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Biography

Nietzsche is born on October 15th, 1844, in the village of Röcken. His/her father, Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche, and his/her mother, Franziska Oehler, come all two from former families Luthérien born. Karl-Ludwig, which was royal tutor, has just settled in Röcken, with its young woman, to take her functions of Protestant Pasteur. In 1846, is born Elisabeth, then Ludwig Joseph (February 27th, 1848). In 1849, Nietzsche loses his/her 36 years old father, who suffered lengthily and painfully from a brain tumor, then his/her brother, the following year (January 4th, 1850), which deeply affected it in spite of its young age. The Nietzsche young person grows then in an exclusively female medium, surrounded by his mother, his sister, his grandmother and his aunts. His/her mother intended it for the pastorate (according to the family tradition: his/her grandfather and his father were pastors), and Nietzsche begins studies of Théologie. But it had lost the Foi for several years, and was interested in the Science, in particular in the very recent evolutionism darwinien. It then chooses to continue traditional studies of Philologie to Pforta, then goes up to Bonn and Leipzig:

“Another distinctive sign of the theologists is their philological incapacity. I understand here by philology (…) the art of good lira, to know to distinguish the facts, without distorting them by interpretations, losing, in the desire to include/understand, the precaution, patience and the smoothness. ”

During its studies at the university of Leipzig, the reading of Schopenhauer ( Le Monde like will and representation , 1818) will constitute the first steps of its philosophical vocation. However, the importance of this reading, which will be with the base of its relation with Wagner, is disputed, because Nietzsche, in this same time, is interested in rationalist thinkers, in particular Démocrite. Moreover, it reads many other thinkers and scientists, (Lange, von Hartmann, Emerson in particular). It is at that time that it briefly meets Wagner, in 1868, in Leipzig. Raise shining, gifted of a traditional solid education, Nietzsche is named at 24 years professor of Philologie at the university of Basle, then professor emeritus the following year. It develops during ten years its philosophical acuity in contact with the thought of the Greek antiquity in which it sees as of this time the possibility of a rebirth of the German culture, - with a predilection for the Présocratiques, in particular for Héraclite and Empédocle, but it also is interested in the philosophical debates and scientific of its time. During its years of teaching, it binds friendship with Jacob Burckhardt and Richard Wagner (which it re-examines as from 1869) of which he would be a distant relative. In 1870, it engages as voluntary male nurse in the Franco-German Guerre, but the experiment is of short duration, Nietzsche falling sick. Although it is at that time patriotic, Nietzsche starts to formulate some doubts in connection with the consequences of the Prussian victory.

In 1872 the Birth of the tragedy appears, which obtains a certain success, but been the subject of a sharp quarrel with the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Erwin Rohde, philologist and friend of Nietzsche, and Wagner which regard this text as the expression of its thought, take its defense. Nietzsche will form then the project to write ten tests, the Out-of-date Considérations , but it will appear finally only four of them, and, put aside Richard Wagner in Bayreuth , these works had very little success. Towards 1875, Nietzsche falls seriously sick, and, following several faintnesses, its close relations believe it in the anguish. Almost blind man, undergoing crises of paralysis, violent nauseas, the frame of mind of Nietzsche degrades himself at the point to frighten his friends by a cynicism and a blackness that they did not know to him. Nietzsche starts to be detached from Wagner which disappoints it more and more, and he regards the Wagnerian medium as a gathering of imbeciles not understanding anything with Wagnerian art. Whereas Nietzsche writes Richard Wagner in Bayreuth , he writes in his notebooks the first criticism of his friend. Not only it does not feel dependant any more with this last by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, but Wagner appeared an indiscreet friend, which will lead Nietzsche to feel certain remarks of Wagner like offenses mortals. Wagner indeed suspected Nietzsche of some supposed inclinations “against-nature” of explaining its morbid state: “an effect of inclinations against nature preceding the pederasty”.

It then gives up its ideas on Germany in which it sees nothing any more but coarseness and illusions. He discusses lengthily with Paul Rée, with which he shares his ideas and its cynicism on the hypocrisy of morals, and starts to write a book, initially entitled the plowshare , then Humain, too human . When Wagner receives this last book (sending which he will not answer), Cosima writes in its newspaper: “I know that here the evil overcame. ” The anti-semitism of Cosima also seems to have played a part in the rupture between her husband and Nietzsche.

In 1878, Nietzsche obtains a pension because its health condition obliges it to leave its post of professor. Then begin a life wandering in the search of a favorable climate as well to its health as with its thought (Venice, Genoa, Turin, Nice - where it will be at the same time as Guyau without the knowledge towards 1888, Sils-Maria…) :

“We are not those which do not manage to form thoughts that in the middle of the books - our practice with us is to think in the open air, going, jumping, climbing, dancing… ”.

In 1882, whereas it recovered health and that its moral worries sometimes his/her friends by his exubérance, Nietzsche meets Lou Andreas-Salome with which it projects to create a “circle of the free spirits”, a “Trinity” (including/understanding Rée) study - within the meaning of Greek mythology. Nietzsche at that time hoped to found a school pythagorician exclusively devoted to the culture and acceptor men and women. Lou dazzled it and subjugated by its intelligence (it said to recognize in it its " sister intellectuelle"). Lou which, at 21 years, had abjured any feeling in love, pushes back by twice a proposal of Nietzsche, after him to have perhaps made hope for reciprocal feelings (it will note in its memories that it did not know any more if it had embraced Nietzsche). This refusal despaired it deeply, him which, in spite of its criticisms against the women, felt the need for a partner who includes/understands it: since its more young age, Nietzsche had lived very often in company of his/her sister, Elisabeth, devoted and faithful sister until the jealousy. With the disease, Nietzsche needed somebody to deal with him, and all the women of its entourage (his mother and its old friend Malwida von Meysenbug) pushed it to marry. The same year, it starts to write Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra at the time of a stay with Nice. Nietzsche does not cease writing with an increased rate/rhythm. This period takes brutally fine the January 3rd 1889 with a “crisis of madness” which, perdurant until its death, places it under the supervision of his/her mother and her sister.

At the beginning of this madness, Nietzsche seems to be identified with the mythical and mystical figures of Dionysos and the Christ, symbols for him of the suffering and its two opposite interpretations. According to the testimony of his/her friend Overbeck come to seek it with Turin, Nietzsche is then still able to improvise with the piano of upsetting melodies; during some time, it will be still able to hold of the conversations, but those are stereotyped, concenant the memories of before the crisis. It receives several visitors, and some, like Rudolf Steiner, try to recover it for their own cause. Then, at the end of some time, it sinks in an almost complete silence until its death. When Overbeck re-examines it for the last time, in 1892, Nietzsche appears to him in a vegetative state. One wondered much about the causes of his disease, and the image even of a thinker become insane led to various appropriations, of living even of Nietzsche. The purpose of certain theories on this subject were to reduce the thought of Nietzsche to its madness. An explanation which was usually accepted, is relating to the Syphilis that Nietzsche had contracted, like number of artists and famous writers of his time, and who in his tertiary phase, said " neurosyphilis" can mimer all kinds of psychiatric pathologies. Nietzsche, at the beginning of its madness (" folie" who did not prevent it in the first times to discuss almost normally), stated to be infected in 1866.

