Welcome to the Greatest Philosophers In History series: where we do an in-depth exploration of the most fundamental ideas and views on life. In this episode, we will be exploring the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. So, let’s get started!
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher of the 19th century, one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy and intellectual history. He was a cultural critic of his era, of traditional European morality and religious fundamentalism, especially of Christianity. Nietzsche’s life was not an easy one.
It is the story of a man who from the beginning of his adult life, until the sudden and devastating end of his productive period, was ostracised from the intellectual community of his time and plagued by ill health. In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown. As he was taking a walk through the city streets, he saw a horse being whipped by its owner, he ran to the horse and threw his arms around its neck to protect it, then collapsed to the ground.
He never recovered. He was diagnosed with syphilis, but this claim has since been challenged and a diagnosis of manic-depressive illness with a periodic psychosis followed by dementia, explained by the slow growth of a tumour, was put forward. He died in 1900.
As a writer, Nietzsche achieved very little success, often times selling only a few copies of his books per year. It wasn’t until his death that his work began to flourish and become popular. His sister, Elisabeth assumed the role of editor of her brother’s unpublished works and manuscripts, to fit her own views which were heavily associated with Nazism.
This is why Nietzsche has been misrepresented as a predecessor to Nazism. He actually despised anti-Semitic people, which was apparent in his works. He thought highly of the Jews, as intellectuals, and as an important contribution to European culture.
After his mental breakdown that would consume the last 11 years of his life, he wrote letters for a short period of time called the “Madness Letters" and signing them alternatively as “Dionysus” or “The Crucified”. Dionysus is the Greek god of fertility and wine, the ultimate “yes” to life, and The Crucified is an allusion to Jesus, which Nietzsche called “the one and last true Christian" with his authentic Christianity dying with him on the cross. This may be less an attack on Jesus himself and more an attack on Christianity and its willingness to escape reality into an imaginary afterlife, it is the ultimate “no” to life.
The root of our misery and suffering is our constant tendency to divide our lives into “Yes” and “No”. By declaring that happiness means the presence of “yes” and that misery means the presence of “no”, we surrender control of our happiness into the hands that we cannot control. His solution was what he called amor fati, the love of fate, to love everything that happens.
To become a Yea-sayer. The book which set the stage for everything he had to say was Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he considered his greatest work. After this, he published Beyond Good and Evil, another of his most famous works.
Nietzsche did not write for the general public, but for an intellectual minority. He is also credited to being an early psychologist, developing certain concepts related to psychology such as the will to power. He considered psychology to be the queen of science, playing a huge role in our decisions, thoughts, and philosophy.
His criticisms rely on a psychological point of view of the popular belief of his time, and questioning our most fundamental beliefs by pointing out their shakiness and scrutinising available alternatives in a new vision of the value of life. Nietzsche shares his views on how he wants us to perceive the world liberating ourselves from oppressive tradition. The main concepts revolve around self-overcoming, perspectivism, human nobility, the will to power, the eternal recurrence, and the overman.
Nietzsche heavily emphasised the concept of selbstüberwindung or self-overcoming. By this, he means the act of expressing strong emotions or using energy by doing an activity or creating something. We must face reality, and suffering is part of life.
It is not to be eliminated, it is to be overcome, leading to growth. We make everything around us so easy, superficial, and bright, unable to face reality. Is this truly freedom?
For Nietzsche, this is a simplified and falsified world. So, to delight in life itself, we must confront it at face value - everything evil, terrible, and snakelike in humanity serves just as well as its opposite to enhance the species “humanity". We are to be grateful for even difficulties.
It is clear that pain is an inevitable part of human existence. From birth till death there is a 100% chance that we will suffer significantly painful experiences. But people run from the pain, they spend their life trying to be comfortable.
Instead of running from it, Nietzsche would want us to face the hardship, as it is the only way we grow as people. Imagine climbing up a mountain. There is struggle, pain, and hardship along the way.
But it’s only from the top of the mountain that you can see the most beautiful views life has to offer. And it is only the people who have the courage to climb that mountain, that will ever get to see that view. He says quote, Nietzsche’s doctrine on perspectivism claims that our view of the world and the statements we take to be true, depend on our perspective of the world.
Thus, it gives rise to the epistemological thesis that our knowledge claims can never be true in an absolute or objective sense. Perspectivism lays the foundations of Nietzsche’s thought, philosophy is subjective, and no philosophy is ultimate – but helps as a base to allow others to see the world differently. He speaks of a new breed of philosophers approaching, of “free spirits¨.
These are not ones who want to establish their truth as a truth for everyone (the secret wish of all dogmatic aspirations), they are outlaws, who are not in agreement with the majority, and whose judgements are their judgements alone. Inevitably they will be presented with bolted doors and shut windows, but for Nietzsche, these are free, very free spirits. He says quote: The idea of vornehmheit or human nobility is not within knowledge per se.
