Nietzsche's Philosophy: Vitalism, Nihilism, and the Superman

Nietzsche's Philosophy: Vitalism and the Death of God

Understanding Nietzsche's Core Concepts

Nietzsche's thinking arose from the need to understand life as a vital impulse, and man in the biological and geophysical sense as being vital. It is, therefore, a thought that is part of vitalism and the philosophy of suspicion. It calls into question the values of his time. In particular, his thinking is considered an irrational vitalism because he believes that nature is not governed by rational principles. We also have to understand his philosophy from what it is: a philosophy of the thinking artist.

Nihilism: Negative and Positive Aspects

His thought consists of two phases, marked by the two sides of his nihilism: a negative side, criticism of the situation in the Western world, and a positive side, the creation of new values after tumbling the previous ones.

The Negative Side: Critique of Western Metaphysics

The negative side begins with the vision of aesthetic life controlled by two forces which oppose and complement each other, present in the creation of any work of art: the Apollonian and Dionysian (the dynamic force of life, cosmic infinity). These two forces define the true nature of reality, tragedy, and since this is bearable only with art, he conceives of existence as the only aesthetic value. The Greeks had managed to strike a balance between the Dionysian and Apollonian. But the arrival of the philosophy of Socrates and Plato broke the harmony in favor of Apollo and against Dionysus.

This makes a critique of traditional metaphysics erroneously based on a belief in the antithesis of values of divine origin. In Nietzsche's view, unlike traditional metaphysics, being is not fixed and immutable, nor is it divided into real and apparent, which is completely anti-vital, giving more weight to the world of ideas than to the senses.

The reason that traditional metaphysics is based on these ideas is due to the prejudices of the philosophers against life (such as the horror of old age or death), a man's need to stay in front of the evolution, and suspicion against the future of a life that has led to the objectification of being and a decadence that makes it subject to a higher reason, whether God, Reason, or Science.

For Nietzsche, there is no such separation between being real and apparent, that caused all these problems, but there is one constant evolution of life and being, therefore. Nietzsche states that in knowledge there's no logical correspondence between subject and object: the aesthetics of mediation between them makes creating the language through metaphor, language loses its metaphorical richness and creativity to be in common use.

For this reason, language has just reduced to a set of identical conceptual structures that mask the truth that is not universal but the sum of the different individual perspectives since reality is not one, but a plurality of elements. Positive science, which can only quantify, is unable to experience life as only reality can reduce the amounts that cannot express their qualities, and cannot make judgments about the value of life. In addition, science, with its will on Reason, has replaced religion and has been serving the interests of power.

Critique of Platonic-Christian Morality

Finally, Nietzsche opens his hammer against the Platonic-Christian morality, considering it an attack against life, as it gives more importance to the world of ideas (the Christian Heaven) than human life on Earth. In addition, it despises the body and feelings. By establishing the concept of sin and promoting moral values, levelers of the slave (compassion, humility) reverse the values of ancient Greece, the morality of Lords (pleasure, strength), which contains the true virtues, and it is necessary to go back in this sense. He is critical of democracy, believing that it empowers the weak and removes the strong.

All this criticism of the West leads Nietzsche to say that "God is dead" at the hands of man, and with it the supersensible world, so that the values that governed life so far, justified by the figure of God, collapse. All this criticism highlights the declining situation of the Western tradition and spirit of the West, which, in perceiving, becomes nihilistic, that is, empty of content. This nihilism is a destruction of values existing so far and away from his own tradition, but also a turning point to a stage where being and man.

The Positive Side: The Superman and the Will to Power

Here begins the positive side of Nietzsche's nihilism: after removing the old values, he proposes the creation of a new life based on monitors, through a transmutation of all values from the perspective of the will to power, and with new values, thanks to the network coverage of the plurality of sense. Life has value by itself and does not have to explain it from outside or impose rules, but enjoy it, and the goal of philosophy will be to strengthen the joy of life.

But these values cannot be created by modern man: it is up to the Superman. Man is only an intermediate stage between the beast and the Superman, which is reached by ascending through three changes of mind:

• First, the camel, which symbolizes the submission to God and the moral law.
• After, the lion, which symbolizes the human struggle against the established values and the moral idealist from knowledge of its self-alienation.
• Finally, the child (Superman), capable of getting rid of prejudices and creating new values.

Because the Superman is the one who plays with life no matter the risk, because it has taken the tragedy and unimportant life and its eternal return. He is a substitute for God on Earth in his creative effort.

The Will to Power

In June to the idea of the Superman, appears from the will to power, a concept of metaphysical and epistemological dimensions: it is the will to create new forms of land, which justifies as a necessary condition of life-affirming error, and from which a claim must do all truth, that supports the error and the plurality of perspectives, unlike the concept of truth as a single perspective, that equals and eliminates the variety of reality.

The name has to address the plurality of the world and being from the will to power, and it is this that gives rise to the different perspectives that see the world, and also take into account that the importance of a trial is not to be true, but whether or not conducive to life.

The Eternal Return

Finally, the most difficult concept to understand of Nietzsche: the eternal return of the same, which means the repetition of time, which is eternity. It is time in that flow, and forever in that it is circular. In his life unfolds without a finalistic linearity: is it in all sense?