Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Critique, Morality, and the Superman
Nietzsche’s Philosophical Task
The philosophical task proposed by Nietzsche is twofold:
- A negative aspect: a critique of the main concepts of religion, philosophy, and morality.
- A positive aspect: the attempt to understand and explain life as a deep background on which everything arises.
Critique of Metaphysics
Since we know this world is unreal, we must look at the other for being in possession of the truth. So dedicated to finding, to “speculate” over the movement of the world: what is to be the world we cannot study in the whirlwind of comings and goings of this life, as it is for him because of error.
Humans invented the fiction of metaphysics to escape aging and give their life meaning infinity. We deny, says the philosopher lively, absolutely any ontology that involves a contempt for life as it is.
Critique of Conceptual Knowledge and Language
First, report a Platonism in the genesis and formation of concepts that has resulted in the reification and substantivation. Concepts that were once created to refer to an experience or original experience, but over time have themselves become substance, acquiring independent living.
In addition, the genesis of the concepts requires a process of abstraction that ignores individual differences arbitrarily to achieve a universal representation. The concept rather than reflect reality, hides it.
Finally, Nietzsche does not escape the close relationship between language and metaphysics static and conceptual knowledge. The grammatical structure of a language defines the field of interpretation and the possibilities of conceptualizing the world.
To avoid suffering the fate petrified to be fixed in a custom category becomes immutable, the German philosopher metaphorical imagination exalts the human being. The metaphor is a true perspective because it is achieved through the integration of various possible summoned game.
Moral Critique
Nietzsche understands morality as “anti-nature”, i.e., that which is opposed to life, which imposes rules against the life instincts. His idea rather spends on the ground that the instincts that Christianity has tried to remove, must be harnessed and used as what they are, an expression of life. Life that should be considered the center from which to judge what is truly good and bad. Morality imposed on the West has become a symptom of declining life and nihilism.
Death of God and Nihilism
Nietzsche announced the death consequences of God’s will for man, consequences that have not yet become known. Because if God was the guarantor of moral, political and legal, of truth, knowledge and nature, the sense of the world and all existence, then the death of God, you have to have an impact on all these areas. The death of God does not mean that no longer believes in God, is that everything has been based on it is gradually crumbling. When the consequences of the death of God come, and before the coming of the superman will nihilism. The nihilist no longer believes in anything, he devotes his life to the systematic critique of truth, the denial of any cognitive and moral value in the idea that if there are no absolute moral truths, no longer has meaning, and this is more properly nihilism, in denying any sense to life. However, another possibility is open, other than nihilism, to create new values, but create it from one who loves life instincts.
Superman
To do this is what we need a superman. Superman has the function of recovering meaning in life. The future Superman is a hero, a philosopher come to understand what the essence of life, the will to power. And through it can manifest life.
The Will to Power
Nietzschean metaphysics or ontology is known for will to power, since this is the most intimate essence of being.