Nietzsche become alienated, it is his/her sister, Elisabeth, which dealt with managing the publication of works and the notebooks of his/her brother. It founded the Nietzsche-Archiv to this end. Devoted sister that Nietzsche liked deeply until it Marie with a virulent Antisémite, Bernhard Förster, it was an enthusiastic admiror of Guillaume II, and adhered then to the Nazi party, meeting Hitler (which it supported as it also supported Mussolini). She made publish last works of Nietzsche, but will use and handle certain extracts of the texts of her brother in order to support a nationalist cause and anti-semite. She composed the Will for power , a book whose Nietzsche worked out several plans without completing it, preferring to make several books of them. She also wrote several books on her brother whose character hagiographic was called into question. Historical criticism established that Elisabeth proceeded to falsifications of the early works, letters and posthumous fragments of her brother.

General characters of the work and the thought of Nietzsche

See also: Vocabulary nietzschéen, : Category: Work of Nietzsche

Of the Birth of the Tragedy to its last works, Nietzsche attempted to include/understand the conditions and the means of the ennoblement and the rise in the Homme. Also many commentators stressed that the fundamental and constant topic of the thought of Nietzsche, through the many variations of its writings, is the problem of the culture - or “breeding”, problem which includes/understands the question of the hierarchy and the determination of the values suitable to support this rise. This project embraces an omnipresent critical part in its work, the destruction of the values of the idealism Plato Christian ician and which controlled up to now the Occident and which, according to Nietzsche, threaten to lead the Humanité to its car-suppression.

During its life, Nietzsche expressed this will of a rise in the man either by a Métaphysique of artist, or by a historical study of the feelings and representations moral human, or finally by an assertion of the tragic existence, through the concepts of “Will for power”, “of Eternal return” and “Surhomme”. These topics, without being excluded, follow one another, sometimes by deepening and intermingling the ones with the others, like when the Philosophie of the assertion is appeared as an exaltation of the human creative power.

One sometimes divided the work of Nietzsche into three periods, by proposing the preeminence of one or the other of these topics. One thus distinguishes a period including/understanding the Birth from the Tragedy and the Out-of-date Considérations , period during which Nietzsche engages, under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner, in favor of a cultural rebirth of German civilization. The second period is the period positivist (of Humain, too human with the Gai Knowledge ); Nietzsche breaks with the wagnerism, and develops a historical and psychological thought influenced by the French moralists. The third period goes from Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra with its last texts; it is the period of maturity tinted of a mysticism symbolized by the Eternal return.

This periodisation was disputed on several occasions, which underlines a difficulty for the interpretation of the texts of Nietzsche: that this periodisation is or not exact, to become to it thought of Nietzsche remains a fact difficult to apprehend and restore for all the commentators, difficulty which was increased by the first editions of the posthumous fragments.

These difficulties are still accentuated by the stylistic form chosen by Nietzsche starting from Humain, too human . It indeed decides to expose its Pensée in the form of Aphorisme S which is followed more or less thématiquement, or that it gathers by chapter. Nietzsche gave several explanations to this choice. These explanations touch as much the work of the exposure of the thought as that of the reception of this thought by a reader.

In the first case, it is a question of avoiding writing systematic treaties, whereas very thought is, for Nietzsche, always in becoming. The rigid form of the treaty destroys the Vie thought, while the aphorism preserves something of philosophical spontaneousness. In the second case, it is a question of prohibiting the access to the texts with a reader in a hurry who would not like to try hard to reconsider what he reads. Nietzsche describes its texts thus as a Labyrinthe which one must find the access which will carry out through all the aphorisms. One can however notice that Nietzsche on the contrary wrote its last works with the concern of being included/understood.

Following these difficulties of reading of works of Nietzsche, several methods of exposure of its thought are used. Some, like Eugen Fink, recall the intellectual development of Nietzsche, by underlining the relative autonomy of each period; others, like Heidegger, privilege the study of the notions of the last period of Nietzsche, notions considered as the expression of the maturity of its philosophical activity. The study of becoming thought of Nietzsche being far from being completed, this article will expose the topics which were constantly regarded as most important in the whole of the history of the reception of its works, while evoking the genesis of some of them.

Will for power, perspectivism and interpretation of reality

Will towards the power

One can translate Wille zur Macht by " will towards the puissance" because the dative, in German, gives an account of this idea of tension. Indeed, it is not a question of a will for power as such because one does not want the power with the traditional direction of the will, but on the other hand there exists something in the will which affirms its power. The concept of will for power is built of this manner against all the philosophical tradition since Plato, who recommends two manners of seizing the gasoline of the alive one: the Conatus , at Spinoza (the fact of " to persevere in the être") and the want-food at Schopenhauer (Nietzsche was conquered by the philosophy of Schopenhauer before criticizing it). But at Nietzsche, food is not in any way a conservation, on the contrary, for him, to preserve is to weaken in the nihilism, only the going beyond of oneself ( Selbst-Überwindung ) of the power by the will and the will by the power is essential with the life and gives its direction to the will for power.

As a description of the world, the Will for power is a metaphysical concept, since it qualifies being it in its totality (according to Heidegger and Müller-Lauter):

“ the most intimate gasoline to be it is the will for power . ”

All being is for Nietzsche Will for power, and there is to be only as a Will for power. In this direction, this fragment summarizes the philosophy of Nietzsche; but it is also, according to Nietzsche, the starting point of its project to revalue the traditional values of the Métaphysique starting from a new prospect taken on the human values produced, which must, on the one hand, to involve the abolition of the idealistic values up to now platonico-Christian women, and, on the other hand, to involve an antagonistic movement with the development of the history under the influence of Plato, movement which would lead then to a revaluation of the life.

The goal of Nietzsche is to sap by this concept the bases of all last philosophies (because the perspectivism shows the dogmatic character of it), and to renew the question of the Valeur S which we allot to certain concepts (the Vérité, the well) and to our Existence, by putting the question to know what makes the eigenvalue of a prospect: for example, which is the value of the value of the truth? The question which rises for Nietzsche from this setting in question is to know if one can then establish a new hierarchy of interpretations and on which bases. Nietzsche is thus not so much a prophet or a visionary, of which a concept as the Will for power would be the message, but it includes/understands itself like the precursor of freer philosophers, as well with regard to the values morals as of the values metaphysics.

But the Will for power, as an interpretation of reality, takes multiple dimensions, such as the eternal return and the Superman. Such a comprehension excludes mainly any research from one inconditionné behind the world, and from cause behind the beings (“base”, “substance”), because it is as we interpret that we design the world like Will for power: thus, the statement on the gasoline must it be paid to the perspectivism to avoid making Will for power a substance or a being. This supposes that other interpretations are possible. But refusing dogmatism to be it, Nietzsche refuses as much the relativism which could rise from its thesis of the perspectivism of the Will for power.

The principal points which make it possible to include/understand this concept were exposed by Müller-Lauter which studied the whole of the texts which is referred to it. One can retain, according to him, several uses of this expression.

Considered in general, the “Will for power” is an expression which indicates general quality all to become: no reality, if all is to become, can remain within its own limits. To be “will for power”, it is never not to be identical to oneself, it is to be always carried beyond “oneself”. But this movement is not possible that if one conceives the power like a requirement of assimilation, victories against resistances: the Will for power increases thus in the adversity, or decrease and seeks other means of continuing. Nietzsche says it this manner: to be, it is to become more .

Considered in particular, a will for power, it is such to become, i.e a being (such man for example). If any being becomes, it however does not change arbitrarily, but according to a structure, and more exactly a structure of growth, structure which defines it or which makes include/understand how it becomes; it is this structure which is its acting reality, individual, which is its will for power:

“the precise name for this reality would be the will for power thus indicated according to its internal structure and not starting from its protean, imperceptible, fluid nature. ” ( Beyond good and badly , § 36)

The will for power is thus the quality of action of the life and becoming, their to become more, but it is not the principle in the classical sense of the term.

