Gresh said:

cez said:

I don't know but you got me reading on existentialism and I am now going to read the work of Nietzsche, who I've never gotten into and for that I thank you.

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id advise against that. its really, really depressing shit

plus the dude was absolutely nuts. by the time he died the only thing he could talk to were his horses

he was about as miserable as miserable gets. and misery loves company

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Nietzsche is one of the best writers that ever existed. He was a great thinker as well.

Don't you know that the very quote you are using against Nietzsche "misery loves company" was an idea that Nietzsche himself made popular? lol.

He went loopy at the very end of his life, this is true. Probably because of syphilis. That doesn't discredit his contributions.

Nietzsche was NOT an existentialist anyway. Existentialism is just a movement that emerged after Nietzsche. Nietzsche is in his own class, it's why the word "Nietzschean" was invented.

It is true that Nietzsche wasn't a romantic, and wasn't someone who believed in having as much pleasure vs pain as possible. He did coin the phrase "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" after all.

It is also true that he was a lonely man.

But if I think about whether he was more of a "happy" man or a "depressed" man, I lean heavily toward "happy", but it's not the happiness of an idiot (superficial, "ignorance is bliss", drug-induced, delusional, or peaceful-idiot happiness). It is what Nietzsche would call true happiness...meaning happiness that derives from "knowledge" or power.

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agreed, nietzsche is a great obscurer of truth if you take him seriously...

assuming you define truth to be happiness/peace, which any reasonable person would.

that shit's bad for your soul

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Nietzsche was certainly against "peace" in general, so if you define peace as happiness then he was not happy. Defining peace as happiness is in opposition to Nietzsche's definition of happiness, though. You sound like a Buddhist who takes everything to do with Buddhism seriously.

To call him "an obscurer of truth" makes no sense to me. He was a liar, because he knew that everyone was a liar. He used lies to illustrate truth, much like art does. He was an artist, but he definitely was an honest and truthful soul in my view.

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just check his biography

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I don't have to check his biography, I own all of his works and have read books that were about him as well.

You are ignorant regarding Nietzsche, as are most of the Nietzsche bashers in this thread. The funny thing is, this is supposed to be a thread about existentialism, and Nietzsche is not technically an existentialist.

I advise everybody in this thread to read a book or two on existentialism. A good starting point would be Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre.

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he believed that the unknowable truth is meaningful in itself

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What if i was to say "I'm satisfied with not being satisfied and thus satisfied with change"? It can be as violent and unpredictable or as calm and static as you'd like, but the bottom line is that you willingly decide on (not necessarily placidly) what it may be.

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Indeed.

Words are just words. In Nietzsche's words, "first one thing, then another, may be injected into them".