The Philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche Essay. Words5 Pages. Philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher and held in regard amongst the greatest philosophers of the early part century. He sharpened his philosophical skills through reading the works of the earlier philosophers of the 18th century such as Summary. Nietzsche opens the second essay by examining the significance of our ability to make promises. To hold to a promise requires both a powerful memory--the will that a certain event should not be forgotten--and a confidence about the future and one's ability to hold to the promise in the future. This confidence demands that, on some level, we must make ourselves Nietzsche and the Prophet Nietzsche and the Prophet According to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the meaning of human existence is to make room for the “Superman”: a superhuman who perseveres in its capacity for unlimited self-creation
Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals: First Essay
Friedrich Nietzsche — was a German philosopher and cultural critic who published intensively in the s and s. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Nietzsche also used his psychological analyses to support original theories about the nature of the self and provocative proposals suggesting new values that he thought would promote cultural renewal and improve social and psychological life by comparison to life under the traditional values he criticized.
Nietzsche was born on October 15,in Röcken near Leipzigwhere his father was a Lutheran minister. His father died nietzsche essayand the nietzsche essay relocated to Naumburg, where he grew up in a household comprising his mother, grandmother, nietzsche essay, two aunts, and his younger sister, Elisabeth.
Nietzsche had a brilliant school and university career, culminating in May when he was called to a chair in classical philology at Basel.
At age 24, he was the youngest ever appointed to that post. Before the opportunity at Basel arose, Nietzsche had planned to pursue a second Ph. in philosophy, with nietzsche essay project about theories of teleology in the time since Kant.
When he was a student in Leipzig, Nietzsche met Richard Wagner, and after his move to Basel, he became a frequent guest in the Wagner household at Villa Tribschen in Lucerne.
His first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Musicwas not the careful work of classical scholarship the field might have expected, nietzsche essay, but a controversial polemic combining speculations about the collapse of the tragic culture of fifth century Athens with a proposal that Wagnerian music-drama might become the source of a renewed tragic culture for contemporary Nietzsche essay. The work was generally ill received within classical studies—and savagely reviewed by Ulrich Wilamovitz-Möllendorff, who went on nietzsche essay become one of the leading classicists of the generation—even though it contained some striking interpretive insights e.
These essays are known collectively as the Untimely Meditations. He used the time to explore a broadly naturalistic nietzsche essay of traditional morality and culture—an interest encouraged by his friendship with Paul Rée, who was with Nietzsche in Sorrento nietzsche essay on his Origin of Moral Sensations see Janaway 74—89; Small As a result, he was freed to write and to develop the style that suited him.
He published a book almost every year thereafter, nietzsche essay. These works began with Daybreakwhich collected critical observations on morality and its underlying psychology, and there followed the mature works for which Nietzsche is best known: The Gay Sciencesecond expanded editionThus Spoke Zarathustra —5Beyond Good and EvilOn the Genealogy of Moralityand in the last year of his productive life Twilight of the Idols and The Wagner Casenietzsche essay, along with The Antichrist and his intellectual biography, Ecce Homonietzsche essay, which were published only later.
At the beginning of this period, Nietzsche enjoyed an nietzsche essay but ultimately painful friendship with Rée and Lou Salomé, a brilliant young Russian student. The three initially nietzsche essay to live together nietzsche essay a kind of intellectual commune, but Nietzsche and Rée both developed romantic interest in Salomé, and after Nietzsche unsuccessfully proposed marriage, Salomé and Rée departed for Berlin. Salomé later wrote an illuminating book about Nietzsche Salomé []which first proposed an influential periodization of his philosophical development.
In later years, Nietzsche moved frequently in the effort to find a climate that would improve his health, settling into a pattern of spending winters near the Mediterranean usually in Italy and summers in Sils Maria, Switzerland, nietzsche essay. His symptoms included intense headaches, nausea, nietzsche essay, and trouble with nietzsche essay eyesight.
