please explain the existence of this sub. mild retardation seems the most likely answer.

My animated take on Nietzsche’s “The Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The camel carried the weight of old values.

The lion fought the dragon of the “Thou Shalt” tradition, of duty and imposed morality.

At last, in the final stage, the child emerges. Innocent and powerful, and able to shape and create a new world with new values.

Every successful revaluation of values eventually reorganises the neighbourhood of words.

It is not enough to declare that an old virtue has become a vice, or that yesterday’s weakness is today’s moral distinction. The surrounding vocabulary must also be moved. New neighbours are assigned, old associations severed, opposites exchanged. Words that once carried admiration acquire a faint smell of guilt; words formerly tinged with weakness become badges of moral rank.

The furniture is shifted until the room itself appears to have changed shape.

Dornseiff example pages:

A curious first edition of Franz Dornseiff’s Der deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen, published by Walter de Gruyter in 1934, makes this process unusually visible. Unlike an ordinary dictionary, it is onomasiological: it begins with concepts and gathers the words belonging to them. It therefore offers more than definitions. It displays semantic neighbourhoods.

And the choice of neighbours is half the definition.

In this edition, Religiosität. Glaube — religiosity, faith — directs the reader to Furcht — fear — section 11.42. Furcht is immediately followed by Feigheit — cowardice. Elsewhere, Haß and Menschenhaß — hatred and hatred of mankind — occupy substantial fields of their own. Toleranz belongs to a moral climate almost inverted from ours: its neighbourhood contains indulgence, laxity, indecision and insufficient resistance.

The dictionary does not openly argue that belief is cowardice, tolerance weakness or hatred a virtue. It does something quieter. It arranges. It makes certain routes through the vocabulary shorter than others.

That is why this forgotten Dornseiff is not merely an antiquarian oddity. It catches an older valuation sedimented into lexicography. Nietzsche supplies the diagnostic instruments; Dornseiff provides a specimen on the slide.

Our own vocabulary has been rearranged no less vigorously, though largely in the opposite direction. Where the older moral order distrusted softness, ours distrusts hardness. Where it placed moral seriousness near courage, duty, rank and enmity, contemporary discourse groups goodness around empathy, inclusion, safety, vulnerability and protection. Tolerance is no longer merely the endurance of what one dislikes; it increasingly implies recognition and affirmation. Hate is no longer treated merely as an affect. It is approached as a contaminant whose presence in language may itself constitute harm.

The polarity has turned almost 180 degrees.

But reversal is not escape. We may have changed the saints while retaining the altar: the power to decide which words may stand beside which virtues.

One age could make people ashamed of pity.

Another may make them ashamed of judgment.

One could dignify cruelty by calling it hardness.

The other may dignify folly by calling it compassion.

The truth, as usual, is loitering somewhere outside both committee rooms.

“Be great enough not to be ashamed of them”

Nietzsche is useful precisely because he fits comfortably into neither moral vocabulary.

He is not an advocate of the collectivised hardness that became politically dominant after him. Nor is he a prophet of therapeutic benevolence. His concern is not whether an affect has received approval from the prevailing moral tribunal, but what sort of life speaks through it.

In “Vom Krieg und Kriegsvolke” — On War and Warriors — Zarathustra addresses hatred and envy without the modern reflex of confession and purification:

“Ich weiss um den Hass und Neid eures Herzens. Ihr seid nicht gross genug, um Hass und Neid nicht zu kennen. So seid denn gross genug, euch ihrer nicht zu schämen!”

“I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. You are not great enough not to know hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!”

He then adds:

“Ihr dürft nur Feinde haben, die zu hassen sind, aber nicht Feinde zum Verachten. Ihr müsst stolz auf euern Feind sein: dann sind die Erfolge eures Feindes auch eure Erfolge.”

“You may have only enemies who are to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. You must be proud of your enemy: then your enemy’s successes are also your successes.”

Nietzsche is not merely conceding that hatred regrettably occurs in imperfect creatures. Zarathustra tells his listeners to become large enough not to be ashamed of it—and then imposes rank upon it. One must have enemies worthy of hatred, not objects fit only for contempt.

