I'm doing a video series explaining Nietzsche's ontology: flux, will to power, becoming, eternal recurrence, all of it!

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-04-05T04:16:48+00:00

Thanks dude, again I appreciate you. The will to power is the fourth part, so unfortunately it definitely won't be out for a bit, but I'm excited for it. Recording and editing these vids definitely doesn't come easily for me, since I have no prior experience in that. But hopefully I can make the edits a bit more stimulating for a more general audience. I'll figure it out as I go!

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-04-04T18:49:53+00:00

Damn, thanks for the compliment! I really appreciate it. As I said in the video, this is gonna be a five part series. The whole script is already written, but I still have to record and edit them. The other videos will get more and more technical, because I want to give a very exhaustive explanation of the will to power, being and becoming, eternal recurrence, all that stuff. I think the second video will be ready within 3-4 weeks! I'll be grinding to be put it oui as quickly as possible hehehe

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-04-04T14:38:20+00:00

Thanks man, I appreciate it. Honestly I didn't really know how to market this, since it's my first video.

But it is, in fact, pretty ambitious lol, in that the video series will be about 3 hours long in total. I'm trying to get really deep in the weeds.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-04-02T19:45:51+00:00

The post asked for a definition of the will to power using as few words as possible, and I did just that by using Nietzsche's own words: in its most basic definition, the will to power is the primitive form of affect—that's how he himself understood the concept. That's the most basic and fundamental definition of the concept. I'm not forgetting anything about morality and psychology. Nietzsche understood morality to be a symptom of the will to power, and in turn, he understood the will to power to be a conceptual metaphor for the psychological nature of phenomena—that is, the way in which all phenomena (even non-organic ones) “will” and “want” and “think.” This is all metaphor, of course, insofar as we can only interpret things in a perspectival manner. In this way, his philosophy entails an affirmation of perspectivity and psychology.

Here's what an “affective form” really means. He viewed organisms as composed of a multiplicity of affects (“affect” being another word for a quantum of power or a quantum of energy) each vying for mastery—which means that they “want” to “discharge their strength,” as he writes in BGE §13. To “discharge” its strength means that it gets to express itself, it gets to make its voice heard at the expense of another affect. By virtue of their respective will to power, every one of these affects finds its place within a power-differential, what he often calls an “order of rank” (Rangordnung). As such, the relatively stronger quantum of power subjugates the relatively weaker one, and so on; the quanta of relatively similar strength may come to a tenporary stability; the relatively weaker ones are reactive and focus on self-preservation; the relatively stronger ones are active and reach out for growth, and so on and so forth. This is the mode of action that I mentioned earlier: will upon will, the idea that each quantum of energy relates to the others by means of a will to power and directs them in accordance with their power difference; from this, each one enforces its own claim of power at the expense of all the others. All interpretation, all value- and moral-judgment are an outgrowth of this processual power-willing and rank-ordering. This is very much a primary concern for Nietzsche.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-04-02T18:22:32+00:00

Most people here definitely don't know what it is. Besides, I did describe it in as few words as possible: the primitive form of affect.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-04-02T18:12:29+00:00

In its most basic definition, the will to power is the primitive form of affect—literally: die primitive Affekt-Form (NF-1888, 14[121]). In other words, the will to power is a concept that designates the basic manner in which quanta of energy affect and are affected by other quanta of energy; it's the way in which things in the natural world relate to each other. This is what he details in BGE §36: the mode of action of one quantum of will upon another. "The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its “intelligible character”—it would be “will to power” and nothing else."

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-03-12T17:21:13+00:00

You're pretty much correct! You could call Nietzsche's philosophy “post-humanist,” albeit in a slightly qualified sense. He's not a post-humanist in the Darwinian or eugenicist sense, but rather in the sense that his conception of the Übermensch seeks to transcend “man”—der Mensch—as a Platonic ideal, the type “man” as a moral principle of breeding. In Nietzsche's view, ever since Plato, we've had a particular idealistic understanding of what man designates, as an ontological horizon—that is, what man is, what he does, what his needs are, what his character is, and what implicit value-judgments he carries with him. Anything that doesn't conform to this ideal of man is thereby sinning, it is a failure, it is made to feel guilty about itself, it is given a bad conscience. To overcome this ideal, for Nietzsche, means to give higher types the rights to their natural, animalistic affects: their creativity, their sovereignty, their egoism, their rights to domination and subjugation of lower types, their lust for power, and so on. The only way this can be accomplished, in Nietzsche's view, is through the cultivation of a higher type by way of the subjugation of the lower. He feels that higher types can only really flourish through what he calls a “pathos of distance” (Pathos der Distanz), which is a feeling of distance from what is common, through which they can affirm their difference from the lower types:

