Kyle Jameson
PHIL-1030-H01
Dr. Phil Oliver
11/28/2013
Nietzsche,
Hero of Disgruntled Teenagers
When
someone says the name Nietzsche, what does one think? If you haven’t graduated
high school, you most likely think that he is the greatest mind of any science,
hard or soft. If you have, you most likely think he is a crazy misanthrope.
However, he is considered one of the first existentialist philosophers who
inspired leaders in all forms of culture with his revitalizing philosophy. Even
the average person has at least heard of Nietzsche, mostly from his influence
on popular culture. Yes, 113 years after his death, he is still one of the
better-known philosophers along with the classic Greeks. However, to know what
made this inspiring, polarizing figure what he is, one must take a look at his
life.
Nietzsche was born in a rural farmland
southwest of Leipzig, specifically in the small German village of a town that
one cannot type on an average computer due to the inclusion of two umlauts The
closest one could get is Rocken bei Lutzen. Oddly enough, we know that
Nietzsche was born at approximately 10:00 AM on October 15, 1884, most likely
since it coincided with the birthday of the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm
IV. When Nietzsche was 5, his father and brother died within six months of each
other. Since Nietzsche’s father was the church pastor and the family lived in
the pastor’s home, the family had to move to Namburg an der Salle, where
Nietzsche lived with his mother, grandmother, two aunts, and his younger
sister. The fact that Nietzsche’s father was a pastor may explain why he
thought that god was dead, since it would be hard to believe that any god would
let their representative die without a proper successor ready to take his
place.
From 1858 to 1864, Nietzsche was in a
boarding school named Schulpforta that was about 4km from his home. There he
met his lifelong acquaintance, Paul Deussen, who became an Orientalist,
philosophy historian, and founder of the Schopenhauer Society. Nietzsche led a
small music and literature club named Germania, where his philosophical stance
started to form. From 1864 to 1879, Nietzsche was mostly in universities where
his appreciation for music and literature was formed. He also had a stage of
his required military service where he served in an equestrian field artillery
regiment close to Namburg, during which he lived with his mother. This military
service was cut short when he attempted to leap-mount into the saddle and
suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his chest wound
refused to heal. After this happened, his university studies continued at the
University of Liepzig. After his time in the universities came to an end in
1880, he led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person. He
circled between his mother’s home and various cities in France, Switzerland,
Germany, and Italy. During this time most of Nietzsche’s most significant works
were written, including The Gay Science,
This Spoke Zarathustra, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. His life effectively ended on the morning of January 3,
1889, when Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown that left him invalid for
the rest of his life. There are ideas that Nietzsche was anti-Semitic, which
seems to be from the fact that his final years were under the care of his
sister who was anti-Semitic. This has likely caused people to falsely read such
ideas from his literary works.
Speaking of his literary works, he had
quite a few. His first was published in 1872, entitled The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music. The book proposes
an alternative to late 18th/early 19th century
understanding of Greek culture, which, based in the designs of ancient
sculpture, called ancient Greece as what we would call the Platonic Ideal of
simplicity, calm greatness, and calmness. Nietzsche, while proud of his work,
described the work in unkind terms as a questionable, strange and almost
inaccessible book filled with formulae inherently at odds with the ideas he was
then trying to say.
Nietzsche, by this time having accepted
the German romanticist, views that irrational forces make up the foundation of
all creativity, as well as of reality. They also identify a wild, free and
beastly energy that existed in Greece before Socrates’ reign of annoyance. They
claimed that this energy is essentially creative and healthy that has been
drowned and overshadowed by forces of logic and sobriety. Such bottling of
creative energy, they claimed, is unhealthy and likely to lead to the bottle
exploding. Nietzsche advocated the revival and release of these artistic
energies that he associates with primordial creativity, existential joy, and
truth. Nietzsche perceived the seeds of the rebirth in the standard German
music of his time, the compositions of such great figures as Wagner, Bach and
Beethoven. The Birth of Tragedy’s
conclusion, in effect, adores the emerging of the spirit as the potential
savior of European culture.
Nietzsche’s second publication, Unfashionable Observations, is a set of
four studies focused on the quality of European and German culture of the time.
