Nietzsche's Critique of Values and Reality

Nietzsche's Core Critique

The prevalence of instincts and the decline of moral 'superation'. It kills life; life is the only thing that is real. What is needed is to propose another moral: the moral of life is the moral of the will to power.

Two Types of Morality

He distinguishes two types of morality:

Master Morality

The morality of lords, the chivalrous morality of high spirits, which loves life, power, grandeur, pleasure; it is the morality of the self, the superman, who wills the death of God.

Slave Morality

Which is the inversion of values: pain, smallness, humility, kindness... these do not create values, but find themselves; it is passive.

Critique of Christian Religion

All religion is born of fear, anguish, needs, and the impotence felt by man in himself. Consequently, no religion has ever contained any truth. Christianity has invented values for life and an ideal, heavenly world, which implies a devaluation of the earthly world concept. With the concept of sin, it destroys the noblest forms and values of life and perverts living at its root. It leads to atheism. Christ is for him a gentle man, good, with weak instincts, whose kingdom of heaven is in his soft, weak heart. Religion, morality, and metaphysics are intimately related; they are not separate, autonomous aspects of man.

Critique of Metaphysics

Traditional philosophy is dogmatic: it considers the self as something static. But it exists. There are no static concepts; there is only becoming, the world of appearances, there are phenomena. He admires Heraclitus (the only philosopher who did not distort reality) and Hegel (for whom all reality is in a permanent dialectical process).

Antithesis of Values

The basic belief of metaphysicians is the belief in the antithesis of values. Thus, reality is divided between the real world and the apparent.

God as Foundation

In the real world, Being is identified with the Good, the moral. The ultimate goal is the permanent, consisting of happiness in the possession of the Good. God as causa sui ensures this real world, absolute good, and the true. He exclaims 'Twilight of Idols'.

History of the "Real World"

According to N. in history: the real world is accessible to the wise, good, and virtuous; it is guaranteed under a Christian promise; it is unprovable (noumenon) but open in the comfort of Kant's imperative; it is unknown to positivism, reduced to a useless idea; finally, it is removed, nothing remains. The error terminates at noon: Incipit Zarathustra.

Critique of Science (Positivism)

It aims to achieve absolute knowledge and total natural laws, to understand logically, to get to the truth and intellectual reality, i.e., arithmetically. It aspires to universal validity, which is camouflaged metaphysics. The scientific spirit is always anti-Dionysian. Rather than savor the joy of life's motley forms, it tries to improve lives and the world through knowledge and logic in science. It believes science is the only value.

Uncommon Language