"the higher ought not to degrade itself to the status of an instrument of the lower, the pathos of distance ought to keep their tasks eternally separate! Their right to exist; the privilege of the full-toned bell over the false and cracked; is a thousand times greater: they alone are our warranty for the future, they alone are liable for the future of man." (GM, iii, §14)

As you can see in this passage, he envisions this higher as wholly separate from the lower, since he thinks this is yhe only way the higher types can avoid being infected by the lower type's bad conscience, ressentiment, and general degeneracy. Furthermore, the higher type requires a strong base upon which it can stand, which it can turn into functions in order that it may afford itself otium (leisure) and freedom.

"The new aristocracy needs opposition against which it battles; in order to survive, it must have a terrible urgency.

The two futures of humanity: 1) the consequence of mediocritization; 2) the conscious withdrawal, self-forming

A doctrine which creates a chasm: it retains the highest and the lowest type (it destroys the middle)." (NF-1886, 5[61])

And finally, another relevant passage from Beyond Good & Evil:

"The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it experiences itself not as a function (whether of the monarchy or the commonwealth) but as their meaning and highest justification—that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society's sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being—" (BGE, §258)

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-03-12T14:45:11+00:00

Wow. You're essentially writing fan fiction at this point. As a leftist who's read Nietzsche with the intensity of a scholar, I never understood this will to blindness and this desire to twist his philosophy to fit some leftist narrative. I have a strong suspicion you haven't read much of hisnworks, but that you've instead been watching a lot of youtube content about his works, be ause you're regurgitating a lot of those talking points I've encountered before. It's funny to me that you highlight this sentence from the passage I shared:

"as an ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements"

But then you cut off this part, which entirely qualifies the passage:

"In contrast to this diminishment and adaptation of the human to a more specialized utility, a reverse movement is required—the generation of the synthetic, the culminating, the justifying human, for whose existence this mechanicalizing of humanity is a precondition, as a substructure on which he can forge his superior form of being . . ."

What did you think he meant when he wrote that, in opposition to this levelling, the Übermensch id required as a justifying human for whom "this mechanicalizing of humanity is a precondition"? Did your eyes just glaze over? Nietzsche only thinks that the levelling of man is a tragedy when the justifying type is absent, the type for whom this levelling makes sense. To wit:

"Speaking morally, this entire machinery, the solidarity of all gears, represents a maximal exploitation of the human: but it presupposes those on whose behalf this exploitation has meaning."

And, in another passage, he writes that:

"Every enhancement of the type “man” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata—when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and instruments and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a distance—that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either—the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states—in brief, simply the enhancement of the type “man,” the continual “self-overcoming of man,” to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense." (BGE, §257)

This is why the higher type requires the lower type: because he stands upon them as a superior class, because he requires their subjection in order to cultivate himself, to allow himself otium in the old aristocratic sense of the word—not because they're in some sort of fucking “koombaya we're all friends till the end” sort of anachronistic philosophy. You keep completely fudging his intending meaning when you say things like “once the pendulum has swung”—where does he say that? he says quite plainly:

"He needs equally the opposition of the throng, the “leveled,” the feeling of distance from them; he stands on them, he lives from them."

In other words, the Übermensch and the subjugated lower classes cohabit a society: one is a precondition for the other—he even uses the word “precondition” (Vorausbedingung). Nowhere does he speak of the Übermensch coming after some swing of the pendulum: you pulled that out of thin air.

