Philosophy Now - The Thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche Flashcards
Nietzsche was most famously known as the ‘Philosopher of the Death of God’.
He talks about a certain collapse of values that comes with a belief in Christian or religious values.
Nihilism is the idea that there are no ultimate values so we become disoriented.
Nietzsche called The Gay Science ‘the most personal of all my books’. It was where he first proclaimed the death of God (Book 3 / 125 The Madman) and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche is addressing non-believers in ‘The Madman’. He is trying to convey that we have not appreciated what the Death of God means.
Giving up on God is not just giving up a metaphysical claim. God was the whole basis of our values, including the value of truth (which is God’s word). So Nietzsche is trying to bring us the true meaning of the Death of God.
When God falls, all the morality that was based on God has to come into question too. This is not what has happened.
He often talks about his project as the ‘revaluation of all values’. The old values can no longer animate us. We need new values.
He doesn’t tell us what these values are, but it’s a project that each individual has to face.
Where there is no external basis for value, he says that most people will fall into nihilism i.e. there are no ultimate values.
Nietzsche is not a proponent of nihilism. He is a diagnostician of nihilism.
He says that nihilism is inevitable. He is a psychologist. He predicted nihilism as Europe’s future.
He was against nihilism and said that weak people would fall into it.
For free spirits, we see the Death of God as opening up new possibilities. We can now write our own moral legislation.
Nietzsche says there are very few ears attuned to my message but it’s up to them to create their own values.
Nietzsche thought that Christian values were inhibiting to certain kinds of people.
He saw it as an individualist project to come up with one’s own values.
He does not give a criteria for choosing values.
Early Nietzsche was a proponent of the need for a new kind of high culture in Germany.
Nietzsche thought that we need suffering. A really great life involves overcoming significant challenges and therefore will include suffering.
There is a common conception of happiness which is absence of suffering.
However, there is another conception, more familiar to the Greeks, that is to do with realising your talents. Nietzsche is in this camp, and says that suffering is inevitable if one is serious about realising their aspirations.
Ubermensch - Nietzsche is not interested in the result of the Ubermensch but in the struggle to get there.
We’ve struggled to get beyond Judeo-Christian values and we should struggle to get beyond ourselves.
Ubermensch is not a relative term. It focusses on the individual = self overcoming / self creation. It was wrongly misappropriated by the Nazis.
He wanted to have an idea of what it would be like to affirm life (after destroying the ‘old’ Christian values). Eternal recurrence is one of these attempts. It is a test. You affirm life if you’d be willing to have the same life over and over again. What could be a bigger commitment to this life?
Nietzsche is interesting across the following themes:
- The replacement values now that God is Dead
- What should our ends be? Do we need a revival of high culture?
- The place of suffering in our life. What is a good life?
Nietzsche often wondered if he had any readers. He said, rather presciently, that ‘some are born posthumously’.
He respected Christianity in one sense, because it warded off suicidal nihilism, especially in medieval times when life was much harder.
He said that we’ll put up with any suffering if we can find meaning.
“He who has a why to live, you can bear almost any how.”
Christianity did a wonderful job of providing meaning but it can no longer fulfil that role for us.
It was not just a set of beliefs, it was a set of rituals and practices that animated all of our lives.
Nietzsche says that there is no such life as a life without values.
Prefiguring Freud he says that we’re nothing but a series of conflicting drives. The question, however, is what are the ultimate values?
Nietzsche is cagey about stating what his ultimate values are, but he emphasises culture and creativity in his work.
The revaluation of all values or “Transvaluation” is a concept from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Elaborating the concept in The Antichrist, Nietzsche asserts that Christianity, not merely as a religion but also as the predominant moral system of the Western world, inverts nature, and is “hostile to life”.
As “the religion of pity”, it elevates the weak over the strong, exalting that which is “ill-constituted and weak” at the expense of that which is full of life and vitality.
