19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche and Western Culture
MARCO Historical and Sociocultural
The second half of the 19th century was marked by revolutions, highlighting the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat due to industrialization. The clash between bourgeois liberalism, nationalism, anarchism, socialism, and communism was also significant. In Germany, the leading power in Europe, population growth occurred thanks to the Second Industrial Revolution (electricity, improved communications). Germany and other countries adopted democratic institutions. After the Franco-Prussian War and unification (1871), Bismarck established a liberal-nationalist state. Another characteristic phenomenon was colonialism, where Europe imposed its values on the rest of the world.
The culture developed through artistic movements: Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Naturalism, and Modernism. Notable writers include Balzac, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Zola. Painters like Courbet, Manet, Gauguin, and Van Gogh emerged. Musicians such as Verdi, Wagner, Bizet, and Brahms flourished. Knowledge and experimental science gained prestige due to technical progress. The 19th century was scientific, convinced of science’s power to advance humankind. The two most important concepts were energy and evolution. Hertz discovered electric waves (X-rays).
Philosophical Framework
After Kant’s death, Hegel’s absolute idealism emerged, focusing on the right. Hegel was opposed by:
- Kierkegaard: Defended individual identity based on Christian values against the state.
- Historical Materialism of Marx: Aimed to transform the world through revolutionary action and establish a classless society.
- Comte’s Positivism and Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism: Proposed replacing religion and metaphysics with science to promote human progress.
- Radical Individualism (Feuerbach): Considered the particular human being and freedom as fundamental values.
- Irrationalism of Schopenhauer: The world and the body are ways to access a deeper reality. The will to live is the essence of reality, a blind and irrational momentum pushing individuals to continue living despite obstacles. Pain can only be escaped through the cultivation of art.
Schopenhauer strongly influenced Wagner’s operas, which aimed to free the viewer from the irrationality of the will to live.
Nietzsche’s Thinking
In the West, two historical approaches are distinguished: democratic and elitist. The former emphasizes equality, while the latter, exemplified by Nietzsche, focuses on individual values and the aristocracy of knowledge. Nietzsche’s philosophy emphasizes fundamental energy and absolute value. Life is cruel and destructive but also a powerful creative force. He criticizes Western culture for adopting an anti-intellectual attitude toward life.
Critique of Western Culture
Nietzsche begins with a critique of philosophy: The Pre-Socratics made a terrible existence bearable (Dionysus) by creating a beautiful world of artistic illusion (Apollo).
Dionysian
Dionysus is the god who dies and is reborn continuously (fertility of spring following the death of winter). The heroes of Greek tragedies accept their terrible fate and glorify life.
Apollonian
Apollonian beauty sets the standard (reason). Euripides eliminates Dionysian, moral, and intellectual elements.
Synthesis
A synthesis between the Apollonian and Dionysian (reason and life) ended with Socrates, who started a model of power in excess of reason. Plato accentuated this error by inventing the real world of ideas, opposed to the sensible world, seen as misleading.
This error occurred because Plato considered language somewhat autonomous, with universal concepts as superior beings. However, language and reason are tools in the service of life. This cult of grammar gave rise to metaphysics and science, drowning the spontaneity of life under formal abstractions (being, representation, etc.).
Nietzsche criticizes the unnatural moral and intellectual approach of Socrates and Plato, who understood virtue only as a rational exercise, where the body, passions, and instincts are the least valuable parts of the soul and should be punished.
Science distorts reality by describing phenomena with atoms, as everything real is sensitive. Finally, he criticizes religion. Christianity represents mediocrity and gentleness born of resentment. This religion sharpened the division between reason and life by projecting values onto a transcendent God, against which man and nature are denied. If morality was initially about noble values (good = noble, bad = weak), Christianity inverted these values, imposing a slave morality of meekness, obedience, and sacrifice.
The final step was Kant (seen by Nietzsche as a Christian with bad intentions), who crushed sensitivity under his ethics of duty, a law based on formal, abstract principles.
Nihilism as Symptom
With the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution came the death of God, meaning the loss of the religious foundation of our culture’s values. Thus, nihilism appears.
Nihilism is the fundamental nature of Western culture, whose metaphysics, morals, science, and religion are based on false values. Nihilism is part of the present era, dominated by pessimism, despair, and denial of the will to live (reactive nihilism). There is also active nihilism, which destroys false values and replaces them with the Superman, enhancing life.
The Superman affirms life and accepts the reality of the world. He denies the Platonic afterlife, forgets the sad Christian virtues, and transmutes all values.
The pessimistic views of Schopenhauer or the empty idols of our time, in which people strive to believe, are symptoms of weakness, desperation, and the vital habit of contemporary man.
Nihilism has a positive side: if God is dead, man plays the role of creator. The overcoming of nihilism requires a philosophical paradigm shift from science to art: humans should create new values like artists create new works. From there, Nietzsche develops his philosophical alternatives.
Nietzschean Proposals
The Will to Power, inspired by Schopenhauer’s will to live, posits that life is a set of forces and energies colliding and overlapping. These forces seek to produce higher and more perfect phenomena. The will to power as a creative impulse characterizes life forms and reconciles the formal (Apollo) and the instinctive (Dionysian), which Western metaphysics had separated. Western philosophy, heir to Socrates, denies this intention, leading to hostile attitudes toward nature and reality. Instincts are beings evolving to higher forms. Rationality chokes and slows the creative strength.
The Eternal Return attempts to retrieve the tragic vision of reality from Presocratic thought. If only this world exists, with a finite set of forces deployed in infinite time, all events of reality are repeated forever. This union overcomes the division between Earth (finite) established by Christianity and the sky (infinity).
Because of this eternal return, each of us will return to being indefinitely, necessitating the creation of new values. The idea of eternal return is tragic because it cancels all hope, leaving life as a repetition of the same pain and joy. In this situation, man falls into despair but recovers as the Superman, a new model of a spiritually elevated human. The Superman passes through a pessimistic thought of eternal recurrence and three transformations of the spirit. The Superman bears the burden of the moral law (camel), throws off the burden and seeks knowledge (lion), and acts without being subjected to anything (child).
The Superman says yes to life and does not believe in equality. He conceives existence as an ongoing experiment, where life forms are tested to become more powerful and beautiful. The artist, intuitive and not deceived by language, faces life in its transfiguring beauty, accepting joy and pain without hiding or fleeing. The Superman is a philosopher-artist who reevaluates all existing values, setting new tables that enhance life. Faced with true intention, error will hold, and present drills or appearances will best express the creative power of life.
Relationship of the Text
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