Human Nature

Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)

I am dynamite.

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Question 1:

What did Nietzsche he say about God?

A. He is all-powerful but not all-loving
B. He is all-loving but not all-powerful
C. He is the source of all meaning, affirmation,
and joy in life
D. He is dead

Controversial Figure
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche presented an
extremely controversial and provocative
philosophy that continues to attract and repel
people over a century after his death.
Called himself an anti-Christ and wrote a
book of the same name in 1888 (IP 376-380).

philosophizing with a hammer

Nietzsche doesn't use argument and logic. In
opposition to the philosophical tradition. He
prefers the use of overstatement and rhetoric
(aphorism), indeed any device he can, to
provoke us, to move us, and to annoy us. He is
always aggressive and confrontational. He
once described his work as philosophizing
with a hammer.
Hammer is also a tuning fork.

The Goal of Nietzsches Philosophy

Subversive.
Challenging and overthrowing conventional
(i.e., traditional) philosophy, morality and
religion.

Christianity: A religion of hate

St. Paul: O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver

me from the body of this death . . . with my mind I
myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the
law of sin (Romans 8: 23-25)

Christianity: A religion of hate

In the kingdom of heaven the blessed
will see the punishment of the damned,
so that they will derive all the more
pleasure from their heavenly bliss.
St. Aquinas, Summa Theologica

The Antidote
Nietzsches philosophy is meant to be an antidote to
all of this. It is meant to destroy conventional
morality and replace it with a higher type of morality,
which is beyond good and evil, beyond what the
Christians and the philosophers have named good
and evil.

Life Affirmation
Nietzsche looks toward a creative, joyful,
strong, life affirming morality, a morality
where we choose, create and affirm our own
values, whereby we give our life its own
meaning and style.

God is dead (IP 369)

The madman.Have you not heard of that
madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours, ran to the market place and cried
incessantly: I seek God! I seek God! As many
of those who did not believe in God were
standing around just then, he provoked much
laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose
his way like a child? asked another. Or is he
hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a
voyage? emigrated? Thus they yelled and
laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his eyes. Whither is God? he cried. I will tell you. We have killed
himyou and I! All of us are his murderers! But how did we do
this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we
unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?
Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? And backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is
there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it
not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do
we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear
nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying
God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?
Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we
have killed him!

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers

of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of
all that the world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives,who will wipe this blood off us?
What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What
festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we
have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too
great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods
simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been
a greater deed,and whoever is born after us, for
the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher
history than all history hitherto!

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his

listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in
astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground,
and it broke into pieces and went out. I have come too
early, he said then; my time is not yet. This
tremendous event is still on its way, still wanderingit
has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and
thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time;
deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and
heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the
most distant starsand yet they have done it
themselves!
It has been related further that on the same day the
madman forced his way into several churches and there
struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called
to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but:
What after all are these churches now if they are not
the tombs and sepulchers of God?

God = Being
I am He who Am (Exodus 3:14)
God the Creator, God as first cause of the
universe, the God of Genesis etc.
God of Being = ens realissimum (the most real
being)

God = Truth
God is Truth
Logos made flesh
In the beginning was the Word [logos] and the
Word was with God (John1,1)

Causes of the death of God

Protestant Reformation
Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Modern science and technology

Galileo, Newton, Darwin, etc.

Protestant Reformation
The theological functions of the Roman Catholic
Priestconfession, consolation, absolution of sin
and guiltwere regarded as the superfluous
trappings of an obsolete religion, as shown by
people like Luther, Erasmus, John Knox, and
Huldrych Zwingli
Everyone his own priest

Science and Technology

At the end of the middle ages, the
plague known as the Black Death
first struck Europe, swept across
Europe, and was responsible for
the death of between a third and
two thirds of Europes population.
Religion explained it in terms of
divine punishment and wrath.
Science explains it in terms of
microbiology. The remedy is not
prayer, but insecticides and
antibiotics!

Will to Truth and Atheism

Atheism is the awe- inspiring catastrophe of a
two-thousand year discipline in truth that finally
forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God
(Genealogy III 27).

Consequences
of
the Death of God

Absolute foundation for morality is removed.

Continue to live in Gods shadow for some while.

Age of ambiguity

politics = nationalism/socialism
science = will to truth at all costs
For some it is cheerful
For some it is nostalgia

Aware of our newly found freedom, human subjectivity

becomes transformed

Nihilism

(from Latin nihil, nil, nothing

Nihilism is a moment wherein we find ourselves
surrounded by nothingness, where life is felt to be
without worth, or value, or meaning. In the
contemporary sense, it is where all the previous
meanings given to one's life (faith, morality, duty,
goodness etc.) have dried up. They strike one as
exhausted, and unbelievable. At the same time there
would appear nothing to replace them with.
The goals are missing (The Will to Power).