Applying to alive, the Will for power has moreover a pathological dimension associated with the feeling with power that Nietzsche had started with thématiser as of Aurore :

“ the life (…) tends to the feeling of a maximum of power ; it is primarily the effort towards more power; its major reality, more the close friend, it is this to want. ”.

“My will always occurs as a liberator and messenger of joy. To want frees: such is the true doctrines of the will and freedom. Will, thus are called the liberator and the messenger of joy that to want it becomes not-to want, however my brothers you know this fable of madness! I led you far from these songs when I taught you: the will is creative”.

Thus, Nietzsche goes against philosophies making of the Bonheur the Supreme Bien, and of its research the goal of any life, and in particular of the philosophies ancient eudemonists, epicureanism and Cyrénaïsme - which did not manage to explain the persistence of the evil - at the head. This position is found in particular in this declaration “ it is not true that the man seeks the pleasure and flees the pain: one includes/understands with which prejudice I illustrate break here (…). The pleasure and the pain are consequences, concomitant phenomena; what the man wants, which wants the least piece of a living organism, it is a increase in power . In the effort which it makes to carry out it, the pleasure and the pain follow one another; because of this will, he seeks resistance, he needs something which is opposed to him… ”.

Pathos and structure

For Nietzsche, the will for power thus has a double aspect: it is a fundamental pathos and a structure.

Also a will for power can it be analyzed like an internal relation of a conflict, like structure intimates to become, and not only like the deployment of a power: the precise name for this reality would be the will for power thus indicated according to its internal structure and not starting from its protean, imperceptible, fluid nature. . The will for power is thus the internal relation which structure a play of force S (a force not being able to be conceived apart from a relation). So it is neither a to be, nor to become, but what Nietzsche names a fundamental pathos , pathos which is never fixed (it is not a gasoline), and which by this fluid character can be defined by a direction of the power, either in the direction of the growth or in the direction of the decrease. This pathos , in the organic world, is expressed by a hierarchy of instincts, impulses and affects, which form a interpretative prospect from where the power is spread and which results for example in thoughts and judgments of corresponding Valeur.

Will for power like interpretation

Thought by Nietzsche like fundamental quality of becoming, the Will for power makes it possible to seize the structure of it (or standard ), and, therefore, to describe the prospect for it. In this direction, the Will for power is not a metaphysical concept but a interpretative instrument (according to Jean Granier, against the interpretation of Heidegger). Consequently, for Nietzsche, it is a question of determining what is interpreted, which interprets and how.

The body like discussion thread

Nietzsche takes for starting point of its interpretation the world which he regards as us being given and best known, namely the body. It thus runs, up to a certain point, the counter to Descartes, for which our spirit (our thinking reality) is the best known one for us. However, the idea of Nietzsche is not completely opposed to the Cartesian thought, since according to him we anything else know only the world of our Sentiment S and our Représentation S, which can be compared with the intuition of our subjectivity at Descartes. Thus the body is not it for Nietzsche initially the body object of the scientific knowledge, but the lived body: our design to be it is an abstraction of our physiological rate/rhythm.

All Connaissance, as Kant had already established it before Nietzsche, must take for starting point the Sensibilité. But, contrary to Kant, Nietzsche holds, like Schopenhauer, that the forms of our apprehension of the existence concern initially our physiological organization (and its functions: nutrition, reproduction), while the functions considered to be traditionally higher (the thought) are only derived forms.

As, for Nietzsche, we can nothing know differently as by Analogie with what is given to us, i.e that any knowledge is a recognition, a classification, which finds in the things what we put at it, and which reflects our most intimate life (our impulses, the manner of which we are affected by the things and how, from there, we judge them). The world as a whole, when we try a synthesis of our knowledge to characterize it, is never but the world of our prospect, which is an alive prospect, emotional. This is why Nietzsche can say world which it is Will for power, since it justified that the Homme, as a organization, is Will for power. For Nietzsche, we cannot make differently than to project this design of the to be which belongs to us owing to the fact that we live, and that also involves for consequence which knowledge is interpretation, since an objective knowledge would mean to conceive a knowledge without an alive subject. Consequently, the being is not initially the object of a search of truth, the being is, for the man, in the most intimate and immediate manner, life or existence.

Starting from this perspectivism, Nietzsche estimates that all Science (as a quantitative schematization) is necessarily derived from our qualitative report/ratio in the world, it is a simplification, and meets vital needs for it:

“… us return account from time to time, not without in to laugh, that in fact precisely best sciences claims to retain us best in this simplified, artificial world right through, in this world skilfully imagined and falsified, that nolens volens this science likes the error, because she also, the alive one, like the life! ”

Initially, at the time of the Out-of-date Considérations , Nietzsche had deduced from this starting point that we cannot include/understand the Matière differently than as endowed with spiritual qualities, primarily the memory and the sensitivity, which means that we anthropomorphisons the Nature spontaneously. It had thus tried to exceed of only one blow the Matérialisme and the Spiritualisme which oppose both the matter and the Conscience in a manner which remains unexplained. However, Nietzsche removed the problem here, by posing l'" esprit" like matter. With the development of the concept of Will for power, Nietzsche does not break with this first thesis of its Jeunesse, since the qualities allotted to this power are generalizable with the unit of what exists; so Nietzsche supposes that the inorganic one could have, like any life, sensitivity and conscience, at least in a more primitive state. This thesis can make think of the ancient design (stoical aristotelician and ) of the nature, which gives birth to a more complex being from a former state (for example, the heart psychè is born from the physis by preserving some qualities).

Interpretation, appearance and reality

This interpretative method implies a basic reflection in connection with the traditional concepts of Réalité and Apparence. Indeed, since Nietzsche sticks to strict a Sensualisme (which requires however an interpretation), reality becomes appearance, appearance is reality: “I thus do not pose l'" apparence" in opposition to the " réalité" , on the contrary, I consider that appearance, it is reality. ”

But so the concepts Metaphysical S of reality and appearance, and their opposition, are abolished:

“We abolished the true world: which world remained it? Perhaps that of appearance? … But not! At the same time how the true world, we also abolished the world of appearances! ”

Of what does consist then reality? For Nietzsche,

“the " réalité" reside in the constant return of things equal, known, connected, in their character logicisable, the belief that here we calculate and can calculate. ”

In other words, the reality which is to us " donnée" is already a result which appears only by a perspective , structure of the will for power which we are. The thought of Nietzsche is thus a Pensée of reality like interpretation, resting on a thesis sensualist, all this supposing that any interpretation exists only as a prospect. Starting from this thesis perspectivist, the question which arises for Nietzsche (as it had been posed with Protagoras, cf the dialog of Plato) is to know if all the prospects (or interpretations) are worth. The genealogy comes to answer this question.

Genius of the heart

If the Will for power can be seen like an effort made by Nietzsche to think the of being and the Devenir, he however endeavors not to reduce his comprehension of the Existence to a concept of which it fears that it does not become the support of a rigid system and Métaphysique. Also one finds, at the end of Beyond good and badly , a voluntarily mysterious evocation, of a genius of the heart which, as its name indicates it, is an interior inspiration, inexpressible and which speaks with our most intimate being, inspiration whose divine symbol is Dionysos. Dionysos is thus the almost mystical symbol of our report/ratio to the world as a Will for power: when we listen to our heart, it is Dionysos which we intend to speak.

