Philosophy Friday: Friedrich Nietzche

Friedrich Nietzsche: 1844-1900

            Friedrich Nietzsche presented a provoking philosophical understanding of human nature, morality, and metaphysics. Nietzsche was raised in a Christian home, but after attending college he became an atheist. He died at age fifty-six of a mental disorder, but his philosophy was hardier, lingering on into the present day.[1]

            Nietzsche divided morality into two categories. The first and lesser category is “slave morality,” which is not unlike Judeo-Christian morality. This morality embraces human equality and the denial of personal empowering. The other category is the higher “noble morality.” The “noble morality” strives for “high courage, discipline, and intelligence, in the pursuit of self-affirmation and success.”[2] Nietzsche believed that there are two forces which fuel human action and morality. The first and better force is the Dionysian force, which is the creative, artistic, and passionate force. Nietzsche argued that the healthy Dionysian force has been weakened and suppressed by the Apollonian force, a strict tyrannical logician force, just as the “slave morality” oppresses the “noble morality.”[3] The ultimate man of Nietzsche’s philosophy would be a man of power and passion, not bound by the conventions, not bound even by traditional morality, and not bound by truth.

Truth, to Nietzsche, is really just an outflowing of our human power. It is no different than a metaphysical faith in the God of Christianity, whom he considered to be a figment of the human imagination. To Nietzsche, truth is “[a] mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.”[4] Our desire to attain an objective truth or, as he calls it, our Will to Truth, is as unnecessary and unhelpful as the God he claims humanity killed. Truth is a product of the “slave morality,” and it intervenes and limits humanity from its highest powerful potential.[5]

Nietzsche’s philosophy elevates the nature of man to that of divinity, and downgrades the relevance and truth of theism, Christian theism in particular, to mere human fancy. Nietzsche even lowers the definition of truth to a mere human convention with importance not exceeding human practicality at best. His philosophy still lingers on obstinately in the post-modern philosophy so prevalent in the Western World, tirelessly flipping the traditional relationship of God and man asunder.

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[1]. Pojman and Vaughn, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Classics of Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1041.

[2]. Ibid., 1041-1042

[3].Robert Wicks, "Friedrich Nietzsche", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2013 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta  (Stanford: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2013)

[4]. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 46-47.

[5]. Tom Grimwood, “Nietzche’s Death of God,” Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, ed.  Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 53-56