
Originally Posted by
Red-Headed
Nietzsche actually existed & was an actual person. Buddha may have been an actual Indian prince, however there is no evidence for Christ, historical or otherwise. The gospel accounts were written hundreds of years later than the alleged 'events' & would only be considered hearsay in a court of law. It seems to me that you are more interested in the imaginary & the mythological than the actual."
And Nietzsche was not interested in the mythological? Thinkers don't frequently refer to imaginary characters in order to explore philosophical ideas?
And Jesus did not exist? That's ridiculous. Scholars, non-chrisitian scholars, would disagree with you.
And the imaginary and the mythological are the actual. They are, they exist, therefore they are actual. You seem to give slight value to the fruits of human imagination. Such a view is a little out of place on a literature forum, no?
"That's your interpretation of the 'pity' in Nietzsche, not an original one either. It depends on translation & interpretation. The Nazis had their interpretations as well, like you, they cherry-picked what they wanted to believe. Nietzsche was quite right to mock the 'meekness' & 'humility' of the slave morality though. Meekness & humility are forced on the herd BY the slave morality of organised religion, especially Christianity. Nietzsche had pity for the human condition."
Your interpretation is funny to me. You think the herd should not be meek and humble? You sound like some kind of egalitarian Nietzschean - a contradiction in terms.
Your interpretation of Nietzsche is off. Slave morality did not make the herd the way it is. The herd already existed, a weak, lowly mass. Then some shepherds, some "holy men" came along and organized them. Took the qualities they already possessed and told them that those qualities were not bad but instead good, were virtues as opposed to deficiencies. If you take away slave morality all you do is deprive the herd of its source of pride. Slave morality reflects the state of the herd, not the other way around. According to Nietzsche at least.
Lose the meekness and humility. Then what do you have? Vanity and aggression. An untamed herd running rampant. I doubt Nietzsche would have endorsed that. And he didn't. The herd did not concern him. All he truly cared about were the great men, the artists and men of thought or action who turn the wheel of history.
"He wasn't wrong though was he? The slave morality of Christianity has tamed exceptional people throughout history. Besides, if he didn't care for the herd, why did he write anything?"
He wrote for the exceptions, for the few. He often despised the overwhelming majority of mankind. He considered them small and unclean. Read your Nietzsche. You pose as an expert and yet it seems you barely grasp the man's thought at all. Read what his thoughts were on slavery.
And we have to be tame. Its called civilization. In solitude you can be free. Amongst people - not so much. If we lost "slave morality" the world would tear itself to shreds.
"Like who?"
Martin Luther King. Gandhi. Lao Tse. Buddha. Nelson Mandela. W.H Auden. Socrates. But I suppose such individuals are merely enervated, subdued specimens in your eyes. Weak. Hahaha. I love that.
"Apparently not clear enough."
"You realise that Achilles was a mythological character right?"
Yes I do. Do you deny the relevance and profundity, do you deny the very TRUTH, of literature? Nietzsche learned a lot from books.
"Well, if I meet any Achaian mythological characters descended from a union between a nymph & royalty, you'll be the first to know."
You just lost the right to ever use the adjective "faustian."
"No, you have a species that has potential. This idea that Nietzsche was proposing a form of humanity that had no empathy or wished to develop a race of 'masters' to rule as overlords is Nazi ideology, not Nietzsche. He wasn't even anti-Semitic or nationalistic."
The species as a whole does not have potential, according to Nietzsche. Only a few superior individuals do.
"Another character from literature. Raskolnikov is a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, no more real than mythological Greeks. Plus, Dostoyevsky deliberately used the character of Raskolnikov in 'Crime & Punishment' as an example of misunderstood (particularly by the Russian zapadnik westernisers) western nihilism. Nietzsche was a real person. You can distinguish between reality & fantasy can't you? One of the definitions of schizophrenia is not being able to distinguish between the real & the imaginary. Nietzsche seemed to believe that was a problem that humanity as a whole was suffering from."
Again. You are on a literature forum. You deny that literary characters are real? They are not real in the flesh and blood, occupying physical space, sense of real. But they are real. Indeed, it could be argued that such characters are more real. Art is not real?! Art is the realest of the real.
"Yes, we can be better than god. Because we can rise above the duality god imposed on us as a species."
"Better than God." All right. Good luck with that.