Nietzsche on the RPF

Bio

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the small town of
Röcken bei Lützen, not too far from Leipzig, Saxony. He was born on the
49th birthday of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and was thus named
after him. His father was a Lutheran pastor and died when Nietzsche was
only four years old, leaving him to be raised by his mother and three
sisters. He was very pious as a young child. A brilliant student, he
became chair of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at
the age of only 24.

At Basel, Nietzsche found little satisfaction in life among his philology
colleagues, and he established closer intellectual ties to the historians
Franz Overbeck and Jacob Burkhardt, whose lectures he attended. When
the Franco-Prussian war erupted, Nietzsche left Basel and, being
disqualified for other services due to his citizenship status, volunteered
as a medical orderly on active duty. His time in the military was short, but
he experienced much. He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, taking
close care of wounded soldiers, but he soon contracted diphtheria and
dysentery himself and subsequently experienced a painful variety of
health difficulties for the remainder of his life. Upon return to Basel,
instead of waiting to heal, he pushed headlong into a more fervent
schedule of study than ever before. In 1872, he published his first book,
The Birth of Tragedy, but a biting critical reaction by the young and
promising philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, as well as its
innovative views of the ancient Greeks, dampened the book's reception
among scholars.

In 1879, Nietzsche retired from his position at Basel due to his continued
poor health. From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led
a wandering existence as a "stateless" person, writing most of his major
works during this period. His fame and influence came later, despite the
interference of his sister Elisabeth, who published arbitrary, uncontextual
selections of his works.

Nietzsche suffered from periods of illness throughout his adult life. In
1889, after the completion of Ecce Homo, his health rapidly declined until
he collapsed. At that moment, he is said to have tearfully embraced a
horse in Italy because it had been beaten by its owner. From that moment
on he never recovered.

Nietzsche spent the last ten years of his life insane, in the care of his
sister Elisabeth, and unaware of the immense success of his works. The
cause of Nietzsche's condition has to be regarded as undetermined.
Doctors later in his life said they were not so sure about the initial
diagnosis of syphilis because he lacked the typical symptoms. While the
story of syphilis indeed became generally accepted in the twentieth
century, recent research in the Journal of Medical Biography shows that
syphilis is not consistent with Nietzsche's symptoms, and that the
contention that he had the disease originated in anti-Nietzschean tracts.

His Works and Ideas
Nietzsche is famous for his rejection of what he calls "slave morality"
(which he felt reflected the inverse of the "will to power" and a perversion
of useful altruism); his attacks on Christianity (the most well known, if
poorly understood, of which occurs in the phrase "God is dead!", taken
from the main character of his work Thus Spake Zarathustra after he,
Zarathustra, meets an old saint in the woods); his origination of the
Übermensch concept (translated as "Overman" or "Superman"); his
embrace of a sort of a-rationalism; and another idea he called "the Will to
Power" (Wille zur Macht). Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Arthur
Schopenhauer and his concept of "the Will to live."

In many respects his thinking anticipated the "Nature versus nurture"
debate. Nietzsche always balanced his statements concerning how truth
is created by ourselves with statements that demonstrated a loyalty to
science. The distinction between the "Dionysian" and the "Appollonian"
demonstrates this tension between the truth according to nature and the
truth that is a cultural construct. Nietzsche's thought has often been
interpreted as an endorsement of evolutionary theory. However, Nietzche
has also profoundly influenced post-structuralist and post-modern
thought (see for example, Michel Foucault) with its view that truth is a
cultural constuct. The notion that we are simply animals (coming from the
apes) pales in comparison to the myth that we were created in the image
of gods. Under this interpretation, the "Superman" was to "overcome"
man the animal, in the same way that the Christian myth once did so.
However, this new morality was to exalt nature and the earth and not the
afterlife. Whereas the medieval Christian philosophers had "read" their
morality back into nature, the new morality would be the inverse, where
nature was "read" back into morality.

The "Will to Power"
One of Nietzsche's central concepts is "the Will to Power" (Wille zur
Macht), a process of expansion and venting of creative energy that he
believed was the basic driving force of nature. He believed it to be the
fundamental causal power in the world: the driving force of all natural
phenomena and the dynamic to which all other causal powers can be
reduced. That is, Nietzsche in part hoped Will to Power could be a "theory
of everything," providing the ultimate foundations for explanations of
everything from whole societies, to individual organisms, down to mere
lumps of matter. The Will to Power is taken as an animal's most
fundamental instinct or drive, even more fundamental than the will to self-
preservation. The Will to Power is something like the desire to exert one's
will in self-overcoming, although it may well be unconscious.

Although the idea may seem harsh to some, Nietzsche saw the "will to
power" -- or, as he famously put it, the ability to "say yes! to life" -- as life-
affirming. Creatures affirm the instinct in exerting their energy, in venting
their strength. The suffering borne of conflict between competing wills and
the efforts to overcome one's environment is not evil, but a part of
existence to be embraced. It signifies the healthy expression of the
natural order, whereas failing to act in one's self-interest is seen as a
'sickness.' Enduring satisfaction and pleasure result from living creatively,
overcoming oneself, and successfully exerting the Will to Power.

