Nietzsche's Philosophy: From Twilight of the Idols to Superman

Nietzsche's Philosophy: From *Twilight of the Idols* to the *Superman*

The Late Period: *Twilight of the Idols* and Beyond

The text belongs to *Twilight of the Idols* of 1888. The content is more than half a *magnum opus* in which Nietzsche pretended to systematize all his thought, called *The Will to Power*. The content is divided into two books: *The Twilight of the Idols* and *The Antichrist*, along with *The Case of Wagner* and *Ecce Homo*. Nietzsche therein does not develop any new thinking, but rather increases what is already known. In January 1889 in Turin, he falls ill and dies on August 25, 1900. The works mentioned, in conjunction with *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, *Beyond Good and Evil*, and *On the Genealogy of Morality*, represent his third and final period of maturity, or what could be called the philosophy of Zarathustra.

Early and Middle Periods: From Philology to Genealogy

In Nietzsche, we can distinguish two periods:

• The first, with his early works, in which he transitions from philology to philosophy as a critique of culture.
• A second period of thought, called middle or genealogical analysis, i.e., a moral-metaphysical critique of tradition, with works such as *Aurora*.

The Context of Nietzsche's Thought

Nietzsche lived in an era marked by the decline of a bourgeois-Christian society with a puritanical morality full of prejudices. His work is a reaction against the mediocrity and conventionality of traditional morality and a critique of its entire value system. It is a time of social crisis, with revolutionary movements that bring hope for liberation and justice for man. Influenced by this atmosphere, Nietzsche also wants to create a new type of man to replace the traditional Christian man: the *Superman*. In Central Europe, there is a renewal of European culture that makes the premise of life its fundamental idea. It is vitality that makes the vital rational. Part of his thinking will be a critique of the European cultural tradition and the political and economic system that sustains it.

Major Influences: Schopenhauer and Darwin

Nietzschean thought suffered three main influences:

1. The early romantic philosophy of Schopenhauer.
2. Darwin's evolutionism.

Romanticism sought to reclaim emotion and feeling for nature. Nietzsche considered it a form of art, sick sentimentality, and histrionic phantasmagoria. He proposed, in contrast, tragic art, sound art that recognizes the terrible and problematic nature of things. Schopenhauer distinguished between the world of phenomena (the world of facts) and the world of things-in-themselves, which he identified as the world of will, an irrational, anonymous force that manifests itself in all reality. The big difference between these two is that Schopenhauer has a pessimistic vision of life, and Nietzsche's is tragic, Dionysian.

The third major influence was Darwin, with his theory of evolution, according to which higher species came from inferior species through an evolutionary mechanism of natural selection. Let's say Nietzsche is not a philosopher in the full sense of the word.