Hitler and Stalin types as it is in St.Francis and Jesus!

I found this on reddit.
I think it compliments what you are saying...

I will say, personally, that I believe that the only way to create meaning in life is to follow one's (own) will unbendingly - the goal is not to achieve the object of the will, the object is afterall insignificant and vacuous like anything else, but to demonstrate willpower and faith in the will itself.

Thus, in post-Christian, post-nihilistic times, the Will itself becomes a spirit of free will, but only free and meaningful to the degree that you are willing to follow it, and not deny it. You must not believe that anything in this world can be achieved, that any goal can be reached, any end-state crystallized; however, as human beings, we are the vessel of a will, and such to demonstrate any significance and reality in this world, we have to follow our Will, because we simply only exist as our will. Thus, the will becomes a savior of past and future, as long as one remains loyal to the will, because the will connects the individual parts of life and thus creates the individual with its identity.

Nietzsche saw Christianity as having corrupted the will, but the true, new savior must be willing to follow his Will into any dark recess and any evil. Not - because the will itself is good or bad, or good or evil, but because the identity entirely lies in the will and thus to represents one's own identity, one must be willing to follow one's will to the end.

However, and this is where the Übermensch comes in, to transcend the ever-egoistical and base desires of the Will, one has to will for mankind as a whole and as such. To enforce the Will of mankind, hard, tyrannically and unswervingly, that represents the Übermensch.

Thus, anything that can ever be achieved by humans in this world is only the expression of our individual wills, and only when these wills combine into a greater will, a whole as the expression of its parts, does beauty arise.

How the will can (still) be free in a modern, scientific world is the fundamental question, but the answer rests on the fact that it is not the will itself (atoms, bodies, humans) that is free, but the desire and choice to follow the will. Thus, the only way to demonstrate free will in a modern world, is to ignore other wills and command yourself to obey your own will; this is, of course, hard in a social world, but he who manages to do it in the midst of the crowd, yet for the crowd as such, has transcended humanity and become truly superhuman. His achieved superhumanity lies in the fact that his will, as an expression of himself and his life, stands out among the others, as an individual capable of self-direction. Yet his goal is to speak for other wills as such, for mankind as a whole.

And then there's this ....

“ Man always A c t s R i g h t l y . ”— We do not complain of nature as immoral because it sends a thunderstorm and makes us wet,— why do we call those who injure us immoral ? Because in the latter case we take for granted a free will functioning voluntarily; in the former we see necessity. But this distinction is an error. Thus we do not call even intentional injury Immoral in all circumstances; for instance, we kill a fly unhesitatingly and intentionally, only because its buzzing annoys us ; we punish a criminal intentionally and hurt him in order to protect ourselves and society. In the first case it is the individual who, in order to preserve himself, or even to protect himself from worry, does intentional injury; in the second case it is the State. All morals allow intentional injury in the case of necessity, that is, when it is a matter of self-preservation! But these two points of view suffice to explain all evil actions committed by men against men, we are desirous of obtaining pleasure or avoiding pain; in any case it is always a question of self-preservation. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness.

We live in an age in which the desire for man and his future – a future beyond mere self-preservation, security and comfort – seems to be disappearing from the face of the earth. Modern atheists who have emancipated themselves from the affliction of past errors – the error of God, of the world conceived as a unity, of free will, and so on – have only freed themselves from something and not for something. They either believe in nothing at all or have a blind commitment to science and uphold the unconditional nature of the will to truth.

"There are no free and unfree wills, only weak and strong ones"

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 2:30 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 10:01 am Not even something good about Marxism?

It's hard to see good in a theory that has a 100% record of destroying economies and killing people.

Unreformed capitalism treats workers as if they are machines,

Marxists mistake "capitalism" for a creed, because Marxism is. It's not. Unlike Marxism, it has no historicism, no teleology, no call for belief or demand for revolution; It's just a means of doing business. And all means of doing business have their liabilities, and need to be watched.

There was a time before owners became capitalists, when owners were people like the people who worked on their farms or workshops; they all ate round the same kitchen table, sang the same songs and danced the same dances. Landed gentry, at that time were the out of touch class, not the owners of the farms or workshops.

Yes, there was sunshine and roses every day. And fish jumped, and corn grew, and the Hobbits would visit in the evening, and everyone would sit around smoking pipes and sipping port.

