FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

A REPORT OF PATRICIO C. CABAYA AB. PHILO. IV

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
• Childhood:
• Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village
in the Prussian province of Saxony (now eastern Germany).
• Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran minister who died when
Nietzsche was only four years old. Nietzsche’s mother
moved their family to Naumburg, another town in Prussia.
• As a teenager, Nietzsche received a full scholarship to a
prestigious boarding school called Schulpforta.
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
• Academics:
• In 1864, Nietzsche attended the University of Bonn, where he learned
from philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl.
• He followed this beloved educator to the University of Leipzig a year
later. It was during this period that Nietzsche discovered the
philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and befriended the composer
Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima Wagner.
• These figures proved influential to Nietzsche’s work. In 1869, at the
age of twenty-five, Nietzsche became the youngest professor of
classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
• First published
• While working as a professor in Basel, Nietzsche began
writing. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872),
explored the origins of the Greek tragedy, the philosophy of
Socrates, and the duality between Apollonian and Dionysian
worldviews.
• In the years to follow, Nietzsche published a collection of
essays called Untimely Meditations (1873) and a book of
aphorisms called Human, All Too Human (1878). These
works marked the first time that Nietzsche began
questioning the nature of morality in his society.
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
• Travel:
• In 1879, Nietzsche resigned from his
professorship due to chronic issues with his
health. He traveled across Europe for the next
decade, often spending summers in Sils Maria, a
village in the Swiss Alps.
• He courted a psychoanalyst named Lou Andreas-
Salomé, who rejected his marriage proposals
several times.
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
• Writings:
• During his wandering period, Nietzsche wrote a prolific number of
books, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), a prose-poem
featuring a memorable line about man being the cruelest animal,
and Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche’s critique of
Immanuel Kant and Plato.
• Nietzsche also wrote several polemics against Christianity like On the
Genealogy of Morals (1887), Ecce Homo (1888), The
Antichrist (1888), and Twilight of the Idols (1888).
• One of his final published works was Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1889),
a whole book dedicated to Nietzsche’s thoughts on his old friend
Richard Wagner’s life and work.
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
• Health decline:
• Nietzsche collapsed in 1889 on the streets of Turin, Italy.
Incapacitated, he lived with his mother for several years. After his
mother’s death in 1897, Nietzsche relocated to live with his sister
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in Weimar.
• He never fully recovered his physical or mental health, and he died
on August 25, 1900.
• One of his most influential books, The Will to Power (1901), was
released the following year. Nietzsche’s sister and his old friend
Heinrich Köselitz—known to many by the pseudonym Peter Gast—
edited the collection of notes.
5 MAJOR THEMES OF NIETZSCHE’S
PHILOSOPHY AND WRITINGS
• 1. Perspectivism: Nietzsche rejected the idea of absolute truth,
instead focusing on how individuals can create meaning in their
lives to overcome nihilism, a belief that life is meaningless.
• Moral relativism: By criticizing traditional Christian morality,
Nietzsche's ideas focused on atheism and a revaluation of values
in his society. In his book The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche
wrote that “God is dead.” His statement about the death of God
refers to his belief that traditional Christianity will no longer set
the moral standard for human life in the modern world.
Nietzsche believed that morality is determined by individual
perspectives.
5 MAJOR THEMES OF NIETZSCHE’S
PHILOSOPHY AND WRITINGS
• 3. Eternal recurrence: Some of Nietzsche's work discusses
eternal recurrence, the idea that all existence repeats an
infinite number of times.
• 4. Übermensch: Nietzsche wrote extensively about the
übermensch, translated as the “overman” or the “superman.”
Nietzsche believed the übermensch was an ideal version of a
human being, a free spirit focused on individual goals and
values. Nietzsche wrote about the übermensch as a man of
knowledge who understands the terrible depth of his own
consciousness.
5 MAJOR THEMES OF NIETZSCHE’S
PHILOSOPHY AND WRITINGS
• 5. The will to power: In Nietzsche’s view, the will to
power is the strongest motivational force in life.
