Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture & 19th Century Context
Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture
Twilight of the Idols, a work from Nietzsche’s critical period, is a ruthless attack on Western culture, philosophy, morals, and religion. His critique of morality is particularly important, as he considers it unnatural, a resentment against primary life instincts, and a promulgation of false values, best exemplified by Christianity. The philosophical basis of this resentment, according to Nietzsche, was introduced by Socrates, with its major formulation in Platonism, and its diffusion in Christianity.
Nietzsche’s works are divided into four periods:
- The Romantic Period: Analyzes the Apollonian and Dionysian as opposing models for understanding the world, favoring the Dionysian.
- The Positivist Period: Influenced by French Enlightenment thinkers, he adopts a critical attitude towards Socratic rationality, developed by Platonism and the Judeo-Christian tradition. He attempts to destroy metaphysics, religion, and morality based on the inversion of values, attacking the foundations arising from Socratic and Platonic thought.
- Message of Zarathustra: Resumes the critique of metaphysics, morality, and Western culture, formulating his main theses: nihilism, eternal recurrence, the overman, the transmutation of values, and the will to power.
- Critical Period: Characterized by a formal critique of culture and Western values, exemplified by Twilight of the Idols.
Nietzsche’s thought is vitalist, a reaction against philosophical idealism, metaphysical speculation, and the absolutism of science. There have been attempts to link his thinking to Nazism, falsifying papers and selectively picking statements while ignoring critical ones. He can be placed within the late nineteenth-century, unsystematic, intuitionist current. His entire system is subject to a trap to the right. Influenced by Darwin’s evolutionism and Schopenhauer, he believed that reason is driven by something irrational, more powerful, which he called the will to power. There are similarities between his analysis and Freud’s, especially in their starting points, though not in their theoretical developments. This is foundational to what we now call postmodernism, with its criticism of moral absolutism, especially religious and metaphysical.
Historical Context: Marx and the 19th Century
The 19th century, the era of Marx and Engels, was a period of revolutions in Europe, driven by liberal, democratic, socialist, and anarchist impulses, which were opposed by the Church, traditionalism, and the conservative bourgeoisie. The turmoil of this period stemmed from economic and social transformations caused by the collapse of the Ancien Régime, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic campaigns. European societies were divided into classes, leading to conflict.
The century began with the immediate success of the French Revolution in 1789. This revolution, also called the bourgeois revolution, saw the bourgeoisie, previously an irrelevant social class in policy decisions, acquire a dominant position. While the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, inspired by the Enlightenment, had boosted the French Revolution, they were not fully realized, resulting in frustrations and social dislocations that explain, in part, the political instability of this turbulent century.
The political triumph of the bourgeoisie was based on their economic power, which reached unprecedented levels with the implementation of capitalism and the development of industrial production (the Industrial Revolution), which replaced the agricultural and handicraft system. This process radically changed the economic conditions of individuals and the structure of social groups. The progressive accumulation of capital in the hands of the bourgeoisie drove scientific progress, leading to new technologies that changed the mode of production and social life. Science was thus oriented towards production.
In art, Romanticism signified a rupture with the exaltation of reason and the search for universality characteristic of the Enlightenment, favoring the irrationality of emotion and individualism. A taste for exaggeration, passion, and the exotic defined art in this era.
In philosophy, two streams derived from the Enlightenment dominated: German idealism and positivism. Idealism sought to overcome the dualism between subject and object, the external reality, that Kant could not resolve. This problem was conceived in terms of reconciliation between nature and spirit. Hegel, the main representative of German idealism, conceived reality as spirit, which reaches its deployment at the end of a dialectical process in which the spirit takes place in nature. Positivism, in turn, led to an extreme confidence in the Enlightenment’s reason, hoping that through science, humanity could dominate nature and perfect the social system.