Nietzsche’s Critique: Reason, Reality, and the Will to Power
Western Criticism of Reason
Demo-heuristic function: It serves to apprehend reality; no representation is valid. This is a function of the real candle. Nietzsche is a philosopher, skeptic, and relativist. This inability of reason is due to two reasons:
- Psychological: Reason flees the truth.
- Rhetorical function: From this perspective, reason is a form of fantasy.
Dialectic-critical function of reason: Reason not only produces fictions but is able to examine them.
Nietzsche criticizes Platonism and Christianity because both views of reality are responsible for a perfect world and give other ideas, as the body is not part of the human essence and we must dispose of it. Nietzsche is directly contrary to Christian morality: its contempt for nature, its condemnation of pleasure, to conceive of this life as a means to the other, a morality of slaves subject to the Almighty Lord of heaven. He also opposes two ideas of modernity:
- The historical conception, which gives meaning to human evolution with the idea of a future state of perfection.
- The idea of uniformity and timelessness of scientific laws.
Nietzsche does not condemn all forms of human culture. He saves the pre-Socratic thought, the sophistication, and the polytheistic religion of the Greeks, just as he saves art, music, tragedy, and poetry.
Concept of Reality
Nietzsche was inspired by Schopenhauer, who explained his new metaphysical view defending the irrational nature of reality. Nietzsche holds a similar idea of reality, but not dogmatic, because we cannot know what the world is. Nietzsche’s fundamental ideas about reality are:
- There is just this world.
- Reality is inhumane, indifferent to the fate of man.
- No salvation.
- All is a manifestation of a matrix from which everything emerges and returns.
- There is no world of permanent essences that repeat.
- Only eternally existing separately.
- Reality is the will to power.
- Life is the hidden essence of the world.
Nietzsche compresses his idea of reality in four myths:
Death of God
The philosopher of atheism.
By God is meant to be absolute, that gives meaning to the world, which saves man from death and becomes a guide and moral legislator. On the death of God is restored pre-Socratic idea of the world without a goal, direction or meaning, and since there is no Lord servants.
The Will to Power
Real is conceived as desire to exist. That is the unmoved mover, the drive or cause of all becoming.
The Eternal Return of the Same
The idea that happens to Nietzsche for not escaping from this life with the excuse that you only live once, the eternal return states the endless repetition of life as lived. It’s a moral standard to guide our action, wondering at every election if we would keep if I had to repeat forever.
Superman
The ethical ideal, the possibility of human existence that opens after the death of God. It is the embodiment of the will to power. It is the free spirit that does not conform to a given mode of existence and, as a camel loaded with the idea of a moral duty.
The moral of the lords and servants, Nietzsche argues that the concept of moral values unnatural and exalts current enemies of life. He speaks of a time the age of superiority, you would like to retrieve, where the ethical ideal was represented by Messrs. expressing the natural order of inequality. But these individuals were intellectually defeated by resentment and envy of the serfs.
The proposal Nietzsche’s moral:
- Fidelity to instinct.
- Pleasure as a moral guide.
- Egoism as an expression of love.
- Libertarianism propio.
- Moral conceived life as an experiment, not subject to ethical individualism-reglas.
- The moral conduct of querer.
- Life as a work of art.