Quote: (07-19-2017 11:08 AM)Stanfield Wrote:
My favourite philosophers are Diogenes and Schopenhauer. I just saw a documentary about Nietzsche. Maybe I am too stupid to understand him but it all sounds like gibberish. Can someone summarise and explain what is so great about Nietzsche? Does anyone else feel confused with his ideas?
His ideas veered all over the place and he changed his mind a couple of times, so it's hard to pinpoint exactly what his thought was.
He was, however, a very original thinker and had an interesting writing style.
He is most famous for his doctrine of the superman, which I'd summarize as follows:
You have a guy who wants to elevate and evolve society. To elevate society he needs to make new rules, which offends conservative parts of society. Despite the initial hostility from conservative elements, the revolutionary ideas of the guy take hold, and effectively elevate society to a new level of operating.
This is in order to elevate society to his own higher level of being. As apes had to evolve into men, so men have to evolve into something more than themselves - supermen.
Eventually, though, society becomes stale and uncreative and trapped in these rules, and is unable of any further elevation and evolving.
So then a new guy comes along, with new rules of how to live, and the cycle repeats, every time men evolving into a higher level of being.
So in order for society to evolve, a guy, a super-man or over-man, has to 1) disbelieve in the old way of doing things and 2) be willing to be sacrificed for the new way of doing things.
In essence, tomorrow's messiah is today's heretic. Jesus was a heretic in his day, but was a messiah for the new age. According to Nietszche, the next messiah will sweep away Christianity and will at first seem to be a heretic - hence Nietszche's declaration that 'God is dead'. That is, the old God and the old morality that came with the religion was stale and old, and a new God and a new morality would sweep it away, and eventually that new thing would become old and be swept away again.
Nietszche, I believe, was trying to explain why society crucified Christ, executed Socrates, scorned Buddha, etc; and yet later honoured the very men they spat at a few generations earlier.
The reason this particular doctrine became famous is 1) he wrote about it in a pseudo-religious style using vivid metaphors in his book 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', which I guess was his way of paying homage to religious innovators in general and 2) he basically declared Christian society as dead and its morals outdated, and that Europe required a saviour to bring a new faith into it, at a time when Atheism was still a crime in many places and 3) because Adolf Hitler declared himself a superman, which did lead to a lot of people analysing his often opaque work.