Friedrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power and the Overman

Nihilism and the Death of God

Nihilism and the death of God, the will and the transmutation of values, the eternal return, and the Overman: culture has reached its own ruin and total decline. Hence, there is a need for restoration. This is the philosopher's task: to liberate man from all fictitious values, restoring the right to life.

The Consequence of Absent Values

Nihilism is itself the consequence of the absence of values. With the death of God, existence has lost its sense of direction. However, this is the condition for the will to power to create other new values.

The New Morality and the Passion for Life

Nietzsche argued that Euripides, Socrates, and Plato removed the art of choosing a philosophy based on the knowledge of causes, effectively killing life. Thus, life is changed; any reason that kills life is rejected. The new morality is based on the passionate desire to live. Life has value in itself and does not need another explanation. It is the absolute value to which all others are subordinate. The new morality will be the exaltation of the primary forces of life: we must evaluate the morality of the lords against the slave morality. The new values are strength, power, passion, and pleasure. These are what we call instincts, and morality should be based on these instincts.

The New Vision of Man

Man enters the pessimistic view of Western decadence. Man is a miserable, intermediate step between the animal and the Overman (superhumanity). Man is a defective animal because he has not yet established himself: he is caught between being overcome or returning to primitive animality. The human species is in a constant, unfinished evolutionary process, which leads toward a higher species (as noted by Darwin). For man to become the Overman, he has to overcome traditional morality and embrace the new morality.

The Three Stages of the Overman

The transformation of man into the Overman goes through three stages:

• 1. The Camel: Initially, he supports the decadent values of Western culture.
• 2. The Lion: Tired of the load, man rebels and destroys all the pillars of Western culture, becoming the lion-man, critic, and master of himself.
• 3. The Child: As the burdens are removed, he becomes the creator of his own values.

From here, the Overman begins to appear, resulting in a new, free, and creative humanity. The features of this Overman are:

• Longing to live: The Overman is concerned, above all, with life.
• Overcoming traditional Western Christian morality.
• Being a superior being.
• Escaping from traditional values.
• Living the will to power.

The Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence

The Will to Power

The desire to dominate is the law of the strongest. Where there is life, there will be dominance. It is the glorification of force and aggression.

The Eternal Recurrence

For Nietzsche, the will to live is so strong that there is a desire to repeat it forever. The eternal cycle of death and life is repeated again for all eternity.