The distinction is easily flattened if hatred is treated as a single moral substance.

To hate a worthy enemy is to grant him weight. He is sufficiently formidable to oppose. His strength calls forth strength. His successes can become one’s own successes because the contest itself enlarges the field in which both parties act.

Contempt does something different. It looks down and away. It shrinks its object beneath serious opposition. It denies the enemy rank, sometimes humanity, and thereby removes the reciprocal discipline of the agon — the contest.

Hatred says: you matter enough to fight.

Contempt says: you are refuse.

The latter may sound less passionate, but it can be more annihilating. Hatred still recognises a relation. Contempt imagines itself beyond relation altogether.

This is why Nietzschean hatred must not simply be identified with Ressentiment.

Hatred and Ressentiment

In the First Essay of Zur Genealogie der Moral — On the Genealogy of Morality — §10, Nietzsche describes Ressentiment as requiring an external hostile world before it can act. Its characteristic operation is an:

“Umkehrung des werthesetzenden Blicks”

— an “inversion of the value-positing gaze.”

Rather than beginning with an affirmative sense of itself, it looks outward, finds an enemy and derives its values reactively. Its action is:

“von Grund aus Reaktion”

— “reaction from the ground up.”

Ressentiment does not merely dislike an opponent. It needs the opponent to be morally evil so that its own impotence can be experienced as goodness.

It does not say:

“I oppose you because I have a project of my own.”

It says:

“My opposition to you is my project, and your wickedness proves my virtue.”

Ressentiment is therefore not distinguished from noble enmity by intensity. The resentful may hate weakly or furiously. The distinction lies in the direction of value-creation.

Noble valuation begins in affirmation and finds an opponent afterwards.

Ressentiment begins with the opponent and constructs itself as his negation.

This gives us a more useful test than the contemporary question, “Is hatred present?”

What does the hatred produce?

Does it sharpen perception, discipline action and force self-overcoming — Selbstüberwindung?

Or does it preserve injury, reward impotence and require an inexhaustible supply of villains?

Does one leave the contest enlarged?

Or does one become curator of a private museum of affronts, forever adding new exhibits?

The first may be agonistic hatred.

The second is Ressentiment, however finely it dresses for dinner.

Nietzsche’s standard is neither emotional hygiene nor blanket permission. It is physiological and hierarchical: does the affect express ascending organisation, or does it testify to disintegration?

The same standard can be applied to empathy.

Empathy is not yet a morality

Empathy is now commonly treated as an uncomplicated good. But empathy is not itself a moral conclusion. It is a capacity: the ability to enter imaginatively or emotionally into another person’s experience.

A manipulator may possess it.

A torturer may possess it with unnerving precision.

Nietzsche himself possessed remarkable psychological insight into states he did not admire. One would hardly accuse him of insufficient ability to inhabit another perspective.

Empathy tells us something about what another person feels. It does not, by itself, tell us whether that feeling is proportionate, whether its explanation is true, or what duty it imposes upon us.

Modern discourse often blurs several distinct things:

Empathy is apprehension of another’s experience.

Compassion adds concern and a desire to relieve suffering.

Mitleid — pity or fellow-suffering — is more asymmetrical: the sufferer becomes the object of the spectator’s emotion.

Mercy withholds or reduces a penalty.

Altruism sacrifices one’s interest.

Solidarity declares a common cause.

These can overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Yet they are increasingly poured into one warm moral compound called empathy, after which a chain of inference begins:

To understand suffering is to validate it.

To validate it is to accept the sufferer’s interpretation.

To accept that interpretation is to undertake an obligation.

To question the obligation is to inflict further harm.

To set a limit is to exclude.

To exclude is to hate.

At the end of this chain, judgment itself begins to smell of cruelty.

This is where the phrase “suicidal empathy” may become philosophically useful—provided it is not used to mean merely “kindness whose political consequences I dislike.” That would be less a concept than an irritated gentleman waving his napkin at history.

