Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture and the Rise of the Superman
Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture
Style of His Work and Influences
The subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “A book for everyone and no one,” reflects the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s works and thoughts. His writing is not systematic; it routinely uses aphorisms and poems. While his style is attractive, the absence of a well-defined vocabulary creates major problems of understanding.
He uses no arguments and deductions, but quick intuitions. He does not avoid contradictions and is often violent. He widely uses symbols, making an unequivocal interpretation of his theories impossible.
For all that, Nietzsche is one of the clearest representatives of modern irrationalism.
Nietzsche’s work would influence the Nazis, who presented themselves as embodying the moral conduct of the Superman. However, he also influenced radical leftist tendencies because he proposed building a new world.
Nietzsche and Vitalism
The philosophy of life includes a set of philosophical ideas raised in the mid-nineteenth century, strongly influenced by the development of biology. All are characterized by opposing the excessive rationalism of the modern age and considering life as the essence of reality.
Life is understood in general terms as movement, passing, constant flux, becoming. Reality is change, evolution, transformation.
Reason, which requires a stable, fixed, immutable foundation, cannot capture this dynamic. It then uses the powers of irrational intuition as a direct apprehension of reality, such as aesthetic experience or mystical experience.
Reality can no longer be explained with concepts but must be suggested through metaphors. Knowledge is now an experience, a lived event.
Nietzsche’s vitalism is the outer flow within the philosophy of life. Influenced by Schopenhauer, he distinguishes between apparent reality (fictitious), which is the phenomenal world of finite beings and individuals, and a living, essential, and infinite reality. He states, “All individual beings are like waves that momentarily rise and sink in the ocean of life.”
Reason gives us the world of phenomena: balanced, serene, orderly. Life gives us passion, conflict, chaos, change.
To clarify the relationship between these two principles, reason and life, Nietzsche turns to the mythical symbolism of the Greeks, Dionysus and Apollo, the two most important gods in the formation of Greek culture.
Nietzsche asserts that classical Greek tragedy shows us the two principles that make up reality. In Greek tragedy before the 5th century BCE, the god Dionysus represented the values of life. Dionysus is the god of wine, health, and fertility; he is the image of instinctive force, of effervescence. The Dionysian man lives in complete harmony with nature. Instead, Apollo represents the values of reason; he is the god of light, proportion, measurement, balance, and serenity. His spirit is found in the beautiful, balanced, and perfect. The Apollonian man masks reality by subjecting it to reason. Nietzsche believes that pre-Socratic Greece did not forget any of these gods; in the Greek balance, one finds Dionysian passion. In tragedy, the two orders of irreconcilable opposition of securities are demonstrated: life and reason.
Tragedy is a courageous acceptance of life despite the pain it entails. In it, feelings and passions struggle against moral and intellectual standards.
But with Socrates and Plato, the decline began.
Moral and intellectual elements were imposed, and the predominance of the logical and rational began, that is, Apollonian values over Dionysian ones. Socrates chose death over the fight.
The Death of God and Nihilism
Nietzsche appears as the communicator of one of the most important events in history that would shake the foundation of our culture: man has killed God.
Nietzsche does not seek substitutes for God. For him, the death of God is a bitter truth that requires a heroic effort to be undertaken.
God represented the transcendent meaning and purpose in the world and life. From Plato, the world of Ideas, which Christians later identified with God, is the belief and foundation of being and of value. All Western philosophy until Kant followed this idea. Now, banishing this metaphysical foundation, man loses something very important that allowed him to live with respect. The first consequence of the death of God is nihilism or falling into nothingness. By removing God, we are left without a foundation. With nihilism, Nietzsche suggests that it is necessary to abandon the old values, the old rules of society and the individual that were present in the Western tradition. Abandoning the core values of bourgeois society means entering a stage where one cannot make value judgments or seek fundamental truths; it is necessary to find fewer points of reference to replace the traditional ones.
Nihilism is a feeling of being thrown out and lost in a world that is incomprehensible, worthless, and without foundation. Now everything is useless; values become devalued. This is the attitude of the last man, who no longer believes in anything and does not make projects. Enthusiasm is gone, and creative power is lost. For him, there is only the absurd. This is the downside of nihilism, which leads to the destruction of the foundations of morality and metaphysics of the West.
