Nietzsche's Philosophy: Vitalism and Critique of Morality

Vitality: Nietzsche's Philosophy

Defending life as the full and real existence of human beings.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of thinkers established a philosophy centered on the exaltation of the vital and affective, in contrast to the excessive rationality of Hegel's idealism or the scientific positivism of Comte. They defended irrationalism and the affirmation of life as the fundamental reality of human beings.

Reason is not the exclusive faculty for understanding reality; poetic inspiration, intuition, instinct, prophetic vision, and the unconscious are also important.

A Critique of European Cultural Values

Nietzsche saw 19th-century culture (dogmatic philosophy, religion, and morality) as the decline of a Christian-bourgeois society with its moral and conventional Puritanism.

Criticism of Traditional Morality

Nietzsche's deepest critique of moral values lies in their unnatural character; that is, they go against nature, against life.

• Laws, Rules, Challenges, and the Decalogue oppose life's primordial instincts.
• The basis is Platonism: It's against nature (Nietzsche argues that the only real world is the sensible world, while the world of Platonic ideas is akin to the Christian heaven), because it establishes two worlds: the world of ideas/the beyond, where God resides.

An escape point: Man living in the real world. With this transposition of values, the values of the weak have prevailed:

• Compassion
• Instincts
• Decline = Mercy = Decay
• Sacrifice

Why Morality Kills Life

Morality is:

• A fiction
• False (Nietzsche: "My principle is that there are no moral principles")
• Slander

Nietzsche rejects a specific morality:

• German
• Bourgeois
• Christian
• Idealistic

The alternative moral aims:

• Life as will to power
• Based on the morality of Lords (will to power, self-improvement)

Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality:

• Master Morality
• Slave Morality (Christian)

He promotes the values of the weak over the strong. To overcome this decline of Christian values, he proposes the Superman, free from religious bondage and all Catholic dogmatism.