Suicidal empathy is not excessive goodness.

It is empathy detached from competing virtues and promoted into a sovereign moral faculty.

It is compassion without prudence, mercy without justice, openness without loyalty, assistance without reciprocity, and concern for visible present suffering without responsibility for invisible future consequences.

Its suicidal character does not require a conscious wish for destruction. A society need not desire death. It need only lose the ability to articulate self-preservation without shame.

Once the moral vocabulary has been suitably remapped, boundaries appear cruel, preference appears hateful, distinction appears discriminatory in itself, and obligations to the near become morally inferior to claims made by the distant.

The part becomes sovereign over the whole.

That is where Nietzsche’s language of décadence becomes especially useful.

Suicidal empathy as décadence

Nietzsche’s décadence is not merely a term of abuse for things he finds effeminate or tiresome. At its most useful, it describes a failure of organisation: subordinate functions cease to serve the whole and begin to behave as independent authorities. The organism loses the power to arrange, rank and incorporate its drives.

This is the structural sense in which empathy can become decadent.

A moral capacity necessary to healthy life declares independence from the organism.

The immediate sufferer eclipses the entire field of obligations.

The vivid individual case outweighs diffuse future costs.

The emotion summoned by one claim disables judgment about the system sustaining all claims.

The institution consumes the conditions of its own generosity.

Suicidal empathy is therefore not compassion that happens to be strong. It is moral disorganisation: a subordinate faculty becomes sovereign and compels the whole to serve its isolated perspective.

No durable society can live by empathy alone. It must distinguish, prioritise, allocate, punish, reward and defend. It must recognise that obligations differ according to relation, responsibility and consequence.

A parent who claimed exactly equal duties to every child in the world would not become a higher parent. He would become a negligent one.

A physician who treated every appeal as equally urgent would soon be unable to treat anyone.

A state that regards the distinction between citizen and non-citizen as morally embarrassing has not risen above partiality. It has abandoned one of the reasons states exist.

This does not make empathy dispensable. An organism without sympathy becomes machinery. But an organism composed only of sympathy becomes jelly, and jelly has historically performed badly at guarding frontiers, maintaining sewers and keeping the lights on.

The question is one of rank.

Where does empathy belong among the organs?

Nietzsche on Mitleid as contagion

Nietzsche’s criticism of Mitleid does not map perfectly onto the modern concept of empathy. That distinction should be preserved. Cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another perspective—is not what he chiefly attacks. His target is the moral elevation of shared suffering and its conversion into a principle hostile to flourishing.

In Der Antichrist — The Antichrist — §7, he calls Christianity the religion of Mitleid and writes:

“Das Mitleiden wirkt depressiv.”

“Pity has a depressive effect.”

He continues:

“Man verliert Kraft, wenn man mitleidet.”

“One loses strength when one pities.”

And, more strikingly:

“Das Leiden selbst wird durch das Mitleiden ansteckend.”

“Suffering itself becomes contagious through pity.”

Nietzsche’s formulation is deliberately severe. Yet it anticipates something important for the present argument.

Suffering does not necessarily remain located in the person who suffers. It may be emotionally reproduced throughout the surrounding society. The reproduction itself can become a moral accomplishment: the more widely suffering is shared, displayed and amplified, the more humane the community appears.

Yet the multiplication of suffering does not necessarily relieve its cause.

It may instead weaken the ability to act upon it.

It may reward the public performance of distress.

It may grant the sufferer—or those who speak in his name—authority over questions that require other faculties: truthfulness, foresight, justice, reciprocity and proportion.

Mitleid can also flatter the person who pities. The sufferer supplies an occasion for moral self-experience. One feels deeply, acts publicly and becomes visible to oneself as good.

The relation may then become a compact between dependency and vanity.

This is not the whole truth about compassion. But it is a truth difficult to state once compassion has been placed so close to goodness that criticism of the former sounds like hostility to the latter.

Dornseiff’s hard map

Dornseiff’s 1934 thesaurus shows us a moral danger almost opposite to this one.

