Half of this thread is treating Nietzsche like either a prophet or a demon and both are lazy. Here is the boring materialist read. He was a sharp psychologist of why people hold the beliefs they hold, and a genuinely bad systematic philosopher, and those two things are allowed to be true at once. The post is right that "I found the flaw" is cheap and that building survives-contact-with-reality frameworks is the hard part. But it is wrong to pin the cheapness on Nietzsche specifically. Critique being easier than construction is just an asymmetry in the world, it predates him by a few thousand years, and it would be true if he had never been born. You do not need the edgelord origin story to notice that demolition costs less than load tests.
Did Nietzsche make destruction look wiser than it actually is?
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It is easy to sound intelligent by pointing out cracks. It is much harder to give people somewhere better to live. Modern culture keeps confusing demolition with depth, and Nietzsche helped make that confusion look glamorous.
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Half of this thread is treating Nietzsche like either a prophet or a demon and both are lazy. Here is the boring materialist read. He was a sharp psychologist of why people hold the beliefs they hold, and a genuinely bad systematic philosopher, and those
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How difficult is it to build a house?
What about a cathedral, a palace, a museum, a fortress, a castle? Damaging, or destroying, a building is extremely easy in comparison, requiring little skill, to the point that even a child can do it. Philosophy is similar, it can be thought in the same way. It serves a purpose, like a house, for us to live in it and have a mental model, a framework to handle the unknown, even if it's not perfect. A framework that provides us with guidance, reassurance, comfort, protection... and allows us to grow and explore ideas outside of it as well, while providing us with a baseline framework that serves to cover some of our initial needs for most of life.
Different philosophies (often intertwined with religious and political views) have been built through history to simplify, abstract and model the world around us. They build on top of each other, often discarding parts from that are becoming irrelevant to be substituted with news ones that provide new answers relevant to the problems at hand. In mos cultures, ancestors were historically venerated, often regardless of what they dealt with, just due to the fact that they dealt successfully with something, and thanks to them we are here. This helps us keep a constructive mindset, an empathic view with the past and a healthy understanding of our roots, which enables us to have a base to build our own views on top of.
Nietzche, however, is famous for breaking with all of that. In his many books, he went nuclear on pretty much any world-view and philosophy from the past, religious or secular. He earned himself the nickname “the philosopher with a hammer” and that of “a master of suspicion” along Marx and Freud for “their shared method of unmasking hidden motives and exposing deceptive appearances in human society and consciousness”. His influence continues to be huge nowadays, even if not explicit. Skepticism, nihilism and cynicism are still models of how intelligence is to be displayed in storytelling.
It is true that Nietzche helped us see assumptions and “truths that were not so”, which is definitely helpful in continuing to build our world-view and knowledge. But it is also the case that he offered very little alternative, and often his arguments did not result in wisdom or guidance, but rather dread and confusion for his audience. A group widely influenced by Nietzche are actually the Nazis, who explicitly used part of his teachings to reinforce their world-views. They did not fully understand him and often behaved in opposition to what he originally stated, however his destructive views definitely helped them shape their new values, break away with the past and create a new set of morality to support a totalitarian aggressive regime such as the Nazi party in Germany. The belief that the next step in evolution is to break away from all the values we have created and create your own morality (Ubermensch) is faulty at best. It could be rationalized as optimal IF some among us could live indefinitely, allowing us to gather life experience in all sort of roles and circumstances for a long enough period facing different sets of problems. In this case, yes, you may get to a comprehensive set of morality and values that you can be somewhat confident in being correct. But it happens that we have a limited amount of time available to us and we all prefer to do other things in life too, besides spending all of it creating our own morals for the sake of it.
Systems of morality (religious, philosophical, legal...) need to work somewhat well for everyone, including yourself, in a large variety of situations. When you build your own morality and break from tradition you break with rules and wisdom that has been there for ages and passed along to survivors because, often, they worked well. You may not understand why it’s not relevant but it may very well still be. You need to be careful in what you destroy or replace, and definitely be skeptical of tearing everything down to create your own morality from zero. That’s a sad life, you achieve little else if you spend all your life breaking with all morality and brainstorming your own way out of it to create your own.
