Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the town of Recken in Thuringia (Prussia). His father was a Protestant priest from the Polish nobility, which explains his unusual surname (it is believed that its Polish version is Nitzke). After the death of his father and younger brother in 1850, his mother moved with Friedrich and his sister Elisabeth to Naumburg. Here Friedrich went to school, from 1858 he studied at the Pforta Gymnasium and was friends with the future Vedanta researcher Paul Deussen, then studied theology and philology at the University of Bonn in 1864 and moved to Leipzig in 1865 to attend seminars of the famous philologist Ritschl and improve his music.
In Leipzig, he became acquainted with the works of Schopenhauer, which had a tremendous influence on him. During his studies, Nietzsche began to contribute to the “Central Literary Newspaper”. Despite being released due to myopia, in 1867 Nietzsche was enlisted in an artillery regiment in Naumburg, where he served for a year and was released due to an injury. At this time, Nietzsche began to publish in the “Rheinische Zurnal” (Rheinische Zeitung). On the basis of his articles from 1867-68, Ritschl recommended Nietzsche for the post of extraordinary professor of classical philology at the University of Basel and helped to award him a doctorate without defending it.
Nietzsche was strongly influenced by the outstanding German composer, thinker, and poet Richard Wagner (1813-1883), whom he met in 1868 and became close to, despite the large age difference, in 1869, when he began his teaching duties in Basel and began to regularly visit Wagner in Lucerne. Despite being released from Prussian citizenship, Nietzsche went to the Franco-Prussian War as a medic in 1870, but a month later he contracted dysentery and diphtheria from the wounded and, miraculously surviving, returned to teaching. In 1872, the joint project with Wagner for the Bayreuth Theater was realized. The break in relations with Wagner occurs (from the autumn of 1876, and the final break – in January 1878), according to the official version, due to a change in Wagner’s ideological positions and the appearance of religious motifs in his musical works (this, as they say, manifested itself later in “Parsifal”, 1882). During this same period, Nietzsche develops serious health problems, he is constantly tormented by severe headaches, this forces him to move from 1876 along the Italian coast, to Alpine high-mountain boarding houses in search of a place more suitable in terms of climate and ultimately forces him to finally leave his professorial position in 1879. In 1882, when he experiences a short period of romantic love-friendship with Lou von Salomé, an improvement in his physical condition occurs: this is “The Gay Science”. Then comes a spiritual crisis – and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, where, as he himself believed, he was able to find his way – what Nietzsche called “method” – and formulate the ideas that he considered his main philosophical discoveries. On January 3, 1889, in Turin, he suffers the first of three apoplectic attacks, a sharp deterioration in his health leads Nietzsche to madness, and on January 10 he is placed in a psychiatric clinic in Basel, then in a psychiatric clinic at the University of Jena. The etiology of the disease was never established. In 1890, Nietzsche’s mother takes her home to Naumburg, hoping for her son’s recovery, then his sister, who returned from Paraguay after her husband’s suicide, takes the sick Nietzsche to Weimar, where he dies in 1900.
Periodization of Nietzsche’s works. Nietzsche’s works, in style and subject matter, reflect the most important stages of his life and ideological evolution, which he himself evaluates in his last works, primarily in Ecce Homo. His works are usually divided into three periods. And this is not only a chronological, but also an analytical division. As Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and finally the lion becomes a child. […] the spirit kneels like a camel and wants to be well loaded […] here the spirit becomes a lion, it wants to gain freedom for itself and be master of its own desert. […] The child is innocence and oblivion, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, an initial movement, a holy word of affirmation. […] The spirit now wants its own will; he who has lost the world finds his own peace” (1: 2, 18-19).
The first period, which researchers have conventionally called “Wagnerian” or “Schopenhauerian,” includes “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” (1872), “On the Benefits and Harms of History for Life” (1874), “Schopenhauer as an Educator” (1874), “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” (1875-1876), and “Untimely Thoughts” (1873-1876).
The second period, the period of intellectual search for an independent path and interest in various philosophical concepts and scientific theories, includes “Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Minds” (1876-1878) and “Dawn” (1881).