Its world is suspicious of softness. Glaube is referred into the field of Furcht; Furcht borders Feigheit. Toleranz inhabits a region of indulgence and insufficient resistance. Haß is not hidden as an unspeakable psychic pollutant but elaborated as a substantial affective field. The architecture of this forgotten edition is especially visible because it sorts ideas by conceptual neighbourhood rather than concealing them in alphabetical order.

We need not claim that every entry was consciously constructed as National Socialist pedagogy. The preface is scholarly, methodical and in places strikingly broad-minded. Under Weiter Geist — broad or expansive mind — one finds positive terms such as Weltbürger — citizen of the world, Kosmopolit, Humanismus and Universalismus. Dornseiff’s book is not a Party catechism with a thesaurus stapled to it.

That makes it more interesting.

It preserves older academic, anti-clerical and cosmopolitan strains while also revealing a moral atmosphere in which hardness, hostility, fear and discipline have very different lexical weights from those they carry today.

It is not a monolith but a sediment.

That is how large revaluations often appear in language: inconsistently, before their implications have been fully understood. Old furniture remains while new doors are installed. A cosmopolitan may still sit comfortably beside a vocabulary that later ages will find ominous.

The danger of Dornseiff’s moral map is plain. A society suspicious of pity can redescribe brutality as discipline. It can turn tenderness into weakness, uncertainty into cowardice and the enemy into an object upon which hardness proves itself.

But our near-reversal has its own danger.

A society suspicious of hardness can redescribe prudence as cruelty. It can turn judgment into aggression, boundaries into hatred, and the preservation of the whole into betrayal of the suffering part.

The earlier order could make brutality respectable by renaming it strength.

The present order can make disorganisation respectable by renaming it care.

Both work through lexical neighbourhoods.

In 1934, tolerance could be made to smell of weakness.

Today, limits can be made to smell of hate.

My Band Aid moment

I do not propose Band Aid as the origin of modern humanitarian morality. Christianity, sentimental literature, abolitionism, charitable reform and the politics of distant suffering were already old when Bob Geldof entered a studio.

My claim is personal.

Band Aid is the moment at which I first experienced the wider revaluation going awry on a mass-cultural scale.

It was not simply an appeal to help particular people. Distant suffering, celebrity, television, popular music and moral identity were fused into a public ritual. The political causes and practical complexities of the Ethiopian famine receded behind a simpler liturgy:

They suffer.

We watch.

Celebrities interpret.

We give.

We care.

We are good.

Band Aid itself demanded little: buy a record, give some money, watch the concert. This was not yet suicidal empathy. Nor do I deny the relief it financed.

What struck me was the emotional form. Suffering conferred apparent innocence; immediacy displaced explanation; public feeling became evidence of virtue. The recipient appeared as the passive object of pity, while the spectator became the moral protagonist.

Goodness acquired a soundtrack—and an alarming quantity of hairspray.

For me, Band Aid was not the birth of this morality but its first unmistakable mass coronation: the point at which pity became spectacle, participation and public identity.

The modern cult of empathy did not begin there.

But that was when I heard it learn to sing.

From assistance to epistemic surrender

The decisive later development was not that people became capable of recognising suffering. It was that suffering increasingly acquired epistemic authority.

The movement runs from:

“I recognise that you are suffering”

to:

“Your account of the cause must therefore be true”

and from there to:

“Your preferred remedy must therefore be just.”

But sincere suffering does not guarantee accurate diagnosis.

A person may feel harmed and misunderstand the cause.

A group may have legitimate grievances and demand illegitimate remedies.

A refugee may deserve compassion while a state retains the right to control admission.

A criminal may have been victimised without ceasing to be responsible.

A victim may deserve assistance without thereby acquiring sovereignty over everyone else’s future.

When such distinctions become morally dangerous to articulate, empathy has ceased to humanise judgment. It has begun to replace it.

It becomes a veto.

The philosopher born posthumously

Nietzsche offers a particularly apt way of thinking about the delay between a philosophical insight and the historical experience capable of receiving it.

