FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE

The imperial German army gave its soldiers copies of his book Thus Spake Zarathustra for their knapsacks. The Nazi party of Germany publicly claimed him as its forerunner. Commentary by such philosophers as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and fine translations by Walter Kaufmann and Arthur C. Danto popularized him. Thus the influence of Prussian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) slowly came to affect the thinking of the 20th century.

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was influenced by him. Russian-American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was much influenced by him in her youth in St. Petersburg. In the early 2000s a popular television science-fiction program, Andromeda, had a character from a race of supposed future "Nietzscheans."

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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was the descendant of three generations of Lutheran Christian preachers. Nevertheless, he lost his faith at 18. At 21 he read The World as Will and Representation, the most important book of philosophy by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). This book confirmed Nietzsche an atheist. On completing his studies, Nietzsche became a philologist and accepted a post at Basel, Switzerland.

There he came in contact with the revolutionary composer Richard Wagner and his circle. Wagner was living nearby at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne with, as Will Durant puts it, "another man's wife." (She was Cosima von Bulow, the wife of Hans von Bulow, a conductor who admired Wagner's music. Cosima was also the daughter of Friedrich Liszt, the Hungarian piano virtuoso and composer.) The great experience of Nietzsche's life seems to have been his Christmas, 1869, first meeting with Wagner. Nietzsche became Wagner's fan. Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was dedicated to Wagner. It concerned the origins of tragedy in ancient Greece. It argued the complementarity of what Nietzsche called the "Apollonian" (the rational) and the "Dionysian" (the passionate) sides of human nature. Nevertheless, The Birth of Tragedy clearly revealed that Nietzsche preferred the Dionysian side.

The music dramas of Wagner, then premiering in Bayreuth, Germany, were Wagner's attempt to create a "complete artwork" (Gesamtartwerk). Nietzsche attended Wagner's dramas with fascination. They were clearly descendants of the Greek tragedies he had written about.

Gradually, however, disillusionment with Wagner and his dramas set in. Nietzsche eventually repudiated Wagner, and mocked him in his book The Case of Wagner (1888).

The nature of the disillusionment was religious and cultural. Wagner, outwardly a free-loving radical, gradually revealed himself (in Nietzsche's view) to be weak and altruistic. The test case was Wagner's opera Parsifal (1876), which Nietzsche found insipid.

For Nietzsche was an anti-Christian. He found Christianity (and Judaism too, I think) too altruistic and weak. Nietzsche professed to believe that all ethics were, in effect, bunk. He believed that ethics simply described the behavior of a master class that dominated each historical society. He professed to prove his case in two books, Beyond Good and Evil (1885) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). There he attempted to show that all our words for good and evil descend from words used to describe the master class and its inferiors, whom Nietzsche called the slave class.

Nietzsche was an anti-metaphysician. Like many philosophers before and after him, he disbelieved in something he called "metaphysics;" he tried to expose metaphysics as an illusion. While metaphysics is for most philosophers the branch of philosophy dealing with the fundamental nature of reality, for Nietzsche it was any description of the supposed hidden and true nature of things. Nietzsche believed that Western man makes many false assumptions about reality.

But in addition to his disbelief in metaphysics, Nietzsche professed to disbelieve in truth, reason and knowledge. He regarded truth, reason, knowledge and metaphysics as all illusions. (For Nietzsche, nearly all philosophy was an illusion.)

Criticism

But does any of Nietzsche's attack on traditional philosophy make sense?

The validity of the concept of an illusion depends, does it not, on one's having a previous valid concept of truth. For what is an illusion? Is it not that which seems -- without being so -- to be a truth? An illusion is precisely not a truth. It is something that seems like a truth.

When illusion depends on the concept of truth, using the concept of illusion to invalidate the concept of truth is not logical.

Clearly, in postulating illusions one must first postulate the truth which these illusions falsify; on which these illusions depend. Despite anything he said, Nietzsche believed in the existence of the world. And he believed in the existence of truth. And he believed that most (but not all) of our philosophies are false. (His philosophy, of course, he regarded as true.)

Back to Nietzsche

In the place of traditional metaphysics, and despite his anti-metaphysical beliefs, Nietzsche nevertheless set up his own metaphysics.

For Nietzsche as for Heraclitus, the world was a flux; Nietzsche's, however, repeated itself in endless cycles. History, for Nietzsche, was an Eternal Return to previous events. (Nietzsche made no attempt to prove any of his metaphysical theories.)

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[To Be Continued and Revised]

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