Nietzsche has often been misinterpreted. There have been many misconceptions about Nietzsche and it is my rather ambitious desire to present an interpretation of Nietzsche that would present a more approving impression and interpretation of Nietzsche. Before we go beyond God is dead, übermensch, eternal recurrence, will to power, and master/slave morality, let us first enlighten ourselves with what Nietzsche really has to say about morality and humanity, and how his Philosophy is really, for me, the most life-affirming of all.
The Value of Existence - “I am a disciple of the Philosopher Dionysus.”
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872 was supposed to be a work on Philology but his colleagues rejected it because of a notorious conclusion – a philosophical one – that the Greeks valued pessimism more than entertainment in their Tragedies. Here Nietzsche first raised the question of the value of existence – is there a value at all? Or how should we value our existence? He quotes Sophocles in Oedipus. King Midas was trying in vain to capture a wise man named Silenus to ask one question: what is the best and most desirable of all things for man. When he finally did, after years of hunting, he heard Silenus laugh and only to hear him say: “Oh, wretched and miserable race, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon.”
Nietzsche knew that we have always thought of Tragedies as having sad endings, endings that terrify us, make us cry; where heroes die in guillotines and heroines are raped after years of virginally chastising herself for her beloved; where Oedipus commits incest; where Agamemnon is murdered by his wife and her lover, and where Prometheus, after giving fire to man, is chained to a mountain peak where everyday an eagle feeds on his liver. But Nietzsche says that this made the Greeks powerful. They did not turn their eyes away from the sadness and futility of life. They did not always hope for happy endings but instead they willed (from Schopenhauer’s idea) that they survive everyday victoriously. Thus they worshipped two Gods in the Tragedies, Apollo, the god of wisdom, glory, harmony, and Dionysus, the god of drunkenness, wildness, orgasm and carnal pleasures. In Greek life there was a balance of everything, and the Greeks faced hope as much as they looked directly at life. Finally, they affirmed man’s struggle to overcome his conformity and commonality by competitions – Olympics, poetry, drama etc – they valued the human mind and body as works of art – and they did so in real grandeur. Thus, for Nietzsche, the Greeks solved the futility of life by ‘affirming the gloom and willing to face it’ – they gave existence value by affirming life as a ‘work of art’, by saying that life has honor and dignity by pursuing greatness amidst the fact of nothingness. They did not sleep dreaming for better days nor did they sleep despairing. Instead they lived everyday as though they were themselves aesthetic masterpieces – and a thing of aesthetic value, a work of art, certainly has dignity, beauty and value in the work of art itself. The Greek was conscious that in the end there may be a tragic ending for her life, but at least it was a tragic, not a mediocre, one, for tragedies always center on heroes and heroines and not on pathetic buffoons.
Questioning Traditional Philosophy – “That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.”
Nietzsche was philosophically dissatisfied with the philosophers before him. ‘Every philosophy has just been hitherto an unconscious autobiography of the philosopher with footnotes about his own view on nature’. Nietzsche, for the most part, was most dissatisfied with two Philosophers, who, he said, have corrupted Philosophy with erroneous metaphysics. These are Plato and Kant – the two biggest names in Philosophy. We shall first deal with Kant.
Nietzsche says that Kant was on the right track, clearing for us most of our misconceptions about Reason. Assuming we know something of Kant, Nietzsche said that all was well until Kant introduced the notion of faith for our morality without anything to support his claim apart from the fact that this serves a function in a moral life. If the end goal of all inquiries about Truth is to know how to live in accordance with truth, then, we must actually know truth and nothing but the truth. But Kant uses concepts like innate moral laws, God, and faith not because they are derivatives of matters of fact and logic but because they serve us a purpose – that of affirming Kant’s ethics of categorical imperatives. But Nietzsche says that this is a fictitious principle based on fictitious foundations! A concept that is useful or purposeful doesn’t necessarily provide us with a good reason to suppose that it is true; usefulness is no argument for Truth.