The following works are attributed to the third period: “The Gay Science” (1882), “Evil Wisdom: Aphorisms and Sayings” (1882-1885), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and for Everyone” (1881-1885), “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), “The Genealogy of Morals” (1887), “Twilight of the Idols” (1888), “Ecce Homo” (1888), etc. The last works, written in the autumn of 1888, even received a special designation from researchers – works of the period of catastrophe. “The Wanderer and His Shadow”, “The Antichrist”, “Nietzsche contra Wagner” (1895) were published during Nietzsche’s illness, he himself considered their publication untimely.
The first complete collection of Nietzsche’s works was prepared in 1892 by his friend Peter Gast with the consent of his mother, but then all rights were acquired by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (1846-1935), who founded the Nietzsche Archive in 1894 and published a second edition of the collected works that same year, in which P. Gast did not participate, and a third in 1899. The twelfth volume (1901) includes the work “The Will to Power” – an inauthentic compilation of Nietzsche’s diary and rough notes, which his sister structured largely under the influence of her husband’s pro-fascist ideas (it is considered indicative that the editor with whom Nietzsche worked during his lifetime demonstratively broke with the Archive after the publication of this volume). It was the active work of the Archive (in 1933, Hitler visited it and received Nietzsche’s personal cane as a gift from his sister) that contributed to the spread of the pro-fascist interpretation of Nietzsche’s legacy and his philosophy in general, which led to the boycott of Nietzsche’s philosophy after World War II until the 1950s.
The first period. Nietzsche’s first philosophical works are characterized by a direct appeal to the material that he knew very well as a philologist – to the material of the culture of Ancient Greece. The main goal of the work “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, or Hellenism and Pessimism”, as Nietzsche writes in the preface addressed to Wagner, becomes the conviction of “the highest vital task of art, this truly metaphysical activity of man” (3: 64).
In contrast to the traditional interpretation of ancient Greek culture as rational, optimistic, joyful, Nietzsche sees its life-affirming power in tragedy and finds a corresponding language in music, relying primarily on Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will and Wagner’s passionate music. It is tragic culture that becomes for Nietzsche the ideal of cultural values that corresponds to the essence of man and his natural inclination.
Nietzsche connects the “progressive development of art,” which is understood as a search for an appropriate language for expressing will and is opposed to the traditional historical view of the progressive development of art, “with the duality of the Apollonian and Dionysian” (3: 64). He points out that “in Greek art there is a stylistic opposition: two different drives go side by side in it, for the most part in schism between themselves and mutually stimulating each other to ever stronger creations, in which the struggle of the aforementioned opposition is perpetuated, until finally, at the moment of the flowering of the Hellenic “will,” they merge into one in order to jointly bring to light an artistic creation—Attic tragedy” (3: 65–66). Nietzsche saw the possibility of the birth of tragedy in Wagner’s Bayreuth project: “not to cut the Gordian knot of Greek culture, as Alexander did, so that its ends scattered in all directions of the world, but to tie it up after it had been cut – that is now the task. In Wagner I recognize such an anti-Alexander” (1: 2, 790).
Developing Schopenhauer’s ideas about the imaginable world as a dream, Nietzsche describes Apollo as “the beautiful semblance of dream worlds” (3: 66), whom, accordingly, “one would like […] to call the magnificent divine image of the principii individuationis” (3: 68). The Apollonian arts – primarily the plastic arts – make the individual phenomenon their main subject, exalt it. The cult of Dionysus is not so beautiful, its joy is in the rough suffering pleasure, in the riot of passions, “in a hangover”, the Dionysian principle, according to Nietzsche, returns man to immediate world harmony, here all restrictions are removed: “everyone feels – he is not simply reconciled with his neighbor, not simply united, not simply merged with him, he has become one with him, as if the veil of Maya was torn and only its fragments flutter before the mysterious primordial One” (3: 70). It is the Dionysian principle that declares itself in the language of music, which Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, defines as the “language of will” (3: 158), music gives birth to the most significant myth – the tragic one. Thus the Dionysian principle influences the Apollonian artistic culture.
