>His entire corpus basically deals with how to escape nihilism

You must admit there is some sort of grand comedy in this: Nietzsche's one 'novel', "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" entire plot line is about a man who tries to warn society of the evils of nihilism and instead of being scared-off by it, all the people he warns fall in love with the idea (ie. willing trade their dangerous freedom to gain safety).

Its a deeply ironic that the current pedestrian understanding of him is that he advocated "atheism and nihilism". You almost couldn't make it up.

Yet, they do, again and again.

I think it's worth noting that dvt's post agrees with the submitted essay. Quoting more:

> At times he described himself as “a nihilist,” by which he meant not that everything is meaningless, but that he actively rejected the available eternalisms. He also condemned “nihilism,” understood as apathetic unwillingness to take problems of meaningness seriously. He particularly included Christianity and “Apollonian” rationalism in that. Nietzsche’s intention was to develop a new, positive alternative.

Then the author's use of the word nihilism in this article is a redefinition of what is the accepted definition of the term.

Rejecting accepted definitions is fine if you have a purpose for doing it. The problem with Chapman is more that he's very sloppy with his langauge. If you read his blog, you might be left with the impression that Nietzsche is just some simple pseudo-mystical bullshitter, because Chapman doesn't explain Nietzsche's double movement from knowing to unknowing and vice versa. To use Chapman's own taxonomy, what Chapman thinks he's doing is dwelling in the space between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, but he's just being meaningless while expecting Nietzsche to somehow do the heavy lifting. Nietzsche probably would've hated this guy.

Rejecting accepted definitions in discourse and propaganda has proven intellectually and politically dangerous in the past, even when the redefinition is made honestly and explicitly. Devastating when made dishonestly and opaquely.

It raises a red flag…why didn’t an author just define a new term for the concept instead of distorting an old term? Why the required effort for a reader to make the translation from accepted definition to the author’s “special language”? This is prose, not poetry. Redefining accepted terminology is the intellectual equivalent of cultural appropriation and, at best, leads to confusion and empty bickering over terminology. Just sounds sloppy to me…imagine doing that in a STEM discipline, you’d be laughed out of the room.

Could be a useful strategy in cult psychology, though, I grant you that.

> Rejecting accepted definitions in discourse and propaganda has proven intellectually and politically dangerous in the past, even when the redefinition is made honestly and explicitly. Devastating when made dishonestly and opaquely.

And if the accepted definition is already the dishonest and dangerous type?

I think the point this author is making is that Nietzsche’s use of word “nihilism” does not match our accepted definition.

>> Nietzsche is easy and fun to read: straightforward, vivid, and outrageous. He was brilliant; the best philosopher of all time, in my opinion.

> I've read almost everything by him, and, cards on the table, I don't really like Nietzsche, but calling him the best philosopher of all time is a bit of a stretch.

IMHO: A few years ago, "straightforward, vivid, and outrageous" was exciting, transgressing. Now it's very tired and a bit aggravating - who wants to deal with more of it?

Are there any (continental) philosophers you would recommend over Nietzsche? I keep trying to move past him and Stirner, but have not managed so far.

Try Simone de Beauvoir's the ethics of ambiguity. It's deals with many of the concerns Neitzsche raises in the area of ethics and moralality and provides some convincing arguments in a short accessible book.

Maybe Adorno's Minima Moralia might be nice? It's well written, in the sense Nietzsche is well written. Can also recommend Walter Benjamin.

In terms of interpreters of Nietzsche, it's considerably more difficult, but Deleuze wrote a really good book on Nietzsche that's worth reading.

Deleuze's books on history of philosophy are interesting and approachable. Although they are more about his own philosophy over people he write about they're still very valuable. Deleuze gets bad reputation for his other writings as they are difficult to read but that's not the case with books on history. He also have books on Nietzsche so that might be a nice starting point. Other continental philosophers that you could try are Heidegger, Foucault or Bataille. Everything depends on what you're looking for, but if you're coming from Nietzsche and Stirner they might be interesting for you.

Edit: As someone else mentioned, Walter Benjamin is also very interesting!

Søren Kierkegaard could be a good candidate.

If you like depressed mood then have a look at Schopenhauer?

I think Dostoyevsky and Camus are more accessible.

Schopenhauer!

Personally, I like Albert Camus very much.

Like Nietzsche, he has a bad reputation for being moody and depressing, but the way I see it, he is really liberating and optimistic. A true humanist.

Where does either of them have that reputation?

>Sure, Genealogy of Morals is probably all wrong

All wrong according to what exactly?

> All wrong according to what exactly?

All wrong as a viable moral theory. It gained a bit of popularity in the "evolutionary ethics" crowd (i.e. those that might think The Selfish Gene is a profound piece of work), but no one really takes it seriously when compared to utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, etc.

