Life of Bata Blogs

A person I met twice told me she read Nietzsche when she was younger. She described that her life was made more difficult with his ideas, and I distinctly remember her telling me that she had to decide to live her life being neutral toward people instead of judging them with Nietzsche’s values. I think she observed that his way was unnatural to adopt in daily life because it went against the cultural norms. Once I picked up Twilight of The Idols (Penguin Classics), a conversation with her was in my mind.

Stylistically, I see that Nietzsche believed in writing Maxims that grasped the essence of what he meant to say. He wrote that very few could understand him, and he developed his style because he wanted to convey in one sentence or paragraph what others could not say in ten books. He liked short, dry, cold, concise, harsh, serious sentences. He makes a point as an observer or critic and moves on to the next idea, paragraph by paragraph. Paragraphs are short and tie with each other, and overall I think he is a good critic and a very good observer.   

It seems like his intellectual growth happened as he studied the pre-Socratic tragedies. He found that there was not much moralizing of the events but mere facts and depiction o how life happened. He saw the difference not only in plays but also in how historians depicted history. For example, Pre-Socratic Thucydides told the story as facts without making one side or the other good or bad. Thucydides saw them as people who were doing what they needed to do to survive and extend their survival by gaining more power. He didn’t make the Spartans, Athenians, Sicilians, or Persians bad whereas later historians depicted Persians evil. In this literature and history analysis, I think he noticed that after Socrates and especially after the flourishing of Christianity, he observed that there was this moralizing of our actions to think that we are the good guys and outsiders are the bad guys in the stories. 

One of his answers was that Socratic influence and the Socratic method must have influenced this change. Moralizing all the time and making ourselves the good guys and our enemies the bad guys is not a mature way to affirm life. Even though Nietzsche was a big supporter of reason, he figured the Socratic promise led us into this pit full of moralizing over and over to come up with reasons to legitimize our actions. Building on the criticism, he even claimed Socrates didn’t affirm life truly because he wanted to believe his formula and fictional promise but he was unhappy and wanted to die even though he had the chance to escape the execution.

Also, he took up this fight with the Christian ways because he thought that the Christian way was not affirming life the way he saw was better. Both the Socratic way and the Christian way provided the expedited solution to the suffering and harshness of life, he argued. He thought it made people feel comfortable way earlier than he thought they should have. His method, will to power, I suspect, must have been about taking more time to embrace and let the feeling of life sit in before choosing an easy passage out with Socratic promise or Christian forgiveness. 

His method to get attention was that he called the Christians and the Socratic practitioners weak because they were accepting a well-put-together answer, only one answer as a solution without the nuances and duality in many things. He even claimed that God was dead to get more attention because people didn’t choose to wrestle with the idea of God and build a relationship with him. People took the word of the preacher and failed to live the spiritual life to the fullest themselves. The Church was growing but the true practitioners who truly wanted to understand God lacked experience. No one made that attempt to talk with God on their own; therefore, God was dead. In that way, you can see that he was a very suspicious man, suspicious of the romantics and suspicious of the easy answer to the problems. 

He considers his best accomplishment was the book called Reevaluation of the Values. He thought he had to do it because the Western thought was polluted by moralization everywhere, away from the truth, wanting to be happy and wanting to feel good fast. He thought the West missed the opportunity to do so when the Protestant movement solved the problems with the Catholic Church with a good enough solution. The period of enlightenment and the opportunity to reassess Western values with the help of the influx of Greek thought was lost with Luther’s good enough renovation.   

Personally, one takeaway for me has been Nietzsche’s encouragement to look at the causal relationship we think exists and encouragement to ask if things actually work that way. It brought light to, for example, one of the causal relationships I have learned in College: in Socratic way if you think, you build knowledge and virtue so that you can eventually be happy. I wanted to maximize virtue and figure out what is the right way and a good life. Now I am evaluating if that causational relationship is actually right. There are reasons to think that the causation might be wrong. Imagine a scenario where you actually might be more virtuous if you are happy. It might be true because I have more virtues such as being willing to help more people when I am happy and in a good mood etc.  

Nietzsche’s other observation was that Western society got the easy solutions to life’s suffering with the Socratic and Christian prescription for happiness; he pointed out that the causes have not been very much studied and proven. So to conclude, I think we can take Nietzsche as a good psychologist, thinker, critic, and observer. I look forward to reading how Will of Power is meant to be practiced to live a more fulfilling and life-affirming way. As Nietzsche would agree, ‘Let’s reevaluate the things that we take to be true, our values, and especially the causations, and let’s not take one simplified answer because it feels good.’