Friedrich Nietzsche

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Genealogy.

The will to power, briefly

Nietzsche teaches that life itself is will to power, a drive to grow, to overcome and to give form, and that its highest form is not rule over others but mastery of oneself; that values are made, not found; that the Übermensch, the overman, is the human being who creates new values and stays true to the earth; and that the strongest yes a person can say is to will their own life again, just as it is, without end. That core, from the tablets of the peoples to the love of fate, is taught in the branch on the will to power, among Power and influence. What follows is the rest of his teaching.

Apollo and Dionysus

His first book reads Greek tragedy as the meeting of two powers of art, named for two gods. Apollo is the god of form, measure and the clear image, of dream, in which the world appears as beautiful shapes, each bounded and distinct. Dionysus is the god of intoxication and the dance, in which the bounds of the self break down and a person is swept into the oneness of nature, its joy and its terror together. Apollo gives the individual; Dionysus dissolves it. Tragedy is born when the Dionysian chorus, singing the sufferings of the god, is given Apollonian form on the stage, so that the spectator can look into the abyss of existence and not be destroyed.

Only as an aesthetic phenomenon, he writes, are existence and the world eternally justified. The Greeks in his reading were not serene because life was easy for them but because they suffered deeply and made art of it, and Socrates, with his faith that reason can understand and correct being, marks the end of that tragic wisdom.

God is dead

In The Gay Science a madman runs into the market place with a lantern in the bright morning, crying that he seeks God, and the unbelievers there laugh at him. Where is God, he cries; we have killed him, you and I. Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Then he falls silent: he has come too early, and the deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars, though they have done it themselves.

The parable is his diagnosis of his age. Belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, and with it falls the ground of the morality built on it, though most have not yet noticed. The danger he sees is nihilism, the sense that nothing has any value at all; the task he sets is to create values that stand on their own, with no world beyond to lean on.

The camel, the lion and the child

Zarathustra's first speech names three changes of the spirit. First the spirit becomes a camel, the bearer that kneels to be loaded with the heaviest burdens, the duties and reverences it has been taught, and hurries with them into the desert. There it becomes a lion, which wants to seize its freedom and be lord in its own desert, and it fights the great dragon whose every scale glitters with the words thou shalt; against it the lion says I will. The lion can win the freedom for new creation, but it cannot create. For that the spirit must become a child: innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling of itself, a holy yes.

The last man

Against the overman Zarathustra sets his opposite, the last man, the most contemptible thing he can show the crowd. We have discovered happiness, say the last men, and they blink. They want comfort, a little pleasure for the day and a little for the night, neither poverty nor riches, neither ruling nor obeying, for all of it is too much trouble. Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same, and whoever feels otherwise goes of his own accord into the madhouse. The crowd, hearing him, cries out to Zarathustra to give them this last man and keep his overman. The danger Nietzsche fears is not that humanity will grow cruel but that it will grow small.

Perspectives

There is only a perspective seeing, he teaches, only a perspective knowing. No one sees from nowhere: every eye looks from a place and with an interest, and the more eyes, different eyes, we can bring to bear on one thing, the more complete our idea of it will be. To ask for a pure knowing, an eye turned in no direction, is to ask for an absurdity. The free spirit is the one who can change perspectives at will and knows that his own is one among many.

From the same thought comes his fable of how the true world finally became a fable. The world beyond, first held by the wise, then promised to the pious, then only thought of, then of no use, is at last abolished, and with it, he adds, the merely apparent world as well, so that this world is left standing in its own right.

The ascetic ideal

The third essay of the Genealogy asks what ascetic ideals mean: the denial of the body, the senses and the world that so many religions and philosophies have praised. His answer is that they mean almost everything. To the suffering they give suffering a meaning, and a meaning, even one turned against life, is better than none. The ascetic priest is the physician of the sick, who soothes pain by changing its direction: someone must be to blame for my suffering, thinks the sufferer, and the priest answers that he himself is that someone. Nietzsche asks his readers not to despise the ascetic but to see what the ideal does, and whether they need it.

Masks and the hammer

Everything that is profound loves the mask, he writes; every deep spirit needs one, because the shallow will misread whatever it says. His own books are written in masks, aphorisms, songs and parables, and he asks to be read slowly, as a good philologist reads, with doors left open. He philosophises with a hammer, used as a tuning fork, sounding the idols of the age to hear whether they ring hollow. And out of life's school of war comes his saying that what does not destroy me makes me stronger: a rule for the one who must overcome his own sickness, not a praise of harm.