Nietzsche’s language may be controversial, but his points are quite benign. Take Will to Power for example. As I’m interpreting Will to Power right now with my limited exposure to his writings, Will to Power is just his explanation for why living beings don’t just stop at mere survival. Think about it: Evolution does not favor those who do the mere minimum for survival, it favors those who excel. Will to Power is therefore the foundation, basis, and cause of all life in an ultimate sense. You could say Richard Dawkins restated Nietzsche’s point when Dawkins coined the term ‘The Selfish Gene’ and elaborated on how life really works at a basic level.
The following is running the risk of stepping into mere speculation because, like I said, I haven’t read all his works yet:
Since we are ‘gene machines,’ and we are programmed by them in countless ways, it follows that we are inherently selfish; that we have a Will to Power of our own. Sit down and watch people sometime and you’ll find this plays out fairly nicely. It’s not perfect of course, but who are we to say that the deviant behavior of selflessness is ‘good’ if the true cause of life is selfishness? This plays into his arguments concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how transient they both are. All cultures, Nietzsche says, have had different values and the cultures of the future will have values different from us. Perhaps what we should be doing is exercising some of our power to ‘revalue all values,’ something that he admitted he was not up to the task of. To be honest, I think he was mostly thinking in the same direction the transhumanist community of today largely thinks in. We DO need to revalue all values. We need someone SMARTER than us to do it...
Though I probably should have said this at the beginning, I still highly doubt Nietzsche’s methods. He does not seem to have followed the rationalist’s path. He was a classical philologist by education and an artistic biographer for much of his writing career. What I’m saying is, maybe he didn’t have rigor at the heart of his philosophy. It’s easy to get the impression from his writing style that this is all just stuff he ‘made up.’ But I don’t know. I plan on finding out.
P.S. SithMasterSean, Nietzsche’s writing has been praised by Nazis. You wouldn’t want to be a Nazi, would you?!
Sorry, that was a bit of a dense quip on my part. Let me deconstruct it.
I got the impression SithMasterSean was deriving his idea of Nietzsche’s writings from other people’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings. Typically those ideas seem to be flat wrong. From what I understand, the Nazis seem to be the most famous misinterpreters Nietzsche, so I thought I’d make a bit of a joke about that, and also try to make a bit of comedic use out of argumentum ad hitlerum while I was at it.
Really, I was just joking around.
What really seems to pay off on LW is clarity, clarity, clarity. I kick myself every time something like this happens. Sorry.
Okay. I think that perhaps you could benefit from reading R. J. Hollingdale’s biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy
Nietzsche’s language may be controversial, but his points are quite benign. Take Will to Power for example. As I’m interpreting Will to Power right now with my limited exposure to his writings, Will to Power is just his explanation for why living beings don’t just stop at mere survival. Think about it: Evolution does not favor those who do the mere minimum for survival, it favors those who excel. Will to Power is therefore the foundation, basis, and cause of all life in an ultimate sense. You could say Richard Dawkins restated Nietzsche’s point when Dawkins coined the term ‘The Selfish Gene’ and elaborated on how life really works at a basic level.
The following is running the risk of stepping into mere speculation because, like I said, I haven’t read all his works yet:
Since we are ‘gene machines,’ and we are programmed by them in countless ways, it follows that we are inherently selfish; that we have a Will to Power of our own. Sit down and watch people sometime and you’ll find this plays out fairly nicely. It’s not perfect of course, but who are we to say that the deviant behavior of selflessness is ‘good’ if the true cause of life is selfishness? This plays into his arguments concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how transient they both are. All cultures, Nietzsche says, have had different values and the cultures of the future will have values different from us. Perhaps what we should be doing is exercising some of our power to ‘revalue all values,’ something that he admitted he was not up to the task of. To be honest, I think he was mostly thinking in the same direction the transhumanist community of today largely thinks in. We DO need to revalue all values. We need someone SMARTER than us to do it...
Though I probably should have said this at the beginning, I still highly doubt Nietzsche’s methods. He does not seem to have followed the rationalist’s path. He was a classical philologist by education and an artistic biographer for much of his writing career. What I’m saying is, maybe he didn’t have rigor at the heart of his philosophy. It’s easy to get the impression from his writing style that this is all just stuff he ‘made up.’ But I don’t know. I plan on finding out.
P.S. SithMasterSean, Nietzsche’s writing has been praised by Nazis. You wouldn’t want to be a Nazi, would you?!
I’m struggling to figure out what this was meant to communicate.
Sorry, that was a bit of a dense quip on my part. Let me deconstruct it.
I got the impression SithMasterSean was deriving his idea of Nietzsche’s writings from other people’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings. Typically those ideas seem to be flat wrong. From what I understand, the Nazis seem to be the most famous misinterpreters Nietzsche, so I thought I’d make a bit of a joke about that, and also try to make a bit of comedic use out of argumentum ad hitlerum while I was at it.
Really, I was just joking around.
What really seems to pay off on LW is clarity, clarity, clarity. I kick myself every time something like this happens. Sorry.