The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Many philosophers before Nietzsche had rejected the specific teachings of Christianity but maintained its basic ethical system. Nietzsche would complete the work of Darwin by cleaving Christianity from ethics, and the case study for this emerging morality would be the newly unified German empire.

Born in 1844 to a Prussian minister father who then died young, Nietzsche renounced God at the age of 18 and was profoundly influenced by the work of Schopenhauer. He avoided military service due to an injury, and so he came to worship the military ideal from a distance. After becoming a professor of philosophy at Basle, he befriended the great composer Richard Wagner, and under his mentorship wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872.

Nietzsche viewed Greek culture as the “union of two ideals—the restless masculine power of Dionysius and the quiet feminine beauty of Apollo” (442). He saw tragedy as a particularly noble art form for its willingness to confront the difficult facts of life without succumbing to despair. A society that moves from tragedy and poetry to logic and rationalism is a society in decay, the final triumph of the Apollonian over the Dionysian spirit. He hopes that the German people, newly unified after its triumph over France in 1870-1871, may be the ones to bring about the return of Dionysian vigor.

Nietzsche later broke with Wagner over the latter’s romanticism and Christianity, and penned a bitter denunciation of his former friend. Prone to severe illness and lonely in life, he wrote the vision of his “Superman” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, a fictional account of an ancient Persian religious leader. Among its most famous passages is Zarathustra proclaiming the death of god. The gods will eventually be replaced by the superman, who will be both a destroyer and a creator, particularly of a new moral system, although that too shall pass one day and history will repeat itself in an infinite loop.

Nietzsche’s subsequent works were all written in fragments and aphorisms, as his health precluded a more comprehensive effort. He introduced the concept of “a morality of masters and a morality of the herd” (456). The former was the ethic of the ancient world, which prized heroic struggle and achievement, while Christianity emphasized humility and the corrupting effects of power and wealth. Both forms of morality are equally motivated by a “secret will to power” (457), a far more powerful force in human thought than reason or ethics. Reason has no independent power outside of the instincts that form our core desires, which then later become manifest as thoughts.

Nietzsche admired the man (and for him, it is only men that deserve admiration) who admits his desire for power, and despises both Christianity and democracy for asking the strong man to place himself at the level of the masses. He believed that “greed, envy, even hatred, are indispensable items in the process of struggle, selection and survival” (459), that an evil man is as valuable as a good one (in some cases, even more so) in sustaining a species’ collective will to endure.

Nietzsche also viewed “the Superman” as an individual that stands out from the mediocre crowd. Quite possibly the product of superior breeding, the Superman would not limit himself to simple categorization as good or evil, always willing to fight great battles for love of struggle. Only a handful of such men will ever rise to such a level, and so the world must abandon democracy with its levelling tendencies and return to the spirit of aristocracy. Nietzsche argued that the world similarly requires a vindication of masculine energy over what he regarded as feminine weakness. The worst form of humanity was the bourgeois (middle-class) who sought only comfort and leisure, having achieved money without any kind of physical labor. A society that enshrined the practical, thrifty businessman as its model had turned mediocrity into a virtue. Nietzsche’s ideal society, not entirely unlike Plato’s Republic, was divided among producers, soldiers, and rulers, who mostly pass on their privileges hereditarily.

Durant suggests that Nietzsche offers “a poem rather than a philosophy” (476), a striking vision but one rooted in a sense of how the world ought to be, rather than how it is. He is practically an anti-philosophical philosopher, who embarked on a career of writing and teaching to show that fighting and ruling were the only worthwhile pursuits. Nietzsche was at least true to his belief that to be great was to be alone, and his solitude eventually led to a permanent mental health crisis that left him in the care of his mother and, later, his sister—an ironic end for someone who had so little regard for the virtues of women.