Fredrick Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone"  ― F.W.N.
"Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule"  ― F.W.N.
“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”  ― F.W.N.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster” ― F.W.N.
"Morality is cowardice”  ― F.W.N.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, cultural critic and classical philologist (the study of language in written historical sources). He wrote critical texts on  religion, Christian morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science.

Background
Born in the village of Rocken Nietzsche was raised in a religious family. His father and grandfather were village Lutheran ministers and his mother was the daughter of a pastor. At age 5 Nietzsche’s father went insane and died of a brain ailment. Regarded as a gifted pupil at the age of 14, Nietzsche won a free place to one of the best schools in the state. At age 21 he declared his loss of faith in the Christian religion and broke off his studies. After reading Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation' Nietzsche declared his conversion to Schopenhauer's thought.

Nietzsche’s key works include: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (1887), The Will to Power (1901).

Historical Context

To understand Nietzsche's work it is important to review the political times during Nietzsche’s coming of age - almost a bildungsroman story for Nietzsche in itself. During the 'Revolutions of 1848' (Nietzsche is just 4 years old) Europe was racked by the liberal movement to remove monarchical structures and to create independent nation-states. The rising tide of the emerging working class collapsed the aspirations of the German bourgeoisie, the respect of clerical authority and organized religion. Displaced and rootless, disillusioned young revolutionaries and intellectuals rose out of the wake’s ‘human flotsam’ with a new vision, albeit pessimistic, of a secular, post-religious identity - the "new men".  The new philosophy of pessimism found its most prominent representative in Germany in the figure of Alfred Schopenhauer. 

Having been schooled in the classics and German romanticism Nietzsche languished in the backwaters of political stagnation after 1848. Over time he turned more to the right drawn by the 'siren call' of cultural elitism (Nietzsche boldly stating ‘knowledge and study is privilege of the few’); the mystical elements of German Lebensphilosophie ('philosophy of life') and the pseudo-science of eugenics.  Nietzsche’s profound  disappointement due to the unification of Germany (outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870) is found in the expressions in his later writings. The rise of the Paris Commune (1870-1871) shocked Nietzsche who warned that universal education could lead to communism. In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' he writes, "That everyone is allowed to learn to read at length spoils not only writing but also thinking".

Superman & The Will to Power

In the opening of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ Zarathustra descends from the mountain. Having spend ten years in a cave he is brimming with wisdom and love and wants to teach humanity about the Ubermech or ‘overman’. Where man must transcend himself towards a ‘Superman’ - to a higher human type of free-spirit and heart (the ‘superman’ of Nietzsche has nothing to do with the ‘blond beast’ of Germanic myth). 

The Superman represents Nietzsche’s archetype for a meaningful life where the ‘Ubermensch’ is the brave warrior-hero who transcends society in pursuit of freedom and what is good – all in the name of living a creative life and a ‘will to power’.  Nietzsche is completely hostile to the idea of equality as he views it as crushing freedom and the will to power.

Nietzsche’s world is not a world of, in the words of Mathew Arnold, ‘sweetness & light’. There is a dark side to ‘the will to power’.  It is a world of light & dark; of opposing polarities and opposing tendencies. The Superman’s ‘Will to Power’ mirrors the destructive side of the Greek primordial god Eros: the force behind rape and pillage; behind victory and conquest.

The Ubermech or ‘Superman’ is a loaded term. Philosophy professor Daniel N. Robinson (Georgetown University) comments: “In ‘Zarathustra’ Nietzsche seems to be indicating that there’s some sort of super race out there just waiting take over.  You could almost see Nietzsche as a prelude to Hitler and the Nazis.  The closest he gets to actually calling someone the Ubermensch is Goethe".

Order & Chaos

In ‘Human, All Too Human’ Nietzsche finds insight in a world of opposing polarities where the source of one’s strength is to keep contradictory forces in tension.  To mediate order and chaos Nietzsche uses the metaphorical ‘dance’ between Apollo, symbol of social order and limit, and Dionysus, symbol of freedom, excess and intoxication (some say Nietzsche failed to take his own advice).

