I'm not intimately familiar with stoicism. If you could elaborate on what part you feel is a straw-man or even link to some of the `constructive responses' I'd appreciate it.
while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature - here Nietzsche accuses all stoics of being hypocrites. Surely there are some who are not.
you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature ‘according to the Stoa,’ and would like everything to be made after your own image - I know of no Stoic, ancient or modern, who advocates this.
what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. - the Stoics consistently cautioned against dogma, evidenced in practice by the abundance of various interpretations - Marcus Aurelius's interpretation differs in ways from Seneca's, which differs in ways from Epictetus's, Zeno's, Chrysippus's, etc. A common saying among modern Stoics is "Stoicism has no pope."
As for constructive responses, google "responding to nietzsche on stoicism."
> I know of no Stoic, ancient or modern, who advocates this.
Nietzsche is not saying that Stoics are consciously doing this, rather that it's an unconscious process - and in Nietzsche's view, a rather fundamental one that far from just the Stoics are involved in. One of Nietzsche's central tenets is that pretty much all 'knowledge' and 'belief' is just us projecting our interpretations (rooted in what we would now term cognitive biases, value judgements, sensations, etc) on reality and then "reading" them back to ourselves as the ground truth, which is in fact unknowable as such.
In general, Nietzsche regards philosophical attitudes as determined by physiology and environment, and in fact says later that Stoicism is a fine medicine for certain kinds of people in some periods of time.
"One of Nietzsche's central tenets is that pretty much all 'knowledge' and 'belief' is just us projecting our interpretations (rooted in what we would now term cognitive biases, value judgements, sensations, etc) on reality and then "reading" them back to ourselves as the ground truth, which is in fact unknowable as such."
Something which Nietzsche is guilty of himself. But that road leads to postmodernism.
Nietzsche did not claim to hold a privileged position in this regard, nor in his opinion does that position necessarily lead to postmodernism. Indeed Nietzsche would have been mortally offended by the entire postmodern project, the forerunners of which he clearly believed to be inspired by decadence and ressentiment. Nietzsche's "there are no facts, only interpretations" goes much deeper than postmodernist ideas about moral relativism or whatever: Nietzsche denies that there is (or at least that we have the grounds to believe in) any such thing as responsibility, guilt, will, causality, Being, or even identity, both in the personal sense and the logical sense.
His focus instead is that, given the essential failure of metaphysics, to instead try to destroy as many as the 'old idols' rooted in these cognitive biases and value judgements - to see to what extent life could endure the incorporation of small-t truth (Nietzsche suspected that many errors were actually necessary for life) - and to re-evaluate our values with the (arbitrary!) view of increasing the health of the human animal. And he makes clear that this depends on the person: "the exception should not try to become the rule." Nietzsche's philosophy is explicitly not for everyone.
In terms of practical life advice, Nietzsche ends on somewhat common ground with the Stoics -
> My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
On the contrary, he is claiming to hold a privileged position; not perhaps on the true nature of knowledge, belief, or "ground truth" (although I believe he is doing that, too), but on the ability to determine what is projected interpretation and what isn't. In fact, if he isn't claiming that privileged position, then he is more than halfway to postmodernism; not perhaps denying that such a position is impossible, but at least denying that anyone has (or possibly could) find one.
By the way, one of the difficulties of a philosophy explicitly not for everyone is that it cannot avoid turning into us-versus-them, followed shortly by the wise and knowing versus the misguided, misled, and heathen sheep. One lesson of the 20th century (if it needed teaching again) was that philosophy can be weaponized.
(One nice thing about (my interpretation of) epicureanism and possibly Zhuangzi is that the sheep may be heathens, but I don't need to care.)
I'm not familiar with the responding literature, but one thing that stands out is his reduction to "living according to life" and dismissal of that as tautological.
He poses the question "Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different?" A central point of Stoicism is answering no to that. Recognizing that our preferences are merely preferences, not needs, and that we can go forward without them controlling our attitude toward what life brings.
Of course we have preferences, and we make evaluations, and we endeavor to change. But Stoicism is partly about grasping those things loosely rather than staking our emotional well-being on them.
Even the cutesy "live according to life": does anyone deny that we often resist life? We know there will be setbacks, losses, death, etc., and instead of anticipating and flowing with them we are surprised and dismayed.
Nietzsche valued a sort of resistance to life. But it's a strawman to treat that value as axiomatic and dismiss Stoicism as inherently contradictory.
