Reddit Reddit reviews The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

We found 4 Reddit comments about The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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4 Reddit comments about The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy):

u/Tuft64 · 10 pointsr/Pathfinder_RPG

I'm going to preface this by saying that this probably doesn't help you much in your quest to understand the best way to be morally repugnant to enter lichhood, however, as someone who has studied a lot (and boy do I mean a lot) of both primary and secondary sources concering Nietzschean philosophy, I'd like to clear up some misconceptions that it looks like you have.

>in the end it demands that empathy is not worthwhile whatsoever. Lichdom generally extolls the virtue of power, and the likewise irrelevance of empathy (something something Nietzsche?)

Nietzsche's problem with empathy is not "ye who feel feelings about people are weak sheep" as many people portray him to be. The actual critique Nietzsche makes is of pity - the "I'm glad it's not me" brand of empathy. Nietzsche thinks pity is the ugliest and weakest of human emotions, rooted in narcissism and self-obsession, a quality that the Ubermensch doesn't have.

As far as the virtue of power, Nietzsche's conception of the Will to Power is not a "fuck you, got mine" Rand-esque belief in an egoistic world where the I is the only being that matters, it's a mode of psychologically elevating the human condition associated with the doctrine of eternal recurrence for those who are healthiest and wish to live life to the fullest. Achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest position in life, these are manifestations of the Will. But not through what Nietzsche calls Kraft, or the primordial strength all things have, and what we use to physically dominate others, instead it is through macht, a conscious channeling of the kraft in a form of self-overcoming and sublimation for creative purposes (hence when the Nazis appropriated Nietzschean philosophy, they overlooked the distinction between the two and just kind of exerted their kraft on like, jews, gays, black people, and cripples, instead of themselves. maybe if hitler had channeled his kraft inwards, he would have made it into art school.)

Raw physical or political (or in this case, I guess, magical power) was not what Nietzsche meant when he talked about the Will. In fact, if you want to learn more about that, I think Heidegger had a lecture series about Nazi appropriation of Nietzschean philosophy (which is ironic, since he himself was also a Nazi).

>Similarly to Nietzsche's work, the ideal Lich is a being of amazing power, but with little concern towards the common, weak man. And that's something I want to incorporate. What can I do to a player already willing to sacrifice an NPC that his character is "extremely attached to" that will impress further on the player than he ever thought possible the ideals of Nietzsche's existentialism, and just the general concept of absurdism?

That's a bit of a misrepresentation of the Ubermensch. The Ubermensch isn't "evil Superman", the strong guy who punches people just for shits and giggles, the ubermensch is a being who smashes the traditional ideals of Christian normativity and transcends the master/slave morality division by forging a new, Dionysian type of morality. Basically, consider traditional metaphysics like Kant's pure reason - there is the Master (pure reason), and the Slave (us, the people abiding by the Categorical Imperative). A clear and aggressive hierarchy that can't change, is immutable, and impermeable. Then, consider Zarathustra, Nietzsche's "prophet", a man who has transcended the laws of the Church and forged a new normative path, so to speak. He doesn't demand that others follow him and bow down to him as his slaves, but he doesn't follow anyone else. He just does. Not a master. Not a slave. Something in between.

As far as the parts about Nietzsche's existentialism and conceptions of absurdism, I think you miss the point a bit here - Nietzsche is a nihilist in the most typical sense. He believes in the complete and abject lack of any and all meaning or value intrinsic in the world (which is a pretty absurdist concept to begin with), but instead of falling to despair, Nietzsche argues that value is an emergent property of a thing that can only occur in a world where we suffer, not one that is smooth and frictionless, because that's inauthentic, and leads to a recreation of the master/slave dichotomy that he argues we need to break free from.

tl;dr I think you might be misreading Nietzsche.

Suggestions for further reading (that is easier to decode than German source) include Gilles Deleuze's "Nietzsche and Philosophy", as well as his collaborations with Felix Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (although to truly decode that book there's a whole nother list of shit you've got to read). Katsafanas' stuff on Nietzschean Internalism is really good too, plus it's a pretty easy read. If you want to read source Nietzsche though, I'd suggest also picking up a companion/read along book like the Cambridge Companion or something similar.

Also, if you want to make your friend's character do something that's really tough for him, just get him to kill one of his own party members. Killing some fake, made-up woman or child doesn't really have any impact on him. But seeing the look on a party member's face when he gets betrayed and the character he's spent so much time on destroyed is legitimately gut-wrenching and sometimes people really get mad and feel betrayed. That way, he has to actually commit a real, damning, and permanent action against someone he really does know and care about, and it feels real because it's someone the player knows and cares about outside of the game, instead of just some fake woman or father that their character is supposed to have a good relationship with.

u/cameronc65 · 5 pointsr/Existentialism

The Nietzsche Reader and The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche are both great resources to dive into!

u/GWFKegel · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

Zarathustra is a great place to start. You won't get all the nuances, but that's okay. If you've got access to a library, I'd also try to track down something like the Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche to help you read through his major works. Or maybe Robert Solomon's Reading Nietzsche

If you can find someone with database access, secondary literature might help you. Try these:

u/Sich_befinden · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

For Nietzsche I think a breadth of secondary sources and interpretations are useful. Like Firework said, Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist is good. Alternatively both the Cambridge Companion and the Oxford Handbook are decent secondary sources, with more contemporary essays on him. Robert Pippin has an introduction as well, but I'm not sure about the quality.

On another note, both Karl Jaspers and Giles Deleuze have books on him, but they are less 'introductions' that interpretations.