Recent work Huenemann has convincingly argued that he probably suffered from a retro-orbital meningioma, a slow-growing tumor on the brain nietzsche essay behind his right eye. In JanuaryNietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, and when he regained consciousness he wrote a series of increasingly deranged letters.
His close Basel friend Franz Overbeck was gravely concerned and travelled to Turin, where he found Nietzsche suffering from dementia.
After unsuccessful treatment in Basel and Jena, he was released into the care of his mother, and later his sister, nietzsche essay, eventually lapsing entirely into silence. He lived on untilwhen he died nietzsche essay a stroke complicated by pneumonia. That writing is now available in an outstanding critical edition KGAmore widely available in KSA ; English translations of selections are available in WEN and WLN.
Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of traditional European moral commitments, together with their foundations in Christianity. This critique is very wide-ranging; it aims to undermine not just religious faith or philosophical moral theorynietzsche essay, but also many central aspects of ordinary moral consciousness, nietzsche essay, some of which are difficult to imagine doing without e.
By the time Nietzsche wrote, it was common for European intellectuals to assume that such ideas, however much inspiration they owed to the Christian intellectual and faith tradition, needed a rational grounding independent from particular sectarian or even ecumenical religious commitments. Then as now, most philosophers assumed that a secular vindication of morality would surely be forthcoming and would save the large majority of our standard commitments.
Nietzsche found that confidence naïve, and he deployed all his rhetorical prowess to shock his readers out of complacency on nietzsche essay score. Christianity no longer commands society-wide cultural allegiance as a framework grounding ethical commitments, and thus, a common basis for collective life that was supposed nietzsche essay have been immutable and invulnerable has turned out to be not only less stable than we assumed, but incomprehensibly mortal —and in fact, already lost.
The response called for by such a turn of events is mourning and deep disorientation, nietzsche essay. Indeed, the case is even worse than that, nietzsche essay, according to Nietzsche.
Not only do standard moral commitments lack a foundation we thought they had, but stripped of their veneer of unquestionable authority, they prove to have been not just baseless but positively harmful, nietzsche essay. Unfortunately, the moralization of our lives has insidiously attached itself to genuine psychological needs—some nietzsche essay to our condition, nietzsche essay, others cultivated by the conditions of life under morality—so its corrosive effects cannot simply be removed without further psychological damage.
Still worse, the damaging side of nietzsche essay has implanted itself within us in the form of a genuine self-understandingmaking it hard for us to imagine ourselves living any other way. Thus, Nietzsche argues, we are faced with a difficult, long term restoration project in which the most cherished aspects of our way of life must be ruthlessly investigated, dismantled, and then reconstructed in healthier form—all while we continue somehow to sail the ship of our common ethical life on the high seas.
The most extensive development of this Nietzschean critique of morality appears in his late work On the Genealogy of Moralitywhich consists of nietzsche essay treatises, each devoted to the psychological examination of a central moral idea, nietzsche essay.
In the First Treatise, Nietzsche takes up the idea that moral consciousness consists fundamentally in altruistic concern for others. He begins by observing a striking fact, namely, that this widespread conception of what morality is all about—while entirely commonsensical to us—is not the essence of any possible morality, but a historical innovation.
In such a system, goodness is associated with exclusive virtues. There is no thought that everyone should be excellent—the very idea makes no sense, since to be excellent is to be distinguished from the ordinary run of people. Nietzsche shows rather convincingly that this pattern of assessment was dominant in ancient Mediterranean culture the Homeric world, later Greek and Roman society, and even much of ancient philosophical ethics.
It focuses its negative evaluation evil on violations of the interests or well-being of others—and consequently its positive evaluation good on altruistic concern for their welfare.
Such a morality needs to have universalistic pretensions: if it is to promote and protect the welfare of all, nietzsche essay, its restrictions and injunctions must apply to everyone equally. It is thereby especially amenable to ideas of basic human equality, starting from the thought that each person has an equal claim to moral consideration and respect.
