Nietzsche's Guide to Greatness | Hacker News Reader

Nietzsche's Guide to Greatness

johnathanbi.com

19 pointsjger1527 comments

The very beginning of this lecture exposes it as complete rubbish.

> Nietzsche thinks this book is gonna be wasted on most of you, but for his rightful readers, it will free you to achieve greatness. Nietzsche wrote his books to cultivate what he called "higher men": people like Beethoven, Napoleon, and, Goethe. Now, before you get too excited, Nietzsche's got some bad news for you. Higher men are born to be higher men, they are born with noble aristocratic natures which he thinks is incredibly rare.

Okay, then why is this lecture about how to be an aristocrat if that's impossible for me, a common peasant? If Johnathan Bi truly believes this, shouldn't he lecturing me about how to be a serf and properly serve my aristocratic masters? (step 1: stop writing comments on HN and get back to work!) Nietzsche never intended to instruct people how to be great, he only sought to explain why things are the way they are. Claiming that "Genealogy" is a "guide" is silly at best.

It seems like he watched a YouTube video on Nietzschean philosophy and decided to build a self-help guru personality around it. I've watched a lot of Coffeezilla's self-help guru videos and this one is giving me the same vibe.

edit: heh, looks like this got kicked off the front page. Good.

Looks like he got tripped up by the fine difference between arete and virtue. In Aristotelian philosophy, virtue is something you are born with but arete is something that is taught. (Accordingly, most peasants are born with virtue, although it might be hard for them to access arete). When put like that, it doesn't sound too off-putting, does it?

So you're saying everyone (or almost everyone) has the potential to be great, we just need to give them the opportunity. Maybe if we go a little farther and say no one, at birth, inherently deserves more opportun.. oops, we're back at egalitarianism.

It's hard to argue against equal opportunity egalitarianism, no? The real hard debate is rather over how to measure outcomes? (Consider free tuition, keeping pple in college/high school until they pass, assigning profs randomly to different schools etc.)

The whole lecture is a screed against egalitarianiam.

Sorry, did not mean to assign (much) merit to the lecture, although it might be worthwhile to read its transcript in order study how exponents of Nietzsche might get tripped up (in subtle ways[0], as well in more obvious ways, e.g., by their own enthusiasm)

[0]he calls some people "sick", which means a cure is at least imaginable, yes?

EDIT: in "Beyond Good & Evil", the occurrences of the combination "Slave morality" are much more numerous than "Slave" on its own. Not so in this guy's lecture.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sklavenmoral

Ultimately, the author concludes:

> So let me end our lecture by expressing both my deep indebtedness, my deep gratitude for Nietzsche as well as my ultimate dissatisfaction with him in the following way:

> I've been too convinced by Nietzsche to be convinced by the rhetoric of the sick.

In spite of "beyond good and evil", Nietzsche was himself caught between Hebraism/Hellenism.

> Okay, then why is this lecture about how to be an aristocrat if that's impossible for me, a common peasant?

What if you suddenly found yourself, through luck or hard work, in a gentrified position?

> What if you suddenly found yourself, through luck or hard work, in a gentrified position?

Then I would certainly not be listening to lectures by Johnathan Bi. I would definitely read and love Nietzsche though.

I have not read through this entirely but would, perhaps, like to propose that Neitzche was riffing off of eastern philosophy and mayhap missed the boat. Namely, the uber mensche is in fact the every man. Without the mundane, there is no sacred or profane, no higher calling, no substrate from which to build these high towers.

I think about this when walking through cities or touring mansions of the rich and powerful, even when looking through a thoughtful, well-organized codebase: who were these craftsmen? What lives did they live while not simply trying to live? But, oh, look what they built with the time they had.

Nietzsche is being turned into self help content even though as a historian of ideas he had some interesting theories. If you want a more sober analysis of 'greatness' you should read Jacob Burckhardt's chapter on the topic in his book Force and Freedom: https://archive.org/details/forcefreedomrefe0000burc/page/n7...

He was one of Nietzsche's mentors and analysed what being 'great' means from a scientific perspective. It's a clear historical deep dive which can't be as easily reduced to bombastic slogans.

Not relevant to Nietzsche, but Johnathan Bi also led a series of lectures on René Girard's Mimetic Theory: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_xn3B6eWvGsILrh5v5nq...

I took the bait when I heard the intro bit on Buddhism, because many people get a lot of stuff wrong about it (even people that practice it, which he seemed to say he did at one point).

> What cessation of desire meant was poofing out of existence.

That's not true. Even in Theravada formulations of Nirvana, which he's talking about, Nirvana is not an annihilation. The Buddha famously taught a Middle Path, which is there in the Theravada as well, between annihilation and an eternal self/soul.

He's not wrong about the power that tends to arise around the priestly caste though, which is why personally for my practice I draw inspiration from the stories of people like Saraha and Tilopa, who disavowed their positions to practice with low caste women.

Stopped reading when there was a long passage about the author instead of Nietzsche

Nietzche also died penniless and alone in an insane asylum. His philosophy is more of a cautionary tale than anything else.

By that measure, perhaps no philosopher is worth listening to. I'm not saying this is a good or a bad idea, just that it would be an interesting... philosophy

If Socrates was so smart, why is he dead?

Great question, instantly invalidates everything he ever said or did

If you ain't immortal, get outta here!

It’s funny you chose Socrates for this example because I believe he isn’t confirmed to have been a real person but rather a rhetorical character created by Plato.

Might be getting this wrong or new evidence has come to light, but I remember reading that theory years ago.

Plato recounts the moments of Socrates' death in Phaedo.

I'd suggest giving that a read, and then ponder the consequence of angering the state. Your very existence may be questioned by future generations. Your motives relegated to insanity or a fiction by those who remain.

Memories deceive; it happens to me and I'm guessing to everyone. Odd that Aristophanes would have written a comedy about this character whom Plato would only invent years later, and so also that Xenophon, a student of Socrates like Plato, also wrote about him. Indeed Socrates lived and breathed just like you and I do; he drank water and wine and took dumps in the morning, and especially asked questions. But your memory was correct in the sense that we can't know how similar Plato's Socrates as written in the dialogues was to the real man, and often in the middle and later works it becomes clear that Plato's Socrates has become almost entirely a mouthpiece for Plato's own ideas. In that sense, Plato's Socrates, especially after the early dialogues, was a indeed fictitious rendering of a real man. Most of the named characters in Plato were (largely fictitious?) renderings of real people.

Personally, I like to remind myself of the fact -- kind of meditate on it to get it into me -- that the long gone people of distant eras were indeed just as real then as you and I are now. Of course we know this consciously but I find it's easy to neglect and stop feeling. Ancient Egyptians or Song Dynasty Chinese or even 5th and 4th century BCE Athenians become flat just-so stories, and when that happens I lose touch of the deep and pregnant mystery that lives in the gulf between historical record, popular imagination, and whatever it was that the people of the past actually experienced, however they actually thought and related. When I (authentically) reconnect with that mysterious reality it lights up a sense of awe in me, and reconditions and renews my relationship with the present, myself and others. I guess, as Plato said, philosophy begins in wonder.

From Theodore Alois Buckley's introduction to Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad:

"When we have read Plato or Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant."

I'd say that this is a bad idea: one of the points of education is learning from other people's mistakes!

(I'm not directing that statement at Nietzsche, but rather thinking of the wealth of practical advice from say, Epictetus.)

Yeah, like, don't hack quantum computers.

Listen but... make your own philosophy?

Is the cautionary tale: make sure you're born after penicillin is invented?

Tesla also died penniless and alone.

I guess the whole electricity thing wasn't a very good idea after all.

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