Nietzsche's Philosophy: Nihilism, Will to Power, and Superman

Nihilism

In the negative sense, nihilism is the realization that the values civilized man holds as outstanding are to be destroyed. In the positive sense, it recognizes the variety of traditional values and removes them. By removing those values, there is just nothing, which is the step to building new values. Nihilism is the logical and inevitable crystallization of Western culture. It is confusion and doubt after the collapse of Platonic philosophy. But the nihilistic time is needed for the arrival of a new perspective, a new appreciation for life and humanity. In addition to all this criticism, there are a number of proposals in Nietzschean philosophy that clearly show the claim for life and personal experience. There is a celebration of individual expression and the use of metaphors, artistic creativity, which he calls the will to power. He also claims an autobiographical philosophy and supports a transmutation of values leading to the recovery of the vital instincts of man, to embrace the land, full life in all its aspects. It is also a defense of mistakes as part of life, and in fact, one of his main ideas, the Superman, is the ultimate expression of passion for life and for man.

Traditional Metaphysics

Radical valuation of life itself: while in the Platonic tradition life was a mere transit, a punishment for the soul that longed to reach the supersensible world, for Nietzsche, there is no such world. It would be a simple invention that served for centuries as a means of escape for man. In a confrontation with reality, with life, man had also chosen to despise it. For Nietzsche, the only reality is the earth. Nietzsche thought that life was perspective. Traditional metaphysics, however, considered being as fixed and immutable; the mobility provided by the multi-perspective had been reduced to the sensible, the false in Platonic philosophy. So, Nietzsche criticizes this philosophy for opposing the evolution of life, dynamism.

Will to Power

For Nietzsche, life is becoming, is movement, is anti-all of which are "dominated" by the will, beyond the "imperatives" of morality. For example, in nature, there are no categories of good or bad. Lightning, rain, sun, animal, vegetable, etc., are neither good nor bad.

Unlike Darwin, for Nietzsche, the struggle for existence in man is not just a struggle to survive or adapt, but goes beyond. It is a struggle for dominance, to take control, to create, interpret, know: will to power. "Only where there is life, there also will: but will not survive, but (...) will to power" (Zarathustra, overcoming of itself) ...

In this sense, the will to power is a will to "want." It is active as it "aims" without waiting passively or trying to adapt... but to "master"...

And he says it clearly: "There is in us a fierce dragon named 'you must', but also against him and a superman who throws the words 'I want'".

Superman

The idea of the Superman is explained with the image of the three transformations of the spirit:

• (A): The spirit is processed into a camel, submission of the will, the burden of moral duty, of religion, of all external and alien to his own desire.
• (B): The camel becomes a lion, symbolizing the courage that will destroy all values. The lion is dislocated against the dragon whose scales symbolize duty.
• (C): Finally, the lion becomes a child who plays, if needed. The forgotten child is the Superman, who, like Dionysus, creates and destroys according to the eternal return of the cycle, overcoming individuality in power that transcends him.

The Eternal Return

From the same means that all happen again as happened time and again because the source of the world is finite and time is finite, everything becomes combined in the same way.

Death of God

The death of God is the summary of the criticisms of morality, Christianity, and metaphysics. It's what keeps man from being a man. The arrival of Superman requires breaking down the foundation of the West: God. From the Renaissance anthropocentrism to the deification of science positivism, through the rational foundation of God of Rationalism and the Enlightenment, modernity leads to the death of God. Are we (humans) we have killed God. Some commentators suggest that our author does not address both the biblical God as the one created by the historical versions of Christianity. He criticizes the God of Christian theology and seems to respect the historical figure of Christ.

Vitality

Vitalism is a philosophy that proposes life as the only beginning of man. It means that man's life and works well if it works to live life, follow your instincts (because reason is considered as another instinct).

Marx's Historical Materialism

Materialism is a doctrine that everything that exists is not determined and explained by something higher and experienced before it is seized empirically. According to Marx, the foundation of human reality, both at the individual and social level, is the mode of production. Marx's mode of production means the general form that the economic structure of society has taken throughout history. Each village or time should be prosecuted in accordance with the actual conditions of its economy and not according to social consciousness expressed as ideology. Historical materialism is the Marxist theory on universal history that explains the various modes of production that have been followed. The analysis of society results in two constituent layers. Marx refers to the economic structure of society, or mode of production, as an infrastructure and superstructure layer to the other. All these related productions constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond various forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the whole process of social, political, and spiritual life in general. The subject is understood as the original substance, the only existential foundation of the world. Materialism "rejects any dualism of matter and spirit and leads to the denial of God." Matter has not been created, is eternal and infinite, its cause must be sought in itself.

The Alienation in Capitalist Society, Marx

The Marxist theory of alienation in Marxist philosophy is the ideological interpretation of this on the psychological and sociological concept of alienation in the stories of work because the worker under capitalism is not considered as a person but like anything equivalent to a certain amount of money and can be used for the multiplication of money itself.

Marx takes the end and applies it to materiality, in particular on the exploitation of the proletariat and the private property relations. In his focus from Marxism on the process of alienation, he called alienation distortions caused by the structure of capitalist society in human nature. Although the actor was suffering from the alienation in capitalist society, Marx focused his analysis on the structures of capitalism that caused this alienation. Under capitalism, workers are alienated from their colleagues. Capitalism destroys the natural cooperation, producing a feeling of loneliness. On the other hand, the capitalist pits workers against each other to detect which of them produce more, work faster, and are more pleasing to the head, generating hostility between coworkers. In capitalist society, workers are alienated from their own human potential. Individuals increasingly take place unless human beings are reduced to the role of beasts of burden or inhuman machines. The conscience is numbed, and the result is a mass of people unable to express specifically human capacities, a mass of alienated labor.