Psychology and genealogy

The Concept of Will for power, as a quality to be it, allows of this fact of interpreting it. It thus makes it possible to synthesize a whole of methodological rules which are the result of reflections which extend from the years 1860 at the end of 1888. This concept thus does not claim with systematization (Nietzsche gave up besides for this reason the Idée of a talk of its Philosophie of the Will for power; cf Will for power), because it evolved/moved much, but one can nevertheless release from the guiding lines allowing as a whole to expose the Pensée of Nietzsche.

One of the most known aspects is its application to the problem of the origin of the Morale, under the name of genealogy. This application of the method to the morals makes it possible to include/understand how Nietzsche analyzes the instinctual Hiérarchie S in plays from all point of view morals, which is properly the genealogical method. The questions which arise are then of the type: which type of men needs such morals evaluations? With which morals such philosopher or metaphysician does want he to come from there, and which need that meets it?

“I realized little by little of what until now all great philosophy was: the confession of its author, a kind of involuntary and insensitive memories ; and I also realized that the intentions morals or immoral formed, in any philosophy, the true vital germ from where each time the whole plant is hatched. One would well indeed make (and it would be even reasonable) wonder, for the elucidation of this problem: how were the assertions formed the most remote metaphysics of a philosopher? - one, do I say would make well, to wonder which morals wants one to come from there? ”

These analyzes of the instinctual and emotional structures form a project of reformulation thus, in the light of the Will for power, of the traditional Psychologie which was founded on the privileged statute granted to the Conscience.

Statute of psychology

By refuting the primacy of the conscience, Nietzsche is brought to develop a psychology the depths (of which all the first chapter of Beyond good and badly is an example) which puts at the foreground the fight or the association of the Instinct S, the Pulsion S and the affects, the Conscience not being that a late perception of the effects of these sets of forces will infra conscious. What Nietzsche names genealogy will be then regressive research on the basis of an interpretation (for example, the moral interpretation of the world) to go back to its source of production, i.e to the fundamental pathos which makes it necessary.

The judgments metaphysics, moral, esthetic, become thus symptoms of needs, instincts, affects generally driven back by the moral conscience, for which morals is a mask, a deformation of the appreciation of oneself and existence. In fine , that amounts making rest the analysis on the determination of the Will for power of a type. For this reason, the individual is not examined by Nietzsche for itself, but as an expression of a system arranged hierarchically of values.

This method thus brings to raise questions of the kind: which instinctual structure, incarnated by such or such man, conduit with such type of judgments? Which need that does meet he, with which Will for power ? Does one want, by morals, to discipline instincts, and in this case, a which aim? Or does one want to destroy them, and in this case, this is because they are considered to be harmful, dangerous, is this because they are, as natural phenomena, the object of hatred and resentment? The first case can be the expression of a need for growth, the second of a logic of self-destruction.

In Beyond good and badly , Nietzsche exposes this genealogy, design thorough and renewed by the thesis of the Will for power (talk to the § 36) of historical philosophy, and he regards the Psychologie as queen of sciences , while underlining what distinguishes its design from traditional psychology:

“All psychology stopped until now at prejudices and fears morals: she did not dare to venture in the depths. To dare to regard psychology morphology and as doctrines of the evolution in the will for power , as I consider it - nobody still thought of it, even by far: as much, of course, which it is allowed to see in what was written until now a symptom from what was overlooked. The power of the moral prejudices penetrated deeply in the most intellectual world, coldest seemingly, more deprived of assumptions - and, as it goes without saying, this influence had the most harmful effects, because it blocked it and denatured. A real psychophysiology is forced to fight against unconscious resistances in the heart of the scientist, it has “the heart” against it. And the psychologist who makes such “sacrifices” - it is not the sacrifizio LED intelletto , on the contrary! - will have, at least, the right to ask that psychology be again proclaimed queen of sciences, other sciences existing only because of it, to serve it and to prepare it. But, consequently, psychology is become again the way which leads to the fundamental problems.”

Let us note that if this news Psychologie rests, in 1886, on the assumption of the Will for power, the idea of the conflict of the instincts was not born from this one. As of 1880, fragments go in this direction, and the Will for power as an idea appears well before being named. The expression Will for power makes it possible to synthesize this unit.

Psychological observation

As that was announced, the Will for power is a concept which is not from the start present in the work of Nietzsche. To give an account of the evolution of the thought of Nietzsche, it is necessary to leave the Hypothèse S which it poses and of the concepts that he uses before the period known as of maturity . The same applies to the Psychologie, since the development of the latter especially appears significant starting from Humain, too human , i.e. in 1878, when he breaks in a conscious way with his cultural medium. Influenced by Paul Rée, Nietzsche then reads with interest the French moralists (Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, etc); it also reads contemporary works of psychology, for what it is necessary to add studies of Sociologie, of Anthropologie, and work on the Théorie of knowledge, such as that of Lange ( Histoire of the materialism ), where one finds a discussion of the scientific statute of the Psychologie. Thought of Nietzsche, with regard to psychology, develops thus on the one hand according to observation of men (the maxims of Rochefoucauld for example, or its personal observations it underlines the special character, relative, and often provisional), and dialogs on the other hand with contemporary epistemological reflections.

The human existence

The psychological observation is thus particularly present in Humain, too human and Aurore ; Nietzsche then wishes to provide the foundations of a historical philosophy, while proceeding to a kind of chemical analysis of our representations and moral feelings, preceding what will become the genealogy. It analyzes the human behaviors, under the influence of Rochefoucauld or Voltaire (to which Humain, too human is dedicated) and perhaps also of Hobbes, and often brings back the mobiles of the action and the human thought to the vanity and the feeling of power. So some of its paintings are in this manner of the tables of moralist of the human existence, certain topics, like this feeling of power, but also the various kinds of morals, are first formulations of the major theories which it will develop later. This stage of its work can be regarded as a series of tests more or less led to describe the man, his motivations and the nature of its social relations (aphorisms on the Amitié, the State, the Femme S, etc).

Genealogy of morals

It is from 1886 that Nietzsche will expose in more ordered way the result of its research, as a genealogical method, in particular in Beyond good and badly , and in the form of essays in the Généalogie of morals . Elements of this genealogy are however already present in Humain, too human (for example, various origins of morals, or character of palliative, and not of true remedy, the religion) and in Aurore (the Moralité of manners like source of civilization, or the feeling of power which guides the man until in morals).

These results can be summarized thanks to the diagrammatic exposures that Nietzsche itself in made. Thus, the question about the origin of morals, he answers that all the values morals are brought back to two systems of different origin: the Moral of the weak and the morals of the strong . The term origin does not indicate here the historical appearance of these systems, but the type of creation of which they are the result, so that the origin, within the meaning of Nietzsche, is it from what the history is determined, and not an unspecified event of the universal history.

To arrive to this result, Nietzsche proceeded to a genealogy comprising several moments, exposed in the first essay of the Généalogie of morals : he sought in the language the first expressions of what was judged good; then, according to the evolution of the direction of the words good and bad , it showed the process of interiorization of these values whose significance was first of all mainly material; finally, tonic of a moral evaluation given to its conditions of expression, it distinguished two fundamental manners to create values morals.

Genealogical interpretation of the moral judgments

The starting point of the genealogical method is linguistic: putting the question of the origin of morals, Nietzsche requires: where does one find the first concepts of good and bad , and which they mean? Drawing aside utilitarian interpretation, Nietzsche proposes that they are the aristocrats of all companies which initially indicated themselves like good , and which this term, in a simple and spontaneous way, indicates the richness, the beauty, the pleasures of the physical-activity, health, in a word, excellence. The word good designates the men of the most raised caste thus, that of the warriors. So it does not indicate what we understand by there today, in particular, a good is not an altruistic, charitable man, accessible to the Pitié.

