Nietzsche’s Vitalism: Will to Power, Superman, and Eternal Return
Theme 1: Nietzsche’s Vitalism
1. Vitalism in Philosophy
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several philosophers developed their philosophies based on the reflection of life. Within this vitalism, there are common and different streams according to their concept of life. It is customary to note at least two ways of looking at life: life in the biological sense, and life in the biographical and historical sense.
2. Vitalism vs. Rationalism
Vitalism in philosophy is presented as a doctrine contrary to rationalism. The most important concepts revolving around vitalist philosophy are: temporality, history, experience, instinct, irrationality, embodiment, subjectivity, perspective, value of the individual, change, illness, death, and finitude.
3. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Life
One can understand the whole philosophy of Nietzsche as the attempt to give radical life to the Absolute. Life has no foundation outside itself; it has value in itself. Life is essentially understood in biological, instinctual, and irrational terms. Life as creation and destruction, as a field of joy and pain. For this reason, Nietzsche thought it possible to measure the value of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics from their opposition or affirmation of life.
4. Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture
Nietzsche’s thought can be understood as a critique of Western culture and a constructive proposal with vitalist thought.
4.1 Critique of Western Pillars
Consider the first: criticism of the pillars of Western culture is a moral criticism (criticizing the “slave morality” and advocating a “master morality” that affirms this world), a critique of religion as a result of fear and rejection of this world (our only world), a critique of traditional philosophy because, like religion, it has sought answers in an afterlife (whether Platonic or Kantian philosophy), a critique of science because it only seeks the immutable and denies the future (thus denying life’s dynamism), and a critique of language because it leads us to believe in names (God, substance, etc.) and forget the essential.
4.2 Nietzsche’s Vitalist Proposal
After critiquing the pillars of Western culture, Nietzsche proposes a vitalist philosophy. He urges us to love life so much that we are fascinated to madness. But what life do we have and want? Not the ‘other life,’ but this one, the only one there is, with its finitude, individuality, change, and contradiction. A life that, along with pleasure, fulfillment, and health, welcomes suffering, vulgarity, drudgery, disease, and death. Nietzsche, inspired by the Greek Dionysian vision, embraced this life and embellished it with his concepts of the Superman, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence. At the core of his philosophy, Nietzsche places life and, after facing various forms of Platonism in Western culture, makes it absolutely finite. Consider the great themes of his philosophy:
4.3 Nihilism and the “Death of God”
The expression “God is dead” means much more than a statement of atheism; it is a metaphor expressing the death of absolute truths and immutable ideas, the death of the ideals that guided human life.
Nihilism occurs after the death of God. The term nihilism, from the Latin nihil (nothing), refers to the time when values have fallen by the wayside, when what humans have put their trust in collapses. We are left alone, with nothing transcendent, facing an empty stage of disorientation.
Nihilism has two faces. A negative side, where losing the values we believed in leaves us lost and disoriented, and a positive side, where the lack of value in what we believed allows us to take a creative, innovative path, even if it means embracing the will to power.
4.4 The Will to Power
The will to power is the expression of meaning becoming domain, strength, and vital power. Life is a restless energy that constantly creates new forms and destroys others, with the stronger life aggressively imposing its law. We need to create new life forms, which involves destroying decadent forms to resist death.
However, the will to power is not merely about the fittest; it’s about developing power, effortlessly taking over a situation by one’s own greatness. It opposes the will to equality. The more powerful and creative a life is, the more it imposes hierarchy and inequality. The weaker and powerless seek to impose equality, reducing the original and exceptional to the ordinary and mediocre.
Nietzsche struggles against identifying equality with justice, finding this identification in the ideals of the French Revolution, socialist and communist proposals, democracies, and Christianity, which states that all are equal before God.
The will to power is the ultimate expression of human autonomy. It can only be overcome by accepting human mediocrity and weakness, leading to the appearance of the Superman.
4.5 The Superman
Speaking of the Superman, Nietzsche is not thinking of a superior race, but of an individual who, after going through nihilism, is capable of accepting life as it is, cheerfully and jovially. This person dares to take risks, says yes to life, and affirms the meaning of their existence on Earth.
The Superman is a superior being because they can be guided by their own rules and not accept imposed ones, moving away from the herd mentality. They create their own values, going beyond good and evil, especially since these concepts have lost their meaning. This creation of value requires the will to power, force, and energy, arising from ingenuity and innocence.
The authentic human being accepts victories and failures, experiences risk, and embraces the game seriously, like a child. The Superman, born after passing through the stages of the man-camel (who seeks security in tradition) and the man-lion (who recognizes nihilism), finds their best image in the child, with their way of life being play and risk.
The Superman also experiences time differently. Time is not linear but a continuous back and return. The Superman’s time is the eternal return, where every moment has infinite value.
4.6 Eternal Return
Eternal return is the endless repetition of all that exists. This concept has been interpreted in different ways and is linked to the cyclical view of time.