Outline of Lecture

I. Introduction
II. His Life (1844-1900)
III. Nietzsche's Reaction to His Times
IV. The Real Definer of Truth is the Overman or Aristocratic Anarchist
V. Truth is the Will to Power
VI. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Second Europe

Friedrich Nietzsche's view of life as the will to power was formed in response to the idea of struggle for existence found in Darwinian evolution. Taking the bleak view of Darwin's theory of natural selection, Nietzsche saw in life only struggle. There is no plan, no end, no purpose--only struggle. One's own survival depended on the destruction of others. Nietzsche took the position that this was the meaning to life, and thought that he was strong enough to face life on these terms and say "yes" to it. He saw few others who had the same strength and courage. But he believed that in the future a new race of Overmen, ideal personalities, would come and destroy the European culture he knew and despised. Nietzsche is a thinker whose ideas are fundamental to an understanding of the late 19^th and the 20^th centuries. He helps us see what had happened to "Europe" by 1900 and what would happen to "Europe" after 1900.
 

Nietzsche was born to a prosperous German middle-class family in 1844, the son of a Lutheran minister and grandson of two Lutheran ministers. He was distantly related to Richard Wagner (1813-1883) with whom he later had a close and stormy relationship. (Most people who had any relationship with Wagner had a stormy one. Wagner demanded discipleship and Nietzsche, as we shall see, was no one's disciple.) Sigmund Freud would have found him a fascinating study. Only four when his father died, Nietzsche was reared by his mother and female relatives. A precocious student, he won a reputation as a classical scholar at the Universities of Bonn and Leipzig. But dry academic studies were not the be-all of his life. The power of art and the love of music (and a talent for composition of piano, choral, and orchestral works) also gripped him from youth. Was it Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (1818) which helped him understand why? Schopenhauer's theme was that in all the world of chaos and the meaninglessness of life only art mattered, and endured. Is it too much to see in this idea the germ of Nietzsche's own belief that the Overman, or Superman, created truth (art) by living and willing?

Nietzsche's brilliance secured him a professorship at the University of Basel in 1869, before he had completed his doctorate. Owing to poor health, he was forced from time to time to give up his post, and finally had to give it up altogether in 1879. Ill or not, he still wrote. In 1872 he published The Birth of Tragedy, which put forward a theme famous ever after as the Dionysus-Apollonian tension in man and life: Dionysus representing the irrational and Apollo, the rational force. In 1882 came The Gay Science, followed in 1883 by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and by Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Following a stroke in 1889 and a mental breakdown, he became an invalid for the remainder of his life, cared for by his mother and his sister, Elizabeth, an interesting figure in her own right. Elizabeth founded the Nietzsche Archives and made herself not only his guardian but his interpreter to the world, destroying writings she did not like and editing others to suit her own view of his ideas. For the last 10 years of his life Nietzsche was intermittently sane and insane until his death in 1900.
 
 

Nietzsche rebelled against the values, ideals, and ideas of his age. He detested the middle-class society and people created by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. He especially abhorred Christianity which he thought symbolized the sick outlook of his times. He was bitterly scornful of the middle class and its conformity, its fear of the eccentric and the exceptional in behavior and thought, for what he called its "herdmindedness". He spurned socialism as well because it cared for the masses and the oppressed. He rejected any attempt to define ideas or ideals rationally. Perhaps his attack on Christianity best illustrated his assault on his times because he thought Christianity summed up all that was wrong with the age.

Christianity, he said, promoted a slave morality. It denied all the virtues of the great personalities of history such as "pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberant spirits, splendid animalism, the instincts of war and of conquest, the deification of passion, revenge, anger, voluptuousness, adventure, knowledge." Instead, it taught submission which no truly human being would ever accept. It taught the worth of all when most were unworthy. It taught contempt of the self, anxiety, guilt, and fear. It taught love, which is what one feels who fears.
 

What is it that we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness and debility, at converting their proud assurance into anxiety and conscience-trouble; that it knows how to poison the noblest instincts and to infect them with disease until their strength, their will to power, turns inward, against themselves--until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt and self-immolation: that gruesome way of perishing . . . .

Nietzsche held up a new heroic figure in opposition to the conformist and "respectable" middle class of his time: the Ubermensch or Overman. Perhaps the best way to describe this hero is that he is an aristocratic anarchist. He disdains to live by the standards of his time and defines his own values. He is not concerned with anyone's life, including his own. He is not prudent or cautious, but daring, alone, aloof from everyone else. He is hostile to peace and order. He ignores and is even cruel to others. He will eventually appear with others like him and they will be, Nietzsche says, a new race, the lords of the earth. In his book, The Will to Power(1888), he says of the coming age:

I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Nietzsche believed that in his own time only Napoleon had the quality of an Overman. "The Revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification." Like other great men, however, Napoleon was pulled down by the bungled and botched who always flock together to pulled down the exceptional leaders. Alcibiades of Classical Athens and Julius II of Renaissance Italy were other examples of Overmen. The goals of such Overmen?
 

