r/Nietzsche • u/Possible_Camp2244 • Aug 08 '26
Original Content Biggest irony
Nietzsche believed this and said in his various work that he is writing for exceptional rare people not for the herd and now he is most mainstream and popular philosopher in masses and favorite of edgelords
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u/Lain_Staley Aug 08 '26
There exists far, far too much resentment in the masses for Nietzsche to be mainstream in any non-bastardized form.
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u/jacques-vache-23 Aug 08 '26
Accusations of resentment can also be a slave morality.
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u/Training-Individual1 Aug 14 '26
This is the kind of spin a cult would pull lol.
That aside, I'm curious about the exactly what kind of chain of reasoning you ground that statement in.
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u/jacques-vache-23 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
A cult? I'm curious about YOUR chain of reasoning. "Resentment" can be a way to say "Shut up and listen to your betters". Well, fk that.
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u/Training-Individual1 Aug 16 '26
I'm not making any cult claims about your statement. I'm just saying that you'd oftentimes find people defending their 'religious group' with a similar logical framework.
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u/jacques-vache-23 Aug 16 '26
I doubt religious people care much what Nietzsche said. His idea of "ressentiment" has a much a defensive nature as religious ideas against the powerful. And Nietzsche actually was a timid, polite, quiet, sickly man. One could easily psychologicalize his ideas as he psychologizes religion.
I've exerted power and I had money. In the end I gave most of my money away to people in need simply because it weakened me and it strengthened them. I did armed security in a bandit zone for years and never fired a shot in anger. Most of the powerful today are far from supermen. Then aren't transcending anything. They are closer to the last man, overly impressed with puny achievements and struggling against making room for something better.
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u/Mooseman72V2 Aug 09 '26
99.9% of people haven’t read anything from him and 95% of people wouldn’t even recognize the name
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u/Top_Mongoose8861 Aug 09 '26
It doesn't matter anyway. He is only useful to those whom he wrote for.
In fact I am happy he is popular, so his intended audience can find him easier.
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u/Artur_Gordon_Pym Aug 09 '26
You cant even understand him without reading previous philosophers so number of people actually reading him well is small
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u/Imaginary_Arrival974 Aug 08 '26
Everybody here talks about the masses as if they are not a portion of a social body, a social contract, and thus a portion of a mass. You guys are the very mass.
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u/Mslmrock99 Aug 08 '26
If anything, it is symptomatic of the success of liberal-capitalism. It’s the predominant modern ideology and governs the worldview of most in the west. So it’s hardly surprising that such an individualist philosopher would appeal to those shaped by such an ideology. The ironies are many since the very ideology produces the conditions for the last man.
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Aug 08 '26
But what matters Zarathustra!
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Aug 08 '26
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u/No_Worldliness5157 Aug 09 '26
For those who couldn't make the connection, that's a nod to "as the proverb of Zarathustra saith, 'What doth it matter'."
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u/roch_ipum Aug 08 '26
I mean to be fair he lived in the 1800s where being an academic type was much rarer and required you to devote your life to it, i dont think the stance would be the same when anyone can just google him and read his works
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u/Historical-Food-4705 Aug 09 '26
i think he is right and for that reason nietzsche tries to write hard to understand ,so to understand, you have to put in effort.
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u/No_Worldliness5157 Aug 09 '26
Has anybody actually run "Zarathustra" through a Gunning Fog Index bot to find its reading level? It's all about the lengths of the sentences.
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u/Historical-Food-4705 Aug 21 '26
is this insult?
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u/No_Worldliness5157 Aug 21 '26
See "Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog Scores : Useful?" from r/writing on Reddit. Newspapers famously tend to be on a 6th-grade reading level, and the opening sentence of "A Tale of Two Cities" is on the post-graduate level just because it's so long.
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u/Historical-Food-4705 Aug 23 '26
okay now i understood it, never got the context in first comment, thought you are saying i am a bot
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u/I-mmoral_I-mmortal Swohlgeraten Aug 09 '26
Not like the majority of people who read Nietzsche even remotely understand Nietzsche.
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u/No_Worldliness5157 Aug 09 '26
But what doth it matter! The wind cometh out at last.
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u/I-mmoral_I-mmortal Swohlgeraten Aug 10 '26
A refreshingly cool north wind in the muggy bog of the marketplace.
