Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is probably the most controversial philosopher who has ever lived in the Western tradition. We will examine his ideas chronologically, from his early work on Greek tragedy to his excoriating criticisms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, his famous slogan that “God is dead,” and finally his later notions of the eternal recurrence, and his legacy.
Nietzsche was a brilliant young student of ancient languages, achieving a professorship at the unheard of age of 24; he was widely regarded as brilliant. But also at an early age, he was wracked by chronic medical problems that forced him into a very early retirement from his teaching position. Nietzsche twice proposed to women through intermediaries, which was not an unusual practice in the later 19th century; but each time he chose as an intermediary a man who was, in fact, the secret fiancé of the woman he hoped to marry. This bad luck in matters of the heart does not end there: He lost his mind at age 45, probably from general paresis, the final stage of syphilis, presumably contracted by visiting a prostitute in his student days, and lived until 56 as an insane invalid. But before that time, Nietzsche traveled Europe on a small pension, writing voraciously, and writing things that no one had ever seen before.
Nietzsche may seem so unique in his ideas that you might assume he emerged fully formed from the head of Zeus. But he had a precursor named Arthur Schopenhauer, the great pessimistic philosopher—literally pessimistic, that is, he called his philosophy the philosophy of pessimism—who so opposed Hegel in the very early 19th century while Hegel was still alive. Schopenhauer had taken the Kantian system and made will, sheer urge or irrational desire, the essence of things in themselves. That is, if you remember the Kantian system, we have experience, and we have synthetic a priori knowledge of regularities in the field of experience. Kant says we don’t know anything about the things in themselves; what’s outside experience? What Schopenhauer says is that which is outside experience are not things at all, but they are the dynamics of power; will is the source of everything, and we experience this will through the categories of intuition and understanding in Kant’s philosophy. This already is kind of a real break from the modern tradition, the medieval tradition, and the Greek tradition, because for Schopenhauer, the ultimate underlying reality of things is not Reason or rational at all.
With this as a background, Nietzsche asked a deep question about all civilizations; and if you want to understand Nietzsche, it’s probably best to think of this as his basic question: What are the conditions that will maximize the power and health of a culture? What makes a culture great? As a prominent young student of ancient languages and literatures, Nietzsche’s early work reinterpreted the spirit of the ancient Greeks, which is, of course, an enormous task. Since the Renaissance right up into the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers have frequently gone back to the Greeks and tried to decide what made the Greeks so good, the Greeks who initiated the philosophical tradition in the West. It was typical to see the ancient Greeks—and it still is today, when one takes a course in Greek drama, takes a course in Greek sculpture—as the embodiment of rationality and moderation. But that is not how Nietzsche saw them. Nietzsche thought that the Greeks, Greek culture, whipsawed between two opposed, antagonistic cultural principles symbolized by the gods Apollo and Dionysus.
The Apollonian spirit is rationality, moderation, and light, and these were the aspects of ancient Greek civilization that everybody interpreted to be the essence of Greek culture. But Nietzsche points out—just as important—there was another side to Greek culture: It was embodied in the cult of Dionysus, the god of drunkenness and destruction. If you want some confirmation of this, you can look at some of the Greek tragedies, for example, Euripides’s the Bacchae. What Nietzsche claimed is that both sides—creation of beautiful structure, in a very broad, vague sense; and the urge to destroy, tear things apart, and reduce them to their most fundamental components—these two impulses are at war in Greek culture. Both sides deal with the pain of existence; the Apollonian spirit covers over the pain of existence with what Nietzsche called a beautiful dream image; the Dionysian spirit in Greek culture revels in the pain, losing the individuality of the sufferer, surrendering to the chaos of Nature’s power, hence identifying with it through a loss of ego. The great Greek tragedians, Nietzsche balanced the two.
