I just had this thought pass my mind yesterday, it is on how paradoxical or ironic Nietzsche’s view on conformism. In the first hand, he critiques conformity, which is greatly seen in his treatment of morality and of course his famous critique of herd morality. While on the other, he despises Socrates for introducing dialectics, which is supposed to be a method that challenges existing norms or ideas. Well, I had to share my thoughts here in hope of an answer that will support or argue against my statement. If there is something I missed in Nietzsche’s ideas, I hope to get it pointed out.

I have been developing a system which claims to answer a why and how to life. I post this on nietzsche because will to power helped put this concept into words, and i believe it is similarly framed, therefore followers of nietzsche will possibly be able to relate to this concept or understand it. My reasoning for this post is because i want to see how other view this concept since i would like to see how well i understand it myself so i want to see if the perception is similar, from my understanding in comparison to others. I am also looking for possible help in the full development of this concept, if it one worth studying, which i believe it is. Without further a do here it is. Rough draft of the general idea without bombarding information.

This is a system having to do with the stimulation of the human, one that was found, not created, discovered, realized. Unconsciously aware in individuals not to its full extent, which is contradictory to its purpose. I call it an animalistic religion, though i pose this concept as something that is beyond religion, even contradictory to it having clashing foundation in its groundwork but there is no other word for it, maybe a spiritual animal would be a name making more sense. Animalistic because although not 1:1 to what animals do, it can act as an analogy to them. A can swim for survival but beyond survival there is something that stimulates the fish even more so, this is an extension of its body. A bird flies, a lion roars because it can, and because it can, it should do so for the sake of it, because the extension of its body is stimulating to it.

The animalistic religion is what is innately born from human, for human stimulating the need for the extension of its body, a childish love for the excretion of acts of service for the body and mind. These acts of service hold a criteria which i have not fully thought about alot, some ideas for concepts that fullfill these criteria are:

Emotional excretion, acting as a channel for the output of love, honest, personal, in relation to the specialness of the individual, having to do with the reasoning for a love for the arts, having to do with the reason for a stimulating feeling in socializing, socializing in and of itself, having to do with the growth that exists in learning, having to do with the things the individual is interested in learning, bonding, in relation to other humans and in relation to building and growing something, having to do with health, it is biological, it is evolutionary, it can be humorous to no avail, it is rewarding to the body, it is related to the expressional output of the specialness of the individual .

Some ideas that contradict its own fullfillness are:

It can be devolutional, it is no to regard caring towards the body, it tricks biology, it can be clever, it can be cunning, it is unfullfilling, it does not necessarily have to relate to the individual personally, it not in service to the body (and mind), it is or can be unhealthy, it artifically stimulates, it falsifies rewarding the body.

Things to note in this criteria:

An act can be the same on in different individuals and it can hold a different criteria, which in turn changes the service it is acting on in the body. The reasoning in whether an act will act in favor of holding a service to the body will be innately from the individual out of its love for extension. Not necessarily having to be aware of its love for extension.

Criteria aside the individual aware of its love for extension must view these acts with a childish wonder, in awe for what they do to the body, in awe for the service and fullness they provide. This childish and innocent view towards the general idea of it all can only result in an obvious praise. An aggressive and compulsory praise to the realization of these ideals, it can be the only thing that makes sense. This is a new avenue of thought beyond religion and in its core possibly replacing spirutality.

If this concept is applied and followed it will lead future generations for a new type of human, similar in the ubermensch in its concept. A man that acts on his own center, what surrounds it, and what is not, for the sake of it, creating a fully diverse ecosystem of individuals acting on their individual acts of service, stunned by their own, and other individuals hierearchical system of acts that they hold. A society without prejudice or possible superiority complexes over others in acts. A generation for the expression of free thinkers in awe of each others free thinking, interested in everything and everyone.

This concept can only be described in the eyes of a human as attractively charismatic and obviously followed for what it is. Althought attractively charismatic from within, and when i say followed, i mean going from, unpraised to praised. The most celebrated part of the human.

