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Grischa
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17 May 2016, 3:04 pm

Syphilis or not, prostitute or not, I'd still be curious about the opinion - of anyone, but perhaps LoveNotHate or Aristophanes - about what I wrote above about Nietzsche/Raskolnikov. It's not my idea, it's a theory by a Mrs. Cybulska, an idea that Nietzsche was only hard on the outside not on the inside
Just wonder how much of this applies to anyone of these: stoics, fans of Nietzsche, etc, before I ever would become enthusiastic of something like that

Mrs Cybulska is mentioned on Nietzsche's wiki site
Cybulska's essay on Nietzsche:
http://www.ipjp.org/downloads/Volume%20 ... a_15e1.pdf



Aristophanes
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18 May 2016, 1:10 pm

Sorry haven't read this thread since my initial quip. I'll be honest I haven't read Crime and Punishment, only Notes from Underground for a literary class-- Dostoyevsky is too depressing even for myself, lol.

This quote you gave resonates:
"He condemned a whole series of intense feelings not because he did not have them, but on the contrary because he had them and knew their danger"

Mrs Cybulska seems to understand the core of any good philosopher-- they don't talk about things they have no experience with, but those in which they do. Those intense "feelings" that she mentions we could call "instinct" today-- credit Darwin for that semantic change. Most people follow those instincts or "feelings" and never question them, but a philosopher makes it his job to question everything to test it's validity. I can see Nietzsche being a very passionate person in conflict with those passions and where they lead.

As for the relation to stoicism, I'll be honest I only started really reading the philosophy about a month ago, even though I've known lay information for years-- so I'm not really qualified to say how it relates to them, but I will give my lay perspective.

From my limited knowledge I would say the above quote tends to fit nicely with their world view: human passion is the problem, not the cure. That philosophy does dovetail with Nietzsche himself:

"Man is something that must be overcome: and therefore you will love your virtues,- for you will perish by them."

So yes, I can see Nietzsche's philosophy being more of a personal exercise (self-control being the ultimate feat of will) from a psychological standpoint than a true outward philosophy.* In that sense he would fit very nicely with the Stoics, although Nietzsche's concept of the over-man (superman) would induce a bout of semantic wrangling, since the Stoics viewed man as merely a flowing piece of the ether (grand life-- world, god, universe, infinity), as opposed to Nietzsche who views the world in hierarchical terms (the binary of "over-man" being "under-man" not to mention his entire concern with values from a hierarchical perspective). Or an example: Nietzsche would say, "This is a superior direction because a superior will has made it so" whereas Zeno would say, "The direction that leads to harmony is the one that will also lead to fulfillment." Two completely different viewpoints, but the underlying point seems to be the same: self-control.

I hope I answered your question and didn't side-track too far, it was a little broad, lol-- if I didn't answer your question PM me and we can discuss it in private so as not to derail the thread.

*Nietzsche tended to write in a parable style, making it hard to pin him down on any core point, but I've always taken his superior will to mean self-control, and there's plenty of outside sources that agree with me on this, but I don't really want to do a term paper citation collection at this point-- we can debate in private if you have an issue with this interpretation.



Grischa
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19 May 2016, 1:41 pm

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts
this one I'll keep in mind especially: "I can see Nietzsche's philosophy being more of a personal exercise (self-control being the ultimate feat of will)"
But I want to be careful, as Cybulska also wrote, that she didn't know how succesfull Nietzsche was in the end (as he went mad)
I don't know how it ended for Zeno, perhaps he was more succesfull
I'll definitely will read more about it



Mazz1990
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17 Jun 2016, 7:50 am

Some very interesting points here...but I think you all should read H.L. Mencken's "Friedrich Nietzsche".

and I'm just gonna leave this here...

Excerpts from "The Will to Power: An Inversion of Terminal and Instrumental Values" -

“An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been “deciphered” when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis” (Nietzsche – Genealogy of Morals). Nietzsche did not only believe this about the works of other people, but also about the world around us, “the meaning of the earth.” A crude formulation of Nietzsche’s claim is that power is valuable to any agent with values, because all agents rely on power to act on their values; power, through its universal instrumentality, is the single, objective, intrinsic and terminal value we have, and that this leaves it up to us what our instrumental values will be – how we gain power. Nietzsche called this claim the will to power.