What?

Nietzsche's position that "morals" are simply the "herd instinct in the individual", that is, simply the social instinct combined with the norms and customs that have built up in a culture over time due to its particular history and development. He does not assign a value to morals from this anthropological position - indeed his ultimate task was to devise a new system of valuation that would let us do this. It's hard to see how any other position could possibly be valid. Nietzsche was not entirely original here, but he was completely devastating.

There is nothing profound about utilitarianism. It's simply abstract thinkers asking "what do we value most of all, and what are the logical means of maximizing it." There's nothing particularly profound about deontologists either, except, as Nietzsche would have said, they're less decadent and more intellectually honest - right is defined by their moral intuition (which, according to N, is simply decided by the above) or God, or whatever, and that's the end of the story. Both of these, along with virtue ethics, already assume they know what good and bad, and everything falls from that based on the particular method (assumption: hurting people is bad; deontologists: hurting people is bad, don't do it, because that's the rule utilitarians: hurting people is bad unless by so doing you decrease the net amount of hurt people.) Nietzsche's question is much more fundamental. He is establishing the nature of morality, pursuing a history of moral development (which he agrees may not be accurate and certainly not anywhere near complete), asks a few questions about the consequences of different moral systems, etc.

> Nietzsche was not entirely original here, but he was completely devastating.

This is vastly overstating his impact on moral ethics (and philosophy in general). He will most certainly remain a historical curiosity (I put him in the same bucket as Wittgenstein and Spinoza), but the world has moved on. Elizabeth Anscombe, GE Moore, Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, etc. have all had much more seminal ideas (just this past century). He doesn't even remotely stand up to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and so on.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is something that was truly devastating—putting an end to the rationalist vs. empiricist debate that had been raging for centuries. Nietzsche? Not so much.

Nietzsche's attacks on Kant are also pretty devastating. It's hard to take Kant seriously in 2021.

> all had much more seminal ideas (just this past century)

Perhaps you'd like to mention what specifically these seminal ideas are that prove moral nihilism, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, Nietzsche's meta-ethical view wrong.

> Nietzsche's attacks on Kant are also pretty devastating.

His attacks on Kant are extremely surface-level. Kant believed in duty, Nietzsche didn't. That's basically it. I mean, Nietzsche's moral theory doesn't even explain baseline moral actions (e.g. a mother's love for her child, not murdering people you don't like, paying your taxes).

> Perhaps you'd like to mention what specifically these seminal ideas are that prove moral nihilism, or perhaps a better way of phrasing it, Nietzsche's meta-ethical view wrong.

Nothing, but that's kind of the point. His meta-ethical views are empty, uninteresting, and ultimately fruitless. They don't really help us become more just or more fair, nor do they illuminate the moral world. It's not like people write deep biting critiques of stoicism or solipsism, either.

These are essentially dead philosophies, in contrast with something like Kantian ethics—which is a sort of "hardline" deontology—and probably wrong-ish, but still studied and taken somewhat seriously.

> That's basically it. I mean, Nietzsche's moral theory doesn't even explain baseline moral actions (e.g. a mother's love for her child, not murdering people you don't like, paying your taxes).

It absolutely does! That's the 'herd instinct', what we would call the social instinct. It also conveniently explains why other mothers could believe the right thing to do was sacrifice their children to Moloch, but obviously one of these exists at a "lower" level and therefore more common than the other since one is more closely tied to survival. (Though, given the frequency of ancient infanticide, it presumably had some survival benefit as well.)

It is really strange to see you making such strong statements about Nietzsche's philosophy when you are clearly completely missing his central points. It really sounds like you've just read secondary sources (like Russel) that have some extremely wrong caricature of Nietzsche's views that amount to "selfishness is the only good" or something. That is not Nietzsche's moral theory. Nietzsche's moral theory is that there are no real tables of morals, just a social instinct that manifests differently in different times and cultures according to the various historical and psychological forces that formed them. No doubt in-group altruism is a necessary prerequisite of social animals to exist at all - that doesn't mean that it has some sort of moral reality.

> Kant believed in duty, Nietzsche didn't.

Not only is this not true, unless you meant is the sense of some real, universal objective Duty, the whole problem is that Kant never stops to consider his priors, let alone demonstrate that such a thing even exists. (And unfortunately for Kant, it didn't stop there: the thing-in-itself is broken too.)

See TGS 335.

The only way to sustain moral realism in the usual sense is to declare "this is what God commanded." If you posit omnipotent supernatural entities, they can do anything. But there's no real or logical foundation for morality otherwise, except to look at it from an anthropological view. And that's okay - humans don't need logical reasons to do things.

I think you're confusing the people who found "The Selfish Gene" enlightening with eugenicists. My guess is there's almost zero overlap between those two groups.