This is the general idea of what i mean when i refer to an animalistic religion, the most fundamental part of what a human is, because it is for humans from humans, for animal from animals, it seems that the alienation and separation of animal and man is what has caused this separation of the fundamental animal reason. The line between animal, human and god, is one that exists on the same plane, on the same axis, at the same time.

This is my modern art piece.

So im low iq. Obviously in schopenhauer and nietzsche’s writing a great deal of emphasis is given to the intellect, atleast in what i just read called wisdom of life. So should I end it all given this because I will basically always be relegated to completely insurmountable suffering. Thx guys and remember to be brutally dismissive and honest to me in the comments. Also yea this is mostly a schopenhauer question but i like you guys better so im here

Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the first book I read to my daughters when they just needed to hear a calm, safe voice while falling asleep. My first grandchild is arriving in a few weeks, and so I took the first part of Zarathustra (Prologue, first and last speech of the first part and a few in between), chopped it down to child-sized bites (apologies for the violence in this reduction) and set it to a picture book story. I made the book on shutterfly. The link is here if any are interested: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None... and Babies

I tried reading *On the Genealogy of Morality*, and it left me quite dumbfounded, and not in a good way. I find it impossible to relate to what Nietzsche writes; it strikes me mostly as the polemical, harmful ranting of an elitist, disturbed man. Is he in favor of master morality? Is he against morality itself? If he isn't against morality, why the need for all this circumlocution? He wasn't a nihilist, yet he wrote extensively about nihilism. He wasn't a social Darwinist, yet he wrote a great deal on the subject.

Who was Nietzsche, really? He strikes me as a philosopher so focused, so obsessed, with escaping modernism, Hegelianism, and idealism that he seems almost devoid of original content; he's always *against* something but never truly *for* anything, I’m not quite sure how to put it.

In this respect, he reminds me somewhat of Heraclitus, though I’ve only read a few fragments of the latter. There is the same notion of superior and inferior people, and the same deliberately cryptic, ambiguous language.

I haven't read much philosophy, just a bit of Foucault, Habermas, the existentialists, the Stoics, and Plato, but so far, Nietzsche is the only one I’ve disliked from the very start.

Please read full post before commenting thank you. Have you heard of R.Scott Bakker? He wrote the Prince of Nothing Series heavily influenced by Dune.

I dont claim to be a philosophy professor so don't destroy me in the comments but after reading Thus Spake Zarathustra I was really fascinated how effective it was through a fictional story articulating complex ideas

"Man is a rope stretched betwixt beast and Superman-a rope over an abyss."

"Man is great in that he is a bridge and not a goal"

"A man must have chaos yet within him to be able to give birth to a dancing star"

"All names of good and evil are images: they speak not plain they hint only. A fool is he that desireth knowledge of them!"

I was trying to find novels which engage with Nietzsche's philosophical concepts in a mature nuanced way specifically the Ubermensch/Overman, and stumbled upon the Prince of Nothing Series By R.Scott Bakker.

Bakker has created an epic fantasy world and engages with it through a philosophical lense. Creating a laboratory to examine several of Nietzsche’s central philosophical problems: the death of God, the genealogy of morality, the will to power, the creation of values, and the relationship between human agency and the forces that shape consciousness. Bakker is not just borrowing Nietzschean ideas. His fictional world gives them a setting in which their implications can be explored, challenged, and pushed to very disturbing extremes.

His take on the Ubermensch within this context is fascinating and truly terrifying, exploring the disturbing gap between transcending conventional morality and becoming worthy of anything beyond it.

"The Dûnyain," Kellhus said after a time, have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self- moving thought. The thoughts all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be any- thing other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? Only the Logos allows one to mitigate that slavery. Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. And only the Dûnyain possess this knowledge, plainsman. The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance. Only the Dunyain are awake."

Is Kellhus an example of self-overcoming and the creation of values, or is he an extreme representation of the desire to dominate? His ability to understand and manipulate others raises questions about whether mastery over human nature amounts to genuine freedom.