The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before.

While Nietzsche's age dreamed of progress and peace, he dreamed of great wars.

The essence of the Overman is his lust for power. Truth is the expression of that lust. It is defined by the Overman as he destroys and creates. In King Lear Shakespeare has Lear say:

I will do such things--what they are yet I know not--but they shall be the terror of the earth.

That sums up the deeds of the Overman. Truth is not something defined rationally and then proven logically. It is the will to power of the most daring and outrageous figure of any age. Nietzsche, of course, would despise the word "outrageous" in that context, and the person who used it, because "outrageous" could never be applied to the Overman. One who said so was clearly not one of the new lords of the earth.

Nietzsche did not write systematically. His ideas come in imaginative, poetic, subjective flashes. Nor did he attempt to prove his ideas because he thought that all reality was in flux and could not be rationally discovered or explained. The only certainty in life and this world is action or will. He thought it unimportant whether an idea was true. What mattered was whether it furthered activity and willing. If it repressed feeling, willing, and action, it was immoral. If it repressed appetites, ambitions, desires, it was evil. If it said "yes" to life, action, willing, it was good. Thus did he transform values, or as he said, "transvalue" ethics.
 

Shall I show the universe to you in my mirror? This universe is a monster of energy without beginning or without end, a fixed and brazen quantity of energy. . . . Would you have a name for my world? A solution for all your riddles? . . .This world is the Will to Power--and nothing else!

Nothing conveys Nietzsche's ideas so well as snippets from his writings. The following are all from Thus Spake Zarathustra on the topics listed just before the passages. They suggest better than anything I have said the poetic and imaginative quality of his writing.
 

(1) On the Death of God, Revaluation of Values, and the "Ubermensch":

When Zarathustra came to the nearest town adjoining the woods he found many people gathered there in the market place, for it had been announced that a tightrope walker was to perform. And Zarathustra spoke to the people thus:

I teach you the Overman. Man is something that must be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?

Hitherto all beings have created something beyond themselves. Would you be the ebb of this great flood and rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

What is the ape to man? A thing of ridicule and a painful shame. Just that man is to be to the Overman: a laughingstock and a painful shame.

You have made your way from the worm to man, and much about you still is worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more ape than any ape.

Even the wisest among you is a mere discord and a mongrel of plant and phantom. But am I asking you to be phantom or plant?

Behold. I teach you the Overman.

The Overman is the meaning of this earth. Let your Will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth.

I beseech you, my brethren, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of hopes beyond this earth. They are poisoners, whether they know it or not. They are despisers of life. They are decaying and poisoned themselves and the earth is tired of them. So let them pass on.

Once to sin against God was the greatest sin, but God died and so the sinners also died. To sin against the earth is now the most terrible of all and to esteem the bowels of the incomprehensible higher than the meaning of the earth!

Once the soul looked with contempt upon the body; then this contempt was the most valued thing of all--it wished to have it wasted and ugly and starved. It believed that thus it could escape the body and the earth.

This soul itself was wasted and ugly and starved and this soul reveled in cruelty!

And you too, my brethren, tell me: what does your body reveal of your soul? Is not your soul poverty and dirt and a miserable comfort?

Forsooth, man is a muddy stream. One must be at least a sea to be able to absorb this muddy stream without becoming unclean.

Behold, I teach you the Overman. He is this sea in which your great contempt can disappear.

(2) On Revaluation:

Truly, men gave all their good and evil to themselves. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not come to them as a voice from heaven.

It was man who put value upon things in order to preserve himself--he was the first to create the meaning of things, a human meaning. That is why he calls himself 'man," that is, the evaluator.

To evaluate is to create. Hear this, you creators. To evaluate is itself the value and most precious of all treasured things.

Treasuring alone produces value, and without treasuring life would have no kernel. Hear this, you creators'.

Change of values--that is the progress of creators. He who is destined to be a creator must always destroy.

(3) On the Death of God and Revaluation:

Once, when one looked out upon distant seas, one said God; but now I have taught you to say: Overman.

God is an inference, but I insist that your inferring reach no further than your creative will.

Could you create a god?--very well, then stop speaking of gods! But surely you could create the Overman. Perhaps not you yourselves, my brethren! But you could make yourselves into fathers and ancestors of the Overman. Let this be your best creating

God is an inference, but I insist that your inferring have its limit in that which can be thought through.

Could you think a god? But let this be your will to truth: that everything be translated into that which can be thought, seen and felt by man. You should think your senses through to the end.

