Nietzsche and the Revaluation of All Values
Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Philosophy
Nietzsche makes a critical review of the history of Western philosophy, calling it a mistake, influenced by Socrates and Plato. Special mention must be made of Heraclitus, from whom Nietzsche takes the concept of *becoming*. For both, reality is change, mutation, difference, and plurality. Although Heraclitus arrived at this through reason and by denying the senses (something Nietzsche criticizes), Nietzsche defends faith in sensibilities and our physical reality. He also criticizes the idea of law or *logos*, a rationality governing reality. For Nietzsche, reality is pure change, becoming, chaos.
Kant affirms a moral claim independently made by man himself from his freedom. However, Kant believed in universal morality, which would be accepted by all since it was rational. For Nietzsche, good and evil are not in things but in the people who value them.
Nietzsche vs. Socratic and Platonic Dogmatism
Nietzsche is particularly critical of Socratic and Platonic dogmatism, responsible for the fundamental error in the history of philosophy. Socrates was the great corrupter who broke the balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian existing in classical culture. With his moral intellectualism, he established that truth is good, not evil. For Nietzsche, this means the negation of life, for truth and virtue are unnatural, merely a drill in our heads. To accept them is to eliminate the instincts of life, our body. Likewise, Christian philosophy, heir to Socratic Platonism, suffers the same mistake. It places the meaning of our lives in another world. Worst of all, it has a morality of slaves: the weak, the obedient to God and his word, once again denying the body and instincts, and refusing to live intensely the only life there is.
The Death of God and Other Philosophers
The death of God appears as the great novelty of Western thought. His disappearance did not mean anything since its vacuum has been filled by reason.
Nietzsche agreed with Hume on the importance they both attach to the senses and their rejection of traditional metaphysics. Hume is a skeptic, but he attacks the concepts of metaphysics from an epistemological perspective. Nietzsche does so from a vital perspective, not because they have a real referent or not, but because they are decadent and opposed to life.
Marx argued that the human essence is work and its relationship with nature and with other beings. For Nietzsche, the human being is the bridge between animal and *superman*. The main thing for Nietzsche is the instincts, the body, the irrational, the Dionysian. Marx believed that the world today is ruled by a bourgeois morality, the result of the current economic structure. For him, all the cultural products of a capitalist society are only manifestations of the ideology of the ruling class. Nietzsche, however, states that there is a morality of masters and slaves. Master morality is that of those who love difference, creation, and life; slave morality is that of those who fear, obey, and are resigned. Within slave morality, there is a distinction between Marxism and Christianity. Marxism is also slave morality, equity-oriented, and its adherents follow a single truth: historical materialism.