Here are some excerpts from the books

"Why do men fear the dark?" "Because darkness is ignorance made visible" "And do men despise ignorance?" "No... they prize it above all things but only so long as it remains invisible"

"Lies are but clouds, giants that blow and rage only to pass, always to pass. But the Truth is the sky, everlasting and elusive, a shelter in the day, an abyss in the night."

"If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders."

"Truth and hope are like travellers in contrary directions. They meet but once in any man's life."

To read Bakker is to stand before a mirror that never gives back an image, only fractures, each crack a scar of absence. The abyss does not answer, it confirms: nothing lies behind the reflection, because the reflection was never there.

S.C. Hickman

Would love your thoughts on this video

Wondering if anyone can provide recommendations for someone who wants to learn about Buddhism in order to better understand Nietzsche. I have very little understanding of Buddhism currently, so more introductory texts would be preferred. Thanks.

One of mine is faith moves no mountains but surely places mountains where there are none:

Hey everyone,

I’m currently taking an ethics class and trying to wrap my head around the clash between Kant and Nietzsche, specifically when it comes to where morality actually comes from.

We've been covering Kant’s idea of universal duty and the categorical imperative—the idea that moral rules should apply to everyone purely through reason, completely separated from your own desires or instincts.

Then I started reading Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, and in section 10 he completely tears into German philosophy and Kant. He basically claims Kant was just influenced by Protestant preachers and called his philosophy a "theologian's instinct" disguised as logic, arguing that Kant only set up his system to sneak Christian concepts like duty, God, and the soul through the back door.

My question is: Is Nietzsche’s criticism fair here, or is he just attacking Kant’s motives instead of engaging with his actual arguments?

How do Kantians usually respond to Nietzsche's claim that universal morality is just secularized Christian guilt that harms personal vitality?

Would love to hear how people who study both thinkers make sense of this contrast. Thanks

I enjoy Nietzsche not just as something to read, but as a starting point for conversations about authenticity, morality, individuality, power, and what it actually means to live on your own terms.

M36, I work in the art world and I'm also into psychology, philosophy, film and literature.

Happy to chat here first and see if we click. If the conversation flows, we can always move to voice later.

Always curious where a Nietzsche conversation ends up. :)

Three interesting passages by Nietzsche from From: Human, All Too Human, Part 4, concerning the soul of artists and authors. ' that I would like to share about what it means to be a writer and how to distinguish BAD WRITERS. Overall part 4, and the whole book of 'Human, All Too Human' has a lot insights about the human condition. Nietzsche had written about any topic you can think about, and Nietzsche can make you think for days:

Human, All Too Human, part 4, aphorism 201:

The Necessity For Bad Authors.—There will always be a need of bad authors; for they meet the taste of readers of an undeveloped, immature age—these have their requirements as well as mature readers. If human life were of greater length, the number of mature individuals would be greater than that of the immature, or at least equally great; but, as it is, by far the greater number die too young: i.e. there are always many more undeveloped intellects with bad taste. These demand, with the greater impetuosity of youth, the satisfaction of their needs, and they insist on having bad authors.

Human, All Too Human, Part 4, aphorism 202:

Too Near and Too Far.—The reader and the author very often do not understand each other, because the author knows his theme too well and finds it almost slow, so that he omits the examples, of which he knows hundreds; the reader, however, is interested in the subject, and is liable to consider it as badly proved if examples are lacking.

Human, All Too Human, Part 4, aphorism 204:

Darkness and Over-brightness Side by Side.—Authors who, in general, do not understand how to express their thoughts clearly are fond of choosing, in detail, the strongest, most exaggerated distinctions and superlatives,—thereby is produced an effect of light, which is like torchlight in intricate forest paths.

I've read most of the gay science prior and really enjoyed it so I decided to get my hands on Thus Spoke Zarathrustra. One thing is that sometimes Nietzsche's prose can feel like decoding an enigma. This is something I like about his work but also something that I worry may prevent me from truly understanding his ideas. Is this a normal first experience? Or am I just not reading it right.

