Ubermensch elevation?

I made this thread for people who know about the ubermensch and the will to power that's the context man

One has to go back to the horse's mouth, though -- no skewered or "too literal" Nazi and eugenics interpretations.

Nietzsche's Overman does not seek the approval of the crowd (thus, there is no following the pattern of others). He creates his own path.

"Power" here is not the controlling "use and abuse" type (nobody needs to follow), but an unobstructed creative affirmation about life. A positive, constructive acceptance of unimpaired reality. It is a being for oneself, fulfilling one's own potential. (A private or personal enlightenment that is figuratively akin to a secret nobility.)

The latter involves being free of Christian duty (always putting others before one's self; sibling's keeper stuff) and its excessive egalitarian orientation that stunts both the individual's and humanity's development (crab bucket mentality). The Overman can still be generous toward others, but does so out of natural inclination or choice rather than due to feelings of guilt or seeking redemption from sin (as well as exploitation of general do-gooderism).

Understandably, the many still under the sway of Christianity or its putative secular imitators (i.e., enter later Ayn Rand territory with respect to both) will interpret the liberated Overman as a villain, selfish bully, or whatever ("evil man").

And I'm just the piano player. Attribute any pejorative, misconceived, and exaggerated fixations about Christian legacy and influential dominance in society and ideological movements --that one might be piqued about -- to those two authors (Fred and the Russian-Jewish migrant). ;)

Friedrich Nietzsche (Ecce Homo translation): Zarathustra, as the first psychologist of the good man, is perforce the friend of the evil man. When a degenerate kind of man [opportunist priest] has succeeded to the highest rank among the human species, his position must have been gained at the cost of the reverse type—at the cost of the strong man who is certain of life. When the gregarious animal stands in the glorious rays of the purest virtue, the exceptional man must be degraded to the rank of the evil.

If falsehood insists at all costs on claiming the word "truth" for its own particular standpoint, the really truthful man must be sought out among the despised. Zarathustra allows of no doubt here; he says that it was precisely the knowledge of the good, of the "best," which inspired his absolute horror of men.

And it was out of this feeling of repulsion that he grew the wings which allowed him to soar into remote futures. He does not conceal the fact that his type of man is one which is relatively superhuman—especially as opposed to the "good" man, and that the good and the just would regard his superman as the devil.

"Ye higher men, on whom my gaze now falls, this is the doubt that ye wake in my breast, and this is my secret laughter: methinks ye would call my Superman—the devil! So strange are ye in your souls to all that is great, that the Superman would be terrible in your eyes for his goodness."

It is from this passage, and from no other, that you must set out to understand the goal to which Zarathustra aspires—the kind of man that he conceives sees reality as it is; he is strong enough for this—he is not estranged or far removed from it, he is that reality himself, in his own nature can be found all the terrible and questionable character of reality: only thus can man have greatness.

_
 
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(emphasis mine)

Interesting. I don't believe Dostoevsky intended the title so much ironically as he did simply differently. Myshkin is very much an idiot, in a certain respect. Also, epileptics then were generally regarded as idiots, regardless; cops, in the present day, generally regard epileptics as dangerous idiots (speaking from extensive personal experience here).

Myshkin is very much the mirror analogue of Jerzy Kosinski's Chauncey Gardener/Chance the Gardener in Being There (originally titled Dasein, incidentally, but Kosiniski thought it a tad pretentious or something). Was Chance an idiot? Yes and no.
That's why I said 'thinking idiot' as it also excludes people like Chance..
 
That's why I said 'thinking idiot' as it also excludes people like Chance..
Ouch. Poor Chance.

"He's a nice guy... but he is a mouth breather."
--Jesus Lizard

Heidegger's moderately insane reading of Nietzsche would have Nietzsche positing that intelligence is only skin deep, and even with less crazy readings Nietzsche was all about the surfaces, so...

Chance dressed "smart", so maybe that's all that matters. Yeah, yeah, authenticity and whatnots, but what "makes" authentic?
 
The latter involves being free of Christian duty (always putting others before one's self; sibling's keeper stuff) and its excessive egalitarian orientation that stunts both the individual's and humanity's development (crab bucket mentality). The Overman can still be generous toward others, but does so out of natural inclination or choice rather than due to feelings of guilt or seeking redemption from sin (as well as exploitation of general do-gooderism).

The most appealing (to me) aspect of the Overman is Nietzsche's emphasis upon that which is most natural (to man), and that contemporary man, influenced by all manner of Christian trappings and various ideologies, is almost wholly antithetical to what is natural. Losers ask how do we preserve our "humanity?"; Zarathustra asks, "How does one overcome man?" (Almost a direct allusion to Saint Max (Stirner), incidentally, despite Elisabeth's idiotic claims otherwise.)

Nietzsche would have appreciated Darwin, and practically speaking, he very much anticipated Darwin: people are animals. Save all that "pretending they are anything but" bullshit for the Christians and the humanists.
 
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The most appealing (to me) aspect of the Overman is Nietzsche's emphasis upon that which is most natural (to man), and that contemporary man, influenced by all manner of Christian trappings and various ideologies, is almost wholly antithetical to what is natural. Losers ask how do we preserve our "humanity?"; Zarathustra asks, "How does one overcome man?" (Almost a direct allusion to Saint Max (Stirner), incidentally, despite Elisabeth's idiotic claims otherwise.)

Nietzsche would have appreciated Darwin, and practically speaking, he very much anticipated Darwin: people are animals. Save all that "pretending they are anything but" bullshit for the Christians and the humanists.