Although there are no non-relational, object-level truths, there is an absolute metaphysical truth about the relations that objects bear to one another. For example, the totality of the causal interactions of one object to every other object would constitute the metaphysical truth about that one object, and would also contain a single piece of the metaphysical truth of every other object in the universe. We can see how this is theoretically impossible to do. Unable to directly perceive this truth for any object, the only thing we are able to do is grow our perspective through experience of the thing in different context; combine our perspective with the perspectives of others in order to make our knowledge of a thing more complete, more absolute, the more objective. Not only can we not directly access these truths, but how far or near we are to an exact copy of the external truths of the world is impossible to tell, as the same predictions could be made by multiple different models. The option left to us rational beings is to attempt to collect this information, starting with the most relevant available and working our way up. This is half of Nietzsche’s will to power, the will to truth. The more true explanations and predictions one can make about his environment and himself, the more control one has over both (assuming that there are ways you can control them).
The other half of Nietzsche’s will to power is never mentioned by name, but I think that it is part of what Nietzsche thinks the ascetic ideal represents, part of why Christian morality was necessary, to provide a self-control of man over himself. It did not matter how he controlled himself or to what end, simply that he gain the power to command and obey himself – “rather will nothing, than not will at all”. This was necessary for him to become constant enough to make promises or social contracts with other people, building the stability required for the truth to build up in any large way, allowing the passing along, and gradual build-up of information from thousands of individuals across generations. This synchronization effect I will call Nietzsche’s will to unity, for though the name is from me, the ideas I all attribute to Nietzsche or at least what he inspired in me. The synchronization of pendulums swung from the same beam discovered in 1665 by Christiaan Huygens, Carl Jung’s ‘Synchronicity Principle’, and most recently the concept of entrainment in ergodic, dynamic systems all represent the free-energy principle (i.e. active inference or embedded cognition) – things will naturally arrange themselves so as to lose the least amount of energy to friction (a very crude formulation, but useful).

“But to me, on the contrary, there seems to be nothing more worth taking seriously [than the deepest rooted problems of our souls (belief systems)], among the rewards for it being that some day one will perhaps be allowed to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness – or in my own language gay science – is a reward: the reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, of which, to be sure, not everyone is capable. But on the day we can say with all our hearts, “Onwards! Our old [selves] too [are] part of the comedy!” we shall have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of “The Destiny of the Soul”…” Nietzsche – GM or Gay Science [me]

Philosophers were once driven by an impulse to knowledge, but like a man who finds his wife, even more like priests who become married to god, they have run aground, stagnated by the allure of but one of the many steps on the journey forever upward. These ‘philosophers’ are first driven by an instinct to meaning, order, and so were drawn to “differences that make a difference” (i.e. we don’t need to know how many leaves are on that tree, but we need to know that the leaves have changed colors and what that means if we need to prepare for winter, information associated with other information). However, the self-same attachment/panic mechanism that makes newborns cry out for their mother or the care system that attaches mothers to their newborns, eventually attaches them to one theory or another that was particularly enlightening and useful (therefore agreeable) to them. This causes a soul to halt as surely as cutting off its wings. Only their wings were not cut off, they are simply bogged down by the heavy blanket of fear; the fear of the uncertainty a world without that theory would drop them into. Without the theory that so many of their most important predictions depend on, more importantly that theory that saved them in one of their most dire moments, that is just despair, emptiness. A child, lost from its mother, will start to cry out for its mother and search, but only for a short time before despair sets in and it lies down and just waits, and it is this power that these philosophers have been trapped by.

The most seductive non-realist accounts of value derive much of their seductive character from their implicit denial of our control over our values. This comfortability comes from denying the ‘terrifying’ part of the will to power. The fear of responsibility, let alone blame, of ‘commanding’ makes this a very uncomfortable belief to have about one’s own values (and the feelings of insignificance when one has lived a life of gaining one’s value from things other than oneself, instead of from oneself, and then realizing that there is no value coming from outside oneself; i.e. realizing there is no god). It is the burden of these “advocates who resent the name” to be held fast by a single position or perspective, struck with a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in love with their captor, so as to avoid the terror of commanding themselves. The consequence of this denial of free will is that they become so attached to one theory and aligned against the other, they miss out on everything the other theory has to offer. They cannot even imagine a bridge between the two theories, a common ground, because that would mean “‘not-my-current-theory’ is true and that is unacceptable because I have a will to truth”, and thus they have missed the point of the enquiry entirely. Instead of this ‘discontent in the face of involuntary contentment’, I would have philosophers and scientists follow a different method, the way of the overman, which would lead to a different conclusion, the will to power.
“As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness - there can be no doubt of that - morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe - the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.” Genealogy of Morality, end of chapter 2?
What they fail to recognize is that they would never have even heard about, let alone understood or come to believe, their current evaluative and epistemological attitudes if they had been closed-minded to them, if they had attached to the belief before it. In the words of Karl Friston, “what is necessary is a faith that the world is knowable, and knowable to us.” These so called “advocates who resent the name”, as Nietzsche calls them, are not true philosophers, only those who take the name ‘philosopher’-