Speaking as someone who loves Nietzsche and considers him truly unique among the philosophers for his extraordinary wisdom and insights, the more I study his works, the more I find certain branches of his attention, like sociology and historiography, incredibly dated, if not completely wrong. I can't, in good faith, try and extrapolate evermore abstract metaphors just to keep certain concepts of his standing, as that would be unjust both to me and him and a very ungrateful gift to him who taught me so much. The concepts I have problems with are thus:

Overman and race

Nietzsche's conception of the Overman undoubtedly rests on the scientific racism and Lamarckism of his era, regardless of the aforementioned intentions to make the Overman into an abstraction, which Nietzsche, mind you, specifically denied in Ecce Homo and posited the Overman as a "supreme achievement" of mankind that can be achieved in this world and not "half-genius, half-saint" of idealistic strivings. His description of the Overman and how he should be created is explicitly a posthumanist project resting on eugenicist premises, that interbreeding of the higher types of men will eventually produce a posthuman with no recourse to the herd, whose ability to create independent, life-affirming values would be an inborn nature that comes as easy as breathing. The Overman was supposed to be a materialist replacement for Christian paradise, the ultimate goal towards which all mankind would be devoted to, but something of this world, not of Platonic hyperuranion. Of course, in Nietzsche's time, racism and eugenics were a hot new thing, so this project was an honest attempt to harness the power of science for a grand purpose, but now, we know such a thing is impossible, at least as Nietzsche describes it; Darwinism decisively superseded Lamarckism, modern genetics rendered 19th century eugenics laughable and races turned out to be sociological concepts with no biological basis.

That also lead to the whole undermining of Nietzsche's ideas of race-mixing with Jews and Slavs to produce superior Europeans, ancient socioeconomic classes being race-based and Indian caste system being an ambitious and valuable project to derive higher types of men. With races relegated to social constructivism, we are forced to put Nietzsche in his dated context, while realising his ideas are wholly impractical and wouldn't lead to any meaningful good he wanted.

Aristocracy as the superior social system

Probably the concept I have the most problem with. Nietzsche claimed that hereditary aristocracies based on slavery produce the healthiest types of societies and individuals, ones that affirm life through Dionysian art and exert their will to power through war, conquest and finding grand endeavors to accomplish, and that with their undermining first with Christianity and then with French Revolution and liberalism, society was doomed to become a place of passive and nihilistic last men that dream nothing beyond their petty pleasures and vices, their liberties and equalities being nothing but levelling poisons killing any and all possible greatness and nobility.

Here's the kicker; this is a doomer nonsense. Liberal republics that Nietzsche decried proved to be superior on every single level over slavedriving aristocracies Nietzsche might have supported, the fact that became unavoidable after the liberal Allies soundly defeated the Axis Powers whose modus operandi was very similar (if not an exact imitation) to what Nietzsche thought an ideal society should be like. Even if you heavily disagree that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany have anything to do with Nietzsche's ideology (they kinda do; you really should read Losurdo's Aristocratic Rebel. No point in lying), then you would have to agree that Imperial Japan definitely has and again, it was soundly bested, to the point of its soldiers famously switching over to American side for ice cream and compassion, instead of fighting for their countries higher values like kamikaze until the end. Up to this point, there is no example of a rigid, hereditary aristocracy resisting and defeating liberal, meritocratic republic. Ancient Sparta, a society that Nietzsche praised, is now famously known to have produced absolutely nothing of cultural value and spent most of its time supressing slave revolts and losing its citizen body to its dumb policies. Even its military record is very middling and their hegemony was dependent on Athenaean democracy undermining itself and Persian patronage. Both Napoleon and Chinggis massively improved their armies by opening the ranks to talent, regardless of circumstances, instead of keeping them reserved solely for the pedigree. Ancient Romans advanced from a mere city-state to a regional power in even greater ascendancy due to its republican institutions, even after emperors monopolised executive power. Hereditary warrior aristocracies seem to hold societies back a lot more than they aid and never last against a republic that actually improves its citizens' lives and opens its offices to whomever can achieve it by merit.

