My statement, "Your response felt rather condescending, rude and insulting to me." I'm sensing red flags from your response based on past experiences with various temperaments, and your not wanting to join me in both of us taking a more mature route for both of us. I think I handled it the best I could admitting my errors at the start of this thread and expressing how I was feeling as a new poster on this message board and wanting to move forward constructively.
So at this point I will just post the last two exchanges we had and ask if you honestly do not see your response as coming off as condescending rude and insulting? If you and/or the audience here don't think so and this is normal digital behavior on this board then I will adapt, and decide if this is worthy of my time to continue. I already said I'm not going to engage in negative tit-for-tat and I wanted to have a discussion that is mutually enriching for you and I and the audience who may be interested in Nietzsche. Hopefully you are game. So here are my last our last two exchanges and I'm asking you (and/or the audience) if both of us did not engage in unproductive communications and if your last commentary to me was not condescending, rude and insulting:
Posted by: Time in Motion ( )
Date: January 16, 2021 11:45PM
Re: Were Christians ever the majority on RFM?
Lot's Wife,
I did not say “ the Christian communities had selected the core documents by 120 AD.” I said “the early Christian communities decided the the basic outline of the Canon themselves” and the early communities likely had “a collection of Christian documents that looked very similar” (note the words: very similar) to the later official canon and I then clearly said, “it's true that it was later that the Bible collection became official.” As you can see I did not say as you falsely claim “the Christian communities had selected the core documents by 120 AD.” So you are countering with a Straw Man. I agree with what you wrote after that because I have read or skimmed much of Ehrman myself and what you wrote actually harmonizes with what I wrote because it appears we have read the same stuff.
I have read or listened via audiobook to most of Nietzsche and consulted scholars on N, so I am surprised you are so confidently disagreeing with me. You wrote: “N never wanted to be a preacher; theology was a required subject in his gymnasium, and he got high grades in it, but he never voluntarily studied it let alone intended to become a minister.” I didn't have the patience to read through all the bios I read on N on my kindle to quote to you how you are mistaken, so I just googled it and this popped up first thing: “After graduation in September 1864,[59] Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn in the hope of becoming a minister.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_NietzscheI realized it is Wikipedia so I then saw this, “By 1864, he focused his attention on becoming a minister and began studying theology and philology at the University of Bonn.” Source:
http://www.philosophicallibrary.com/german-philosopher-friedrich-nietzsche/You said N. never wrote an autobiography. So I googled that and found several places that explain that his book Ecce Homo is an autobiography.
I agree N hated Christianity with a passion. So now you appear to agree with me on that from previously saying in your first confidently claiming I am wrong, “He was not advocating the breakdown of Christian morality” (Date: January 15, 2021 02:52AM). You then wrote “To the extent that he praised Jesus, it was Jesus the iconoclast and not the image that emerged from the Pauline-Church Fathers-Constantinian process.” Yes I’d say that is correct, which he covers in his book The Antichrist. But again, he did however not only praise Jesus but also criticized Jesus as well for being partially responsible for Christian mortality. Here is a good example of what I am talking about where he criticizes Jesus’ moral ethic: see
http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/human-all-too-human/aphorism-87-quote_a576767c1.htmlI just read TSZ [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] where he further criticizes Jesus’ ethic and Christian morality, but I don’t have the patience to quote from it, but if you read it yourself you will see what I mean. I recommend the Graham Parkes translation for seeing all the NT references provided in footnotes (which are quite illuminating), showing that he was replacing the good and ethical role-model-Jesus with his beyond Right and Wrong, anti role model Zarathustra the godless. It is clear if you read TSZ that Zarathustra is an anti-Christ, a reversal of Jesus’ ethic of kindness, giving, caring for the poor and the needy. N wants his readers who are higher men (elite men), above the rabble, to return to the Greco Roman ethic and become “hard,” (tough), avoiding “Christian” pity/compassion, and by dying as hyperboreans (as he put is elsewhere) their “spirit” can then pass on into future generations and evolve the superhuman species (either memetically/culturally or genetically is unclear), so that a new post-Christian band of higher “men” (or perhaps new hominids) will rule over the leftover human rabble. He repeatedly says in TSZ that mankind is basically polluted by Christian morality and so Christian men need to die off so a new species can emerge that say Yes to the earth and evolving Life. I learned this in part from reading his notes when writing TSZ.
At this point in my response, I’d like to know your sources because it is the opposite of everything I have read from what I consider the top Nietzsche scholars. For example, you say, “At no point did N seek to eliminate the Zoroastrian influence on Christianity … To the contrary, Zarathustra is Zoroaster, the father of Zoroastrianism.” In all due respect, are you serious! I’m baffled. Nietzsche’s makes it clear in Ecce Homo:
“I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name ‘Zarathustra’ means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. But this question is itself at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he had longer and greater experience here than any other thinker…what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the supreme virtue…To tell the truth and to shoot well with arrows: that is Persian virtue. – Have I been understood? The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.”
