Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Key Terms and Concepts
Treachery
In legal language, treachery implies that a crime is committed with caution to avoid risk. Nietzsche acknowledges Kant’s contribution to the demystification of the “real world,” but he believes Kant betrays the impulse to cling to a supposed supersensible world as the foundation of morality.
Appearance
The surface appearance of something, which, according to Nietzsche, is a hoax of the senses, motivated by fear of contingency and perpetual growth.
Artist
For Nietzsche, the most authentic attitude towards existence is that of the artist. The unique can only express itself through artistic creation, as opposed to the uniform and simplifying nature of the concept. Those who want a full life will have to become artists, guided by beauty, and make their existence into art.
Categories of Reason
These are the concepts that “reason” creates to explain reality. For Nietzsche, they are only the abstract expression of the grammatical functions of language, that is, fictions that come from an anthropomorphic projection.
Causa Sui
From Latin, meaning “cause of itself.” In philosophy, it refers to first-order realities, supreme values.
Subjective Certainty
A mental state of complete trust of the subject in a cognitive act itself.
Science
Used in this context as “knowledge” in general. Nietzsche criticizes the mechanistic and positivist view of science of his day, which reduced reality to matter and mechanical motion. For Nietzsche, the universe is not subject to deterministic laws, but rather a chaos of forces.
Concept
An idea that forms the understanding. It is formed when differences are arbitrarily abandoned. For Western philosophy, to understand a reality is to apply a concept, but how can different realities be the same concept? The answer is that they share a common presence. For Nietzsche, there are no essences, there is no feature that exists in different individuals; objects do not exist, since the identity that we attribute to them is nothing more than a fiction that comes from our way of interpreting reality.
Supreme Concepts
For Nietzsche, reality is constituted by dynamic forces struggling to reach their maximum power. Nothing is explained by a concept, so it only designates inaccurately, and the more general a concept is, the further its content is from what really exists. The most general concepts are the “highest concepts,” and in them, the greatest separation from reality is fulfilled.
Constellation
A completely arbitrary grouping of stars, where the stars may be hundreds of light-years away from each other, but seen from Earth, they can be connected with imaginary lines, forming designs in the sky.
Thing
Everything that has entity, whether bodily or spiritual, actual or abstract. It is equivalent to being synonymous with substance. For Nietzsche, things are fictions created by man to make reality more manageable.
Thingness
The quality of being a thing, referring to the thing itself.
Body
According to traditional philosophers, human beings have a body but are not a body. Nietzsche is totally opposed to this way of evaluating and interpreting the ontological structure of man, who is none other than a living body. The body is the human being and nothing else, and the soul is just a word for something in the body.
Décadence
From the French: decadence. It expresses declining life.
Becoming
Reality understood as a process or change. Man needs to set the changing multiplicity of the real, otherwise it would be impossible to acknowledge and share experiences with other human beings.
Dionysian
The division between “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” as two basic attitudes towards reality is a constant in Nietzsche’s thinking. They respectively pay tribute to Apollo and Dionysus. According to Nietzsche, everything is Apollonian, and the Dionysian foundation is precisely the neglect of this support in any form, which has caused the excessive decadence that has characterized the Western tradition.
Egyptianism
Egypt was a culture characterized by its passion for the eternal, immutable, and therefore static. Nietzsche uses it as a metaphor to reveal the idiosyncrasies of traditional philosophers.
Eleatics
Followers of the philosophy of Parmenides of Elea, among whom Zeno stands out.
Empiricism
Transcription of the Greek concept of “sense experience, knowledge through the senses.”
Ens Realissimum
Reality itself in its highest level, God as the pinnacle of traditional metaphysics.
Spectroscope
An instrument designed to separate the different components of an optical spectrum.
Faculty
The ability to do something.
Phantasmagoria
An illusion of the senses.
Fetish
Idolatry. Fetishism is a psychological mechanism by which an object is projected with qualities it lacks.