On the topic of the claim that mankind's will to power has been dulled with all the liberties and equalities, I also find this very untrue; art and sport are absolutely flourishing in the modern liberal republics. You have thousands of talented artists producing excellent, thought- and emotion-provoking art and thousands of athletes competing at astounding heights of human potential, all enabled by the virtues of industrial, liberal republics. Yes, there are definitely last men Nietzsche warned about in our society that seek nothing but comfort, but humanity has never had greater athletic achievements than today (which are basically sublimated martial energies) and many artists that would not have access to means to produce their art otherwise now have it. Even discounting that, you have a boatload of people living dangerously, sailing the world in a sailship, exploring bonebreakingly tight caves, travelling to the depths of India, Somalia and whatever highly dangerous place you can think of and generally living the life as fully as possible. The access to the opportunity to become Nietzsche's free spirit is at an all time high and many people are absolutely taking the chance and succeeding. Where aristocracy has proved to be self-destructively rigid, sterile and suppressive, liberal republics have allowed the human potential to flourish to its heights. Yes, the old virtues Aristotle and Roman philosophers wrote about are largely gone, but the virtues that replaced them are still producing extraordinary individuals. This is not a good picture for Nietzsche's extolling of aristocracy and denigration of liberalism.

Gender

Nietzsche's attitude to women is well known and while certainly different from how it was IRL and carrying a dose of metaphor, Nietzsche is consistent enough in his belief in traditional patriarchy and gender roles across his works. Multiple times he brings women, slaves and children into a single grouping and denigrates femininity as poisonous and weakening. Masculinity, of course, is praised with all the virtues Nietzsche appreciates in his works. When deigning to give praise to women, Nietzsche's ideal woman is a scheming force that manipulates the notionally dominant man with feminine cunning and guile, a pretty traditional negative stereotype he untraditionally admires, but usually his women are irrational, emotional, shallow, in need of male leadership, childbearers and objects for male goals and amusement. He rebukes feminism in all its forms as horribly unseemly and deadly for feminine "virtues". My biggest gripe isn't even this (even if it is certainly a very big gripe, yikes), but that Nietzsche, a man devoted to nonessentialism and impermanence, takes the position of an ardent essentialist when gender is in question. He cannot look past the patriarchic tradition and just like traditional aristocracy and slavery, he considers it natural and healthy and its downgrade as tragic and destructive to social health. He does not acknowledge at all that women might have some virtues and admirable contributions other than stereotypical patriarchic roles anywhere in his works. His take on gender is disappointingly simplistic and uninspiring, a reiteration instead of revaluation. Meanwhile, emancipated women have hitherto contributed immensely to the human culture and world, from various scientists and artists, to actual soldiers ruthlessly fighting to protect their homelands. Women have at many times proven they are just as profound and virtuous as men and certainly far more than the role of a childish childbearer in need of a man would want them. I genuinely struggle with understanding Nietzsche's antifeminism and devotion to traditional patriarchy as anything other than woefully misplaced, especially once I stopped rationalising everything and anything he wrote that was disagreeable as some profound metaphor I couldn't just yet fathom.

I’m currently reading The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist, and I am finding a lot of parallels between his argument and Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. McGilchrist talks, for instance, of paradoxes which are inevitably an invention of the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere builds a system with static parts and finite, determined ways by which they can interact with each other. The system is closed and ultimately self-referential, so contradictions within it arise. Contradictions which are taken by the left hemisphere to be an objection to reality and not as evidence of the limits of the system. McGilchrist writes:

“Paradox means, literally, a finding that is contrary to received opinion or expectation. […] Here it seems that the left hemisphere, with its reliance on the application of logic, is stating the opposite: that it is reality that is inadequate to our ordinary ways of thinking. […] In other words its understanding of paradox is — not that there must be problems in applying this kind of logic to the real world — but that the real world isn't the way we think it is because logic says so.”

