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For anyone who wants an alternate view (by Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism #9): "Do you want to live "according to nature"? O you noble Stoics, what

For anyone who wants an alternate view (by Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism #9): "Do you want to live "according to nature"? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature - extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown - imagine this indifference itself as a power - how could you live in accordance with this indifference?8 Living - isn't that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn't living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And if your imperative "live according to nature" basically means what amounts to "live according to life"- why can you not just do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? The truth of the matter is quite different: while you pretend to be in raptures as you read the canon of your law out of nature, you want something which is the reverse of this, you weird actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be "in accordance with the stoa ," and you'd like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it - as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of stoicism! With all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves for such a long time and with such persistence and hypnotic rigidity to look at nature falsely, that is, stoically, until you're no long capable of seeing nature as anything else - and some abysmal arrogance finally inspires you with the lunatic hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves - Stoicism is self-tyranny - nature also allows herself to be tyrannized. Is the Stoic then not a part of nature?.... But this is an ancient eternal story: what happened then with the Stoics is still happening today, as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image. It cannot do anything different. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the spiritual will to power, to a "creation of the world," to the causa prima [first cause]."

ssivark 7y ago
At a quick glance, that passage seems to be almost deliberately obfuscating the difference between living while accounting for nature (the uncontrollable aspects) i.e. in accordance with, versus, living like nature.
- 0815test 7y ago
  No surprise there - the "living like nature" part was the whole schtick of Nietzsche's philosophy. More like an Epicurean with a healthy dose of Cynicism than a Stoic, if we have to make that kind of basic comparison. He would probably conflate Stoicism with the (nowadays prevalent and in many ways successful) "English" approach to values, which he considered a reversal of the "true" values that's driven by resentment, and a philosophical dead-end. Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of Amor fati. The fact that he acknowledged this principle so thoroughly despite opposing many other parts of Stoicism must surely be of some significance.
  - HNLurker2 7y ago
    >Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of Amor fati. He looked down on any philosophical idea that uplifts your soul like stoicism, buddhism (deliberately making his work and ideas seem scary to them: happened to me when I first got into his ideas) etc
    - codingslave 7y ago
      He discouraged philosophical frameworks because he believed that in the end they limit human life. A truly well lived life, according to Nietzsche, is one where the individual breaks free of indoctrination and dogma, and lives life as they want. In the truest sense. This is Nietzsche's goal for humanity, so he spends his time writing philosophy aimed at tearing down religion and systems of moral control. Nietzsche wants to free humanity...
- fastball 7y ago
  Yes, in more recent times, it reminds me of author Naomi Wolf basing her book on a false premise[0]. Likewise, Nietzsche gets something wrong in the first line and proceeds to waste an entire paragraph. 0: https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Author-Learned-of-a/246370 https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Author-Learned-of-a/246...
hydrox24 7y ago
I'm not sure that Nietzche got the Stoic philosophy quite right, but his words address a strain of thinking that absolutely does exist. One which considers the natural world an almost sacred good, a model or standard which humans fail to live up to, instead wallowing in our industrial creations. One of the best meditations on this view of the world, which is neither unfair to it nor, ultimately, particularly kind, is Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek". It is non-fiction, but undoubtedly counts as literature, and won a Pulitzer prize in 1975. It meditates on precisely the fruitfulness, desolation, and transcendence in nature.

ssivark 7y ago

At a quick glance, that passage seems to be almost deliberately obfuscating the difference between living while accounting for nature (the uncontrollable aspects) i.e. in accordance with, versus, living like nature.

0815test 7y ago
No surprise there - the "living like nature" part was the whole schtick of Nietzsche's philosophy. More like an Epicurean with a healthy dose of Cynicism than a Stoic, if we have to make that kind of basic comparison. He would probably conflate Stoicism with the (nowadays prevalent and in many ways successful) "English" approach to values, which he considered a reversal of the "true" values that's driven by resentment, and a philosophical dead-end. Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of Amor fati. The fact that he acknowledged this principle so thoroughly despite opposing many other parts of Stoicism must surely be of some significance.
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  >Though Nietzsche did also develop a highly refined statement of "living in accordance with unchangeable nature" through his idea of Amor fati. He looked down on any philosophical idea that uplifts your soul like stoicism, buddhism (deliberately making his work and ideas seem scary to them: happened to me when I first got into his ideas) etc
  - codingslave 7y ago
    He discouraged philosophical frameworks because he believed that in the end they limit human life. A truly well lived life, according to Nietzsche, is one where the individual breaks free of indoctrination and dogma, and lives life as they want. In the truest sense. This is Nietzsche's goal for humanity, so he spends his time writing philosophy aimed at tearing down religion and systems of moral control. Nietzsche wants to free humanity...
fastball 7y ago
Yes, in more recent times, it reminds me of author Naomi Wolf basing her book on a false premise[0]. Likewise, Nietzsche gets something wrong in the first line and proceeds to waste an entire paragraph. 0: https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Author-Learned-of-a/246370 https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Author-Learned-of-a/246...

hydrox24 7y ago

I'm not sure that Nietzche got the Stoic philosophy quite right, but his words address a strain of thinking that absolutely does exist. One which considers the natural world an almost sacred good, a model or standard which humans fail to live up to, instead wallowing in our industrial creations. One of the best meditations on this view of the world, which is neither unfair to it nor, ultimately, particularly kind, is Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek". It is non-fiction, but undoubtedly counts as literature, and won a Pulitzer prize in 1975. It meditates on precisely the fruitfulness, desolation, and transcendence in nature.