Friedrich Nietzsche





Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was
a famous and influential German philosopher.

The son of a pastor, he was very pious as a child. A brilliant student, he
became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869,
but retired in 1879 due to poor health. From 1880 until his collapse in
January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a
"stateless" person, writing most of his major works during this period. His
fame and influence came later, with the help of his sister. She has been
associated with the Nazis in the 1930s, and is responsible for selective
quoting and abuse of his philosophy in Nazi ideology.

Nietzsche is famous for his rejection of what he calls "slave morality"
(which he felt reflected the inverse of the "will to power" and a perversion
of useful altruism); his attacks on Christianity (a character in one of his
works declared that "God is dead"); his origination of the †bermensch
concept (translated as "Overman" or "Superman") in only one of his books;
his embrace of a sort of a-rationalism; and something he called "the Will to
Power" (Wille zur Macht), possibly best regarded as an early attempt at
psychology. Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and his
concept of "the Will to live". H.L. Mencken's book on Nietzsche described
his work as an early effort to reconcile the philosophical implications of
Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" evolutionary theory with
contemporary moral and ethical systems. He greatly disliked Darwin and his
idea of "the survival of the fittest". In many respects his thinking
anticipated the "heredity" side of the ongoing debate about which has more
influence on human behavior: learning vs. heredity in the modern discipline
of psychology. ("Irrationalism" in human behavior typically stems from
genetic/instinctively-derived impulses). Nietzsche's thoughts also
anticipated the "biological world view" and genetic interpretation of social
behavior in the modern discipline of sociobiology (c.f. one can find updated
"Nietzsche" in A New Morality From Science: Beyondism by Dr. Raymond
Cattell, which draws from concepts elucidated in Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis by Harvard professor Dr. Edward Wilson as well as other emergent
disciplines such as "medical anthropology." Nietzsche's concept of breeding
upwards towards the "higher man" is indirectly addressed in biological
interpretations of human history, such as Dr. Elmer Pendell's Why
Civilizations Self-Destruct or Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West).

Every human action, according to Nietzsche, is born of a basic instinct to
exercise one's own power in some way. Gift-giving, love, praise, or harmful
acts such as physical violence, carrying tales, etc. all stem from the same
unconscious motive: to exert the will. The theory of the will to power is
not limited to the psychology of human beings. Instead, it is the essential
nature of the living universe, manifest in all things. Growth, survival,
dominance in business or physical competition, all are seen as elements of
this will.

Some see Nietzsche's "will to power" or, as he famously put it, the ability
to "say yes! to life" as life-affirming. Creatures affirm instinct in
exerting power and dominance. The suffering born of conflict between
competing wills and the efforts to overcome one's environment is not evil,
but a part of existence to be embraced in that it signifies the healthy
expression of the natural order. Enduring satisfaction and pleasure result
from living by instinct and successfully exerting the will to power. This
'will to power' has some affinities with Hegel's theory of history, but an
even greater similarity to Crowley's "Law of Thelema" (the Law of
Willpower--"DO WHAT THOU WILT"). This philosophy also bears some resemblence
to the principle of Tao in Chinese philosophy--particularly, Taoism, which
holds that to follow one's own natural wills will bring about a happier existence.

Nietzsche pointed out that in order to smooth over conflict between
disparate interest groups, opinion leaders of civilizations start to tell
white lies. Future generations often take white lies at face value, and add
their own white lies, so that over time so many white lies get built on top
of each other so that moral, ethical, and religious theological systems
become Byzantine, convoluted, and even inverted (or to use a more modern
term "Orwellian") compared to "common sense" morality that would be obvious
in a primitive setting. Particularly dangerous is "slave morality" which is
actually a two way street: the lies a master or oppressor tells his slaves
or the oppressed to keep them in a place unfairly beneath their real talents
and abilities, and the lies the slaves (or otherwise oppressed or expoited)
tell their masters (or more powerful people) to avoid incurring their ill
favor. Nietzsche then tried to dissect the elements of "slave morality"
embedded within ethical and religious systems. Theologically, "slave
morality" can include promoting mysticism instead of hard-headed pragmatism,
and glorifying weak and unproductive people over strong and efficient
producers. An American population expert, Dr. Elmer Pendell, took this theme
further with a biological intepretation of history in his classic work Why
Civilizations Self-Destruct.