The historical and linguistic analysis leads thus to a sociological search for order: the first morals evaluations depend and are the expression of a row. Nevertheless, Nietzsche does not take again on its account the contemporary theories, such as that of the influence of the medium of Taine, because if it is necessary to take account of the social determinations, the company cannot be used as integral explanatory principle. Besides it re-elects this Science according to its genealogical interpretation ( theory of the forms of domination ) which it judges first relative with the sociology and the psychology of its time.

Social hierarchies

The question is thus for Nietzsche the following one: up to what point do the castes of a company allow the development of a particular species of moral judgments? Nietzsche typologiquement distinguishes several types of moral judgments according to the possible social situations (warriors, priests, slaves, etc):

“If the transformation of the political concept of preeminence into a psychological concept is the rule, it is not by an exception to this rule (though any rule gives place to exceptions) that the caste the highest form at the same time the sacerdotal caste and that consequently it prefers, for its general designation, a title which points out its special functions. It is there that for example contrast between “pure” and “impure” is useful for the first time with the distinction of the castes; and there still develops later a difference between “good” and “bad” in a direction which is not limited any more to the caste. ”.

The social situation allows a feeling power to be characterized by forms which are clean for him, and which, originally, have spontaneous and whole expressions little interiorized. From this examination of the castes, Nietzsche releases a first great opposition then:

“One guesses with how much facility the way of appreciating clean with the priest will be detached from that of the warlike aristocracy, to develop in a completely contrary appreciation; the ground will be especially favorable to the conflict when the caste of the priests and that of the warriors are jalouseront mutually and are not able any more to get along on the row. The value judgments of the warlike aristocracy are founded on a powerful body constitution, a flourishing health, without forgetting what is necessary to the maintenance of this overflowing strength: the war, the adventure, hunting, dance, plays and physical exercises and in general all that implies a robust activity, free and merry. The way of appreciating sacerdotal upper classes rests on other conditions first: such an amount of worse for it when it is about war. ”.

Nietzsche brings back thereafter any morals to two fundamental types which correspond originally to the opposition dominating/dominated. It should be drawn aside the idea that the dominant ones, those which create the values initially, would be only warriors: the genesis of the values released by Nietzsche clearly states a conflict between the world of the physical-activity and that of the mental activity (i.e. of the interiorized will for power). Also Nietzsche sees it initially an argument on the question of the row of the values between the warriors and the priests.

Owing to the fact that this comprehension of morals allows the constitution of the types, it should not be reduced with the reality of the social hierarchies: a social hierarchy is a condition first of the creation of a evaluation, but, according to Nietzsche, the evaluations can become independent of their ground of birth. The origin makes include/understand how a value was born, it does not make yet include/understand why it remained. Consequently, a slave, within the meaning of Nietzsche (weak), can be a Master very well, in a more prosaic direction, i.e. to have capacity and richnesses. The social hierarchies only make it possible to include/understand how moral types were made possible, and the question remains to know which type of men then transmitted it (and by which new means).

As for the " types" , these are genealogical interpretations that one does not meet such as they are in reality (opposite typical features can for example be dependant).

Two sources of morals

There are thus, according to Nietzsche, a fundamental duality in morals, duality which it had already formulated clearly in Humain, too human and Aurore : the morals of the forts and the morals of weak, the latter finding its origin in its opposition to the first.

The morals of weak and resentment

See also: Resentment

The morals of weak is characterized by its resentment; Nietzsche of thus described the psychological mechanism:

“When oppressed, crushed, controlled, under the empire of the vindicatory trick of the impotence, start to say: “Let us be the opposite of malicious, i.e. good! Is good whoever does not make violence with anybody, whoever does not offend, nor does not attack, does not use of reprisals and leaves with God the care revenge, whoever is held hidden like us, avoids the meeting of the evil and of the remainder little thing of the life waits, like us, the patients, the humble ones and the right ones. ” - All that wants to say all in all, to coldly listen to it and without party taken: “Us, the weak ones, we are definitely weak; we will thus do well anything to make of all it for what we are not strong enough. ” - But this bitter observation, this prudence of quality much lower than has even the insect (which, in the event of great danger, does it dead, nothing to make of too), thanks to this false coining, with this impotent deception of oneself, took the pompeux outside of the virtue which can await, which gives up and which is keep silent, like if the weakness even the weak one - i.e. its gasoline, its activity, all its single, inevitable and indelible reality - was a free achievement, something of voluntarily selected, an act of merit. This species of man has a need for faith on neutral the “subject”, endowed with the free will, and that by an instinct of self-preservation personal, of assertion of oneself, by what any lie usually seeks to be justified. ”

The morals of weak is thus the expression of this Ressentiment : the resentment is the affect of an overcome will which seeks to be avenged, i.e. it is the symptom of a decreasing life, which did not open out. This revenge will be expressed by values created to fight against the forts, by devaluing their power (the fort becomes the malicious one in opposition to the good). Thus, according to Nietzsche, the Pity, the altruism, all the humane values, are in fact of the values by which one denies oneself to give the appearance of moral kindness and to convince itself of its superiority; but under these illusory values ferments an impotent hatred which seeks a means of revenge and domination. The Christianity, the Anarchism, the Socialism, etc are examples of morals of the resentment.

“the revolt of the slaves in morals starts when the resentment itself becomes creator and gives birth to values: the resentment of these beings, with which it true reaction, that of the action, is prohibited and which finds compensation only in one imaginary revenge. While any aristocratic morals is born from a triumphal assertion of itself, the morals of the slaves opposes as of the access “not” with what does not form part of itself, with what is “different” from it, with what is its “non-ego”: and this not is its creative act. This inversion of the appreciative glance - this point of view necessarily inspired of the outside world instead of resting on oneself - belongs into clean to the resentment: the morals of the slaves always has and before any need, to occur, of an opposite and external world: it needs, to speak physiologically, of the external stimulants to act; its action is fundamentally a reaction. ”.

The morals of the forts

In contrary direction, the morals of the strong exalte power, i.e. selfishness, or pleasure of being oneself, pride, the free and happy activity. These values are primarily the result of a spiritualization of the animality which can then open out fortunately. Thus in Greece sexuality it is expressed in the worships of Dionysos and in art; at Plato, the desire of knowing is the consequence of a spiritualization of the instinct of reproduction. The morals of the weak acts as contrary direction, while seeking to destroy with the root all the instincts, by hatred of the life, i.e. in consequence of an interiorized violence which can be expressed only in the negative form of the destruction of oneself (it is bad aristocratic morals). By contrast, which will characterize best morals of strong , it will be its capacity to raise men cultivated, inventive, active, endowed with a strong and constructive will.

One should not however be unaware of that the forts, in the history, are first of all (term underlined by Nietzsche in the first aphorism of the ninth part of Beyond good and badly ) of the men violent one, but this violence is not same kind as the violence of weak, which also wants the power to him, but by other means. The violence of the fort is spontaneous and without ulterior motives, it is not vindicatory, while the violence of weak is calculated, and it is a violence with the service of the resentment, i.e of hatred. Although the force at Nietzsche is not necessarily expressed by violence, and, that moreover, the spiritualization of the most aggressive instincts is the highest form of the culture, it remains that the " spontanéité" fort is initially particularly cruel, whatever the civilization considered:

“This " audace" noble races, insane, absurd, spontaneous audacity; the nature even of their companies, unforeseen and incredible - Périclès celebrates especially the ῥαθυμία Athenians -; their indifference and their contempt for all safety measures of the body, the life, the wellbeing; terrible cheerfulness and the major joy which they taste with any destruction, with all pleasures of the victory and cruelty: - all that was summarized for those which were the victims, in the image of the " barbare" , of " the enemy méchant" , of something like the " Vandale". ”.