This is what made the Greeks a model of what Nietzsche admired: health in cultures, manifesting through intellectual, artistic, or political-military greatness, yielding tremendous creativity. He thought he had the recipe, if you will, for the Greek success in this: that they balanced the Apollonian and the Dionysian. But, in fact, in Nietzsche’s retelling of Greek history, it was the Greek philosophers (Plato and Aristotle) who rejected Dionysus for Apollo and brought about a decadent age of Greek culture. In other words, philosophy, with its Apollonian, rational, moderate concerns, ruined what was most alive in Greek culture.
The bulk of Nietzsche’s mature work—he wrote his Birth of Tragedy, his description of ancient Greek tragic drama, early in his career, his first book—is an unrelenting critique of Judeo-Christian morality. He is the most vicious critic of Judaism and Christianity that ever lived. He attacked the religious tradition and its morality as injurious to the greatness, power, and health of Western civilization. Nietzsche literally thinks that Christianity has made Western civilization sick. One way of describing this is in his book, The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche contrasts an aristocratic with a slave morality. What he’s doing is he’s going back and generalizing about many ancient societies, and many ancient societies had slaves, including the Greeks, and before then the Egyptians (the Jews were the slaves); there were many, many ancient societies like this. He says, let’s contrast the moral values of the aristocracy with the moral values of those who are slaves. This could literally include not just actual slaves but indentured servants, peasants, etc.; the morality of those who are in power known and the morality of those who have no power.
How should we distinguish these two? From the point of view of the aristocratic morality, the aristocrats valued, above all, power. If you asked the aristocrat what is good, what is good is what is like themselves: powerful, truthful, noble. What is bad? The contemptible slaves who are weak. The slave morality, on the other hand, what does the slave regard as good and not so good? What’s good for the slave is precisely what is weak, because what is weak is nonthreatening. The slave regards as good themselves, and whatever else cannot harm the slaves. But here, something new happens: The slave morality invents a new term. For the aristocrats, for the nobles, the opposite of good is bad, contemptible, low, decadent, unimportant, disgusting. For the slaves, the opposite of what is good is evil. “Evil” is the label that the slaves invent to describe those creatures they resent and fear; in other words, the nobles themselves. The concept of evil, Nietzsche’s point is, was invented in human history; it doesn’t come from God, and it doesn’t come from nature; it comes from human beings in certain social situations.
The slave morality goes further: From the point of view of the slaves, they create God as a beloved judge who will reward them in the next life and, just as important, torture the powerful (the aristocrats) eternally in the fires of hell. This gives the slaves and the poor a meaning for their suffering. Nietzsche at one point said human beings can live with almost any kind of suffering, as long as the suffering has a meaning—they can think of it as serving a purpose or having some payoff in the end. For the poor and the slaves, why remain alive? Only because there is a God: The God will reward us; we will sit at the right hand of the Father in the afterlife. So those defeated by life, those lacking in strength or creativity to make this life meaningful—the losers, if you will, in life—must invent a meaning in the next world, ruled by a new king, God, where they will be rewarded; and this makes their suffering bearable.
Another way of putting this that Nietzsche had—another very unattractive way, for the slaves, to put it—is that the slaves transform weakness into merit. From Nietzsche’s point of view, to be a slave, one must intrinsically be a coward. This seems a little harsh to us, but what he means is pretty straightforward: If you’re not a coward, and someone tries to enslave you, you die trying to fight against the master; those who don’t do that become slaves. What the slaves then do intellectually, imaginatively in their own minds since they cannot take or fear to take a real-world antagonism or victory over the master, they try to get revenge in their heads. The slaves transform weakness into merit, for example, when the master whips me, and I say to myself, I could fight back, but I shouldn’t because I would be lowering myself to his level; and I’m better than that because God has taught me, and I’ve learned not to fight back; I should turn the other cheek. What Nietzsche has to say is I (the slave) have just transformed fear and cowardice into merit. I’m not fighting back, that’s true, but the reason is not that I’m afraid; the reason is I could fight back, but I freely choose not to fight back. It’s a virtue that I’m not fighting back. Filled with resentment and self-loathing, afraid of their own stronger instincts, the slaves live a life of guilt that they think God wants from them; that is, God in some sense enjoys their guilt.
