Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Will to Power, Eternal Return, and the Death of God
Nietzsche’s Philosophy
Life as Will
The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer’s first work, delves into the origin of tragedy, the spirit of music, and the core of faith: life as reality. The ultimate nature of all life is what we love most profoundly, what escapes concepts—what is “lived” and not merely thought. This spontaneous instinct is permanent and continuous change. Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche explores the will to life—a creative force, the desire to procreate, and a blind grasp on reality. This enduring will is the unique and absolute source of all things, but also of pain, because to want is to live, and life is temporal.
For Schopenhauer, consciousness reveals the pain of living, preventing us from seeing the profound reality of life. Thus, humanity creates art, a world of apparent beauty where the will forgets the dislocation of existence. Through the ascetic life, one renounces desire, thus avoiding deception and pain. Nietzsche, however, exalts life, seeking release from culture and hoping to achieve the eternal recurrence of a grand, admirable life.
Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche finds tragedy in the incessant confrontation of generation and corruption, life and death. His philosophy is vital, proclaiming the joy of living, but also accepting life’s tragic character—not masking it, but accepting suffering as the price of beauty. The Übermensch (Superman) is defined by the will to power.
Language and Life
Language, the focal point of mental activity, influences how we think, feel, and live. Pre-expressive language helps us express insights and thoughts. While things can be expressed, our relationship with them depends on our perceptions, organized by our will. Nietzsche denounces the enchanting power of pre-expressive language to change life.
Art and Reality
Life isn’t accessible through intellectual comprehension, but through intuition that penetrates existence. Art and poetry are how we grasp the world’s original essence. Aesthetics and ontology are united, represented by two symbols:
- Dionysian spirit: The god of orgies, representing the unmeasured heat of life, a living symbol of overflowing, breaking barriers and spiritual limitations.
- Apollonian spirit: The god of beauty, representing reason, measure, balance, and individuality.
The struggle between these two represents the “tragic game”: life-death, birth-decay.
Evolution of Greek Tragedy
Greek tragedy expresses the antithesis between the infinite and finite, the Dionysian and Apollonian. Pathos (feeling the tragic life) isn’t pessimistic; it’s a return to the truth that all individuals arise from the same source. Light and night, birth and death are intertwined. Similarly, art involves the tragic and sublime acceptance of life’s pain, which also engenders grandeur. Tragedy captures the creative synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
Socrates represents the decadence of the Greek spirit, taking life as a tragic mystery and sorrowful character, breaking the balance and allowing Apollonian forces (reason) to predominate.
Nihilism
Nihilism is a philosophical stance denying the existence of inherent values. Nietzsche criticizes Western tradition’s separation of language and life (vitality), including religion and moral philosophy. This loss of meaning is nihilism, a failure of imposed Christian values. However, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not nihilistic.
Critique of Philosophy
Origin of Nihilism
Nietzsche locates the negation of life in Socrates and Plato, who tried to escape life’s expiration by dignifying it with infinite concepts. This created an ideal reality of concepts: truth and reason triumphing over the imperfect world and life—Apollonian over Dionysian. Nietzsche unmasks this idealism, showing it’s not real. What we experience with our senses is real, the becoming of Heraclitus, the appearance.
Intuition vs. Concept
The triumph of language and concept is the domain of consciousness against intuition. Consciousness invents causes and correlates, turning everything into the intelligible. We invent concepts through a unique, stable, and public identity. But the subject isn’t an identity, but a masked plurality. The basis of knowledge is intuition, through which we grasp the immediate and individual—life itself.
Critique of Metaphysics
Language fabricates things, letting us invent. Language changes appearance and pushes us towards permanence, unity, and concepts of being. What matters are not the words, but the drive of words. Words are metaphors expressing not things, but our intuitions. Language only indicates the relation between things and humans. Words are concepts, metaphors, and metaphors are only wasted forms.
Critique of Truth
Philosophy’s error is forgetting intuition as the origin of concepts and accepting that concepts designate reality. There’s no truth in knowledge or concepts. Perspectivism (seeing the world from multiple viewpoints) cannot be objective.
Critique of Science
Nietzsche’s critique isn’t against the mechanism of positive sciences, but against their attempt to mathematize reality, which is unable to know the uniqueness of each thing. His attack on the Enlightenment was directed against theological dogmas and the Church.
Critique of Morality
The genealogical method shows the reality behind words: the will to power. Nietzsche criticizes Christian morality as decadent. The apparent division between the real world and an ideal world is a distinction of Western tradition, Platonic and inflated by Christianity. This division leads to what he calls “slave morality,” where what others say is true is considered real. Life is decadent slavery. Nietzsche embodies ascending life, creating values of life, facing the prospect of Apollonian decadence. The division of the real into fact and appearance is an Apollonian division.
Decadent Life
Nietzsche exposes three theories: the Übermensch, the transvaluation of values, and the will to power. He believes the root of Western tradition, from Socrates onward, is creating good and evil. His moral thinking is to overcome morality itself. Zarathustra proclaims the need to go beyond good and evil, positing a natural morality that affirms the values of life. We must affirm life, never deny it, and restore the original state of moral innocence. Natural morality identifies with the Übermensch.
Death of God
The “death of God” means a radical critique of religion, morality, and metaphysics upon which Western civilization is built. This shifts humanity’s orientation away from a transcendent world to focus on this world, this real life. With the death of dogmatism and a supernatural conception of reality based on reason and the division between right and wrong, a pluralistic vision of reality and life emerges.
Nihilism and Perspectivism
Perspectivism recognizes the multiplicity of interpretations, enabling human freedom, liberated from its historical burden. The death of God leaves room for life and the Übermensch. The transvaluation of values amounts to a constant becoming, affirmed in life.
Will to Power
The will to power is Nietzsche’s essential concept, synonymous with the capacity to create values. Reality and the Übermensch are dominated by the will to power, which creates reality and values without accepting any morality. Whoever has created, knows. The concept of will to power is at the core of the “transvaluation of values” and the new morality of the Übermensch. It means accepting life (instinct) joined with the eternal return of time.
Eternal Return
This concept has pre-Socratic origins, especially in Heraclitus. The eternal return is the constant, rhythmic repetition of things. Affirming it means admitting a world dominated by becoming, where everything repeats like a game or dance. This doctrine is the supreme attempt to see becoming as being, renouncing the transcendent. It requires lived experience and deserves to be lived eternally. The Übermensch accepts life as becoming, as eternal repetition. This idea stems from the desire to accept life with all its consequences.
Nietzsche’s Philosophy
Nietzsche goes beyond meaning; he’s a new human type, a prophet of the Übermensch. He follows the Apollonian. Nihilism has a downside (being from nothing) and a positive side (a historical transformation). Nietzsche’s philosophy doesn’t fit into any mainstream. He criticizes Western culture, creating, along with Marx and Freud, a philosophy of suspicion. 19th-century European culture is in crisis, the path of European man is wrong. The 19th century is a busy century of revolutions. Romanticism reacts against Enlightenment thinking, and scientific and philosophical positivism. The reaction against positivism marks the transition to the 20th century. Positivism highlights life, spirit, and freedom. European mentality changes. Nietzsche’s philosophy is called “the hammer.” Written in 1888, his critique of Western tradition is devastating, directed at all fields: positivist science, religions, Socratic morality.