Ethics
Nietzsche's influence on human rights philosophy is a powerful, while
indirect, result of his general moral thought. Nietzsche’s morality can be
seen in some ways as a sharp and passionate critique of both Kant’s
duty-based morality, and Bentham and Marx’s collectivist moralities. On
the other hand, Nietzsche can perhaps be best classified as a moral
skeptic; that is, he claims that all ethical statements are false, because
any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and "moral facts"
is illusory (in a similar vein to Hume). Instead, ethical statements (like all
statements) are mere "interpretations". While Nietzsche may seem to
have very definite opinions on what is moral or immoral, his moral
opinions may be explained without attributing to him the claim that they
are true. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely
because it is false. On the contrary, he often claims that falsehood is
essential for "life."

One of Nietzsche’s more famous ethical postulates is his division
between "master morality" and "slave morality." In short, he viewed the
master morality as being the expression of our noble, if sometimes
ruthless or recklessly powerful, instincts, and the slave morality as the
expression of our lesser, pitiable instincts: the former expressing our
desire to glorify and revel in life, the second our desire to raise pity,
misery, and weakness to a venerable status.

For the master morality, Nietzsche says:
“The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he
does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: "What is
injurious to me is injurious in itself;" he knows that it is he himself only
who confers honour on things; he is a creator of values. He honours
whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification.
...It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for
invention.”

He says that within the slave morality:
“...a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will
find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, together with his
situation. The slave has an unfavourable eye for the virtues of the
powerful; he has a skepticism and distrust, a refinement of distrust of
everything ‘good’ that is there honoured--he would fain persuade himself
that the very happiness there is not genuine. On the other hand, those
qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought
into prominence and flooded with light; it is here that sympathy, the kind,
helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and
friendliness attain to honour; for here these are the most useful qualities,
and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence. Slave-
morality is essentially the morality of utility.”
(Beyond Good and Evil)

But we must be careful not to confuse Nietzsche’s idea of master morality
with simply a form of grandiose tyranny. While he certainly recognized
(some might say even revelled in) the dominant, the “hard and severe,”
aspects of the master morality, in a sense it was for him merely a
celebration of the will to power, meaning our natural impulse toward life.
In contrast, he believed the slave morality could be every bit as tyrannous
as the master morality (and indeed, that it had become more so through
Christianity):

“For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional
morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life
is something essentially amoral—and eventually crushed by the weight of
contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of
desire and altogether worthless.” ("Attempt at a Self-Criticism," from The
Birth of Tragedy).

Nietzsche's assessment of both the antiquity and resultant impediments
presented by the ethical and moralistic teachings of the world's
monotheistic religions eventually led him to his own epiphany about the
nature of God and morality, resulting in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Nietzsche is also well-known for the statement "God is dead." While in
popular belief it is Nietzsche himself who blatantly made this declaration,
it was actually placed into the mouth of a character, a "madman", in The
Gay Science, and later was proclaimed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. This
largely misunderstood statement does not proclaim a physical death, but
a natural end to the belief in God being the foundation of western
cosmology. It is more of an observation than a declaration. Nietzsche
believed this "death" would eventually undermine the foundations of
morality and lead to moral relativism and nihilism. To avoid this, he
believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality and placing them on
a natural foundation.

Politics
Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, heavily edited Nietzsche's
work in order to promote him as a proto-Nazi thinker (she was herself an
ardent German nationalist and pro-Nazi); this bastardization was largely
to blame for Nietzsche being associated in the 1930s with the Nazis, who
primarily took Elisabeth's deliberately misconstrued versions of his works
as their source.

It is worth noting that Nietzsche's thought largely stands opposed to
Nazism. In particular, Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism (which partially
led to his falling out with composer Richard Wagner) and nationalism,
took a dim view of German culture as it was in his time, and derided both
the state and populism. He was also far from being a racist, believing that
the "vigor" of any population could only be increased by mixing with
others. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says, "...the concept of 'pure
blood' is the opposite of a harmless concept."

As for one particular term coined by Nietzsche—the "blond beast"—noted
Nietzsche translator Walter Kaufmann has this to say: "The 'blond beast'
is not a racial concept and does not refer to the 'Nordic race' of which the
Nazis later made so much. Nietzsche specifically refers to Arabs and
Japanese, Romans and Greeks, no less than ancient Teutonic tribes
when he first introduces the term...and the 'blondness' obviously refers to
the beast, the lion, rather than the kind of man."

While some of his writings on "the Jewish question" were critical of the
Jewish population in Europe, he also praised the strength of the Jewish
people, and this criticism was equally, if not more strongly, applied to the
English, the Germans, and the rest of Europe. He also valorised strong
leadership, and it was this last tendency that the Nazis took up.

While his use by the Nazis was inaccurate, it should not be supposed that
he was a good democrat either. One of the things that he detested most
about Christianity was its emphasis on pity and how this leads to the
elevation of the lower classes, the weak and the disabled. He wrote in
The Anti-Christ, "The weak and the deformed shall perish: first principle of
our philosophy. And we shall aid their demise." Similar comments can be
found in Ecce Homo and The Will to Power; and it might be argued that he
would have agreed with the Nazis' sterilisation of the disabled. He also
referred to the common people as "the rabble" and liberalism as
"reduction to the herd animal." While he had a dislike of the state in
general, he made it clear that only certain individuals should break away
from it in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

It is, however, hard to classify Nietzsche's politics, as he did not see this
as his main concern. He seems to have very little interest in the economy.
There are also some liberal strands to his beliefs, such as his distrust of
strong punishment for criminals and even a criticism of the death penalty
can be found in his early work.

(Excerpts adapted and portrait taken from the Wikipedia article on Nietzsche. Click
here for complete article.)

Works

Beyond Good and Evil

Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Birth of Tragedy