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Originally Posted by m1rr0r dash
i think that you are confusing amorality with immorality.
this is the exact mistake that the National Socialists make in appropriating Nietzsche's writings to justify something that Nietzsche COULD NOT HAVE and DID NOT support.
let us take by comparison the actions of Heidegger who DID have a choice, chose to join the National Socialist party, gave lectures supporting their actions and excused himself by claiming to be apolitical. THAT is immoral.
my (limited) understanding of Nietzsche's amorality as described in The Birth of Tragedy is that it seeks to make decisions about right and wrong based on aesthetics rather that a (christian) code of ethics.
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I think I merely pointed to Santayana's known beliefs and implied that I am inclined to agree.
And yeah, Nietzsche, of course, denounced his Prussian citzenship. Much like K. and D. he felt the individual was important and that systems and institutions threatened the sanctity of the individual. What Friedrich tends to overlook in his categorical rejection of Christianity is that this very same concept is extremely integral to the New Covenant.
Also, I tried earlier to allude to the common ground that Nietzsche shares with Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard, because, in actuality, they are not so far apart from each other. Each are counted among the first existentialist thinkers. Each are indebted to Schopenhauer and each reacted to the Germanic tradition of Kant and Hegel. In my view, N. never got too far away from this tradition, however, and tended to operate as an outsider on its fringes. His powerfully seductive thought largely amounts to only so much juvenile sand castle wrecking.
It's just that Soren used a Socratic dialectical method and wrote under pseudonyms to show the whole of the psyche, to soar to the heights and also plumb the depths.
And Fyodor, of course, authored several masterpieces where nihilism (amorality) is explored and a critique is implied through a process of negation. For instance, he gave us Stavrogin in
The Possessed, Ivan in
The Brothers Karamazov (as contrasted with Alyosha), and the ever-so-identifiable embittered basement dweller in
Notes From Underground, the Underground Man. Most important to this discussion (even though this is not a thread about Nietzsche) is D.'s character of Raskolnikov in
Crime & Punishment who assumes a Nietzschean Will To Power and commits his horrible crimes, but discovers to his transfigured amazement in the end that there is beautiful and abundant life outside of the spider-hole of his psyche.