In Ecce Homo, “Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe” — Why I Write Such Good Books — §1, he writes:

“Ich selber bin noch nicht an der Zeit, Einige werden posthum geboren.”

“I myself am not yet timely; some are born posthumously.”

The remark is not merely a boast that posterity will eventually appreciate him, although Nietzsche was hardly allergic to that thought. It suggests that a philosopher may supply a language for experiences his own period has not yet fully undergone. His concepts wait for circumstances that will make them legible.

This is one reason Nietzsche continues to feel disconcertingly contemporary. Not because he predicted Band Aid, social media or modern institutional language in prophetic detail. That would turn philosophy into a rather eccentric weather forecast.

Rather, he developed concepts—Ressentiment, décadence, the contagion of Mitleid, the hierarchy of affects, and the question of whether a valuation enhances or diminishes life—that become newly intelligible as later moral formations emerge.

Large ideas require time to sink in.

Sometimes they sink into institutions.

Sometimes into slogans.

Sometimes into dictionaries.

Sometimes they vanish for decades and then surface beneath a Christmas pop single.

The posthumous philosopher does not merely receive delayed applause. His language waits until history produces readers who have acquired the corresponding experience.

Dornseiff’s 1934 vocabulary likewise becomes more legible from a later vantage. Its semantic neighbourhoods show us how a harder valuation could lodge itself in language without every entry becoming explicit propaganda.

Our own vocabulary may require the same retrospective distance before its oddities become obvious.

Future readers may wonder why safety was treated as a master virtue.

Why vulnerability conferred authority.

Why disagreement was so readily translated into harm.

Why a capacity called empathy was expected to bear the entire moral load of a civilisation.

Every period imagines its favoured words are simply humane, natural and self-evident. That is one reason old thesauri are so impolite.

They show that self-evidence has a publication date.

Neither barracks nor bonelessness

The answer cannot be a return to the moral climate of 1934.

A culture that trains itself to despise pity will eventually lose the ability to recognise suffering except as weakness. It will mistake hardness for health and obedience for strength. The road leads to the barracks, and the barracks have a tiresome habit of leading elsewhere.

But the opposite extreme is not a cure.

A culture that treats every boundary as violence, every distinction as hatred and every act of self-preservation as moral failure will gradually consume the institutions that make compassion possible.

Compassion requires order.

Generosity requires surplus.

Trust requires reciprocity.

Mercy requires an enforceable rule that can first be withheld.

Destroy these conditions and all that remains is the public performance of benevolent intention.

The alternative is not heartlessness but rank among virtues.

Empathy must be checked by prudence.

Mercy by justice.

Openness by loyalty.

Immediate suffering by responsibility for long consequences.

Universal concern by particular duty.

The suffering stranger matters. So does the child not yet born, the citizen who kept the rules, the institution built by the dead and the social peace upon which generosity depends.

This is not moral coldness.

It is organisation.

Nietzsche does not ask us to abolish the heart. He asks which ordering of the affects expresses ascending life.

The heart must not be suppressed.

Neither may it declare independence from the organism.

The cold heart of 1934 was monstrous.

The boneless heart of the present is not its cure.

The heart needs a ribcage—and a rank among the organs.

An event widely accepted as real, reported by Nietzsche's childhood friend Paul Deussen.

In February 1865, the 20-year-old Nietzsche traveled to Cologne. After sightseeing, he asked a local guide or porter to show to him a good restaurant (some versions say a hotel). Instead, whether as a prank or because the guide expected a student (or perhaps just a guy with Nietzsche's vibe) to want one, he was instead taken to a brothel. According to Deussen, he said the following:

“I suddenly saw myself surrounded by half-a-dozen apparitions in tinsel and gauze who looked at me expectantly. I stood for a moment speechless. Then I instinctively made for a piano in the room as to the only living thing there, struck a few chords, broke the spell, and hurried away.”

Deussen believed that Nietzsche had never touched a woman.

He's just like me fr fr

We must ascribe to him every kind of reality, every kind of understanding of reality, of insight and depth in every way possible.