Myth first gives pleasure by its presentation of the semblance of the world – this is the sphere of Apollonian seeming, then this higher pleasure from the destruction of this world of seeming. Only the tragic myth, when Apollo begins to speak the language of Dionysus, can express the eternity of life: “only the spirit of music allows us to understand the joy experienced from the destruction of the individual. For individual examples of such destruction only clarify for us the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which expresses the omnipotence of the will, as it were, behind every principii individuationis, eternal life – beyond any phenomenon and in spite of any death and destruction. The metaphysical joy of the tragic is the translation of the instinctive, unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of the image: the hero, this highest phenomenon of the will, is denied to our pleasure – he is only a phenomenon, and his destruction does not affect the eternal life of the will” (3: 159-160). Nietzsche develops Schopenhauer’s idea that music is a direct image of the Will. The Will plays with itself, rejoices and creates.
Thus Nietzsche defines the Dionysian principle as the foundation of the world, as the calling of humanity, which is best expressed in music and tragic myth – as a consequence, they underlie the plans of Apollonian artistic culture, all our ideas about the world: “this Dionysian underground of the world can and must appear only to the extent that it can then be overcome by the Apollonian enlightening and transforming power, so that both these artistic aspirations are forced, according to the law of eternal justice, to develop their powers in strict proportion” (1: 1, 156). The combination of one and the other in tragedy allows us to accept the world in its terrible, horrific integrity; the fate of the tragic hero shows the relativity of the value of individual existence.
In this work, Nietzsche also undertakes his first critical attack on modern culture. Its inauthenticity lies in its fascination with the Apollonian principle, its trust in scientific ideas and optimism. This culture, which Nietzsche calls Socratic-Alexandrian, is becoming obsolete, and he considers the state of education to be evidence of this. It is superficial, excessively logical and rational. Nietzsche is looking for the moment when the harmonious Attic culture suddenly became defective, reoriented exclusively towards the Apollonian principle. He connects this moment with the so-called “revolution” of Socrates and presents here his understanding of the figure of Socrates and its significance in the history of culture and philosophy. It was the daring rationality of Socrates that decomposed Athenian society: the subordination of truth to the logical procedure of dialogic debate, even if Socrates called it the art of maieutics, deprived natural inspiration of its value, it was labor – and labor ceased to be the humiliating lot of slaves – all this ultimately undermined the physical and spiritual strength of the Greeks. It was Socrates who “banished music from tragedy”: the main goal of culture became universal rational knowledge and enlightenment, called upon to simultaneously teach truth and virtue to everyone.
However, the “desert sea of knowledge” exhausts vital forces. In the “Experience of Self-Criticism” (1886), with which Nietzsche prefaces a new edition of this early work, he writes that he managed to grasp “something terrible and dangerous, a horned problem […] it was the problem of science itself – science, for the first time understood as a problem, as something worthy of questioning” (1:1, 49). According to Nietzsche, modern science is already convinced of the limitations of the possibilities of theoretical reason, Socratic man is leaving culture – the philosophical victories of Kant and Schopenhauer appear, German music appears from Bach to Beethoven and Wagner – tragedy, a tragic worldview and a tragic type of man are revived. In Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche devotes special sections to the criticism of Strauss’s music and the philosophical historicism of Hegel and Hartmann, highlighting the pessimism of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner as an ideal of creativity. “The revival of tragedy” is the goal of Nietzsche’s entire philosophy, which he formulates in the conclusion of The Birth of Tragedy…: “Now follow me to tragedy and sacrifice with me in the temple of one and the other God!” (3: 215).
The second period. And Nietzsche, as he himself will write in the late preface (1886) “invents” “free minds” — those who will be able not only to understand, but also to realize this unique project of “morning philosophy” (1: 1, 488) of purification of man — the work “Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Minds” is addressed to them. On this basis, an assessment of this period of Nietzsche’s philosophy as rational-optimistic arises. He writes about wanderers with a free spirit, overcoming frozen convictions. According to his later assessment, it is here that the idea arises: “Is it not possible to turn all values upside down? […] And if we are deceived, then are we not, by virtue of the same thing, deceivers?” (1: 1, 235). Nine sections are devoted to the values that make up the understanding of the “human” today: what a person considers his achievement in understanding the world, what he attributes to the sphere of morality, religion, what he calls creativity and culture, what he values in other people and on which he builds a family, how he understands the state and himself. The basis of the reasoning is the doctrine of affects – “opinions grow out of passions, the inertia of the spirit turns the latter into frozen convictions” (1: 1. 488). It is necessary to reconsider these convictions, to be convinced of their unreliability and relative probability, as Nietzsche writes, and “to change” them.