The Yin-Yang image is an apt symbol for the ‘Apollonian-Dionysian’ dance. Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson finds insight between the two: "The Taoist believe that the symbol represents 'being'. Now, being is not the same thing as objective reality, Being is what you experience as a conscious creature. That's being. For the Taoist being is made up of these two elements - order and chaos...things you understand and things that work the way that you expect them to, and things you do not understand and that can pull the rug out from under you at any moment...These are symbolic representations of the most unchanging elements of being - the most real...in fact they're hyper real, because one of the things that defines real is that it's permanent...it's part of the existential landscape of human being...The reason that the white paisley has a little black dot in it and [vice versa] is that the Taoist recognized that chaos can turn to order at any moment, so a new order can rise out of a chaotic structure. What's the optimal position? The line between the two. If it's too orderly then it's totalitarian, and if it's too chaotic then it's disgust and fear and emotional pain and depression.”

Nihilism & The (False) God is Dead

Essential to Nietzsche writings is his cry ‘crisis of nihilism’ - the idea that all things lack meaning, including life itself; that knowledge and objective truth is impossible.  The heroic ‘superman’ puts chaos into play with the destruction of higher values (ie, the current order of religious faith and dogma) and opposition to the affirmation of life.

In ‘The Gay Science’ Nietzsche writes: "After Buddha was dead his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."

For Nietzsche good and evil are childish notions and what really matters is will and choice. That self-assertion is the highest value and power decides important questions rather than reason.  Nietzsche’s critique against Buddhism and the non-egoistic ascetic is his famous saying “God is Dead”, which was his way of saying that the idea of God is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology (an account of a given thing's purpose). 

The thinking, spiritual woman and man, sidestepping Nietzsche’s ‘de-constructional’ claim that rational explanations don’t work, interpret Nietzsche’s God as an ‘Old Testament God’ − an imperfect, false god with human qualities: mean, nasty, hateful, vengeful. Better if Nietzsche said, “The False God is Dead”.  Amen.

Influenced by Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ American abstract painter Mark Rothko found inspiration from classical Athenian tragedies to transcend pessimistic and nihilistic point-of-views (POVs) that the world is fundamentally meaningless. The tragedies taught the Greek spectators that they are infinitely more than petty individuals, finding self-affirmation not in another life, but in the terror and ecstasy of the opposition of the rational against the emotional in the backdrop of the abstract against the primal. Proclaiming that "the exhilarated tragic experience is for me the only source of art", Rothko strove to create an art that could free modern man’s spiritual and creative energies. Where the dread of the abyss of human suffering is transcended by the joyous affirmation of an enlightened meaning of one's existence.

Religious Herd

The religious 'common herd' was despised by Nietzsche as well as his contemporaries such as the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the French novelist Gustave Flaubert.

Saddened by his inability to move the herd of people in the marketplace, Zarathustra, resolves not to try to convert the multitudes, but to speak to those individuals who are interested in separating themselves from the herd. Leaving the herd has never been a rational decision in the history of mankind; it provides people with protection, comfort and community - people want to belong and be accepted. The downside? Compliancy: the herd lives without questioning the values and purposes of the herd.  In the BBC documentary 'The Long Search' Ronald Eyre summaries the downside of the herd: "Every idea, every statement, every institution has a tendency to harden up and go dead." 

Nietzsche views the 'ascendent' Christianity as weak. His character, Zarathustra, advocates a struggle where the Ubermensch challenges the otherworldly Christian values.  Nietzsche views Christianity as a ‘religion of servitude and guilt’ designed to keep people in their place, to set a limit on their progress, to set a limit on the expression of their feeling.  He had a strong contempt for Christ because of the mercy He showed to the weak and outcasts: “What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.”  Some academics have argued that the infamous Nazi cruelty can be traced to Nietzsche’s criticism of Christ’s teaching of loving the downtrodden.

Nietzsche's most trenchant critiques of traditional morality is that most of what passes for morality, isn't morality - its cowardice.  The Christian idea of “turning the other cheek and let someone hurt you” was never the true Christian idea where the meek dutifully reply, “Thank you very much.” No!  Nietzsche was against that. There are stories of nuns, ministers and others, even today, who died of some horrible thing; they ate themselves alive with it.  Nietzsche must have recognized genuine weakness among the ‘pious’: a lack of righteous anger; being ‘virtuous’ when they allowed others, because of their faith, to hurt them and allowed themselves to become a doormat to the world.