Knowledge is not something one can have like a detached thing that one possesses, but rather the knowing subject has to live his knowledge, it becomes associated to how much truth one can endure. The nobility in these free spirits resides in putting oneself at a distance from people and things: to have a sense of differences in rank between people and strive for higher distinction. He speaks of “the pathos of distance”, which refers to a differentiation between the ordinary and the noble types of man, a chasm separating the great from the mediocre.
Nietzsche is concerned with issues of not just individual decadence, but also of cultural decadence. He is concerned with life-affirming great individuals, not merely for their own sake, but for the rejuvenation and flourishing of culture. However, Nietzsche does not intend to elevate all of humanity.
His intent is to elevate those who can be elevated. He is fine with the herd staying the herd, but he wishes to seduce people away from the herd and expects the herd to hate him. What most interested Nietzsche throughout his entire intellectual career can be summarised in the form of the question “how are we to live?
”, or more poignantly “how are we to endure life? ” He conceives life as a chaotic process without any stability or direction. And that we have no reason to believe in such a thing as value of life, insofar as these terms imply the idea of an objective purpose of life.
Human life is value oriented in its very essence, without adherence to some set of values or other, human life would be virtually impossible. So, if there are no values out there and we cannot live without values, then there must be some value-creating capacity within ourselves which is responsible for the values we cherish, and which organise our lives. The noble and brave types creates values.
He honours everything he sees in himself: this sort of morality is self-glorifying. A faith in yourself, a pride in yourself and a fundamental hostility and irony with respect to selflessness belong to a noble morality. Nietzsche stated that the modern man would have to create his own values and morals in a world void of religion and belief, while avoiding the risk of falling into nihilism, the belief that life is meaningless, devoid of any value structure.
Perhaps one of Nietzsche’s most famous statements is his proclamation of the death of god: As you might tell, it doesn’t sound very much like a celebratory statement. Although Nietzsche was concerned on ending all the values that have been compiled for millennia from all kinds of civilizations and that are rooted within society, he did believe it to be necessary and possible. He calls this process of transcending our existing values as a Revaluation of All Values.
Proposing that a revaluation of values that runs deeply enough can eventually lead the entire human race into a new pattern of life beyond the human, a figure which he calls the overman, which we will get into later. By proclaiming the death of god, Nietzsche looked upon a historical event where god, who played a central role in most people’s lives for many centuries has now become one of many facets of some people’s lives. There are still believers and churches, but god no longer defines the role of our world, it is for this reason that god is dead.
Nietzsche states Christianity to be fundamentally rooted in a “slave morality” and he criticises the masses, for this suicide of reason, this worm-like reason. The slave morality resents the virtues of the powerful. However, Nietzsche perceives evil as something powerful and dangerous, it is felt to contain a certain awesome quality, a subtlety and strength that block any incipient contempt.
According to the slave morality then, “evil” inspires fear; but according to the master morality, it is “good” that wants to inspire fear. The sacrifice of all freedom, pride and self confidence in the spirit leads to enslavement. The master morality does not intend to oppress others, but rather create new values and ways of life.
A slave morality sees virtue from refraining to exercise one’s power and sees evil in doing so. He argues that Christianity is derived from subservience, obedience and being a member of a flock. It is a way of hating life and wanting to escape life into a heavenly and eternal afterlife.
However, the less our reality is dumbed down, sweetened up and veiled over, the closer to the “truth” we are. For as long as there have been people, there have been a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command. Considering that humanity has been a breeding ground for the cultivation of obedience, the average person has a need to obey, a “thou shalt”.
A herd instinct of obedience, taken to extremes, will signify that in the end, there will be nobody with independence or the ability to command. A high, independent spiritedness, a will to stand alone, even an excellent faculty of reason, will be perceived as a threat. Everything that raises the individual over the herd and frightens the neighbour will henceforth be called evil.
Thus, Nietzsche sees Christianity as something inferior to man, something to grow out of, away from and above. It is the deterioration of the human race. To twist every instinct of the highest type of man into uncertainty, self-destruction and invert the whole love of the earth into hatred against the earthly.
The most disastrous form of arrogance, who have given way to a herd animal, a mediocre breed. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche explores why we need values at all, or more in line with his terminology, what is the value of values? And what is the right perspective on values?
Ultimately, what gives life its meaning? Nietzsche explores why it is that people believe that their life has some sort of purpose and are not nihilists. He believes that people cling to true world theories.
