John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche: Two Influential Philosophers
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (London, 1806 – Avignon, France, 1873) was a British economist, logician, and philosopher. Son of James Mill, also an economist, he was educated exclusively by his father under the strict principles of Rousseau’s Emile. Endowed with extraordinary intelligence, at ten years old, he was versed in Greek and Latin and had a thorough knowledge of the classics. At thirteen, his father introduced him to the principles of logic and political economy, focusing on the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo in this area.
In 1823, he joined the East India Company, where he would eventually take over as head of the Office for Relations to Indian States. Politically active in defense of the abolitionist cause during the Civil War, from 1865 and for three years, he held a seat in the House of Commons, where he would be a source of constant controversy because of his strong support for measures in favor of the less privileged classes and equal rights for women.
His early writings were published in the pages of the newspapers The Traveler and The Morning Chronicle, and dealt primarily with the defense of free expression. In 1824, with the appearance of The Westminster Review, the organ of transmission of the philosophical radicals, Mill was provided with a privileged atrium from which to spread his liberal ideology.
In the field of ethics, Mill argued for a nuanced kind of utilitarianism in which influences can be glimpsed in Bentham. He introduced a constant concern to include in the usual concept of “utility” the pleasures derived from the free exercise of imagination and critical consciousness. On the main philosophical trends of his time, Mill was in favor of Comte’s positivism and contrary to Hamilton’s intuitionism.
Politically, he always showed great enthusiasm for the democratic form of government, tempered by pessimism about the real impact on social welfare of its practice. His work on logic and the methodology of science was very important in his time, notably through his constant search for a valid principle for inferring general laws. In the footsteps of Hume, Mill defined causation as a falsifiable empirical process he called “induction by enumeration.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, poet, and philologist, whose thinking is considered one of the most radical, rich, and evocative of the twentieth century. Born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, Prussia, his father, a Lutheran minister, died when he was five, and he was educated by his mother. He lived in a house with his grandmother, two aunts, and a sister. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Basel at age 24. His frail health (he was concerned all his life by his lack of sight and constant headaches) forced him to retire in 1889. After ten years, he suffered a nervous breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.
Besides the influence of Hellenic culture, particularly the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Nietzsche was influenced by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of evolution and by his friendship with the German composer Richard Wagner. A prolific writer, he wrote several important works, including:
- The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885)
- Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
- The Genealogy of Morals (1887)
- Twilight of the Idols (1888)
- The Antichrist (1888)
- Ecce Homo (1889)
- The Will to Power (1901)
One of the fundamental arguments of Nietzsche was that traditional values (essentially represented by Christianity) had lost their power in the lives of people, which he called passive nihilism. He put on his cutting proclamation “God is dead.” He was convinced that traditional values represented a “slave morality,” a morality created by weak and resentful individuals who encouraged such behaviors as submissiveness and conformity because the values implicit in such behavior served their interests. Nietzsche said the ethical imperative of creating new values should replace the traditional ones, and his discussion of this possibility evolved into his portrait of the man to come, the “superman” (Übermensch).