Nietzsche’s Philosophy Exposed by Bracketing Down Historically and Intellectually.
Running up to and extending beyond Friedrich Nietzsche’s lifetime (1844–1900), many of the West’s most profound and influential thinkers were making new efforts toward understanding and explaining reality, living authentically within it, and speculating about what this could mean for the future. Nietzsche was part of this. Out of different areas of the spectrum of human nature, thinkers were moving in different directions—ending with competing classes of philosophical explanations relating to how people might or should live. In explaining the operation of this process, philosophers like Fichte, Hume, and William James have suggested that—starting from different mentalities or attitudes—people choose from among philosophies of life. At this stage, out of their respective primary dispositions, they choose among humanity’s deepest levels of commitment. They strive toward truth and reasoning amounting to what they might defend with their lives and those of their children—as well as knowledge of false beliefs that might need resisting even through the harshest conditions of torture or cruel execution.
When we consider such cosmic philosophies, we discover that they are always articulated in two parts—or in problem/answer terms. There is the relevant human condition, and there is what can or should be done about it. And when we consider the degree of “completeness” and “certainty” associated with the individual problems and answers making up different combinations, we end up with the five most basic competing philosophical patterns in terms of which life is approached. Here we are talking about what gives rise to the deepest divisions within humanity. Representing one of these patterns, Nietzsche developed a philosophy with a total (fully developed and all-encompassing) problem joined with a partial (less complete and less certain) answer—but, combined together, strongly advanced as the available philosophical solution.
Considered as a background, there are five competing directions of belief—four outward toward intensity of belief, and one inward toward nothing believed in. Often in combination (like “Northeast” or “Southwest)—such directions of belief may be discussed or compared as types of world-outlooks one can tend toward or away from like poles of a map. These belief patterns can be described as: Overwhelmed, Satisfied, Creative, Regimented or Amorphous—and can be arranged into the acronym “OSCAR.” From within this grouping, we will show that Nietzsche operated essentially out of an Overwhelmed perspective—sometimes, as we will later see, described as “pessimism,” in its deepest sense. As a comprehensive spirit of the time (Zeitgeist), his philosophical writings often suggest conditions of, or feelings of, despair or meaninglessness—as might be symbolized in the struggling upkeep of irrational hope by a fish flopping about with no certainty that water might even be out there. (A more complete treatment of the larger framework we are selectively bracketing away from is a 35-page discussion with examples, pictures, and variations within 12 related cultural features and their outcomes found at my website as the “second download” by searching for “Alexander Flynt” spelled with a “y”).
Getting more specifically to Nietzsche’s concern, in treating with Overwhelmed conditions there are two basic philosophical approaches. The first involves escaping reality through mind-altering distractions, and the second amounts to accepting and living with the full pain and truth of reality as one finds one’s own path—as validating and meaningful in itself—but with no final promise of conventional comfort or certainty. Advancing the first approach in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), trans. Strachey, (1962), Sigmund Freud wrote, “Life as we find it, is too hard for us.” Therefore, “we cannot dispense with palliative measures” such as the “powerful deflections” a few might find in a preoccupation with “art or science” or the “mass” “delusional remolding of reality” made available by “the religions of mankind.”
Nietzsche too found humanity, at least of his general era, as Overwhelmed. But he confronted this from the second approach—often as some have associated with “existentialism.” This is evidenced by the full-range of alternative philosophical approaches he rejected outright and the indefinite and unsettled way he treated with material prior to and even after taking his philosophy as far as he could. In The Will to Power, (1901), trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale, (1968), he dismissed the feudal past’s aristocratic control by a “priestly morality”—as well as a related control by experts in “present-day sociology,” which “simply does not know any other instinct than that of (the herd).” In the same writing, he also dismissed the Enlightenment era’s individual agency opened to all people through democracy and human rights—as the “feeble-optimistic eighteenth century” that “had prettified and rationalized man” with “its bourgeois [middle-class] morality.” He continued on—dismissing Hegel’s teleological model of “history with an immanent spirit and a goal within”—as advanced within a pattern of undisputed certainty requiring the full and exactly controlled commitment of every person, as with Marx’s communism. Another approach to society rejected by Nietzsche was to live in terms of only what is calculated to serve oneself—especially as exploitation and dependence disguised as kindness—as when in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), trans. Walter Kaufmann (1954), Nietzsche has his spokesperson “Zarathustra” discuss interacting with one’s neighbor—ending with; “you shall not use him.” Likely influencing such thinking was the way the famous operatic composer Richard Wagner made ill use of the admiring young Nietzsche and others—as discussed in Nietzsche’s writings (especially from 1778–1788) and detailed in a book by Joachim Köhler, (1996) trans. (1998).