The third period. What should be the rules of this change — this is the subject of the work “The Gay Science”. Nietzsche took one of the self-definitions of the poetry of the troubadours, which suggests eternally young love without jealousy and sadness — gaya scienza. Here Nietzsche uses the image of an hourglass to denote the idea of return, here he first mentions Zarathustra, the superhuman, the death of God, here he formulates the task of re-evaluation of values and a number of significant images that later become the subject of separate works. So, for example, in the poetic appendix “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei”, where there is a lot of autobiography, Nietzsche writes: “Here I sat and waited, in a hopeless dream, Beyond good and evil, and to me Through light and shadow in the morning seemed Blinding midday, sea and play. And suddenly, my friend! I began to double — And Zarathustra appeared to me for a moment … “(1: 1, 718).
This work turns out to be a test of a new style – semantic play, which involves deep penetration, listening to the meaning of words, their combination, their impact. According to researchers, this work influenced the entire “playful” theme of 20th century philosophy: from I. Huizinga, L. Wittgenstein and M. Heidegger to M. Foucault, J. Deleuze and J. Derrida. Moreover, Nietzsche not only implements this style in the text, but in the last part of the work describes it as a new ideal, “a bizarre, seductive, risky ideal to which we would not want to incline anyone, since we do not recognize such an easy right to it for anyone: the ideal of the spirit, which naively, therefore, without wanting it itself and from an overflowing excess of fullness and power plays with everything that has hitherto been called sacred, good, inviolable, divine; […]; the ideal of human-superhuman well-being and benevolence, which often enough appears inhuman, […] – only now […] the tragedy begins…” (1: 1, 708). In this work the thematic and stylistic sequence of Nietzsche’s philosophical development is most evident.
The topics that are parodied are numerous: the aphoristic form of presentation allows one to touch upon the problems of consciousness and self-awareness, casually noting, for example, that “the development of language and the development of consciousness (not reason, but only self-awareness of reason) go hand in hand” (1:1, 675), the philosophical understanding of the will (here Nietzsche finally differentiates himself from Schopenhauer, believing that he “believed in the simplicity and immediacy of every volition, while the volition is only a well-oiled mechanism that almost eludes the observing eye” (1:1, 594), causality (as “the consequences of the most ancient religiosity” (1:1, 593), and, of course, morality and religion, which will later become the subject of special consideration. Separately, one should mention a fragment that stands out from the entire work in terms of content, emotion and style – “The Mad Man” – it is here that the Nietzsche’s famous “God is dead! God will not rise again! And we have killed him!” (1:1, 593). In the history of philosophy, there are diametrically opposed interpretations of this thesis: Christian and atheistic. A special place is occupied by the interpretation of this thesis by M. Heidegger (14). But both the accusations of Nietzsche’s atheism and the assumptions about the creation of a new religion flirting with Manichaeism do not take into account the critical pathos of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole: he writes about the state of the modern spirit and tries to direct it to a living ideal: “Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves turn into gods in order to prove worthy of it? Never has a greater deed been accomplished, and whoever is born after us will, thanks to this deed, belong to a history higher than all previous history!” (1:1, 593). Here we should first of all note the idea of a change in human reference points, the experience of a restructuring of one’s worldview on the same human foundation – hence this “faith in unbelief”, which echoes the ideas and images of Dostoevsky. Another question is whether man is ready for this: “I have come too early […], my hour has not yet struck. This monstrous event is still on its way and is coming to us – the news of it has not yet reached human ears” (1:1, 593). Therefore, death and devastation turn into an opportunity to reject everything imposed on man from the outside and rooted in the collective consciousness – an opportunity to reassess values. In the preface to the second edition, Nietzsche emphasizes precisely this task; he himself is recovering and “waits” for the “philosophical physician”, who will “consider all these daring extravagances of metaphysics, especially its answers to the question of the value of being, as symptoms of certain bodily states” (1:1, 494). Criticism, “saturnalia of the spirit” are filled in this work with “a premonition of the future”, the embodiment of which will be Zarathustra. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is a book considered a turning point in the philosophical biography of Nietzsche. First of all, in its style, which appeals directly to empathy and emotional perception of those meanings, from the first part to the fourth increasingly personal,which Nietzsche considered his most important discoveries. He writes it in fits and starts, very quickly, and publishes it in parts, with the fourth part, parodically reminiscent of the plots of Wagner’s “Parsifal”, being published, indeed, as the subtitle says, as “a book for everyone and for no one” – in a quantity of 40 copies, of which seven were distributed. Each part is made up of parables, begins, according to the rules of Greek rhetoric, with an invitation to the topic, with a specific story, with the personal experience of Zarathustra, and ends with a pathetic commandment and the conclusion of the circle: “Thus spoke Zarathustra”.
