Nietzsche’s Critique: Overcoming Western Nihilism
Nietzsche’s Critique of Western Civilization
Thesis: This excerpt from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols showcases his attack on the use of “reason” in traditional philosophy. He criticizes the invention of an “other” world and “other” life, born from a distrust of our own reality. In the same vein, Nietzsche critiques the decadent dichotomy of the “true” and “apparent” world, a concept prevalent in religious (Christian) and philosophical (Kantian) thought. This does not contradict Nietzsche’s thesis that the artist chooses appearance, because it is a reality selected. The artistic choice, characterized by the tragic, should not be pessimistic but Dionysian.
The Problem: The Decline of the West
The text addresses a fundamental problem posed by Nietzsche: the decline of Western civilization. According to Nietzsche, the disappearance of the Dionysian/Apollonian bipolarity in Greek tragedy (starting with Euripides) and the guiding philosophy (Socrates and Plato) towards the dichotomy of a “real” world and an “apparent” world, in “this” and “other” life, marks the beginning of this decline, leading inexorably to nihilism.
Subsequent milestones in this pernicious ideology, which engulfs and degrades humanity, include Christianity (a vulgarized Platonism) and “rationalist” philosophy, exemplified by the intellectual mummies of René Descartes (Cogito, ergo sum) and Immanuel Kant (distinction between phenomenon and noumenon). In this progressive nihilism, humanity has passed through the stages of the camel (a beast of burden carrying “anti-vital” Christian values), the lion (a symbol of rebellion and protest during the Enlightenment), and the child (representing spontaneity and enjoyment of life, foreshadowed by Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Wagner’s music during the 19th-century positivist era).
At this juncture, Nietzsche sees two possibilities: continuing down the path of human annihilation or a rupture, reinforced by the re-emergence of the Übermensch (superman), who would reinstate the Greek context where there were supermen who understood not another world but this world, not another life but this life.
Key Ideas in Nietzsche’s Philosophy
Nihilism and suspicion towards life, inherited from Plato, continue in Christianity with its dualism of heaven and earth. This denial of the value of life is characteristic of Western nihilism. It represents the disease and decline of Western humanity: the pursuit of the good in itself, rationality at any cost, a lack of instincts, and the condemnation of the body.
The Platonic-Christian tradition denies any value to this life, earthly life, the only one we have. The will to power is the revolt of the instinctive, unconscious passion against the coldness of rationality.
Socrates and Plato established, in contrast to the underworld, another otherworldly realm of ideas, true and accessible to those who have “killed” their bodies while alive. Kant, too, succumbs to epistemological nihilism, distinguishing between the phenomenon (the thing for me) and the noumenon (the thing in itself). From the standpoint of morality, Kantian noumenal presuppositions (freedom, immortality, God), unprovable and unavailable, offer comfort to reason constrained by its limitations.
Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical proposal transcends dualism: there is only one world, this world. Dualistic metaphysics is like sunrise (there is a real world and another who is his shadow, apparently). Nietzsche’s philosophy is that of midday, where the shadow is shortest, matching in one only true and apparent world. Following Nietzsche’s proposal is an ethic: carpe diem, live every moment, even the bad ones, as if it were the last.
Terms and Concepts
The terms referenced in the text can be linked to a single semantic field expressed in Nietzsche’s thesis: there is no more to life than this life; there is no world other than this world. This is a criticism of Western metaphysical dualism, such as the Platonic-Christian-Kantian view, which divides reality into two worlds: real and apparent, with the former being the foundation of the latter. The “real world” is a sublimation of the impulses of the will to power. The fear of death leads to the “creation” of a timeless world. The “real world” is a “moral-optical illusion.” Western humanity’s disease lies not in inventing another world that is inhuman but in the hypocrisy of inventing it and declaring it the only true one.