But nihilism must be overcome, taking it with all its consequences. Then comes the other side of the death of God, which becomes a liberating and humanizing event. It marks the end of moral barriers, the removal of limits and conditions.
Man discovers that God was a human creation and feels able to create new values that promote life instead of its cancellation. By renouncing God, a thrill of freedom comes to man. Therefore, negative nihilism is the necessary prologue to raise a new way of thinking; it is what Nietzsche called the philosophy of the future, the thinking of the Superman. Now the references will be the meaning of life and the will to power.
Nietzsche suffered the consequences of nihilism as 19th-century European thought, and thus his thought passes through three stages:
- Nihilism as the destruction of the values that had been in force until then. It is a time of doubt, confusion, and loss of consciousness.
- Nihilism seen following the Platonic-Christian thought. It is a time of reflection and detachment from that tradition.
- Nihilism as a starting point toward a new reality, towards a new perspective of being and of man. It is the time of reassessment of the life expectancy of the aurora.
Criticisms of the Platonic-Christian Tradition
Criticisms of Western Culture
Nietzsche starts from a fact: Western culture is sick. This disease is called nihilism and decadence. The symptom is that European man is becoming more humble, more mediocre, more equal, more civilized.
Nietzsche places the origin of European decadence in Greece. Parmenides reduces reality to the rational and explains it through concepts, but concepts actually stop and kill; they are fixed, abstract, and therefore stop the becoming, petrify it, and turn it into something stable that never stops, because reality is changing, becoming.
But it was Socrates who was the great corrupter, the great denier of the Greek essence expressed in the tragic poets, the creator of theoretical man, who submitted everything to reason.
Plato attributed to Socratic concepts the properties of being of Parmenides and committed the great metaphysical fraud of creating an ideal world beyond the tangible world. This big lie was a requirement of reason, which needed something stable and absolute. Plato introduced the invention of reason as the true home of man, the realm of eternal truths and values for their own sake. The more man’s rejection of the sensible world, the more assured the other. All subsequent philosophy will be guided by moral choices, for runaways who repudiate this world and seek the other.
On this Platonic metaphysics and anthropology, Christianity developed an unnatural morality, a morality that is opposed to life, punishing the body to save the soul. Christianity is a moral death because it will produce the true liberation of man. It is the morality of the herd and slaves, for whom obedience and unity are virtues, while pride is a sin. It is a morality of weakness, resentment, and revenge.
Facing this, Nietzsche opposed Christian morality, favoring a natural morality of life, a morality of lords and the strong; it is the morality of the Superman.
Nietzsche therefore rejects the concept of fixed and immutable reality, but he also rejects all those who dictate what is meant by truth; he especially rejects scientists and priests.
Faced with the prospect of equality and uniformity of Western culture, Nietzsche understands the value of the individual. The Superman is an individual proud of his uniqueness; he will have his own idea of reality, truth, and moral values. This acknowledges the value of early pre-Socratic thought, not guided by reason or by ethical truth.
The Problem of Values
For Nietzsche, all philosophical problems are ultimately problems of values. Whenever philosophers reflected on the past, they raised it with values and said, “What is valuable is the real, the true, the good.” God also appeared as the basis of absolute and eternal values. Thus, the death of God resulted in the loss of all traditional values.
In Nietzsche’s thinking, life is the foundation of any assessment, and therefore the measure of life is of value. All values are relative to life.
For Nietzsche, European culture has developed a system of moral, ontological, and epistemological values that needs to be reversed to restore vigor, creativity, and the tragic vision of life in powerful times. It is the inversion of all values.
A. On Moral Grounds
In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche criticizes the moral force from an etymological analysis of the historical evolution of moral concepts.
He says research in various languages led him to the following result: in ancient languages, the concepts of good and evil are related to men and not to actions. The good was the aristocratic, noble, men of higher position, the powerful. The trouble was the simple, vulgar, plebeian.
These two denominations had been created by the noble and powerful, as they were the ones who could give names. Later another contrast appears. Good and evil move to a moral basis as a result of a historical fact: the ill-considered revealed, call themselves good and call the noble evil. This transmutation was performed by the Jews and continued by the Christians. The priests, moved by the rebel resentment of the weak against the strong, reinforced moral equality with a moral hierarchy. They invested values.