Difficult and indirect representations of inadequacies and despair can often be sensed from reading Nietzsche’s writings with their obscure probing, irregular developments, shifts of focus, and repeated restarts—regularly leaving the reader thinking, “OK, but is there a larger context?” Yet a comprehensive philosophy was being worked out. Summing up what the West faced as a total problem was the idea that it now had to “pay for having been Christians for two thousand years” (The Will to Power)—with its related God, as we shall see from later quotations, no longer functioning as an agent of help or comfort. In the end, none of the West’s old ways of thinking and living were found to be worth saving or building upon. All traditional operating of judgement and truth had to be eliminated in order to free up a mentality allowing for the emergence of a new answer. And this turned out to be a partial answer—a goal needing further personal development and working out by adherents—and even then, available only to those with the greatest strength and will.
In offering students a pictorial representation of how completely the traditional culture had to be erased in order to get to a needed new understanding, I have used Nietzsche’s symbolic description of a process found at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As the end of a pictorial sequence, in interpreting the use of the German word child (“Kind,”) I have ended up with a baby—rather than the usually pictured pre-adolescent child. I believe this more accurately represents the complete absence of any vestiges of traditional evaluative or interpretive thought arrived at through this sequence and in related instances.
Consider the image that appears below:
Nietzsche’s Camel, Lion, Dragon, Child: Transition Away from Traditional Culture, © 2020, A.W. Flynt
My pictorial version of what Nietzsche described starts with a camel having fully burdened itself with the elements of traditional culture. It then goes into the desert, with the fate of its burden and itself to be determined. Somehow, seeking to break free from old ways, an unwavering resistance to the continued influence of the culture emerges—taking the form of a lion. Determined to maintain itself as everyone’s way of living and thinking, the culture moves to defend itself—taking the form of a golden-scaled dragon. In the end, the lion is fully victorious over the dragon—with the outcome taking the form of a child (“Kind”), which I have represented as a baby free from all vestiges of past believing. The way was opening to Nietzsche’s further and final philosophical development—as I will summarize from selected quotations.
The need to end all influence of traditional culture was reinforced in The Will to Power. Such conscious vestiges of awareness as “symptoms of pessimism,” the “corruption of reason,” and an “inability to know the truth” were hindrances. Needed still was the “development of pessimism into nihilism” (a clearing away of existing cultural values and instructions) until there remained only “the condition of strong spirits and wills.” Nietzsche asserted, “Incomplete nihilism; its forms: we live in the midst of it.” Yet the “strongest” people can “overcome the values that pass judgement.” To be arrived at were conditions within which the understanding of things could now “once more become ‘infinite’ to us: in so far [as] we cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations.” There would no longer be any outside grounding for values, meaning, and certainty accompanying awareness (possibly representing a start-over akin to an ideal state of Zen.) All past ways of believing and judging were rightfully to be gone—making way for the operation of an entirely new mentality thinking only for itself.
Relying on a more recent edition of The Joyful Wisdom (trans. Thomas Common, 1960), it would seem that the greatest and final obstacle in the way of needed new interpretations was a failure to recognize the death of God. This death was not of Nietzsche’s doing, but rather what was observable—although not yet acknowledged—as having already taken place within the West. In pointing this out, Nietzsche has the “madman” ask, “Do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God”—saying, “‘God is dead! God remains dead!’” Elsewhere in, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale only, 1966), Nietzsche says “God” “does not hear—and if he heard he would still not know how to help.”
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we find the final directions required by Nietzsche’s philosophy. With all old possibilities of help and meaning having been exposed as obstacles to be abandoned, one needed to turn to an inner strength and decisiveness greater than found in the past—and move on to become a “Superman” [Übermensch]. Yet both this new human type and the road to it are unclear. We are told that “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss.” “Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!” But how was one to journey across the abyss and become the Superman? Nietzsche’s spokesperson, “Zarathustra,” could not say much beyond that each person had to find their own way. Zarathustra said, “‘This—is now my way: where is yours?’ Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way does not exist!’” Each person was to find their own meaning and way of approach. This leaves the greatest controversies associated with Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly assertions relating to the individual character of the Übermensch, likely to be extended interpretations of Nietzsche’s less contextual comments, or brought in from outside beliefs by adherents. Yet our summary framework will probably hold through substantial backfilling.