By Pentadact

bob_arctor: Neechy is wrong. Basically. E is always pronounced in German with a kind of a "a" or "uh" sound. Eine Frau. Eye-nuh Frow. Yeah. Right on.

valmordae: Your idea that Nietzsche had "noticed" that Man was just an animal, hopefully, does not refer to the fallacy that Nietzsche accepted Evolution or Darwinism. In fact, if you read some of his literature he was quite a polemic against Darwinism - as he believed it was contradictory and incompatible with the idea of the Overman.

It seems that Nietzsche was opposed to the idea of Modernism, in the same vein as Jonathan Swift and others. His criticism of a complete devotion to science is obvious and is seen in a large quantity of instances.

Anyway, back to the point, Nietzsche did not accept evolution.

And he probably did not "notice" that man was an animal from The Origin of Species, either, although I do not know of any sources that would support either argument.

Jason L: Er, what? No. Darwinian evolution, at least as it was seen at the time, is absolutely fundamental to his philosophy. The Ubermensch, as far 'above' modern and historical humanity as we are 'above' apes, is a direct descendant of the zeitgeist of progress, succession and hierarchy which Darwin's work inspired.

He did describe evolution as a tremendously destructive and dangerous idea, which at a stroke destroyed previous theories of morality and humanity. That revolution was the very reason he felt it necessary to propose a new theory, with evolution at its root.

Jason L: Yeah, here we go. http://www.fathom.co... ...index.html

Nietzsche was a philosopher, and his polemics are directed against 'Darwin and his followers' - that is, those philosophers who claimed to derive inspiration from Darwin and to whom Nietzsche was exposed. His objection was to the social implications they drew - that altruism was the rule within a species, that the cream would naturally rise to the top in society as they did in evolutionary history. He was right at home with the core of competition and selection, and would ondoubtedly have applauded the more selfish refinements which have been made.

Gabriel: Jason L is correct, Nietzsche not only wrote much polemic against evolutionary naturalism because random mutations harm an organism long before (if ever) they help it, but he also praised Christianity in the anti-Christ for the central point of its religious message: that man is not the center of things nor has he the power to reach the divine.

The Overman is only incidentally opposed to religions like Buddhism and Christianity because at the time he read them as praising weakness. Even he realized, as he pointed out in Kant, that he had a theologians blood. And indeed, the great thinker Paul Tillich has pointed out, anyone who poses the existential question of the despair of meaningless (death of God, loss of absolutes) and attempts to answer it affirmatively (what Nietzsche called the positive nihillism of the overman) is in essence a theologian.

Gabriel: Correction, my entry was intended to support valmordae's post.

Gabriel: To supplement:

"Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature." N. Gay Science, entry 109.

Nietzsche criticized the "cult of science" for upholding to absolute laws as if the universe were a mechanism or organism (including darwinism). To him, science was guilty of the same naiveties that religion was: it made absolute claims about the world. Here is another:

"An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not with our sort of arbitrary division and fragmentation, an intellect that saw the flux of events, would throw aside the concept of cause and effect and deny all determination." ibid, entry 111.

To supplement his praise of Christianity:

"Even Christianity has made a great contribution to enlightenment: it taught moral skepticism -- in a very impressive and effective way, accusing, embittering, but with tireless patience and subtlety. It destroyed in every individual human being the belief in one's "virtues." ibid, entry 122.

Remember that N. was accustomed to speak not just of the death of God in a final sense, but that the "old God is dead" (ibid, 143). N.'s philosophy is neither dependent on the old monarchic monotheism nor on evolutionary science. He states that only one thing is needful: "Giving style to one's character -- a great and rare art!" (ibid, 290).

God's reality does not contradict N.'s philosophy. His conception of the overman is on the horizon of a society that has lost its belief in an idol: the old monarchic God of Europe's religion. This was because it provided an easy and uncritical defense of moral absolutism. Just because darwinism inspired his conception of the geneology (and therefore relativity) of moral values does not mean that there can be neither, but that they must not be taken for granted. Every value is affirmed positively all the time, in a life which the overman wills to recur for all eternity. This same sort of view is embeded in the religious philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, who understood religious faith in much the same way as N understood the will to power: to live with the risk of absolutely everything on the line. An overman is one who has the courage to affirm their existence positively despite its lack of inherent value.

My teacher, Dr Charles Guignon, was instructed at the University of California Berkeley by Dr Derk Pereboom. They are leading scholars in existentialism. Dr Guignon is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Martin Heidegger. I have had the fortune to study under him, where I formulated these interpretations of the work of Nietzsche.

Nice blog! Kudos.

Gabriel

J-Man: Just bought 3 Nietzsche books, going to start them tonight.

icouldbeahero: So, between the facts you like Nietzsche and math and write amusing prose I have decided you are awesome.

Jazmeister: I support this decision.

Palms: I'm in the middle of reading Thus Spake Zarathustra after rewatching 2001. That whole film is like a Nietzsche love-in. Incidentally, I've also been getting into Bowie recently and a lot of his stuff has Nietzscherian (is that a word?) undertones.

icouldbeahero: Nietzschean, I think.