Nietzsche reasons that in the beginning all we knew was that we existed, we had a life, and we knew that there is nature. But ages and ages of inquiry has led us to conclude that our existence is for some greater purpose by a greater Being, that we were above animals for we could reason, and nature has some purpose somehow. But no definite answers were given, apart from speculation. And we even got to have science to back our speculations! But Philosophy and Science have not yet given the Truth for man, and man is still left at the dark. His Genealogy of Morals begins ‘We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge – and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves!’
Nietzsche says we have scarcely grasped the question of the meaning of life when a Greek named Plato betrayed his teacher Socrates and began preaching about another world – the perfect world of forms. Plato betrays the entire tradition before him by seeking not to know this world, the true world, the earth, but instead saying that the TRUE world is not of this world but another – where everything is perfect and true and beautiful and good and real. This was the start of an entire history of philosophy that was based on lies – a philosophical tradition that betrayed the earth by looking for Truth in another – another world that we cannot really prove at all. Our philosophical tradition, then, was also instrumental into the fabrication of our belief-systems; but there is something more, something else, that really caused one great catastrophe: the death of God
Morality and the Death of God – “In truth there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”
Nietzsche wanted to find out what caused the death of God. What this means will be clarified later; all we know that morality has had something to do with such an event. So in his works The Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science and Human, All Too Human, he began his most ambitious project – the determined campaign against Christian Morality. To do this he wanted to re-construct nothing less than the origin of our morality – a genealogy of the received morality that we are practicing.
Nietzsche says morality has historically centered on the proper values, and linguistically centered with the good. In the beginning, the good was defined by the noblemen, the aristocrats, as the way of life of the powerful, of the masters. They were the good, as opposed to the way of the lives of their slaves. To be good was to be a master, to assert life, everything that asserts the ‘vigorous, free, joyful activity’. The activity of the Masters were prompted by ‘the consciousness of the possession of honor, dignity, wealth, the abundance of ability, the urge begotten by excess of power.’ The opposite of the good Masters were the bad slaves – those who were weak, lacking, the people whom ‘the masters pitied, for they could not enjoy life as the masters do.’ Thus in the beginning, during the age of antiquity (from Homer’s Iliad to Caesar’s Empire) morality was a matter of masters over slaves, good over bad. The masters were the ones who created the norms of good, beauty, and truth. They said ‘YES’ to their lives, to the world, they affirmed and asserted themselves. The masters were value creating, they fashioned the world from their own point of view. Nietzsche is of course aware that the slaves had a morality of their own. Their hardships from slavery made them despise the attitudes of their masters; their poverty and lacking made them jealous and envious of their masters. Their weakness and inability to assert themselves made them Resent their masters. They followed their masters but deep inside they said ‘NO’ to the master (think of Gollum, who was motivated by greed while he remained a puny creature). They aspired to be like their masters and yet they despised the masters because they knew that slavery is a birthmark. So for them the lifestyles of their masters were EVIL. What is good for the master the slaves called evil. (Think of Marx – the exploiters, the rich, were always evil to the alienated masses.) Thus, where the masters said yes to life, the slaves said no. a resounding no, a negation to life influenced entirely by resentment. ‘But being weak and powerless, however, slaves cannot immediately express their outrage over the actions of the strong. So their resentment simmers in them. It becomes a longing for revenge for revenge and colors their lives with rancor.’ The slaves, then, plotted revenge. And the best revenge they had in mind was to make the masters slaves and to make the slaves masters; morally, this amounts to making the values of the slaves ‘good’ and the values of the masters ‘evil’. This would have been the best form of revenge, if only it could have happened. But it did happen.
