Nietzsche: Understanding Nihilism and the Will to Power

Nietzsche: Nihilism

Nietzsche criticized the metaphysics and morality of slaves in the Western world, who despised the sensible world. He believed this had led to the decline, the annihilation of the will of man.

If Dionysus represented everything vital, strong passions, music, and so on, with the arrival of Platonism to Greece and then to Christianity, the values are reversed: life is sentenced, it devalues the sensible world for the benefit of the supersensible.

This devaluation, after two millennia of Christian rule, leads to nihilism, when God and the supersensible world lose their value in the currency of modernity. This is symbolized by Nietzsche with the expression "God is dead." It will be passed to say "God is truth," to say "everything is false" and then lose the meaning of life, entering into decay and general depletion. That is, the will to power decreases and reaches the will to nothingness, passive nihilism as Nietzsche describes it. It is passive because things come to decay on their own.

Against this passive nihilism, Nietzsche wants to react with active nihilism, in which the values do not collapse on their own, but would be torn down directly by the will to power, to then create new ones.

All of Nietzsche's critique of Western culture is a manifestation of this active nihilism, passive nihilism brought forward to try and create a new civilization.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche "tells" of three transformations of the spirit: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and finally, the lion a child.

The camel is the moment of humanity that comes with Platonism and up to the end of modernity. Its basic feature is being able to bear patiently the burdens, the burden of moral resentment toward life.

The lion represents man as critical, as active nihilism that destroys the values set, the whole Western culture and lifestyle. A lion defends his conquests.

And the child is the man who knows about the innocence of becoming, they invent values, which takes life as a game, as an affirmation. It is the other radical Dionysian world. It is the metaphor of man's future, the superman.