Since we don’t like this world, we create a more ideal one – from Plato’s world of forms, to religions such as Christianity and the eternal heaven or Hinduism and the illusion of the individual self. To Nietzsche, these true world theories are human invented realities. People use them to satisfy the unfortunate reality.
This ties back with his views on perspectivism. He also explores how values arise psychologically and discusses why values such as pity, fairness, and willingness to help each other have been cultivated in society. At the base of our most habitualised normative evaluations, what is considered “good” and “evil” in every sphere of human activity, if we scratch the surface, a mixture of appalling character traits emerge, ranging from weakness and fear to wishful thinking and self-betrayal, and all these find their symptomatic expression in the modern condition.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, after ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra had been in the mountains in solitude for an entire decade he states: And thus began his down-going. Nietzsche presents three stages in life for self-overcoming: the camel, the lion, and the child. To Nietzsche, all of us are born camels, and most of us are going to die camels.
Most people who interact with the world bear the burdens of others. A camel carries heavy stuff and it doesn’t complain, it keeps going on ahead. What sorts of burdens are tied to our backs?
Nietzsche would say everything you’ve ever been told to do by somebody else, you’ve been getting weight after weight tied to your back, with people telling you all the stuff that you should do. To be free, we must get rid of these weights, to act as we truly are and say no to tradition. Once you have unburdened yourself, you undergo a new transformation, you become the lion.
For Nietzsche, the main struggle here is the existing lord, a dragon called “thou shalt”, which is the great barrier to true freedom. It sparkles with golden scales and on each scale is written a “thou shalt”, representing thousands of years of tradition. To conquer the dragon, one must build self-mastery and muster the courage to mutter the sacred No, asserting one’s independence outside external influences.
The final stage is the child. Nietzsche says quote: He believed that the truly free spirit will resemble a child at play, who discover the world for the first time, who is curious and filled with wonder. The child is not weighed down by rules and values, the child discovers for themselves the meaning in things.
Having uttered the “sacred No” to reject everything that came before, the child shouts the “sacred Yes” that affirms life. Apart from these stages. There are three major teachings Zarathustra has to offer: the will to power, the conception of the Eternal Recurrence and the advocacy of the overman.
Nietzsche entertains the idea that the will to power is an integral part of reality, if we look at organic life, we find that we live in a dynamic and chaotic process of creation and decay, of overpowering and becoming overpowered. This Will to Power is ultimately decisive for life to develop itself and to survive, or as Nietzsche puts it: "for its potential to become what it is. " The will to power is the true way, not the Schopenhauer approach of the will to survival or the will to knowledge.
We need knowledge for a purpose, to live it, not to have it, but to experience it. The will to power is ingrained in our deepest self, where the smallest of actions have a will to do something. It is always present – it might be potentially discoverable or paralysed, but there is always a will to power – which we should strive for.
As Nietzsche puts it: “If we succeed in explaining our entire life of drives to one basic form of will, it would be this will to power and nothing else. ” However, the most important concept of the will to power, and the one Nietzsche was most likely to emphasise, is that the will to power is becoming who you truly are. It is pure self-expression and self-overcoming, without being enslaved by things.
In essence, it is the main drive force in humans. Nietzsche proposed finding a new set of values in this life, loving life and not just accepting the good, but also accepting that there is evil, suffering, pain, and annihilation. And that the best afterlife we can experience is none other than another repetition of the life we just experienced.
This is what is known as the Eternal Recurrence, the ideal of the most high-spirited and world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was life after life. Zarathustra, who is standing in front of a crowd, begins speaking. The crowd look at him, and then they begin laughing.
They think he is some sort of street performer. Nietzsche created the concept of the ubermensch or overman, whose antithesis is the last man, a mediocre animal without dignity and comfortably surrounded by the herd, who despises everything the overman has to say. The man who is master of himself.
But to master oneself is the hardest of all tasks, that which requires the greatest increase in power, and if happiness is the feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome, the overman will be the happiest man and, as such, the meaning and justification of existence. It is the pinnacle of self-overcoming, to rise above the human norm and above all difficulties, embracing whatever life throws at you. He says quote: Nietzsche's extravagant style and eccentricity makes his work seem like a sort of mental tonic designed to encourage his readers to continue to confront their doubts about the well roundedness of many of our most fundamental ideals about ourselves and our world.
We conceive of ourselves as subjects trying to live a decent life, guided in our doings by aims that fit the normal expectations of our social and cultural environment; we believe certain things to be true beyond any doubt, and we hold others and ourselves to many moral obligations. For Nietzsche, to give life a meaning, it isn’t something to be discovered, but rather to be created. The overman is the truth that shall be.
The overman, the will to power, self-overcoming, to live dangerously, amor fati, the eternal recurrence, these are all signs by which Nietzsche found meaning in life.