Nietzsche identifies a certain nation of people who were always slaves – by the pharaohs, by Alexander the Great, by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, then the Romans – all the dominant civilizations of Western Antiquity. Who are these people? The Jews. The Jews that Marx loathed, Hitler tried to exterminate and the Palestinians want out of Arabia. (A funny thing, Marx himself was a Jew, and he considers the exploiters evil.) The Jews, being a nation of slaves, being a weak people, were unable to resist their conquerors. So instead of resisting them, they resented them. They bore their sufferings quietly and turned their other cheeks but deep inside they were burning with hatred, and they constantly prayed to their God (they were the only people who had one God) to punish their enemies for them, because they cannot do it themselves. This was, for Nietzsche, ‘the beginnings of the slave revolt in morality.’ Nietzsche says one day Jesus of Nazareth preached to the Jews a doctrine of repentance and brotherly love – ‘the kingdom of God is within you’. But the Jews had this man crucified. Another Jew, Paul, who was educated in Greek Philosophy, did a great feat unsurpassed in history – he overturned the doctrines of Jesus in order to overturn the morals of the Roman Empire. Paul preached that there is heaven – this was his debt to Plato, and he made Christian those who believed in his Judeo-Greco movement. ‘Israel, with its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all ideals, over all nobler ideals.’ The time came that this movement gained power in Rome and along with its rituals brought over its morality – the dichotomy of good/evil. Zeus was an ugly figure, so was Apollo. But Sebastian being stoned or Mary Magdalene was not. All then that the Romans enjoyed the Jews considered Evil. All that the Romans considered lowly practices the Jews called ‘Holy’. This revolt in morality grew in strength, proliferated, by conversion, sub hoc signo -V. And who brought about this victorious slave revolt in politics and morality? – the Apostle to the Gentiles, the most learned of all, and who was the most Jew of all – Saul of Tarsus, a Jew! A Jew! Saint Paul, a Jew!
Nietzsche says that this Judeo-Christian morality is the very morality that was handed to all of us ‘Christianity itself was the revaluation of all the values of antiquity.’ He shatters our belief that morality is unchanging, intrinsically good, and gives value to human existence. But this very morality is a morality not of goodwill, but resentment; it negates life instead of asserting it. It is not essentially a morality of love but a morality of suppressed hate – ‘Christian love is the mimicry of impotent hatred’, a morality that is poisonously immoral. Once Christianity took hold of Europe, it fashioned morality towards its virtues – obedience, piety. The individual was negated and the flock, the man-cattle, the herd, was the ideal. Christianity tried to suppress the will to power, the primary instinct of the masters, by preaching conformity by humility. ‘He who humbles himself will be exalted – by whom?’ Nietzsche asks. Since the Jews had one God (Normalgott), they also fashioned themselves to be one of the herd, (normalmensch). He preferred the values of Polytheism, where gods have their own individual values and hence fostered individuality, the will to power, to thrive. Worse, Christianity was complicated by the fact that Luther developed Paul’s idea of Faith – for Luther says, ‘ Faith alone, without any works, makes just before God.’ Thus, the Europe of Nietzsche’s time, and even much of the world right now, go with our lives doing evil deeds, committing base acts and unholy works of sin with only the slightest remorse. Why is that? Because we believe that however sinful we are, our faith would enable us to be forgiven for our sins. We are the hedonistic faithful. We only pay lip service to our ‘love for Jesus’ but we are very much worldly and not at all concerned with our souls. We act as if God does not exist, for we do as we please. Nietzsche remembers Dostoyevsky – ‘If God did not exist, then everything is permissible!’ But then everything wrong is being done, and it is really permissible. No God punishes the evil of civilization anymore just as He used to during Noah’s time, or the Tower of Babel, or the Dark Ages, or the Bubonic Plague. Hence Nietzsche’s conclusion – ‘God is dead’.
