Nietzsche’s Radical Critique of Culture, Religion, and Morality
Nietzsche’s Philosophy: A Critique of Culture
The whole philosophy of Nietzsche is, first, a radical critique of the foundations of Western culture based on a metaphysics. Religion and morality have replaced and inverted the values of life. Moreover, it is an attempt to overcome this culture that qualifies as a product of resentment against life.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian: Philosophy as a Tragic View of Life
In his book “The Birth of Tragedy”, Nietzsche outlines key issues in his philosophy. He does so by describing the development of Greek culture, using metaphors like “the clash of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.”
Nietzsche thought that Greek culture was conducted by opposing aesthetic forces that fight each other and cannot exist without the other: “The Apollonian”, which represents order, light, measure, limit, the principle of individuation, and “Dionysian”, which is the symbol of the deep flow of life itself, that breaks all barriers and ignores all limitations.
Nietzsche thinks that the ancient tragedy is a unification of the Dionysian and the Apollonian.
In the phenomenon of the “tragic” is the true nature of reality. The tragic vision of the world is presented as a fact of life and death.
This seesaw of life is what Nietzsche called the “opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian.” He comes to give life itself the name of Dionysus.
Tragedy is for Nietzsche a cosmic principle. The world is a “tragic game” and tragedy is the “key”, the key which provides understanding of it.
“Intuition” is the way to capture that deep, dark background that is life. Only through art expression is it achieved.
Consequently, Nietzsche’s philosophy is here for art, a tragic wisdom.
Socratic will to rationality, as Nietzsche sees it, is the decline of Greek culture and authentic philosophy. It begins the era of reason and man’s theory.
The Critique of Philosophy
The proposed task is to unmask all idealism. Only “evolution” is. There is only space-time, the world experienced by the senses.
According to Nietzsche, Socrates impersonates rationality over safety instincts, initiating the Greek decadence. The Socratic equation “reason = virtue = happiness” seems outrageous and contrary to life. After Socrates begins the attack on metaphysics, which he calls “egipticism”, which suggests that Plato was seduced in his travel to Egypt by the priests, becoming alien to the very essence of Greece, including the philosophy and morality in denying time.
This criticism of Plato as the initiator of a moral interpretation of being is a critical thinking replacing the interpretation that the world did the pre-Socratic philosophers and, for Nietzsche, was closer to reality.
- Two serious mistakes at critical points in this philosophy:
- The underestimation of the reality of the changing, of becoming. Also, it derives from the discredit suffered by sensitive knowledge.
- The confusion between “last” and “first.”
Metaphysics is for Nietzsche the world upside down.
The task proposed is the inversion of Nietzsche’s ontology and the evaluation that has made being so far.
What had hitherto been considered appearance is reality, and instead, what until now was believed to be true, the timeless, eternal, God is the invention of thought.
The Criticism of Religion
Nietzsche makes a similar criticism of religion to philosophy. He considers God one dimension of human existence outside of it projected by man.
Nietzsche believes that Christianity has made an investment of religious values of Greece and Rome. It is an oriental slave revolt against their masters, a “neurosis” religious. He believes that Christianity is the mortal enemy of the superior type of man who has seduced European philosophy.
Christianity is the strongest manifestation that has been universal in the history of the “loss of the instincts.” It is a form of “Platonism,” a “Platonism for the people,” a vulgar form of metaphysics. “Death of God” means to Nietzsche the deletion of the importance of values.
Christ is for him, the meek, weak instincts, but he is not considered the founder of a church.
The founder of the Church, for Nietzsche, is Paul, who took a different turn to the moral values preached by Jesus. He credited Nietzsche with bringing to an end the process of decline of Christianity that began with the death of the Redeemer. The same Christian concept of “sin” is for Nietzsche an attack against life. Christianity and all truth becomes a lie.
The Moral Critique
It’s the deeper critique of Nietzsche to the culture.
In his analysis of morality, he claims to be “beyond good and evil.” For it, his method of analysis is the genealogy research, an etymological and historical evolution of moral concepts.
He performs analysis of the origin of morality among the Greeks and the turn suffered from the moral concepts of Socrates and Plato.
Resentment is generated by these new moral values. And this “bitterness” is typical of the priests. The Greeks had not known it, it comes in Judaism and Christianity inherited it.
Nietzsche shows that behind the pretense of universality and objectivity of moral preferences are hidden emotional nature.
Assuming this argument, Nietzsche distinguishes two basic types of morality: “master morality” and “slave morality.” The first is active, Superman’s own morality and a morality that loves the “death of God”. The “slave morality” seeks equality of all men, love of neighbor. It is passive. The language itself.