The ENTIRE Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Bygone Philosophy
14,280 views
He collapsed in a street in Turin in 1889, threw his arms around a horse being beaten, and never recovered. He spent his final eleven years in silence.
In the decade before that silence, he wrote twelve books that diagnosed the spiritual collapse of the modern world with a precision nobody has surpassed before or since.
Then his sister handed his unfinished notes to the Nazis. His name became synonymous with the ideology he had explicitly despised. And the real philosophy — the actual ideas in the actual books — got buried under a century of misreading.
This video unburies it.
Not a summary. Not a list of quotes. The complete philosophy — every major idea, in the order it was meant to be understood, taught the way it was meant to be taught.
What you will actually understand by the end:
→ What God is dead actually means — and why it is a warning, not a celebration
→ The diagnosis of nihilism — and why Nietzsche thought the twentieth century would be catastrophic
→ Slave morality and ressentiment — the psychological history of Western values nobody taught you
→ The Übermensch — what it actually is, stripped of every misreading
→ The eternal recurrence — the heaviest thought in philosophy, and what it is really asking you
→ The will to power — not domination, something far more interesting
→ Amor fati — the love of fate and what it demands
→ The Nazi theft of his ideas — what his sister did and why it matters
→ What Nietzsche was actually trying to give you
Most people who quote Nietzsche have never understood him. Most people who fear him have never read him.
This is the video that changes that.
#nietzsche
#philosophy
20 Comments
Bygone philosophy: Hold my beer
That's the usual fate of every genius.
It is almost routine, not an exception but a rule, that the genius is bound to be misunderstood by his contemporaries, for the simple reason that he is far ahead of his time. So there is always a revival after the death of a genius. It may take one hundred years, two hundred years, but a genius always has a revival.
It is unfortunate that by the time people start understanding him, he is no more. And he suffers the misunderstandings all around him his whole life. He lives almost alone, with no communication with his contemporaries; and by the time he is being understood, he is no more. He never comes to know the people who will understand him.
So it was absolutely certain that Friedrich Nietzsche would have a great revival, and his words and his insights would be echoed all over the world - not only in the world of philosophy, but in the world of religion, morality, aesthetics. Whatever he touched, he always brought something absolutely new to it.
And that's the trouble - because for thousands of years people have understood a thing in a certain way. When a person like Nietzsche turns all the tables - which centuries have founded - and alone, single-handedly, fights against the whole past, it is a very difficult situation - and more so for a Western philosopher who has no understanding of meditation.
He naturally gets very frustrated. It is bound to bring him insanity - the misunderstanding of the people. Everybody misunderstands him. In the world full of millions of people, there is not a single person with whom he can have a heart-to-heart contact, communion. He is in a desert - it drives him mad. That's what happened with Nietzsche.
He lived a life of immense frustration, because he was giving great insights to the world; and in return - only condemnation. He was bringing new light - and not a single friendly response.... Even his friends were not friendly about his philosophical approaches. That finally drove Nietzsche to madness; he died a madman.
His death in madness is a condemnation of the whole Western approach. In the East people have been misunderstood, but because there was an underlying meditative silence and peace and contentment, and a deep understanding that this is just how things are - they are bound to be misunderstood - there was a natural acceptance of it. They were not frustrated, they were not angry; they were not going insane or committing suicide.
But in the West it has been almost always the situation with every great philosopher - the misunderstanding from all corners, from all dimensions, and the deep expectation of the person of being understood. He is not a meditator; he cannot accept the situation of misunderstanding, that it is natural, that he cannot do anything about it, that he will be understood when the time is ripe.
But it does not matter whether he is understood or not: he is perfectly contented that whatever is true to him he is giving to the world. Now it is up to the world when to understand, or not to understand it. He is not dependent in any way on the response of people.
But Western philosophy, Western religion both have missed the quality of meditation. And that creates a new thing. When a man like Nietzsche goes mad, the enemies, who are all around - the people who misunderstood him and drove him mad - take advantage of the situation of his being mad. They start saying that it is his philosophy which is basically wrong, that has driven him mad.
His madness becomes a proof that he is a wrong man - that he is not only mad today, he has always been mad. Whatever he has said is insane. So it becomes a more solid ground on which to refute the person completely, to erase him completely - and that's what happened with Nietzsche.
But a revival was certain. You cannot continue to misunderstand something which has even a little bit of truth in it - and Nietzsche has tremendous insights. If they can all be understood, it will help the Western mind to change many things.
For example, Nietzsche was the only one - even in his madness he would not sign his name without writing over his signature "Antichrist." Even in his madness that much was absolutely certain to him: that he was anti-Christ, that Christ has created a tradition which is immensely dangerous to humanity, that he has polluted the human mind, even about small things.
Where Christ had always been praised, people were surprised that Nietzsche would find a very solid criticism. For example, when Christ says, "If somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other too," Nietzsche was the first man to say that this is an insult to the man who has slapped you.
Now, it needs a certain intelligence to understand what he is saying. He is saying, in giving him the other cheek you are reducing him to subhumanity; you are becoming a god. Behave like a human being: give him a good slap the way he has given you one.