“But that one works rigorously in the sciences and that there are contented workers certainly does not prove that science as a whole possesses a goal, a will, an ideal, or the passion of a great faith. The opposite is the case, to repeat: where it is not the latest expression of the ascetic ideal - and the exceptions are too rare, noble, and atypical to refute the general proposition - science today is a hiding place for every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui, bad conscience - it is the unrest of the lack of ideals, the suffering from the lack of any great love, the discontent in the face of involuntary contentment…The proficiency of our finest scholars, their heedless industry, their heads smoking day and night, their very craftsmanship - how often the real meaning of all this lies in the desire to keep something hidden from oneself! Science as a means of self-narcosis: do you have experience of that?…Whoever associates with scholars knows that one occasionally wounds them to the marrow with some harmless word; one incenses one‘s scholarly friends just when one means to honor them, one can drive them beside themselves merely because one has been too coarse to realize with whom one was really dealing - with sufferers who refuse to admit to themselves what they are, with drugged and heedless men who fear one thing: regaining consciousness…This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation - I have already indicated it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticized). Therefore they are necessarily allies, so that if they are to be fought they can only be fought and called in question together. A depreciation of the ascetic ideal unavoidably involves a depreciation of science: one must keep one‘s eyes and ears open to this face!…Physiologically, too, science rests on the same foundation as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is a presupposition of both of them - the affects grown cool, the tempo of life slowed down, dialectics in place of instinct, seriousness imprinted on faces and gestures (seriousness, the most unmistakable sign of a labored metabolism, of struggling, laborious life).”

So, originally, it is a quest for knowledge that drives philosophers to produce arguments, change the details of their system, respond to alternate systems and make claims; however, once an attachment is made, these things will be in the service of defending the beloved, the thing to which one has attached.

The whole point of a scholarly or scientific inquiry is that it discovers generalizable patterns in the world. If you want generalizable patterns, you shouldn’t base your observations on personal preferences. “Objectivity” becomes synonymous with generalizability. The more different perspectives from which your theory is true, the more true predictions your theory makes. Nietzsche could not find an objective method for producing philosophy, but he instead created a subjective method for creating an objective philosophy –

“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing” and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will out “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be.” – GM, 3.12

Rather than create the world in our image, Nietzsche would have us create ourselves in the image of the world. This was the ‘meaning of the earth.’ We create values in the image of the world and we create companions by teaching them the process of following the meaning of the earth and the ideal of the overman. We teach them the stair-building method, not simply how to stand on the stair we happen to be on.

“I have a question for you alone, my brother: like a sounding-lead, cast I this question into your soul, that I may know its depth…are you a man entitled to desire a child? Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the ruler of your passions, the master of your virtues?...Or does the animal speak in your wish, and necessity? Or isolation? Or discord in you? I would have your victory and freedom long for a child. Living monuments shall you build to your victory and emancipation. Beyond yourself shall you build. But first of all must you be built yourself, rectangular in body and soul. Not only onward shall you propagate yourself, but upward! For that purpose may the garden of marriage help you! A higher body shall you create, a first movement, a spontaneously rolling wheel – a creating one shall you create. Marriage: so call I the will of the twain to create the one that is more than those who created it. The reverence for one another, as those exercising such a will, call I marriage…Far from me also be the God who limps there to bless what he has not matched! Laugh not at such marriages! What child has not had reason to weep over its parents?...Yes, I would that the earth shook with convulsions when a saint and a goose mate with one another. This one went forth in a quest of truth as a hero, and got for himself a small decked-up lie: his marriage he calls it…Careful, have I found all buyers…but even the most astute of them buys his wife in a sack. Many short follies – that is called love by you. And your marriage puts an end to many short follies, with one long stupidity. Your love to woman, and woman’s love to man – ah, would that it were sympathy for suffering and veiled deities! But generally two animals alight on one another. But even your best love is only an enraptured simile and a painful ardour. It is a torch to light you to loftier paths. Beyond yourself shall you love some day! Then learn first of all to love. And on that account you had to drink the bitter cup of your love. Bitterness is in the cup even of the best love; thus does it cause longing for the overman; thus does it cause thirst in you, the creating one! Thirst in the creating one, arrow and longing for the overman: tell me, my brother, is this your will to marriage? Holy call I such a will, and such a marriage.”

