Nietzsche’s Vitality: Reassessing Knowledge, Metaphysics, and Morality
Nietzsche’s Vitality in *Twilight of the Idols*
Nietzsche synthesizes a new point of view in four theses from which we must consider the interrelated problems of knowledge, metaphysics, and morality. However, he knows it is a problematic view. Nietzsche’s language is used to criticize language itself, creating a contradiction in his use of the word “real.”
The Four Theses
Thesis 1: What philosophy has called the apparent world is the only real world. Nietzsche only changes the attributes of both worlds: what was called apparent is now called real, and what was real is now called apparent. When philosophy stated that the world of sense experience was an apparent world, it gave it a kind of reality, the reality of appearance. This apparent reality contrasted with true reality. Nietzsche says we can ignore this second reality and that there is no more reality than that which results from the preparation we make of the testimony of the senses through our language.
Thesis 2: The unproven belief that linguistic information processed is a more accurate reflection of reality than a moral belief. For Nietzsche, the only thing really accessible to man is the ability to select their language and master the process, therefore contributing to both the senses and the concepts of reason.
Thesis 3: The invention of this world is but a result of the instinct of revenge directed against life in its entirety. This instinct for revenge is a disease, an outcome of resentment: the man who invented fables about another world is a sick animal that has been wounded by life and denies it, denying its own coming. The disease is localized in their sensitivity.
Thesis 4: The philosopher who invented fables about another life-denying world is sick and decadent. Nietzsche thinks there is another way of understanding life: that of the Dionysian artist. The difference is that this artist is not so stupid as to have believed his fable when in fact it is nothing. The Dionysian artist considers appearance more valuable than reality. The Dionysian artist is not just pessimistic because he says if anything is terrible and problematic, he takes it as material. He does not need more reality than there is in this world. He creates a lie, but a healthy lie.
The Eternal Return and the Will to Power
The eternal return: the philosopher appears now as a legislator, a creator of new values. The only way to lead to the Superman is through a transformation of the mode of experiencing time. Nietzsche alludes to this with the image of the south because he has to make the decision to set off into the sunset towards the dissolution of subjectivity.
Nietzsche gives a double meaning to the idea of eternal recurrence:
- An ethical sense: the idea of eternal return is the possibility that each moment of our life is eternal and then repeats ad infinitum.
- A cosmological sense: moments of this kind are possible only on condition that a transformation lies in the distinction between the real world and the apparent world.
The Will to Power: active nihilism in what works as a criterion to decide the fact of nihilism is the eternal meaninglessness. With the arrival of nihilism, all are forced to take sides; there is only struggle between opposing wills of power, a struggle of interpretations. The true essence of the will to power is hermeneutics, or interpretation. Of different interpretations of the world generated by the will, we would have to exclude those characterized as moral criteria proposed by revenge. Nietzsche’s criteria to decide on an interpretation of the world are physiological: strength versus weakness, or active nihilism.