The remarkable fact, from Nietzsche’s point of view, the remarkable thing in his perspective is that the slave morality, which he believes was invented in Western history by Judaism, and then Christianity—which from Nietzsche’s point of view, Christianity is simply high-octane Judaism; it’s the form in which Judaism spread over many, many cultures, the most successful form of Judaism—in each case, Judaism and Christianity are slave moralities. The Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the meek; they will inherit the kingdom of heaven) is a perfect expression of the slave morality from Nietzsche’s point of view. The strange thing historically, Nietzsche says, the bizarre thing, is that the slave morality won. That is, the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, which essentially meant the aristocrats who owned the world—that is, the Roman world—came to accept the morality of slaves. This, from Nietzsche’s point of view, is bizarre, and it’s something that should be remedied.
Nietzsche’s philosophy is somehow associated with nihilism. Nihilism could be defined on the one hand as the belief in nothing, or perhaps more helpful is to say it’s the rejection of all values, the belief that nothing has any value. Nietzsche is not a nihilist; Nietzsche claims that it is Judaism and Christianity that are nihilistic. Why? Because, he says, they devalue humanity and Nature and life. From Nature’s point of view, Nietzsche is an atheist: There is nothing outside this world of Nature; there is no God outside this world. From his perspective, anyone who says this world is a mere precursor to the next; the true world is someplace else; this one is a mere shadow or sham—that person is a nihilist, because they are disparaging the reality and value of things in this world.
As a result, people who adopt the slave morality discourage pride, desire, and power; these, by the way, were classical virtues. If you go back to Aristotle, one is supposed to have pride. In Christianity, it’s a sin. The Judeo-Christian morality, the slave morality, discourages pride, desire, and power in favor of meekness and weakness, making people ashamed of their strongest instincts, arguing that the greatest achievements of humanity are nothing before the throne of God. For Nietzsche, the greatest nihilism, and what he fears most, is not Judaism and Christianity, but what he thinks they’ve led to: devaluing man; considering human being a weak little puppy, a pleasant, kind, moral but impotent creature incapable of greatness. He claims that is the doing of Judaism and Christianity, and he thinks it is making Western society sick.
But what kind of moral order, or disorder, was Nietzsche advocating? Here we have to be very careful in reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche did literally say that no act of torture, rape, or murder is intrinsically wrong. Why would he say such a horrible thing? Because, he says, Nature, which is the only reality, is intrinsically torturous, rapacious, and murderous. That is, take a walk in the woods and see what the creatures there are doing to each other. There is no reason to expect human beings would treat each other any better. But this doesn’t mean that he actually recommended cruelty. In general, Nietzsche opposed any morality centered on the patient, on the object of the act as opposed to the actor. It is not the case that Nietzsche opposes all moralities. What Nietzsche does is look at a morality, or even a religion, and weighs it in terms of its likely contribution to the aesthetic greatest of the culture in which it’s practiced; it’s the effect of a morality or a religion that he’s interested in. For Nietzsche, a proper morality ought to be based in the effect of the act on the actor. That is why ancient ethics, like Aristotle’s, was much less objectionable for him than modern utilitarian and Kantian ethics, which decide whether my acts are right or wrong solely based on how they affect other people. From Nietzsche’s point of view, in the ancient moral tradition, part of what makes the act right or wrong is the status it gives to the actor.
