Nietzsche’s Challenge to Western Thought
The philosophy of Nietzsche involves a radical confrontation with much of the Western tradition. He is opposed to dogmatism, whose roots lie in Socrates, Plato, or Christian philosophy.
The distinction or opposition, made in his earlier works, between the Dionysian and Apollonian leads him to develop an original interpretation of the history of philosophy. According to this view, thought moves away from life, from Socratic reflection, leading him to oppose it, denying it through the invention of a character endowed with transcendent reality, characteristic of immutability. This reflects the stability and policy of the metaphysical metaphor.
Critique of Metaphysical Dualism
Nietzsche opposes ontological dualism, a reflection of Platonic dualism, which speaks of this unique, sensitive, and imperfect world, and the next world as supersensible and perfect, the basis of that conception. According to this conception, reality is split into two fields: supersensible reality, which is static and timeless, versus a changing, sensible, perishable reality.
In the first case, there is an undervaluation of sensible reality due to its changeability, while human reason operates as an immutable category (concept). But the fact that reason or categories work this way does not show the “imperfection” or “dependency” of the sensible world, but rather the inadequacy of reason to know it.
In the second case, the supersensible world is nothing more than an illusion or a fiction, a fantasy built as a denial of the world of sense, the only reality to us.
In the third case, the use of a supersensible world is interpreted, then, as an anti-vital reaction, as a negation of life (a life marked by suffering as well as by joy), a vengeance against nature, especially by spirits who hate life.
Critique of Morality
Nietzsche accuses Platonic-Christian morality of being unnatural and going against life instincts. Its center of gravity is not in this world, but in the beyond, in a static reality, or in the supernatural world of Christianity. It is a transcendent moral that is not about man, but about God, and requires a rejection of nature.
Critique of Knowledge and Language
Regarding the explanation of knowledge, the metaphysical tradition, influenced by Platonic-Christian thought, posits that knowledge corresponds to an immutable reality and an equally immutable truth: conceptual knowledge. The concept is nothing more than an inappropriate way of referring to reality, a general and abstract means to grasp reality and, therefore, detached from the singular and concrete, away from reality. Far from offering us knowledge of reality, the concept hides it. The concept is nothing more than a metaphor of reality, a general representation of a reality that is individual.
Nietzsche also directs his attention to the role played by language in philosophical reflection. Just as the value of concepts is falsified by the traditional metaphysics, the value of words and the sense in which they are used is also misrepresented. Thus, crucial and subtle language contributes to strengthening this metaphysical deception about reality.
The Death of God
An analysis of the trajectory of Western thought and culture leads Nietzsche to confirm the death of God. God had been the compass of Western man, but man has killed God, inadvertently driving him slowly out of thought and culture. Upon discovering the death of God, man is lost; his life loses meaning.
The death of God is, in fact, the death of Christian monotheism and the metaphysical dogma, for whom there is only one God and one truth. And man is responsible for it. Becoming aware of this, man replaces God and that unique truth with multiple gods, multiple truths, in a desperate attempt to save the values associated with that image of God.