Thus, morality emerges as a result of resentment. Resentment created the moral values of the West and is responsible for an incurably mediocre man, that is, of the nihilism that threatened the West.
Nietzsche gives a particular meaning to the term “resentment,” because in his opinion, resentment arises when one lives depending on something outside and away, in a situation of irrational obedience that leads to slavery. Therefore, the behavior of the so-called slave is led by resentment, hatred, and rejection.
Slaves live depending on something alien to their own interests. Western morality is in this case and comes from hatred and resentment.
By contrast, the noble method of valuing corresponds to master morality. Assessing as noble is positive. It depends only on one’s own interests. The noble rating is thus in connection with the will to power, which is synonymous with the ability to create reality and values. The Superman is characterized by power and thus will create his own reality and accept standards imposed values without foundation or transcendental. The will to power is not the law of the jungle. It is the power of the creators, a power that, without effort, takes hold of the situation.
Reflection on morality is present in all stages of Nietzsche’s thought but especially in the latter. Zarathustra is the symbolic figure that Nietzsche used to display three fundamental theories: the Superman, the transmutation of all values, and the will to power.
Nietzsche believed that some elements of Western morality, as it has been shaped by Jewish, Socratic-Platonic, and Christian traditions, have been made from the opposition of good or bad, raised on the denial of vital instincts, binding it to rational knowledge.
Nietzsche proposes to overcome these attitudes and values, returning them to their original meaning, recovering the value of good as an expression of ascending, strong life, and evil as an expression of the downstream life of the weak. The Superman will live beyond good and evil morality.
Nietzsche wants a natural morality that affirms the values and instincts of primitive life, recovering moral innocence because the Superman will create his own value to express the will to power.
B. In the Ontological Field
The supreme error of metaphysics was to admit a real-world face to a world of appearances. This bug is fixed by investing these two worlds and staying with the only apparent one.
This division into two worlds was the result of the decline of man, who needed something more to feel safe and secure.
For Nietzsche, there is only becoming, what is on earth, where nothing stands still.
God fakes a substance, a taxable basis of psychological facts, and from this, man invented the substantiality of things and the idea of being, which is a hoax of grammar and language.
Concepts and words need a fixed and immutable basis for understanding changes and sensory qualities, and thus comes the concept of being, but this fixed and immutable does not exist in reality.
C. In the Field of Epistemological Knowledge
Our philosophical and scientific concepts are more or less subtle falsifications with which we intend to grasp, that is, to assimilate becoming, change, evolution, introducing under its current wild a support that allows us to grasp, catch, capture. Man, with his concepts, with his thinking, distorts reality. Concepts are just metaphors that our capacity for abstraction develops, which leads to the usual setup and use, but they do not give us the true reality.
Reality is becoming, change, movement, while words and concepts are fixed and immutable and therefore can never enter the origin, the very essence of things.
Philosophical and scientific concepts are developed within a system, but these systems are constrained by the functionality of a grammar. So sometimes language itself deceives us. Just keep in mind that thought and language refer to things of the world we live in, and they are not fixed and immutable, nor do they follow the rules of grammar.
In logical, mathematical, moral, and religious language, there is a fiction of reason. Only metaphorical language and art can give us something of reality.
D. In the Land of Truth
With regard to truth, Nietzsche has a utilitarian conception of perspective. Nietzsche’s perspectival theory is based on three points:
- Do not accept the division of the world into appearance and reality. The world of the senses, appearance, is the only basis of knowledge.
- Truth is not something that has value in itself and corresponds with reality. Truth has only a pragmatic value.
- There are no absolute facts or realities, but only perspectives of things. Truth or falsity is a perspective as possible. There is no single reality that can be known by science.
Nietzsche highlights the value of sensitivity and direct reference to existential truths. He believes that the Western tradition imposed and despised the senses, giving value to rationality concepts and subjecting the value of life to the value of reason.
Nietzsche radically affirms the value of the world that the senses give us, the world of appearances, of becoming, of life. For all that, he says that something is true if it serves the development of life, if it follows the life instinct and the desire for power increases.
What matters is not the truth or falsity of a trial, but whether that trial helps life or not. The value for life is the decisive criterion for accepting an opinion or theory. So Nietzsche says that “truth is that kind of error without which a certain species of living beings could not live.”
