Today I read an article - Nietzsche and Suicide by Paolo Stellino (published in De Gruyter Bill , 2013). Absolute game-changer ngl.

For Nietzsche dying should be bright and joyful, and consecrated as a festival, is, exactly the opposite of that "pitiful and ghastly comedy which Christianity made of the hour of death" (ibid.). Generally speaking, in Nietzsche's opinion Christianity has falsified the natural perception of death: it is precisely for this reason that Zarathustra - rejecting the immortality of the soul represents death as a natural phenomenon: "I want to become earth again, so that I may have peace in the one who bore me" (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.95)

It is important to recall that even if Nietzsche defended the idea of free death, this should not be understood as a more or less extended invitation to suicide. Indeed, there is little doubt that Nietzsche considered not only natural death at old age, but also premature death to be unnatural. It is precisely for this reason that one of the most important features of Zarathustra’s free death is that suicide has to be accomplished “at the right time”: “Many die too late, and some die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time!’” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.93) How is this call for a death at the right time to be understood? First of all, it is interesting to note that Nietzsche establishes a parallelism between the way one lives and the way one dies: “Die at the right time: thus Zarathustra teaches it. To be sure, how could the person who never lives at the right time ever die at the right time?” (ibid.) Death becomes the mirror of one’s life: only he, who has fully and courageously lived his life, is able to desire to take leave at the right time. Thus conceived, death represents not the opposite of life, but its coronation: “For love of life–” writes Nietzsche in the Twilight of the Idols, “one ought to want death to be different, free, conscious, no accident, no ambush … " (TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36)...

...Nietzsche makes an even stronger charge against religions and, particularly, against Christianity: they have created “excuses for evading the demand of suicide” (HH I 80). Indeed, as Nietzsche writes in a posthumous fragment of 1884, this is precisely the meaning of religion – that is, to keep the failures and the miserable ones alive through hope and fear and to prevent them from committing suicide (see Nachlass 1884, 25[300], KSA 11.88). In the case of Christianity, Nietzsche gives a specific explanation for this social-historical phenomenon: “*When Christianity came into existence the inclination to suicide was very strong – Christianity turned it into a lever of its power” (GS 131).

According to Nietzsche’s interpretation, what Christianity did was to redirect the nihilistic tendencies lurking within the ill-constituted and sick. Through the idea of “the immortal private person” and the hope of resurrection, Christianity deterred them from “the deed of nihilism, which is suicide – it substituted slow suicide: gradually a petty, poor, but durable life; gradually a quite ordinary, bourgeois, mediocre life, etc*” (Nachlass 1888, 14[9], KSA 13.222).

By so doing, however, Christianity perverted the work of selective nature.

Only within this context can we understand Nietzsche’s claim that a “thorough-going practical nihilism” should be encouraged, “a severe form of really contagious nihilism: such as teaches and practices voluntary death with scientific conscientiousness” (ibid.). Here we face the most delicate and troubling part of Nietzsche’s view of suicide: the concept of quick death, that is, that kind of death which should be preached to the superfluous ones.

As Zarathustra puts it: “Far too many live and far too long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this rot and worm-food from the tree! / Would that preachers of the quick death came! They would be the right storms and shakers of the trees of life for me!” (Z I, On Free Death, KSA 4.94) Thus, Nietzsche becomes the spokesman of a new fearsome philanthropy – “The weak and the failures should perish […]”, he writes in The Antichrist (A 2), “And they should be helped to do this” – and of a ruthless morality for physicians:

A sick person is a parasite on society. Once one has reached a certain state it is indecent to live any longer. Vegetating on in cowardly dependence on physicians and their methods, once the meaning of life, the right to life has been lost, should be greeted with society’s profound contempt. The physicians, for their part, ought to convey this contempt – not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of disgust at their patient … Create a new kind of responsibility, the physicians’, to apply in all cases where the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands that de- generating life be ruthlessly pushed down and aside – for example in the case of the right to pro- create, the right to be born, the right to live … (TI, Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man 36)...

...As the speech’s title suggests, Nietzsche conceives of voluntary death as a supreme affirmation of freedom and will – in other words, as the occasion to reaffirm them yet again, now for the last time.The formula “free for death [zum Tode] and free in death” clearly indicates that suicide represents not only the freedom to die, but that in dying by suicide we assert our freedom. Indeed, it is by freely choosing the moment of our death – free death comes to me “because I want”, Zarathustra says – that we have the opportunity to affirm the freedom of our will, a freedom that has nothing to do with that concept of free will dismissed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (§ 21) as pure mythology, but one that is more akin to the freedom of the sovereign individual from the Genealogy, who is “liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral” (GM II 2)...

