|
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a highly influential German philosopher.
His Life
Nietzsche was born in the small town Röcken bei Lützen not too far from Leipzig, Prussia (now a part of Germany). He was born on the 49th birthday of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of
Prussia and was thus named after him. His father was a Lutheran pastor and died when Nietzsche was only four years old,
leaving him to be raised by his mother and three sisters. He was very pious as a young child. A brilliant student, he became
professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the age of only 24, but
retired in 1879 due to poor health. From 1880 until
his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering existence as a "stateless" person, writing most of his major
works during this period. His fame and influence came later, despite the interference of his sister Elizabeth, who published
arbitrary, uncontextual selections of his works.
Nietzsche endured periods of illness during his adult life. After the completion of Ecce Homo his health rapidly
declined until he collapsed: in 1889 he is said to have tearfully embraced a horse in
Italy because it had been beaten by its owner. From that moment on he never recovered. He
was diagnosed with syphilis. Nietzsche spent the last ten years of his life
insane, in the care of his sister Elizabeth, and unaware of the immense success of his
works. The cause of Nietzsche's condition has to be regarded as undetermined. Doctors later in his life said they were not so
sure about the initial diagnosis of syphilis because he lacked the typical symptoms. While the story of syphilis indeed became
generally accepted in the twentieth century, recent research in the Journal of
Medical Biography shows that syphilis is not consonant with Nietzsche's symptoms, and that the contention that he had the
disease originated in anti-Nietzschean tracts.
His Works and Ideas
Nietzsche is famous for his rejection of what he calls "slave morality" (which he felt
reflected the inverse of the "will to power" and a perversion of useful altruism);
his attacks on Christianity (a character in one of his works declared that
"God is dead"); his origination of the Übermensch concept (translated as "Overman" or "Superman"); his embrace of a sort of a-rationalism; and another idea he
called "the Will to Power" (Wille zur Macht). Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and his concept of "the Will to live". H.L. Mencken's book on Nietzsche described his work as an early effort to reconcile the philosophical
implications of Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" evolutionary
theory with contemporary moral and ethical systems. In many respects his thinking anticipated the "heredity" side of the ongoing
debate in psychology about which has more influence on human behavior: learning or heredity. Nietzsche's thoughts also
anticipated the "biological world view" and genetic interpretation of social behavior in the modern discipline of sociobiology (c.f. one can find updated "Nietzsche" in A New Morality From
Science: Beyondism by Dr. Raymond Cattell, which draws from concepts elucidated in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by
Harvard professor Dr. Edward Osborne Wilson as well as
other emergent disciplines such as "medical anthropology.") Nietzsche's concept of breeding upwards towards the "higher man" is
indirectly addressed in biological interpretations of human history, such as Dr. Elmer Pendell's Why Civilizations
Self-Destruct or Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the
West.
The "Will to Power"
One of Nietzsche's central concepts is "the Will to Power" (Wille zur Macht), an abstract process of expansion and
imposition. He hypothesizes that it could be taken as the fundamental causal power in the world, something to which all other
causal powers can be reduced. That is, Nietzsche in part hoped Will to Power could be a "theory of everything," providing the ultimate foundations for explanations of everything from
whole societies, to individual organisms, to lumps of matter. In contrast to the "theories of everything" attempted in physics, Nietzsche's was teleological
in nature. Nietzsche perhaps developed the Will to Power concept furthest with regards to living organisms, and it is there where
the concept is perhaps easiest to understand. There, the Will to Power is taken as an animal's most fundamental instinct or
drive. Will to Power is something like the desire to exert one's will, although it may well be unconscious. Arthur C. Danto says
that "aggression" is at least sometimes an approximate synonym. In any case, since the Will to Power is fundamental, any other
drives are to be reduced to it; the "will to survive" (i.e. the survival instinct) that Biologists (at least in Nietzsche's day)
thought to be fundamental, for example, was really to be explained as a manifestation of the Will to Power. Not just instincts
but also higher level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the Will to Power. This includes both such apparently
harmful acts as physical violence, lying, and domination, on one hand, and such
apparently non-harmful acts as gift-giving, love, and praise on the other. In Beyond
Good and Evil, he claims that philosophers' "will to truth" (i.e., their apparent desire to dispassionately seek objective
truth) is actually nothing more than a manifestation of their Will to Power; when it is not, the will to truth is nothing more
than nihilism. As indicated above, though, the Will to Power is to explain more than just an individual animal. The Will to Power
is also to be the explanation for, e.g., why matter behaves as it does, why plants grow, and why social classes behave as they
do.