Religious academics point out that Nietzsche wrongly viewed the Christian faith, like many atheists, as an epistemology versus a response to previously acquired knowledge: “But when faith is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road”. Nietzsche goes on to say, “Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth”.

The Climb

The Self can be viewed as a ‘climber’ in life.  We learn and struggle to overcome life’s challenging (and sometimes embarrassing) stages; akin to climbing up a ladder.

The struggle of a ‘climb’ can be seen in Nietzsche’s view of life’s suffering: “self-loathing, the torture of mistrust, and the misery of himself to be overcome that is necessary for self-knowledge and, finally, a life of dignity” (Novus Tenet 1).

Climbing metaphors can be seen the medieval fantasy television drama series ‘Game of Thrones’: Physical, Social and Spiritual. A Christ allegory is seen in Jon Snow, the outcast protagonist, who is assassinated by his officers – a betrayal like Judas.  Snow dies, is resurrected (by the Red Priestess Melisandre) and undergoes a great sacrifice to be a savior or a redeemer. Snow’s ‘spiritual climb’ – death by heroic sacrifice followed by a triumphant return – transcends his physical and social assents.

On the Road to Post-Modernism

Nietzsche's work has occupied a prominent place in French universities, and he is regarded by many “post-modernist” thinkers as the most influential philosopher of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Post-Modern movement is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction, post-structuralism, and institutional critique. In the 1970s a group of poststructuralists in France developed a radical critique of modern philosophy with roots in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and became known as postmodern theorists, notably including Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or a rejection of ‘grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, often criticizing Enlightenment rationality and focusing on the role of ideology in maintaining political or economic power. The idea of a ‘lack of meaning’ or nihilism would later become a fundamental component of the existentialist and surrealist movements that followed.

Nietzsche favored perspectivism which held that truth is not objective but is the consequence of various factors effecting individual perspective. When Nietzsche poses questions such as, “What about these linguistic conventions themselves?” or “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?”, he is championing the notion of perspectivism, the philosophical belief that interpretations and conceptions of truth depend on the perspective of the one who is observing; that there is no absolute truth outside our own perspective. The early beginning of postmodernism begins with the concept of perspectivism.

In “The Closing of the American Mind” author Allan Bloom puts forth his complaint in the opening, “the contemporary university student talks as if there is no such thing as truth and falsity; right & wrong. Has no sense of personal identity and has no worldview to on which ground any of those things.”  Bloom traces the source of the problem to the continental thinkers and value relativism.

The late philosophy professor Dr. Arthur Holmes takes caution with Bloom’s ‘continental’ claim: “That's not the whole story. The influence is much from the positivist tradition with its assertion that the pragmatist tradition of only having an instrumental view of truth and meaning where values are just expressions of emotion.” 

The maxim “When the door closes, a window opens” suggests, possibly, a closing of some ‘analytic mind’ (hopefully not a rational one) and an opening of a ‘creative mind’.  The character of Nietzsche’s philosophy or outlook is naturalism – a biological vitalism – that life is a creative force. Nietzsche’s ‘vitalism’ plays a strong role in whatever he says about human knowledge, human thought and epistemology – an ethos that later feeds into post-modernism.  What is important is to maintain integral thinking - to embrace and extend the two kinds of human thought: analytic (Classical) and the creative (Romantic) (not right/left brain biology).

In Closing

 
In 1869, at the age of 24 Nietzsche was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philosophy at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have held this position) but resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889 he became mentally ill with what was then characterized as paresis attributed to syphilis, a diagnosis that has since come into question.  It was not long before he died that he caused a crowd to assemble as a result of collapsing on a public street in Italy.  Before Nietzsche collapsed, he had run over and put his arms around a horse.  He was hugging and caressing and kissing the horse that had been mistreated by a coachman.  He must have found in the suffering of that innocent animal just the sort of authentic experience that human nature sets out to deny itself and in denying itself that it inflicts it on others and the innocent.

He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, then under the care of his sister. Nietzsche died at 56. Nietzsche’s death in 1900 is significant to many as the departure from modernism and most likely the reason for many scholars claiming that he was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th-Century.