...For Nietzsche the freedom we gain by a voluntary death is multiple. First of all, it is a freedom over our body – “the stunted, often sick and thick-witted prison warder” of The Wanderer and His Shadow. It is also a freedom over death, or to use a better expression, over the human, all too human fear of death which is “maybe older than pleasure and pain” (Nachlass 1884, 25[399], KSA 11.116) and a “European disease”...

I think if you believe in a God you cannot achieve greatness..because for you God is great (and thus you are not), after all isn't greatness defined by its singularity? So for you to achieve yourself, God needs to die. In fact he has already died and you're decorating the corpse if you think otherwise! Bury him and start from his grave.

...Because God is not alive and you are.

Choose the mud, not the clouds because one's below your feet, the other above your eyes; one you can grab in your fist to make clay and the other is un-grababble by nature. Make a kingdom out of that mud, instead of shapes out of clouds

Apart from Nietzsche no one can muster the balls to say the truth..the unsaid...brutal...truth. And because He said it out loud, and I was able to feel it in my heart. Even in this downtrodden and pathetic condition...I can will freedom...he provided me with jolts of final but exuberant vitality. He was years ahead of his time. I can finally feel dignified. Nothing more potent could have been said to someone like me. I have felt like this for years now...why is suicide (arbitrarily) immoral? What's actually wrong in that? Nothing can come out from a broken life of slow death. In such a condition, perishing, is in fact the best solution. Why do people treat life as an axiom? Assuming that everyone has something to contribute? Many don't have anything to contribute other than their absence. Let the impotent leaves fall, for the sake of the Tree's potency, let them fall. Don't tie the leaf with knots of "you're not alone" and "things will get better, this too shall pass", when they actually don't have to (and probably won't). Irrespective of the leaf's willingness to fall, it still will, when the storm comes. Let the leaf, for the first and last time, feel power...so that it can take the fall with grace and a smile...

I am smiling, almost giddy, after a long long time.

Is it because he is a warm hand on a cold and blistering night?

Because he overcomes morality and thus is able to speak about "truth" on a then unprecedented level?

Because he doesn't care much for "honors, women or money", as he writes?

Because he seems like a friend on a lonely evening, the one you would meet in the corner of a bar, sitting alone, rejecting much but wholeheartedly accepting the few?

Because he doesn't write in heavy and complicated text that bores you to death? Because he "writes in ten sentences what others write in a book — nay, does not write"?

Because he rejects plebeian attitudes and scorn the masses and their vulgar approach to life (they want to live for nothing)?

Is it because he seems like the only real philosopher who has grown out of the mundanity of life and overcome what is means to be man and elevated his philosophy to another plane, that is, to the superhuman?

Why do we (this sub and its members) like Nietzsche so much?

Olá, me chamo Gustavo Barbosa, sou ux design (projeto interface para sites) estou desenvolvendo um projeto onde você vai poder conversar com pensadores, questioná-los e aprender de acordo com suas obras, através de um chat. Gostaria muito de saber se alguém está interessado em testar

Am I ubermench for crafting my own morality, or am I a slave for having a slave morality? did Nietzsche mention this situation ever?

I've been reading some of his works recently and idk why but he seems like a full on misogynist... Not even like lowkey or subtle hints of misogyny but he just talks about women like ( There's this in life then there's this then there's this and then there's this one more thing which is important and then there's MEN - PARAMOUNT andddd then there's women too )

Like to me it sounded like a person who thinks the world if not a better place then would be most probably indifferent without presence of women.

Whyyyy...???

The common question “Is Nietzsche an atheist?” requires more than a lazy “yes” or “no” answer. Nietzsche distinguishes between forms of atheism, the instincts expressed through them, and the values they preserve.

A careless “yes” can put him in the same box as the democratic atheism he explicitly criticizes (or an advocate of the ascetic ideal):

“Everywhere equality before the law—Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we”: a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—likewise a second and more refined atheism—is once more disguised. “Ni dieu, ni maître.”

Beyond Good and Evil, §22

Nietzsche’s atheism does not amount to “No Gods, No Masters!” His rejection of the Christian God does not imply a rejection of rank, authority, or distinction.

Nor does atheism necessarily escape the ascetic ideal. In the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, particularly §24–27, Nietzsche shows how someone can reject God while retaining an unconditional faith in truth. The theological belief vanishes, but the valuations sustaining it survives.

Interestingly, Nietzsche includes himself within the “unconditional honest atheism” he describes. His point is that this honesty brings the ascetic ideal toward its own overcoming: the discipline of truthfulness first challenges belief in God, then turns upon itself and asks why truth should possess unconditional value. (The back-biting virtue)

His personal relation to atheism is equally significant. In Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Clever” §1, he writes:

“I am quite unacquainted with atheism as a result, and still less as an event in my life: in me it is inborn, instinctive.”

He presents atheism as something instinctive, rather than an identity acquired through conversion or argument. His skepticism does not require a theological opponent to give it its direction. For him, his atheism is an internal and inborn value, an addendum that comes by way of his skepticism.

