Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture, Metaphysics, and Morality
**Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Culture**
Nietzsche criticizes the totality of thought and culture in the West. Nihilism is the process by which the meaning of life is lost. The strength of the spirit of the West is exhausted by inadequate and fictitious values, based on the fear of life, and represented by Christianity. We can distinguish between:
- a) Passive: Loss of validity of the old values.
- b) Active: Capacity of destroying them and creating new ones.
Nietzsche’s thought is a hymn to life.
**Critique of Metaphysics**
- A) On the ontological level: Nietzsche criticizes the traditional metaphysical conception built upon the dualism of the Platonic world, the difference between sensible and intelligible worlds, and the essential and the apparent. The metaphysical world or the first error of Plato’s part of “what is not becomes, what becomes is not.” Nietzsche says that what is real is only becoming. The proposed ontology is an inversion of appearances that are real; the ideas are an invention of thought.
- B) At the level of knowledge: (Contrasting sense knowledge and intuition, intellectual intuition is a spark that is mainly found in literature. Metaphor leads us to concepts that are abstractions of reality.) The basic shape of knowledge is intuition, by which we capture the immediate and individual, and reclaim intuition and metaphorical language as a way of understanding life, compared to rational speech. Conceptual or metaphorical language describes but does not really explain. The concept is an empty generalization, abstracted from reality; they are signs that take the place of intuitions, the result of words that were originally metaphors of reality, an empty form that has degenerated. Nietzsche says, “Every concept is at bottom a forgotten metaphor.” Life is so elusive from the concept that it cannot be grasped.
**Critique of Language**
Language prevents counterfeiting, which underpins the truths of metaphysics and science. Concepts are derived from words, and there is no overlap between words and things. Words are metaphors, and the concepts that we use are remnants of the ethical concept itself. Especially as virtue (joy of life has been transformed into its mission).
**Critique of Truth**
Nietzsche’s perspectivism states that there is no truth in the concept of reality. Truth does not designate the truth; it is a matter of perspective. Truth is traditionally understood as a designation of things uniformly valid and binding between concept and reality. “The truth is that kind of error without which a given species of living beings could not live.” Truth is how we feel reality. Nietzsche says there is no single truth, absolute, objective, and defends another position, perspectivism, whose postulates are (as the Sophists thought and defended): “All knowledge is relative.” The world has a fundamental sense, but many, depending on the subject. There are as many interpretations as subjects. Knowledge is understood as perspectivism, without objectivity. A possible goal of the philosopher will not be the truth or falsity of statements, but their ability to enhance life. Truth promotes life, and falsehood weakens it, in its biological dimension. Ortega defends his perspectivism, not biological, but historical.
**Critique of Science**
It attacks the mechanism of positivist science; Galileo mathematized reality. According to Nietzsche, life is not quantifiable; the tendency to mathematize rejects all that is real, the characteristic of subjective life. Science is not an authentic interpretation of what is real. It rejects the mechanism and positivism; everything can be reduced to mathematizable biology. We do not know what life is until we live it.
**Critique of Morality**
The genealogical method allows the study of the origin of moral concepts and values that were imposed as accepted by all from group strength. The vital force is equivalent to the good man, who is noble, an aristocrat, with noble ideals, and who is beyond good and evil, like the Greek heroes. The weak are cowards. The values of the weak are a defense against life. Morality is weak because believing in a morality of all becomes a morality of nobody. Two types of morality:
- a) Master morality: Moral force, the aristocrat is the creator of values, autonomous, takes into account happiness, brings his will to power (to impose the will to live) above all, without expecting compensation beyond earthly life.
- b) Slave morality: Passive morality that does not create values but accepts those found before it; it is the morality of the slave. The slave is cowardly, feels resentment towards the powerful, and proclaims values that make life more bearable: humility, patience, and understanding. These values are decadent and should be destroyed.
Nietzsche considers the history of Western culture as the triumph of the morality of the herd over aristocratic moral values. He criticizes Christian morality, set on the world of Plato’s dualism, because it is unnatural, goes against life, is declining, is the result of resentment, and the product of a desire for weak power. The catastrophe of taking over the herd values occurred when Socrates imposed the morality of the herd on the Presocratics. It should be rejected because it is the result of resentment and leads to a degradation of human life; it is a hatred of humanity, and it rejects happiness and beauty, proclaiming a transcendent and a willingness of nothing: nihilism. If God becomes an argument against life, the negation of God will bring the return of life values and the appearance of the superman, able to create new values. Judaism and Christianity carried out an inversion of values, initiated by Platonism, making the weak man good. Slaves cannot enjoy life; they rebel against their lords, setting a moral law that presides over differences between individuals and prohibits enjoying the self-expansion of the will to power.
**Critique of Religion**
The death of God is a metaphor that means the abolition of the transcendence of the dualism of worlds and the discovery that these are human inventions. It symbolizes a God-given moral ontology that is hostile to this world. The death of God means a radical critique of religion, metaphysics, and morality developed on the death of Western thought. The death of God is a historical event, “the most important event of the time,” initiated in the Renaissance, continued with criticism, and by the Enlightenment. Once the death of God is complete, it pushes man to nihilism (nothing, the absolute vacuum); he has lost his traditional values. This situation allows the revaluation to begin; man has to create his own values. The death of God allows the arrival of the Superman, who creates his own values. The place of God will be taken by life and the creator of new values, the Superman.