This Violence is not an end in itself, but is the base of the human rise, without which the man disavows himself and mutilates himself as an animal. The whole of the instincts which show the proximity of the man with the animal must be, for Nietzsche, spiritualized, because this spiritualization is an increase in the will for power, for example in artistic creation. Thus, when it examines the process of rise in the fort, Nietzsche, which underlined the cruelty first of this fort, does not put ahead the physical force, but well the heart. And, in Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra , it addresses itself to the men violent one thus:

“the beautiful one is impregnable for any violent will. : And I do not require the beauty of anybody like you, violent man: that your kindness is the last of your victories on yourself. : Because this is the secrecy of the heart: it is only when the hero left it that it in silence - the surhéros approaches. -”

The violence of weak is on the other hand for problematic Nietzsche, if it dominates: it is a cruel violence, a violence for revenge, and it is not easily let convert into creative activities, but is transformed more easily into systems of cruelty, i.e in religions or morals aiming at even cutting down the existence what is different.

It is then necessary to stress the importance of this opposition of two morals which structure the history of the Occident: all that is strong created what is good, philosophy and art Greek, which is weak created the religion monotheist and its system of repression of the force which is still ours today. The question which arises for Nietzsche is thus knowledge how such a system could develop starting from the resentment and of the interiorization of the will for power.

Interiorization

Impossibility for the castes subjected to a severe discipline and for the people subjected to exteriorize their forces freely does not make disappear these forces. We find in the second case the origin of the resentment of the values morals. Nietzsche puts here at the day a phenomenon " prémoral" who consists of the reversal of the forces towards the interior: interiorization which will allow the development of the heart and the deepening of psyché human in a variety of the unknown types hitherto.

Natural impulses of conquest, oppressed by external factors (State, education…) against the oppressed individual, in itself, creating a faintness, whose origin remains to him unknown, that it in term of fault, bad conscience and culpability will rationalize are turned over.

Religious interpretation

This phenomenon of interiorization is variously interpreted. It receives in particular a religious interpretation, and, in the case of the resentment of weak, the interiorization, which is a cause of sufferings morals and physics, will find in the Christianisme an interpretation as a Péché.

The invention of the culpability

According to Nietzsche, indeed, the moral inversion of the values by the weak ones, is not enough to explain the power with which it was essential in the history. One still needs for it the intervention of the priest, of which we saw that it is opposed, in a competition of Caste S, with the Guerrier (and with the policy). The invention of the Christian priest is the reinterpretation of the suffering as a culpability of that which suffers: whereas the fault was rejected on the malicious , it is now for its own faults that the weak one suffers.

Judaism and Christianity.

The problem of the suffering

The religious interpretation of the existence makes it possible Nietzsche to release two fundamental attitudes vis-a-vis the suffering, which it summarizes by the formula: Dionysos against Crucifié.

The first attitude consists in perceiving the suffering like a stimulant for the life; the Greek Tragédie is an example. The second attitude consists in being folded up on oneself, to react, so that one cannot act any more. So the interpretation of the suffering is thus at the same time an evaluation of reality.

Critical of the Knowledge and the Metaphysical

The examination of the morals evaluations will make it possible Nietzsche to support that these values are not only of the evaluations of an ethical nature , but that they also extend to the Métaphysique and explains the origin of it. The fundamental question raised by Nietzsche is here: does what mean the will of truth? Or: we want the truth, but why not the error?

Since any knowledge is an interpretation, all the Concept S which are relative for him must be them also reinterpreted généalogiquement. The genealogy shows the origin of the values morals of the Ressentiment which makes use of certain metaphysics categories, such as the Truth, the Good, etc Ainsi human cognitive faculties seem given by an evaluation of the existence born of the Haine, i.e. of reactive affects whose principal motivation is the Vengeance. Knowledge and metaphysics, fields of the human spirituality seemingly of a great purity, would be thus actually dependant on a strong affectivity without which they would not exist:

“You call " will of vérité" what pushes you and returns to you burning, you wisest among the wise ones.

Will to imagine the being: thus I call your will!

You want to return conceivable all that is: because you doubt with a mistrust that it is already conceivable.

But all that is, you want to subject it and fold it with your will. To make polished and subjected to the spirit, like the mirror and the image of the spirit.

It is there all your will, O wise among the wise ones, it is your will for power there; and also when you speak about the good and the evil and the evaluations about values. ”

Critical of the possibility of metaphysics

Criticism nietzschéenne of metaphysics, as a Psychology of the depths or genealogy (revealing the origin of concepts such as truth, being), is presented in the form of a result, exposed in 1886. Nietzsche criticizes internal contradictions metaphysics by an examination which one could describe as positivist, and who is often based on arguments skeptics.

In the first chapter of the first volume of Human, too human (in 1878), it gives an account of the impossibility of the Métaphysique, which one takes Conscience provided that one wants to reason well in a rigorous way, i.e. in manner skeptic : method which is that of Ænésidème, Hume and Kant (in spite of violent criticisms of Nietzsche, the Kantian criticism of metaphysics is seen like a problem of first order).

“Let us take a little with serious the starting point skepticism: to suppose that there does not exist world different, metaphysical, and that, only known world of us, all the explanations borrowed from metaphysics for us, of which eye would we see are unusable the men and the things? ”

With regard to the skeptics, Nietzsche will say, at the end of its conscious life (cf Antéchrist ):

“I put besides some skeptics - the only suitable type in all the history of philosophy -: but the others are unaware of the elementary requirements of intellectual probity. ”

This criticism shows that we do not have any Connaissance anything apart from what we perceive, which what we perceive is anything else to only become, and which this Perception is a prospect. It results from this thesis that there cannot be absolute Vérité for us:

“; there is not not more eternal data that there are absolute truths. ”

However, in Human, too human , Nietzsche do not exclude that a metaphysical world can exist; in accordance with the method skeptic, he also admits that such a world could be proven:

“It is true that there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility is hardly contestable. ”

Nevertheless, it will specify later this last assertion by considering it under the angle of the proof, while deviating this time from the Pensée skeptic:

“- it is absolutely impossible to prove any other kind of reality. ”

That means in particular that there is knowledge at all, but only attempt at interpretation of the world in which we live. This point is expressed already in Humain, too human and with more force still and in a way repeated in the Twilight of the idols :

“the “true world”, an idea which is not used any more for nothing, which does not engage even any more with nothing - an useless idea, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it. ”

Nietzsche will pass in another plan, by affirming not only that the proof of the Existence or the non-existence of this world is perfectly indifferent for us (what the Sceptique S had already recognized), but that it still should be explained why, in spite of this known rigorous demonstration since millenia, another world could be thought like other thing that a simple hazardous assumption and why one wanted to see it true while trying to prove it.

For Nietzsche, there is thus no absolute Vérité so that the monolithism of the Métaphysique (cf the Twilight of the idols ) is denied. Its position is agnostic (although he criticizes the “veneration for the Unknown, the Mystery in oneself” of the agnostics). It does not reject the existence of God or a " principle suprême" , but it avoids trying to think it or to prove it. God is not about knowledge, but of the faith, and in this direction, the méthaphysique one, inherited the Greeks are doubtful, and since saint Anselme and Descartes, it is vain and misleading.