What you called world must first be created by you; it itself shall become your reason, your image, your will and your love.

How could you endure life without this hope, you men of intellect? You would not want to have been born into the incomprehensible, nor into the unintelligible.

But to reveal my heart wholly to you, my friends: if there were gods how could I bear not to be a god'. Therefore there are no gods.

(4) On Will to Power:

And whatever I compose and gather, I do so in order to compose and gather into one whole that which is fragment and riddle and gruesome accident. How could I bear to be a man if man were not also a composer and solver of riddles and redeemer of chance! To redeem the past and recreate the "it was" into "thus I willed it--that alone I would call redemption!

The will alone is the liberator and bringer of joy. This is what I taught you. Now learn this also: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing frees; but what do you call the thing that puts even the liberator in chains?

"It has been": this is the gnashing of teeth and the most forsaken sadness of the will. Being impotent in the face of all that has been done, it is an angry observer of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards. Its most forsaken sadness is that it cannot break time and the desires of time. Willing frees. But what does the will contrive in order to rid itself of sadness and to mock as its prison?

Every prisoner is a fool! And in a foolish manner the imprisoned will frees itself. The fact that time does not go backwards makes it angry. "That which once was" is the stone that it cannot roll back. Therefore out of anger and discontent it simply rolls stones and takes revenge on all things which, like itself, feel anger and discontent.

I led you away from all such fairy songs when I taught you that the will is a creator. All "it was" is a fragment, a riddle, a gruesome chance, until the creative will adds: "But I wanted it thus!" Until the creative will adds: "But so do I will it! So shall I will it!"

The will must desire something higher than all reconciliation, namely the will to power. But how will it arrive at that? Who would teach it even to will backwards?

(5) On the "Ubermensch"

You would say: Now I am dying and disappearing and in a trice I am a nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled returns and that will create me again! I myself am part of the causes of the eternal return. I shall return, together with this sun, this earth, this eagle and this serpent--not to a new life or a better life or a similar life. I shall return eternally to this selfsame life, in order to teach again the eternal return of all things; in order to pronounce again the word of the great noon of the earth and man, and to proclaim again the Overman to man.

This isn't hard to figure out, is it? Nietzsche rejected everything about the Enlightenment, except perhaps its optimism about the future. He despised almost all men, except for anyone who had the capacity to become an Overman. He scorned science, logic, and reason. Truth is what the Overman's will to power forges, not the heritage of Europe and cherished values about man, God, the world, society, and the future. The world is a monster of energy, not an ordered universe obeying laws and open to man's reason. Society is the type of organization the "bungled and botched" impose on themselves. The Overman has no use for society or the rule of law. Nor for God, who is invented out of the fear of petty men.

If Nietzsche accepted anything of the Enlightenment, it might be optimism for a bright future for mankind. But even there his twist on this idea would be an odd one. No one but Nietzsche and the Overmen would want to see the future he envisioned. It would be a time of great wars as Overmen appeared and tested and refined themselves against each other, causing death and destruction for millions of people. Only the "bungled and botched" would want the tranquil and prosperous future contemplated by the Enlightenment.

Why have we spent time on Nietzsche? Your first reaction is probably, this guy is insane, not just in the way that gets you committed to an institution, but really deranged in his ideas as well. But he shows one of the kinds of influence Darwinian evolution had on philosophy. And he points to the next century. We shall think about him again when we look at Fascism and discuss existentialism. You will see traces of Nietzsche in both.
 
 

You may be a Nietzschean if you have ever said or thought:

The goal of life should be to find yourself. True maturity means discovering or creating an identity for yourself.

The highest virtue is to be true to yourself (consider these song titles from a generation ago: "I Gotta Be Me," "I Did It My Way").

When you fall ill, your body is trying to tell you something; listen to the wisdom of your body.

People who hate their bodies or are in tension with them need to learn how to accept and integrate their physical selves with their minds instead of seeing them as in tension with each other. The mind and body make up a single whole.

Athletes, musicians, etc. especially need to become so attuned to their bodies that their skills proceed spontaneously from the knowledge stored in their muscles and are not frustrated by an excess of conscious rational thought. (The influence of Zen Buddhism on this sort of thinking is also very strong.)

Sexuality is not the opposite of virtue, but a natural gift that needs to be developed and integrated into a healthy, rounded life.

Many people suffer from impaired self-esteem; they need to work on being proud of themselves.

Knowledge and strength are greater virtues than humility and submission.

Overcoming feelings of guilt is an important step to mental health.

You can't love someone else if you don't love yourself.

Life is short; experience it as intensely as you can or it is wasted.

People's values are shaped by the cultures they live in; as society changes we need changed values.

Challenge yourself; don't live passively