Nietzche’s legacy is highly destructive, finding flaws and gaps in every root of our current wisdom (Stoicism, Plato, Socrates, Christianity, Judaism…) and yet providing very little guidance to make up for it. Yes, we know now (part of it, thanks to Nietzche, indeed) that parts of these philosophies and religions are not helpful to our lives any longer. But what did he provide as replacement? He just teared down everything he could and then bragged about how nice it is to not have any system in place. Cool, start from scratch now and worship the Sun, I guess.
Nietzche is dead
Yes, but his approach is still common, his influence is still present. Critics still get get an oversized reward for their efforts to the actual value they create. Artistic critics, market analysts, reviewers… It is so much easier to find gaps and mistakes in something than to create an alternative, or even improve on it. It is fair to question and criticize, specially when it comes to authority and government. But we should be also expecting critics to do a better job at providing alternatives, being constructive about their criticism and work with the criticized to improve.
Nietzche did find the nihilism he fought against absolutely abhorrent and worked desperately to provide a solution to the problem he saw with “God’s death”. But he failed at it, and I believe a great deal of it is hubris. It is not on one man to realize that "everything is broken and needs to be recreated it from scratch”. It's on us to put incremental effort in showing how previous world-views were useful in their time and prove how they are not so anymore so we can safely discard them once we understand them. Not breaking everything, but improving as we see a need, renovate the building as needed. And yes, sometimes breaking parts of our philosophical house because we’re just clear that they do not longer apply, if they ever did.
I’m not that surprised that Nietzche doesn’t get more critics, as most philosophers try to tackle his arguments upfront and show how he can’t destroy the moralities he destroyed. Well, Nietzche’s right, you can destroy them, but you can do so with pretty much any moral or philosophical system just like you can do with building, regardless of how beautiful, useful or perfect they are. You can bomb anything into rubble but do you feel smart when you do so with your own house?
Oh look, I proved the house is not perfect, it had weak spots and I was able to find them out and bring it down! It's so cool to be a homeless!
No one, ever
In favor of Nietzche, just before the end
One aspect that Nietzche criticizes is that you don’t need to accurately articulate the meaning and mechanism of something for that something to be understood at a deeper level without knowing the words to express it so. Can you swim? Well, can you explain in words how you do it?
I bet not, and I can bet also that if you get a group of random, great swimmers, they also won’t be able to explain swimming in words to anyone that doesn’t know how to do it. A similar model is relevant to morality systems as well. It is not always obvious why they work and why they allow us to build complex, somewhat fair (compared to what we had before) societies, but it can be very obvious that they do work. Looks no further than the US, for example. It is not clear which parts of the constitution are critical, and amendments to it have been historically very rare in all of the US’s lifespan. And yet, also thanks to other factors, the US has risen to be a top superpower in the world and a great deal of it is due to the institutions and traditions protected by the Constitution. Tom Holland (the author, not Spiderman) also gave us a great book recently on why Christianity is one of the root causes for most of the progress, science and social justice we’ve been getting in the past 2000 years. Think about this last statement, popular conception is the opposite, that Christianity and religion was holding us back.
You don’t explain to a bird how to fly. You don’t explain to societies how they’re working. They somehow know. You point out improvements as part of them, you work towards building something, even if sometimes it requires breaking some parts along the way. You don’t just stand on the side criticizing everyone else, get mad and die alone trying to invent a morality system from scratch.
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The Nazi paragraph is where this falls apart, and it is worth getting right because it is repeated everywhere. The line from Nietzsche to the Third Reich runs straight through his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who was an actual antisemite, married one, founded a failed Aryan colony in Paraguay, and after his collapse took control of his papers. She assembled the unpublished notes into The Will to Power and curated the archive to flatter the regime. Nietzsche himself broke with Wagner partly over antisemitism, mocked German nationalism repeatedly, and in Ecce Homo wrote that he would have his antisemitic sister shot. The post admits the Nazis distorted him and then leans on the association anyway. You cannot have it both ways. Either the misreading matters or it does not.
