/lit/ - Literature

Retards on /lit/:
>Nietzsche was actually a Christian

Meanwhile, Twilight of the Idols §58:
>It is quite justifiable to bracket the Christian and the Anarchist together: their object, their instinct, is concerned only with destruction. The proof of this proposition can be read quite plainly from history: history spells it with appalling distinctness. Whereas we have just seen a religious legislation, whose object was to render the highest possible means of making life flourish, and of making a grand organisation of society, eternal,—Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such an organisation, precisely because life flourishes through it. In the one case, the net profit to the credit of reason, acquired through long ages of experiment and of insecurity, is applied usefully to the most remote ends, and the harvest, which is as large, as rich and as complete as possible, is reaped and garnered: in the other case, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted in a single night. That which stood there, ære perennius, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organisation, under difficult conditions, that has ever been achieved, and compared with which everything that preceded, and everything which followed it, is mere patchwork, gimcrackery, and dilettantism,—those holy anarchists made it their "piety," to destroy "the world"—that is to say, the imperium Romanum, until no two stones were left standing one on the other,—until even the Teutons and other clodhoppers were able to become master of it. The Christian and the anarchist are both decadents; they are both incapable of acting in any other way than disintegratingly, poisonously and witheringly, like blood-suckers; they are both actuated by an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands erect, that is great, that is lasting, and that is a guarantee of the future... Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,—in a night it shattered the stupendous achievements of the Romans, which was to acquire the territory for a vast civilisation which could bide its time.

>>18430458
>State's also do not rise from the will, the instincts, nor an imperative. That is secular and enlightenment thinking. Rome was formed as a divine law, following the survival of men out of the ruins of Troy.
Who did the forming and out of what will? This is what Nietzsche was referring to and concerned with, and this will for him, as far as the future is concerned, was the will of the Ubermensch, a Caesarean-Napoleonic will that does not favor democracy. This does not necessarily mean that what you said is false or irrelevant, just that Nietzsche is addressing the same issue, but from a different angle.

You have to remember that democracy is not the endgame for Nietzsche. He had no stake in preserving it. His only use for modern democracy was its potential for clearing the way for the Ubermensch so that another aristocracy could be born; beyond that point, it, along with the type "democrat" and the democratic mob, were despicable to him.

>When I came to human beings for the first time, I committed the solitary's folly, the great folly: I set up in the market.
>And in speaking to everyone, I spoke to no one. But in the evening rope-dancers were my companions, and corpses too; and I myself almost a corpse.
>But with the new morning there came to me a truth: then I learned to say, 'What does the market matter to me, and the mob and mob-noise and long mob-ears!'
>You superior humans, learn from me this: In the market no one believes in superior humans. And if you want to speak there, very well! But the mob blinks: 'We are all equal.'
>'You superior humans'—so the mob blinks—'There are no superior humans, we are equal, the human is human; before God—are we all equal!'
>Before God!—But now this God has died. But before the mob we would not be equal. You superior humans, go away from the market!

Democracy rising due to an excess of power is precisely what "decline in organizing power" implies for Nietzsche. The governing powers gradually lose their ability to organize when those they govern gradually gain more power for themselves, and once those they govern gain too much power, the governing powers learn to negotiate instead, from which begins democracy. In this state of affairs, the governing powers, having been deprived of their ability to organize power themselves, rely on a certain degree of self-organization among those they govern, which they negotiate for. The state, which is made up of wills, thus unlearns how to organize power, and learns how to negotiate for it. Nietzsche considered this to be a state of destitution rather than something desirable, calling Europe's "system of small states" a "wretched European nervousness" while simultaneously praising Russia's (at the time) position over Europe's, for precisely the reason Tocqueville gave in that quote you posted (because it had the capacity to concentrate all the power of society into one man).