The Philosophy
Nietzsche’s philosophy is actually quite easy to understand (especially when one considers the other philosophers he is most often associated with; Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, etc.). There are no convoluted expositions of self as a relation which relates to itself (Kierkegaard) or the way consciousness is what it isn’t and isn’t what it is (Sartre). Although reading Nietzsche does present its own challenges.
First, he often doesn’t directly spell out what he intends in his writing. Much of his work is almost poetic in nature (he took great pride in writing prose that had a tempo and which needed to be read a certain way to be understood) and most of it is aphoristic; short, punchy sections, seldom connected to each other, with an abundance of metaphor and allusion.
Second, he was deliberately provocative and, although he knew that he would be misinterpreted and misused, at times he almost seems to court false readings (he often spoke of the need or desire of philosophers to conceal themselves behind “masks”).
Third, what he advocates is so diametrically opposed to the cultural and societal norms anybody reading this will have grown up with that it can be difficult to figure out where and how exactly he should fit into our worldview.
If I only had two words to sum up Nietzsche’s philosophy, I would go with elitism and power. If you relate everything you read in Nietzsche back to these central concepts (with a couple of tweaks), you will more often than not come out close to what he intended, I think.
Will to Power
Nietzsche was captured early on by Schopenhauer’s anti-rational conception of the will, not reason (as had been argued by and large since the time of Socrates), as the driving force in the universe. Despite this similarity the two philosophers had very different ideas of what this will actually was. Where Schopenhauer’s was a will to existence, Nietzsche envisaged his as a will to power. They also advocated very different responses to their respective insights into the ‘essence’ of the universe. Schopenhauer adopted a pessimistic reaction and recommended an ascetic denial of will, while Nietzsche argued for a more Stoic-like embracing of will (nature).
Wherever we look in nature we see the will to power playing out. In fact, all life operates through the principles of injury, assault, exploitation, and destruction. Whether animal, insect, or plant, all life takes what it can, trying to increase its power or influence, without any considerations over whether or not it should. He even sees the will to power operating in humans, claiming that each person is a mass of drives each striving for supremacy. Any decisions we make or actions we take arise from one desire outcompeting all the others.
One argument you might raise against Nietzsche here is that humans are different from all other life in that we are rational and this elevates us above everything else. Normative moral concerns aren’t a problem to be solved; they are what makes us human. Nietzsche would probably disagree with just about everything in that sentiment. First, he would question whether we really are rational. Second, he would question the assumption that it is good to be rational. Finally, he would argue that rather than denying and suppressing our natural desire (to power), we would do better to accept it.
There is no doubt that this is a combative, aggressive, and selfish doctrine. However, because Nietzsche saw the will to power (through strength and dominance) as a universal natural principle, he valued the same characteristics in individuals, who are after all, a part of nature.
Morality
Nietzsche is a moral relativist. He doesn’t believe that morals exist as objective universal principles we can rationally deduce. Morality is usually nothing more than a reflection of what a particular group of people find pleasant or useful. This is why moral values differ across cultures and times.
He divided morality into two categories; master and slave morality, the former belonging to the noble, knightly-aristocratic warrior who creates (another key theme in Nietzsche) his own morals, defining ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (or ‘noble’ and ‘contemptible’) by what (dis)pleases him. They start with the ‘good’ declaring it to be whatever is helpful or advantageous for them and define the ‘bad’ in light of this as simply whatever diminishes their power. Nietzsche identifies the Romans and the French aristocracy as exemplifying his master morality.
Slave morality trades in the good/bad distinction for a good/evil one. How is this significant? First, the word ‘evil’ elevates the whole discussion, so now instead of merely saying those who do what I disapprove of are rejecting my values, when people go against me, we are passing a damning, personal judgement on them. They haven’t just made their own values; they are wrong, objectively flawed, evil people. Second, the slaves formulate their whole morality by starting with values they didn’t create. They take the values of the masters (strength, nobility, selfishness, etc.) and declare these ‘evil’. This occurs out of the ressentiment (resentment) they feel towards the masters. Once this is done, they invert those values to get their ‘good’ values (meekness, humility, poverty, etc.). The slave morality is exemplified in the Judaeo-Christian religion.
Nietzsche is often criticised as promoting a stark, value-less world that inevitably leads to nihilism but in truth, he was anything but a nihilist. What he did was reject any school of thought that proposed absolute values we are all beholden to, as with Christianity, where becoming the perfect servant to God was perversely considered the ideal. His philosophy is not nihilistic because, rather than saying there are no values, he merely insists that values don’t come ready-made, instead we need to make our own.