Reading this passage made me immediately think of Nietzsche’s “Reason” in Philosophy section in Twilight of the Idols. The ‘left hemisphere’ is substituted by Nietzsche with ‘the philosophers’. (With an honest exception of Heraclitus.) The philosophers, with their belief in Being; static, unchanging, mummified, bereft of history, lead them to dismiss all that which is not those things, namely reality. "That which is cannot evolve; that which evolves is not." The senses are ultimately blamed for introducing deception, and thus a ‘apparent’ and ‘real’ worlds are constructed, wherein the ‘apparent’, i.e. the world of the senses, is negated from the standpoint of the ‘real’ world, which is in turn an abstraction of the former; a linguistic-metaphysical abstraction of the world of the senses, which holds primacy over the latter and not the other way around. “Reason is the cause of our falsifying the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show us a state of Becoming, of transiency, and of change, they do not lie.”

Much the same argument, but in different words, is also discussed by McGilchrist. The right hemisphere has primacy in terms of experience; it is the hemisphere that confronts reality in its constantly changing, non-quantifiable state, while the left hemisphere is more concerned with the familiar, sequential, and static. On a neural level, it is reflected by RH’s INTERconnectedness and LH’s INTRAconnectedness. The latter hemisphere is fundamentally much more self-referential than the former. It is, however, also more assertive in the treatment of its systems and abstractions as being, in a sense, truer than the constant flux that the RH primarily deals with. The emissary thus proclaims himself the master.

This is the same role-reversal that Nietzsche talked about, put in different language. The world of the senses is deemed false, while its abstraction is proclaimed real and consequently revered.

“They place that which makes its appearance last—unfortunately! for it ought not to appear at all!—the “highest concept,” that is to say, the most general, the emptiest, the last cloudy streak of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning. This again is only their manner of expressing their veneration: the highest thing must not have grown out of the lowest, it must not have grown at all.... Moral: everything of the first rank must be causa sui.“

There seem to be a lot of parallels between Nietzsche and McGilchrist, which he is often explicit about (even in the name of the book), and he also seems to draw a lot from the phenomenologists such as Heidegger, for whom Nietzsche was quite influential, especially in his treatment of metaphysics. Though I found this specific part at times almost word for word Nietzsche, so I thought I’d share.

Has anybody read The Master and His Emissary and maybe has some further thoughts on its connection to Nietzsche’s philosophy?

Domestic conflicts are making it nearly impossible for me to study or focus on my job. The only thing that helps is doing heavy physical labor—it lets me stop thinking about things for a while.

There were plenty of times I could have kicked someone's ass over these disputes, but I didn't, and now I regret it every day.

I could have sought legal recourse, too, but I didn't do that either, and it’s draining my energy. I almost always wake up angry, and I stay angry all the time. How can I forget about this—or at least stop thinking about it—and focus on my work?

I even had a run-in at a store recently—I was accused of under-weighing some candy and told I had to pay for it again. I just walked away, but the guy threatened to tear me a new one. I regret every day that I didn't kick his ass for what he said. For the record, the candy was worth a cent at most.

You might point to Stitch, but he renounced world conquest and destruction—isn't that Christian morality imposed by the cartoon?

A Word About Nietzsche and the Values of Life, by Martin Buber

There have always existed people who cannot be included in any classification or designated by a group name, because any naming does them violence: we sense that each name fails to express especially what is essential about them. Far too many spheres of life intersect in them, and they are the enunciation and dawn of far too many divergent premonitions and inklings to be locked in one conceptual chamber along many others. They are large and undefinable like life itself, whose apostles they are. They seem to announce a future form of development for the human species. In their essence, they exceed our language. In their longing, they exceed our powers. Friedrich Nietzsche is to be counted among them.

Is he a “philosopher”? He did not create a uniformly constructed system of thought. Is he an artist? He did not create shaped objects. Is he a psychologist? His deepest knowledge is of the future of souls. Is he a poet? Only if and when we think of poets as they are thought to have existed once: “Seers, who tell us something about what might possibly happen,” who “let us feel in advance something of the virtues of the future.” Is he the founder of a new community? Many rise upon hearing his name, but they do not come together since everyone finds a different and only a single star in this blessed night sky as his own, and everyone does not reach general insights of the kind that unite people but instead finds his most authentic strength activated. His deepest intention was not to communicate and propagate his own thoughts, but instead to elicit and transform into moving energy the most personal and productive traits and most hidden treasures of everyone’s individuality. He called the innermost purpose of his work the increase of general fertility.

