Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture and Values
Critical Values of European Culture
The rational, the religious world, and the moral world are the three worlds invented by Western man. Nietzsche interprets their values as symptoms of decay.
Criticism of Morality
Morality, as it has been taught so far, is under laws, decalogues, standards, and requirements that oppose life and its primary instincts. The moral philosophical foundation of this is a natural anti-Platonism. The center of gravity of these ideas is placed not in this life, but in the other, in the beyond, in the world of ideas. What we have done is say that someone from outside the world, outside life, aimed at men. Then, weak values have prevailed: compassion, mercy, sacrifice. Life rests on a basis that is against traditional morality. But life is the only real morality; the rest is fiction, falsehood, slander.
Nietzsche criticizes the moral force from the study of the origin of moral prejudices. Therefore, he used the genealogical method, which consists of etymological and historical research of the “evolution of moral concepts.” In “Good and Evil, Good and Bad,” Nietzsche maintains the following thesis: in all languages, good originally meant “the noble and aristocratic” versus bad, which meant, in a non-moral sense, “simple, vulgar, commoner.” The contrast between good and evil is a moral one. This new versus the old faces and moves. The nobles now become evil, and the good are now formerly known as the noble and bad (commoners).
Two Types of Morality
- Slave Morality: Reverses the values: pain, smallness. Does not believe these values, but that it is itself.
- Master Morality: The maximum values are aristocracy, strength, and power. It is the moral self of Superman, which wants the death of God.
Criticism of the Christian Religion
Any religion is born of fear, anxieties, and needs; no religion has ever contained any truth. Christianity is Platonism. The true foundation of Christianity is nothing but resentment. Christianity represents the moral. It has spent the values of ancient Greece and Rome, which were values of life, and has invented an ideal world. It’s the mortal enemy of Superman.
Criticism of Traditional Philosophy
Western philosophy has been tainted from Socrates and Plato. Socrates made Apollo succeed over Dionysus, reason over life. Plato, in turn, created another world, devaluing it at the same time he invented the pure spirit and good in itself. After the idealism of Socrates and Plato lies a resentment of life, the spirit of decadence, and hatred of the very notion of becoming.
Nietzsche attacks almost all authors of Western philosophy except Heraclitus because he is the only one who started from the notion of becoming and has not rejected the testimony of the senses. Philosophers have fallen into the trap of metaphysical concepts, which are understood by Nietzsche as grammatical deception. They mummify the conceptual language of reality. The concept of “being” is not only a moral-optical illusion but a deception. The great mistake of metaphysics is to have admitted a “real world” versus an “apparent world,” when only the latter is real. The conceptual language becomes a hoax entitled by reason. Nietzsche proposes metaphorical language. The metaphor suggests interpretive fields of reality.
Nietzsche modifies the concept of truth. He does not support any kind of truth itself. Against metaphysical dogmatism, Nietzsche advocates perspectivism: “no facts, only interpretations; there are no things in themselves, but prospects.” Nietzsche criticizes the relationship of connaturality between men, the power of knowledge, and reality. The individual needs to have security for the other, and language pursues a certain univocal understanding. It contributes to the establishment of a parallel reality in language and setting the concepts. But if life must always overcome itself, then the usefulness of fiction is not eternal. When this is forgotten, fictions become timeless and eternal truths, and the truth of man will become an adversarial theory of life and imposes certain truths.
Nietzsche may seem like sophistry; he refutes the other truths which claim to be true to say that truth is a type of error. Nietzsche thinks that knowing is not following the thread of causality; it is to pass from causes to effects. Knowledge is a glimpse, a kind of transgression.
The Death of God
God is dead—everything, morals, and religion, which sought an orderly functioning of our lives and were based on something otherworldly. The death of God is the condition of liberty. The death of God is the annihilation of the distinction between the real and apparent, supersensible and sensible worlds. The cases of higher values that have hitherto governed, and that put all the interest in that other world, were in themselves contrary to life.
The New Hierarchy of Values
Nihilism
Nihilism itself is the consequence of the absence of values, which had been the basis of Western culture. With the killing of God, our existence and our life have lost their sense of direction. We can speak of a negative or passive nihilism, which is the moral or metaphysical tradition, and a positive or active nihilism, of destroying the system of values. Nihilism is installed within Christianity. Christianity, its moral and metaphysical philosophy, and critical trends go nowhere. The Christian God was for Nietzsche the mask of nothing.
The Will to Power
Will to power means the domain will, strength, vital impulse, emotion, passion, will to power, the law of the jungle… The superman is the one that should found a society of noblemen and tyrannical rulers.
The Transmutation of Values
The reversal of values occurs in Nietzsche’s work as a critique of Christian morality. Christian morality is the rebellion of the lower classes and slaves under, against the upper caste and aristocratic. The foundations of Christian morality are the result of the weak man’s resentment of life, the life drain. The history of Western religion and morality is nothing more than the triumph of weakness against strength, and therefore, the story of a decline. The ideal type of current morality exists only at the expense of a big lie: the “real world” that arises out of denial. Life is denied because it includes pain, and the world is deprecated in favor of a world idea. Nietzsche contrasts the more enthusiastic claims. Man is only body. The body ceases to be a grave or jail and becomes the true self of man, and earth, no longer the desert where man is banished, becomes his joyful home.
The Eternal Return
If the future of the world had been directed to a permanent end, to a final condition of stability, being, or nothingness, that final word should have been reached. But this world is in itself a necessity, which is its willingness to assert itself and, therefore, ever returning on itself. This Dionysian world of eternal creation and destruction of itself has no other purpose than the circle. From eternity, the world accepts and repeats itself eternally.
The Superman
The Superman is the expression and embodiment of the will to power. Man must be overcome, which means that all current moral values, a moral gregarious that tends to leveling and equality, must be transmuted. The first characteristic of Superman is his freedom of spirit. His virtues have nothing to do with others. Nietzsche presents Superman as a result of three transformations that appear in Zarathustra: the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion a child. The Superman has the innocence of a child, is beyond good and evil, and does not act on the principle of duty but for love.