Creation
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche talks of three metamorphoses the spirit must make. First, one must become a camel, capable of bearing the many burdens of life. Second, in order to conquer ones freedom, one must become a lion (the “blond beast”), which resists the values already established by other people (the sacred “No”). Because the lion cannot create, the final step is to become a child, who is the creator, capable of making values for itself (the sacred “Yes”).
This theme, creation, lies at the heart of everything Nietzsche talks about and is arguably the greatest value he affirms.
A consequence of this drive to create is that it must also necessarily be a drive to destroy. There can be no creation of new values if those that existed prior aren’t first torn down. This is, by the way, a theme that frequently recurs in Nietzsche; an embracing of the whole, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, joy and suffering, creation and destruction. Any worldview which focuses on only one half of the story is, by definition, incomplete.
The Ubermensch
Nietzsche’s will to power is embodied in one of the notions he is most famous for, the ubermensch (usually translated as ‘superman’ or ‘overman’), whom he sees as being a future, stronger, nobler generation of humans (he often refers to them as a new species although he doesn’t mean this literally) unafflicted by weaknesses such as pity, kindness, or a belief in equality. He has in mind an aristocratic class of people – stronger, more warlike, more driven, less weak, less cunning, less manipulative – than the ‘normal’ folk (the “herd”).
The ubermensch aren’t intellectual, scholarly types formulating grand theories or working out detailed philosophies. Instead of thinking and planning, they do. They are conquerors and rulers, defined by action and instinct. They don’t concern themselves with what the ‘right’ thing is, or what would be ‘best’ for everyone – why would an eagle concern itself with the welfare of a sparrow? The living embodiment of the will to power within them, they constantly seek more; more exuberant joyful experiences, more passion, more power; in short, more life.
It’s important to realise that, despite the way I’ve characterised them here, the ubermensch aren’t monsters; they aren’t mean or cruel, although they will certainly sometimes do things that we would interpret as both mean and cruel. They are like forces of nature and if sometimes they explode and vent, perhaps going on a rampage of sorts if a natural outlet for their fiery spiritedness doesn’t present itself, this is only because their raw energy must be dissipated somehow. They don’t deliberately or vindictively aim to ‘get even’ or exact punishment for some grievance (they don’t care enough about the “herd” to want to cause them suffering), but when they do (as they invariably will) it is the same as when an eagle flying overhead may leave a sparrow flailing in its wake or even send it plummeting to the ground. Nietzsche would say their cruelty is an ‘honest’ or even ‘innocent’ expression of their natural exuberance, as opposed to the scheming, manipulative duplicity of the less ‘noble’ (priestly) types which is a cruelty born from ressentiment that seeks to cause suffering indirectly out of fear or even envy of the strong qualities of their betters. The ubermensch take and do what they want in plain sight just because they can (think of a wild lion).
Of course, the ubermensch may also be generous and giving to their inferiors, assisting and protecting them when necessary. Their succour, however, isn’t given out of any misguided belief in equality, nor do they expect anything in return for their gift. Rather, they give because they have so much. Nietzsche would even say they give (when they do so) out of love for their inferiors, but again, not the petty form of conditional or dependent love most of us are familiar with; on the contrary, they give out of a truly unconditional love, one which asks for, and needs, nothing in return.
One final point I will make about the ubermensch is that Nietzsche consistently referred to them as a race of human beings who might arise in the distant future. They will be distant descendants of modern men and women. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche refers to this process as self-overcoming, stating that life is that which must always overcome itself. By this, he means the will to power working through individuals as a procreative drive to “an end, to something higher, farther…”
Society
In The Antichrist Nietzsche gives an outline for the natural order of a society. It is a society made up of three castes almost identical to the ones Plato set out in The Republic. The highest is the most spiritual caste made up of those who represent happiness, beauty and grace on Earth. It also contains the fewest members. It may come as a shock to see the ubermensch described here as spiritual but that is only because we have been conditioned to associate spirituality with long robes, contemplation, inactivity, kindness, and a rejection of the worldly. On the contrary, for Nietzsche, it is only the ubermensch who are capable of being spiritual because they represent the pinnacle of human development; dynamic, uninhibited, soaring individuals fully in touch and comfortable with who they are.
The second level is exactly as it is in Plato; that of the guardians. These are the noble warriors who are the executive arm of the most spiritual. The last level has the most members and is made up of the mediocre; those who engage in all manner of professional activity; the trades, handicraft, science, agriculture, most art, etc. For them, to be mediocre is their happiness; the mastery of one thing, specialisation, is what they are naturally inclined towards and all they are capable of.