Implicit in this theory of ‘companions’ who will “follow me because they want to follow themselves – wherever I want” is the idea that those who follow this method for the sake of power in the raw, not to use it, but to protect dear ones should a threat one day arise, will lead to a natural convalescence, a convergence, of the creating ones, if none are attached to their theories and they are free to follow the creative script together.

“For a bottom-up thinker like me, however, getting a detail wrong when I’m trying to solve a problem doesn’t have implications for the whole solution, because I haven’t reached the whole solution yet. If someone shows me a part of a project where I did something wrong, I say, “Change it.” – Temple Grandin (The Autistic Brain)

“I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To ‘will’ something, to ‘strive’ after something, to have an ‘aim’ or a ‘desire’ to my mind – I know none of these things from experience.”
– Nietzsche

“Whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is – will to power –” – Nietzsche, Zarathustra

Perhaps the trickiest part of this solution is allowing for the creation of values while avoiding Euthyphro’s Dilemma. This is achieved by the fact that the “creation” of the ‘creators of new values’ Nietzsche talks about, is really only a discovery. It is only a creation in the sense that it is the invention of it in the human language or mind. The creation itself was an identification of possibility space entailed by both facts about human beings and facts about the environment human beings are in, which existed regardless of the mind cognizing it. Rather than values sometimes being created rather than discovered, I would say sometimes values are discovered from the ‘meaning of the earth’ rather than directly from fellow man. This is not to be confused with deriving observations of mankind, which is creating. Only observations from mankind are never a creation, merely a copying, a spreading. The testimony of others is not creation of ideas. This is also the cause of the loneliness Nietzsche talks about, the star alone in space, because his ideal has gone ‘where no man has gone before’ so to speak. But if one can draw others to follow his new ideal, he can make stars themselves revolve around himself, because what is man other than his ideal?

“You know, for example, that ‘poetry’ has a very wide range. After all, everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry…but he who is wise in any other way, in a profession or any manual work, is merely a mechanic.”
– Plato, Symposium 205 b

“I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot. Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there dances a God in me.” – Zarathustra 1.8
““He who seeks may easily get lost himself. All isolation is wrong”: so say the herd. And long did you belong to the herd…Are you a new strength and a new authority? A first motion? A self-rolling wheel? can you also compel the stars to revolve around you?...Free, do you call yourself? your ruling thought would I hear of, and not that you have escaped from a yoke...Many a one has cast away his final worth when he has cast away his servitude…can you be judge for yourself, and avenger of your law? Terrible is aloneness with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star projected into desert space, and into the icy breath of aloneness…But one day will the solitude weary you; one day will your pride yield, and your courage quail. You will one day cry: “I am alone!”…you will one day cry: “All is false!” There are feelings which seek to slay the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, then must they themselves die! But are you capable of it – to be a murderer?...You force many to think differently about you; that, charge they heavily to your account. You came nigh to them, and yet went past: for that they never forgive you. You go beyond them: but the higher you rise, the smaller does the eye of envy see you. Most of all, however, is the flying one hated…Injustice and filth cast they at the lonesome one: but, my brother, if you would be a star, you must shine for them none the less on that account!...But the worst enemy you can meet, will you yourself always be…Ready must you be to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you become new if you have not first become ashes!...You lonesome one, you go the way of the creating one: a God will you create for yourself out of your seven devils! You lonesome one, you go the way of the loving one: you love yourself, and on that account despise you yourself, as only the loving ones despise. To create, desires the loving one, because he despises! What knows he of love who has not been obliged to despise just what he loved! With your love, go into your isolation, my brother, and with your creating; and late only will justice limp after you. With my tears, go into your isolation, my brother. I love him who seeks to create beyond himself, and thus succumbs.” – Zarathustra 1.17

The commander who vanquishes all of his enemies is great indeed, but the commander who turns all of his enemies to trusted allies is better still. I often like to imagine a land of warring tribes. In this land there are tribes who try to make peace with their enemies, but are still willing to fight if they have to, and other tribes who think only their tribe deserves to win, that they are fundamentally and immutably different, and will fight to the death. In this land, each tribe fighting to the death will continually shrink, while each of the cooperative tribes will shift between shrinking and growing, when they meet a fighting or cooperating tribe respectively. In this way, through the power of sheer numbers, a cooperative strategy works best. This is the power of unity.