Nietzsche believed that the best use of this desire is to
focus on knowledge and overcoming one’s own
limitations.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism
The term ‘perspective’ comes from the language of
vision. We literally see things from and with a particular
perspective. Our eyes are located at a particular point in
space, from which some things are visible and others are
not, e.g. the top of the table, but not its underneath. A
scene looks different from different perspectives – from
high up, we can see further and things look smaller,
from below things ‘loom’ over us and we cannot see
very far.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism
● The idea of perspective has a rich metaphorical
life.
● Important for our purposes, when someone
seems to overreact emotionally, we tell them to
‘get things in perspective’ – what has happened
is not as important as they seem to think, they
need to see the ‘bigger picture’ or take the
‘longer view’.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism
● In emotional overreaction, the immediate
experience (which is near) dominates the person.
This relates to Nietzsche’s talk of ‘foreground
evaluations’ – we take what is near to us (in the
foreground) as the standard by which we
interpret the world.
● Nietzsche talks about ‘perspective’ when he is
relating beliefs to our values (and hence to our
instincts). He uses the word ‘interpretation’ to
mean a belief about something as if it is like this
or that.
● An interpretation is an understanding of the
world from a particular perspective; and so
interpretations, like perspectives, relate back to
our values.
● (Different perspectives are defined by different
values; differences in belief are not themselves
enough. Two people with different religious beliefs,
for instance, may occupy the same perspective if their
beliefs reflect the same underlying set of values.)
● Nietzsche is saying that philosophical beliefs about
truth and goodness are part of a particular perspective
on the world, a short-sighted, distorting perspective.
One of its most important distortions is that it denies
that it is a perspective that its truths are unconditional
that it represents the world as it truly is.
● philosophers are wrong to think that it is
possible to represent or hold beliefs about
the world that are value-free, ‘objective’,
‘disinterested’.
● to sense perception
○ First, we find it easier, argues Nietzsche, to
reproduce an image we are familiar with
than to remember what is new and different
in our sense impression. We are averse to
new things, and so already, our experience
of the world is dominated by an emotion.
○ Second, we cannot take in everything –
we do not see every leaf on a tree, but out
of our visual experience, create for
ourselves an image of something
approximating the tree.
○ Third, whenever a new idea or experience
arises, people become over-excited,
impatient to develop or experience it. Over
time, we become more cautious, see it
more for what it is.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism: ON TRUTH
● Certainly Nietzsche says that what people
believe is true depends on their
perspective, as does how they understand
the concept and value of truth. But this
does not mean that truth itself varies
between perspectives.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism: ON TRUTH
● Nietzsche’s attacks on the value of truth are not
attacks on the idea that there is any such thing as
truth. That appearance may be as valuable as truth
does not imply that there is not truth – instead, it
presupposes that there could be! Perspectivism
claims only that the truth must always be represented
from some perspective; there is no one way to
represent the truth.
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• The best passage on God’s death is offered by Nietzsche
in The Gay Science Science in section 125, entitled “The
Madman.”
• Nietzsche describes a man who enters the town market or
bazaar and cries out loudly, “I seek God! I seek God!” He
encounters a group of mocking atheists, who laugh at him until
the Madman tells of God’s death. He proclaims: “God is dead.
God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we
comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” (GS 181)
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• All of the good interpretations of this
passage resist a literal reading that might
understand God’s death as a passing away
of the divine being in a manner similar to
human passing. Neither should Nietzsche’s
proclamation be seen as a more grandiose
way of expressing unbelief.
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• “’God is dead,’” writes Stephen Williams,
“is not a rhetorical way of saying
• ‘God does not exist’” (Williams 97).
• “the end of theism, the death of God, the
end of Christianity
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• certain interpretive emphases produce
different connotations.
a) “secularization thesis,” the death of
God is seen as the death of an epoch –
the end of a Christian era and the
inauguration of a post- Christian one.
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
b.) “ontotheological
thesis,” Nietzsche is primarily
announcing the death of the
metaphysical God.
On one hand we interpret God’s
death culturally, historically, and/or
sociologically.
