Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Nietzsche
    Nietzsche
    Nietzsche
    Ebook132 pages2 hours

    Nietzsche

    By Paul Carus

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A perfect crystal is rare; so the perfectly normal man is an exception; yet for all that he is a better representative of the ideal of his type than the average.


    Nietzsche was most assuredly very ingenious; he was unusually talented but he was not a genius in the full sense of the word. He was abnormal, titanic in his pretensions and aims, and erratic. Breaking down under the burden of his own thought, he ended his tragical career in an insane asylum…


     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPublishdrive
    Release dateJul 10, 2017
    Nietzsche
    Author

    Paul Carus

    Paul Carus (1852-1919) was a German American author, scholar, and philosopher. Born in Ilsenburg, Germany, he studied at the universities of Strassburg and Tübingen, earning his PhD in 1876. After a stint in the army and as a teacher, Carus left Imperial Germany for the United States, settling in LaSalle, Illinois. There, he married engineer Mary Hegeler, with who he would raise seven children at the Hegeler Carus Mansion. As the managing editor of the Open Court Publishing Company, he wrote and published countless books and articles on history, politics, philosophy, religion, and science. Referring to himself as “an atheist who loved God,” Carus gained a reputation as a leading scholar of interfaith studies, introducing Buddhism to an American audience and promoting the ideals of Spinoza. Throughout his life, he corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Booker T. Washington, and countless other leaders and intellectuals. A committed Monist, he rejected the Western concept of dualism, which separated the material and spiritual worlds. In his writing, he sought to propose a middle path between metaphysics and materialism, which led to his dismissal by many of the leading philosophers of his time.

    Read more from Paul Carus

    Related to Nietzsche

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Science Needs Metaphysics: Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything.

      Oct 1, 2015

      Technology cannot keep pace with theoretical predictions about subatomic reality coming from physics. The same applies to our ability to observe the far reaches of the universe. Theory outstrips data and can become more extravagant with the claims it

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Etched In DNA: Decoding The Secrets Of The Past

      Dec 30, 2019

      What does it mean to be human? Ancient DNA helps paleoanthropologists probe deeper into our ancestral past.

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      New American Paintings

      Nov 23, 2021

      Editor/Publisher: Steven Zevitas Associate Publisher: Andrew Katz  Design/Production Manager: Alexandra Simpson Operations Manager: Alexandra Simpson Marketing Manager: Liz Morlock Copy Editor: Lucy Flint Nora Burnett Abrams Museum of Contemporary A

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Popular Creation Story of Astronomy Is Wrong

      May 17, 2018

      In the early years of the 17th century, Johannes Kepler argued that the universe contained thousands of mighty bodies, bodies so huge that they could be universes themselves. These giant bodies, said Kepler, testified to the immense power of, as well

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      E Pluribus Unum?

      Jun 1, 2021

      E Pluribus Unum?
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Philosophy of Ancient Greece

      Feb 28, 2020

      The Philosophy of Ancient Greece
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Varieties of Experience

      Sep 1, 2020

      THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local cult

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Thinking Makes It So: Ward Farnsworth Reframes the Stoics with Wit and Insight

      Aug 30, 2018

      Seneca’s suicide, at the order of the emperor Nero, presents a macabre scene. Previously adviser to the fickle, impetuous, paranoid, thin-skinned emperor, Seneca was erroneously implicated in an assassination plot and was ordered to take his own life

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics: Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

      Sep 8, 2016

      Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other—contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two ba

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy

      Mar 9, 2017

      When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supe

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy: Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore.

      Oct 30, 2014

      When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supe

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      This Essentially Meaningless Conflict

      Sep 22, 2017

      MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S accomplishments are impressive by any standard: she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, among other honors. But perhaps a better measure o

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Critical Thinker

      Apr 16, 2023

      ANAXIMANDER AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE, by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane, $40) Most scientists know what science is until someone asks them to define it, and then they don’t. It’s something to do with precision and accuracy, so you’d think there was a pre

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Herbert Spencer’s Principle of Equal Freedom: Is It Well Grounded?