It is to this work that the characterization of Nietzsche’s philosophy as music and dance primarily applies. Truths are presented as revelations, but the meaning of these revelations is rooted not so much in the immediate and commonly used meaning of words as in the rhythm of words combined into sentences, in their phonetic consonance and their polysemanticity.
At the center of the work is the figure of Zarathustra, whom Nietzsche “discovers” for himself in The Gay Science: the prophet of the Avesta is considered to be a real historical figure. The essence of his sermons from the point of view of tradition is the idea of a special world-ordering role of human choice.
As many researchers believe, Nietzsche often identifies himself with Zarathustra: he is just as lonely and filled with the wealth of will and love, which cannot be told to a crowd of people equal before God. This is not abandonment, this is a need for free air – vital self-sufficiency, which is also revealed to Zarathustra himself not immediately: first he goes to people.
Will to power. Zarathustra is described through will, or more precisely through will to power. Terminologically, Nietzsche nowhere gives an expanded definition of will to power. Although already in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music he wrote that only in Athens did they dare to talk about will to power. In Nietzsche’s works of the last period, this term is encountered more often than others. Will as an explanation of everything that happens becomes for Nietzsche a kind of structuring principle in relation to his other ideas. In all manifestations of life – the “pathos” of the will to power, which is not reducible to the philosophical categories of formation, development, being. This is precisely why the idea of the will to power provoked various interpretations and formed the basis of the compilation work “The Will to Power”. It contains various definitions of the will to power, written by Nietzsche, apparently, throughout his life. Nietzsche, indeed, had a project of work dedicated to the revaluation of values, which was to consist of four parts.
However, the context of the work essentially identifies the will to power “Will zur Macht” with the will to rule, to dominate “Will der Macht”, which does not correspond to the context of the works published during the philosopher’s life. The essence of the will is in its striving for power, for the affirmation of life. By the way, there is exactly such a Russian translation of the term: “will to power”. This is how Nietzsche was understood, for example, by Heidegger, noting in the work “European Nihilism” that the will to power is not the desire to seize power.
The main thing in Nietzschean understanding of will is its life-affirming, creative character. In contrast to another understanding of will – as flawed, “punished” by existence, in the sense that its volition is always realized in the “existent”, which it is unable to change, and therefore is forced to be tormented by “action and guilt”, “until finally the will gets rid of itself and becomes the negation of will”: “Away from these fables I led you when I taught you: “Will is a creator” (1: 2, 102).
Quite rightly, the question arises about the metaphysical nature of the concept of the will to power, which he often identifies with the will to life. Life is understood as a continuous process of competition between many wills that strive to become stronger, constantly increasing or losing their power. However, according to Nietzsche, this does not mean that the will is accessible to logic, rational explanation, and knowable in the traditional sense of the word.
The principle of the confrontation of opposing wills does not boil down to the Darwinian struggle for survival and self-preservation – “the struggle is for dominance, for growth and expansion, for the power of the will to power, which is the will to life” (1: 2, 8). However, Nietzsche does not conclude his discussion of the principle and his description of life as a disordered flow of becoming with a systematic exposition: he wanted to give a “living” philosophy, without cutting out of it something lifeless, something wooden, “quadrangular stupidity”, “system”. In this sense, the will to power turns out to be that anti-metaphysical center of philosophy, which replaces all those simplifications and prejudices, according to Nietzsche, that were accepted in the form of concepts of causality, substance, subject, object and others in systematic philosophy.
