Philosophy essay

1. Nietzsche saw himself as the first to recognize a profound sickness at the core of modernity.

1. Modernity – refers to the historical period of the nineteenth and twentieth century nation-states and to a corresponding set of cultural conditions and beliefs dominated by Enlightenment ideals.

1. Modernity includes a faith in science, objective truth, and rationality, expectation of inevitable progress, capitalism, urbanization, large scale industrial enterprise mass literacy, media, culture, political democracy, anti-traditionalism, individualism and secularization.

1. The Outsider

1. Nietzsche, a depressed outsider, came across the work of Arthur Schopenhauer.(1788-1860) and his philosophy of pessimism.

1. Pessimism – life is disappointing and for every satisfied desire, new desires emerge; our only hope is detachment and withdrawal.

1. Schopenhauer believed that life was an irrational, purposeless striving for a pointless existence.

1. According to Schopenhauer, what little salvation there is comes from resisting the will to live at all costs and curtailing our desires.

1. From Schopenhauer Nietzsche concluded that life makes no objective, absolute sense.

1. For Schopenhauer life does not result in a divine plan or orderly way.

1. Schopenhauer believed life was governed by the will to live but Nietzsche believed it was governed by the will to power.

1. Tragic Optimism

1. Nietzsche saw Bismarck, the Prussian leader who won wars against Austria and France, as an example of a higher morality based on strength, power, and the will to dominate.

1. He was impressed that Bismarck ruled by “blood and iron.”

1. Nietzsche then combined Bismarck’s power of domination with Darwin’s ideas of evolution to come up with his own unique doctrine of overcoming.

1. Nietzsche transformed Schopenhauer’s doctrine of pessimism into his own doctrine of overcoming.

1. Nietzsche believed that Schopenhauer was right in recognizing that life consisted of continual struggle and hardship. However, Nietzsche believed that Schopenhauer’s reaction of retreat and renunciation was decadent and weak-willed. Nietzsche’s solution was tragic optimism.

1. Tragic optimism – Nietzsche’s sense of joy and vitality that accompanies the superior individual’s clear-sighted imposition of his own freely chosen values on a meaningless world.

1. To Nietzsche Schopenhauer failed to recognize that the struggle to survive aims at the dominance of the strongest and the fittest.

1. Zarathustra Speaks

1. Thus Spake Zarathustra

1. Nietzsche used the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra.

1. Zarathustra was a call to rise above decadence and mediocrity.

1. Zarathustra was at once a great destroyer of values and a creator of newer, higher values.

1. Zarathustra’s destroyer-creator announces the arrival of a new evolutionary type, the overman.

1. Nietzsche’s purpose was clear, to destroy conventional morality and replace it with higher immoral idea.

1. Truth is as Matter of Perspective

1. According to Nietzsche aesthetic vision (art or taste) e.g. what pleases me, is the basis of meaning, not science, religion, morality or rationality.

1. Nietzschean perspectivism – every view is only one among many possible interpretations, including especially Nietzschean perspectivism.

1. Nietzsche calls the different points of view experiments.

1. Nietzsche’s value system is anti-moral from the point of view of conventional Christian morality.

1. Anti-philosopher – a radical critic of certain foundational doctrines of modern science and philosophy who disputes the possibility of objectivity and universality and who rejects the absolute authority of reason.

1. Attack on Objectivity

1. What can Nietzsche offer in place of objectivity, universality and reason?

1. Instead of offering a recognizable philosophical argument, Nietzsche offers a twofold appeal, 1.) calls on us to justify life as an esthetic phenomenon, 2.) the will to power.

1. Neither component depends on reason or scientific inquiry for its justification.

1. Nietzsche says that knowledge itself is an invention.

1. Nietzsche says we have no chance of discovering the objective truth about anything. He says that truths are creations that serve our will to power.

1. Truth is seen by Nietzsche as a function of the physiology and pathology of the individual, not absolute, unchanging fact of nature or proposition derived from reason.