To the extent that the study of ethics can be broadly lumped into three
categories (obedience-oriented, contractual, and utilitarian), Nietzsche
clearly rejected obediance-oriented philosophies (one either obeys or does
not obey a higher authority) in favor of a utilitarian approach (one weighs
costs and benefits on ones own to determine the ethical implications of an
action). According to Dr. Norman Ravitch, professor of history at U.C.
Riverside, "What Spengler, Toynbee, and Nietzsche can teach us is how
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, despite superficial differences, were all
forged and/or altered by a religious revolution in ancient Iran associated
with the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra. The central notions of dualism
between Good and Evil, Salvation through an Expected Messiah, and the Final
Battle between St Michael and Satan animate these world religions and their
devotees. Pragmatism, reason, and common sense have little place in these
primitive Semitic world views. All conflict is interpreted as part of a
cosmic struggle between Good and Evil and there is no room for compromise or
tolerance."

Nietzsche's assessment, of both the antiquity and resultant impedements
presented by the ethical and moralistic teachings of the world's
mono-theistic religions, eventually led him to his own dualistic epiphany.
Resulting in his work Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Nietzsche may have contracted syphilis as a student (some think the is the
cause of his madness) and endured periods of illness during his adult life,
which forced him to resign from the University of Basel. After the
completion of Ecce Homo his health rapidly declined until he collapsed: in
Italy, wearing only underwear, he tearfully embraced a horse because it had
been beaten by its owner. From that moment on he never recovered. Nietzsche
spent the last ten years of his life insane and unaware of the immense
success of his works.

The cause of Nietzsche's condition has to be regarded as undetermined, as
doctors later in his life said they were not so sure about the initial
diagnosis of syphilis, since he lacked typical symptoms. Other possibilities
could be a tumor or an endogenous illness, possibly paranoia.

In his important work "The Anti-Christ[ian]" Nietzsche frontally attacked
German scholarly Christianity for what he called its "transvaluation" of
healthy instinctive values. He went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers
of the Enlightenment who felt that Christianity may simply be an untrue
religion to claiming it may have been deliberately propagated as an
inherently bad and subversive religion (or in late 20th century parlance: a
"psychological warfare weapon" or "ideological computer virus") within the
Roman Empire by the Apostle Paul as a form of covert revenge for the Roman
destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple during the Jewish War. However, in
the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche has a remarkably high view of Jesus, claiming the
scholars of the day fail to pay any attention to the man, Jesus, and only
look to their construction, Christ. According to the American writer H.L.
Mencken, Nietzsche felt that the religion of the ancient Greeks of the
heroic and classical era was superior to Christianity because it portrayed
strong, heroic, smart, and muscular men as role models and did not try to
demonize healthy natural desires, such as creativity and writing poetry.

Nietzsche made it acceptable to view one's pre-Christian ancestors as "noble
savages". His works have also been valued as a religious "deprogramming
tool", such as in the large tome Which Way Western Man? by former American
Christian minister and co-founder of the ACLU William Gayley Simpson in
which he recounts in great theological detail how Nietzsche's works allowed
him to see the light of Darwin and overcome the dysfunctional "slave
morality" that had been programmed into him by society and co-religionists.

Nietzsche's works helped to reinforce not only agnostic trends that followed
Enlightenment thinkers, and the biological worldview gaining currency from
the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (which also later found expression
in the "medical" and "instinctive" interpretations of human behavior by
Sigmund Freud), but also the "romantic nationalist" political movements in
the late 19th century when various peoples of Europe began to celebrate
archeological finds and literature related to pagan ancestors, such as the
uncovered Viking burial mounds in Scandinavia, Wagnerian interpretations of
Norse mythology stemming from the Eddas of Iceland, Italian nationalist
celebrations of the glories of a unified, pre-Christian Roman peninsula,
French examination of Celtic Gaul of the pre-Roman era, and Irish
nationalist interest in revitalizing Gaelic. The English character "Tarzan:
Lord of the Jungle" represented a fantasy in which Victorians who were
becoming increasingly industrialized and alienated from their rural and
small village roots could show that they still retain the innate "right
stuff" to make it under primitive, savage, and one might appropriately add,
"Nietzschean" circumstances. A lot of early American heroes, such as
Meriwether Lewis and Davy Crockett, who could simultaneously serve as a
learned aid to President Thomas Jefferson or as a U.S. Congressman
(respectively), and also hold their own in close combat with Indians in the
wildest parts of the frontier, carry obvious Nietzschean overtones and even
became folk heroes in their own time. (The Tarzan, Lewis, and Crockett
examples are ones that come to mind to the author of this Wikipedia article
and are not ones that were specifically made by Nietzsche himself, in fact
Nietzsche's examples are all of poets, philosophers, thinkers, and
strategist, NOT barbarians).