      Sep 1, 2020

      During the mid-to late nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer was the most widely read philosopher in the world. A large part of his appeal was owing to his ambition of providing a complete and comprehensive account of human reality based on scientific

      38 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      10 Brilliant Insights from Daniel Dennett

      May 1, 2024

      Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machi

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Challenging Orthodox Science

      Jul 15, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT [email protected] Imants Barušs Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418 The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psyc

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Searching For Sense Amid Chaos

      Sep 28, 2023

      EVER SINCE THE POLITICAL STRATEGIST Steve Bannon mentioned, vaguely and dubiously, “Julius Evola and different writers of the early twentieth century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really kind of eve

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      News From Nowhere

      Jan 23, 2018

      News From Nowhere
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Know Your Philosophers

      Aug 2, 2020

      Know Your Philosophers
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Rebel Greek Philosophers

      Mar 23, 2023

      Rebel Greek Philosophers
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Deep Dives Into The Unknown

      Apr 20, 2023

      Jack Hunter, ed. August Night Press 2023 Pb, 409pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781786772244 August Night Press is an imprint of White Crow Books, the publisher of a substantial catalogue of titles arguing, generally, that we are more than “animated meat”. These i

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious

      Dec 30, 2020

      Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in May, 2020. In May, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and ph

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Who Said Science and Art Were Two Cultures?

      Nov 17, 2021

      On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Novelty

      Sep 30, 2024

      Novelty
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      'Enlightenment Now' Says Human Progress Is Real, Remarkable, And Yet Often Unacknowledged

      Feb 27, 2018

      Steven Pinker marshals data from detailed studies that show the stirring extent of progress human beings have achieved since the 18th century.

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Nietzsche

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Nietzsche - Paul Carus

      2017

      All rights reserved

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      ANTI-SCIENTIFIC TENDENCIES

      DEUSSEN'S RECOLLECTIONS

      EXTREME NOMINALISM

      A PHILOSOPHY OF ORIGINALITY

      THE OVERMAN

      ZARATHUSTRA

      A PROTEST AGAINST HIMSELF

      NIETZSCHE'S PREDECESSOR

      EGO-SOVEREIGNTY

      ANOTHER NIETZSCHE

      NIETZSCHE'S DISCIPLES

      THE PRINCIPLE OF VALUATION

      INDIVIDUALISM

      CONCLUSION

      ANTI-SCIENTIFIC TENDENCIES

      Philosophies are world-conceptions presenting three main features: (1) A systematic comprehension of the knowledge of their age; (2) An emotional attitude toward the cosmos; and (3) A principle that will serve as a basis for rules of conduct. The first feature determines the worth of the several philosophical systems in the history of mankind, being the gist of that which will last, and giving them strength and backbone. The second one, however, appeals powerfully to the sentiments of those who are imbued with the same spirit and thus constitutes its immediate acceptability; while the ethics of a philosophy becomes the test by which its use and practicability can be measured.

      The author's ideal has been to harmonize these three features by making the first the regulator of the second and a safe basis of the third. What we need is truth; our fundamental emotion must be truthfulness, and our ethics must be a living of the truth. Truth is not something that we can fashion according to our pleasure; it is not subjective; its very nature is objectivity. But we must render it subjective by a love of truth; we must make it our own, and by doing so our conduct in life will unfailingly adjust itself.

      Former philosophies made the subjective element predominant, and thus every philosopher worked out a philosophy of his own, endeavoring to be individual and original. The aim of our own philosophy has been to reduce the subjective to its proper sphere, and to establish, in agreement with the scientific spirit of the age, a philosophy of objective validity.

      It is a well known experience that the march of progress does not advance in a straight line but proceeds in epicycles. Man seems to tire of the rigor of truth. From time to time he wants fiction. A strict adherence to exact methods becomes monotonous to clever minds lacking the power of concentration, and they gladly hail vagaries. Truth, they claim, is relative, knowledge mere opinion, and poetry had better replace science. Then they say: Error, be thou our guide; Error, thou art a liberator from the tyranny of truth. Glory be to Error!

      Similar retrograde movements take place from time to time in art. Classical taste changes with romantic tendencies. Goethe, Schiller and Lessing are followed by Schlegel and Tieck, Mozart and Beethoven by Wagner.

      The last half-century has been an age of unprecedented progress in science and we would expect that with all the wonderful successes and triumphs of scientific invention this age of science ought to find its consummation in the adoption of a philosophy of science. But no! The mass of mankind is weary of science, and anti-scientific tendencies grow up like mushrooms, finding spokesmen in philosophers like William James and Henri Bergson who have the ear of large masses, proclaiming the superiority of subjectivism over objectivism, and the advantages of animal instinct over human reason.

      These subjective philosophies if considered as expressions of sentiment, as sentimental attitudes toward the world, as poetical effusions of a semi-philosophical nature, are perfectly legitimate and can be indulged in as well as the several religions which in allegories attune the minds of their followers toward the All of which they are parts. There is no need to condemn arts or emotions for they have a right to exist just as they are.

