Thucydides v Plato according to Nietzsche

From Twilight of the Idols, What I Owe to the Ancients:

For the deplorable embellishment of the Greeks with the colours of the ideal which the 'classically educated' youth carries away with him into life as the reward of his grammar-school drilling there is no more radical cure than Thucydides

Man, not God

From The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols:

8. What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a man his qualities — neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant — and perhaps by Plato.) No one is responsible for a man's being here at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Human beings are not the effect of some special purpose, or will, or end; nor are they a medium through which society can realize an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end.

A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a man belongs to the whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or sentence his being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit" — that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world.

Nietzsche on Free Will

From The Four Great Errors in Twilight of the Idols:

3. The error of a false causality. Humans have always believed that they knew what a cause was; but how did we get this knowledge — or more precisely, our faith that we had this knowledge? From the realm of the famous "inner facts," of which not a single one has so far turned out to be true. We believe that we are the cause of our own will: we think that here at least we can see a cause at work. Nor did we doubt that all the antecedents of our will, its causes, were to be found in our own consciousness or in our personal "motives." Otherwise, we would not be responsible for what we choose to do. Who would deny that his thoughts have a cause, and that his own mind caused the thoughts?

Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it.

But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and illusions: the will being one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence it does not explain anything — it merely accompanies events; it can also be completely absent. The so-called motives: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something shadowing the deed that is more likely to hide the causes of our actions than to reveal them. And as for the ego ... that has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words! It has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!

What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for mental causes has gone out the window. That is what follows! And what a nice delusion we had perpetrated with this "empirical evidence;" we interpreted the real world as a world of causes, a world of wills, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here: it simply interpreted everything that happened in the world as an act, as the effect of a will; the world was inhabited with a multiplicity of wills; an agent (a "subject") was slipped under the surface of events. It was out of himself that man projected his three most unquestioned "inner facts" — the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he interpreted "things" as "being" in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things what he had already put into them. The thing itself, the concept of thing is a mere extension of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear materialists and physicists — how much error, how much rudimentary psychology still resides in your atom! Not to mention the "thing-in-itself," the horrendum pudendum of metaphysicians! The "spirit as cause" mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God!

Nietzsche and the Art of Insightful, Unhinged Polemic

Nietzsche is the most entertaining of philosophers, and certainly very insightful, but it frightens me to think that philosophical neophytes might start with him and be taken in by some of his unhinged polemics. Insight blighted -- and made entertaining -- by unhinged polemic such as this from Hollingdale's translation of Twilight of the Idols:

1. In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless... Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life. Even Socrates said as he died: "To Live -- that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius". Even Socrates had had enough of it. -- What does that prove? What does it point to? -- Formerly one would have said (-- oh, and did say, and loudly enough, and our pessimists most of all!): "Here at any rate there must be something true! The consensus sapientium is proof of truth." -- Shall we still speak thus today? are we allowed to do so? "Here at any rate there must be something sick" -- this is our retort: one ought to take a closer look at them, these wisest of every age! Were they all of them perhaps no longer steady on their legs? belated? tottery? decadents? Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?...

And then:

3. Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was. But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is frequently enough the sign of a thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding. Otherwise it appears as a development in decline. Anthropologists among criminologists tell us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? -- At least that famous physiognomist's opinion which Socreates' friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea. A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum -- that he contained within him every kind of foul vice and lust. And Socrates answered merely: "You know me, sir!" --

Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence in Schopenhauer

From section 54 of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation:

What we fear in death is by no means the pain, for that obviously lies on this side of death; moreover, we often take refuge in death from pain, just as, conversely, we sometimes endure the most fearful pain merely in order to escape death for a while, although it would be quick and easy. Therefore we distinguish pain and death as two entirely different evils. What we fear in death is in fact the extinction and end of the individual, which it openly proclaims itself to be, and as the individual is the will-to-live itself in a particular objectification, its whole nature struggles against death. Now when feeling leaves us helpless to such an extent, our faculty of reason can nevertheless appear and for the most part overcome influences adverse to it, since it places us at a higher standpoint from which we now view the whole instead of the particular. Therefore, a philosophical knowledge of the nature of the world which had reached the point we are now considering, but went no farther, could, even at this point of view, overcome the terrors of death according as reflection had power over direct feeling in the given individual. A man who had assimilated firmly into his way of thinking the truths so far advanced, but at the same time had not come to know, through his own experience or through a deeper insight, that constant suffering is essential to all life; who found satisfaction in life and took perfect delight in it; who desired, in spite of calm deliberation, that the course of his life as he had hitherto experienced it should be of endless duration or of constant recurrence; and whose courage to face life was so great that, in return for life's pleasures, he would willingly and gladly put up with all the hardships and miseries to which it is subject; such a man would stand "with firm, strong bones on the well-grounded, enduring earth,"¹⁰ and would have nothing to fear. Armed with the knowledge we confer on him, he would look with indifference at death hastening towards him on the wings of time. He would consider it as a false illusion, an impotent spectre, frightening to the weak but having no power over him who knows that he himself is that will of which the whole world is the objectification or copy, to which therefore life and also the present always remain certain and sure. The present is the only real form of the phenomenon of the will. Therefore no endless past or future in which he will not exist can frighten him, for he regards these as an empty mirage and the web of Maya. Thus he would no more have to fear death than the sun would the night. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna puts his young pupil Arjuna in this position, when, seized with grief at the sight of the armies ready for battle (somewhat after the manner of Xerxes), Arjuna loses heart and wishes to give up the fight, to avert the destruction of so many thousands. Krishna brings him to this point of view, and the death of those thousands can no longer hold him back; he gives the sign for battle.

¹⁰ From Goethe's Granzen der Menschheit.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

A major philosophical influence on Nietzsche was Schopenhauer. Scandalously, Schopenhauer is often left unread these days and what is often a Schopenhauerian thought read in one of Nietzsche's books, who still retains an allure for the contrarian wishing to take on the world, is often misinterpreted.

Hence, the following from Ecce Homo, which is classic Schopenhauer and brilliantly expounded in his epistemology, is often just taken as an one of Nietzsche's sui generis philosophical insights:

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.