Nietzsche proclaims that the death of God was imminent, for science, morality and philosophy have all conspired for this event. Darwin’s Evolutionary doctrines have already declared that man has no unique worth save for the fact that he is one step higher than the ape; ‘if God fashioned man according to His own image, than God must be one step higher that the god of the apes – either this is true or preposterous!’ He says in Twilight of the Idols. Also, the uniqueness of the Earth in the universe is no great feat but just a cosmic regularity, so says Copernicus and Galileo. Finally, Kant has ridiculed man’s reason – for we finally are aware that the world of Noumena, where God is and what God is, is, at best, unknowable to our mental faculties. So in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche says that ‘Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ But the horror of it is perilous. The world we live in is not yet ready to hear this event, and we still live our lives believing that God is there to provide purposefulness to our lives and to give us eternal repose and salvation. But the way civilization goes shows that we just worship God for practical purposes, for tradition, and for psychological effect – to convince ourselves that everything is meaningful and everything will be all right. In Will to Power he writes, ‘So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother?’ But as he said, utility is no argument for truth. But we are all guilty of sinning and disregarding Christian morality – so we are all God’s murderers. ‘To have lost God is to mean universal madness – and for mankind to understand this fact when they are still unprepared would mean this madness will break out.’ Nietzsche insists that a Godless world is a miserable world. Imagine, no God! Would life be not dreary and useless and horrible? 2,000 years of an eternal truth sustaining a civilization until we realize that we ourselves have overturned this great Religion! But Nietzsche says, either we accept it fully, and live tragic, but heroic lives, or, we refuse to believe it but fear everything for the rest of our lives until we realize, life is really nothing – nihilism. Nietzsche thinks that we ought to prefer a heroic life. Nietzsche wants us, in The Gay Science ‘to give value to our lives without the saving grace of God – we have to create for ourselves, overcome ourselves…we want to be the poets of our lives.’ Nietzsche’s greatest quest as a philosopher was to overcome nihilism – the state where life is robbed of all values of good, beauty, and truth caused by the catastrophe of the death of God, and to inquire how we can find ways to overcome it without allowing ourselves to lose our sense of being, our value as human beings, our will to power. Nietzsche desired to give meaning to life in a godless world lest ‘existence remain…a thoughtless accident’.
The Revaluation of all Values and the Will to Power - ‘Be a man and do not follow me – but yourself! Be yourself!’
Nietzsche’s method was often scorned for its brutality, but it was essentially philosophical inquiry in the truest sense, although it was unsparing and disrespectful (what could we expect from the man who calls himself the immoralist and writes a book entitled The AntiChrist). Nietzshe, nevertheless, considered himself the Prophet of Zarathustra (Zoroaster, the man who preached about the duality of the universe) and the disciple of Dionysus, the god of excess and unrestraint. Nietzsche said that he was a Free Spirit, the philosopher who is ‘the legislator of values, and the surgeon dissecting morality.’ A Free Spirit is one who does not conform to the morals, an immoralist, one who is not of the herd.
Nietzsche called for all free spirits, seekers of wisdom, to accept nihilism in order to overcome it. After accepting it, one must then proceed to inquire, to ‘follow truth in all its hideouts.’ Even our teachers we must repay well by ceasing to become just students forever. ‘One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only. And why will you not pluck at my wreath? We must be able to question the very foundations of our own morality rooted in faith if this faith was the one who gave us this decadent morality. ‘Every true faith is infallible inasmuch as it accomplishes what the person who has the faith hopes to find in it; but faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of mean part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe. If you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.’ What Nietzsche objects to is the failure to question one’s own assumptions; ‘questioning means experiencing fully, with an open mind and without reservations; and failure to questions seems more and more synonymous with the desire not to experience possible implications.’ Courage does not simply mean having to stand up for one’s convictions, but having the courage to question one’s own convictions! Philosophically, the method was to be called Revaluation, a war against accepted valuations, against the prevailing morality of Western Civilization; a morality that entails nihilism once the death of God has been recognized. Nietzsche says that Revaluation reveals the fable of an error. He says that in the beginning the true world was the world, then Plato referred to a true (perfect) world; Paul followed suit and betrayed Jesus’ ‘the Kingdom of God is within you.’ Then Kant said that it is unattainable, indemonstrable, unknowable, but even so, an imperative of moral law. Hegel brought it back to the world but it remained elusive. Then the positivists (Comte et al) proposed that it be abolished. All these Philosophers have contributed to the collapse of the slave morality, the herd mentality. Then comes Nietzsche, INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.