BGE The exact nature of this alleged revolt is a matter of ongoing scholarly controversy in recent literature, see Bittner ; Reginster ; Migotti ; Ridley ; May 41—54; Leiter —; Janaway 90—, —9; Owen 78—89; Wallace ; Anderson ; Poellnernietzsche essay, but the broad outline nietzsche essay clear enough. Afterward, via negation of the concept of evil, the new concept of goodness emerges, rooted in altruistic concern of a sort that would inhibit evil actions.
For Nietzsche, then, our morality amounts to a vindictive effort to poison the happiness of the fortunate GM III, 14instead of a high-minded, dispassionate, and strictly rational concern for others. That said, Nietzsche offers two strands of evidence sufficient to give pause to an open minded reader.
Second, Nietzsche observes with confidence-shaking perspicacity how frequently indignant moralistic condemnation itself, nietzsche essay, whether arising in serious criminal or public matters or from more private personal interactions, can detach itself from any measured assessment of the wrong and devolve into a free-floating expression of vengeful resentment against some real or imagined perpetrator.
The First Treatise does little, however, to suggest why inhabitants of a noble morality might be at all moved by such condemnations, generating a question about how the moral revaluation could have succeeded. The Second Treatise, about guilt and bad conscience, offers some materials toward an answer to this puzzle.
Nietzsche begins from the insight that guilt bears nietzsche essay close nietzsche essay connection to nietzsche essay notion of debt. The pure idea of moralized guilt answers this need by tying any wrong action inextricably and uniquely to a blamable agent. As we saw, the nietzsche essay to assign blame was central to the ressentiment that motivated the moral revaluation of values, according to the First Treatise.
Thus, insofar as people even nobles become susceptible to such moralized guilt, they might also become vulnerable to the revaluation, and Nietzsche offers some speculations about how nietzsche essay why this might happen GM II, 16— These criticisms have attracted an increasingly subtle secondary literature; see Reginsteras well as Williams a, nietzsche essay, bnietzsche essay, RidleyMay 55—80Leiter —44Risse, Janaway —42and Owen 91— In such cases, free-floating guilt can lose its social and moral point and develop into something hard to distinguish from a pathological desire for self-punishment.
Ascetic self-denial is a curious phenomenon indeed, on certain psychological assumptions, like descriptive psychological egoism or ordinary hedonism, nietzsche essay seems incomprehensiblebut it is nevertheless strikingly widespread in the history of religious practice.
One obvious route to such a value system, though far from the only one, nietzsche essay, is for the moralist to identify a set of drives and desires that people are bound to have—perhaps rooted in their human or animal nature—and to condemn those as evil; anti-sensualist forms of asceticism follow this path, nietzsche essay.
As Nietzsche emphasizes, purified guilt is naturally recruited as a tool for developing asceticism. Suffering is an inevitable part of the human condition, and the ascetic strategy is to interpret such suffering as punishmentnietzsche essay, thereby connecting it to the notion of guilt. Despite turning her own suffering against her, the move paradoxically offers certain advantages to the agent—not only does her suffering gain an explanation and moral justification, but her own activity can be validated by being enlisted on the side of punishment self-castigation :.
For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; nietzsche essay more precisely, a perpetrator, nietzsche essay more specifically, a guilty perpetrator who is susceptible to suffering, nietzsche essay. someone must be to blame for it; but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it— you alone are to blame for yourself!
GM III, nietzsche essay, The principal bow stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself to cause the human soul to resound with wrenching and ecstatic music of every kind was executed—everyone knows this—by exploiting the feeling of guilt. Consider, for example, the stance of Schopenhauerian pessimism, according to which human life and the world have negative absolute value.
From that standpoint, the moralist can perfectly well allow that ascetic valuation is self-punishing and even destructive for the moral agent, but such conclusions are entirely consistent with—indeed, they seem like warranted responses to —the pessimistic evaluation. That is, if life is an inherent evil and nothingness is a nietzsche essay improvement over existence, then diminishing or impairing life through asceticism yields a net enhancement of value. While asceticism imposes self-discipline on the sick practitioner, it simultaneously makes the person sicker, nietzsche essay, plunging her into intensified inner conflict GM III, 15, nietzsche essay, 20— While this section has focused on the Genealogyit is worth noting that its three studies are offered only as examples of Nietzschean skepticism about conventional moral ideas.
