His Works and Ideas

Style of Thought

Nietzsche was probably the philosopher who best understood the complexity of human being and his discourse. Thinking is not simply a logical and intellectual process, but it involves beliefs, imagination, commitment, emotional feelings, desires, and other elements. Nietzsche presents or rather describes his thoughts in images, poetic prose, stories, and symbols. Conceptualization of his thought is therefore a complex interpretive process. For this reason, it is said, "everyone has his or her own interpretive reading of Nietzsche."

Nietzsche is unique among philosophers in his prose style, particularly in the Zarathustra. His work has been referred to as half philosophic, half poetic. Equally important are punning and paradox in his rhetoric, but some of the nuances and shades of meaning are lost in translation into English. A case in point is the thorny issue of the translation of Übermensch and its unfounded association with both the heroic character Superman and the Nazi party and philosophy.


God is Dead

Nietzsche is well-known for the statement "God is dead." While in popular belief it is Nietzsche himself who blatantly made this declaration, it was actually placed into the mouth of a character, a "madman," in The Gay Science. It was also later proclaimed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. This largely misunderstood statement does not proclaim a physical death, but a natural end to the belief in God being the foundation of the Western mind. It is also widely misunderstood as a kind of gloating declaration, when it is actually described as a tragic lament by the character Zarathustra.

"God is Dead" is more of an observation than a declaration, and it is noteworthy that Nietzsche never felt the need to advance any arguments for atheism, but merely observed that, for all practical purposes, his contemporaries lived "as if" God were dead. Nietzsche believed this "death" would eventually undermine the foundations of morality and lead to moral relativism and moral nihilism. To avoid this, he believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality and placing them not on a pre-determined, but a natural foundation through comparative analysis.

Nietzsche did not take God's death lightly. He saw its tremendous magnitude and consequences. In "Gay Science" 125, Nietzsche describes the magnitude of God's death:

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us?

In Nietzsche's mind, there might be an overlap here between the tragic crucifixion of Jesus and the "murdering of God." Since Nietzsche was a genius at expressing multiple meanings in a single phrase, this is a very real possibility.


Jesus and Christianity

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche attacked Christian pedagogy for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. He went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, who felt that Christianity was simply untrue. He claimed that it may have been deliberately propagated as a subversive religion (a "psychological warfare weapon" or what some would call a "mimetic 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 Antichrist, Nietzsche has a remarkably high view of Jesus, claiming that the scholars of the day fail to pay any attention to the man, Jesus, and only look to their construction, Christ.


Overman (Übermensch)

After the death of God, the world became meaningless and devoid of value. Nietzsche called it a world of nihilism. There is no value, meaning, and purpose in such a life, since God is the source and foundation of all values. In that godless world, who or what should we look for? Nietzsche presents the "overman" or "superman" (Übermensch) as the image of a human being who can overcome the Godless world of nihilism. In a short passage of "Zarathustra's Prologue" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:

I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man? All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

In the same Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche portrays the overman as the image of life that can tolerate the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same, the ultimate form of nihilism.

For Nietzsche, life on earth was always the issue. His lament over the crucifixion of Jesus and his accusations against Paul arose from his concern for happiness on earth. Nietzsche introduced the overman as the hope human beings can look for. He is more like an ideal man who can become the lord of the earth. The existing human being is a "rope between overman and beast." Human beings are yet "too human to become an overman." Nietzsche characterizes the overman as the "meaning of the earth" in contrast to otherworldly hopes.

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra "Zarathustra's Prologue")


Interpreting the overman as a superhero or a superhuman being would be wrong. This misinterpretation was developed by those who have linked Nietzsche's thought to Nazi propaganda. Their misrepresentation was caused partly by the ambiguity of this concept.


Child, Play and Joy

In "Zarathustra", Nietzsche explains the threefold metamorphoses of the human spirit: from a camel to a lion, and from a lion to a child. A camel is obedient; it has an attitude to carry burdens, symbolizing the spirit of medieval Christianity. A lion is a free spirit, representing the free Enlightenment individual of modernity. What, then, does the child represent for Nietzsche, who placed him at the last stage?

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea. ("Zarathustra" The Three Metamorphoses)

The ego-centered or self-conscious adult is more like a lion. An individual according to the ideal of the Enlightenment is a free spirit who is free from all bondage to the past, tradition, and authority. He or she is free to think and act. However, Nietzsche points out the deficiency of a free spirit. The modern individual does not realize that one's life is given as a kind of fate. The fact that one was born and came into the world is a fact or fate one receives without one's choice. No one can choose to be born. A free spirit is not as free as he or she might suppose.