Nietzsche believes that every organism naturally seeks and should seek the conditions for the maximal expression of its powers. He thinks this is simply the way of nature; this is how things are made. This holds for different types of human beings as well. Nietzsche rejects the idea—this is very important—that one reality fits all. A different type of person needs a different type of moral system to release their maximal powers: The warrior needs a war and needs a moral code that befits a warrior; the artist requires sensual beauty; the philosopher requires a quiet study; average, everyday people need to be given a set of beliefs so that they’ll keep working every day and not commit mass suicide. He also believes that no culture can produce greatness without social order; so by no means would Nietzsche admire anarchy in the streets. What we need in average people, he once wrote, is solid metronomes of the spirit: people to go to work, go home and sleep, raise their children, go back to work, go home and sleep, etc.
Nietzsche is also not making any generalized moral proposals, precisely because he believes humans come in different types; and the proper rules for release of the most creative energies in one type will not hold for another. There’s actually a remarkable passage in which Nietzsche says there is something to be said in favor of the exception, but only if he does not try to become the rule. That’s a quite remarkable statement, and what he means is this: He’s highly self-conscious about his own role in his own philosophy. If you asked Nietzsche, what kind of type are you, and what rule should hold for you? Nietzsche would say that he’s a free spirit. As a free spirit, he is supposed to avoid many of the rules of society—not all, but avoid many of them. For example, at one point, even though he did try to get married twice, he said a married philosopher is a joke; in other words, true philosophy requires opting out of normal family life. Nevertheless, what Nietzsche means by saying that there is something to be said for the exception but only if it doesn’t try to become the rule, his point is simply this: I am a free spirit; my social role is to say these seemingly insane things and give a critical analysis of society. But I do not presuppose that other social members should live like me. He is not proposing a general morality, only a sort of overall criterion, an aesthetic criterion, for what counts as a creative moral system. And what is a creative moral system will vary with type of person to type of person.
Arguably, Nietzsche views reality as a chaotic work of sheer power; in fact, at one point he essentially said the way to understand existence is simply as the will to power. This is a bit like Schopenhauer’s notion, the will to power; that is, reality is a will or urge to create forms that are powerful. The only proper normative standard to judge all this is really aesthetic, not moral, artistic. Moral standards are then beneficial when they serve aesthetic standards.
Nietzsche was virtually the first major intellectual to see, or at least to write and say out loud, in the second half of the 19th century that Western society was abandoning God, in other words, that Western society was becoming more and more secularized. We ought to say a little bit about the secularization thesis, which has been written about much in the last century or so. If you judged from the point of view of today, in our new century, we might say American society is quite religious, and Nietzsche might agree. But what Nietzsche’s referring to more broadly is hard to deny: In the modern age, in Western society people may still identify with religion, but religion ceases to be the focus of everyday life. Very few people decide the production goals for their factory based on a reading of the Bible; very few people choose their career based on advice from their priest. We may go to church, or mosque, or temple on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, but those decisions we keep distinct from our economic, everyday decisions.
At any rate, Nietzsche was one of the first to notice that this change was taking place, and he famously wrote the phrase “God is dead.” What he meant is that human beings, from Nietzsche’s point of view, had made God, of course—we had invented God; there never was one—and we are now ceasing to believe in him. We who created God are now in the process of killing God by ceasing to believe in him. Nietzsche did not regard the loss as an unalloyed improvement—and to understand this is to understand Nietzsche—for when Nietzsche said to himself “God is dead,” what he then asked is what values will replace the dominant Christian values in Western civilization? His own hints at what ought to replace Judeo-Christian values in the oncoming modern civilization were two: One of them, and one of his most compelling notions, was the something called the eternal recurrence, or the eternal return.
This is Nietzsche’s own myth; he actually got it from thinking about the thermodynamics of his own day. Here’s the idea: This is a kind of pseudoscientific hypothesis; that is, it’s Nietzsche’s version of an idea from thermodynamics at the time. Let us suppose for the moment that matter is atomic (made out of little atoms) and finite (that is, the total number of atoms is finite). But let us also suppose that time is infinite. If that’s true, then sooner or later every possible combination of that finite number of atoms must occur. Not only that, though: If time’s infinite, then every possible combination of atoms must occur endlessly; it will happen again and again and again.