One thing that stands out in all of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on society is his insistence on elitism. Some people are just better than others and are entitled to different things. As a consequence of this belief, he rejects the idea of equality at every turn in his writing. Nothing could make less sense to Nietzsche than to treat different people as if they were the same. Indeed, he holds that the inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all. If everybody is equally entitled to everything, then this is effectively the same as if no one were entitled to anything.
Nietzsche is quite disdainful of the mediocre, who tend to be unremarkable and can therefore be clumped together in a collective, referring to them variously as the “herd”, the “rabble”, or the “crowd”.
Nietzsche is, again like Plato, violently opposed to democracy and any form of parliamentary government, both of which give too much power to those least worthy of it; the rabble. Only the best are fit to rule and to do this effectively they can’t be beholden to their inferiors.
Truth and Reality (Perspectivism)
Truth is overrated for Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and Evil he questions why we prefer truth to untruth or even ignorance. A judgement’s falseness is no objection to that judgement. What we ought to ask ourselves is to what extent it is “life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating.” The will to power is Nietzsche’s crucial value, so anything that furthers this is ‘good’; objective truth is simply irrelevant.
One reason Nietzsche is so dismissive of objective truth is he doubts that such a thing even exists. Human reality is entirely subjective. We don’t see the world ‘as it really is’ (such a thing doesn’t even make sense to Nietzsche); rather we interpret what we see from a unique perspective. It is impossible for us to step outside of this perspective (as this particular being with this particular past and these particular experiences) to see anything objectively. Our subjective perspective is reality, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Science / Darwinism
Science used to be dominated by religion but cut itself free during the scientific revolution. Since then, it has been steadily working to separate itself from, and dominate, philosophy. Nietzsche gives a few reasons for this that turn on scientists (or scholars) being small-minded, defensive specialists (“nook dwellers”) belonging to the cult of utility, but he also blames philosophy for having failed to deliver quality thinking.
Scientists have closed themselves off from life as a whole and resolved to focus on only one part of it. As such, they can never aspire to the heights that a philosopher, who climbs the peaks so she may survey the entirety, can. He sees the scientific man as an industrious member of the rank and file who aims for complete objectivity. Nietzsche particularly loathes this obsession with objectivity, which strips away the subjective and the self from everything, rendering their pronouncements literally meaningless (because the only thing that grants meaning and value is the subjective). To this point, he accuses the scientists of “unselfing” the spirit.
To be sure, the scientist isn’t useless, but she is only useful as an instrument, to be used by more noble beings. The particular type of instrument they are, are mirrors, because they faithfully reflect back whatever they discover; a reflection which is completely bereft of any self and all the more impoverished for this.
Nietzsche was opposed to Darwin and his theory of the “struggle for existence”. In the first place, as we’ve already seen, Nietzsche thought the will to power, not existence, was the operative force in the universe. And secondly, he criticises Darwin’s theory on the grounds that if he were right, humanity ought to be steadily improving as the strong and powerful overcome the weak. Instead, what we see is humanity becoming more and more decadent and society declining in vigour and vitality as life-denying values flourish. (This objection is fairly clearly based on a misunderstanding of natural selection, but there it is)
Joy and Suffering
Curiously, despite Nietzsche’s insistence on unadulterated, raw strength and power as the noblest of traits, a key and recurring theme in all of his books is gaity, lightheartedness, joy, dancing, and cheerfulness. In this aspect, more than any other, he turned away from Schopenhauer’s pessimism and assertion that the will be snuffed out. He was absolutely opposed to the scholarly, dry, serious disposition that characterised many of his contemporaries. This dialectical seriousness that had infected philosophy he put at the feet of Socrates, a man who incessantly and pedantically questioned his Athenian betters, using logical disputation and ‘cleverness’ to run rings around them. The Athenian military commander doesn’t know what courage is, instead he acts courageously. This is Nietzsche’s ideal, a man who acts purely on instinct.
Suffering and pain have a bad reputation for us. We avoid them and readily label them ‘bad’, but for Nietzsche, it is suffering alone that has created all the “enhancements of man”. Suffering and adversity forge strength in those who move through them. Nietzsche doesn’t just suggest suffering, should it come our way, is positive; he insists we need it, and we need it higher and worse than ever before. One can only become great if one has the opportunity to overcome the greatly terrible. He doesn’t stop there either. Cruelty, violence, and war are all to be valued as things which force the individual to test himself and encourage competition to weed out those who are weak and sick, and therefore unfit to continue the species.
