Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Influences and Nihilism
Influences Rejected by Nietzsche
Suppression of Socrates’ Instincts
Plato consummated nihilism through the subordination of life to ideas.
Christianity
Christianity is the model of slave morality. It makes everyone equal because everyone is considered sinful. People-God. Platonism for the lie is more durable.
Descartes and the Rationalist Tradition
To identify being and thinking, life is beyond thought, which is subordinate to life. Nietzsche knew the irregular history of philosophy. Every society considers moral instincts that seem useful: morality is a feature of life. The only categorical imperative that exists for Nietzsche is the duty of the living.
Utilitarianism
The greatest degree of happiness for the greatest number of people is “morality for the masses” as opposed to life than the individual.
Scientific Positivism
Science does not give us the true interpretation of reality. Hypothesis, the mathematization, does not explain the relationship with reality. To establish quantitative relationships and to reduce all qualities to quantities is a mistake. Behind the mask of science emerges a new image of man: the arrival of the Superman.
Influences Assumed by Nietzsche
Ancient Greece
Man was harmonic. The recourse to the classical tradition has always had a sense of combat against a present that seemed too sad and miserable, to help us think about the future by deepening the archaic past. The idea of truth is not separate from life.
Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Sophists
Movement is a characteristic of change and life. They do not have a univocal concept of truth.
Left Hegelians
Materialist and atheist critics. “God is dead” means that man creates God as a photographic negative of human misery and a sense of values.
Schopenhauer
Nietzsche’s master. Schopenhauer says the will is central to human life. Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauerian pessimism.
Wagner
Opera in terms of a total work of art. Pessimist.
Darwin’s Influence, Discussed
Aesthetic spectacle of natural selection and the struggle for life. The principle of natural selection does not work on the Superman, who clearly has a critical-moral and not a biological meaning.
Apollo and Dionysus
- Apollo: Day, light, reason, thing-in-itself, wisdom, principle of individuation.
- Dionysus: Night, darkness, irrational will, appearance, phenomenon, drunkenness. Dionysus is the opposite of Socrates.
Western Civilization
Western civilization consists of denouncing the “instincts” to encourage various cultural events. Everything comes from a unique instinct: the desire for nothing, hate—or fear—of life. All aspects of Western culture since Socrates and Plato, the same error persists: the search for truth in the suprasensible world (Ideas), while underestimating life. Therefore, nihilism is not a theory but a diagnosis: we are sad because we suppress life. The broken line of Western culture since Socrates until now is called “nihilism” in the unhappy consciousness and lack of ability to create that characterizes Western man.
Passive and Active Nihilism
Passive nihilism is decadence and the will to power. Active nihilism, the increasing presence of the will, will be a means of overcoming power. To be a Superman, one must pass through the stages of the camel and the lion. Therefore, the symbol of the Superman is the child: you do not know what you want and therefore cannot be built. The nihilists of the “other worlds” make the mistake of placing life outside the walls of life itself. When these values crack—when they collapse because they are illusory—nihilism will necessarily follow. When you receive it, it will be the time of the “last man”. Any criticism of Nietzsche is a manifestation of this active nihilism that wants to move to passive nihilism and create a new civilization that collapses before the final old one.
Stages of Nihilism
- Resentment: Accusation against life.
- Bad Conscience: Accusation against life, but now with the internalization of blame.
- Christianity’s Ascetic Ideal: Sublimation (positively transforming what is negative). The ascetic ideal is an inversion: believing that the weak are strong, only to support and be quiet.
- The Death of God: God is dead means that we have run out of any criterion for evaluating our actions, no supreme value that targets us.
- The Last Man and Men Who Want to Die: God is dead means that there is a gap. Modern man knows well enough that his life is empty, with a lack of meaning. No one can reach Superman if they do not experience the misery of the last man.