And yet, he is not one of the advocates, the Socratic individuals, whose very best dimensions are revealed only in the descendants of their thought. He is a creator. Never before in our age have such rich and full words been coined for the most painful secrets and the wildest dreams of thinking people. Ideals that previously had only been able to live in the thin, refined air of the highest mountaintops have entered through him into human interactions and into man’s impoverished language, born of bodily and primitive needs, where they have begun to shine only more wonderfully. Just as a sculptor places his hand, trembling with a certain order to form, on the soft, shapeless sculpting clay, this emissary of life placed his blessed and gifted hand on the longing, searching, and struggling of our time, where it was shaped into something visible.

For he was an emissary of life. An apostle, or perhaps only a baptizer and herald. He did not proclaim his own existence but his longing. His critics have said this often enough (he himself frequently expresses it: “Where our deficiencies are, there our enthusiasm also unfolds”). This golden strength of his desire, which created something real out of what he was not, makes him only more charming for us. The fact that the sick person taught a new form of health (“a stronger, wittier, tougher, bolder, funnier one”), that the quiet thought-poet given over to reflecting on the innermost things, glorified the will to power and the rebirth of the life of the instincts, this seems to us the crystallization of our own tragedy. We learn to love him like a near and far friend in distress, who, like us, needs bread and medicine, and who, like the creative friend, is always ready to give away a completed world.

He arrived in an age of smallness. The relation of people to the world had become small, pathetically small, and man’s relation to himself and to his own becoming had become rotten to its deepest core. He fights with the century’s finest and most noble blade against the reigning metaphysics and morality, because he saw them as tools and symptoms of a life in decline. He uncovered the weak mendacity of our values and truths. But the tip of his raised sword already glowed purple in the sunrise. He found fresh and fertile seeds in ancient royal tombs; from dead cultures he dragged into the light the elements of new formations. In the confused and infertile business of the present, he gathered what is real and capable of procreating. Before our eyes, he erected the statue of the heroic individual who creates himself and beyond himself. In the place of a thin and weak-loined altruism, he placed the egoism of his own development and generous virtue; in the place of pity, the capacity to rejoice alongside and act in concert with others. To the acolytes of the afterworld, he taught the lofty meaning of the earth and of the human body. He confronted the ideals of a comfortable and painless life with a life amid storms and dangers, whose powerful beauty is only intensified by pain. Instead of the happiness of the greatest number, he taught that the purpose of humanity is the production of great men and great works. He presented a great antagonist to the God of the world’s beginning: the becoming God to whose development we can contribute, the hoped-for result of future evolutions.

When he departed, life had become greater and more worthy of living.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber

Buber on Nietzsche article: https://archive.ph/fN574

If I am wrong or misunderstood, please correct me.

"If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters"

Nietzsche was a believer in strict social stratification. He actually admired ancient systems like the traditional Indian caste system because he believed a rigid hierarchy was necessary to support a tiny elite of exceptional thinkers and artists.

I disagree. When a system suppresses a massive group of people or limits what they are allowed to do based on their birth, it does not protect excellence—it destroys it. Oppressed groups have their own unique skills and art forms that could enrich the entire world. By locking them into rigid roles, you stop them from ever showing those talents.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar made this exact point in his 1936 text, Annihilation of Caste. Ambedkar argued that a birth-based hierarchy is not just a division of labor, but a brutal "division of laborers." He pointed out that by preventing millions of people from developing their natural capacities, a hierarchical system intentionally suffocates latent intelligence and talent, which ultimately stops all of society from progressing.

Does a society need a "ruling class" to achieve peak artistic and philosophical greatness, as Nietzsche argued?

Or does a rigid hierarchy inherently backfire by suffocating the hidden genius and unique art of the people at the bottom?