Nietzsche Flashcards
He was the first philosopher to fully face up to Western man’s loss of faith in religion. If there is no God and no transcendental realm, then morals, values, truth, standards of every kind, are not given to man from outside himself - but are created by man to meet his own needs. We create our values.
At first he was deeply influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer and Wagner; but he rebelled against both, and went on to produce some notorious anti-Wagner polemics.
Some of his best known books are:
1/ The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche argues that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition.
He found that the art form transcended the pessimism and nihilism of a fundamentally meaningless world. The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering and affirming it, passionately and joyously affirmed the meaning of their own existence.
Greek tragedy declined when rationalism, embodied in the figure of Socrates, became dominant in Athens.
(In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of reason and rational thinking, while Dionysus is the god of the irrational and chaos, and appeals to the emotions and instincts.)
2/ Human All Too Human: Nietzsche’s first in the aphoristic style that would come to dominate his writings, discussing a variety of concepts in short paragraphs or sayings. Reflecting an admiration of Voltaire as a free thinker, but also a break in his friendship with composer Richard Wagner two years earlier, Nietzsche dedicated the original 1878 edition of Human, All Too Human “to the memory of Voltaire on the celebration of the anniversary of his death, May 30, 1778.”
3/ The Gay Science: Nietzsche experiments with the notion of power but does not advance any systematic theory. The book contains Nietzsche’s first consideration of the idea of the eternal recurrence - a concept that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
4/ Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality.
5/ The Genealogy of Morals: examines humankind’s transformation from barbarous creatures not civilised beings who can feel remorse, regret, pity and compassion, but in the process, deny instinct and freedom. Nietzsche claims that weak people had to invent God so they could believe their suffering meant something.
6/ Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Much of the work deals with ideas such as the “eternal recurrence of the same”, the parable on the “death of God”, and the “prophecy” of the Übermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science.
His attack on Christianity is not neutral and disinterested. It is violent, dramatic and melodramatic in many ways. It’s an attack on Christianity rather than on Christ.
He is personally and intimately involved in denying the existence of divine justice, of divine mercy of religious transcendence altogether.
He radically questioned the foundations of Western thought. We are slaves to convention.
4 main traditions within Western civilisation which Nietzsche attacked: the tradition of Christian morality, the tradition of secular morality, the ordinary-day every morality of the unintellectual mass of mankind (‘herd values’) and some traditions deriving from Ancient Greece (Socrates).
All the positive values of Christianity are criticised and rejected. He is not a democratic philosopher, he is a philosopher of the great and noble. Nietzsche despises the supporting of the weak person from outside himself.
He was deeply knowledgeable about Ancient Greece and he became implacably hostile towards Socrates. Nietzsche never forgave Plato for setting up a hero whose main qualities are those of talking everybody else into the ground. When Euripides, Aristophanes and Socrates appear, a full grasp of the tragic being of mankind is replaced by reason, replaced by what he regards as ‘the trivialising practice of rationalising everything’.
Nietzsche thought that if human values are ‘made by us’ and are not derived from God or any authority outside ourselves, then the question of how we get them becomes of fundamental importance.
The view that things somehow are their origins is a mistake: the genetic fallacy.
Nietzsche’s criticism of German idealism hinges on the view that fails to take account of the unconscious drives which determine our actions. It takes over from Christianity: a wholly negative attitude towards those unconscious drives in us and builds a civilisation on their suppression. This is very close to the Freud of Civilisation and its Discontents.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct - Freud
We’ve lost belief in all these gods and in religion generally, and that means we’ve lost belief in the very foundations of our value system. We’ve failed to live up to this fact. We try to relate our lives to a value system whose foundations we have ceased to believe in - it makes our lives and us inauthentic.
If anything, Nietzsche welcomed conflict. He saw mankind as a rabble led by an elite, and he thought the elite were entirely right to be selfish, to sweep aside the weak and simply seize for themselves whatever they wanted. His recommendations make living together in some kind of harmony extremely difficult, especially if you add to this view that laws are there to make things easy for the weak.
The whole evolutionary process has consisted of the strong eliminating the weak. Yet with the ancient Greeks and Jews, along came so-called moralists who taught that these processes were immoral, in fact wicked. The strong should humble themselves and shelter the weak and meek. If we had always done this, we would never have emerged from the pre-human state.
Whereas Schopenhauer regarded the Will as the source of all evil in the world, and man’s unhappiness, Nietzsche regarded is as the origin and source of man’s strength.
If there is nothing outside this world - no God, and no transcendent realm of any kind - then life cannot have any purpose outside or beyond itself. Whatever meaning or justification it has must come from within itself: it must exist purely for its own sake. All this makes it rather like a gigantic work of art.
The Superman or Ubermensch has been a much misunderstood concept; it’s misuse and abuse but he Nazis is only one example. Nietzsche was trying to get at the notion of an unrepressed man, who is being in an uninhibited, untrammelled, free-spirited way. He is not living his life according to false values.
The greatness of the early Greeks, of the pre-Socratics, lay in their tragedy. Their tragedy was a way of facing the worst aspects of human life, its transitoriness (short-lived), its impermanence, its corruptness, its dependence upon forces greater than ourselves; and their highest achievement was their gift of making these things a major tale, a story, a wonderful tragedy.
Shakespeare occasionally asked: is the whole world really to be taken seriously, or is it not a great game, a great play, some kind of drama played out by we do not know whom, as a spectacle for who we do not know whom?
Are we simply here as part of a huge cosmic drama?
A great deal of Nietzsche’s thought goes into rehearsing and trying to make sense of the aesthetic justification of man.
Recommendations from Nietzsche:
- Take seriously the idea that there is nothing beyond this life
- He is interesting for not presenting a ‘nice and neat’ system and acknowledging contradictions in his own thought.
- He asks, “why should the world be intelligible to us?”
- How much are my beliefs symptoms of a weakness or sickness?
On the Genealogy of Morals
What price have human animals paid to become civilised animals?
A guilty conscience and perpetual self-loathing is the price we pay.
The book is full of insight into our conscious and unconscious drives.
Nietzsche’s ideas were picked up most significantly by Freud.
The first book contrasts noble morality and slave morality.
Noble morality has the wrong connotation It is perhaps not a morality at all but a value system, which has more to do with a mentality than a distinct social class.
Slave morality comes out of Judeo-Christianity. It defines as good what the master morality defines as evil.
Nietzsche not only thinks that master morality is historically prior but a more fundamental expression of what life, of what vitality is. Therefore, slave morality is expressing a hatred of life.
