Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
The statement, typically placed in quotation marks,[1] accentuated the crisis that Nietzsche argued that Western culture must face and transcend in the wake of the irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations, moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.
Nihilism is sacrificing the meaning "God" brings into our lives; in aphorism 56, Nietzsche explains how to emerge from the utter meaninglessness of life by reaffirming it through his idea of Eternal Return.
He interpreted Napoleon as an autocratic genius who stood above conventional morality, invalidated the French Revolution, restored colonial slavery,[21] and tried to revive the aristocratic spirit of Roman Empire, paganism and Renaissance, and not as a progressive revolutionary leader like some of his contemporaries.
[32][30][33] In his letters and personal notes he ridiculed American abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe,[34] and wrote disparagingly of German attempts, led by the Kaiser and Christian activists, to end slavery in colonial Africa (leading to Brussels Conference Act of 1890).
According to Nietzsche, who often held pre-Socratic Greece and ancient Rome as the social model, individualism and freedom should be reserved only for the aristocratic minority, while discouraged among the subjugated masses who don't have the natural capacity for it.
[47] Arguably, such elitist individualism can be interpreted as similar to early liberalism since many authors and politicians at the time supported stratified society with low social mobility, racial exclusion, colonial conquests and even slavery.
He claimed that idea of subject, whether in metaphysical or scientific sense, leads to the belief in essential equality of people and is politically used to justify notion of human rights, therefore calling René Descartes the "grandfather of French Revolution".
Against the strictly "egoist" perspective adopted by Stirner, Nietzsche concerned himself with the "problem of the civilization" and the necessity to give humanity a goal and a direction to its history, making him, in this sense, a very political thinker.
[59][60] He also decried "liberal optimism" of political economy, the idea that economic development and technological innovation should solve social problems; even though it was more attainable and moderate than socialist utopianism, he still saw the goal of mass happiness and comfort as unworthy and philistine.
[67] In December 1888, his last month of sanity he wrote in a notebook: It will be a good idea to found societies everywhere so as to deliver into my hands at the right time a million disciples.
He also developed some sympathies to the diligent, competent bourgeoisie, seeing the wealthy capitalist class as necessary allies in the struggle against both Adolf Stoecker's Christian movement and social democracy which were gaining influence in Germany.
[73] He was critical of French Revolution and was deeply disturbed by the Paris Commune which he saw as a destructive insurrection of the vulgar lower classes that made him feel "annihilated for several days".
[81][82][83] He named him together with Savonarola, Martin Luther, Robespierre and Henri de Saint-Simon as fanatics, "sick intellects" who influence masses and stand in opposition to strong spirits.
[88]Unlike many conservative and liberal authors of the era, Nietzsche didn't justify the dismal conditions of the working class purely as an unfortunate price that had to be paid for the leisured, cultured lifestyle of the upper-class minority, but saw them as an expression of natural caste order which is necessary for both the rich and the poor.
He claimed that even if reduction of work and granting more leisure to the masses were economically feasible, they would have a negative social, cultural effect because people of common nature are incapable of enjoying aristocratic idleness.
Property, acquisitions, mother-country, status and rank, tribunals, the police, the State, the Church, Education, Art, militarism: all these are so many obstacles in the way of happiness, so many mistakes, snares, and devil's artifices, on which the Gospel passes sentence—all this is typical of socialistic doctrines.
Behind all this there is the outburst, the explosion, of a concentrated loathing of the "masters,"—the instinct which discerns the happiness of freedom after such long oppression... (Mostly a symptom of the fact that the inferior classes have been treated too humanely, that their tongues already taste a joy which is forbidden them...
It is not hunger that provokes revolutions, but the fact that the mob have contracted an appetite en mangeant...) [92]Nietzsche never mentioned Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels by name, and it is unclear whether he was acquainted with their ideas.
By losing their native aristocratic class, subjugated Jews, now composed only of the priestly caste and the Chandala, became resentful toward their foreign masters and generalized such feelings into a religious ressentiment towards any type of aristocracy, thus inventing the Master–slave morality.
Nietzsche even claimed that anti-Semites are also the product of Jewish spirit, since with their Christian, populist and socialist ideas, they exhibit the same slave morality and ressentiment that were historically pioneered by the Jews.
He also held many common stereotypes about Jews being physically inferior, shrewd, egotistical, exploitative, dishonest and manipulative, although he didn't necessarily consider all these characteristics negative.
His biographers, Domenico Losurdo and Julian Young, describe Nietzsche as being primarily against such populist, economic antisemitism, seeing it as motivated purely by resentment of Jewish success and money.
"[5] Domenico Losurdo ridicules the idea that an "intellectually rather mediocre woman" managed to manipulate and derail interpretations of Nietzsche for decades and inspire political movements encompassing millions of people.
Detractors note that authors such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau also had complex views on matters of politics, nation and race that were incompatible with Nazi ideology on numerous points, but their influence on the Third Reich is still not dismissed as a misunderstanding.
[156] And in his notebooks, which were edited by his sister Elizabeth and published after his death under the title The Will to Power, he wrote "When the instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and renounce conquest, it is decadent: it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers.
By means of it the superior or strong type of man is preserved, and all institutions and ideas which perpetuate enmity and order of rank in States, such as national feeling, protective tariffs, etc., may on that account seem justified.,[160] in those writings he chose to publish, he unambiguously denounced "The nationalistic fever ... among the Germans of today, including now the anti-French stupidity, now the anti-Jewish, now the anti-Polish...",[161] describing war as "a comedy that conceals" [162] via the "pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationalism has induced.
"[163] He opposed the "rule of mandarins" solving conflicts through hidden machinations instead of open war,[164] and praises aristocratic "warriors" over common "soldiers," expressing doubts about arming and training the conscripted proletarian masses, seeing them as a potential revolutionary threat.
In one of the passages, Nietzsche wrote: "Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions."
[185] Perhaps Nietzsche's greatest philosophical legacy lies in his 20th century interpreters, among them Pierre Klossowski, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari), Jacques Derrida and Albert Camus.
The systematic institutionalisation of criminal delinquency, sexual identity and practice, and the mentally ill (to name but a few) are examples used by Foucault to demonstrate how knowledge or truth is inseparable from the institutions that formulate notions of legitimacy from "immoralities" such as homosexuality and the like (captured in the famous power-knowledge equation).
