Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Vitalism, Art, and Critique
Nietzsche represents a critique of rationalism and idealism from a new perspective with two facets:
- A negative side: criticism of the main concepts and values that have traditionally served to explain the world in Western culture.
- A positive side: the attempt to understand and explain life as the deep background of what unfolds. Hence, his philosophy is known as vitalism.
Tragic View of Life
The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music outlines the key themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy. He describes life as the original background and depth of the concrete that comes around, art as the best medium to interpret it, and intuition as a method of understanding life that cannot be grasped by reason or conceptual understanding.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian
Nietzsche believed that the forces originating from Greek culture had been two aesthetic forces that fight each other but cannot exist without the other: the Apollonian, representing order, light, and measure, and the Dionysian, the symbol of the deep flow of life itself. Nietzsche says that it is necessary to recover the tragic vision of the world, presenting this image of the world as a reality in which life and death, birth and decay are infinite. For Nietzsche’s philosophy, art is tragic wisdom, a penetrating look at the original struggle of competing principles represented by Dionysus and Apollo.
Relativity of Knowledge
Knowledge is a resource for Nietzsche’s most unhappy beings. It serves to keep them in existence but also misrepresents its value. What is fixed from then on must be true. Designation is invented for things uniformly valid and binding. The truth depends on the correct use of language conventions; the lie is to believe that life is captured through concepts.
The Concepts Hide the Truth
Nietzsche wondered what happens to the conventions of language and whether these are consistent with things. The truth is the most deceptive guise of reason. The words express pure metaphors for things. Concepts become when applied to a plurality of individuals. Every concept is formed by alignment of different cases, but nature knows no forms or concepts. The concept is the residue of a metaphor, which is to understand the world as a humane thing.
Man: Conceptual and Intuitive
Nietzsche contrasts the conceptual man, who uses logic and cannot know things as they are, with the intuitive man. Thanks to intuition and art, one can come to understand life better than the scientist. He understands intuition as a kind of divination, with eyes like a ray that penetrates into the essence of things.
Criticism of Western Culture
Nietzsche attacks philosophy, religion, and morality in a special way, but also covers critical art, science, politics, etc., which he considers responsible for the path followed by culture. The criticism of Western culture is a scathing critique, which is done to death. It is the philosophy of the hammer, which seeks to strike and remove the concepts and cultural constructions.
Criticism of Philosophy
The Socratic equation reason = virtue = happiness seems outrageous and contrary to life because happiness is equivalent to a life instinct fully upward. It opens a moral interpretation of being, to put the Good as the supreme Idea, which replaces the interpretation that made the world and pre-Socratic philosophers was more close to reality. For Nietzsche, the biggest mistake of philosophy consists in the underestimation of the changing. Rejection of the real world space and time, putting in place an imagined world, which they call the real world. Nietzsche proposes a reversal of the ontology and the valuation to be made of so far. What was considered here apparently is real and what Nietzsche it was thought the true self is the invention of thought.