Social utility of the truth

Knowledge not existing, it should be explained why there is nevertheless a will of truth. According to Nietzsche, the truth is initially social and pragmatic, which is included/understood on several levels:

at the individual level, the Mensonge is more difficult than the veracity: it is more useful to say the truth and to conform to general hypocrisy;

“the men flee less the lie than the injury caused by the lie. ”

As these are certain truths which are retained; for the benefit of the community.

it is thus more advantageous to follow the truths received in certain mediums, for example:

“Among philosophers as, another species of saints, the logic of their profession wants as they let level only certain truths: namely those for which them profession with the sanction of the company. In Kantian terms, they are truths of the practical reason . ”

Nietzsche supposes that the " categories; ultimes" from our thought result from a selective history; so we cannot do without the concepts of metaphysics:

Is true what did not make perish humanity .

The general rule is that an institution or a company, generates a field of beliefs which are specific for them (cf the Twilight of the idols ). The stronger the authority is, and the less it tolerates the demonstrations. Manners, the Law S, the police force, thus ensure the perenniality of an evaluation of reality. All Connaissance which leaves this framework is false, dangerous, bad. But it is not a question for Nietzsche unilaterally to condemn this arbitrary obstruction of the authority and of the habit to the reason because it is the arbitrary one which made it possible humanity to survive.

Metaphysics

This gregarious conformism does not explain the metaphysical idealism in the immediate future (that Nietzsche names the “desirable one”, which the man wants that the world is, in contradiction with what is) and the belief in a self-knowledge. The problem of metaphysics thus requires first of all to be analyzed in several elements. Nietzsche proposes here an interpretation of metaphysics like division of the totality of being in two distinct spheres.

To be and become

Nietzsche leaves indeed a design of the metaphysics in which the opposites have a fundamental value:

to be/become
true time/eternity
/false
un/multiple
etc

These opposites have an ontological statute radically different and cannot be explained the ones by the others. These oppositions cause serious difficulties Logique S and Morale S:

“How a thing could be born from its opposite? For example, the truth of the error? Or will of the truth of the will of the error? The act not involved in the egoistic act? How the pure and radiant contemplation of wise born is from covetousness? Such origins are impossible; it would be madness to dream to with it, worse still! The things of the highest value must have another origin, an origin which is particular for them, - they could not result from this momentary, misleading world, illusory, of this labyrinth of errors and desires! It is, quite to the contrary, in the center to be it, the immutable one, the occult divinity, the " thing in soi" , what must be their raison d'être, and nowhere elsewhere! ”.

According to Nietzsche, the fundamental opposition metaphysical would be whereas what is does not become, which becomes is not .

Why what is about becoming must it be rejected? It should be answered that to become it misleads us because we can never apprehend it.

But, if we rigorously do not have any cognitive access to a metaphysical world, we should explain why one comes from there to think that the desire misleads us. Without the existence of the to be, the world of becoming could not have all our confidence. The men always believe in entities of which practically nobody forever have experience. The Belief S nuns and the Certitude S metaphysics must thus be the subject of a particular examination.

Will of denigration

For Nietzsche, the belief in a metaphysical world is the symptom of a Volonté to depreciate this one. One finds the evaluations of weak thus:

“In this case, we are avenged for the life by opposing to him the phantasmagoria of a life " autre" and " meilleure" ”.

The Philosophe S are thus avenged for the Vie in momifiant all that in their eyes has value:

their Notion S is eternal, without no becoming, therefore without generation, growth, corruption, therefore without life, pathos.
that supposes the suppression of the body and the Passion S: the philosophers, when they produce abstractions, empty the concepts of their entrails, striking all that is perishable of nullity. The experiment however shows us the opposite but that supposes a particular glance, a prospect under the report/ratio for eternity.
will of denigration, Nihilism: the true world = nothing. In some manner that one considers the problem, these premises being given, that one is in India, in Greece, etc the conclusion is that this world, the world in becoming, is soft, false, a Néant to be.
because the directions are held for immoral, they must be condemned from the point of view of the Connaissance. The Hatred of the direction led to imagine another world.

In conclusion, according to Nietzsche, knowledge has a moral origin; it is an evaluation of the world according to human values, according to what the man wishes to find in the world.

Idealistic criteria of knowledge

The Feeling, the Plaisir which a Croyance causes would be the proof of its Vérité. The Idéalisme thus merges with the desirable : the Homme wants that the world or a part of the world satisfies her Désir S. the interpretation of reduced Nietzsche in this manner any idealism, any metaphysics and any morals with a form of Eudémonisme. By there, he denies the right to them to say what is true.

Indeed, all that is proven in this case, it is the force feeling, the force of the desire in contradiction with reality. But a truth can be tedious, despairing, not conform with our moral wishes; it is necessary to seriously consider the idea that the truth can be horrible, inhuman, that one can perish of the truth. In this manner Nietzsche removes any bond necessary between Vérité and Bien, bond which exists in the metaphysics of Plato and of Aristote but also in Christian theology.

So idealism, i.e. the refusal of the Réalité that we have under our eyes with the profit of a different reality and more pleasant, this idealism, thorough to its extremes, is comparable with the morbid feelings which a patient feels who does not support the physical contact. The idealist, the Christian, the democrat, the Socialist, the anarchist, the feminist, etc all, are more or less in a false situation relative with reality: they adopt an infantile behavior of refusal, of autism, which inevitably rises from their weaknesses.

Convictions morals (such that equality between men) which supposes metaphysics categories as the idea that there would be a gasoline one and universal of the man (who thus suppose a other world, the world true, real, morals), are then not distinguished from a kind of lie irrepressible determined by deep a physiological and psychological faintness vis-a-vis our fundamentally immoral existence, vis-a-vis the tragic character of the life.

Contrary to the eudemonism of the truth, the capacity to look at reality coldly, without projecting its desires and its dissatisfactions there, is for Nietzsche a named philosophical Vertu Probité.

Critical of the reason

Since metaphysics is refuted, the idea appears that we can make a history of knowledge, which leads Nietzsche to regard the Catégorie S of our cognitive faculties as the results of grammatical practices become instinctive. But the language has a remote origin and conveys rudimentary prejudices :

“the language, from its origin, goes back to the time of the most rudimentary form of psychology: to become aware of the conditions first of a metaphysics of the language, or, more clearly, reason , it is to penetrate in a mentality coarsely fetishistic. ”

This metaphysics of the language expresses primarily the Croyance in the Causalité of the will, belief of which rise from the principles of the reason:

the Identity
the Me, the Substance
the idea of cause, the Causality
the Finality

This metaphysics of the language involves with the error of the Être:

“I fear that we cannot get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar…”

The original error

It is finally necessary to discover the origin of the possibility of any metaphysics, beyond or in on this side interpretations which one can make: the starting point of all the errors of the Métaphysique is a belief:

“At the origin of all, the fatal error was to believe that the will is something which acts - that the will is a faculty …”

This belief implies two things:

there are action S; these actions suppose an actor;
we believe to find in us a model of this cause (the agent, the subject, it me).

Consequently, we project the categories of the action in the world of the Phénomène S, and believe that any event supposes a substance which cannot be reduced to phenomenal qualities. It is there the idea of a Chose in oneself.

This error thus is not only induced by the language, like the other errors, but it is originally psychological of which it should be explained why it had a so great success.

This success is explained if it is considered that this error in the self-knowledge as causes were interpreted as free will (this point is analyzed by Nietzsche in the chapter of the Crépuscule of the idols entitled the four great errors). It refers to the thesis of Nietzsche according to which the Liberté was invented to make the men responsible for their acts.