This picture of the world also determines Nietzsche’s specific epistemological position. We can only speak about what we see from our position, based on our point of view: “We cannot say anything about a thing in itself, since in this case we are deprived of the point of view of the knower.” Therefore, it was called perspectivism: “there is only one thing – perspectival “knowledge”, and the more we allow affects to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we have for contemplating the thing, the more complete our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity.”
The key attribute of Nietzsche’s will to power is freedom: “Will liberates: this is the true teaching about will and freedom – Zarathustra teaches you” (1: 2, 61). However, for Nietzsche, this freedom does not imply a rationally justified goal and progress; moreover, it removes restrictions and allows life itself to unfold. Life can be called “the only goal of my will.”
The doctrine of the superman. This characterizes the superman, the Übermensch, about whom Nietzsche writes in the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra himself emphasizes that he teaches about the superman. He is the “highest” self-realization of the will. The three stages of transformation that we mentioned relate to the human spirit, which itself is “something that must be surpassed”: from the real imperfect world and externally imposed ideas – to its own desert and the freedom of the “sacred No” through the battle with the Dragon “You must!” – to the creation of new values. Higher people are the predecessors of the superman, they boldly go forward, “further than themselves”, to the “land of their children”. Unfortunately, Nietzsche did not describe this creative stage in more detail even in parables. This explains the peculiar assessment of the value of man, that is, modern man, burdened with everything human: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an abyss… What is important in man is that he is a bridge, not a goal: in man one can love only that he is a transition and destruction” (1:2, 9). Freedom and self-contempt are the meaning of the characteristics of the superman, who thus affirms life itself.
The image of the superman is contrasted with the image of the “last man”: “The earth has become small, and the last man hops across it, making everything small” – he lives the longest, but he is “the most despised man, who can no longer despise himself” (1: 2, 11). The stupid crowd, listening to Zarathustra, rejoiced and was ready to “give the superman” in exchange for becoming the last man, without understanding the essence of the contrast.
All this forces us to interpret the artistic image of the superman as the idea of man’s liberation of life within himself – in contrast to the nationalist interpretation that was derived from The Will to Power on the basis of the mention of the “blond beast”. According to Nietzsche, “there has never been a superman” (1:2, 11).
The idea of the superman existed in the history of culture and philosophy as ideas about heroes and geniuses (among the sophists, skeptics, Renaissance philosophers, the enlighteners, the Storm and Stress movement, German idealism, etc.). However,
Nietzsche introduces this idea as a development of the doctrine of creative will or, which is also true, as a basis for speaking about creative will and eternal return in that ambivalent understanding of it, which we will still point out.
In the same vein, we must understand the will to truth, which opens another important book of this period, Beyond Good and Evil. It is about a truth that is different from traditional rationalistic truth, about thinking that is different from traditional rationalistic thinking: “Could you think of God? – But let this mean for you the will to truth, so that everything becomes humanly thinkable, humanly visible, humanly felt! You must think through your own feelings to the end!” (1:2, 60).
Eternal return. In his later works, Nietzsche formulates another idea, which he considered his main discovery – “the highest formula of affirmation that can be achieved at all” and even specifically specified in his diary, and then in “Ecce homo” the time and circumstances of the discovery of the formula: it “dates back to August 1881: it is sketched on paper with the inscription “6000 feet beyond man and time”. That day I was walking along Lake Silvaplana through the woods … “(1: 2, 743). This is the idea of the eternal return. Zarathustra begins to teach the eternal return only after he outlined the perspective of the superman as striving for the highest manifestation of the will to live. Zarathustra himself is initially frightened by the cyclical nature of the return: “- Ah, man eternally returns! The little man eternally returns! … And the eternal return of even the smallest man! – That was my aversion to any existence “(1: 2, 60).