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• Journalist Amy Sullivan, for example, off-
handedly refers to the death of God as the
assumption that we were “entering a postreligious
age in which religion was at best irrelevant and at
worst irrational”
• The Christian religion is no longer the
presupposition of civilization”
• Likewise, Michael Novak frames it as the death of
modernity and the move to postmodernity
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• From henceforth onward, Nietzsche might be
saying, our societies will be functionally atheistic,
or at least agnostic. The death of God is the death
of a common vocabulary, a shared framework in
which politics and public discourse will operate.
• Christianity will no longer be our cultural given
or norm, but simply become “a piece of antiquity
intruding out of distant ages past”
THE MEANING OF NIETZSCHE’S DEATH OF
GOD
• In summary,
• we can say that for advocates of the
secularization reading, “the death of God is
something post-Christian rather than anti-
Christian; by now we are living in the post-
Christian time of the death of God, in which
secularization has become the norm for all
theological discourse”
NIETZSCHE’S SUPERMAN AND ITS
RELIGIOUS IMPLICATION
• Nietzsche’s concept of the superman represents the
highest principle of development of humanity. It
designates the affirmation of man’s full potentiality
and creativity.
• Nietzsche posits the concept of the superman as a critique on
religion, morality, and the crisis of modernity, as well as a
panacea to the social problems of his time.
• This was the period of enlightenment, which was
characterized by the belief in progress, achieved
through the application of reason, rejection of
religious beliefs and traditional morality.
• During this perigoood, morality and religion were
subjected to serious critical examination.
• This resulted in the rejection of the application of faith
with reference to matters of practical life.
• Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman (Übermensch) was
given a detailed treatment in his most favourite book:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
• Zarathustra announced the “death of the modern man and
the advent of a new man, superman, who has liberated
himself from the tyranny of religion”
• Nietzsche opposed most of the commanding ideals of
his own generation, especially, the notion of equality.
The idea of the superman (Übermensch) has been
considered by some interpreters as “an aristocratic
attempt to revaluate modern politics”
• Certainly, Nietzsche did not consider his age one of
automatic progress or inevitable enlightenment. On the
contrary, he saw it as possibly “the final chapter in the
dwarfing of man –the leveling and mediocritization of
humans that have begun with Socrates and Christ”
• Against the ideal of Christian morality, equity and
progress, Nietzsche pits the counter ideal of the
superman.
• Admittedly, if the modern era, which he considers as
decadent, has to be overcome, a revaluation of the
Christian values is imperative for the superman. This
is why he is of the view that “humanity is something
that must be overcome” (Niezsche, 2006, p.5) to make
way for the emergence of the higher man – the
superman.
• Nietzsche (2006) conceives the superman as “an
expression of free-spiritedness, the essence of
humanity, the affirmation of one’s full potentialities,
authority, power, freedom and creativity, as well as the
highest principle or development of humanity”
• It is a statement of freedom and liberation of man
from the tyranny of Christian religion and moral
absolutism.
● Nietzsche’s superman does not negate life but
affirms it. It represents the capability to transform
the world and uphold one’s freedom, potentiality
and creativity.
● However, the superman can only accomplish this
through the forceful rejection of existing moral
and religious principles, which, to a large extent,
have been neglected by modern culture.
● In Nietzsche’s view, Christianity had concentrated attention
on God-man, but since ‘God is dead,’ it has to be replaced
by the man-god. This new man-god is “the superman – the
noble man, who combines the beauty and strength of the
animal with intellectual powers, which will enable him to
conquer himself, the masses, the world and even fate”
● The superman is “the master of the earth,” (Nietzsche,
2005, p.6), fulfilling the mission of the earth and giving
meaning to history. In other words, he is a law giver, a law
interpreter and one who directs the affairs of the earth – a
man-god.
● Thus, “the superman rejects all conventional
human practices and values and invents his
own value, which in relation to the existing
values, will be new ones” (Nietzsche, 1966,
p.135). He represents the essence of
humanity – one who breaks the tradition of
metaphysical and religious absolutism.