Even a being that only had two values, to create and to destroy apples, would still instrumentally value information, and would do better to pretend or convince itself that it valued information terminally. This is because information will help it to stay alive and continue to have the capacity to create and destroy apples. This I find in Plato’s Symposium, where every soul wants to have in the future what it has now, and since that will never cease, they desire immortality for the never-ending pursuit of their values and goals. This is Nietzsche’s departure from Schopenhauer: it is not a will to life, because nothing already living will want to live; it is a will to power, because what the living desire is to live in the future and the future is uncertain, so raw, malleable power is necessary to increase the security, the predictability of the future. Life is simply the desired effect of the drive to power. Technology is an exemplar of this principle. No matter a culture’s values, they will desire technology (unless they value “no technology”, in which case their culture will not compete very well with the others). The point is - information/technology, in other words predictive power, is good for everyone who has values, despite what those values are. This is the power of the will to truth.

The development of large cities and settlements reflect the ease with which the desire for unity (which can be traced back to safety, fitness and predictability) can manipulate people to fit nicely together with one another (free-energy principle). The truth on the other hand is hard and rigid, unmoving even to the most pleading eyes. To gain a firm hold of truth requires knowledge built up over decades, centuries and millennia; this first required that we become close enough with each other to create strong enough centers of thought that would be able to survive through the generations, necessitating a certain amount of unity for truth to amass strength. In reverse, the amount of unity made possible by the industrial revolution – the progress of transportation both of humans and information – is much more than ever before. This is the synergistic relationship formed by the directly opposed wills of unity and truth, the power of a balance between the two.

“an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will: so that between the original “I will,” “I shall do this” and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will. But how many things this presupposes! To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!” - Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

These two premises make up the core of Nietzsche’s will to power: first, the unity in the form of predictive, controlling and explanatory power over other morally responsible agents (contemplative objects) (this unites agents through finding mutually beneficial instrumental values); second, the information that increases the predictive, controlling and explanatory power over non-morally responsible agents and objects (reactive objects). At this point, we can become self-aware of these internal truths about unity and about truth itself, and of the problems and potentials with both of these wills.

“What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?” – Nietzsche, GM
“Nietzsche read William Rolph’s Biologische Probleme around mid-1884, and it clearly interested him,[12] for his copy is heavily annotated.[13]…Rolph was another evolutionary anti-Darwinist like Roux, who wished to argue for evolution by a different mechanism than the struggle for existence. Rolph argued that all life seeks primarily to expand itself. Organisms fulfill this need through assimilation, trying to make as much of what is found around them into part of themselves, for example by seeking to increase intake and nutriment. Life forms are naturally insatiable in this way.” – Wikipedia

There are two ways to revere unity and truth: to revere the ones you have or know now; and to revere the unity or truth that is greater than that which you now have. “People just need to believe in something greater than themselves” is what the High Sparrow says the Margery Tyrell, and while he is probably speaking of some sort of god-like being, I would argue that Nietzsche’s ‘overman’, the self of tomorrow, could, and should fill this role. The problem with the will to truth and the will to unity is their tendency to mistake the former as the correct course rather than the latter. The problem is that humans tend to mistake a will of truth and unity for a will to truth and unity. The risk inherent in changing oneself, and the attachment to one’s self-image predisposes people toward making this mistake, since the use of power feels, and is, so much safer than the acquisition of power. “Many never become sweet; they rot even in the summer. It is cowardice that holds them fast to their branches. Far too many live, and far too long hang they on their branches. Would that a storm came and shook all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!” (Zarathustra, 1.21).

The root of the problem is that the environment is not a stable state; in fact every unexpected observation updates and changes our predictions (or has the potential to) because of “updates” to our beliefs about our environment. This is why truth, as a model which makes perfect predictions, is a fluid spectrum with no ceiling beside godhood. Nietzsche in fact says:

“Whoever is completely and wholly an artist [a creating-one presumably] is to all eternity separated from the “real,” the actual; on the other hand, one can understand how he can sometimes weary to the point of desperation of the eternal “unreality” and falsity of his innermost existence – and that then he may well attempt what is most forbidden him, to lay hold of actuality, for once to actually be. With what success? That is easy to guess.” Nietzsche, GM