But then the recovering Zarathustra rethinks this discovery – it turns out to be connected with the idea of the superman. But this is not a plan for a bright future, but a harsh law of the eternal return of life: “Life is without meaning, without purpose, but returns inevitably, without a final “nothing”, “eternal return” – which not everyone can accept: the weak seek meaning, purpose, task, pre-established order in life; for the strong, it must serve as material for his creativity. Such is Zarathustra himself: “I accept you, life, whatever you are: given to me in eternity, you are transformed into joy and desire for your unceasing return; for I love you, eternity, and blessed is the ring of rings, the ring of return, which has betrothed me to you.”
The idea of eternal return was formulated in ancient philosophy (Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, the Stoics, Lucretius, etc.) as the idea of cyclical development of nature. Nietzsche, together with the recovering Zarathustra, comes to the idea of return as liberation and election, as renewal and strengthening of life itself. On this basis, one can assume that return is not a repetition of the same thing, or at least Nietzsche himself has two approaches to return.
The thesis of the death of God is thus complemented by the idea of the death of that which is human and which fetters the will: “From God and the gods this will drew me; and what would be left to create if gods existed!” (1: 2, 61). The death of God is reported several times in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: first as news that Zarathustra knows, but the saint who meets him does not, then as a character whose death provokes a reaction from the crowd, partly repeating the plot from The Gay Science, and only then is the true meaning of the thesis revealed: that which gave meaning to our daily life as a promise of heavenly bliss dies, that which makes us all equal and at the same time ascribes significance to every nonentity dies, everything that we considered valuable, or, more precisely, was the external justification of values, dies.
The death of God foretells the coming of the superman, and only the highest people can comprehend the death of God. But this does not mean that the superman takes the place of God, or, even more so, that man takes the place of God. This means a radical reassessment of all values. Later, philosophers of the 20th century, having linked the idea of the death of God with the idea of the superman, derived the thesis of the death of the subject (J. Bataille, M. Foucault, E. Levinas, etc.). This means a fundamental change in the philosophical definition of the human – not in opposition, but in the renewal of the same. For example, in the poststructuralism of J. Deleuze, P. Virilio, M. Foucault and many others, primarily political philosophers, this received a rather controversial definition of transgression – the crossing of the boundaries of the same. > The reaction of man is fundamentally important in this regard. The parable “The Festival of the Donkey” is indicative, because of which Nietzsche’s sister did not want to include the fourth part in the new edition of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” – it takes us back to the Dionysian principle, which was discussed in “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, to the joy that is characteristic of higher people – the invention of the festival turns out to be a good sign, according to Zarathustra, of coming changes.
Revaluation of values. What philosophy should be, what and how it is supposed to deal with, what values should be abandoned, what kind of morality destroys the will to live – these problems are addressed in Nietzsche’s last works. And above all in the work “Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” The following “On the Genealogy of Morals” was supposed to be an appendix to the text of “Beyond Good and Evil.” These two works revealed the internal causes of the decline of the human spirit and proposed a new method for analyzing these phenomena. The previous “dogmatist philosophy,” which persistently strove for truth, wasted its efforts in vain—“and perhaps the time is not far off when it will be understood again what, in fact, was already sufficient to serve as the cornerstone of such majestic and absolute philosophical structures as have been erected by dogmatists up to now—some superstition from time immemorial (such as, for example, the superstition of the soul, which has not ceased to rage to this day under the guise of the superstitious concepts of “subject” and “I”), perhaps some play on words, some grammatical temptation, or a bold generalization of very narrow, very personal, human, all-too-human facts” (1:2, 239). The will to truth must now be considered not from the point of view of the opposition of truth and falsehood, truth and error. The opposition and appeal to pure spirit and goodness in itself is “the worst, most tedious and most dangerous of all errors.” Philosophical problems should be approached from the position of “prospectivity, that is, the condition of all life.”
Such will be the new philosophy, the emerging “new kind of philosophers”, the tempters will not be dogmatic in the sense that the new philosophers will not claim that their personal truth will become the universal truth, they will be free. It is also absurd to accuse the new philosophy of vindictiveness and malice – Nietzsche’s reasoning presents an image of love that would affirm the will and destroy what is contrary to it: “Where it is no longer possible to love, there one must – pass by! – Thus spoke Zarathustra and passed by the fool and the great city” (1:2, 128). The aphorism about philosophizing with a hammer should be understood in the same way: “But my ardent will to create always draws me anew to man; thus the hammer rushes upon the stone” (1:2, 62).