Ah, those wonderful, old days...

Technology intervened, as it does, in that quite peaceful arrangement of society.

"Technology" has always been with us. It's what humans do.

This is cartoon historicism. It has zero to do with what really happened. It's a Marxist myth; no more.

Society changes when technologies change in the process of economic growth. The agricultural revolution changed the balance of power in the countryside so the owners of machines and land became more powerful than their labourers relative to what had gone before. The balance of power had previously changed in favour of the labourers after the Plague decimated the numbers of labourers. In colonial and post colonial subSaharan Africa labourers migrated to towns thus changing the village communities and the communities in the new urban centres of commerce and industry. Economic facts are grounded in scientific historical , sociological,and anthropological method and are not myths.

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 8:45 am I get it fine.

I'm pretty sure you don't.

Because you keep thinking I'm saying that Nietzsche knew and supported the Nazis. I'm not saying that, and if I ever gave a basis for such a misunderstanding, I now revise that.

Nietzsche died in 1900, on the cusp of the New Year and the new century. At that time, Hitler was 11, the Third Reich not conceived, and a major war fought on a different ideology was to intervene between Nietzsche and his later admirers. So that should settle the question of what Nietzsche could have known. He certainly fancied himself a prophet, but he wasn't a good enough one to know what was coming. But that's not what's under dispute.

The right charge, instead, is that the philosophy of Nietzsche was exactly what the Nazis needed to rationalize doing what they did. That's quite a different claim; and whether Nietzsche himself knew the Nazis or would have supported them personally is both speculative and irrelevant to the entire question of what his philosophy did, long after he was dead. It is what he wrote that condemns him to association with the Nazis. That much is obvious.

I'm reminded of an old and oft repeated quotation from Gertrude, in Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Every Nietzsche apologist undertakes, as his first job, to prove to the world that Nietzsche was not a Nazi. There is probably nothing much more commonly written in introductions to his work, or on the various sites the laud his philosophy. But in being so "artlessly jealous" to defend Nietzsche, such apologists reveal an opposite overwhelmingly obvious fact, a fact that accounts for all their desperate pleading on his behalf: that fact is that everyone instantly recognizes the affinity between Nietzsche's ideas and those that later powered Nazism. Were in not so, they would need to expend much less energy trying to exhonerate him from association with the Reich's later activities. But the more they protest, they more they remind us of just how very clear the association really is.

Everybody gets it, and gets it instantly, when they read Nietzsche. Those who dislike him can smell it right away; but those who like him also smell it, and get to work immediately trying to disprove the connection. It takes a vigrous effort at revisionism, one of just the sort you're doing, to try to break the close affinities between Nietzsche and the subsequent ideology. And they've given it their best try, and will continue to do so. But in so doing, they undermine the very conclusion they want, and they end up pitching for the other team: no matter what Nietzsche himself may have thought, he was opening the door to a whole nasty package of possibilities, and then giving them the leather wings they needed to flap forth from the Pandora's box of bad ideas he had pried open. And then, of course, Nietzsche propped the box open, but declaring the "death of God" and insisting that we are "beyond good and evil" -- provided of course, that we realize that all that's going on in the moral world is "the will to power, " and are, ourselves, ubermeschen enough to seize our opportunities.

Say what you want, but the clamour of protest itself shows that everybody already knows what Nietzsche is responsible for. And God, who is the only Judge of these things, knows what guilt or innocence falls to his account. And we, we don't really have to decide...so long are we are wise enough not to believe Nietzsche.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 11:58 am

This is cartoon historicism. It has zero to do with what really happened. It's a Marxist myth; no more.

Society changes when technologies change in the process of economic growth. The agricultural revolution changed the balance of power in the countryside so the owners of machines and land became more powerful than their labourers relative to what had gone before. The balance of power had previously changed in favour of the labourers after the Plague decimated the numbers of labourers.

Yes, technology changes things. One of the things it changed was the conditions Marx observed and from which he extrapolated. He thought industrialization would end in bloody revolution, then in the Triumph of the Proletariat...and that it would happen in advanced countries like England and Germany.

