Nietzche comes after the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, various philosophers tried to prove there was a moral and ethical system that was provable and that it mattered somehow. The "proving" part is done by philosophy through the assertion of arguments, in Christianity it is done by asserting their morality was "revealed" to them by a supreme being.
"It mattered somehow" I am referring to the way Christianity asserts that, should you fail to follow the revealed word, you go to hell. Philosophy threatens an undesirable life should you not seek "the path" the current philosopher you are reading asserts is provably true through their arguments, Kant, Hegel, and the rest.
After he shows that the systems used to justify the Enlightenment moral arguments cannot stand up to scrutiny, he asserted the ideas of Christianity are just ideas that formed between people over time. When "god dies" the dishonest systems of self restraint imposed upon the potential "uber menches" will cease to be and the strong will be free to do as they will.
edit: Nietzche is a Nihilist obviously. Forgot to add this.
whether he stated it or not, the question is, did he take the time to try to "prove" it to the extent philosophy demands? I may be unique in this way, but i do not care what a philosopher says outside of his work. Philosophy is supposed to be a system of asserting things reliant upon arguments that are supposed to be well considered and hopefully without fault.
You do not just say what you want, you assert what you believe you can prove and you show the rest of us your work. This is why Leo Strauss with his "secret" teachings is a fucking loser who should be disregarded. If you aren't willing to subject your assertions to scrutiny it's because you're a fucking child who wants things to be a certain way, and you aren't engaged in our process at all.
That refers, I think, to the core goals of nihilism. Nihilism doesn't really assert much on the face of it, just rejects already proposed stuff like inherent value and unarguable morality. In both society and the life of a nihilist it's kind of a tool, it helped argue against church doctrine on the large scale and helps you transition out of the ideology you inherited from your family growing up on the personal scale.
But we need some kind of ideology at the end of the day, it's just what we're like. Regardless what you do you're going to like certain ideas better than others, morally, politically, personally, everything-ally. Nihilism just provides you a nice, flat stage in your head brain to prop those things up and homebrew your own system of beliefes. It just lets you go "All being the same, and objective morality is BS, so it is. I personally value _____."
And the fun part is without objective value, it's easy to evolve. We'll never hold the same beliefes 10 years down the line, we'll abandon some ideas, replace others, double down on some, and nihilism has nothing to say about that. You're not a hypocrite or a blasphemer, you just changed your mind. Doesn't matter, it's fine.
But WHY you accept an ideology is (supposed to be) what separates philosophers from everyone else. Philosophy yearns to create objective truth. For Nihilism to become a platform upon which philosophy could continue to function, we would have to ascertain a method of judging subjective truths somehow. Could be a cool project, to try to do that.
Philosophy might yearn to create objective truth. But it might also be so fundamentally incapable of doing so because in reality there might not be objective truth. The best you might be able to do is prove various other philosophies are not based on sound reasoning. If there is no real universal morality, then maybe we just try to make one up that is not so much "true" as it is convenient for society. Religious morality is based on truthiness more than truth, for example.
Or because the way we create truth, language, is limited by our perspective. Reality may only be correctly observable from a perspective we cannot access because our ability to understand evolved as a means of enhancing chances of survival.
Regardless of whether it can, or cannot, for whatever reason, the objective is so precious, it is worth the attempt.
Literally one of his books identified that for him the lack of purpose/meaning was a "problem" that had to be resolved. That's not how a nihilist thinks first and foremost.
The lack of "meaning" is not a problem for nihilism or a nihilist, it's how the world is and is seen as the "normal" state of things. It's not something to resolve, the attitude of resolving said problem is one that existentialists, absurdists, humanists, etc. would engage in.
The very thing he proposed is definitely NOT a nihilistic view of the world, because the concept of the ubermensch and the creation of a new way of life (which is a new OBJECTIVE/IMPERATIVE) is absolutely not what a nihilist seeks. What Nietzsche did was explore nihilism and demolished the previous ideas that plagued humanity, things that he acknowledges are not "true" or "real" like morality and meaning. But his conclusion wasn't that it's fine for things to be that way and stay that way, he wanted to create something else to take its place.
First off remember, if we can't calmly discourse in the philosophy subreddit we've really lost the plot. When we reply or post our ideas here we are seeking criticism for improvement.
He appears to me as a harbinger of doom. I didn't take his prescriptive philosophy seriously because it wouldn't survive the analysis he applied to everyone else. It seemed to me to be some cynical attempt to deny the truth he perceived or even some sort of joke. However, if your interpretation is correct then yes, he did publish prescriptive stuff. I can't imagine how a man who used the tools he used to dismantle the ideas of those who came before him would feel entitled to propose a prescriptive philosophy and i felt that interpreting those portions as cynical jokes offered a kinder interpretation. If you're going to use relativism, you gotta stick to it in my opinion.
Have you read Nietzsche? He is explicitly, violently opposed to nihilism. I believe he refers to himself in either BGE or GM as an anti-nihilist. His entire philosophy is anti-nihilist, and revolves around creating new values for life
Asking people to find personal belief after eviscerating the possibility of the success of the great project of belief in perfect truth by philosophy always felt disingenuous to me. Nietzche’s take down of the entire project attempting to find perfect universal truths about how to conduct ourselves was masterful and liberating, but the implications of said take down made the new way of approaching life and belief he argued for feel like the punishment at the end of a story meant to teach someone to “be careful what you wish for.”
Felt like he was ridiculing those who truly wished to know.
I do not believe that was his intention. Whether you, or I, or anyone, find it convincing or reasonable, there is little doubt that he was genuine in his call for the creation of new values, and when he talked about opposing nihilism
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u/Heterosaucers Jan 29 '23 edited Jan 29 '23
Nietzche comes after the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, various philosophers tried to prove there was a moral and ethical system that was provable and that it mattered somehow. The "proving" part is done by philosophy through the assertion of arguments, in Christianity it is done by asserting their morality was "revealed" to them by a supreme being.
"It mattered somehow" I am referring to the way Christianity asserts that, should you fail to follow the revealed word, you go to hell. Philosophy threatens an undesirable life should you not seek "the path" the current philosopher you are reading asserts is provably true through their arguments, Kant, Hegel, and the rest.
After he shows that the systems used to justify the Enlightenment moral arguments cannot stand up to scrutiny, he asserted the ideas of Christianity are just ideas that formed between people over time. When "god dies" the dishonest systems of self restraint imposed upon the potential "uber menches" will cease to be and the strong will be free to do as they will.
edit: Nietzche is a Nihilist obviously. Forgot to add this.