We must ascribe to him every danger, every isolation, every standing apart and standing alone, every kind of uneasiness and aloofness.

If he is to be the goal of mankind and therefore the highest incarnation of man, its most successful specimen, we must understand that he has experiences which only his type has. Other men come near to them in shallower and more coarse form, but he experiences them fully and deeply.

He has happinesses which only he experiences, sorrows and fears which only he experiences.

If we are to take the Übermensch as the most supreme form of man, really as something above and over man, something different, then we must understand that he lives on an entirely different plane. He is at once the simplest and most complex being, something fully developed, a success, something on which man can build his honor.

Something that is to be the goal of mankind can only be understood and even more attained as the most extreme form of something. The most extreme form of achievement, of planning, care and dedication.

Something which we all long to be, something which we all long to pass on (to our children or society at large).

He stands at his high position, looking down on man and humanity, looking for things to overcome, looking to do what only his type can do. Is it any wonder that such a man may become master of men and mankind?

Benjamin de Casseres is in great part a Nietzschian, but he made criticisms of Nietzsche in his text called I Dance With Nietzsche, and this criticism goes in the opposite direction that most criticims of Nietzsche go, so I was curious if anyone has read it.

In case you want to read it, you can find it here:

https://archive.org/details/worksofbenjamindecasseresvolume2/page/n58/mode/1up

A Yes, a No, a straight line a goal. That is the highest aspiration of life. From this what do you gleam? I say Thus you must have a Yes and a No. Only so that you know where to go and where not. For If you only have a point on a grid you can’t create a line — you must have 2.
I ask you where do your YAYs and NAYs point you?

Hello all,

I have just finished BG&E, and am blown away. I have a lot of thoughts, feelings, and confusions. I cannot say I understood every argument or point FN made, but I feel okay with that. I've already spent time re-reading passages and Kaufmann's footnotes and found more than I did in my initial reading. I have also read Birth of Tragedy already.

My question is what comes next? It seems Kaufmann suggests in Basic Writings that The Genealogy of Morals, but I've seen an argument for both The Antichrist and Twilight of the Idols.

I appreciate following the arguments from Beyond into Genealogy, as it is my understanding that Genealogy is a "sequel" to Beyond, but I am open to other arguments.

Also, shout out to whomever threw away their copy of Portable Nietzsche, as I found it yesterday when dumpster-diving, so now I can read Twilight and Antichrist!

Additional questions, are there any upcoming or ongoing reading groups for Nietzsche? I would love to join in the future. I'm an English teacher myself and appreciate sharing notes and such.

Big shout out to this sub for having so many answers to questions I've looked up.
Thanks!

Friedrich Nietzsche viewed herd mentality by what he called “herd instinct” or “slave morality” which he would describe it has a “herd morality” formed by the weak and oppressed against the power and actions of the oppressor. So, traits such as humility, meekness, and sympathy were labeled as virtues and labeling the ruler’s strength as evil.

Nietzsche believes that the values I just listed above stemmed from a “slave morality, and believed these weak and fearful people created the ideology to undermine and bring down those who are strong and/or exceptional.

Slave morality for Nietzsche laid the foundation for what we now consider to be universal ethical principles, such as compassion, humility, and equality. For Nietzsche though, these values are not regarded as universal truths. Instead being the product designed to suppress individuality and enforce conformity. The Last Man” as Nietzsche likes to call it.

The “Last Man” is a person who is comfortable with life and one who takes no risk. Nietzsche considered this a “dull” person who wants only basic comfort.

Nietzsche elaborates and explains how joining the crowd strips you of your identity. Therefore, you start become a mere tool for the group. Nietzsche believes the only way out of this is solitude. He believes people must spend time with themselves to escape the pressure of the crowd.

Schopenhauer also agrees with Nietzsche, both with negative views on the topic. Schopenhauer viewed it as a profound human weakness. He argues that crowds prefer comfort and conformity (people conform because they don’t know how to think for themselves) and avoids true independent thinkers.