We can now see he was totally wrong. What was going to happen instead was that the proles were going to rise into the middle class, on the wings of technological and economic innovation, so that the "nasty, brutish and short" lives of the Medieval peasant and the industrial poor were going to lengthen, their occupations were going to change, their health and leisure time were going to increase, their powers of consumption of good vastly improve, their disposable income multiply, and so on. And this was going to wipe out any possibility of revolution and any possibility of his utopian fantasies.

Whatever was yet to come, it is now abundantly apparent that it was not to be what Marx expected. That much is already sealed and done, closed off by subsequent history. We know what happened between Marx and now, and it wasn't what Marx said would. And that is why the neo-Marxists of today have had to banish him to "vulgar" theorizing (their word), and make such extraordinary efforts to salvage the scraps of his utopianism and dreaming through transforming it into identity politics.

Marx failed...and any neo-Marxist who wants a chance of saving his theories has to revise extensively in order to keep up their religious faith in his basic ideas; because reality has already defeated them.

In colonial and post colonial subSaharan Africa...

Of which Marx really knew nothing. But I do. I lived there.

Subsaharan Africa went from raw tribalism to modernity in one massive, convusive twist, through colonialism. It passed through none of Marx's intermediary phases, and in no way represents his historicist theories. And while totalitarian Marxist regimes in those African states have been tried and tried, they don't work; they inevitably end up serving the African "big man" culture of the tribe, and horrible despots like Mugabe or Amin are the result of the toxic fusing of tribalism with modern power.

Marx knew nothing about that at all.

Dubious wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 10:15 amIC never rationalized it that way. He's incapable of being rational when it comes to Nietzsche no matter the amount of data you throw at him as has been consistently proven. He still insists that N was anti-Semitic; nothing and nobody after all the corrections offered will change his mind on that.

As for the Will to Power motive, consciousness itself is a manifestation of it and cannot exist without it. Consciousness is that which strives. One cannot strive without a will to enforce it....and since consciousness includes everything humans do in whatever capacity, the Will to Power is inherent in everyone...as much in the Hitler and Stalin types as it is in St.Francis and Jesus!

Perhaps you have already but I'd highly recommend the two essays Wotan (1936) and After The Catastrophe (1945) by CG Jung as a way to understand Nietzsche in the context of the late 19th century (fin de siècle) era.

I think we have to examine men, and likely ourselves (this would be a Jungian admonition), in a dual manner: on one hand what they say, and what they say about themselves, but then in another sense -- what they represent, and how it is that they *appear* in a given time-frame. The easiest way I could illustrate this, and again from a Jungian angle, would be through an examination of the highly complex figure Donald Trump.

So on one hand there is the man Donald Trump and what he might say about himself; his life-history; his business-life; his entertainer-life; and then his decision to enter politics . . .

But there is another aspect to him: what he *manifests* within the psycho-social landscape. That is psychologically and psycho-socially. And this, I suggest, was likely unknown to him. It was always pretty clear to me that what Donald Trump represented was a suppressed imago of 'former America'. His rather raw *ugliness* and brashness, lack of self-awareness, and his (completely) in-your-face fuck you attitude, provided a sort of *hook* that captured the attention, admiration and enthusiasm of a wide swath of American populace who (it might be said) projected onto Trump a wide range of stuff.

One might think that by noticing this aspect about Trump that I am attacking him in some way, or taking the side of those who oppose him, but that is not the case. I think we have to notice and pay very close attention to the psycho-social aspects which when examined reveal a great deal about *what is really going on*.

Nietzsche -- according to Jung who is, certainly, a psychologist but also a cultural commentator -- delved very deeply into mythological territory and a notable grandiose presentation of his ideas in overblown, fantastic ways. He plays the role, and the role seems to capture him, of prophet, and he invests Zarathustra with *projected content* which (as Jung points out) is evocative of an 'unconscious spirit' which Jung identifies with Wotan: something, some type of impulse, or psycho-social memory that *exists* in the Germanic peoples.

But in thinking about Nietzsche, and certainly Zarathustra, one does have to ask What sort of reaction, in the reader, does it call out? All the references are symbolic and Zarathustra is a symbolic tract through which, at the same time, ideas are communicated. But why this form? And why then Nietzsche's own self-association with Zarathustra-as-prophet and Nietzsche's own self-association with the Antichrist? One takes this tongue-in-cheek, that is true, and as ironical, but it does not seem at all sufficient to stop there. So, a more depth analysis is required.

