Summary of NIETZSCHE's Thought

In this lesson from a TEACHER we offer you a brief summary of Nietzsche's thought, which is part of a movement known by the name of vitalism and that it is based on the idea that life cannot be reduced to any category other than life. It was in force during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Within vitalism it is possible to speak of two main currents, according to the meaning they want to give to life. For Nietzsche, life is understood as biology, while for Ortega y Gasset, life has a biographical and historical meaning.

For Nietzsche, life has value in itself. Life is becoming, creator and destroyer of the world, it is irrational and instinctive. If you want to know more about the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, he continues reading this summary of a PROFESSOR. Don't miss out! The class is about to begin!

Index

1. Nietzsche's Critique of Western Culture
2. The death of God and the birth of a new philosophy
3. Negative nihilism and positive nihilism
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4. Superman and the inversion of values
5. The eternal return as a sign of vitality
6. The will to power as the essence of life

All Western culture has its roots in Classical Greece and in the rationality advocated by Socrates and Plato. But Nietzsche understands this stage as the end of archaic Greece, a philosophical stage that understood life in its two fundamental aspects, which were represented in the Greek tragedy by Apollo and Dionysus. The first would represent order, reason, measure. While the second represents the irrational, the instinctive, the biological.

But starting with Socrates, the entire Dionysian dimension of reality is forgotten, in favor of the Apollonian. From that moment, everything was light, beauty and harmony. So, for Nietzsche, the crisis of western culture begins with Socrates and Plato who deny the world of life, the earth and the body, and invent a rational world, which they understand as the only real one and identifying the biological world as not being or not real.

The crisis of western culture reaches its maximum splendor with tradition Judeo-Christian, considering that the belief in a single God, constitutes the maximum perversion of the same. Nietzsche's attack on the Western tradition is directed:

1. To philosophy, understood as metaphysics
2. To religion
3. To morale
4. To science

These areas of life they have been invented, corrupted. The triumph of the Apollonian over the Dionysian, supposes, for Nietzsche, the end of the archaic Greek spirit.

Nietzsche does not deny knowledge, but defends its relative nature, subjectivism and perspectivism.

To know the thought of Nietzsche it is important that we understand the conception that the philosopher has about God.

God is dead and, with it, the old prejudices of the Greek-Judeo-Christian-Western tradition, and thus has abandoned the idea of ​​the existence of absolute truths. With God dead, there is nowhere to hold on. God was the way to accept all the evils of life, not being able to accept that life also has a tragic dimension. God represents the Absolute, the handle where everyone finds a false security. God represents the truth and the good, the objectivity. Once this is dead, it is replaced by other aspects of existence such as Nature, Progress, Science, which, when understood in an absolute sense, can be compared to God himself.

But only accepting the death of God, accepting that there is no other foundation of morality than the human being, denying the absolute and accepting the perspectivism and that it is possible to live in becoming, which would be the essential condition for the birth of the Superman, one who has reached a state of spiritual and moral maturity superior to that of the last man and the common man. He is capable of generating his own value system, identifying as good everything that comes from his genuine will to power.

All western culture is nihilistic by believing in the existence of some Absolute values as the good or the truth, which puts all its hopes in something that does not exist, thus rejecting the only reality that exists, the world of life, the sensible world. In this sense, it is a negative nihilism.

On the other hand, there is nihilism as consciousness of the death of God, which can be passive or active. The first, once God has died, finds no meaning in his life and falls into despair. The second is that of the one capable of invest the securities, put an end to the old and invent new ones.

This is the nihilism defended by Nietzsche in proposing, with his hammer philosophy, the destruction of all traditional values ​​and their replacement by totally new ones, and is a necessary condition for the emergence of the Superman.

When Nietzsche speaks of destroy values does not refer at any time to living without them, but reverse them. What it is about is to overcome the old tradition that condemned life and its irrational aspect and proposes values ​​that imply the affirmation of life. This would be the overcoming of this "slave morality”, In favor of "Moral ofI love him ”, what allows the triumph of the moral of the superman.

Look, I teach you the superman!

The superman is the sense of the earth. Say your will: let the superman be the meaning of the earth! I conjure you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of super-earthly hopes! They are poisoners, know it or not.

They are despisers of life, they are dying and they are, they too, poisoned, the earth is tired of them: may they disappear!

(Thus spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche)

The eternal challengerno the same thing consists in accepting that everything good and bad in life, the past, the present and the future will be repeated ad infinitum (and beyond). This is the ultimate affirmation of life. Life is being born and dying, it is fleeting, becoming. Everything changes, Nothing remains, as I said Heraclitus, and he added, Change is the only permanent thing. There is only the moment, and that moment is the one that must be repeated.

It does not mean that the moment does not end, but rather to want it not to end, that it lasts forever, without end. Here is the only permanence. And this leads to the will to power.

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We finish this summary of Nietzsche thought to talk about the will. The will to power it is the starting point of all reality, the vital force that maintains the human being and makes it overcome. Because Nietzsche thinks that everything that exists has a will to live, and that will is irrational. For this reason, reason constitutes only a part of reality, since in this there is chaos, death, the multiple, change.

Reason, for this thinker, is subject to the irrational, to instinct, to emotions. The will, that vital force it directs everything, albeit briefly, but it is present in all human beings. It has no meaning or purpose. Is he beginning and end of existence and life.

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Nietzsche. F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Ed. Planet. 2017