Nietzschean Philosophical Concepts
Tragic Artist
For Nietzsche, reality is vital; life becomes the object of his faith, and the question arises: the origin of all concrete and changing things. Reality is real, if pure becoming. The concept cannot grasp it, but metaphor can, since it does not provide an objective meaning but accepts subjectivity and asserts multiplicity (Nietzsche’s perspective). For Nietzsche, one must grasp something through metaphor, not concept.
Tragedy is the highest form of art, art that affirms reality and man himself as he is, tragic. The artist is tragic because they do not pretend goals or origins outside of this world, but affirm reality, life, even in its most awesome and painful aspects. The tragic artist selects and edits reality, not hiding or denying it, but assuming and accepting it, beautifying it through acceptance. This is what the true philosopher does, one who accepts life as it is and can turn their life into a work of art.
Supreme Concepts
Dogmatic philosophers take reason as the “real” reality of the world, designating it as intelligible. These concepts pretend to describe the true characteristics of the world: being, substance, unity, cause… For Nietzsche, these do not designate anything real, but are terms our reason elaborates to refer to a world invented by our cowardice before the reality of becoming. Reality must be captured by sensible intuitions, captured adequately by the senses.
Believing Reality & Belief
What Platonic dogmatic philosophers qualify as real knowledge, the highest knowledge because it consists of certainties of reason, are really beliefs, habits of reason.
Decadence & Deshistorizing Values
Decadence (Life): Decadence is the life of those who believe in values contrary to life, an objective, immutable, rational world above earthly values, everything that opposes biological becoming.
Deshistorizing Values: A process followed by dogmatic followers because, from the Platonic philosophy, they eliminate the dynamic nature that reality should be understood to have. History is constant flux, as is reality. To say what history is being is another way of saying it is becoming.
Becoming
A term designating the process of being or Being as process. It includes all types of change: movement, alteration, generation. From Greek philosophy, being is branded as becoming in opposition to some conception of the static. The affirmation of becoming, of mutable being, is identified with the dynamic conception of reality, the only conception that takes its true “historic” nature.
Egypticism
A metaphorical image marking the tendency to remain static, the petrification of traditional Dogmatic philosophy or bodies of thought, a tendency to deny the main feature of reality: becoming. This image is used because the figures of this era’s paintings lack expression.
Fetish & Language Fetishism
Fetish: Excessive and superstitious veneration. With the words “No fetish of language,” Nietzsche means that the grammatical category of the subject is projected from our experience onto reality, generating deception, the false belief that reality contains subjects (identical beings, consistent, free of qualities, though these creatures are subject to change). Language fetishism consists of attributing a power to language that it does not have. The metaphysical language, abandoning metaphorical language, consists of a use of grammatical structures.
Idiosyncrasies
Its own character, peculiarity, distinctive and defining characteristics of any expression or thing. Nietzsche uses this to refer to the characteristics that define dogmatic, traditional, Platonic philosophers, whose peculiarities he criticizes.
Optical Illusion (Twilight of Morality)
The intelligible world, which characterizes the traditional metaphysical world as the “true” world, is unreal. The metaphysical world does not exist beyond the reason that invented it (hence it is an illusion). Our illusion is caused by perspectives because determined reality comes without the first consideration (moral) of the sensitive world, of being as becoming.
The People
Nietzsche analyzes moral concepts and states that the concept of “good” initially discovered by the noble was referring to what was simple, not what was troublesome, nor the Jews and the vulgar. For Christians, they make bad into good and call the noble “evil.” Unnatural morality is a result of the suggestions of Christianity, of the rebellion of the weak… Western morality creates resentment, a cause of hatred of the weak man towards real life. This is because of Western nihilism, which can only be overcome by the appearance of the Superman, who reactivates aristocratic values of the affirmation of life as it is, a joy of living.