As the title suggests, the studies are both unfashionable and nonconformist,
mainly due to Nietzsche’s stance as a cultural critic conflicting with the
self-congratulatory spirit of the time.
In 1878, Nietzsche completed Human, All-Too-Human, supplanting this
with Mixed Opinions and Maxims as
well as The Wanderer and his Shadow
in the following two years. Nietzsche, reluctant to construct a philosophical
system and sensitive to the importance of style in such writings, composed
these works as hundreds of adages of greatly varying lengths. These adages
often reflected on things happening in culture and psychology, usually relating
to how people are made up. The idea of power, one that he would later be known
for, tends to appear as an explanation. He also invokes hedonistic ideas of
pleasure and pain that he would later criticize in works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The ideas he
became infamous for were introduced in The
Gay Science, written in 1882. This brings up ideas like the famous “God is
Dead” and the idea of eternal recurrence-that we live out our exact lives many
times over for all time.
Besides The Gay Science, one of Nietzsche’s most famous works is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A book for All and
None, regarded by him as one of his most significant. It is a tale of
self-overcoming, and a guidebook for others heading towards the same end. The
work was used to inspire soldiers during World War I, with over 150,000 copies
printed and issued. The book is antagonistic to Christianity, and it often
inverts parts of the Old and New Testaments. In the spirit of pre-Socratic
naturalism, the works is also filled with nature metaphors, invoking such
figures as fire, water, earth, air, animals, plants and celestial bodies. All
of this serves to describe the development of Zarathustra’s spirit, in all of
its solitary, reflective, strong-willed, sage-like, dancing and laughing glory.
Zarathustra serves as a voice of heroic self-mastery, along with a proud and
sharp-eyed eagle and a wise snake. The mode of higher psychological health,
surpassing the human condition, is described by Nietzsche as ubermenschlich, or
superhumanness.
Thus
Spoke Zarathustra is a controversial work, mostly since it is thoroughly
literary. Nietzsche speaks in parables and short stories populated by the many
archetypes as its characters - the hunchback, the ugliest man, the soothsayer,
the saint, and the jester, to name a few - leaving the messages that are weaved
into the book open to various interpretations. One of the most well known and
morally disturbing figures, the superhuman, only really shows up in this,
making it questionable if Nietzsche believes this as the real destiny for
mankind. There is also the question of whether or not the tale is properly
ended at the Third Part’s end, or if the psychologically complicated and
question-raising Fourth Part is more than just a supplement and all four parts
make a smooth progression.
Beyond
Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is arguably a re-write
of Human, All-too-Human due to loose
correlations between the tables of contents and the thematic sequence.
Nietzsche identifies imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality and
creativity as factors that make a genuine philosopher as opposed to incidental
characters of scholarship. He takes aim at some of the great philosophers that
speak of philosophies that follow these, such as free will and bipolar
thinking. Alternatively, Nietzsche takes the perspective of a society that has
gone beyond good and evil, challenging the traditional concepts of what is
evil, like exploitation, domination, destruction, and harming the weak, as being
universal concepts. Above all of this, he believes that living things want to
discharge their strength and express their will to power - the pouring out of
energy that naturally entails danger, pain, lies, deception and masks. Here,
will is a fountain of constantly swelling power as opposed to hollowness
inside, deficient feeling or drive for satisfaction.
While at this perspective, Nietzsche
denies the existence of universal morality applicable indiscriminately to
humanity, instead designating moralities in an order of rank that rises from
the vulgar to the noble; some for the leaders and some for the followers. What
counts as preferable and legitimate depends on whether one is weaker and
sicklier or healthier and running over with life.
While talking about Nietzsche’s
writings is all and good, I feel that I should give my own stance. One of the
most well known ideas from Nietzsche is the idea of a dead god; that god
existed at one point, but since then he has died. This is a very believable
philosophy; since when have we told people we need to worship god as our lord
and not just believed in Jesus, who himself said that god is the one deserving
of worship and not him. Furthermore, there is a school of thought that thinks
the belief of mankind, genuine belief, feeds divine powers and gives them both
power and sustenance. However, in the 1800s people were mainly secular, with
those worshipping Christianity doing so due to family pressures instead of
being from a real want to worship a higher power. Either god is actually dead
or humans have gotten to the point that no good, omniscient and omnipotent
figure could stand the presence of them.
