I have just joined a great little Facebook group called Coffee with a Madman, a Friedrich Nietzsche appreciation group. Why don’t you pay us a visit.
I am afraid I haven’t read any Nietzsche in many years but I do remember some of my earliest ideas on Nihilism and Anarchism (two ideologies often wrongly mixed up) coming from this man’s writings. I would definitely tend towards anarchism by the way. Also many of my ideas on the preposterousness of organised religion possibly bear some echo of his works.
For my little bit of Nietzsche I will use this piece from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape…The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth…Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman–a rope over an abyss…what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end…”
Definitely my thoughts as opined in my views of the total unnecessity of religion in a modern intelligent society. As soon as we lose modern quasi religious fairy tales the sooner we can aspire to overman and leave our ape selves behind. My refuted nihilism probably shows a little in that thought.
By the way the trouble with madness is its subjectivity. The classic example was from the old soviet era when if you wandered far from the path of Communism you were considered mentally ill and could find yourself with a free ticket to the gulags.
Most religions still use the same methods but substitute the term ‘madness’ with ‘heresy’…
And before long as with most religions, the lunatics are running the asylum