And this leads to the problem of interpreting Nietzsche who cannot but be seen as an intensely problematic character. I cannot say that I have it worked out, and I can say that I may understand it dimly, but it has occurred to me that in Nietzsche, and both known and unbeknownst to him, the irreconcilable conflicts of the age lived. And in my view they tore him apart at an inner, psychic level. I would not want to make an irrational diagnosis of the man, but given the intensely difficult area in which he worked, and given the dynamite-like nature of his realizations, I cannot see how a psychological assessment would not be required, alongside his intellectual propositions and realizations such as they are.

All of this requires far more thought and the time to get clear about it.

Turning now to Immanuel Can and his position as-against Nietzsche, we might ask and we might try to get clear about what he is opposed to. He describes Nietzsche as one might expect a Christian man to describe Satan if Satan were a topical, cultural and intellectual figure. As if Nietzsche self-consciously created Nietzschean Doctrines to thwart the work of the Good Angel as well as of the Historical Jesus himself. But that, right there, is a misinterpretation in certain, specific senses. But this is not right. So one can say, on one hand, that Nietzsche noticed what had already been done through a long-standing cultural and ideological reassessment by Christian Europe of those elements that made it up. Nietzsche did not propose anything really. But he definitely explained it in the most dramatic and incisive form that could be imagined.

Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, Marx -- these are devilish spirits of Satanic Chaos who have advanced onto the Christian landscape and must be fought back with the Sword of the Spirit! I write this out in a deliberately dramatized manner and yet there is no doubt that this is how many (and possibly most) Christians actually organize their perception of the world. It is intensely interpretive.

So, to accurately see and assess Immanuel Can one has to see him as operating out of an active mythology that dovetails into concrete social and political realities.

But I would say at the same time that it is impossible that any one of us could honestly locate ourselves outside of this cultural and mythological *world*. It is a question of the degree to which we are in it, consciously or unconsciously, or outside of it, consciously or unconsciously.

And this is why I have mentioned the notion of hysteria. I do not have a complete handle on it, perhaps, but I would say that if an hysterical state could be defined, it would arise when a given person, or a group, or a culture, is not aware that it is 'possessed' by strong psychic and psychological currents. So the hysterical person is prompted to act out of an hysterical inner stance and tends as a result to project inner content outward onto an external stage. To withdraw the projection, to self-center, to become as circumspect as one was formerly trapped and enthused by the exterior drama, would be (certainly according to Jung) a proper and responsible attitude.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 2:50 pmThe right charge, instead, is that the philosophy of Nietzsche was exactly what the Nazis needed to rationalize doing what they did. That's quite a different claim; and whether Nietzsche himself knew the Nazis or would have supported them personally is both speculative and irrelevant to the entire question of what his philosophy did, long after he was dead. It is what he wrote that condemns him to association with the Nazis. That much is obvious.

This is not quite right. Allow me to mention here that Theodore Roosevelt was as active reader of Nietzsche as was HL Mencken, of course, and Nietzsche's ideas, based in that deep attraction that is always evoked when the notion of the reality about will to power is grasped, spread out everywhere.

There is nothing particularly weird or even unusual about the German desire to expand or to open new territory. These sorts of activities are and have been part-and-parcel of things as all know. Even the racial theory was not significantly different from how the English viewed themselves (and certainly the Protestant Americans like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard). While it cannot be denied that these ideas, traits and tendencies became perversely expanded in Nazism, it is not possible to deny that all powerful peoples avail themselves of this 'will'. It is a question of degree (and other underlying psychological factors).

So, in our modernity all people, in all states and in all organizations have, to one degree or another integrated the strict power-principle into their actions, activities, and as I previously said into the way that they obfuscate and then present what they do (popularly) as being something else altogether.

One good example of Nietzscheanism-in-operation is to consider the Philippine War and the Cuban War (the Spanish-American War) through a Nietzschean lens. These had only to do with territorial and *imperial* expansion and, in numerous senses, were non-different than Germany's expansionism. It is my view that one of the most evident, and very interesting, studies of, say, a modern Nietzsche-inspired project is America's will to construct the Panama Canal. It involved absolutely ruthless use of power, and yet something remarkable, immensely useful and grand came out of it.

