Understanding Nietzsche’s Main Ideas
1. Introduction
The path followed by European man, marked since the days of Socrates and Plato, is a closed path. If Hegel collects, maintains, and integrates all the spiritual history of the West into his system, Nietzsche, instead, undergoes a devastating criticism and denies it as metaphysical.
2. The Worldview: The Birth of Tragedy
Art, not science, is the best expression of life. Tragedy reveals the true nature of reality: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. With Socrates, the tragic wisdom is lost.
3. Knowledge, Language, and Truth
(From *On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense*). Consideration of scientific and artistic knowledge, the life of rational man and intuitive man.
4. Metaphysics
Metaphysics (namely Christianity, Platonism, and ultimately, the entirety of Western culture) is nothing other than the split between the sensible and the supersensible world, becoming and being. The supersensible world is considered true and good; the body is separate from God.
5. The Root of Metaphysics
Resentment and vengeance against life, against becoming. The position of the supersensible world as the real world (a negation of life, of becoming) arises from resentment against life, the inability to fully assume it. Resentment arises because life is born and dies. Because of the passage of time, one cannot deny anything as true, by positing this other world, the *real* one, beyond becoming.
6. The Supersensible World
The supersensible world is God, and God is dead. That is, the interpretation of being in force during the course of Western metaphysics has lost its obligatory character and has annihilated itself. The truth, which since Plato is an afterlife, has neither asserted its presence nor its absence: this is nihilism.
7. Release from Vengeance
(The overcoming of metaphysics). To address an attitude toward life that does not need to put a blemish on it because it has to be judged. Do not give up what’s happening, what is born and dies, by bringing over a real world, good and comforting, but *will* the eternal recurrence.
8. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same
The meaning of the doctrine of eternal recurrence is to recognize the value of becoming, of eternity. To imprint upon becoming the character of being – this would be assuming the loss of the supersensible world, and the sensible is manifested as it is.
9. A New Type of Humanity: The Superman
The release from vengeance (assuming the death of God) is the birth of a new type of humanity, which Nietzsche calls the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth, with the motto “stay true to the earth,” to life, radically assuming the death of God and nihilism, and overcoming the situation of the last man, in which the usual values no longer apply. The last man is without values.
10. Nihilism
God, nihilism, and pure metaphysics were hidden. With the death of God, nothing is revealed. Everything has lost value. The *will to power* is a constitutive behavior of man, but if anything, it is life that has become pathological. We are in the situation where the last man wants nothing. We must embrace nihilism to stop it from being negative.