And most importantly, they will be completely different, they will not defend existing values and be modern in supporting all innovations in the field of ideas.
Nietzsche had in mind, first of all, such new values as democracy, socialism, feminism – all of this, according to Nietzsche, is an obstacle to the free manifestation of life, since it allows the crowd, the masses, the weak, the woman to rule equally with the one who carries within himself the embodied law of life. Nietzsche’s negativism, to which his philosophy is often unfairly reduced, presupposes optimism and life-affirming creation: “To create is a great deliverance from suffering and an easing of life. But in order to be creative, one must undergo suffering and many transformations” (1: 2, 61). The rejection of existing and functioning values is justified in the name of a higher law, standing “beyond good and evil.”
In the critical part of Nietzschean philosophy, morality and religion, first of all Christianity, thus come to the fore. This is the subject of the above-mentioned works and the work “Antichrist”, which was to become the first part of “The Revaluation of All Values”. Moral and religious values are historically and socially relative, in practice they generate contradictions, they are historically changeable. Their appearance cannot be explained by expediency or some single basis. The genealogy of morality is called upon to show the conventionality of the existing moral virtues, their constructivist, and not essential character. This is a fundamentally new discipline, the task of which should be the historical study of the origin of prejudices. This is the exposure of the artificial and unnatural construction of what is considered objectively given, true, original – moral values. The main criterion should be self-evidentness, which does not imply a priori, logicality, hypothetical nature as justifying the right of moral values to exist. Three problems seem to Nietzsche the most indicative – ressentiment, guilt and bad conscience, as well as asceticism. The most striking is the idea of ressentiment, which explains the origin of many moral experiences: this is a peculiar, almost reflexive, reproduction of a negative emotion that appears due to powerlessness. According to Nietzsche, a weak person, due to the lack of internal vitality, feels envy, jealousy, hatred, a desire for revenge. However, these feelings, again due to weakness, do not find their realization, which enhances the effect of ressentiment – i.e. the reproduction of a state of powerlessness in relation to the object and, as a result, self-flagellation, or self-poisoning with constructed artificial prohibitions and norms, which gives the original evil feeling a mask of piety and morality.
Resentment can be directed outward — this is a “slave revolt in morality” — or turned inward — this is asceticism. Both are ideals preached by Christianity and socialism. Christianity, which has a long and destructive history, according to Nietzsche, is the main culprit of such decomposition of the spirit that we observe today. In the history of modern thought, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a special place. Regardless of its substantive assessment, it undoubtedly turned out to be one of the most influential in the twentieth century, going beyond the framework of German philosophy. Nietzsche’s philosophy found itself at the epicenter of political history, became the subject of free interpretation, and in this dissected form — a formative factor in the manipulation of mass consciousness. This arouses additional interest and requires an even more careful attitude to the original ideas.
Nietzsche is rightfully considered the founder of the philosophy of life, within the framework of which its “academic” version by W. Dilthey (1833-1911), the intuitionism of A. Bergson (1859-1941), the philosophy of culture by O. Spengler (1880-1936), the sociology of culture by G. Simmel (1858-1918), the mythology of culture by L. Klages (1872-1956), etc. emerged.
Nietzsche’s ideas had a direct influence on the theory of archetypes of K. Jung, the existential phenomenology of M. Heidegger, M. Scheler, the hermeneutics of P. Ricoeur and G. Gadamer, and the existentialist teachings of K. Jaspers, J.-P. Sartre, and A. Camus.
It is necessary to highlight the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy on poststructuralism, which is often defined as neo-Nietzscheanism, within the framework of which, based on Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, there arises M. Foucault’s concept of the microphysics of power, R. Barthes’s pleasure from the text, J. Deleuze’s image of the multiple surface, J. Baudrillard’s temptation; based on the idea of eternal return – J. Deleuze’s idea of repetition and difference; based on the idea of the superman – Deleuze’s idea of the super-fold and many others.
But even without accepting Nietzsche’s ideas directly, without referring to them, 20th century philosophers absorbed the invaluable experience of his philosophizing.
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