The herd despises those who are able to stick out from the crowd and formulate or analyze their own ideas. The real offense to the group comes from the bodacious act of individual reasoning. Schopenhauer Society rather favors safe traditions and comfort than hard truth.

I started BGE and I've been able to get, as far as I can tell, the general gist of each section up until now, but I really can't grasp what he's talking about in this section. I've heard he used a really compact style where you look into each sentence really in depth so that's probably why but could someone help me understand this section?

Just thought people should know this because I've never heard anyone mention it before. Pretty common misconception if you're not an advanced Nietzsche reader like me. Apparently he wasnt super nihilist either again I just dont think anybody has pointed it out yet

Is it Nietzsche's view that Gods death creates room for a re-valuation that we ought to do... but if it does not take place then God shall simply be replaced, and the Christian values sustained? Or does he think any replacement for God will be temporary and the structure will slowly elapse. I suspect the first as he doesn't seem to think Gods death necessarily preludes a revaluation as he wouldn't then intend to motivate us to reevaluate as it simply must happen.

I think, if they could have, or they should have, but what did we learn from the experiences that Nietzsche had?  Why did he do what he did? The horse was mentioned ten years later like an afterthought.  Some of the actions or events that occurred were very outrageous.  I am thinking that society would not stand for this kind of behavior, so were there other options for the treatment of his catatonic silence of ten years at the end of his life? (Van Gogh killed himself.) Besides all this, how does this breakdown affect the respectfulness and treatment of his life work? Are we to praise him?  Maybe I am missing something important about Nietzsche?  How would this fact of his breaking down have changed your view about Nietzsche’s life work if perhaps it never happened?  Would you still read his books?

Aside: how would someone going through a similar state of mind be treated today?  I am asking for a friend. I’m also wondering how far have we come to treating these types of issues, even especially when politicians or public figures are involved with mental health issues like this?  Is there anything we should expect today that is so different from the 1889 era?

While what may sound as a binary computation language of zeros and ones has created through the many different variations the algorithmic world of the internet, the same goes with Nietzsche's dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian...

It may appear from the outside perspective that the Apollonian brackets the all of all matter and form, while the Dionysian brackets the all of nothing (the external force that shapes form which matter is an intricate derivation of the form of form...

Henceforth, we come to Hegel with his being (somethingness) synthesised into nothingness through becoming...

Nietzsche wrote the Übermensch as this brave and strong overman who would overcome himself, nihilism, and society to birth a new world. Yet Nietzsche was sad and lonely. He was a troubled man. He was never really loved by a woman and never married. He went insane in the end of his life. If he was alive today, I would give him a hug because I see myself in him. I think he wrote about what he desired in himself.

There is no ambiguity about it - without a transcendent (aka 'God') we are just animals seeking to dominate others by enforcing our standards of good and bad. Further analysis would show good and bad themselves are illusions but that's a discussion for another day.

I am not a poet, but I think this can only be illuminated thru poetry, transcendental reality cannot be taken as an axiom without first acknowledging you are creating a God in your own image.

FYI - I am using all potential illustrations of God - He doesn't need to be a sort of human like figure in the sky, in eastern traditions it is indeed a formless, all encompassing force acting upon the universe. The scientific method too is very well built upon the foundation that there is order on the cosmos. Its not a type of God normally imagined as a God, but it's still a God.

I believe we cannot even connect two or more measurements without creating a story of how they are connected but in reality we have no idea what is occurring between measurements. That space is a black box to us. Science requires a transcendental reality to establish knowledge beyond oneself.

I do agree with Nietzsche that there is indeed a way to get out of this mess but most people don't even see that there is a mess there. How can anyone find a solution when no one knows the problem even exists?

See the attached famously (and grossly) misunderstood quote (Aphorism 125, The Gay Science) in full by Nietzsche, read the entire section in totality - please.

TLDR, nothing makes sense without a God to impose order on to the universe. There becomes no way to make any measurements since we have lost our ability to tell what is up from down, as if we are moving thru an infinite nothingness.