Nietzsche compares Christianity to Buddhism. He posits that Christianity is “the struggle against sin”, whereas Buddhism is “the struggle against suffering”; to Nietzsche, Christianity limits and lowers humankind by assailing its natural and inevitable instincts as depraved (“sin”), whereas Buddhism advises one merely to eschew suffering.
While Christianity is full of “revengefulness” and “antipathy” (e.g., the Last Judgment), Buddhism promotes “benevolence, being kind, as health-promoting.” Buddhism is also suggested to be the more “honest” of the two religions, for its being strictly “phenomenalistic”, and because “Christianity makes a thousand promises but keeps none.” Martyrdom, rather than being a moral high ground or position of strength, is indicative of an “obtuseness to the question of truth.”
Because sex is, in Nietzsche’s thought, a fundamental affirmation of life, for its being the very process by which human life is created, Christianity’s elevation of chastity (including, for example, the story of Mary’s virginal pregnancy) is counter to the natural instincts of humanity, and therefore a contradiction of “natural values”.
Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for what he called “transvaluation” stemmed from his contempt for Christianity and the entirety of the moral system that flowed from it: indeed, “contempt of man”, as Nietzsche states near the end of The Antichrist. Nietzsche perceived the moral framework of Christian civilization to be oppressive:
- Reproduction derided as sinful
- Life as a mere investment for the hollow promise of an illustrious afterlife
- Death valued over life
Transvaluation would mean the exaltation of life rather than the exaltation of suffering, and an acceptance of every instinct or lust as organic and therefore valid, and so beyond the scope of moral condemnation. What one desires would be merely what one desires, rather than either sinful or pious. What one desires would be the product of stimuli rather than the product of “will”.
“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity”
Whenever Nietzsche has an opposition he’s never really for one thing, rather than the other. For example, Apollonian (reason) versus Dionysian (instinct) - he thinks health is a balance between these forces.
He starts seeing Socrates as the enemy (Birth of Tragedy) and later on it’s Christianity (The Genealogy of Morals/The AntiChrist). They both involve a severe repression of that affective emotional sexual part of ourselves - the libido in Freud’s terms.
Nietzsche’s notion of health is a balance, which is in fact very Aristotelian.
He champions Dionysus because it’s the one that’s losing (to reason/Christianity). It’s not so much that Dionysus should be the victor, it’s that we need to address the imbalance.
Nietzsche recommended that people read him as a psychologist.
What’s good in Freud is twice as good in Nietzsche. Freud had this veneer of scientism for salesman purposes.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud were the first writers to espouse the idea, that who we are is largely inaccessible to consciousness.
Schopenhauer called it The Will
Freud called it The Id
Nietzsche called it The Drives
These drives are unavailable to us. Society has taught us to repress those drives. Civilisation, in fact says Freud, has been built on their suppression.
Not only have repressed those drives but we have moralised that repression through Christianity.
Christianity has become a machine to make us disown part of ourselves (we have become strangers to ourselves). Nietzsche thought there was only one Christian and that he died on the Cross (Jesus). It was Paul who instituted the religion of guilt.
Nietzsche admired Jesus but said that he died too young.
Christianity is an ideology that makes us reject life: be meek, be humble, turn the other cheek in order to gain God’s acceptance.
Nietzsche is ultimately irresponsible because he knew that he would be misunderstood and misused. He just didn’t care what the mob would do with it.
Nietzsche addressed the question of how are we going to create new values. That question is still ongoing today and nobody has really answered it.
Nietzsche was a brilliant psychologist. He said that we’re just a bundle of drives, but we need to get some order amongst them or harmonise them.
There are these rare individuals like Beethoven, Goethe and Wagner who have a master drive which makes all other drives coherent - this is equivalent to self-overcoming.
Nietzsche was brave enough to ask the big questions, particularly with regards to what kinds of values we should have. He wanted us provide our own answers.