1. The idea of self that persists throughout a lifetime is a fiction or metaphor, not a fact.

1. According to Nietzsche a hidden agenda lurks behind science, philosophy, and religion.

1. Philosophers, scientists, true believers of all types seek power over the world, over others, even over themselves.

1. They often disguise this as efforts to improve life and human behavior

1. The Will to Power

1. The single goal of science, religion and philosophy is the assertion of power.

1. Modernity, with its mass movements, reliance on science, technology and educated reasonableness, and Christianized emphasis on altruism, devolves away from the intensification of life and toward the mere preservation and extension of it.

1. The Disease of Modernity

1. Nietzsche claimed that late nineteenth century European culture was dominated by a superficially optimistic belief that scientific progress and Christian morality could subdue the will to power and thereby make life safe and meaningful for the masses.

1. The cultural sickness Nietzsche describes is based on unwarranted faith in science, philosophy, and Christianity.

1. Each of these decaying belief systems in hostile to the will to power, the will to exalt ourselves, and the will to live.

1. The Problem of Morality

1. Nietzsche believed that like science, modern ethical schemes reduced the great passion of living to his utilitarian calculations or pinched Kantian formulae.

1. Far from expressing objective truths, or even scientific facts, moral codes reflect the desires and perspectives of those who create them.

1. Nietzsche said that what philosophers called a rational foundation for morality was merely a scholarly variation of in the common faith of the prevalent morality.

1. Nietzsche accuses modern European culture of being moralistic.

1. Moralistic – consists of expressing commonplace moral sentiments that conflict with one’s behavior and equating moral sentimentality with virtuous living. Today we would call that being hypocritical.

1. Being moralistic is a form of hypocrisy that resembles what Freudian psychologists call reaction formation – the ego defense mechanism that attempts to prevent dangerous ideas from being expressed by endorsing opposite ideas and behaviors as barriers against them.

1. For Nietzsche all modern morality has a Christian basis.

1. In Nietzsche’s view, modernity is anti-life and anti-nature and modern Christian moralities are symptoms for decadence and decay.

1. The Problem of Generalized Accounts

1. Nietzsche didn’t like utilitarianism because he said it sublimated the individual to the group, manifested unwarranted faith in reason, and preached altruism.

1. Nietzsche disagreed with the modern notion that with proper education and the application of scientific empiricism, society can be reformed.

1. To Nietzsche modern culture is wrong in its belief that bad actions stem from curable ignorance and not evil. Modern morality reduces threatening but vital passions to mere errors.

1. Nietzsche says that the ideal modern citizen is tame, democratic, sheep=like, and compassionate.

1. Nietzsche’s critique of culture centers on his deep and abiding suspicion of all attempts to generalize a code for living.

1. Science, modern philosophy, and transcendental schemes turn away from life, itself, from vitality, to the extent that they speak of and to all.

1. Modern science and philosophy lead to cultural and spiritual disease because they generalize where one must not generalize.

1. So intense is modernity’s assault on individual expressions of the will to power it forgives, tolerates, and emphasizes with those that would harm it.

1. In Nietzsche’s view, all of modernity’s efforts to make scientific and moral progress are pointing toward the cultural shift that heralds the next great level of evolution, the end of human history and the beginning of the age of the overman.

1. Philosophy and science do not provide us with meaning, we create it.

1. God is Dead

1. By God is dead Nietzsche believed that the ideal of God had lost its creative force.

1. If we dig deep into our psyches we will discover we no longer have ultimate faith in God, our true faith is in scientific and technological progress.

1. The idea of God is so deeply ingrained we are not aware of this great spiritual shift.

1. If there is no God, all values must be re-evaluated.

1. According to Nietzsche the death of God leads to nihilism

1. Nihilism – belief that the universe lacks meaning and purpose.

1. Consequently, moral, social and political values are creative interpretations.

1. Under nihilism what counts is found in the particular subjective interest of individuals and groups. What gives me and my kind advantage over others?

1. We chose value systems and philosophies based on our sense of power.

1. Overman

1. The death of God and increasing democratization of western culture signals both a great calamity and a great opportunity depending on your perspective.

1. It is a calamity for those inferior types who cannot bear to stand on their own and who crave the security of the democratic heard.

1. It is a glorious opportunity for the fearless, the brave, the overman.

1. Overman - higher type, more than human being that will emerge only by overcoming the false idols of conventional morality and religion.