"Child," for Nietzsche refers to the attitude of accepting one's being, given as a fate, with joy. The child affirms his fate of being with joy. This affirmative attitude to life is the strength of the child. As Nietzsche puts it, the total affirmation of fate is the "love of fate." The child lives with a total affirmation of life; hence it is "holy yes." The child's selfless affirmation is "innocent," and "forgetful" of ego or self-consciousness. The child is also playful. The child transforms his or her life into joy and play. The burden of life is made lighter, so the child can fly and dance. Such Nietzschean expressions as "dancing wheel," "game," and "play" translate his insight that "joyfulness" must belong to the essence of human life.


The "Will to Power"

One of Nietzsche's central concepts is the will to power, a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he believed was the basic driving force of nature. He believed it to be the fundamental causal power in the world, the driving force of all natural phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers could 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, down to mere 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 regard 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, even more fundamental than the act of self-preservation; the latter is but an epiphenomenon of the former.

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. (from Beyond Good and Evil)

The will to power is something like the desire to exert one's will in self-overcoming, although this "willing" may be unconscious. Indeed, it is unconscious in all non-human beings; it was the frustration of this will that first caused man to become conscious at all. The philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto says that "aggression" is at least sometimes an approximate synonym. However, Nietzsche's ideas of aggression are almost always meant as aggression toward oneself - a sublimation of the brute's aggression - as the energy a person motivates toward self-mastery. 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 in this light a manifestation of the will to power.

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force ( - its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on. (Beyond Good and Evil, 636, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

Not just instincts but also higher-level behaviors (even in humans) were to be reduced to the will to power. This includes 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, Nietzsche 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; this will can be life-affirming or a manifestation of nihilism, but it is will to power all the same.

[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. (Beyond Good and Evil, 259, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

As indicated above, the will to power is meant to explain more than just the behavior of an individual person or animal. The will to power can also be the explanation for why water flows as it does, why plants grow, and why various societies, enclaves, and civilizations behave as they do.


Similar Ideas in Others' Thought

With respect to the will to power, Nietzsche was influenced early on by Arthur Schopenhauer and his concept of the "will to live", but he explicitly denied the identity of the two ideas and renounced Schopenhauer's influence in The Birth of Tragedy, (his first book) where he stated his view that Schopenhauer's ideas were pessimistic and will-negating. Philosophers have noted a parallel between the will to power and Hegel's theory of history.


Defense of the Idea

Although the idea may seem harsh to some, Nietzsche saw the will to power - or, as he famously put it, the ability to "say yes! to life" - as life-affirming. Creatures affirm the instinct in exerting their energy, in venting their strength. The suffering borne of conflict between competing wills and the efforts to overcome one's environment are not evil ("good and evil" for him was a false dichotomy anyway), but a part of existence to be embraced. It signifies the healthy expression of the natural order, whereas failing to act in one's self-interest is seen as a type of illness. Enduring satisfaction and pleasure result from living creatively, overcoming oneself, and successfully exerting the will to power.


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 there is no universally true fact, 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. 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." Interestingly enough, he mentions a 'dishonest lie,' discussing Wagner in The Case of Wagner, as opposed to an 'honest' one, saying further, to consult Plato with regards to the latter, which should give some idea of the layers of paradox in his work.

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 clearly delineated fashion without some syncretism, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality:

  • "good" and "bad" interpretations vs. "good" and "evil" interpretations
  • "aristocratic" vs. "part of the 'herd'"
  • determines values independently of predetermined foundations (nature) vs. determines values on predetermined, unquestioned foundations (Christianity).

These ideas were elaborated in his book On the Genealogy of Morals, in which he also introduced the key concept of ressentiment as the basis for the slave morality.

The revolt of the slave in morals begins in the very principle of ressentiment becoming creative and giving birth to values - a ressentiment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says 'no' from the very outset to what is 'outside itself,' 'different from itself,' and 'not itself'; and this 'no' is its creative deed. (On the Genealogy of Morals)

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 epiphany about the nature of God and morality, resulting in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra.


Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Nietzsche's concept of the "Eternal Recurrence of the Same" shows an interesting contrast. While Nietzsche himself was enthusiastic about it, any other philosopher has not taken it seriously. This concept arises out the tension between one's will and the irreversibility of time. No matter how one wills, one cannot go backward in time. Nietzsche formulates this concept as to mean that all events reoccur in the same sequence, again and again. The question is this; can you will it? According to Nietzsche, it is the ultimate form of nihilism. There are a number of interpretations of this concept, but none is beyond speculation.