      We protest against subjectivism in philosophy only when it denies the possibility of an objective philosophy. We do not deny that the masses of the world are not, cannot be and never will be scientific thinkers. Science is the prerogative of the few, and the large masses of mankind will always be of a pragmatist type. If the pragmatist considered himself as a psychologist pure and simple showing how the majority of mankind argues, how people are influenced by their own interest and how their thoughts are warped by what they wish the facts to be, pragmatism would be a commendable branch of the science of the soul. Pragmatism explains the errors of philosophy and we can learn much from a consideration of its principles. It becomes objectionable only in so far as it claims to be philosophy in the strict sense of the word.

      The name philosophy is used in two senses, first as we defined it above, as a world-conception based upon critically sifted knowledge; and secondly it is used in a vague general sense as wisdom in the practical affairs of life. And if pragmatism claims to be a philosophy in this second sense it ought not to deny that philosophy as a science is possible.

      Philosophy as a science is philosophy par excellence. It is the only philosophy of objective validity. All other philosophies are effusions of subjective points of view, of attitudes, of sentiment. But we must insist that these two contrasts may exist side by side just as art does not render mathematics supererogatory, and as a physicist who in his profession devotes himself to a study of nature according to methods of an objective exactness may in his leisure hours paint aStimmungsbild to give an artistic expression to a subjective mood.

      This world is not merely the object of science. There are innumerable tendencies which exist and have a right to exist, but they ought not to banish science, scientific enquiry and scientific ideals from the place they hold; for science is the mariners' compass which guides us over the ocean of life, and though the majority of the passengers do not and need not worry about it, science is after all the only means which makes for progress and lifts mankind to higher and higher levels.

      If we criticize men like James and Bergson and other philosophers of subjectivism we do it as a defence of the indispensable character of the objectivity of science as well as of philosophy as a science.

      James and Bergson were by no means the originators of their method of philosophizing. There have been many sages before them who deemed the spectacles through which they viewed the world to be the most important or even the only significant issue of life's problems. The Ionian physicists were outdone by the sophists, and in modern times Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the most sovereign contempt for science.

      Among all the philosophies of modern times there is perhaps none which in its inmost principle is more thoroughly opposed to our own than Nietzsche's, and yet there are some points of mutual contact which are well worth pointing out. The problem which is at the basis of Nietzsche's thought is the same as in our philosophy, but our solution is radically different from his.

      Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher who astonishes his readers by the boldness with which he rebels against every tradition, tearing down the holiest and dearest things, preaching destruction of all rule, and looking with disdain upon the heap of ruins in which his revolutionary thoughts would leave the world.

      For more than a century Germany has been the storm-center of philosophical thought. The commotions that started in the Fatherland reached other countries, France, England, and the United States, after they had lost their force at home. Kant's transcendentalism and Hegel's phenomenalism began to flourish among the English-speaking races after having become almost extinct in the home of their founders. Prof. R. M. Wenley of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., expresses this truth with his native Scotch wit in the statement which I do not hesitate to endorse, that German professors when they die go to Oxford, and we may add that from Oxford they travel west to settle for a while in Concord, Boston, Washington, or other American cities.

      Hegelianism had scarcely died out in the United States when Schopenhauer and Nietzsche began to become fashionable. The influence of the former has been felt in a quiet way for some time while the Nietzsche movement is of more recent date and also of a more violent character.

      Nietzsche represents a type of most modern date. His was a genius after the heart of Lombroso. He was eccentric and atypical.

      Lombroso's psychology is an outgrowth of nominalism which does not recognize an objective norm for truth, health, reason, or normality of any kind, and regards the average as the sole method of finding a norm. If, however, the average type is the standard of measurement, the unusually excellent specimens, being rare in number, must be classed together with all other deviations from the average, and thus a genius is regarded as abnormal as much as a criminal—a theory which has found many admirers in this age that is sicklied over with agnosticism, the modern offshoot of nominalism. The truth is that true genius (not the pseudo-genius of erratic minds, not the would-be genius of those who make a failure of life) is uncommonly normal—I had almost said abnormally normal.

      A perfect crystal is rare; so the perfectly normal man is an exception; yet for all that he is a better representative of the ideal of his type than the average.

      Nietzsche was most assuredly very ingenious; he was unusually talented but he was not a genius in the full sense of the word. He was abnormal, titanic in his pretensions and aims, and erratic. Breaking

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1