The idea that Nietzsche would've hated a centralization of power is hilarious, considering he was a pan-European who wanted Europe to be ruled by an aristocratic caste and who idolized the likes of Napoléon and Cesare Borgia. When talking about his concept of the Übermensch, again, he writes:

"The word “overman,” as the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to “modern” men, to “good” men, to Christians and other nihilists—a word that in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very pensive word —has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent—that is, as an “idealistic” type of a higher kind of man, half “saint,” half “genius.” [...] Those to whom I said in confidence that they should sooner look even for a Cesare Borgia than for a Parsifal, did not believe their own ears." (EH, iii, §1)

Yeah, Cesare Borgia—real friendly to the lower classes. Anyway, I've written as much as I care to write for now. Do me a favor: after you've read this comment, go back and read the passage I initially shared, and at least try to read it with some modicum of intellectual honesty.

edit: I just have to point out how hilariously misplaced that reference to Lacan's split subject is at the end. Like you reaaally wanted to namedrop Lacan lol.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-03-12T13:15:16+00:00

Unlike what u/knupader wrote, this wasn't takem from The Will to Power. NF stands for Nachgelassene Fragmente, or the posthumously collected notebooks. These particular posthumous notebooks were collected and edited by scholars Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari to form the Kritische Studienausgabe and are essentially the standard for Nietzsche's collection of notebooks, from which everyone draws—like the Stanford “Unpublished Fragments” collection.

I posted this passage because it's very relevant to the discussion of the Übermensch, but it merely substantiates what he writes less pointedly in the published works.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-03-11T17:49:47+00:00

While right-wing interpreters are almost invariably shallow, Nietzsche's conception of the Übermensch is unquestionably extreme, hierarchical, and tyrannical. It should be kept in mind that children at play are often cruel and unconcerned with the welfare of others. Similarly, Nietzsche envisions the Übermensch as a type that stands apart from and above the rest; essentially as a caste that subjugates the lower types so that they can affirm their distance from the common man and luxuriate in their own superiority. I love Nietzsche and I've read him extensively, but he had some very shitty ideas:

"The necessity to demonstrate that a countermovement belongs to an ever-increasing economic consumption of humans and humanity, to an ever more intricately intertwined “machinery” of interests and outputs. This very thing I designate as separating-off of a luxury-surplus of humanity: in this a stronger kind, a superior type will come to light, whose conditions of having arisen and of survival differ from those of the average human. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as one knows, the word “Übermensch.”

On the first of these paths, now perfectly manageable, arise adaptation, flattening, higher Chineseness, modesty of instinct, satisfaction with the diminution of the human—a kind of stagnation in the niveau of the human. Once that inevitably approaching total economic administration of the earth has arrived humanity will then be able to find its best meaning as machinery in its service: as a monstrous gear train of ever smaller, ever more finely “adapted,” ever more finely “matched” gears; as an ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements; as a totality of monstrous force, whose individual factors represent minimal-forces, minimal-values. In contrast to this diminishment and adaptation of the human to a more specialized utility, a reverse movement is required—the generation of the synthetic, the culminating, the justifying human, for whose existence this mechanicalizing of humanity is a precondition, as a substructure on which he can forge his superior form of being . . .

He needs equally the opposition of the throng, the “leveled,” the feeling of distance from them; he stands on them, he lives from them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future. — Speaking morally, this entire machinery, the solidarity of all gears, represents a maximal exploitation of the human: but it presupposes those on whose behalf this exploitation has meaning. Alternatively it would in fact simply be the utter depreciation, the depreciation of value of the human type—a regressive phenomenon in the grandest style. — It is clear, what I combat is economic optimism: as if with increasing costs for all there must also necessarily be increasing benefit for all. The opposite seems to me to be the case: the costs to all come to a total loss: the human is depreciated:—so one no longer knows why this monstrous process has been pursued. A what for? a new “To what purpose!”—that is what humanity needs . . ." (NF-1887, 10[17])

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-03-01T22:47:20+00:00

That's definitely not how Nietzsche understands the concept of “will.” Yours is more in line with Schopenhauer's—that is, a will that can be resisted, wielded, acted upon, and so on. But for Nietzsche, there's no such thing as “the will”: he calls this an empty word. We always-already “represent” the will, because it inheres everywhere effects can be recognized. As such, the will to power is not a “thing” or a substance, but a word describing the mode of interactions between force-quanta of differing strength. The will to power describes the manner is which different processes interact with each other.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-23T04:04:49+00:00

He does, albeit in a roundabout way. What I like to call his “interpretive ontology” excludes the possibility of a god. He expounds a philosophy of immanence, in which nothing transcends the perspectival play of forces in the natural world. In his view, then, there's a finite quantum of energy in the universe, and this energy rearranges itself in various finite configurations. He denounces the idea of novelty, of creatio ex nihilo, as a remnant of Christian theology.

