Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche

• Joyful Wisdom

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft la Gaya Scienza
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• How should we read Nietzsche?

• Arguments embedded in the person of Nietzsche,
  and addressed to the reader as a person

• What is goal of Nietzsches philosophy?

• The revaluation of all value
• Death of God? Nihilism? Will to power?
  Eternal recurrence?

• What does the good life involve for Nietzsche?

• A total critique of moral framework given through
  Christianity

• A mode of living that affirms rather than
  negating life

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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

• 1844 - 1900

• The Origin of Species first published 1859

• Father and Grandfather Lutheran pastors

How did this affect the style of his philosophy?
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Nietzsches argument

• P1 God is Dead
• P2 Western culture and values are supported by a
  belief in the existence of God
• SP Values are desirable
• --------------------------------------------------
  --------------
• C1 There is no longer a metaphysical support for
  European culture and values
• C2 It is required that new values are created

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• It makes the most telling difference whether a
  thinker has a personal relationship to his
  problems and finds in them his destiny, his
  distress, and his greatest happiness, or an
  impersonal one, meaning that he can do not
  better than to touch them and grasp them with the
  antennae of cold, curious thought. In the latter
  case nothing will come of it that much one can
  promise in advance, for even if great problems
  should allow themselves to grasped by them they
  would not permit frogs and weaklings to hold on
  to them. - 345

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• The greatest recent eventthat God is dead,
  that the belief in the Christian god has become
  unbelievableis already beginning to cast its
  first shadows over Europe The event itself is
  far too great, too distant, too remote from the
  multitudes capacity for comprehension even for
  the tidings of it to be thought of as having
  arrived yet - 343

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The meaning of our cheerfulness

• At long last the horizon appears free to us
  again, even if it should not be bright at long
  last our ships may venture out again, venture out
  to face any danger all the daring of the lover
  of knowledge is permitted again the sea, our
  sea, lies open again perhaps there has never yet
  been such an open sea - end of 343

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Nietzsches critique of science

• 1. it serves an empty and useless truth in
  preference to the prosperity of the species
• 2. science actually has a moral basis, and one
  that flies in the face of life

Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might
perhaps be a quixotism, a minor slightly mad
enthusiasm but it might also be something more
serious, namely, a principle that is hostile to
life and destructive.Will to truththat might
be a concealed will to death - 344
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Nietzsches critique of science

• Science has not purged itself of a residual
  belief in God

• The metaphysic that values truth over life
  continues through science

science is Christianitys creature
How we, too, are still pious
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• Nietzsches Goal

Even if a morality has grown out of an error, the
realization of this fact would not as much as
touch the problem of its value. - 345
Either abolish your reverences oryourselves! The
latter would be nihilism but would not the
former also benihilism?This is our question
mark. - 346
Faith is always coveted most and needed most
urgently where will is lacking - 347
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Nietzsche contra Darwin
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Nietzsche contra Darwin

• Emphasis upon struggle rather than flourishing

The struggle for existence is only an exception,
a temporary restriction of the will to life. The
great and small struggle always revolves around
superiority, around growth and expansion, around
powerin accordance with the will to power which
is the will to life - 349

• Self preservation rather than expansion of
  power

The wish to preserve oneself is a symptom of a
condition of distress, of a limitation of the
really fundamental instinct of life which aims at
the expansion of power and, wishing for that,
frequently risks and even sacrifices
self-preservation - 349
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• What is a philosopher?

• Not what the Volk consider as wise

• A creator of new value

• An inspirer and leader of the people a legislator

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The Good Life

• Like Aristotle, flourishing But of what does
  this flourishing consist?

• not moderation, but rather excess,
  expenditure, risking oneself for the sake of a
  goal

• The rule of the philosopher-legislator that is,
  the Gay Scientist

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Flourishing great health

• expansion of power that even risks and
  sacrifices itself (349)

• Continual creation of new forms positing of new
  values

• Affirmation of this present life

• Flexibility ability to alter ones beliefs
  according to the exigencies of life