Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Transmutation of Values and the Superman
The death of God, the supreme value advocated by Western culture, leads to nihilism (the denial of everything). This proposition is not so much a philosophical attitude to life as a destructive and disintegrating force in front of the non-sense of Western culture. There are no absolute values. The ancient artifacts of Western metaphysics (God, Reason, Morality) have been discredited, fossilized. They do not have a meaning beyond that which we want to give them. Impera fiction, the absurdity, the drill. When Western culture is dying, nihilism becomes the result. Nietzsche distinguishes between three types of nihilism:
- Passive Nihilism: The fact of the vacuum leads to a flight into new fantasies. Permanent escape from oneself. Contrary to life.
- Reactive Nihilism: The fact of that void—God’s death—leads to a collapse into the abyss, nothingness, the nausea.
- Active Nihilism: Nihilism that leads to the limit of the death of God and becomes a creative force. This is the Superman vitalist nihilism. Nihilism is thus a dialectical force in a sense because destruction is to create vital. Active nihilism clears the ground for the effective transmutation of values. From here, life will be enhanced.
But why so much obsession with life? Because life is not contingent upon anything, it is an end in itself, not a means to an external end.
The Transmutation of Values
By far, the Nietzschean vitalism task is to propose a radical transmutation of values. That is, a transformation of the decadent values of Western culture that praises fear and weakness. In his words: “The concept is invented to further devalue the only world that exists, the concept of the soul to despise the body, and the concept of a good man to disregard the wishes and needs.” What it is, in sum, is to annihilate the true greatness of the human being to submission, to neutralize the power. But Nietzsche is not merely an apocalyptic description of the contemporary world; he proposes alternatives, a transmutation of values that have life as the main axis. That is why Nietzsche claimed master morality (natural morality) that considers virtue as the expression of our desires. Nietzsche inserts this new morality into a world where what prevails is change, diversity, and plurality. It is necessary to live fully in a world in constant transformation, giving up the false security that seeks to give us the concepts and science. Recover the value of metaphors and multiple interpretations. Everything stops rot.
However, this transmutation of values, this return to the state of affairs, can only be carried out by the Superman.
Slave Morality vs. Master Morality
For Nietzsche, in the field of morality, we should distinguish two types:
- The Slave Morality: The morality preached by Christianity and that has gripped the Western World. Based on weakness, decay, fear, rejection of the body, and feelings, it is articulated around the idea of God. This is an unnatural morality.
- The Master Morality: The morality of the Superman, who can become their own source of values. Morality is in line with life, with the will to power.
It is clear that for Nietzsche, the great immorality is the moral commitment of the lords. He defends a moral naturalism: life—an expression of nature—is the source of all values. However, the slave morality that has been imposed in the West establishes ideas of guilt, malice, resentment, obedience, and submission—eigenvalues of weak, vulgar, and decadent individuals. What they did, ultimately, is to reverse things, considering as strong and powerful anything improper of men and attributing it to a fiction called God. Only when you see the Superman, announced by Zarathustra, will man recover and live their primitive innocence, finally, beyond good and evil.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian
- The Apollonian element represents the rational, theoretical, clear, and lucid consciousness, detachment from the passions and instincts, the chill calculator.
- The Dionysian element represents the natural, earthy, vital, instinctual, emotional, and sentimental—dance, music, drunkenness, poetry.
In the ancient Greek cultural traditions (in the Homeric tradition, for example), both elements were in balance. Man was seen as a fusion of Apollonian (rational) and Dionysian (instinctive) elements. So far, all is well. But what happened?
From Nietzsche’s point of view, the emergence of Socrates on the scene suggested a breakdown of the prior balance in advocating the relationship: Reason = Truth = Virtue (Properties). This relationship involved a very clear Apollonian opted for the component at the expense of the Dionysian. And herein lies, for Nietzsche, the source of all the evils of Western culture, the birth of tragedy. Socrates became the great corrupter, destroying feelings, instincts, and emotions in favor of the dictates of Reason. He puts concepts and abstractions where before there was a game and art, order and measure where before there was spontaneity, fear where before there was nobility. Philosophy has focused on the rational pursuit of truth, assuming further that the real and virtuous identifies with it. The crime was perpetrated.
Plato’s Dualism
Plato, the outstanding disciple of Socrates and his spokesman, would have gone even further (to delirium). No one accepts this gaping between the instinctive and the rational, but he also divides reality into two worlds: the intelligible world (true), which represents the rational, and the sensible world (misleading), which represents the emotional and instinctive. Let us remember that Plato had to bury our sensitive side if we wanted to get closer to understanding the ideas.
This would have been the beginning of a dualism that would have us believe in the existence of an apparent world to which belong all the senses, the earthly, corporeal, while the “Real World” would be of reason, spiritual, the eternal and immutable. For Nietzsche, rather, we should overturn or think that all we have is what has so far been spurned by all Philosophy, Religion, and Western Culture. To rate the sensible as false or apparent is a form of escape from our own nature, that is what makes the weak and fearful. For Nietzsche, the “Real World” ended up becoming a fable.
Here lies, in the opposition between the “apparent world” and the “Real World,” the source of corruption and decadence of Western culture. This has developed a series of metaphysical devices (Reason, God, Morality) it is necessary to expose because they oppose the values that come from the desires, emotions, full of life, in short.
The Innocence of Becoming
The innocence of becoming is the fruit of understanding things in their changing and flowing nature, away from the idea of order and regularity that traditional philosophy has tried to impose as a way to win in security and tranquility. There is no single meaning, nor a single interpretation for the evolution. The world is as it appears to us, not as some would like it to be. It’s “innocent” because it is “beyond good and evil” and responds only to its internal dynamics. Becoming is innocent because it is alien to the burden of guilt that some will want to impose.