I personally do not see Nietzsche as outside of the context of German nationalism and the rebirth and reanimation of The Germanic Spirit, and it seems to me foolish to try and exonerate him. But if it would have been carried out different it might have succeeded, and had it succeeded it would be defended and admired more than condemned.

But that should not be the point when reading Nietzsche. It seems beyond doubt that Nietzsche sucks-in his readers and also 'seduces' them. Ask any youngish Nietzsche reader to give an assessment of what Nietzsche *means* and you will get an unfiltered, will-to-power type reduction that justifies and explains criminality. It becomes a simplified model that explains all sorts of different power-projects.

I should mention that CG Jung said that only a *mature* reader should come under Nietzsche's influence. Why? Because Nietzsche presents an appeal to something essentially lawless.

It is what he wrote that condemns him to association with the Nazis. That much is obvious.

That is a superficial understanding. He becomes 'associated' with so many different trends in Modernity that to see him as solely associated with National Socialism and Nazism is a way to avoid facing the larger issue. A far larger European problem.

Will our society ever remember the value of religion...so that capitalism won't end up being consumed and destroyed by greed? Who knows.

Seems to me, folks are gonna have to get to it in an ass-backwards way. That is: they're first gonna have to rediscover their own worth as sunthin' more than a collection of parts (physical/psychological), then they can rediscover why they're sumthin' more than a collection of parts.

So you're saying capitalism won't be consumed and destroyed by greed if people become more religious?

There was a generally protestant environment back in those days when free market theorists were making their debut, ya know. Many of the principles of capitalism are justified by, and reliant on, certain religious truths taken for granted. Further, the enormous wealth disparity between the lower class and property owners that allowed capitalism to revolutionize feudalism, was, itself, an effect of ruling class ideology and philosophy that justified the power and privilege of the elite as 'ordained' and reflective of the order of 'god's' kingdom on earth.

In other words, it's maybe because of religion that capitalism was even made possible in the first place. Hard to say what an alternate history would be like in which feudalism evolves directly into socialism, skipping capitalism, if that's even possible. But behind all this, what makes the common sense notion that capitalism is 'necessary' and workable, so embedded in ideology, is its proximity to religion and religious concepts... none of which is/are true.

Not to say capitalism is unnatural, but that it's subsistence has to be constantly defended from otherwise normal and natural phenomena (like revolution), social conflict and cyclic economic problems (e.g., the booms and busts).

So you're saying capitalism won't be consumed and destroyed by greed if people become more religious?

Me, to be clear, I'm sayin' if folks recognize themselves as persons and not some half-assed product, they skew toward the good. They're less likely to cheat, to slack off, to rely, to envy. They aren't merely honest, they work at it.

God, He's the spice atop a heapin' bowl of already delicious ramen.

Did you really just say that 'god' is one of these?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 4:19 pm There is nothing particularly weird or even unusual about the German desire to expand or to open new territory.

Tell that to Czechoslovakia and Poland...and Holland, and Belgium, and France, and Italy, and North Africa...

So, in our modernity all people, in all states and in all organizations have, to one degree or another integrated the strict power-principle into their actions,

"The strict power principle?" You're going to have to tell me what "principle" you mean there.

One good example of Nietzscheanism-in-operation is to consider the Philippine War and the Cuban War

So...your argument amounts to "People who buy into Nietzscheanism cause wars." Not much of a defense of Nietzsche, that.

However, I find this explanation very simplistic, if it is what I think it is. Still, I'll wait to see this "power principle" of yours spelled out, and then I'll decide whether it's too simplistic or not. Maybe there's more to it than "everything is about power."

I personally do not see Nietzsche as outside of the context of German nationalism and the rebirth and reanimation of The Germanic Spirit, and it seems to me foolish to try and exonerate him. But if it would have been carried out different it might have succeeded, and had it succeeded it would be defended and admired more than condemned.

Well, really that's not a useful argument for your case. It just amounts to, "If the Nazis had won, we'd all be admiring the Nazis." Maybe we'd have no choice: but it wouldn't make the Nazis any less wrong.

It seems beyond doubt that Nietzsche sucks-in his readers and also 'seduces' them.

He's a rhetorician and a propagandist, really. You can tell by his lack of proofs and evidence for things. He just floats grand claims "out there," and says, "You have to believe me, because I'm so smart."