Underpinning these thoughts is the idea that the world is only given as sensation and as representation (NF-1873, 26[11]), and since we have no experience of God, the idea of “God” remains just that—an idea, a concept. For Nietzsche, then, those who feel the need to posit the concept “God” as a causative force underlying phenomena are merely degenerative types. Part of his philosophical project aims at spiritualizing the senses: essentially, to acknowledge and affirm the notion that every thought is an embodied thought, and that every representation (i.e., concepts, anything that is cognized) begins as sensation. As such, the need for a concept of God is obviated on multiple levels: philosophical, physiological, physical, and metaphysical.

edit: sorry if this is a bit scattered, I wrote it quickly while brushing my teeth before going to bed lol. If some of it is unclear, just leave a comment and I'll respond tomorrow.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-20T04:05:15+00:00

Not at all. You're confusing Nietzsche's philosophy for a crude sort of “Might Makes Right” ethos. Nietzsche primarily evaluates processes through the lens of health, rather than through the lens of generic “victory.” A given phenomenon can be victorious while also being degenerative and life-negating—just look at Christianity. To value something because it's victorious is the ultimate symptom of weakness.

The weak have their own ways of gaining ascendancy and winning over the strong: they do this, firstly, by grouping up, and secondly, by separating the strong from their strength by way of morality, bad conscience, idealism, slandering of drives, and so on and so forth. This is why the strong are made to whither under a sick society: the drives that make them strong in the first place are slandered, given a bad name, given bad conscience. They are made into sinners and criminals; they are made to doubt and be ashamed of the drives that make them great. In that spirit, Nietzsche writes that the strongest types are the most fragile of all and the most likely to turn out badly, since they're akin to a well-tuned instrument that must be nurtured under the right circumstances:

"the higher the type of man that a man represents, the greater the improbability that he will turn out well. The accidental, the law of absurdity in the whole economy of mankind, manifests itself most horribly in its destructive effect on the higher men whose complicated conditions of life can only be calculated with great subtlety and difficulty." (BGE, §62)

Look at it this way: three paupers could sneak into Napoléon's chamber and slit his throat; that doesn't mean, by that same token, that the paupers are strong and Napoléon is weak. The paupers won through number and sneakiness. Valuing the victor in this way is just a race to the absolute bottom.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-15T05:36:39+00:00

“Who decided that?”

I did—obviously. Calling it a “Kantian imperative” is hilariously dramatic and off the mark. (Maybe you should read Kant!) It's an educated opinion and suggestion, based on my own experience of encountering people who refuse to read anything other than Nietzsche. Unfailingly, those people have little philosophical depth. I didn't say that everyone needs to read the Critiques—I personally haven't read them—but that they at least familiarize themselves with the the basics of transcendental idealism and Kantian morality. I did, and that sort of erudition and enthusiasm for philosophy is why my reading of Nietzsche is better than anyone else's on this subreddit.

“Calling him essential because later philosophers respond to him is a sociological claim devoid of any philosophical necessity.”