He was using Zarathustra so the reader thinks of dualistic Zoroastrianism which N is seeking to unravel and reverse with his immoralist monism. Have you actually read Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Ecce Homo, etc? I really am struggling to understand how you can get N. so wrong yet express your views so confidently. Also see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra#SynopsisYou wrote “He wanted his new Superman to be like that, to engender a radical new vision for humanity that would unite people in achieving higher aspirations.” I think you have a watered down liberal Nietzsche you read somewhere, or something. Superman/Overman is not meant to inspire people today to higher aspirations like Jesus did for Christians, the free spirits and higher men like Napoleon or Goethe (or Nietzsche and his Zarathustra) are meant to do that. The Superhuman is not a goal for men now, but is an unclear future hope for a new post-Christian species or culture. Just as we evolved past homo erectus to become homo sapiens, and evolved beyond Romans into Christians, N likely expected his higher men to live in such a way so as to pass on a new spirit into future generations that would evolve humans into something else, the Supermen or Overman/Beyond-moral-man. He begins TSZ saying I love those who die as higher men so their spirit passes over the bridge to the Overman. The Overman is what comes after civilized human beings. OK, in a way sure the Superman is meant to replace the Christian God and the Messiah species, so in a way I guess it can be seen as an inspiration. But it is not so innocent as you make it sound, N was a nihilist, an optimistic one, but still a nihilist. His god was Dionysus, the personification of the amoral will to power.
Regarding scientific materialism, I have read almost everything he wrote and he very much despised scientific materialism, as what he called the will to truth. He was influenced by Heraclitus. He promoted only practical truths toward exercising your will to power, but if truth was not useful, then lying was OK. He was pro science yes, as practically useful, but did not care much for logic and constantly broke all the rules of formal logic with for example his constant ad hominems, etc.
Yes, I am aware of Wagner and his sister. So we agree there. Except that I think there have been a lot of liberal professors at University that have tried to gloss over Nietzsche’s full attitude of the Jews. He was not what we’d call an anti-Semite, but he probably held an elitist prejudge against Jews like many did. He had mixed things to say about Jews and Judaism to say the least. For example, here is what one person writes on N and anti-Semitism, “In another place, Nietzsche writes that Jewish scholars support logic because logic “makes no distinction between crooked and straight noses” (TGS 348). Source:
https://www.atlassociety.org/post/nietzsche-and-the-jews-judaism-and-anti-semitismRead the whole short article in the link for the full context.
Many scholars find that his last works are a commentary on TSZ and N himself said TSZ is his best book or something to that effect. So I don’t think you should try to distance yourself from TSZ. But we agree that his other books should be read along with TSZ. Regarding your last statement you seem to just want to disagree with me through straw men arguments. You said, “And it was not a madman who said ‘God is dead:" You then said N said it not the madman. I actually wrote, “Nietzsche’s madman …” so OF COURSE I know N said it, as the madman is a character in HIS parable. Yeesh! Even more, the madman does say: “Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Posted by: Lot's Wife ( )
Date: January 17, 2021 01:15AM
Re: Were Christians ever the majority on RFM?
This is growing tedious.
1) You say that the early Christians had basically reached agreement on canonical texts by 120 AD and without political pressure. You cite Ehrman in support of that, but you then say you haven't really read much Ehrman. That is obvious. You should read the sources you cite because you misconstrue him.
2) You say again that Nietzsche wanted to be a minister. I repeat that is false. He took a class for one semester in college because that was the course to which he was admitted. He dropped it at the earliest possible moment, and his letters show he despised Christianity long before that. If you'd read his letters or a real biography, you would know that he hated Christianity from his early teen years.
3) You said Nietzsche wrote an autobiography. I said he wrote no autobiography. You then indicate Ecco Homo. Say whatever you want, Ecco Homo is NOT an autobiography: an unacknowleged intellectual odyssey, perhaps, but it's not at all an autobiography. Moreover like Geneaology of Morals, it is historically flawed. Nietzsche was a polemicist, not an historian.
4) I said Nietzsche treated Jesus as a Superman but disliked Christianity. You Take issue with that. I stand by my previous comments. As is well understood, Nietzsche used men like Zarathustra and Jesus metaphorically--meaning that he stripped them of much of their actual character and presented them as models. If you can't deal with such contradictions, you'll never understand the philosopher.
5) You really need to read about his relationships with his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother. You cannot understand his hostility to Christianity or even the nature of the Christianity he experienced, without knowing his family background.
6) Next a digression on Thus Spake Zarathustra and Nietzsche's understanding of the prophet. You said he was the origin of binary thinking. Putting aside the fact that the yin-yang dichotomy was already present in China and that the same thing was evident in Indo-Greek thinking from about 1,000 BCE, how much do you think Nietzsche really understood about Zoroastrianism? The Avesta was not translated into English until the 20th century, and it was barely available in other European languages in Nietzsche's day. Furthermore, none of the major Farsi histories of Zoroaster or commentaries on his religion were available to Nietzsche. So I repeat: he used Zarathustra as a metaphor, an icon, and knew very little about the man or his faith.
7) You insist on treating TSZ as if it were a logical text. It is not. It is a song about a Superman, and it ends in its final book on a depressed note because Nietzsche realized he hadn't really succeeded. I'm not sure how you can possibly read that as an exposition of his overall historical philosophy because it was never intended as such.
8) You claim that Nietzsche had an "elite prejudice" against Jews. That is utterly ridiculous. His best friend was a Jew and he respected the Jewish emphasis on education and logic. He abandoned Wagner and a lot of other friends and mentors over anti-semitism and denounced German nationalism for that reason as well.
9) As for "God is dead," you refer to one of his works. In fact, he said it in BGE and at least a third book as well. When he did so in the other books, there was no discussion of a madman at all. They were Nietzsche's words and sentiments. Moreover, when a classically educated writer introduces a madman, he often does so to express transcendent logic. As Foucault showed in detail, Nietzsche was doing what Shakespeare and the ancient Greek playwrights did. The blind man, the fool, the court jester: those were vehicles for the highest truths to a philologist like Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is not the sort of philosopher you can master from books on tape. It takes a lot more effort than that.
END QUOTE