The Will to Power and psychology
The Will to Power is in part a psychological theory. Nonetheless, it has been more or less ignored by psychology as a
discipline.
Similar ideas in others' thought
With respect to the Will to Power, Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and his concept of "the Will to live" (and explicitly denied their identity.) Other
ideas similar to Nietzsche's are Taoism, which holds that to follow one's own natural
wills will bring about a happier existence, and Hegel's theory of history.
Criticism of the idea
Although the idea may seem harsh to some, others see Nietzsche's "will to power" -- or, as he famously put it, the ability to
"say yes! to life" -- as life-affirming. Creatures affirm instinct in exerting power and dominance. The suffering born of
conflict between competing wills and the efforts to overcome one's environment is not evil, but a part of existence to be
embraced in that it signifies the healthy expression of the natural order. Enduring satisfaction and pleasure result from living
by instinct and successfully exerting the will to power. (Note: part of this follows from Nietzsche's somewhat quirky definition
of "life".)
Ethics
Nietzsche's work addresses ethics from several perspectives; in today's terms, we
might say his remarks pertain to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics. As far as meta-ethics is
concerned, Nietzsche can perhaps most usefully be classified as a moral
skeptic; that is, he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical
statements and "moral facts" is illusory. (This is part of a more general claim that all facts are false, roughly
because none of them more than appear to correspond to reality.) Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) are mere
"interpretations". Sometimes, Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what is moral or immoral. Moreover, his idea
of noble men imposing their own values on the world suggests a non-skeptical meta-ethical view, namely ethical subjectivism. Note, however, that Nietzsche's moral
opinions may be explained without attributing to him the claim that they are true. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't
disregard a statement merely because it is false. On the contrary, he often claims that falsehood is essential for "life". In the
juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality"
and "slave morality". Although he recognizes that not everyone holds either scheme in a pure fashion, he presents them in
contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality:
- "good" and "bad" vs. "good" and "evil"
- "aristocratic" vs. part of the "herd"
- determines own values vs. determines values on an instrumental, utilitarian basis
- not like Christianity vs. like Christianity
Nietzsche's assessment of both the antiquity and resultant impediments presented by the ethical and moralistic teachings of
the world's monotheistic religions eventually led him to his own dualistic epiphany, resulting in his work Also sprach Zarathustra.
Religion
According to Dr. Norman Ravitch, professor of history at U.C.
Riverside, "What Spengler, Toynbee, and Nietzsche can teach us is how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, despite superficial
differences, were all forged and/or altered by a religious revolution in ancient Iran associated with the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra. The central notions of dualism between Good and Evil, Salvation
through an Expected Messiah, and the Final Battle between St Michael and
Satan animate these world religions and their devotees. Pragmatism, reason, and common sense have little place in
these primitive Semitic world views. All conflict is interpreted as part of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil and there is
no room for compromise or tolerance." ... In his important work "The Anti-Christ[ian]" Nietzsche frontally attacked German
scholarly Christianity for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. He went beyond agnostic and
atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment who felt that Christianity may simply be an untrue religion to claiming it may have been
deliberately propagated as an inherently bad and subversive religion (or in late 20th century parlance: a "psychological warfare
weapon" or "ideological computer virus") within the Roman Empire by the Apostle Paul as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple during the Jewish
War. However, in the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche has a remarkably high view of Jesus, claiming the scholars of the day fail to pay any
attention to the man, Jesus, and only look to their construction, Christ. According to the American writer H.L. Mencken,
Nietzsche felt that the religion of the ancient Greeks of the heroic and classical era was superior to Christianity because it
portrayed strong, heroic, smart, and muscular men as role models and did not try to demonize healthy natural desires, such as
creativity and writing poetry.
Nietzsche's works have also been valued as a religious "deprogramming tool", such as in the large tome Which Way Western
Man? by former American Christian minister and co-founder of the ACLU William Gayley
Simpson in which he recounts in great theological detail how Nietzsche's works allowed him to see the light of Darwin and
overcome the dysfunctional "slave morality" that had been programmed into him by society and co-religionists.