So he just unilaterally declares, "God is dead," and rolls on as if there are no questions to be asked, and expects us to follow blindly.

Yeah, really? No thanks. Rational people still expect evidence, not just grandiose claims.

I should mention that CG Jung said that only a *mature* reader should come under Nietzsche's influence. Why? Because Nietzsche presents an appeal to something essentially lawless.

Well, the real problem is that Nietzsche is amoral. (Check that: he tries to be: he doesn't quite manage to pull it off.) The important thing is to read him crticially, not to just believe his patter. And youngsters tend to be easily astonished by preening, and to attribute more truth to mere rhetorical flourishes than they ought to. Loudmouths impress them.

But I find that the people who really can't read Nietzsche properly are Atheists. To quote Browning, they have "a heart too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed..." They see that he doesn't like Jews and Christians, and they whoop "Hooray," and bash cheerfully forward, confident that Nietzsche's on their side. And that's a bit tragic; because unpacking the terrible price of Atheism is the one part of his critique of things that Nietzsche actually gets pretty much right. If they listened to him better, they might actually learn something they need to know.

But they never seem to do so.

...to see him as solely associated with National Socialism and Nazism is a way to avoid facing the larger issue.

I don't. He's also associated with amorality of all kinds, anti-religiosity, Foucault, Critical Theorists, radical individualism, Teutonic romanticism, hubristic Humanism, moral relativism, death-of-meaning thinking...and a whole lot of other toxic movements and trends that have troubled modern and postmodern society. He's not "solely" associated with any of these, but in some measure, with all.

But he's on the hook for giving "aid and comfort" to the Nazis, too. He was their guy, their hero of the philosophical past, for sure. They really couldn't have done all they did, or justified it so easily, without his help.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 7:26 pmSo...your argument amounts to "People who buy into Nietzscheanism cause wars." Not much of a defense of Nietzsche, that.

However, I find this explanation very simplistic, if it is what I think it is. Still, I'll wait to see this "power principle" of yours spelled out, and then I'll decide whether it's too simplistic or not. Maybe there's more to it than "everything is about power."

My developing sense about you -- the way you think, how you react, and then what you say -- is that you are 'incapable of hearing -- for all that you have ears'. Because you cannot hear, or listen, you then hear-interpret and as a result modify what a person said into what you a) hear them to have said or b) desire them to have said. It is weird indeed but you keep doing it.

Well, really that's not a useful argument for your case. It just amounts to, "If the Nazis had won, we'd all be admiring the Nazis." Maybe we'd have no choice: but it wouldn't make the Nazis any less wrong.

But this is not at all what I said and it is not what I meant. When you rewrite, you twist things.

What it points to is something more subtle, more nuanced, and more difficult. Something along the lines that 'the victors write the histories' is one aspect. And they write histories that favor their actions and choices. And often they misrepresent their motives. But often when a great success is realized (say for example the construction of the Panama Canal) the ways and means that was used to achieve the Great Thing is often seen as being justified-in-a-way even by the average man. But when it fails it is far easier to condemn.

It is not that I am making a moral argument but more that I am explaining how things often work in our world.

The National Socialists in the 1930s were admired and praised by many different political and intellectual figures for the 'great transformation' they brought about. The economic success as well as the social programs were admired and praised.

He's a rhetorician and a propagandist, really. You can tell by his lack of proofs and evidence for things. He just floats grand claims "out there," and says, "You have to believe me, because I'm so smart."

So he just unilaterally declares, "God is dead," and rolls on as if there are no questions to be asked, and expects us to follow blindly.

Here, even as you seem to agree with some part of what I wrote, you re-engage with your hack-jobbery. Now, you have to be stopped and corrected.

He is far more than a mere rhetorician, and far more than a mere propagandist. If your reading of Nietzsche is summarized in this way you did a very bad reading. However, I would say that this is likely the case. But here is the bizarre thing: you have not then ever really read the Bible! This was indicated through the article that Dubious submitted. Nietzsche knew the Bible many many times better than you seem to. He knew things about it that you cannot know because of the obstacles that you face in your own mind. So my basic question is Why is it that many of your opinions and ideas are of this sort?

You have not yet understood what Nietzsche meant when he declared 'God is dead and we killed him'. You are on the outside of understanding because of your literalist-position and frame of mind.