This attachment to a certain belief system is the same attachment we feel as children towards our mothers. Mothers meet our needs, make the world a predictable and safe place. Worse, we are also the caretakers of these values, so the attachment of a mother to her child is also represented in a man’s attachment to his beliefs. As adults, our belief systems (children of the mind) take on this role of meeting our needs, and it is easy to become attached to the belief system itself, as opposed to the functional role it plays. To actually be, to remain the same for a time, that is forbidden to all mortals, for that would require a perfect prediction of ones surroundings, omniscience, or even omnipotence.
To become more truthful than we are now, that is the way of the overman. Literally, the meaning of the earth is the meaningful differences in information that increase our ability to act intentionally in the world; that is, the information we use to update our model of the world to project better predictions about the world. Unfortunately, it is a necessity of updating that you first kill yourself, which decreases your predictive power, before being born again into a new form that has higher predictive power than ever before.


Yeah and thats not even the half of it...if you want the full paper or sources just message me



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17 Jun 2016, 8:22 am

The_Blonde_Alien wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
Alas, Nietzsche went insane (perhaps he had syphilis?) late in life.
What's up with this talk of him having syphilis? Did he had sex too much? I herd women kept rejecting him often.
You don't get syphilis from "too much sex", and no one said that he caught it from a woman, either ...


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17 Jun 2016, 2:37 pm

Fnord wrote:
You don't get syphilis from "too much sex", and no one said that he caught it from a woman, either ...

...Richard Wagner was an anti-semite, not a sodomist, so far as we can tell...



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18 Jun 2016, 10:48 am

Another question? Who here puts ayn rand and nietzsche together?
Rand is a preacher of sheer egotism, which is not what the übermensch is about.
The übermensch is about overcoming society and tradition as the basis of one's morals and values. That does not mean one has to become a randian as*hole, even though randian as*holes like to think it means that.

The übermensch can be compassionate and sympathetic- if he choses to do so.
The randian as*hole followd a religion of assholery made up by a sad old lady.

Also: ASPs can be übermenschen, but being born a square peg does not automatically make you own it, as we all know too well.


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18 Jun 2016, 1:35 pm

shlaifu wrote:
The übermensch is about overcoming society and tradition as the basis of one's morals and values. That does not mean one has to become a randian as*hole

Perhaps true. Maybe this . .
An Ubermensch could be compassionate, but he would not like being carried away by compassion, because that is weak
An Ubermensch would be able to control his feelings,
He could feel compassion, but it does not affect him.

My little thought experiment above was that Nietzsche was a deeply compassionate man who had a hard time to control his passions/compassion
The Ubermensch his ideal alter-ego



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Tufted Titmouse
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Joined: 4 Dec 2014
Age: 41
Gender: Male
Posts: 42

19 Jun 2016, 12:18 pm

The_Blonde_Alien wrote:
If not, could his idea of the "Superman" be a reference to the autistic spectrum in any form shape or way?

Even if his "Superman" idea may not be connected that still begs the question:

Are those who belong in the autistic spectrum, especially those with Asperger's, more likely to become the "Superman" that Nietzsche describes?


I've seen numerous threads on numerous A.S. forums about how autistics are the next stage in evolution or whatever. I find the idea of autistics becoming Nietzschean "supermen" just as ridiculous. When I look at this forum, at the 'liberals' (forever whining about how society must do more for its dregs) and the 'libertarians' (who just want to be left alone to eat doritos and play video games) the phrases that come to mind are more along the lines of 'slave morality' and 'last men'.



Mazz1990
Emu Egg
Emu Egg

Joined: 17 Jun 2016
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Posts: 3
Location: Maryland, United States

20 Jun 2016, 4:03 pm

"May I still venture to sketch one final trait of my nature that causes me no little difficulties in my contacts with other men? My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity or—what am I saying?—the inmost parts, the “entrails” of every soul are physiologically perceived by me—smelted. This sensitivity furnishes me with psychological antennae with which I feel and get a hold of every secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character—perhaps the result of bad blood, but glossed over by education—enters my consciousness almost at the first contact. If my observation has not deceived me, such characters who offend my sense of cleanliness also sense from their side the reserve of my disgust—and this does not make them smell any better. As has always been my wont—extreme cleanliness in relation to me is the presupposition of my existence; I perish under unclean conditions—I constantly swim and bathe and splash, as it were, in water—in some perfectly transparent and resplendent element. Hence association with people imposes no mean test on my patience: my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in enduring that I feel with them"
-Nietzsche, "Ecce Homo" chapter 1, :roll: section 8.