"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism...
[more]"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism and realism, Nietzsche assaulted Christianity, morality, and the entire Western philosophic tradition. The problem with Socrates, he wrote, is that he was ugly -- and that was enough of a refutation.
In one of his sharpest tactical moves against classical thought, Nietzsche claimed that morality is nihilistic. Its faith in abstractions -- the concepts of good and evil, a heaven that awaits us after death, principles of proper behavior -- causes believers to look away from life itself, from the flux of events, from the joy of living. "Amor fati," Nietzsche declared, is the principle of true existence: "love of fate." He urged his readers to embrace all experience without regret and without resentment. According to Nietzche, weak and decadent people are those who resist what they are; they make the wrong decisions, choices which result in sickness and indigestion (certainly a sign of a thwarted development).
From his early lectures on rhetoric and language and his first explosive book, "The Birth of Tragedy," through his final tomes, "Ecce Home," "Twilight of the Idols," and "The Anti-Christ," Nietzsche opined, digressed, ranted, observed, distorted, twisted, and inflated all that he saw, thought, and experienced. His books rarely sustain an argument for more than several pages; often, a point is shorter than a paragraph. Yet, even when his writings seem cranky, cantankerous, or grumpy, a sense of immanent joy remains -- even if it seemed to elude the author himself. After presumably suffering a mental breakdown in 1889, he lived the remainder of his life without writing or teaching. But perhaps such was his joy.
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