Nietzsche on Revenge and Punishment

>>8323197
Go back to Heraclitus for the answer, because Nietzsche is basically on board with Heraclitus. That is, there is no justice. He goes on further to explain that punishment is just how we get our Schadenfreude fix. I don't think he's fundamentally opposed to some healthy cruelty once in awhile and he doesn't really drop a moral condemnation on it though he opposed it from a consequentialist perspective. He at least wants us to call a spade a spade in the field of justice though.

He also opposes reformative justice, since he argues that reformation is basically punishment and worse yet, it's punishment that if successful removes a man's best traits as his best (ie strongest) traits are usually the ones that see him getting into conflict with social mores.

He dislikes cruelty inflicted by the mob against the individual in particular, I think he would actually be more supportive of Ahabesque heroic revenge than a death penalty handed down by a jury. But of course he sees both as not resulting in justice and expresses some support for what we call today 'restorative justice' which is a more individualist conception of justice which sees offenses as offending against victims rather than against the state or some abstract principle of 'the law'.

I think he'd be more amenable to the ancient Germanic tradition of a blood money payment than to imprisonment or what have you.

>>8323427
Good post

>>8323197
My favourite line, unrelated to Nietzsche, on revenge is this:

"You are punished by anger; not for it."

It calms me to such an unreal degree.

>>8323427
Great post. Do you have a book on Heraclitus to recommend or his fragments are all I need?

>>8324595
His fragments are all that's left other than secondary sources which are also working exclusively from the fragments. The straightforward fragments are easy to interpret and the not so straightforward ones are just targets for people to project their own bullshit on so I never found secondary sources useful for him.

I should specify that Heraclitus doesn't exactly say that there is no justice but rather that there is only justice in strife. Which for human purposes is effectively saying there is no justice and also nothing is truly knowable to humans from his perspective. This kind of shit is why he was known as the weeping philosopher.

PEL has a good episode that discusses this. If you don't have 2 hours then I think at 60min is most relevant.

>>8325138
Forgot link:
https://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/11/10/episode-11-nietzsches-immoralism-what-is-ethics-anyway/

>>8323197
what is with Nietzche's fixation on snakes?

>>8325448
I think it's because of the Bible convincing Eve to eat the apple for knowledge of good & evil/etc