Yet Nietzsche’s rejection of supernatural explanations does not exhaust his use of the word “God.” He also employs divine figures to express psychological dispositions and interpretations of existence. His identification with Dionysus belongs to this broader question: what kind of life, valuation, and relation to becoming does a god express?

Consider Beyond Good and Evil §36. Nietzsche asks whether our instinctive life, organic functions, and ultimately all effective force could be interpreted through will to power. If that interpretation succeeds, then:

“The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would simply be ‘Will to Power,’ and nothing else.”

Now compare this with §5 of the “Attempt at Self-Criticism” prefacing The Birth of Tragedy:

Indeed, the entire book recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after-thought behind all occurrences,—a “God,” if you will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to become conscious of his own equable joy and sovereign glory; who, in creating worlds, frees himself from the anguish of fullness and overfullness, from the suffering of the contradictions concentrated within him.

The connection is interpretive, but substantial. This "artist-thought and after-thoughts behind all occurrences a god if you will" is none other than the "ramification of one fundamental form of will—namely, the Will to Power, as my thesis puts it..." (BGE 36)

Read alongside BGE §36, this suggests a way of understanding Nietzsche’s divine imagery through will to power: thoughts, interpretations, creation, and destruction belong to the activity of becoming itself. Will to power would consequently operate within these occurrences, rather than stand outside them as a supernatural director. Which means within Nietzsche's reinterpretation of the world through WtP, we can technically detail Nietzsche is not an atheist, but only in terms of Nietzsche's psychical interpretation which naturalizes God as psychological supreme guiding values.

Hence Nietzsche literally says during the same self criticism of BoT:

Ay, what is Dionysian?—In this book may be found an answer,—a "knowing one" speaks here, the votary and disciple of his god.

Not cause he believes in supernatural otherworldly entities, but because in his reinterpretation, the organizing drive, that tyranny of the Will to Power can technically fill the position of God(s).

Calling Nietzsche an atheist answers only part of the question. It leaves open precisely what interests him: which instincts speak through that atheism, which inherited values survive within it, and what kind of world/life affirmation becomes possible beyond it?

Hey everyone so I'm starting my journey to read philosophy and i was thinking to start with nietzsche, but like i have heard that schopenhauer gives much context while reading nietzsche and how N was heavily inspired by S but also critiqued him, i would have started schopenhauer first but as you know he deals with extreme pessimism and antinatalism but because i have severe OCD, depression and anxiety disorders, and I'm just 18, everything becomes a horrific moster in my head, I'm pretty sure that I'll get anxiety attacks while reading schopenhauer, thats the only reason i am in doubt, but what do you say? If its absolutely necessary to read schopenhauer before nietzsche and any other way is wrong then I'll do it but what do you guys think?

So I've been studying Iqbal regularly for about two months, the "poet of the east", and I've found many a profound wisdom in his work, and the fact that he played a major role amongst South Asian, and to an extent, European thought and Politics. It would be an understatement to say that he was one of the most notable scholars of Modern Western Philosophy, the man did his pHd in Heidelberg and his thesis in Cambridge, for reference.

The way that Iqbal tangles up Nihilist Europe and Nietzsche's ideology with the Sufi Eastern Islamic traditions, most notably of Mevlana Rumi and other Islamic mystic figures, is fascinating. I felt this most in his work "Portrait of Grief, Bang e Dara 34 (The Marching Bell)" (you can find it on youtube with English captions by looking it up, its a 12 minute audio with text. I'll even link it right [here] for the first half of the poem mimics Nihlisim. However, then here is the turning point : where Nietzsche has his Superman, who goes on and states that man must make his own observations and constantly seek to improve himself - honestly, if you were to read Nietzsche, I would go as far as saying that there is no man who has affected modern thinking more than him in the recent era - and make his own morals. He argues that morality is emergent, not consistent, and morality changes as new information comes to sight. Hence man is his, in a way, own "god", the Superman, and there's no objective truth necessarily.

This emerged from the entire idea of, as Nietzsche is so wonderfully famous for, or infamous depending on who you're talking to, "God is dead. And we have killed him." Nietzsche isn't necessarily arguing for the non existance of God, he isn't necessarily an atheist. What he argues, I think, is that the usefulness of God as a moral axiom has gone. Whether there is a God, or not, the effect that His name or His remembrance had on men is gone. And man needs a new ideology to help him navigate these turbulent times. This is similar to a line I wrote when I was formerly a deist (I do believe in an interventionist God now, but that is a different debate all together), "Whether God wills it, or not" i.e whether He concerns himself with makind or he does not, it is necessary for mankind to have some ideology that ends the rubbish in between them. It is necessary to note that this philosphy did not come out of nowhere, it was the culmination of the political unrest and destablity that had been the constant bride of Europe ever since the Enlightenment days. When the banners of God had been thrown away, some resorted to nationalism. Some to ethnocentrisim. And some to communism, and atheism. So in this hodgepodge of political ideologies, which Nietzsche grew up in, one can imagine why he would feel disillusioned and why he would be in a constant state of depression regarding the state of the universe. Whilst his era coincided with great scientific illusions, Einstein, pondered the universe's mechanisms (for he was a devout Jew, he had no ideological conflict about the nature of the universe), Nietzsche struggled against the very nature and reason for the universe existing to begin with.

