Nietzsche and Morality

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Philosophy Now
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Nietzsche and Morality

Post by Philosophy Now »

Roger Caldwell responds to an analysis of Nietzsche’s morality.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/70/Nietzsche_and_Morality
Impenitent
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Re: Nietzsche and Morality

Post by Impenitent »

Nice review, looks like an interesting book...

have to brush up on grinding lenses

-Imp
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Jacobsladder
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Re: Nietzsche and Morality

Post by Jacobsladder »

The striking development of Nietzsche's view on Spinoza, from the very positive to the rather negative and even condemning tone, can be better understood through the lens of Nietzsche's understanding of the Dionysian aspects of human existence and his "eternal' struggle against the metaphysical systematical, the "spiders" in their web. While Spinoza arrived through reason, as a second, higher form of knowledge towards a third form, the knowledge of god, it's clear from the broad scope of Nietzsche's work that there's a fundamental "non-platform", the drunken Dionysian soul, rupturing, breaking apart unified conceptual models, the ghostly schemata, the lands of abstractions,like in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense:
That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
Smashing a framework and pairing back ironically together leads to a more postmodern, perhaps even Baudrillardian outlook. It's at that stage it cannot be followed anymore reasonably or intellectually. Here art, illusion and even some perhaps "inhuman" and "irrational" or at least amoral elements come to join and disrupt any higher discussion. Which is exactly where most philosophers would start massively disembarking, the wonderful Spinoza probably leading that exodus. But it's that reunion, that almost alchemical merger, with its many psychoanalytic overtones, which I believe would separate Nietzsche from Spinoza in the form of quite a tremendous chasm.
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