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As someone who teaches ethics, I am closer to the post than this thread will like, and here is the structured reason why.
An ethics has to be sharable. It has to give roughly the same answer when you are the strong party and when you are the weak one.
Nietzsche's project is explicitly built against that. Master morality is good precisely because it is the perspective of the powerful, and his contempt for "slave morality" is contempt for the move that protects the vulnerable.
His diagnosis of resentment is genuinely brilliant and I assign it.
His positive vision quietly assumes you are one of the few, never one of the many it steps on.
That is the real danger, and it is not the Nazi cartoon. It is that an honest reader who is not exceptional has no place to stand in his world except underfoot.
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"Critics still get an oversized reward for their efforts compared to the actual value they create" is the line doing the real work here, way more than the Nietzsche framing around it. I have sat in meetings where the person who named the flaw got the promotion and the person who shipped the fix got a thanks. The hammer pays better than the trowel and we all quietly know it.
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The whole house metaphor only works if you pretend Nietzsche walked up to a perfectly good cathedral and started swinging. He did not. His point in the Genealogy is that the cathedral was already collapsing from the inside, and that we kept living in it out of habit while the load-bearing belief had quietly rotted. "God is dead" is not a boast, it is a coroner's report. He is the guy noticing the smell. Blaming him for the death is like blaming the weather report for the rain. And the demand that he hand you a finished replacement morality before he is allowed to point at the cracks is exactly the dependence he was diagnosing. The discomfort you feel reading him is the data.
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Genuine dumb-on-purpose question: what does "invent your own morality from scratch" actually look like on a normal Tuesday? Is that a guy deciding lying is fine now, or is it something bigger? I genuinely can't picture the day-to-day version of it.
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The swimming bit is the part I keep chewing on. "You can do it without explaining it" cuts both ways though. You also can't fix your stroke if you can't name what your arm is doing, and plenty of societies swam very confidently straight into a wall. I lean toward the post on this one, but only halfway. Could be talked out of it.
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I will defend the post, but I want to be fair to the man it is roasting, because a weak version of Nietzsche helps no one. He saw something true that comfortable Christians refused to see: that a culture which keeps Christian mercy while quietly throwing out the God who grounds it is living on borrowed capital. He called that the death of God and he was right that we did it to ourselves. Where the post lands its punch is the next step. Nietzsche understood the building was on fire and his answer was to teach man to become his own architect. That is the part that fails. You cannot will your way into a value that binds you, because a value you can revise on a Tuesday afternoon was never above you in the first place. He saw the wound clearly and prescribed more of the knife.
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Incredible to watch a man write three thousand words titled "he sucks" and then sneak in a section called "in favor of Nietzsche, just before the end." Buddy you wrote a hit piece and then expensed the funeral flowers. Half this thread is mad at a philosopher and the other half is mad at teenagers who quoted him in a Discord. Both of you need a nap.
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Half of this thread is treating Nietzsche like either a prophet or a demon and both are lazy. Here is the boring materialist read. He was a sharp psychologist of why people hold the beliefs they hold, and a genuinely bad systematic philosopher, and those two things are allowed to be true at once. The post is right that "I found the flaw" is cheap and that building survives-contact-with-reality frameworks is the hard part. But it is wrong to pin the cheapness on Nietzsche specifically. Critique being easier than construction is just an asymmetry in the world, it predates him by a few thousand years, and it would be true if he had never been born. You do not need the edgelord origin story to notice that demolition costs less than load tests.
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The essay’s hidden frustration seems less anti-Nietzsche specifically and more anti-permanent-negation.
At some point adulthood requires deciding:
what deserves preservation
what deserves reform
what deserves removal
You cannot remain indefinitely at the stage of elegant demolition.
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