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u/No_Worldliness5157 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Aye. "The figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and in falling the red skins of them break. A north wind am I to ripe figs. Thus, like figs, do these doctrines fall for you, my friends: imbibe now their juice and their sweet substance! It is autumn all around, and clear sky, and afternoon." Perhaps a vague nod to the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree in Luke 13? Could you imagine traipsing the Chemin de Nietzsche in Èze? They say it's a 90-minute hike.
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u/Mesoseven Aug 10 '26
I mean, I think whoever his intended readers are, they certainly would love reading the books more than worrying if they were the rare ones nietzsche was talking about.
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u/Xavant_BR Aug 11 '26
Ok maga... and what you want here? a hugh? looking for a friend? someone to tell you that is not your fault the fact you live a miserable life? nietzche fans have nothing to do with it... get over it. Nietzche mainstream in a era where internet is plenty with conservative idiots? what a joke .
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u/LucienNyx6666 Aug 09 '26
He also said he distrusted systems. Now, people call themselves “Nietzscheans”. Anti-dogmatism became another dogma.
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u/I-mmoral_I-mmortal Swohlgeraten Aug 09 '26
That's not how that works. Nor is a title a dogma... lol
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u/LucienNyx6666 Aug 09 '26
Ok so enlighten me: how does it work?
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u/I-mmoral_I-mmortal Swohlgeraten Aug 10 '26
Well, it's like when one realizes a selfless person is still doing what they do out of the desire and pleasure it brings them and thus they are selfish.... it's a loop.
But, as far as dogma goes, that prescribes an ought for how YOU ought to live... to outright deny the lives, experiences, and perspectives of others.
For Nietzsche, Perspective is a fundamental condition of life, where one respects their own instincts, rather than say half of them are from Satan and need to be killed off...
In otherwords, a Nietzschean lives in accordance with their own rank ordering of values.
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u/LucienNyx6666 Aug 10 '26
Alright, but a Nietzschean generally accepts many of the core premises of his philosophy. One of them being that life has no inherent meaning. If life has no inherent meaning, then Nietzsche urges you to create your own. However, this is a normative practice and a prescription for the problem of meaninglessness. Any philosophy that provides an ethical or normative practice is dogmatic, though not in the colloquial sense of the word. In ancient philosophy, “dogma” is a foundational tenet, principle, or settled opinion adopted by a specific school of thought. In this respect, Plato is dogmatic. As are the Epicureans, Stoics, and yes, Nietzscheans. Anti-dogmatism would require an absence of collected teachings. Yet, humans seem incapable of not developing a written or oral account of principles they take to be foundational. Nevertheless, I don’t see how Nietzscheans escape the charge of dogmatism. Even if we use the colloquial definition of the word. As soon as you say, “For Nietzsche…”, you’re already implicated in doing something analogous to what Christians do: “well, according to the Bible… [insert teaching]”. Same structure, different metaphysics. Furthermore, check this out: 1. If the rejection of dogmatism is treated as a normative imperative, then the rejection of dogmatism entails commitment to a normative principle. 2. If the rejection of dogmatism entails commitment to a normative principle, then the rejection of all normative principles is self-defeating. 3. Therefore, if the rejection of dogmatism is itself treated as a normative imperative, then the rejection of all normative principles is self-defeating. So you see, anti-dogmatism can itself become another dogma. “Reject inherited meaning” is, in fact, a normative imperative. The very label “Nietzschean” betrays its own normative imperative. You’re implicitly saying “I am inheriting someone else’s framework for existence” when the point was to eliminate inherited belief. How, then, is this any different from inheriting a religious title? Dogmatism, as understood colloquially, ends with the refusal to identify with a label at all. You may find that you accept the premises and conclusions of the philosopher who postulated them, but at some point, there needs to be a sense of separation. So my final questions are these: are you creating your own values because you have examined that there is an apparent lack of meaning, or are you doing it because this was Nietzsche’s conclusion? Why this conclusion and not something else? How do we know that life is inherently meaningless, and why should we accept Nietzsche’s account over Plato, Christianity, or something else entirely?
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Aug 08 '26
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u/No_Worldliness5157 Aug 09 '26
Believable bullshit? As a Jewish friend of mine said long ago, if you can't recognize bullshit when you see it, then how is it that you can't smell it?
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u/mytwoba Aug 08 '26
"The worst readers are those who act like plundering soldiers. They take out some things that they might use, cover the rest with filth and confusion, and blaspheme about the whole." Human, All Too Human, book II, Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions: 137)