Nietzsche, Friedrich, << NEE chuh, FREE drihkh >> (1844-1900), was a German philosopher and classical scholar. He deeply influenced many philosophers, artists, and psychologists of the 1900’s.
Classical scholarship.
Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy (1872). It presented a new theory of the origins of classical Greek culture. Nietzsche believed that Greek culture could best be understood as resulting from a conflict between two basic human drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian was represented by Apollo, the god of the sun. The Dionysian was represented by Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication.
The Apollonian is a drive to create clarity and order. It is a desire for a world in which everything possesses a clear identity and can be distinguished from other things. The Apollonian tendency finds expression in the visual arts, where each form stands out clearly from other forms. Nietzsche argued that, in reality, the world lacks any clear distinctions, that it is confused, chaotic, and cruel. The Apollonian drive tries to redeem the horrors of the real world by giving it the illusion of order and beauty, thus making it tolerable.
The Dionysian is a drive that tries to rip apart Apollonian illusions and reveal the reality that lies behind them. This revelation takes place only in special states of ecstasy or religious frenzy induced by drinking, wild music, and sexual license.
Nietzsche and religion.
Nietzsche was a severe critic of religion, especially Christianity. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883 to 1885), he proclaimed that “God is dead.” This was his dramatic way of saying that most people no longer believed in God. Thus, religion could no longer serve as the foundation for moral values.
Nietzsche believed that the time had come to examine traditional values critically. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), he examined the origins of our moral systems. He argued that the warriors who dominated earlier societies had defined their own strength as “good” and the weakness of the common people they dominated as “bad.” Nietzsche called this “master morality” because it represented the values of the masters.
Later, the priests and common people, who wanted to take power, defined their own weakness and humility as “good.” They called the aggressive strength of the warriors “evil.” Nietzsche identified these values, which he called “slave morality,” with the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that dominates Western culture. He criticized these values as being expressions of the fear and resentment of the weak against the strong.
Psychological ideas.
Nietzsche’s major psychological theory states that all human behavior is inspired by a “will to power.” He wanted to disprove and replace a common prevalent psychological theory that was known as hedonism. Hedonism holds that human behavior is inspired by a desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Nietzsche argued that people are frequently willing to increase their pain, strain, or tension to accomplish tasks that allow them to feel power, competence, or strength.
Nietzsche did not mean that people wanted only to dominate each other, nor that they were only interested in physical or political power. He wrote that we also want to gain power over our unruly drives and instincts. He thought that the self-control exhibited by artists and people who practice self-denial for religious reasons was actually a higher form of power than the physical bullying of the weak by the strong.
Nietzsche’s ideal was the overman (or superman), a passionate individual who learns to control his or her passions and use them in a creative manner. This superior human being channels the energy of instinctual drives into higher, more creative, and less objectionable forms. Nietzsche believed that such “sublimation” of energy is far more valuable than the suppression of the instincts urged by Christianity and other religions.
His life.
Nietzsche was born on Oct. 15, 1844, in Rocken, Saxony, near present-day Leipzig, Germany. He was a professor of classics at the University of Basel in Switzerland from 1868 to 1878, when he retired because of poor health. He then devoted himself to writing. In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died on Aug. 25, 1900. Nietzsche is often wrongly considered a racist, anti-Semite, and forerunner of Nazism. These charges are largely the result of distortions of his ideas by his sister Elisabeth and by Nazi propagandists after his death.
See also Ethics (Nietzsche).
