FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

By Sherina Noor Amna Shahzad

BACKGROUND Friedrich Nietzsche was born on 15th October 1844 in a small village of Germany

He was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, philologist, Latin, and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history

He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of 24.

Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties.

 He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother (until her death in 1897), and then with his sister Elisabeth Nietzsche, and died in 1900.

IMPORTANT WORKS OF NIETZCHE

The Birth of Tragedy: He identified certain factors within the human personality which make it impossible for man to adequately enjoy himself in modern society. These energies are naturally self destructive and usually unconscious impulses the person has little control over. These spontaneous bursts of emotion is termed as Dionysiac, after the Greek God Dionysus

The Doctrine of the Will to Power The will to power explains the fundamental, changing aspect of reality. According to Nietzsche, everything is in flux, and there is no such thing as fixed being. Matter is always moving and changing, as are ideas, knowledge, truth, and everything else  The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans – achievement, ambition, and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life. These are all manifestations of the will to power

The Perspectivist Conception of Truth

 Truth, according to Nietzsche, is a matter of perspective, not fundamental reality. This understanding of truth and morality has come to be known as perspectivism.

THE GAY SCIENCE

The Gay Science is where he introduces a lot of the ideas that he lays out in other books, like the death of god, and even Zarathustra himself.

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man. 

‘GOD IS DEAD’

A world without moral certainty

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

We abandoned God . This meant that the concept of God was "dead", and therefore, any ethics and indeed sense of direction in general founded on this metaphysical claim of the existence of God and religion was "dead" as well.God never existed. God is a concept that human beings have made up.‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

‘GOD IS DEAD’

This is inevitable in the timeline of civilization.

strengthening life-instinct and growth toward the overman 

Everyone’s concept of right and wrong emerged.

METAPHYSICAL REALMThe metaphysical (meaning above/beyond the physical world) is a concept that has survived in philosophy for centuries. It still continues to this day Any belief in a ‘God’ or the afterlife beyond our physical world is dealing with metaphysics• Any belief in the soul is dealing with metaphysics• Any belief in ghosts or spirits is also dealing with metaphysics• Any belief that suggests that morals are True in a correspondence sense is dealing with metaphysicsTherefore, dismissing God as dead, for Nietzsche, was a dismissal of the metaphysical and all that goes with it

NIETZSCHE AND NIHILISMNietzsche’s denial of

God and any metaphysical realm

brings us to something known as nihilism.

NIHILISMNihilism (from the Latin nihil = nothing) is a

philosophical position that argues that existence is without objective meaning,

purpose, or intrinsic value. Nihilists generally assert that objective morality does not exist,

and that no action is logically preferable to any other.

Existence has no higher meaningNo proof or argument of existence of a higher

ruler or creatorhumanity has no moral obligation to worship

them.

NO WAY THROUGH

NIHILISMNihilism is

wrong – Keep belief in

metaphysics (religious

faith)

Nihilism is correct – No

metaphysical reality

(Need to reassess the way that we view the

world)Christianity Nietzsche

NIETZSCHE Nietzsche asks us to examine a world without God. He believes that human beings are at the leading edge of evolution…

‘Man is a rope, fastened between animal and übermensch (superman or overman) –

a rope over an abyss.’ Nietzsche insists on two things from humanity:1) The courage to face reality and2) A desire to provide a new direction in our lives now that there is no God to provide it.

NIETZSCHE’S ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY

Nietzsche despised Christianity. He believed that it symbolised everything that was wrong with the world. He thought of it as a vampire that sucked the life out of human beings. The Romans had virtually ruled the known world for 1500 years until Christianity was adopted as the state religion…

‘Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum – in a night it shattered the tremendous

achievement of the Romans’.Nietzsche is suggesting that, through the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, the values of Rome had changed from strong masters of the known world to morality befitting slavish obedience to a divine overlord (God).

NIETZSCHE’S ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY

Nietzsche considered that Christianity denied life, making human beings sick from within. Nietzsche saw that human desires and passions were the most important thing for the evolution of the human race. Christianity denies passion and desire, Nietzsche suggests that the individual was as:‘…a caricature man, like an abortion: he had become a ‘sinner’, he was caged up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of appalling notions…full of hate for the instincts of life, full of suspicion in regard to all that is still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’.

Nietzsche’s AlternativeIn a sense what Nietzsche is saying is that ALL WESTERN VALUES have arisen out of Christianity and that these values undermine the very essence of what it is that makes us human. For Nietzsche some humans are better than others and so should behave as such, he is advocating that the ‘few’ become like the übermensch or the masters - pursuing their desires and passions, becoming the pinnacle of evolution, and the ‘many’ slaves serve their worthy masters. This is known as master and slave morality.Nietzsche believed that the values that Christianity and democracy demand of us - passivity, selflessness, guilt, equality, justice, humbleness, compassion, forgiveness and charity – must be rejected and eliminated…On the other hand he demands that lust, anger and revenge should be regarded as virtues rather than vices – these mark out the strong ‘masters’ while the Christian values were for the weak ‘slaves’.

• In a world without God, one needs the courage to face one’s situation, set one’s own goals and say ‘Yes’ to life.• Humankind is to strive to go beyond itself – to become ‘Supermen’ and to allow that quest to give meaning to life.• Christianity (and, through its values, democracy) have promoted ‘slave morality’ to defend the weak; Nietzsche wants a ‘master morality’ to encourage the development of the ‘strong’.

Nietzsche’s Conclusions

NIETZSCHE'S INFLUENCEThe history of 20th-century philosophy, theology, and psychology are unintelligible without him. The theologians Paul Tillich and Lev Shestov acknowledged their debt as did the “God is dead” theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer; Martin Buber, Judaism's greatest 20th-century thinker, counted Nietzsche among the three most important influences in his life and translated the first part of Zarathustra into Polish.