Our reason gives us an overall view of reality; it gives us stable concepts. This is only an appearance, an error, but it is useful and is imposed by custom.
There are no absolute truths. Each theory is a view of reality, but there are other equally valid views.
The new man, the Superman, will know the future and will realize that human reason can never embrace reality with its categories and concepts.
The Superman
The Superman appears in a message of Zarathustra. He is the future man who will live when the transformation of values has been made and death has reached Western culture. The Superman embodies the values of the pre-Socratic era.
Man is an animal not fixed; he is defective because he has to make himself in freedom. But man is in danger of being fixed, of becoming a pet, losing the will to power, the desire for continuous improvement that is his main value.
The last man (European), after God has passed, has fallen into negative nihilism. He is the man who lives the sad end of a civilization whose values are already dead; he is a man transformed into a plant. The man of modern life is only seeking comfort, daily pleasure, without setting goals or ideals. It is the 19th-century European man, according to Nietzsche. It is necessary to overcome this and continue on an upward path. It is necessary to believe in the Superman. The Superman is a hope, a bridge, being on the road. He is the overcoming of God and nihilism, the affirmation of life as the will to power, the creator of new values and annihilator of the ancients. He is what gives meaning to human life but based only in this earthly world.
The Superman is in himself the source of all value and all truth. He possesses a sense of the earth; he behaves as an amoral being with the innocence of a child, apart from the crowd, and creates his own morality.
The Superman is not a new race but a new way of being human, accepting fate, passing, dying.
The Superman’s feature is the will to power, meaning the ability to impose, not to submit to anything. The desire to be more, live more, to self-improve, to show increased strength, this is all upward life.
The Superman is beyond good and evil. He is his own standard. In traditional morality, the weak have risen to their miseries. The dim are the sick, the cowards, the poor, and hence their virtues are humility, obedience, compassion.
The Superman will impose the morality of lords, who are the strong, the rulers, those who trust in themselves, have no sympathy or compassion, are proud and arrogant. This morality will transform the man who, tamed by Christianity, is mean, mediocre, cautious, servile, and lazy, and return his essence, the will to power.
In the first speech of Zarathustra, he presents the three metamorphoses of the spirit of man, pointing the way to the Superman: the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion a child.
The camel, an animal that supports heavy loads, symbolizes those who obey blindly, kneel and receive his load, support social obligations, and obey the moral law and traditional values. They say, “I must.”
The camel who wants to be transformed into a lion, an animal that gets rid of oppressive burdens. It symbolizes the nihilist who rejects traditional values and is released from control and yokes. He says, “I love you.”
But the lion has to be transformed into a child to live free from prejudice and create a new table of values. The child is innocence and forgetfulness. He is able to create new things and is beyond good and evil. It is true freedom, living life as an adventure and a game. He is natural; he says yes to life.
The Superman is the synthesis of Nietzsche’s message and represents the new man who comes after the criticism of the values of Western culture that Nietzsche proposed to destroy throughout his work.
The Eternal Return
It is a complex concept, seemingly originating in the pre-Socratics, particularly in Heraclitus. It is around, the rhythmic repetition of the things of this world.
Zarathustra is the prophet of the eternal return and tells us that in this world, everything is repeated like a game or a dance.
Eternal return means that everything, including our life, will be repeated exactly the same for all eternity in successive cycles, each one of which Nietzsche called “the great year of becoming.” Time is a circle; the now is repeated forever. The past will happen again in the future. The future has already happened in the past.
This revelation of the eternal return has two faces: it can be an excruciating ordeal or a great hope.
Seen from the past, the eternal return is a fatalistic theory. If all returns, all efforts and decisions are useless because what will happen has already happened before. Even the hope of the Superman is absurd because man will always return.
But looking ahead, the eternal return gives meaning to every current decision, as it will lead one to think that what we decide now, we will decide forever. Every moment becomes a dimension of eternity.
In the ontological dimension, the eternal return is linked to the desire for permanence and timelessness that every man carries within him. The world and life pass but then are repeated forever. Nietzsche denies transcendent immortality but accepts the eternity inherent in the world and life.
Nietzsche’s philosophy is also like an eternal return; it returns continually to the same issues and always reaches the same point: the affirmation of life as the most important thing for man.