Nietzsches Typology
HUMANITY

Weak
D of G = calamity
Passive
Slave-moralist
Life hostile
No-sayers
Religious
Gregarious (herd animal)
Philistine
E.g., ???

Strong
D of G = opportunity
Active
Master-moralist
Life affirming
Yes-sayers
Non-religious
Solitary
Artistic
E.g., ???

Relativism
(Nietzsches perspectivism)
All truths are perspectival. They are true only from
the perspective or the point of view of the person
who adopts it.
There is no absolute truth in itself. Truths are relative
to the life and interests of the person or community
who holds them. They are useful fictions or nontruths because they help us live a certain way. Take
away the necessity to live that way and they have no
independent value or use.
Nietzsche says: truth is a kind of error without
which a certain kind of living creature cannot live
(WP sec. 493).

Master Morality
and Slave Morality
Nietzsche reminds us in The Genealogy of Morals (IP
388) that the idea of Good did not originally apply, as
it does for us, to altruistic or unegoistic actions.
Good was used at the time of Homeric Greece (8th
century) to describe the way of life of the noble,
mighty, highly placed and high minded.
Bad was seen merely as the opposite of Good, all
that was base, low minded and plebeian.

Slave Revolt in Morality

Aristocratic Value
(active)
GOOD

BAD

Slave Value
(passive)
GOOD

EVIL
(plus ressentiment)

Art
How do we go beyond nihilism? Nietzsches
answer: art.
It is art allows us to pass from a mere
negative, nostalgic and despairing attitude
towards the loss value, into an active,
affirmative, joyous attitude.

Reevaluation of Values

We have art so that we will not perish from the truth (Will to Power sec. 822).

ART

MORALITY/TRUTH

Truth

Art

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888)

The Overman
(der bermensch)

Nietzsche thus looks toward a time when his

ideal of humanity will come into existence. He
looks towards the future of what he calls the
Overman (der bermensch).

The Overman

The overman is not a superman in the sense

of having all the best properties or
perfections normally attributed to the human.
He or she is beyond man. He or she is over
and above man. The Overman transcends. He
is more than human. He is a new species as it
were. Nietzsche says that the Overman is as
far from us as we are from the ape. Man is
simply the bridge - the space in between animal and overman.

The Overman
Why? Because the overman is without
resentment. He or she affirms life in all its
colors and aspects. He says Yes to what is
'outside,' what is 'different.' This 'Yes' i.e.
positing something as good, is the overmans
creative moment. The Overman gives birth to
values which are essentially respectful of the
difference between self and other.

The Overman
The Overman is not trying to get others to
believe the same as him. He is not trying to
force his own values and views on others. He
creates his own values and in the process
creates himself.
If he is a master, he is master only over
himself.

The Eternal Return of the Same

(IP 370)
The Greatest Weight. - What, if some day or night a
demon were to steal after you in your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: "This life as you live it now
and have lived it, you will have to live once more and
innumerable times more; and there will be nothing
new in it, but every pain and every joy and every
thought and every sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you,
all in the same succession and sequence - even this
spider and this moonlight between the trees, and
even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass
of existence is turned upside down again and again,
and you with it, speck of dust!

 Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your

teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have
you once experienced a tremendous moment when
you have answered him: "You are a god and never
have I heard anything more divine." If this thought
gained possession of you, it would change you as you
are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and
every thing,"Do you desire once more and
innumerable times more?" would lie upon your
actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed
would you have to become to yourself and to life to
crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate
eternal confirmation and seal? (Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, Section 341; (IP 370)

Stoics
A member of a Greek school of philosophy, founded by Zeno
about 308 B.C., believing that human beings should be free from
passion and should calmly accept all occurrences as the
unavoidable result of divine will or of the natural order.
The Stoic world is a living creature with a fixed life cycle, ending in
a total conflagration (ekpyrsis, 138, 156, 174). Since the Stoics
believed that this is the best of possible worlds, they argued that it
will then be succeeded by another identical world, since any
variation on the formula would have to be for the worse.
Thus, the Stoics arrived at the conception of an endless series of
identical worlds the doctrine of cyclical recurrence, according to
which history repeats itself in every minute detail.

Determinism (amor fati)

"Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then

you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained
and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever
you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: 'You
please me, happiness, instant, moment!' then you
wanted everything to return! you wanted everything
anew, everything eternal, everything chained,
everything together, everything in love, O that is how
you loved the world, you everlasting men, loved it
eternally and for all time: and you say even to woe:
'Go, but return! For all joy wants eternity. (Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Drunken Song, Section 10; IP 371)

Innocence of Becoming
Irresponsibility and innocence. Man's

complete lack of responsibility, for his

behavior and for his nature, is the bitterest
drop which the man of knowledge must
swallow, if he had been in the habit of seeing
responsibility- and duty as humanitys claim to
nobility. (Human All Too Human; IP 367)

Guiltless
We are trying with all our might to withdraw,
banish, and extinguish the concepts of guilt
and punishment from the world. (WP sec
765)