Apart from "noble savage" and "religious deprogramming" themes, in his
brazen work "The Anti-Christ" Nietzsche wrestled with a major tragic issue
that remains very much with us today. The politics of urbanized society may
tend to reverse the evolutionary processes that bred for various strengths
and nobility in primitive man. Ugly, physically weak, and inadequate men who
would never make it in a frontier environment nevertheless through low
cunning and mafia-like behavior might through financial manipulation acquire
control of society. This fear was reflected in the hostility by frontiersmen
in the era of Jacksonian Democracy towards creation of a U.S. central bank,
for fear that "Eastern Establishment" financial manipulators would take over
the society. In "The Anti-Christ" Nietzsche said that while it was necessary
for Jews at points in their history to affect "slave morality" as an
oppressed minority as a means to get their oppressors off their backs by
deceiving them while hiding their own strengths, the deception practiced by
Saul of Tarsus in spreading Christianity went too far in its social
destructiveness. Hence a paradox: a person who practices "slave morality"
shows true inferiority if he really believes in it, but one can show
strength and superiority if one uses it as sheep's clothing to disguise the
stalking wolf. (As Sun Tzu put it: "All war is based on deception.") The
question remains: at what point do men who amass great power through cunning
and deception reflect a Darwinian hero, or do they instead reflect a
different trait that goes by the chapter title "parasitism" in Dr. Wilsons'
book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. ("Parasitism" is typically called
"criminality" in human societies; a vivid example is the protagonist of
Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel "Crime and Punishment" who thinks he is so
superior he can take morality into his own hands and winds up a guilt-ridden
criminal convicted of murder; some scholars think that Dostoevsky may have
specifically created his plot as a Christian rebuttal to Nietzsche).
Nietzsche's own life reflected the possible perversity of selective factors
in congested, complex, modern, urban environments. Sexual promiscuity within
a primitive tribe might be "eugenic" (i.e. it can increases stronger traits
within the gene pool) to the extent that it may enable more fit men to
disproportionately spread their seed compared to less fit men, but in a
modern urban society, this behavior can be the undoing of great men through
the spread of syphilis, as was the case with Nietzsche himself. Getting back
to the aforementioned American frontier icons, the apparant suicide of
Meriwether Lewis in a probable effort to protect his legend after becoming
ruined in business dealings as Governor of the Louisiana Territories (and
also after possibly contracting syphilis from the Mandan Indians), may
reflect how a "Nietzschean hero" in one context can become a failure and a
tragedy in another. As another example, after Davy Crockett's principles
cost him his Congressional seat in the face of intrigue by fellow Jacksonian
Democrats (a "failure" or "weakness" from one viewpoint), he redeemed his
legend by returning to the frontier and making a heroic last stand at the Alamo.

Works:

   * Die Geburt der Tragšdie, 1872 (The Birth of Tragedy)
   * UnzeitgemŠsse Betrachtungen, 1876 (Untimely Meditations)
   * Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878 (Human, All Too Human)
   * Morgenršte, 1881 (Daybreak, or The Dawn)
   * Die fršhliche Wissenschaft, 1882 (The Gay Science)
   * Also sprach Zarathustra, 1885 (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
   * Jenseits von Gut und Bšse, 1886 (Beyond Good and Evil)
   * Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 (On the Geneaology of Morals)
   * Der Fall Wagner, 1888 (The Case of Wagner)
   * Gštzen-DŠmmerung, 1889 (The Twilight of the Idols)
   * Der Antichrist, 1895 (The Antichrist)
   * Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1895 (Nietzsche vs. Wagner)
   * Der Wille zur Macht, 1901 (The Will to Power, a highly selective
     collection of notes from various notebooks, not intended for
     publication by Nietzsche himself, but released by his sister)
   * Ecce Homo, 1908 (Behold the Man, an attempt at autobiography; the title
     refers to Pontius Pilate's statement upon meeting Jesus of Nazareth)