Nietzsche's Philosophical Concepts: Causa Sui, Becoming, and Vitalism

Causa Sui

Causa sui is a Latin expression used to describe something that gives itself existence, whether or not it exists by reason of its own universality, according to nature. It presupposes an exception to the principle of causality, which preferentially applies to what exists through another cause.

Supreme Concepts

Supreme concepts are rational categories that dogmatic philosophers use to refer to a true world, the intelligible world. For Nietzsche, these are terms that elaborate a world beyond our reason and that, in an invented manner, replace our suspicion of the reality of becoming.

Belief and Knowledge

What dogmatic Platonic philosophers call true knowledge is, in fact, knowledge elevated to the being of reason. Its certainties are really beliefs, habits of reason.

Decadence

Decadence is the life that opposes the values that believe in life. It contrasts with the values of life, of becoming. It is what decadence opposes to the values that are instinctive and biological.

Dehistoricizing

In the process by which dogmatic philosophers eliminate the dynamic character of reality, history must be understood as a continuous becoming. To be is to be real; to speak of history is to speak of how things become.

Becoming

Becoming is the process that includes every type of change: movement, alteration, generation, and corruption. The affirmation of becoming, of the mutable being, is identified with a conception of dynamic reality, the only conception that captures its true nature, history.

Empiricism

Empiricism is what arises from the sensible.

Ens Realissimum

Ens realissimum is the scholastic expression of the philosophical notion of the "very real entity": an existing entity that refers to nothing else, a very real body that refers exclusively to itself. Being most real means being perfect and necessarily existing in itself. For Nietzsche, this ens either exists as realissimum or cannot exist, since reality is always conditioned.

Idolatry

Idolatry is a religious term referring to the worship of idols. Nietzsche uses this expression metaphorically, applying it to supreme religious concepts. Dogmatic philosophers forged these concepts out of reason, because they represent a "true" reality: unique, eternal, unchanging, and the true object of knowledge. For Nietzsche, these supreme concepts, these idols of reason, are mere appearances that do not correspond to anything really existing; they are conceptual mummies.

Monotheism

Monotheism refers to the way intelligible principles, the rectors of the world, configure theology and renounce becoming. For Nietzsche, all these are false, since the belief in a single, immutable God opposes the life that is eternally its own.

Against these religions, Nietzsche creates the appropriate counterpart: perhaps the religions are polytheistic, because they better express the reality radically separated from life.

Subreptitiously

Subreptitiously means acting by taking advantage or by concealment. The term can be understood as "hidden" and, more accurately, "unconsciously."

Idiosyncrasy

Idiosyncrasy refers to the characteristics used by dogmatic, traditional, and Platonic philosophers.

Eleatics

The Eleatics were a group of pre-Socratic philosophers, including Parmenides and Zeno, whose central thesis is the static conception of being. Their rational categories are deduced from reason and negate the sensible.

Nietzsche uses the expression "Eleatic" to characterize the philosophers who accepted this conception of being.

True World Static

For Nietzsche, the true world is static, the opposite of becoming, as Plato conceived it.

Unity of Opposites

Heraclitus affirms that reality is pure becoming. Although reality is submitted naked to incessant change, it is hidden in its regularity (logos), which is manifest in the world. In this sense, Heraclitus commits an error: he affirms that being is becoming, yet he assigns meaning to what is captured as a unity and a permanence in things.

Vitalism

Vitalism is what Nietzsche defends: values that affirm life in the human being. These values characterize existence, which finds itself in a reality where life and death, order and chaos, are part of life's own form. Both must be accepted.

The First and the Last

Philosophers confuse the last with the first: what is first is how to create God from man. If God is the cause of himself, and is the cause of the first, it is from this that shadows emerge as the last.

Nietzsche, influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, held that the first is man, and the last is God, who creates man in turn. Thus the traditional values are the result.

Reality

Reality is what offers meaning.

Formal Science

Formal science includes logic and mathematics.

Fetishism

Fetishism is adoring a material object and turning it into a god.