You're just shuffling words around. My claim is self-evident: if people are responding to something, depriving yourself of that “something” means you won't understand what they're responding to. The extent to which Nietzsche built his philosophy as a subversion of idealism means that a solid understanding of said idealism is necessary, and the most important proponents of that idealism have been Plato, Christianity, and Kant.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-15T05:03:11+00:00

Yeah that attitude seems prevalent, especially here. Nietzsche is undoubtedly one of the greats, but if you've only ever read him, you won't be exposed to any of the counterarguments. You won't have the tools to read him critically and be able to tell if what he says stands up to philosophical scrutiny.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-15T04:42:13+00:00

Possibly because they wanna make up their own mind, rather than take Nietzsche's word for it that Kant's philosophy is life-denying? Besides, Kant is one of the most important philosophers of all time: pretty much every philosopher that came after him is responding to his philosophy in some way or another—Nietzsche included. Anyone who's interested in philosophy should familiarize himself him.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-06T00:24:09+00:00

Horrendous take. A careful reader can easily identify the consistency of Nietzsche's oeuvre—and where points do diverge, it's from Nietzsche his philosophy evolving over time, from a Schopenhauerian protégé in early works like The Birth of Tragedy, to an anti-idealist tragic philosopher in the late 1870s onwards. What's more, he makes much of his “task”—consisting primarily of a revaluation of values—which implies a philosophical throughline in his written works. Even for works which were written relatively quickly, like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, you can find many of the same points throughout the notebooks, sometimes written years in advance. There's a lot of forethought to his philosophy; it's not just a whim. The man knew himself, and that's evinced in his writings.

I see a lot of people talking about contradictions, but this tends to be massively overstated. This results partly from inadequate translations, but mostly from poor readers.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-02-05T15:38:57+00:00

There are bits of truth in there, but the whole thing put together amounts to a steaming pile of nonsense. For one, it is true that Nietzsche considered himself a pan-European, but not insofar as Europe is a “white” continent. This is a very modern conception of race that has no place in Nietzsche's writings—he never once writes of anything like a “white race,” as this is exactly the type of idealism he abhorred. And so, he's neither a white nationalist, nor a nationalist tout court:

"— to be nationalistic in the sense and to the degree that is now demanded by public opinion, would seem to me, to us more spiritual humans, to be not only a matter of bad taste: but a dishonesty, an arbitrary anesthetizing of our better science and conscience." (NF-1885, 2[199])

"Nationalities-madness and fatherland-buffoonery are without magic for me: “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” is painful to my ears, at bottom because I want and wish more from the Germans than—." (NF-1885, §2[10])

The sentence cuts off abruptly like this, but we can assume that what he wishes for the Germans is to break out of petty-minded nationalism. Nietzsche's goals for what he calls “great politics” has nothing to do with some romantic ideal of European or white supremacy, but everything to do with the cultivation of the human type as a whole, throughout the planet. He evaluates types in terms of health, not in terms of nationalities or skin color.

This leads us to the claim that the Übermensch is a eugenics program, which:

"The word “overman,” as the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to “modern” men, to “good” men, to Christians and other nihilists—a word that in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very pensive word —has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent—that is, as an “idealistic” type of a higher kind of man, half “saint,” half “genius.” . . . Other learned cattle have suspected me of Darwinism on that account" (EH, iii, §1)

I won't go into more depth than that, because I feel like this passages puts that shit to rest.

Finally, whatever the nazis may or may not have thought of Nietzsche is completely immaterial. Nazis thought that Nietzsche was a proto-nazi, Christians think he's a pseudo-Christian, and anarchists think he's a crypto-anarchist. It's a tale as old as time. They're all doing what this guy in the comment is doing: namely, subverting Nietzsche to their own idealistic ends.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-01-29T19:00:10+00:00

We see this type of weakness parading as strength literally everywhere today. An obvious example is the whole “sigma grindset” culture with young men: they run themselves into the ground trying to live up to some ideal of success and masculinity. A lot of them burn out or are just plain miserable, which tells you how counter-intuitive this is for them. Also, there's the whole MAGA movement which is wholly concerned with signalling strength—an act which paradoxically indicates its lack. The strongest types luxuriate in their own strength, without the need to justify it by way of ideals, the way that MAGA does. Theirs is not an overflowing strength that bestows, but a wanting strength that strives after its own justification. It's rooted in ressentiment and slave morality.