● It was his conviction that the Christian morality
and religion have enfeebled man, striping him of
his freedom, potentialities and creativity and,
thereby, making it difficult for the emergence of a
higher humanity – the superman. Nietzsche is of
the view that the superman is the highest
development of humanity and that man is only a
bridge to the superman.
NIETZSCHE’S SUPERMAN AND ITS
RELIGIOUS IMPLICATION
Man and the Superman
● What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman
(superman) – a rope over an abyss. Man shall be just that
for the overman: a laughing stock or a painful
embarrassment. Therefore, do not spend any time or
energy on man! Mankind is not our goal, but the
superman (Nietzsche, 2005, p.7).
Man and the Superman
● This quickly brings to mind, the Darwinian concept of
evolution. Man is still unexhausted for the greatest
possibilities. Nietzsche states in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
that man is, in his present state, weighed down by his bad
conscience, is truly a sick animal, but, perhaps, this
condition is like a pregnancy, a sickness heavy with the
future possibilities.
Man and the Superman
● Thus, “man is such an incomplete, transitional creature
that it almost seems as if nature had some future plans for
him – as if man were not an end, but only a way, an
episode, abridge, a great promise”
● Nietzsche’s superman is that being, which has overcome
what has so far defined us as human – the now crumbling
system of value.
Man and the Superman
● These Supermen were not necessarily physically strong as
the common interpretation of a superman implies. Although
“they may be weak in one sense, they are creative in ways
that allow them to move humans forward socially,
economically, and in other ways” (Gayon, 2005, p.205). This
implies that the superman is an embodiment of creativity,
ingenuity and, in fact, an expression of free spiritedness.
● on the will to power and the superman.
○ All beings seek to discharge their power
and to dominate. The will of power
always encounters and seeks to overcome
resistance. The superman is self-
domination and domination of others
● on the will to power and the superman.
○ Nietzsche (1967) understands life in terms
of the desire to preserve and enhance
power.
○ The drive for enhanced power is the basic
drive in man. Thus, the will to power is the
essence of life.
● on the will to power and the superman.
○ For Judeo-Christian values, such as humility
and love, Nietzsche substitutes an ethics of
power – the principle that might makes right.
○ This is the logical consequences of Darwin’s
statement of the survival of the fittest, because,
the best fitted individuals desire not merely to
survive, but to acquire power over others
● on the will to power and the superman.
○ Instead of accepting the social instinct as a
guide to conduct, Nietzsche advocates
egoism and rugged individualism – the
competitive striving to fulfill all egoistic
instincts and accomplish personal
advancement.
● on the will to power and the superman.
○ Nietzsche believes that European morality
denies the central role of the “will to
power” – and does so in a dishonest
manner. He puts the blame for this upon the
morality of Christianity.
○ Nietzsche posits the superman as an
embodiment of the “will to power.”
● on the will to power and the superman.
○ He postulates the concept of the superman as a solution
to the problem of cultural decadence and the
enfeeblement of man by religion.
○ He envisioned a new day, when the truly complete
person would achieve new level of creativity and
thereby become a higher type of person – the superman,
who is strong-willed enough to reject the Christian
morality and invent his own morality – the master
morality, which is an expression of the “will to power.”
● from the perspective of master morality – the
superman’s morality – the word ‘cruelty’ simply
refers to the basic “will to power,” which is a
natural expression of strength. Nietzsche’s
notion of the “will to power,” therefore, is
clearly manifested in the attitude and behaviour
of the superman.
SOURCES:
1. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/friedrich-nietzsche-life-and-philosophy#7
AeZ8HDgqb7RaptrVBAsr4
2.Cole, K. (2008). The Meaning of Nietzsche’s Death of God. http://www.sophia-
project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/cole_deathofgod.pdf
3.“Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman and Its Religious Implications.” Journal of
Philosophy, Culture and Religion, Oct. 2019, https://doi.org/10.7176/jpcr/45-03.
4.Nietzsche’s perspectivism. (n.d.).
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a865/d23ed47678acf2c9f7b4a34c1d685e0b5775.
pdf.
5.Nietzsche’s perspectivism. (n.d.).
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a865/d23ed47678acf2c9f7b4a34c1d685e0b5775.
pdf