Nietzsche: Unmasking Traditional Thought and Values
Analysis of Nietzsche’s Philosophy
Nietzsche (N.) aims to break with the Western philosophical tradition, seeking new ways of expressing feelings and thoughts. To emphasize this break, he takes a critical tone. His philosophy is a genealogy, trying to find the source of the error—first, metaphysics. He uncovers the past and hidden impulses that move man to act. So, Nietzsche’s philosophy can be understood as an unmasking. The ultimate goal of his thought is the critique of reason, understood as rational, illustrated reason. This rejection of reason, knowledge, and truth is what drives him to avoid any argumentative discourse. His intuitive and explosive style makes it impossible to establish his ideas clearly.
The two key disqualifications Nietzsche makes are those of Plato and Kant, for there is a mistake common to both. The two make a distinction between the apparent world and another, real world, and that, according to Nietzsche, is meaningless. This concept goes back to Parmenides, who introduced into the Greek world the difference between being and appearance.
Criticisms of Traditional Morality
The deeper critique of Western culture is a critique of moral values. Parmenides did not say how the world is, but how it should be, with a focus not on an objective description of reality. This was the trigger error. Thus, philosophers have invented another “ideal” world. In traditional morality, decadence instincts prevail over those of overcoming. In the “ideal” world, being is considered fixed and immutable.
Nietzsche criticizes moral life, but life is the only real thing. He only rejects a particular moral: the Christian idealist. He aims to put forth another moral: the moral of life; life is will to power. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality: that of the lords, which loves life and the death of God; and the slave morality, characterized by resignation and compassion, typical of Christianity. The metaphysical world that philosophers are proposing goes against life.
- Life is, in the first place, the opposite of conceptual thought; it is becoming. It is not something fixed; everything changes.
- In the second place, life is creativity; it is understood as a creative force for new perspectives on reality.
- And in the third place, and in connection with the above, life as will to power is the will to create. This will to power is the blind, multi-directional will that makes up the universe.
These forces can be active or reactive, ascending or descending. The Western moral error is its “unnaturalness”; it is a sick and decadent morality. The moral ideal is the rule of virtue. This ideal makes man a slave. Christian morality, as the supreme value, is governed by moral decadence. This represents a doubling of moral personality. No intelligible or spiritual world exists. There is only the world experienced by the senses, a unique world, unreal, of living movement whose principle is the will to power, which knows nothing stable.
Critique of the Christian Religion
All religion is born of fear, anguish, and needs, and the importance felt by man himself. Therefore, no religion has ever contained any truth. It is an attempt to deal with the inability to accept one’s own destiny. Christianity makes up its ideal world in which the values fostered involve feelings of the herd. Religion involves the alignment of man. The unprecedented critique is of enlightenment, and Nietzsche interprets Christianity as a vulgar morality that comes from God. Nietzsche wants to reverse the anti-Christian values through assessments. He considers Christianity as the mortal enemy of man’s higher rate; anti-Christianity is the transmutation of all values that has lasted millennia. Thus, the transmutation of values is not merely anti-Christian but anti-Platonic.
Critique of Science
Science also follows the guidelines set by the moral standard that aims to achieve absolute knowledge and total natural laws. It aspires to a knowledge of universal validity. The critical spirit is the ideal form of metaphysics where you see the need for universality against the tragic conception of the world. This will always be anti-Dionysian, believing in logic as the last value. Science is characterized by understanding; it is dominating. Scientists are superficial; they never achieve the great questions of life, as these lie in its depths. However, Nietzsche proposes an authentic conception of it, which creates a society of free spirits.