As someone else suggested - the same guy who correctly pointed out that atheism cannot have categories for good and evil, got upset about weakness and a slave mentality. What is wrong with that (just from Nietzche’s perspective)? He contradicts himself.
But even pretending that his argument was rational - the reason humility is a virtue and arrogance is a sin is because Humility is the understanding of our own mortality, our own littleness, our own limits - as we stand before all-loving, all-good, all-powerful God. Arrogance can have only the focus and worship on ones’ self. But this is a self that is so limited and in reality - so weak. Nietzsche is gone. Into nothingness (so he believed). So what good did all that yelling about power and strength do for him? It didn’t buy him one extra day of life. So, it’s irrational. Nothing matters, everything is reduced to nothing in the end. There is no purpose or meaning. Then - anyone (like Nietzche) who writes books attempting to explain things or get upset about things, or teach people how to have Power - are illogical and contradictory.
This is too stupid to think about. Evil is the deprivation of the good. It is a lack. Where does “power” come from?
Again, contradictory and idiotic for too many reasons to mention. Survival of the fittest is not a moral law. You either survive or not - and nobody does ultimately, not even the Nazis. You’re either fit or not. Beyond that, why should the fit survive? Because he says so? Because Darwin said so? That’s just an atheistic-religion.
LOL - prove that without using metaphysics.
Too funny. Nobody was forbidding Nietzche from obtaining some knowledge about what Christianity is-- but he just didn’t want to acquire it.
You do need to start reading some good Catholic books to get that poison out of your mind. Any number of apologetic books against atheism will touch on these issues. You have to be grounded in the certainty of God as necessary Being, necessary for any kind of reasoning, and necessary for objective morality. Catholic critiques of naturalist philosophy - Evolutionism - are important also.
Reggie, I think all your arguments are excellent especially the one about metaphysics!
We are in an especially fortunate position with an extra century and a bit’s scholarship, more education for more people (on and off), largely affordable books, public libraries, internet. And the blessings in our Anglo-American heritage of the last 150 years.
Nietzsche was a bloke, who said things. Like people do. The argument is more against those who promote him, to my mind. His dad was a Lutheran pastor and that was probably not like the nice Lutheran pastor in your town in the U.S. He probably had drummed into him that Catholicism was a worse kind of atheism than atheism itself.
It’s incumbent on those who promote him to admit that his lassitude in not continually critiquing his own and others’ critiques is a serious pitfall.
I don’t know what Nietzsche thought of what J H Newman had to say for example. Was Newman writing for a Prussian Lutheran readership? Could Newman leave unsaid some things that we knew in this country and Prussians didn’t?
In any event it’s not surprising as Ridgerunner points out, that people like him said things like that. The problems weren’t
only in him.
Anybody that is actually promoting his views should remember that Nietzsche was a gentleman of leisure, engaging in polemic during his few years of semi-fitness. He was essentially a poet. What we don’t get, and should expect of a “philosopher” that proponents actually propose to promote, is cut and thrust among members of the same and other faculties and similar institutions of learning. He only lectured for one year and that was in his own interpretation of some of the Classics.
So, I agree, he didn’t put in enough spade work around classics, philosophy, questions of God or anything. If he had done, like so many others, he still might not have ended up with views we could agree with all that much.
Whilst syllabuses must remain broad and even get broader, it would be good if university teachers would point out that Nietzsche wasn’t a philosopher in the sense of someone whose work was forged out of the same kind of hard graft as usual ones’ are.
Not only German Lutherans, most American and English Protestants and even the bulk of Catholics, in practice go with something suspiciously like the institutionalised acedia that has afflicted all the churches since about the year 1200 and only too loudly shouts the death at the lived out level, of the God Whose aim it once was to indwell. Of course we all repeat the official version of our faith and try to think we are adhering to it. Unbelief IS slavery.
Kierkegaard (another story teller) is often regarded as a forerunner of what are nowadays many varieties of existentialism and he advocated authenticity in response being given priority over convention when appropriate.
Somebody like Kant had no problem talking reams about God because it was the form in his day, and after all there really are the arguments. Perhaps what Nietzsche was saying was, what’s the point in any of the philosophy in the face of such a volume of unbelief and hypocrisy and it was as if society were on a search to replace man with a pretend superman - a search sadly as I write somewhat advanced in the UK.
I should have said Macintyre by the way, with a A in it.
