But be aware that Nietzsches Zarathustra has not much in common with the original Zarathustra.
Rather the opposite, the original Zarathustra is considered the one, who brought the dualistic thinking of good vs. evil into this world.
Nietzsche wanted to get rid of it, to go beyound good and evil, so he lets the creator of this (in his and my opinion) harmful philosophy negate this philosophy.
>> "It’s common to declare that you are “beyond good and evil,” to adopt ethical nihilism"
This may have been in a related article on the site, but, if this is a reference to Nietzsche, as it seems to be, he was not a nihilist, ethical or otherwise. The book was called Beyond Good and Evil, and he points out this is not the same as Beyond Good and Bad. He advocated the opposite of nihilism: value creation as the basis for meaning.
Just pointing this out as I find Nietzsche is often misunderstood to be a nihilist.
> Is it any surprise that Hitler and Mussolini displayed the cruelest forms of Nietzschean behavior — even drew directly upon Nietzsche as inspiration for their atrocities?
What he's calling "Nietzschen behavior" is not Niestzchean. But then again, Nietzsche is the most misunderstood philosopher.
I think his ideas about us humans are brilliant. Still are very relevant. We didn't change. I believe Nietzsche turned out to be extremely far-sighted.
Would Zarathustra be the opposite of your scumbag description?
So I ain’t read the book from OP or Noetzsche but ain’t Nietzsche explicitly say this in Zarathustra or something. I’m sure I didn’t do a good reading but I thought I remember hearing him talk about the incredible violence of what the op article would call “human domestication”
>> Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how society functions best.
It was Nietzsche's great insight that internal considerations play a much larger role in constructing morality than external considerations. See, in particular, _On the Genealogy of Morals_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_. Nietzsche's first questions on encountering a morality were always: what "instincts" are active here? Does this ethic arise from a overwelling of strength and confidence, or from resentment, envy, and fear? Nietzsche called the former good and the latter bad. He despised the Political Correctness of his time. I've no doubt he would have attacked the PC beliefs of our era as well, seeing them the same way that pg does: as arising out of fear.
>>It’s easy to see why Nietzsche sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today
> The true Übermensch would never give a second thought (or the light of day) to such a piddling subject as this, one who exhibits all the frailties and animal passions of the last man! "Second chances" and "forgiveness" are just as much symptoms of christian morality as good and evil themselves. Remember always that justice died with God. Our only arbiter is the creative life, is the aesthetic domain.
>Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of Amor fati.
He looked down on any philosophical idea that uplifts your soul like stoicism, buddhism (deliberately making his work and ideas seem scary to them: happened to me when I first got into his ideas) etc
> One of the things Nietzsche hated most were life denying philosophies. If your philosophy of life made you weaker, then it was evil.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. I think that Nietzsche observed philosophies and decided some that thought they were life affirming were life denying, but I don't necessarily think built into that is hatred. Indeed, I think you can take out of Genealogy that he rather admired the slaves. Their life denying philosophy served their ends, after all.
I actually think Nietzsche probably has more in common with the Stoics than not. They both seek to overcome a world that might deny them. One through acceptance, one through self-overcoming.
>His entire corpus basically deals with how to escape nihilism
You must admit there is some sort of grand comedy in this: Nietzsche's one 'novel', "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" entire plot line is about a man who tries to warn society of the evils of nihilism and instead of being scared-off by it, all the people he warns fall in love with the idea (ie. willing trade their dangerous freedom to gain safety).
Its a deeply ironic that the current pedestrian understanding of him is that he advocated "atheism and nihilism". You almost couldn't make it up.
> At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical project are attempts to re-ground morality on something other than the crumbling foundations of 'Western values.'
And in the process of doing so, he did a really good job of destroying what was left of traditional western values. The problem was, he didn't build anything adequate in their place. That doesn't necessarily make him evil. But it left the road wide open for those who were evil to use his destruction of values as their rationale for not having any (or rather, for having an evil set of values, and actions to match).
> If you can't get more than 'do what you want' from reading Nietzsche, that's not his failing.
It can be. He's not known for clarity. That's on him.
But from what I've heard, Zarathustra was the first to tell people of the difference so that they could see it.
No reference, just something I think I've read or heard somewhere, sometime. Or maybe Nietzsche[1] said it somewhere.
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1998
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