One could argue that Nietzsche meant that the idea of a need for
religion is dead, but I would say that is unlikely. While not impossible due to
the increasing secularity in the 1800s, it seems to me more likely that the
actual god is dead given the actual quote by Nietzsche from The Gay Science saying that God is dead.
Also, religion had not died, even if god has. Incidentally, it also says we
have bled him to death, giving fuel to the flame of belief starvation.
Besides the idea of a dead god,
Nietzsche also promoted the idea of questioning anything that is draining on
the expansive energies of life, even if the thing in question is something that
societies hold dear. Honestly, this is an interesting idea, mainly due to
conflicting ideas on what is or is not draining as well as conflict on the need
for society. There needs to be something you can replace the ideas with so that
societies do not collapse. As Hobbes said, life without society is brutish,
short, and generally unpleasant. One could say that society is a table, held
off the ground of natural states by the ideals they believe in, making up the
legs. If one leg is simply removed, the table becomes unstable and may
collapse, especially if it is a large table. The table could be made more
stable by rearranging the ideals, but even then the table is still less stable
then before. Instead, a new leg, one that is less draining to life, must
replace it.
The ideas of the focus on the self and
a dead god bring up another point, one that Nietzsche actually proposed: the
lack of an afterlife. Nietzsche says we instead relive life continuously,
experiencing everything we have done infinitely many times over. Some find
comfort in this, but I do not. This may be due to how much more bad there has
been in my life than good, but I instead attribute this to the fact that I do
not want to relive the same experiences infinitely times over, but instead I
want to go through new experiences, even if I’m going though similar
experiences in a new way. From what I understand of religions that believe in
reincarnation, they share this desire, wanting to change from their previous
lives and eventually achieve moral perfection.
Nietzsche was - and still is - an
important figure in philosophy. Whether or not you believe that his ideas are
right, one must admit that he has had significant cultural impact with them. In
all forms of media, the tendrils of influence from him can be seen; the idea of
a dead god has been explored in everything from literature to video games. One
particular example that comes to mind is the novel Small Gods. Written by Terry Pratchett, Small Gods shows plentiful influence from Nietzschian philosophy
that one can bleed a god to death, this following the vein that gods are fed by
belief. While the god near death, Om, has many followers, only one actually
believes in him. Every other follower is either following out of fear or out of
a desire for power. Because there is no true belief, Om is reduced to a turtle.
Unlike Nietzsche, Terry Pratchett proposes that the one remaining follower can
use his pure strength of belief to convince everyone else to truly believe,
which Nietzsche most likely did not conceive of.
Even before Nietzsche, literature and
mythology have shown monsters with a stance beyond or before good and evil that
Nietzsche expressed. The traditional monster instead seems to follow
Nietzsche’s idea of leadership based on power. For example, Grendel most likely
ranks below the Sphynx, who in turn ranks below Medusa, who in turn ranks below
Cthulhu.
Even the original Role-Playing Game,
Dungeons and Dragons, uses Nietzschian philosophy on self-improvement and
bettering oneself to beyond human levels as a core mechanic. In D&D, as it
is colloquially called, characters gain experience that causes them to increase
in power and skill, representative of spiritual betterment, to the point of
becoming the superhuman.
One cannot doubt the influence of
Nietzsche. His life was a turbulent one, especially early on to start him down
the path he took. His works, covering everything from power to the idea of a
dead god, act as his face and serve as the reason he is so polarizing. Even
when I disagree with him, I respect him as deserving of being one of the faces
of philosophy. He has inspired factors in everything from literature to
entertainment of all forms. Reading about his philosophy, it is hard to see
what makes him so misanthropic besides his desire to challenge society and his
denying of universal good and evil. He simply wanted people to embrace more
wild and creative thought instead of being purely logical and subdued.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wicks,
R.. N.p.. Web. 28 Nov 2013.