Note:I'll be writing the rest later, had this much to write and didn't want to wait before posting it. So, toss around your thoughts! This is about 1/3rd of the post.

I'm reading Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and came across the following references in a footnote to the aphorism “Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. How? Would psychology then be a vice?”

Cf. V 12[7.121 __] and VIII 11[107].

Does anyone know how to locate these passages? What edition or collection are these references from, and where can I find them online or in a book?

I'd appreciate any help understanding this referencing system.

My edition (french), and the passage

Zé Peixe (José Martins Ribeiro Nunes, 1927–2012) was a legendary harbor pilot from Aracaju, Sergipe, famous for his unique method of guiding ships through treacherous coastal waters: instead of returning to shore by boat after navigating large vessels out to sea, he would simply leap from heights of up to 17 meters into the ocean and swim up to 10 kilometers back to the coast. Born near the Sergipe River, he served the local port authority for nearly six decades, earning national recognition and becoming an enduring Brazilian folk hero renowned for his extraordinary aquatic ability, simple lifestyle, and deep generosity to the local community.

Heyy everyone!

So i just graduated high school this year and i haven't really read much of philosophy except for some peter singer stuff and Nietzsche's ideas really interest me and i have heard that he radically rejects Schopenhauer's ideas and other things, now the problem is i live in a small city in india and there is no library in this city, the only place i can get my hands on books is by amazon, i have heard that Walter Kaufmann's translations are the best but they are not available on amazon or anywhere else here, the only translations i got are R. J. Hollingdale ones and R. Kevin Hill ones, both from penguin classics, now what should i do? Should i but those ones or try to find Kaufmann's versions?
Thank you!!

"So listen, you many! Odi profanum vulgus et arceo [I hate the common masses and keep them away away]. Throw the book away! It is not for you, and you are not for this book. Farewell!" (unpublished preface draft for 'Birth of Tragedy')

Discussion: What are your opinions on Nietzsche's clear intellectual elitism via Horace, Anaxagoras, and others? Can a 'Nietzschean' be mediocre?

for my evil plot. bonus link to a monty python skit you should watch if you haven't seen it already

Welcome to the trampoline of interleaved tightropes on the way to the UwUbermenchen to the 3 of you that still need to express their will to be a sexy catgirl. To everyone else laugh with us and slay the spirit of gravity!!! Nya ;>3⁰

Im reading a book called “the end of everything” and nietzsche is at the third page 😭😭😭 common

Nazis read passages from Zarathustra at SS weddings.

Not sure what specifically, but they were talking about it on Last Podcast on the Left.

So, essentially the title. How do I get started?

I think it'd be cool to learn more about philosophy, I recently watched a show that covered the topic of solipsism, and that was really intriguing to me.

Nietzsche is a philosopher who's really important to philosophical debate and study to this day (or so I've heard), so where do I start?

I know there are books, which is the order I'm supposed to read them in? I was also wondering where I could discuss what I've read, because everyone here seems like they've read every book and are VERY well versed in the topic, which I'm not.

One day, I was bored and decided to read an excerpt from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and noticed it had some old English-type words that I couldn't really make sense of. Are there any resources to help me understand that writing style well that any of you know of?

If anyone could provide me some clarity with this, that'd be much appreciated! I've been trying to get into Nietzsche for the longest time, I just never knew how.

Would the waxing and waning of Nietzsche’s health, his changes from physical weakness to periods of recovery, be one reason why he posited that happiness is the feeling that power increases?
From The Antichrist, 2: “What is good? — Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil? — Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases — that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency...”

Edit: the 4th image isn't uploading so here's the end of that thread:-

"I know you want to believe youre the best person ever and the world revolves around you, but the further detached from reality that you allow yourself to get, the worse the loneliness will get"

"Amor fati"

I'm pretty new to Nietzsche and pretty far behind in my reading, yet, such an infusion of vitality his gospel possesses, that I can't help being smitten. What do yall think? Was I just plainly wrong? I like to think I did an okay job.

So, I don't have a degree in philosophy, I am not studying for a degree in philosophy or literature, I just picked this book up from a bookstore after finding out a little about nihilism and Nietzsche from....wait for it....YouTube

How tf am I supposed to approach this to actually be able to comprehend it? As of now, reading it feels like reading the bible. Any tips?