Oeaohoo

I was interpreting it as something broader than simply lying or narrow unconsciousness. Basically everything that humans do is built upon layers and layers of contrivance, of abstraction, of interpretation, of artifice - fundamentally, of bullshit.

@Leo Gura You make a mistake when you conflate life-denying with uptight and serious, and similarly when you imply that the inverse of life-denying is hedonistic. That’s not at all what Nietzsche is about. If you have the time/interest, this short paper does a great job of summarising Nietzsche’s thinking on this subject. Also - @Joseph Maynor - Nietzsche and Ayn Rand have basically nothing in common - not even according to Ayn Rand...

I get the sense that @Leo Gura hasn't actually read any Nietzsche first-hand, though I could be wrong... Some thoughts: Nietzsche wasn't some ultra-regressive neo-aristocrat - he "blasts" slave morality disproportionality because society at his time of writing was so possessed by it. It's fair to say that Nietzsche misses the boat on genuine spirituality & enlightenment, to his detriment, but there's far more to slave morality than just peace and love - namely, in a word, ressentiment. See Osho's discussion of Nietzsche for more on this. It was precisely the life-negating nihilism of Christianity (and ascetic modes of being in general) that he was criticising! The trouble with just lumping Nietzsche in as another "classic Orange knee-jerk reaction to Blue' is that it wasn't the Blue aspects of religion (arbitrary dogma, ideology, blind faith, moral absolutism, etc.) that he was particularly concerned with (at least as regards his genealogy of morality and the slave-master dichotomy). It was the particular doctrinal approach to morality which puts all the emphasis on not-doing and what shouldn't be done (and thus defines good in terms of evil rather than bad in terms of good, as was the aristocratic way). In fact, when we was concerned with dogma, he was just as concerned with rational materialist dogma as religious dogma! What Nietzsche was a knee-jerk reaction too is the one-sidedness of Platonism and Christianity, which - rather than spiritualising the material world too - made the material world something corrupt, evil and to-be-escaped, and thus set up the duality between mind and body which has subsequently plagued the philosophical tradition! (Not a coincidence, Nietzsche would add.) The most fundamental problem Nietzsche had with such life-denying philosophies was that his ultimate goal was a total affirmation of life! As far as locating Nietzsche on the spiral goes, I would definitely put him at Yellow. I agree with you that he has a red shadow, and I would say that he also has an orange shadow, but I think he knew that (though he obviously wouldn't frame it in such terms). That being said, I'm not sure that the Spiral Dynamics model is the best lens to view someone as idiosyncratic as Nietzsche through.