Nietzsche’s Core Philosophical Concepts: Nihilism, Dionysian, Morality, and More
Nihilism: Nihilism is the denial of any belief. It is, in principle, a philosophical attitude to life that reveals the hopelessness of being devoid of meaning, without reference. It is the negation of all value to existence. For Nietzsche, initially, all cultures believe in an absolute reality and deny the values of life and earth. In that sense, European culture is decadent and nihilistic. Then there is nihilism as an attitude, which can be active or passive. Passive nihilism is what happens to humans after the death of God. This is a very serious potential loss, a loss of direction and meaning. Without God, there are no guarantees, neither absolute nor north, nor horizon. Every death represents an uprooting, a detachment, and also a little of the loss of self. Humans, after killing God, feel stained with blood and lost.
Active nihilism assumes that God is dead and that, therefore, everything is possible. Surrendering to despair and suicide is a necessary stage for the emergence of a new period in the history of culture, to meet again with the sense of the earth, the emergence of a new morality, and a new human, the superman.
Dionysian: Relative to the god Dionysus, god of wine and crops. For Nietzsche, it is part of the typical conception of the Greek world before the appearance of philosophy with Apollo. It represents the spirit of the land and the values of life, against Apollo, who expresses world order and the values of reason.
Nietzsche first introduced these concepts in The Birth of Tragedy, a work that explains how Western philosophy (from Socrates and Plato) has shelved the Dionysian dimension. It champions the values of reason and of humans themselves, desirable, and undervalued land values and life, preferring the spirit and the rational and leaving aside embodiment and the irrational.
The Dionysian represents everything that Nietzsche claims as forgotten and undervalued in our culture, philosophy, religion, and morality: the world of the senses, appearances, parties, music, dance, pleasure, corporeality, instincts, chaos, and deformity. The greatness of the Greek world was to understand reality as composed of legality and rationality, but also of horror, instinct, and irrationality. Nietzsche does not deny that human beings are rational, but that is only one aspect; humans are also instinctive, creative, groundbreaking, special, different, and even ‘bad’. So, he claims the Dionysian as a fundamental category of the human being that has been buried by Western philosophy and that we must recover.
Unnatural Moral: This is the moral characteristic of the weak and resentful of life, those who reject the body and its passions, and who affirm the reality of a higher world towards which we must sacrifice in this life. Morality arises as opposed to natural morality, which is that of the strong, based on the will to power and the value of this life, the here, the earthly life, as the most important thing. Unnatural morality is a morality of slaves, cowardly and resigned; in short, the morality of the weak. It requires sacrifice and mortification in this life to earn another life in the hereafter.
The origin of this moral is the Socratic moral, originally guilty, according to Nietzsche, for the loss of Western culture and the abandonment of the accurate values of the early Greeks. It essentially equates knowledge with virtue (truth = good = understanding), making the wise, who prioritize the rational part, dominate and suffocate their passionate and instinctive part, the ideal model of man. Nietzsche harshly censures this ideal and advocates the development of the vital and instinctive part of human beings in a healthy moral system, governed by the instinct of life, leading us away from a downstream way of life. A natural morality affirms the mere existence of this life and leads us to live fully and intensely, without obstacles or chained by a false heavenly world towards which to sacrifice this life. Sound morality is the morality of the superior human, the superman.
Apparent World: This concept refers to Nietzsche’s division of reality into two worlds established by metaphysics and religion. A real world, above, is reached through reason, objective and immutable, eternal, and relates to good and spiritual. In Plato, it would be the world of ideas; in Christianity, God; and in Kant, reality itself. The lower world is the apparent world, the world of the senses, subjective, changing, a world of corruption, change, and death, which accounts for the poor and the body. It is the sensible world in Plato, the underworld or valley of tears in Christianity, and the reality of phenomena in Kant. For Nietzsche, this division must be reversed. We must consider the real world that which has hitherto been considered the apparent world, and false and nonexistent the world that has hitherto been regarded as superior and real. The apparent world is the only world we have, and to deny and flee from it is typical of the weak and resentful. The death of God is the death of the real world, leading us to find the only world we have, this one, the world of becoming, of change and death. We must confront the knowledge that there are no laws beyond those that we, humans, invent. And where we play with life, accept it, and love it as it is, without denying it or inventing perfect worlds to comfort our sorrows.
Transmutation of Values: This is the reversal of the moral values of the unnatural, replacing the values of traditional morality, which Nietzsche brands as slave morality, a morality that denied the pleasures of life and resigned to it (the Christian values and bourgeoisie). It is replaced by a strong and creative moral system that affirms life and gives supreme value to the affirmation and reaffirmation of humanity.
This can occur only after the death of God. Once we kill the absolute moral values that underlie it, making humans God’s children and lovers of absolute truth, the superman emerges. It is not the human who transmutes values, but the superman, who bravely accepts life, embraces pain and tragedy, and still wills, wills the difference even knowing that this is not the easy way, who wants to grow and be generous for no reason, no reward in another life, who wills even if it means death anxiety. The transmutation of values is the affirmation of life and becoming, and therefore the recognition that we are alone, without God to join us, but life recovers all its pleasures, it states that after all their pains. We must establish the moral of the lords, the difference to equality, strength, the heroes against the humble and meek, the brave, the land of the living.
Innocence of Becoming: According to Nietzsche, traditional philosophy has always rejected evolution, the changing and flowing nature of things, chasing the illusion of an ideal rather than the reality of this changing world in which we inhabit. For these philosophers, the flowing nature of reality, change, becoming, has been bothersome because it does not produce the tranquility that truth would. For them, true reality should be immutable, eternal, universal, and so on. Nietzsche says that becoming is the only existence, but of a future without any regularity. The innocence of becoming is the understanding of reality and of ourselves without order, without permanence, without any legality that comes from outside; order and legality that humans impose on a changing world to deny it. Evolution does not make sense, neither a real, unique, or a single way of being valued and appreciated. It is fluid and changing, multifaceted and incomprehensible. It is to accept that the world is as it appears to us and not as reason wishes it were. The innocence of becoming is a behavior that is beyond good and evil, concepts of closed and flowing deniers. It is the understanding of change and appearances outside the human vanity that seeks to find absolute truths and values.