Nietzsche's Critique of Philosophy: Embracing Becoming Over Being

Nietzsche's Critique of Philosophers: Denying Evolution

Rejecting Sensory Experience

Philosophers deny evolution and refuse the testimony of the senses, viewing them as deceptive. They deny the body and embrace the immaterial, focusing on concepts like God.

Heraclitus vs. Parmenides

Nietzsche admires Heraclitus's focus on evolution and criticizes Parmenides's commitment to being and reason. He argues that Heraclitus correctly rejects Parmenidean being but, like Parmenides, misinterprets sensory experience by positing a hidden order (logos), maintaining the distinction between essence and appearance. We believe our senses lie because we interpret them through reason.

Embracing Sensory Experience

Nietzsche praises the senses, particularly smell, as inaccessible to reason. He views science as a consequence of accepting sensory testimony, referencing positivism. He rejects abstract knowledge as empty and valueless.

Nietzsche's Critique of Philosophers: Inverting Reality

Prioritizing Abstractions

Philosophers prioritize abstract concepts expressed in language over the world from which those concepts are formed. This error reveals their value system.

Idolatry of Concepts

Philosophers' rejection of becoming leads to an idolatry of abstract concepts, which are seen as superior, unchanging, and self-caused. God is the ultimate expression of this rejection, the realissimum ens causa sui, spinning a conceptual web from a "sick mind."

Critique of Language and Reason

Trapped in Language

Nietzsche criticizes language for trapping us in terms that deny becoming, such as subject and predicate, cause and effect, and the self. Language, or logos, values the world from the perspective of permanence, reducing change to a stable reality.

Critique of Enlightenment Thought

Nietzsche criticizes the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and its concepts as tools for interpreting the world. He challenges the arrogance of philosophy, which considers itself superior due to its possession of language, a deceptive tool.

The True Nature of the World

The Basis of Reality

The qualities philosophers use to dismiss the material world are, for Nietzsche, the basis of its reality.

The Transcendent as Illusion

The characteristics of the transcendent world—permanence, stability, immutability—are, for Nietzsche, markers of non-being. The transcendent world is an illusion, a product of reactive forces that deny life.

Origin of Transcendence

The idea of transcendence arises from a lack of vital force, a denial of the Dionysian dimension of life.

Decadent Life and the Artist

The division between real and apparent worlds is a symptom of decadent life. The decadent artist takes appearance as reality, while the tragic (romantic) artist confronts all without fear, embracing the Dionysian. Nietzsche advocates a dynamic, metaphorical understanding of life through art, rather than a reductive rationality.