Nietzsche tried out many different arguments against pity and compassion beginning already in Human, nietzsche essay, All-too-human and continuing to the end of his productive life—for discussion, see ReginsterJanaway forthcomingand Nussbaum Nietzsche resists the hedonistic doctrine that pleasure and nietzsche essay lie at the basis of all value claims, which would be the most natural way to defend such a presupposition. From that point of view, the morality of compassion looks both presumptuous and misguided.
It is misguided both because it runs the risk of robbing individuals of their opportunity to make something positive individually meaningful out of their suffering, and because the global devaluation of suffering as such dismisses in advance the potentially valuable aspects of our general condition as vulnerable and finite creatures GS ; compare Williams 82— For him, however, human beings remain valuing creatures in the last analysis.
It follows that no critique of traditional values could be practically effective without suggesting replacement values capable of meeting our needs as valuers see GS ; Andersonesp. at —7. Nietzsche thought it was the job of philosophers to create such values BGEso readers have long and rightly expected to find an account of value creation in his works. It is common, if not altogether standard, to explain values by contrasting nietzsche essay against mere desires.
Consider: If I become convinced that something I valued is not in fact valuable, that discovery is normally sufficient to provoke nietzsche essay to revise my value, suggesting that valuing must be responsive to the world; by contrast, subjective desires often persist even in the face of my judgment that their objects are not properly desirable, or are unattainable; see the entries on value theory and desire.
We [contemplatives] … are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, nietzsche essay, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, nietzsche essay, affirmations, and negations.
Only we have created the world that concerns man! GS ; see also GS 78,,nietzsche essay,; Z I, 17, 22, II, 20, III, 12; BGE,nietzsche essay,; TI IX, nietzsche essay, 9, 24, Some scholars take the value creation passages as evidence that Nietzsche was an anti-realist about value, so that his confident evaluative judgments should be read as efforts at rhetorical persuasion rather than objective claims Leiteror relatedly they suggest that Nietzsche could fruitfully be read as a skeptic, so that such passages should be evaluated primarily for their practical effect on readers Nietzsche essay ; see also Leiter Others Hussain take Nietzsche to be advocating a fictionalist posture, according to which values are self-consciously invented contributions to a pretense through which we can satisfy our needs as valuing creatures, nietzsche essay, even though all evaluative claims are strictly speaking false.
First, while a few passages appear to offer a conception of value creation as some kind of legislative fiat e. Second, a great many of the passages esp. GS 78, nietzsche essay,connect value creation to artistic creation, nietzsche essay, suggesting that Nietzsche took artistic creation and aesthetic value as an important paradigm or metaphor for his account of values and value creation more generally.
While some Soll attack this entire idea as confused, other scholars have called on these passages as support for either fictionalist or subjective realist interpretations.
In addition to showing that not all value nietzsche essay leads to results that Nietzsche would endorse, nietzsche essay, this observation leads to interesting questions—e. If so, what differentiates the two modes? Can we say anything about which is to be preferred?
Nietzsche - Genealogy - 3rd Essay (1, 11-19)
, time: 34:22Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Nietzsche states that “the difference among men becomes manifest not only in the difference between their tablets of goods—in the fact that they consider different goods worth striving for and also disagree about what is more and less valuable, about the order of rank of the goods they recognize in common—it becomes manifest even more in Summary. Nietzsche opens the second essay by examining the significance of our ability to make promises. To hold to a promise requires both a powerful memory--the will that a certain event should not be forgotten--and a confidence about the future and one's ability to hold to the promise in the future. This confidence demands that, on some level, we must make ourselves Nietzsche introduces this essay by asking, "what is the meaning of ascetic ideals?" He answers that it has meant many different things to many different people, suggesting that we would "rather will nothingness than not will."
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