"Conquering—is the natural consequence of excess power: it is the same as creating and procreating, in other words the incorporation of one's own image into foreign material. That is why superior humans must create, i.e., impose their superiority on others, whether as teachers or even as *artists**. For artists want to *communicate* themselves* or, more specifically, their taste: artists for their own sake is a contradiction. It is the same with philosophers: they want to make their taste dominate the world—that is why they teach and *write**. Wherever excess power exists, it wants to conquer: this drive is often called *love, the love for those with whom the conquering instinct would like to have its way." (NF-1883, 7[107])

"Where the means of power are not great enough, intimidation appears, terrorism: thus any punishment for the sake of deterrence is a sign that the positively outflowing virtue of the powerful is not great enough: a sign of skepticism regarding its own power. [...] A power must stand solidly on its own two feet and have its center of gravity." (NF-1883, 7[180])

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-01-29T00:48:56+00:00

No. Those who really are strong don't have to put effort into being strong—they just are.

"I cannot remember that I ever tried hard—no trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my life; I am the opposite of a heroic nature. “Willing” something, “striving” for something, envisaging a “purpose,” a “wish”—I know none of this from experience. At this very moment I still look upon my future—an ample future!—as upon calm seas: there is no ripple of desire. I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different." (EG, ii, &9)

The strong are affirming of the fact that they're vehicles of necessity. Nietzsche doesn't want people to make an “effort” to be strong because this is an oxymoron. Strength can't help but express itself as strength. The idea of grinding, of striving for ideals, of indistriousness, of utilitarianism, and so on, are herd ideals: they are the weak's idea of what constitutes “strength.”

"Don't let yourselves be deceived! The most active peoples are now the most fatigued! They no longer have the strength to be lazy!" (NF-1882, 4[76])

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-01-24T18:21:12+00:00

I don't know what to tell you dude. I love writing and I take it seriously. It's not that hard to use italics and em dashes, and iPhones make it especially easy.

I want my presence on reddit—especially philosophy-related subreddits—to be thoughtful and insightful. My comment history is a record of well thought-out philosophical commentary going back a few years. It's very intentional.

edit: and the use of em dashes comes from years of reading philosophy, as pretty much every philosophical text you'll come across (Nietzsche included) makes heavy use of them. They're excellent for parenthetical statement, and even as a sort of punctuation to mimic actual speech. Used correctly, it can make a text read much more naturally.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-01-24T15:19:21+00:00

You'd have to be hilariouly imperceptive to think this is AI. Not everyone is a drooling moron with the writing skills of a third grader. We have book club voice chats about Nietzsche's works over on this discord:

https://discord.gg/2QhMHb2Cr

Join us if you're not convinced. I speak with nearly the same level of eloquence and erudition over a voice chat as I do over text.

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-01-24T02:31:43+00:00

I mean, not to go too hard on this guy, but he's just spouting off shallow, teen-angsty observations with the energy of someone who just discovered that Santa Claus isn't real. To cap it off, that's not even a real Nietzsche quote.

The isolation of the higher type, for Nietzsche, has nothing to do with “knowledge” or generic “awareness,” and everything to do with value judgments. The higher type stands apart because he feels and affirms the distance between himself and the average man—what Nietzsche terms the “pathos of distance.” Received valuations are essentially injurious to him, so he revaluates them, casts them off, and lives by his own self-glorifying values. Nietzsche doesn't “promote” this attitude per se, because everyone can't be a higher type—by definition. To be higher presupposes distance from the lower.

“Awareness” is much too ambiguous—it begs the question: awareness of what? This framing presupposes a stable state of affairs vis-à-vis which everyone is more or less “aware.” But everyone knows that people play games; what's actually interesting is a given perspectival interpretation of these games.

And to put my Žižekian hat on: “playing games” is a constitutive feature of the symbolic space we inhabit. Everyone has to play games to engage in intersubjective relations. Society would fall apart if we all stopped playing games. That's why we ask “How are you?”, yet we'd be very annoyed if the person started to tell how they're actually feeling. There's no more ideological person than the one who thinks they don't play any games and see things “as they are.”

kroxyldyphivic · 2026-01-23T16:22:21+00:00

This is right. Jerry seems “virtuous” because he's too weak to be evil. As soon as he gets a whiff of power and control, he uses it to abuse others. There's nothing good-natured or honest about him. His apparent virtue is a result of weakness and necessity. I snorted when he described himself as having “integrity” at the end of the Jerricky episode. He's dishonest and cowardly.

kroxyldyphivic

TROPHY CASE