And the argument that looked very strange to the Christians who were his contemporaries, was very simple: "In this way you are proving equality. 'I am also a human being. If you hit me, then I will hit you. I am not a god, I cannot forgive you.' All those who have been trying to forgive are very subtle egoists. They are enjoying reducing the other person almost to an animal. That is worse than hitting the man back hard! Just behave like man to man."
And you can watch it: the person who gives his other cheek - you can see in his eyes and in his face and in his words great pride and great ego. Even when Jesus himself on the cross asks, "Father, forgive these people, because they do not understand what they are doing," he is still trying to prove on the cross the same thing for which he is being crucified - that everybody is ignorant and only he knows.
Again, it was the insight of Nietzsche to see that Jesus' emphasis is not on forgiveness, his emphasis is, "They do not know what they are doing. They do not know whom they are crucifying. They do not understand that they are crucifying the only begotten son of God." In simple words, "These are idiots. Just forgive them - they are not worth punishment."
Even on the cross his ego is as assertive as it has ever been. He is not a humble man. Although he teaches humility, he never shows humility in his whole life. Then certainly his teaching of humility is just the teaching for making your ego so subtle that it can use humility as food, as nourishment.
He is certainly not a humble man. There is no indication in his whole life of where he has acted in a humble manner.
All his declarations that he is the messiah for whom you have been waiting for centuries, that now God has sent his own son to fulfill the promise.... These are not the words of humility, these are not the words of a person who is nobody.
Jesus is not nobody - he is higher than everybody else. Even the prophets, Moses or Abraham or Elijah, are nothing; they are only prophets, just messengers. He is the only begotten son of God, and he says clearly that he was even before Abraham.
Now, Abraham was alive almost three thousand years before Jesus; and Jesus is saying he was before Abraham. He is trying to say that he belongs to eternity, he is eternal, and all these prophets are just bubbles in time. He has always been and will always be - but prophets come and go.
Nietzsche is the only man in the whole Western history who has a deep psychological understanding of Jesus Christ, and who has a very subtle analysis - far more subtle than any Freud or Jung can do. He has almost all the insights. He could have founded psychoanalysis. He could have founded communism. He could have founded anarchism.
He is really vast, and in all dimensions he goes to the very roots. But people have understood one thing for thousands of years, and then suddenly there is a totally opposite interpretation. Rather than accepting the interpretation, they would prefer to reject the man. And he was rejected by the society in every possible way. He lived almost always lonely.
His writing is also very prophetic, even the method. He does not write in the ordinary way philosophers have been writing down the ages, his writing is aphoristic. You can make a whole philosophy out of one paragraph, it is so condensed. And the man had so much to say that he could not manage to elaborate it himself, so he has just put it in the most condensed form. Just the method of his expression was making him a laughingstock in the eyes of other philosophers who were trained to write in a certain logical manner, giving every proof and every argument.
But Nietzsche has to say so much that he cannot go into details of the arguments and procedures of how he has arrived - he simply writes the conclusion, and that conclusion is aphoristic. He then moves to another subject; and he goes on moving that way.
But I love the way he writes. That should be ultimately the way of writing. If people are intelligent you need not go through all the arguments before you give the conclusion; just the conclusion should be enough. If they are sharp and intelligent they will immediately get all the preceding arguments that are not given to them; there is no need....
He was not writing for children, he thought he was writing for philosophers. But he misunderstood:
those philosophers were also not mature enough. They wanted the whole procedure. They could not immediately see the whole procedure in the conclusion; and he had to say so much that it was impossible for him to go into the whole procedure. In every direction and dimension he was touching the foundations."
The ENTIRE Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Bygone Philosophy
14,280 views
He collapsed in a street in Turin in 1889, threw his arms around a horse being beaten, and never recovered. He spent his final eleven years in silence.
In the decade before that silence, he wrote twelve books that diagnosed the spiritual collapse of the modern world with a precision nobody has surpassed before or since.
Then his sister handed his unfinished notes to the Nazis. His name became synonymous with the ideology he had explicitly despised. And the real philosophy — the actual ideas in the actual books — got buried under a century of misreading.
This video unburies it.
Not a summary. Not a list of quotes. The complete philosophy — every major idea, in the order it was meant to be understood, taught the way it was meant to be taught.
What you will actually understand by the end:
→ What God is dead actually means — and why it is a warning, not a celebration
→ The diagnosis of nihilism — and why Nietzsche thought the twentieth century would be catastrophic
→ Slave morality and ressentiment — the psychological history of Western values nobody taught you
→ The Übermensch — what it actually is, stripped of every misreading
→ The eternal recurrence — the heaviest thought in philosophy, and what it is really asking you
→ The will to power — not domination, something far more interesting
→ Amor fati — the love of fate and what it demands
→ The Nazi theft of his ideas — what his sister did and why it matters
→ What Nietzsche was actually trying to give you
Most people who quote Nietzsche have never understood him. Most people who fear him have never read him.
This is the video that changes that.
#nietzsche
#philosophy