Nietzsche admonishes all free spirits to renounce morality in favor of living dangerously, non-conformingly. Instead of worshipping idols we should instead seek to improve ourselves by asserting the Will to Power. It is only by the assertion of will to power that we can give value and dignity to life. Will to Power is achieved by morals of Affirmation – saying ‘YES’ to life, motivated by strength, superior intellect, and self-perfection. This is in contrast with the slave morality – a negation of life because life was motivated by conformity, humility, pity, resentment, meekness, cowardice, poverty. The Will to Power is the way towards self-mastery; for life to be meaningful, we should create meaning for our own lives. We should aspire to attain the heights of dignity as human beings by attaining self-perfection (not fashioned in God’s image – for God is dead), great self-discipline (the possession of overwhelming passion for life but the ability to control it) and the perpetual thirst for Truth. This is the very will to power that Christianity tried to suppress. But Nietzsche says that the collapse of Christian values was caused by this sublimation. The defeated Christian seeks to nourish his soul with prayers full of vengeance, repression and resentment. But Nietzsche has another remedy. ‘What is the strongest medical kit of the soul? Victory through self-assertion.’ The Will to Power is the underlying drive that propels human existence into something meaningful.
The Overman and Eternal Recurrence – ‘I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?’
Nietzsche proclaims this throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ‘Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly hopes!’
Nietzsche’s overman is an ancient conception. The concept of the overman was from the Greek hyperanthropos. The common man, subdued by received morality, must break free from the herd. He must do this by being a free spirit, doing all he can by living his life meaningfully in his one and only world, the earth, by asserting his will to power. And the will to power asserts himself over others. But it is hard to assert himself over himself. But once man has overcome himself, he becomes meaningful. He becomes the overman, the man who has overcome himself.
Nietzsche has an evolutionary image in mind – ‘what is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be a laughing stock to the overman.’ But it does not only mean a physical breed of strong men, but also intellectually, morally, and egoistically. ‘The man who has disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself…and became the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength.’ The overman lives history as if it was an afterthought but he is aware that he is the value of it. ‘He does not have an instrumental value for the maintenance of society: he is valuable in himself because he embodies the state of being for which all of us long; he has the only ultimate value there is…The value of a human being…does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom it could be useful.’ He says that Napoleon, Caesar, and Jesus were only great men, but human, all too human. For Napoleon conquered Europe but was so greedy he did not know how to stop; Caesar was a man of great power but succumbed to being a tyrant and suffered the faith of all tyrants. And Jesus was the perfect man until He became Christ and in Heaven he promised a day of revenge, a judgment day to all those who wronged him and did not repent. He thinks that they were still motivated by greed, resentment, vengeance, the will to power consumed them, and they did not overcome themselves. Thus, there is no person yet who has become the overman. For the overman has the power to be a tyrant deliberately refrains to be one. The ideal is ‘to be the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul,’
Nietzsche also teaches that the overman is also filled with love. The overman who is full of passion for life but is the sole and great master of his passions. Thus he loves other people and treats them not as neighbors but as friends. This he means in the context of Plato’s Symposium, where the proper object of friendship is self-improvement. Friends love one another because they seek to attain excellence for one another. Friends are educators with one another, and do not possess pity for others when they suffer. For suffering is intrinsic to human nature, and suffering is good in the sense that when we get past it we only become stronger – our convictions, when they are committed to the Truth and self-mastery, will always make us stronger at the end of the day. And though we may suffer everyday of our lives, we will not surrender from it nor shall we say ‘no’ to misery and hardship. For the man who has truly overcome himself always longs for life – he affirms life by saying YES to