1. Without God to limit us, to define us, to smother us, we can finally grow beyond man.

1. The same science that has given us so much has robbed us of purpose.

1. The overman is Nietzsche’s answer to the pessimism and nihilism that follows in the wake of God’s death.

1. To Nietzsche the overman is further from the mere man than we are from the ape.

1. Slave Morality

1. A herd man is a merely human type of person that cannot face being alone in a godless universe, refuses to be an individual, and who turns to the group or herd for power, identity and purpose.

1. The inferior person’s awareness of his or her inferiority produces a resentment of the higher types and elitist value systems.

1. In an effort to control their superiors the herd has created a slave morality, a value system guilt, fear, and a distortion of the will to power in which characteristics of the inferior type, humility, passivity, and dependency are praised as virtues. Under herd morality the characteristics of the superior type (overman), love of domination, delight in one’s own talents, and fairness are condemned as arrogance and cold-heartedness.

1. Today rationalistic Christian and Greek ethics are the two chief sources of slave morality.

1. Fairness, equality, moderation, stepping aside, refusing to claim the full rights accompanying superior ability and talent, and resentment are all characteristics of slave morality.

1. Ressentiment

1. Slave morality originates from a deep form of psychologically polluting resentment that Nietzsche always referred to using the French word ressentiment.

1. Ressentiment – French for the psychically polluting resentment that generates slave morality; the dominant emotion of the underman.

1. Slave morality is so opposed to the authentic individual that the herd man’s own self-creating impulses are stifled in favor of the external stimuli that function as guidelines from others and from the herd.

1. Slave morality is phony because it is always a reaction and never an originating impulse.

1. The herd man fears the other in the form of the authentic individual or even the different.

1. Thus, the slave morality encourages conformity; national, ethnic, and religious bigotry; and unthinking patriotism.

1. Slave morality is a morality of resignation, deferral, withdrawal from the full range of life, and prohibition.

1. In reality, the merely human members of the herd do not reject the lusty, fateful, self-affirming, creative aspects of the human psyche because they are bad, but because they are too weak, corrupt and sick to live up to them. Out of ressentiment they prevent others from living up to them as well.

1. Master Morality

A. Although, both the overman and the herd man have a will to power they approach their will to power differently.

B. The overman expresses the will to power openly, honestly, and nobly through exuberance, life-affirmation, self-creation, and self-imposition.

C. Because the underman lacks courage he must resort to appeals to God, to neurotic guilt, and demands for pity.

D. In the herd the will to individual power is perverted through manipulation, ressentiment, and indirection, and shaped by feelings of gross inadequacy. It is not expressed honestly and openly.

E. Master morality – morality that looks only to the overman for values that transcend the slave morality’s good – evil dichotomy. It replaces it with values defined by aesthetic terms: glorious-degrading, honorable-dishonorable, refined-vulgar, and so on.

F. The overman only looks to himself or herself for value.

G. Whereas the overman’s morality begins with the affirmation of himself or herself, the herd man’s morality begins with the invention of the evil other.

H. The master morality is a positive orientation, the slave morality is negative.

I. We are living in the twilight of our culture and no new value system has replaced the older one.

J. This provides us with unlimited opportunities for growth.

K. Having overcome merely human resentment and self-loathing the overman looks forward to being precisely what and who he or she is.

XVI. Amor Fati

1. According to Nietzsche, in the absence of God we must redeem ourselves with the sacred yes to life expressed in the amor fati.

1. Amor fati – the love of fate, expressed as joyous affirmation and delight that everything is exactly as and what it is.

1. Nihilism teaches us there is no purpose that gives meaning and quality to our lives.

1. Science shows that matter follows inexorable laws.

1. Amor fati blesses everything exactly as it is.

1. Through amor fati we exist as part of a complex whole that can be precisely what it is and cannot be otherwise.

1. Commentary

1. Nietzsche’s assertive denial of objective meaning has influenced a whole generation of scholars and literary critics.

1. Nietzsche has influenced contemporary theories founded in the rejection of the possibility of unbiased interpretation.

1. When being an individual becomes the goal what happens to Nietzsche’s assertion that you shouldn’t follow the herd?

1. Today it is politically incorrect to assert that we are not all equal, but does that assertion have any validity?

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