It's quite a stretch that Nietzsche had Stirner's book, but the skeptical majority(?) assumes he never read it due to lack of a smoking gun reference. For lurkers who desire some quotes from the contrarian view...

On one hand, Der Einzige's editor Ernst Samuel (Anselm Ruest) contended that Nietzsche's zero acknowledgement of Stirner in his literature was due to "Nietzsche had read Stirner, but withheld mention of him in his writings because he feared that while it was 'a positive philosophy which yearned for life', it was apt to be 'misused by many readers as a justification for petty crimes and cowardly misdeeds'."

Deleuze went a bit further and crouched the reason in Stirner being a foundational part of the nihilist movement that Nietzsche encouraged going beyond. (Setting aside what was proposed in Deleuze and Anarchism, that this stemmed from Deleuze’s (Mis)Reading of Stirner in "Nietzsche and Philosophy")...

  • Gilles Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy): We have every reason to suppose that Nietzsche had a profound knowledge of the Hegelian movement, from Hegel to Stirner himself. The philosophical learning of an author is not assessed by numbers of quotations, nor by the always fanciful and conjectural check lists of libraries, but by the apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself.

    We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's work if we do not see "against whom" its principle concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights.

    Nietzsche never stops attacking the theological and Christian character of German philosophy (the "Tubingen seminary") -- the powerlessness of this philosophy to extricate itself from the nihilistic perspective (Hegel's negative nihilism, Feuerbach's reactive nihilism, Stirner's extreme nihilism) -- the incapacity of this philosophy to end in anything but the ego, man or phantasms of the human (the Nietzschean overman against the dialectic) -- the mystifying character of so-called dialectical transformations (transvaluation against reappropriation and abstract permutations).

    It is clear that Stirner plays the revelatory role in all this. It is he who pushes the dialectic to its final consequences, showing what its motor and end result are. But precisely because Stirner still thinks like a dialectician, because he does not extricate himself from the categories of property, alienation and its suppression, he throws himself into the nothingness which he hollows out beneath the steps of the dialectic.

    [...] Nietzsche's positive task is twofold: the Overman and Transvaluation. Not "who is man?" but "who overcomes many "The most cautious peoples ask today: 'How may man still be preserved?'

    Zarathustra, however, asks as the sole and first one to do so: 'How shall man be overcome}' The overman lies close to my heart, he is my paramount and sole concern - and not man: not the nearest, not the nearest, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the best" (Z IV "Of the Higher Man", 3, p. 2 9 7 - the allusion to Stirner is obvious).

    [...] The overman has nothing in common with the species being of the dialecticians, with man as species or with the ego. Neither ego nor man is unique.

    The dialectical man is the most wretched because he is no longer anything but a man, having annihilated everything which was not himself. He is also the best man because he has suppressed alienation, replaced God and recuperated his properties.

    We should not think of Nietzsche's overman as simply a raising of the stakes: he differs in nature from man, from the ego. The overman is defined by a new way of feeling: he is a different subject from man, something other than the human type. A new way of thinking, predicates other than divine ones; for the divine is still a way of preserving man and of preserving the essential characteristic of God, God as attribute.

    A new way of evaluating: not a change of values, not an abstract transposition nor a dialectical reversal, but a change and reversal in the element from which the value of values derives, a "transvaluation".
 
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On one hand, Der Einzige's editor Ernst Samuel (Anselm Ruest) contended that Nietzsche's zero acknowledgement of Stirner in his literature was due to "Nietzsche had read Stirner, but withheld mention of him in his writings because he feared that while it was 'a positive philosophy which yearned for life', it was apt to be 'misused by many readers as a justification for petty crimes and cowardly misdeeds'."
This sounds very unlike Nietzsche. Whatever reasons he may have had for not acknowledging Stirner, i don't think it's that.

Deleuze went a bit further and crouched the reason in Stirner being a foundational part of the nihilist movement that Nietzsche encouraged going beyond. (Setting aside what was proposed in Deleuze and Anarchism, that this stemmed from Deleuze’s (Mis)Reading of Stirner in "Nietzsche and Philosophy")...
Even with it's problems, I think both Deleuze's work, as well as Derrida's (in Spurs, particularly), on Nietzsche hold up pretty well.

Heidegger's writings, in retrospect, come across as rather reductive. He was using Nietzsche more to advance his own thinking. At times, his work reminds me of a Bill Burr routine in which he spouting all manner of crazy shit, but then he steps outside and says something that suggests a surprising level of awareness/self-awareness. The difference is that Heidegger generally does not do that latter part.

Of course, I didn't see this twenty-five years ago because Heidegger's writing possesses this crazy seductive allure, with creepy, almost cult-like qualities. (His later work, even with it's apparent and unsettling Naziism influences, is like a drug. You go down the Georg Trakl rabbit hole and you never come back.)

But this--
Deleuze’s (Mis)Reading of Stirner in "Nietzsche and Philosophy")...
--is a really interesting read. I need to review the relevant Deleuze material, cuz that sounds way off (I mean, it sounds like Deleuze was way off, that is).

It's possible that Stirner is generally even more misread than Nietzsche given that considerable familiarity with the Hegelians (a slog even on the best days) is practically essential, but cumulatively far less so owing simply to vast differences in popularity and familiarity. Some of the early American "Individualist" anarchists seem very much influenced by Stirner, but what texts were even available to them and were they reading them in translation? I don't know anything about Rand's direct relationship with Stirner's work--I'd posit that Rand was, to some degree, an "admirer" perhaps, but the feeling would absolutely not have been mutual.
 
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