Yet it is true that Nietzsche presents his ideas in a very compelling form. It would seem fair to say that Nietzsche seduces readers, especially immature ones, but that would need to be carefully and fairly explained. But not through hack-jobbery.

Well, the real problem is that Nietzsche is amoral. (Check that: he tries to be: he doesn't quite manage to pull it off.) The important thing is to read him critically, not to just believe his patter. And youngsters tend to be easily astonished by preening, and to attribute more truth to mere rhetorical flourishes than they ought to. Loudmouths impress them.

No, this is wrong as well. He critiques a form of morality which has some dubious and questionable features which require criticism. And he notices that at other times moral action and a moral man were defined in different ways. He is amoral and in reaction to a certain defined morality, that is true, but this is not the same as being amoral.

It is true that he must be read 'critically' so, at least, you are right there.

But I find that the people who really can't read Nietzsche properly are Atheists. To quote Browning, they have "a heart too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed..." They see that he doesn't like Jews and Christians, and they whoop "Hooray," and bash cheerfully forward, confident that Nietzsche's on their side. And that's a bit tragic; because unpacking the terrible price of Atheism is the one part of his critique of things that Nietzsche actually gets pretty much right. If they listened to him better, they might actually learn something they need to know.

Well, you are a Theist, are you not, and therefore on the side of the Good. But you regularly perform hack-jobs and reason very badly. I personally observe that, if anything, you drive people away from even being able to appreciate the religious tradition you say you wish to defend. I might suggest to you that when people encounter types like you, a desire arises to similarly 'bash' you. You provoke in a certain sense the tragedy of misunderstanding.

Also, and from what I have gleaned and gathered, the atheistic position is often a reaction against people within a religious tradition who lack self-awareness and a self-critical spirit. So years ago I realized that, in a way, to declare oneself an atheist is a way to get out from under an entire oppressive tendency in religionists and certain oppressive religionists who carry it out. There is a strange conundrum here.

He's also associated with amorality of all kinds, anti-religiosity, Foucault, Critical Theorists, radical individualism, Teutonic romanticism, hubristic Humanism, moral relativism, death-of-meaning thinking...and a whole lot of other toxic movements and trends that have troubled modern and postmodern society. He's not "solely" associated with any of these, but in some measure, with all.

That is a fairly expressed statement! What's the matter with you?!?

And to fill out the statement would involve one, to do it well and right, in very careful explication. Careful, detailed, thoughtful, thorough.

AJ: There is nothing particularly weird or even unusual about the German desire to expand or to open new territory.
IC: Tell that to Czechoslovakia and Poland...and Holland, and Belgium, and France, and Italy, and North Africa...

You missed the point. Similarly, the United States, led by a man who was directly reading Nietzsche, launched into wars and justified them through manifest destiny type claims and other rhetorical postures. I cited also the machinations involved in wresting the Panamanian isthmus from Colombia and then the major power-machinations required to build the canal (a 'wonder of the world').

It is true that those on the victim-end of such actions tend to have a critical position (the Filipinos or the Cubans say or the complaining Colombians) but these critiques are drowned out by a triumphalism and by 'control of the narrative'.

It's difficult to imagine a "splendid" war. But that's how John Hay, U.S. ambassador to Britain and a good friend of Theodore Roosevelt, characterized a conflict with Spain 100 years ago. U.S. forces won a swift and decisive victory after suffering relatively few deaths and claimed a host of new territories overseas. As a result, the country began establishing itself as a formidable world power. When the fighting ended, an enthusiastic Hay said to Roosevelt, who had led a special cavalry unit, the "Rough Riders," in the war: "It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave."

From this article. Submitted as a reference, not necessarily because I agree on all points.

The American 'anti-imperialism' movement began substantially around that time. See Mark Twain's "To The Person Sitting in Darkness" essay. Text here.

Fascinating that you know all this stuff. It’s amazing what you can just copy and paste from the web.

All this parroting of irrelevant garbage for what? History is dead. Get a life.

Talk about relevant stuff that actually means something like there is no such thing as man’s idea of god.

Oooh look a pretty butterfly…oh you missed it. Life is now, don’t miss it, stop allowing the past to steal the precious now, your drowning in irrelevant crap. Keep it simple..

We all bleed the same red blood for Christ sake.

Get off your dam soap boxes.