everything life has to offer, even death. And even if we die a hundred deaths, even if we die forever and ever in eternal recurrence, we will always say yes. We will not seek hope in heaven that we may one day find peace. For Nietzsche, there is no heaven but the earth. If your life is one big mess full of misery, you will always dream of greener pastures. But Nietzsche says that suppose one day a demon comes to you in your loneliest loneliness and says that ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unalterably great and small in your life will have to return to you…the eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, a speck of dust?’ what would you say? The slave will despair at this double jeopardy: if there is no god, there is then no heaven and worse, you will live miserable lives forever and ever! But the man who has overcome life will say again and again, YES! To everything! I will that I face life every single moment of eternity, all of which life has to offer. The overman finds his happiness where the lesser men find destruction and nothingness. His morality is perpetual-overcoming, perpetual self-affirmation, perpetual self-creating. For the overman, life is a joy. Every moment of it. He lives in such a way that he can also will that every moment of his life will become a moment of eternal recurrence. For Nietzsche says that ‘all joy wants eternity – wants deep, deep eternity.’ Joy must forever recur, for the life of the overman is in totality a forever-recurring joy. If we have lived our lives in such a way that every moment of it is joyous, then, would we not prefer to live this life over and over again, in eternal orgasmic bliss of self-overcoming and self-creating? Would we not wish to be poets who create happy songs over and over again? Life is a joy over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over
and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…
I was playing four songs over and over as I was doing this. Air Supply’s Keeping the Love Alive ( We can’t stop, the feeling’s too strong, we got the will to hang on. Can’t stop, we struggle and fight to survive, just keeping the love alive.) Then System of A Down’s Tentative (No one’s gonna save us, no one saved us, not even God), then Coldplay’s What If (What if there’s no time, nothing wrong, nothing right,…ooh, that’s right, let’s take a breath, jump over the side) and finally Josh Groban’s You’re Still You (I look up to everything you are… in my eyes you do no wrong). They reminded me of Nietzsche. This will be my last report in a Philosophy class and I am reporting about Nietzsche. So I’d like to savor the moment. Moments like these, worthy of forever recurring life-affirming bittersweet sentimental philosophical joy.
I might start quitting Smoking. We could look at it both ways. If I do it because I must conform to standards of self-preservation and out of respect for others, I am being one of the herd, a slave to society. But if I look at it as a way of overcoming an addiction, of taming my desires and passions, then I am beginning to overcome myself.
Nietzsche spent his last decade in sanatoriums and mental asylums all over Europe. He paid too terrible a prize for his courage. He died of Syphilis in 1900, just as a new dawn was breaking over the world. I think he died just as how Zarathustra gained self-knowledge of his self-overcoming, just as the sun rises. Zarathustra spent his first days as an overman with the company of powerful beasts while Nietzsche spent his last days in the company of animals, lunatics consumed by their passions and blind rage.
We would all like to overcome ourselves, rise above the herd, and be brave and strong and wise. But we really could not easily will that we leave all for the exhortations of one dead man. I think Nietzsche’s greatest contribution to Philosophy is his power and ability to inquire purely for the sake of morality. He was a devotee of Truth. The Overman was his Parish Priest, Love was his Patron Saint.
Nietzsche’s greatest fear was that in his death ‘someone would pronounce me holy.’ He did not wish to attract followers nor did he wish to be venerated. His was a genuine desire for Truth. But he clearly was crazy, but I think if he were sane he wouldn’t have been so prolific. His craziness allowed him to talk like a man possessed, and he challenges all our convictions, I was even hurt with some things he had to say. But that was his way. I admire him but I do not believe all of him, if I may say. I try my best not to believe anyone completely. Sometimes I try to be responsible, just being myself. Even if I would have to die because I am just being myself.
But to die being yourself! What joy! What bliss! To think that in your last breath you had yourself, you were yourself! Would you not will that you would die over and over being not any other, but yourself?
