He was wrong. He criticizes ascetic ideals and defends life-affirming morals, which he seems to define as the creative, emotional, unconstrained part of ourselves, the proactive man who celebrates his terrenal existence, not the contemplating man who wishes to observe an ideal, non-existing platonic heaven. Dionysus over Apollo, etc.
But both parts of ourselves serve the same goal. The rational and measured search for the platonic idea of the good, and the emotional search for instant gratification, both have happiness as their end goal. Both are driven by a dopaministic reward system in our nervous network. Dyonisus is just more ancient in the evolutionary history of our brain, the mammal limbic system and therefore simpler and harder to control, while Apollo is basically the neocortex, which is able to regulate emotions so we don't fuck up and regret our impulsive decissions, so we can plan ahead and have a functioning civilization.
But the worst thing is that he calls this a slave morality, a priestly or jewish idea, in contrast to the aristocratic "master morality" of doing whatever you want whenever you want. What the fuck. That is what brainlets and monkeys would do. Rulers who act like this lose power very soon.
Furthermore, he recognizes that this slave morality, this ethical system based on self-control and rejection of impulsive behavior by beast-like people, as a new thing for humans, and thus he calls it a degeneration over the original master morality. But that is a contradiction. He was valuing creativity before, he praised men who invented their own morals. Well, there you have a completely new set of morals, invented by men alone, not found in any inferior animal, a moral so original and creative it can prove a challenge to the ancient masters. Nietzche should be praising the genius of this invention.
First, go read the World as Will and Idea. It's not your fault you're a materialist, but you might as well get cured while you're young. Then go read Nietzsche a little more closely. The first thing he's trying to do is btfo Germany, which is why he sets this up in the first place. In the end, though, he thinks the master morality is a bad idea too. The superman doesn't put himself into restrictive relations like "master" or "slave". The superman is independent. >We hyperboreans, we live on mountaintops Is what he's after. He thinks that ethics should be individual and independent, that each person should make them for their own sake as an expression of their full potential.
James Russell
Cringe and elementary reading bro. Come back after highschool
Julian Ward
How exactly am I wrong? The whole metamorphosis passage of Thus Sprach is about what I just said
Logan Gutierrez
I'm joking. I've never read Nietzsche
Noah Williams
/board
Samuel Kelly
>criticizes ascetic ideals and defends life-affirming morals, which he seems to define as the creative, emotional, unconstrained part of ourselves Whenever I see criticism of Nietzsche it is almost always framed in this dichotomy sense where life-affirming somehow isn't so affirming cause you have posed life-affirming and life-denying as opposites in themselves. When Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal life denying, he isn't saying that discipline and contemplation are useless - he is challenging those that practice 'discipline' and 'contemplation' to up their fucking game or die. There are many things to affirm of life. Nietzsche is saying asceticism becomes life-denying when it has the pretense of holiness and sufficient material conditions sustaining the conditions of its practice
Colton James
>when it has the pretense of holiness >"as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself..." ~somewhere in bge
Jacob Jenkins
>He criticizes ascetic ideals Can you provide quotes where he does this?
Chase Harris
Not OP, but the Genealogy of Morals has an entire section dedicated to the critique of asceticism.
Carter Reyes
>Dionysus over Apollo I don't know how you came to that conclusion from reading Nietzsche, but he believed that there should be a balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The slave morality of Christianity caused Man to turn inward and suppress the Dionysian yes, but his solution was not to reject the Apollonian and revert to a master morality. Instead it was to become the Overman through overcoming a period of nihilism (like Zarathustra retreating to the cave) following the death of God. The Overman is beyond Good and Evil, beyond master and slave, and beyond Apollo and Dionysus. Of course how exactly to do this is unclear to both Nietzsche and the reader.
William Lewis
If there is an entire section then it should be pretty easy to produce at least one quote where he makes such a criticism.
Wyatt Cruz
OP, how much of Nietzsche have you read? It sounds like you started with "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and got turned off by its aphoristic and impenetrable style. You should probably start with "On the Genealogy of Morals" and "Beyond Good and Evil" before moving on to Zarathustra.
Daniel Brown
>superman it's overman you dumbass
Isaac Gonzalez
Sorry I didn't have it in front of me.
>But is he. really a physician, this ascetic priest?-We have seen why it is hardly permissible to call him a physician, however much he enjoys feeling like a "savior" and Jetting himself be reverenced as a "savior." He combats only the suffering itself, the discomfiture of the sufferer, not its cause, not the real sickness: this must be our most fundamental objection to priestly medication.
This is several pages into the third essay of the Genealogy, entitled "What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?". He talks about how asceticism is basically a mental illness. It's very spread out and so hard to pinpont a small section where he explicitly says >asceticism bad in just a few sentences.
Anthony Ross
Sorry, I read an older translation. Is the difference really that important?
Grayson Gomez
Sorry for the bad formatting, I thought I had all the line breaks taken out. Copying from a pdf fucks everything
>But both parts of ourselves serve the same goal. The rational and measured search for the platonic idea of the good, and the emotional search for instant gratification, both have happiness as their end goal Correct, but once you bring biology into the game everything loses its magic
Mason Nguyen
You didn't read "The Birth of Tragedy," he doesn't say "The Dionysian is more desirable than the Apollonian" or any such nonsense. In the essay itself, despite what he said later, he uses Schopenhauerian terminology and associates Apollo with the principle of sufficient reason and Dionysus with the metaphysical Will. He also praises the creative spirit of the Jews in relation to slave morality, and calls them the "strongest, purest, toughest race in Europe" in BGE.
Lincoln Powell
You need to break all of your preconception with Nietzsche and remember BGE, Ecce Homo, and everything as a whole.
Thomas White
OP here, I admit I have not read much, so I appreciate the comments in this thread
