Nietzsche
Article
Nietzsche is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between May 10, 2022 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “You read Nietzsche in freshman philosophy”; “I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books)”; “Nietzsche speculates that slave morality originated with the Jews”. It most often appears alongside Christianity, Jews, US.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 7
- Issue count: 7
- First seen: May 10, 2022
- Last seen: May 30, 2025
Appears In
- Book Review: The Gervais Principle
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
- Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head
- Open Thread 341
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
- Bayes For Everyone
Related Pages
-
- Christianity (3 shared issues)
-
- Jews (3 shared issues)
-
- US (3 shared issues)
-
- 4chan (2 shared issues)
-
- Achilles (2 shared issues)
-
- Agamemnon (2 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Tate (2 shared issues)
-
- Ayn Rand (2 shared issues)
-
- Bentham’s Bulldog (2 shared issues)
-
- Bugatti (2 shared issues)
-
- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
-
- Fascism (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Still, it never hurts to get reminders. This book made me more aware of approval-seeking and status in my life for a little while. I might try Be Slightly Evil next and see if it enlightens me further. You read Nietzsche in freshman philosophy, and for a few weeks you vaguely feel like you ought to be the ubermensch. But that’s hard, and it’s not really clear why it would even be a good thing, so eventually you forget about it. The Gervais Principle has a similar effect.
II. Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty:
I think we can do better - that it’s possible to make a case against “slave morality” that doesn’t rely on being pro-badness and cruelty. I’m an expert on Nietzsche (I’ve read some of his books), but not a world-leading expert (I didn’t understand them). So take all of this as a riff on the concept, rather than a guide to Nietzsche’s original intent.
As a student of philosophy, Clayton is heavily influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Camus. He analyzes the experience of being paralyzed primarily through the lens of Existentialism. It’s hard to imagine a more apt philosophy for interpreting body horror.
If you can handle the body horror, it is worth reading. It helps to be familiar with Nietzsche, Existentialism, and the broader disability rights community/anti-ableism ideas.
2: Comment of the week: an r/ssc reader with a (thankfully minor) spine injury shares his extensive thoughts on the recent Two Arms And A Leg review. I’ll try to collect the Nietzsche comments into a Highlights post soon.
Inline links: shares his extensive thoughts
According to his myth, master morality is the natural creed of the free, strong, noble peoples of the world. Eventually, though, their victims banded together and decided that strength and nobility were evil, and the best thing to be is harmless and meek, and slave morality was born. Like all great and true myths, this one bears no actual relation to history. There never was a tribe of blond beasts practising an ethos of pure cruelty. It’s master morality that was invented by the weak and the botched—by one particular weak and botched individual, which was Friedrich Nietzsche. Its isn’t to compensate for his weakness. Nietzsche insisted he was strong, but he was always very specific about what his strength was made of. ‘I always instinctively select the proper remedy when my spiritual or bodily health is low; whereas the decadent, as such, invariably chooses those remedies which are bad for him.’ Master morality is a remedy by and for the weak.
My nomination for the Ubermesch is TracingWoodgrains, the notable gay furry formerly of the Blocked & Reported podcast and currently notorious on Twitter for his provocative essays. When I read Scott’s essay, he was the first person I thought of. One of his highest values is excellence. It informs everything he does. He is constantly advocating for the metaphorical poppies to get taller, and rages against our education system that encourages equality by holding back the more talented kids. He makes no apologies for it and doesn’t begrudge anyone pride in their achievements. But he also maintains an ethic of civic duty, and feels an affinity with his former Mormon community over their mutual desire to improve the world, create thriving communities, and engage in mutual aid. A true Nietschean master concerns himself only with his own excellence, but Trace is constantly encouraging and supporting others to become more excellent. This is on clear display in his essay on why he is voting for Kamala Harris despite the fact that she represents a political machine that is an anathema to his values.
Inline links: TracingWoodgrains, essay on why he is voting for Kamala Harris
Please note that this isn't a defense of Nietschean morality, which I find equally contemptible. Nietschean morality is simply your own, except with the polarity reversed. Instead of the weak being fetishized as paragons of goodness, they fetishize the strong.
I’m in this argument’s target audience. Although I'm mostly atheist, I accept that the modern world has worse aesthetics than its predecessors. I think it's trying as hard as it can to push a bad-things-are-good philosophy down our throat that we might one day choke on. And like everyone else in this category, I'm anti-woke. I do hope the worst is over, but I have continued nightmares about what would have happened if the DEI world had done a better job exploiting the post-George Floyd moment and cemented its advantage forever.
Inline links: worse aesthetics, bad-things-are-good
I am no fan of medieval theocracy. But I do have a weakness for the 1880 - 1930 period of fin de siecle culture, Art Nouveau, economic liberty, and progressophilia. This period wasn't very religious - Nietzsche had already declared God dead in 1882. But the Cultural Christians would argue that such a flowering of culture and optimism could only happen within a generation or two of a Christian society. It (they would argue) contained the seeds of its own destruction, doomed to degenerate into our current postmodernist brutalist whatever. If I want the 1890s back, I shouldn't advocate the (mostly classically liberal) positions of the 1890s. I should advocate for Christianity, the only ideology under which something like those positions can be stable.
If this sounds like some sort of esoteric, speculative division, I’m doing a bad job explaining it. I mean to gesture at an idea that smart people have been pointing at for centuries. It’s at least similar to Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vs. “Apollonian” modes, and to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “the bricoleur” vs. “the engineer”, and to Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. It’s near the heart of what Iain McGilchrist is describing in The Master and His Emissary. I think it’s the same thing as Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives? It overlaps a lot with Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” and with Jonathan Haidt’s “the elephant” and “the rider”. Heck, the lack of clarity on this divide is what makes Jordan Peterson’s dialogues with atheists so frustrating.