1844-1900
Friedrich Nietzsche was born into a family of Lutheran pastors but later repudiated the Christian faith. He entered Bonn University in 1864 as a theology and philology student. His interests turned more to the latter, concentrating on classical and biblical texts. He read David Strauss’s skeptical Life of Jesus (1835-1836), discovered Arthur Schopenhaur’s atheistic philosophy, and became friends with Richard Wagner, leading to a stormy relationship.
Nietzsche became a professor in classical philology in Basel, Switzerland, in 1869. His university career lasted ten years. He resigned in 1879 for health reasons. His final decade of sanity produced his major works, including his attacks on Christianity, Wagner, traditional morality, and most aspects of the European philosophical tradition and its greatest icons, such as Socrates, Plato, and Immanuel Kant (strangely, he said little about Aristotle).
While he despised Christianity, Nietzsche admired Jesus himself, or at least the historical Jesus who, Nietzsche thought, the church had distorted. As a classical philologist he developed theories about the origin of tragedy (from music) and of ethics in ancient Greece. The latter led him to contrast Apollonian and Dionysian lifestyles, aristocratic and slave moralities, and life-affirming, ascending values versus life-denying, descending values. He shares with Max Weber the credit (or blame perhaps) for switching ethical discourse from virtues to values. Nietzsche went mad in 1889 and died in 1900.
NIHILISM, CHRISTIANITY, AND THE UBERMENSCH
Nietzsche’s philosophy is mostly based on three components: his ontology, his theory of ethics, and his views on intellectual history. His ontology includes his best known saying, "God is dead"; truth is subjective; the will to power; and eternal recurrence. His ethics involve a preference for aristocratic values over slave morality, the Uber-mensch, and the claim that we create our values. Contrary to traditional religious and philosophical ideas, we do not discover them or receive them from God or nature, reason, conscience, intuition, or a moral sense. The last point leads to the problem of nihilism. Nihilism (from nihil, Latin for nothing) can be defined as consisting of three main components, atheism, moral skepticism, and the claim that life has no meaning.
From this one might conclude that therefore "anything goes." While Nietzsche clearly endorsed all three of the above, he is best classified as an aesthetic, amoral atheist. He did not accept the apparent corollary of nihilism that Fyodor Dostoyevsky (among others) claimed followed from its premises. Instead, it is our task to create or invent our own values and also to create the meaning of life for ourselves, a view repeated in the twentieth century by philosophers as diverse as Karl Popper and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Nietzsche’s first book proposed an instinctual, amoral, Dionysian creative energy that has been submerged and repressed by an Apollonian force of logic and sobriety (an anticipation perhaps of subsequent work on the left brain versus the right brain). He rejected several ideas he saw as intrinsic to European philosophy, such as self-consciousness, free will, and either/or thinking. However, some may claim that his own thinking often exhibits either/or thinking: life-affirming or life-denying, ascending or descending, Apollonian or Dionysian, slave versus master morality.
Nietzsche certainly went counter to the main trends of both nineteenth-century and twentieth-century political thought, making it rather curious why so many left-wing thinkers were so enthused about him. He challenged the moral idea that exploitation, domination, injury to the weak, destruction, and appropriation are universally evil behaviors.
Nietzsche argued in The Anti-Christ (1895) that noble values in Roman society were corrupted by the rise of Christianity, and he discussed many of its main figures, concluding that Christianity is a religion for the weak and unhealthy whose effect has been to undermine the healthy qualities of more noble peoples. This is in striking contrast to Karl Marx’s opposite argument (made by many leftist thinkers) that the real problem is that the church has taken the side of the powers that be, sanctifying their exploitation of the weak and vulnerable members of society.
Nietzsche’s Ubermensch idea can be misunderstood if it is taken in a collectivist rather than a radical individualist sense. It has been translated as both "superman" and "overman." The former is highly misleading and the latter unclear. The best term might seem to be "superior man." But this also is misleading. It is neither racist nor nationalist nor class nor genetically based. Nietzsche had ambiguous attitudes toward Charles Darwin and definitely was not a social Darwinist. It is arguable that everyone, or at least anyone, could be an Ubermensch, a person who mastered her or his passions and became a creator rather than a creature. It is used basically as a this-worldly alternative to traditional piety.
Ubermensch is related to both the weakest points in Nietzsche’s philosophy, lack of systematic, logical argument, and the strongest point, his brilliant critique of egalitarianism, especially anarchism, socialism, and democracy. But again this must not be confused with later Nazi or other racial, anti-Semitic, nationalist, genetic based theories of group superiority. While it is unfair to see him as a precursor of National Socialism, he can be seen as a precursor of postmodernism and theories of social construction with their subjectivist theories of truth. In addition nothing in his theories seems to rule out racist, fascist, or even Communist ideologies (unlike Kant, utility, that is, all the theories he despises).
SCHOLARLY RESPONSES
Many Nietzsche scholars respond to criticism about the unsystematic and even contradictory nature of his ideas by claiming he was not propounding a system but proposing ideas and hypotheses. This would explain his method of aphorisms, bald assertions, and diatribes without argument and also why his twentieth-century appeal was to such a wide variety of literary and philosophical figures of differing views, from far right to far left. Many would say the same about Plato, who is also contentiously associated with twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies.
However, it can then still be asked, "If it is true that we invent our values then we invented the perverse one such as slave morality, human equality, Platonism. Thus, one can ask of preferences for affirming life versus denying life, why is the former preferable?" What is the basis for this other than Nietzsche’s own opinions? Why cannot revenge, resentment, and hatred be noble under some circumstances if people create their own values? This is a problem not unique to Nietzsche because it rests on the fact-value distinction Weber and Nietzsche helped formulate.
There is also a question of the coherence of his critique of Christianity. In his ultimate critique of Christianity, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he argues that Christian morals have emerged from revenge, resentment, hatred, impotence, and cowardice. He may well be correct about this and claims that Paul or the church or someone else distorted the original message of Jesus, but perspectivism and subjectivism regarding truth rule out any argument that this is correct. Finally, it is arguable that his compatriot, Gottlob Frege, father of modern mathematical logic, had an effective critique of subjec-tivist theories of truth.