Politics
Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth Nietzsche's heavily edited Nietzsche's work in order to promote him as a proto-Nazi thinker
(she was herself an ardent German nationalist and pro-Nazi); this bastardization was largely to blame for Nietzsche being
associated in the 1930s with the Nazis, who primarily took Elizabeth's deliberately
misconstrued versions of his works as their source.
It is worth noting that Nietzsche's thought largely stands opposed to Nazism. In
particular, Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism and nationalism, took a dim view of German
culture as it was in his time, and derided both the state and populism. While some of his writings on "the Jewish question"
were critical of the Jewish population in Europe, he also praised the strength of the
Jewish people, and this criticism was equally, if not more strongly, applied to the English, the Germans, and the rest of Europe.
He also valorised strong leadership, and it was this last tendency that the
Nazis took up.
Themes and trends in Nietzsche's work
Nietzsche is important as a precursor of 20th century-existentialism
and an inspiration for post-structuralism and an influence on
postmodernism. However, dry academic summaries of his thought cannot
capture the liveliness of his writing, and his extraordinary sense of humor, as in the famous exchange: "God is dead" -
Nietzsche; "Nietzsche is dead" - God, and the riposte, "Some are born posthumously!" - Nietzsche. In many respects his writings
today appear "romantic" relative to modern sociobiological and medical anthropological theory in the same sense that the Wright Brothers' flying machines appear quaint relative to modern high
performance jets.
Nietzsche's works helped to reinforce not only agnostic trends that followed Enlightenment thinkers, and the biological
worldview gaining currency from the evolutionary theory of Charles
Darwin (which also later found expression in the "medical" and "instinctive" interpretations of human behavior by Sigmund Freud), but also the "romantic nationalist" political movements in the
late 19th century when various peoples of Europe began to celebrate archeological finds and literature related to pagan
ancestors, such as the uncovered Viking burial mounds in Scandinavia, Wagnerian interpretations of Norse mythology stemming from the Eddas of Iceland, Italian nationalist
celebrations of the glories of a unified, pre-Christian Roman peninsula, French examination of Celtic Gaul of the pre-Roman era, and Irish nationalist interest in revitalizing
Gaelic.
Apart from "noble savage" and "religious deprogramming" themes, in his brazen work "The Anti-Christ" Nietzsche wrestled with a
major tragic issue that remains very much with us today. The politics of urbanized society may tend to reverse the evolutionary
processes that bred for various strengths and nobility in primitive man. Ugly, physically weak, and inadequate men who would
never make it in a frontier environment nevertheless through low cunning and mafia-like behavior might through financial
manipulation acquire control of society. In "The Anti-Christ" Nietzsche said that while it was necessary for Jews at points in
their history to affect "slave morality" as an oppressed minority as a means to get their oppressors off their backs by deceiving
them while hiding their own strengths, the deception practiced by Saul of Tarsus in spreading Christianity went too far in its
social destructiveness. Hence a paradox: a person who practices "slave morality" shows true inferiority if he really believes in
it, but one can show strength and superiority if one uses it as sheep's clothing to disguise the stalking wolf. (As Sun Tzu put
it: "All war is based on deception.")
Some people have suggested that Dostoevsky may have specifically created the plot of his Crime and Punishment as a
Christian rebuttal to Nietzsche. This cannot be correct, however, as Dostoevsky finished Crime and Punishment well
before Nietzsche published any of his works).
Quotes
- "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the abyss,
the abyss also gazes into you ."
- "That which does not kill you makes you stronger."
- "A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play."
See also the Friedrich Nietzsche Wikiquote page
List of Works
- Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872 (The
Birth of Tragedy)
- Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1876 (Untimely Meditations)
- Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878 (Human, All Too Human)
- Morgenröte, 1881 (Daybreak, or The Dawn)
- Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882 (The Gay Science)
- Also sprach Zarathustra, 1885 (Thus
Spake Zarathustra)
- Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886
(Beyond Good and Evil)
- Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 (On the Genealogy of Morals)
- Der Fall Wagner, 1888 (The Case of Wagner)
- Götzen-Dämmerung, 1889 (The Twilight of the Idols)
- Der Antichrist, 1895 (The Antichrist)
- Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1895 (Nietzsche vs. Wagner)
- Der Wille zur Macht, 1901 (The Will to Power, a highly selective collection of notes from various notebooks, not
intended for publication by Nietzsche himself, but released by his sister)
- Ecce Homo, 1908 (Behold the Man, an attempt at autobiography; the title refers to Pontius Pilate's statement upon
meeting Jesus of Nazareth)
External links
|