Consciousness
Nietzsche sees consciousness (what he also calls the “mirror effect”) as something of a crutch for humans. It is our most recently developed feature and therefore the weakest. Our capacity for consciousness is responsible for many of the mistakes we make. Fortunately, we have a natural remedy for this ailment; instinct. Acting on instinct is always right, Nietzsche thinks. Rather than over-analysing everything, we would do much better to trust our gut. This will put us in touch with who we really are. Not only this, we don’t actually need consciousness in order to act, think, feel, will, or remember. In fact, if we think about it, most of our lives actually are lived without conscious interference.
Why did consciousness arise then? The strength of consciousness was always proportional to the capacity for communication and the need for communication. Consciousness then, developed only under the pressure of the need for communication – “the development of language and the development of consciousness… go hand in hand”. Communication would never have developed in an isolated being, so it (and consciousness) belong to the social, or herd, nature of humanity. This makes it immediately inferior.
The Individual
It is often presumed that Nietzsche is all about the individual. One of the central planks of his philosophy, after all, is that of the ubermensch, the strong, noble individual. This is in contrast to the herd or the rabble, who make up the majority. He also insists that there is no one size fits all morality. What is right for one person is not necessarily right for another person. He even warns us against swallowing his own philosophy, as if it were gospel, saying instead that we must discover for ourselves our truths.
However, much of what Nietzsche is concerned about is the human as a species rather than the individual. The ubermensch are individuals but they are a race of individuals who Nietzsche thinks will lift humanity up to great heights. In The Gay Science Nietzsche says, “the species is everything, one is always none”. Ultimately, this is a dream for humanity, not for one or two people.
Religion
Nietzsche was fiercely atheistic and vocally criticised religions as promoting values that are in effect a denial of life. Almost all religions reject the physical or earthly as something inherently inferior, or even evil, in comparison to some paradise-like afterlife we will supposedly ascend to, if we do or say the right things. Unfortunately, since human life manifestly is the physical, these pernicious beliefs, in rejecting the physical are also a rejection of human life.
In The Antichrist, Nietzsche offers a history of Christianity. Originally, the Jewish God, Yahweh, was a god of strength; the cultural expression of a consciousness of power, joy, and hope. However, as calamity after calamity befell the Jews, they should have abandoned this belief that was no longer beneficial. Instead, the priests got a hold of god and tied happiness and unhappiness to the ideas of divine reward and punishment. This introduced the ideas of guilt and sin into the collective, further poisoning their lives. What had started out as a healthy, uniting force gradually became an insidious salvation mechanism.
The Christian rebellion was first a rebellion against the Jewish church; that is, against the hierarchy of society. But once Jesus died on the cross, Christianity, in order to preserve their faith in their Messiah; 1) blamed the Jews, 2) elevated Jesus to a god, and 3) invented the barbaric, revolting idea of the sacrifice of the guiltless for the sins of the guilty. Paul then added immortality to the brew and made salvation available to everyone, completing the recipe for Christianity as we know and love it today.
However, Christians were still on the bottom rung of the social ladder in ancient Rome. The Romans were a thriving, successful master race embodying many of the principles Nietzsche valued. So what did the Christians do? Their priests effected a revaluation of values, so that whatever was harmful to life became ‘true’ and whatever enhanced life, ‘false’.
Interestingly enough, Nietzsche was reasonably well-disposed towards Jesus, whom he saw as a noble individual unafraid to stand up to the ruling powers of his time, declare his freedom, and create his own values. It was later Christians who turned what he had started into the poisonous, life-negating doctrine that it would become and which Nietzsche would oppose with all his being.
Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for declaring that God is dead… and we are his murderers. With this, he was highlighting what he saw as an impending crisis of morality which would hit as our increasingly secular society found the grounds of its morality, which he believed were rooted in Christianity, undermined. In short, losing our belief in God also meant losing the foundations of our morality.
Nietzsche also talks a little about Buddhism in The Antichrist, and although he feels it, like Christianity, is nihilistic, he has generally positive things to say about it. Buddhism is more realistic than Christianity, endorses a number of practical measures (clean diet, no stress, etc.) and values objective thinking over wishful, supernatural fantastical delusions. Also, there is no sin in Buddhism, merely an acknowledgment of suffering and a plan to put a stop to it.
The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence
The doctrine of eternal recurrence first arises in The Gay Science where it is posed as a test of one’s passion for life. He asks what you would say if you had to live your whole life again; all the joy and pain, the same events in the same sequence, for all eternity? Would you consider this a blessing or a curse? Only if you can affirm this doctrine have you lived life as Nietzsche felt it was supposed to be lived. It is also one of the central themes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, being one of the two obstacles Zarathustra has to overcome.