If we follow the reasoning of Nietzsche, the whole of the Erreur S of metaphysics has a theological origin thus and Morale: the man is the cause of his acts; its Me is its Substance, its being, according to which it will interpret the world of the Phénomène S by projecting there this psychological causality which separates what acts (a prone , a substrate of what becomes) of its effects. This belief involves the invention of the Unité, the identity, causality, etc all these categories which will take a systematic form in metaphysics.

The Nihilism

“The most worrying guest is held with our door. ”

According to Nietzsche, the report/ratio of the Man to the world, so much with regard to the Volonté (Désir S, aspirations, Espoir S) that the Understanding and the Raison (metaphysical, knowledge) were up to now primarily the result of moral judgments born from the resentment from impotent which say " non" with reality and the life, while avoiding higher virtues of morals. The Théologie ensured the perenniality of this moral determination of the Existence, and philosophy was made the auxiliary of it. No one philosophizes, indeed, did not wonder about the Valeur of the truth; this value was always so to speak given by Définition, and it was the same for the well.

What can then mean of such Jugement S? Insofar as they are built in opposition to appearance, they can mean only the Néant: God, the being, the good and very thought of in oneself, of the absolute, are the symptoms of the same will to overcome to become to it, associated with nothing, of a will to finish some which, paradoxically seemingly, starts to create values. These values, however, express great lassitude, the exhaustion of the man vis-a-vis the world. That is expressed in various ways in the modern world: the war, the Trouble, idleness, the search for morbid or increasingly violent excitations (alcohol, erotism), the search for activities abrutissantes (work), soft life from day to day and of the intellectual public life (Journalism, opportunism of the remunerated academics), psychical conflicts (Neurosis, Hysteria), etc

This is why, the nihilism is according to Nietzsche the major event of the Europe, it is even the Destin since Plato. But this nihilism bursts today: it would then express an historical turning point in the hierarchy of the values received up to now. This bursting of the nihilism could be summarized by the famous formula: “God died. ”, because if God died, morals does not have any more a base, although the shade of the dead god (his axiologic influence) still strongly acts on even atheistic men:

“the question of the nihilism " what good is it? " leaves the use which current, thanks to which it goal seemed fixed, was given up to now, required of the outside - i.e. by any supra-human authority. When one had désappris to believe in this one, one sought, according to a former practice, another authority which could speak an absolute language and order ends and tasks. The authority of the conscience is now in first line a compensation for the personal authority (the more morals is émancipée theology, the more it becomes pressing). Or it is the authority of the reason. Or social instinct (the herd). Or the history with its spirit immanent, which has its goal in it and with which one can be given up. ” ( Will for power , I, I, 3).

The criticism of metaphysics, by refuting the idea of the thought of one in oneself, of a to be absolute, contributes to precipitate the nihilist crisis, by bringing it to its extreme point where one cannot dodge to think the hierarchical problem of the values which, private of their base, enter in contradiction with the world in which we live: our values became insupportable, and sources of psychic Contradiction S.

The nihilism means whereas the old values are depreciated. Thus, the criticism of the Métaphysique reveals it the nihilism of the human values. But Nietzsche distinguishes several types of nihilism, according to the force or the weakness which inspires it.

Two forms of the nihilism

First of all, Nietzsche distinguishes two types of nihilism:

“nihilism, a normal condition. Nihilism: the goal is lacking; the answer to the " question; why? " - What means the nihilism? That the higher values are depreciated. It can be a sign of force, the strength of the spirit can be increased so much so that the ends that this one wanted to reach until now (" convictions" , " articles of foi") appear unsuitable (-: because a faith generally expresses the need for conditions of existence, a tender with the authority of an order of things which makes thrive and grow a being, makes him acquire force…) ; in addition the sign of an insufficient force to set up a goal, a raison d'être, a faith. It reaches the maximum of its relative force like forces violent destruction: like active nihilism. Its opposite could be the tired nihilism which does not attack any more: its most famous form is Buddhism, which is a passive nihilism, with signs of weakness; the activity of the spirit can be tired, exhausted, so that the ends and the values recommended until now appear unsuitable and do not find any more credit, so that the synthesis of the values and the ends (on what any solid culture rests) breaks up and that the various values are made the war: a disintegration… ; then all that relieves, cures, tranquillizes, engourdit, comes in the foreground, under various dressings-up, religious or moral, political or esthetic, etc the nihilism represents an intermediate pathological state (- pathological is enormous generalization, the conclusion which does not lead to any direction -): either that the producing forces are not yet rather solid, - or that the decline still hesitates and that she did not invent her means yet. ”

When the nihilism consists in devaluating the natural world in the name of a suprasensible world, Nietzsche speaks about a nihilism about weak: the world should not exist for the weak one which is not able to control the things, to put a direction in the world. The world is for him a suffering: it feels higher than him, and, therefore, foreigner with becoming. This nihilism is expressed for example in the Pessimisme, but, primarily, it is of moral origin, because the values morals enter in conflict with the world which we live. It is an inconsistent nihilism, because it should logically lead to the suppression of oneself: if morals and the world are contradicted, it is necessary indeed is to destroy old morals (but not any morals: Nietzsche is immoralist and not have-moralist), is to destroy oneself:

“to come Here contradiction between the world that we venerate and the world that we let us live, which we are. It remains us, either to remove our veneration, or to remove us ourselves. The second case is the nihilism. ” But the decline is far from being a final state; on the contrary, according to Nietzsche, any being, extremely or weak, has periods of declines. The decline is thus a natural phenomenon and is not used as moral judgment.

The advent of the Nihilism, and the possible decline of the modern societies, bring into play the future of Europe (and not of the nations, even less of the " races"), and imply of this fact a careful thought on modern civilization, in particular in the field of the policy and the legislation, the goal of Nietzsche being to include/understand the means of making possible a new civilization which breaks with the old values of the Occident, like with its most doubtful values, such as national particularisms of the time.

Culture and Legislation

The nihilist crisis calls a reflection on the bases of the values which form a Culture. This reflection embraces on the one hand a criticism of the Modernité, as a heiress of the values platonico-Christian women, and, on the other hand, a news gives thanks to the possibility of establishing new hierarchies by the Philosophe, as a Médecin of the culture and Législateur. Does this crisis of the values pose the problem of why human Existence (“What good is it? ”). Can humanity give itself to itself goals? The philosopher has as a responsibility to create a scale of values allowing to substitute for the will of nothing a will of life, a future, going beyond.

Critical of the modern culture

“ Which will not be the loathing of the future generations when they have to deal with the heritage of this period when they were not the alive men which controlled, but pretenses of men, interpreters of the opinion. ”

An important aspect to include/understand the thought of Nietzsche is its relative anti-modernism. This opposition appears with virulence in its criticism of the Démocratie, of Rousseau, the Christian heritage and modern education. For as much, Nietzsche is not traditionalist, insofar as it would wish to see the policy, the State and any authority subordinates with a élitiste education turned towards art and the thought. Much more, the culture is opposed to all that is political, and all that is political is dangerous for the culture ( the Twilight of the idols , § What the Germans miss). He is thus neither a conservative, nor an apostle of a company of traditions which would solidify to become to it cultural of humanity. Nietzsche is also opposed to militarism, and critical very severely the military and cultural silly thing and the conceited claims of the Reich:

“the error to believe, like makes the public opinion, as do all those which think publicly, that it is also the German culture which was victorious in these fights and which it is this culture that it is now necessary to decorate of crowns which would be proportioned with events and so extraordinary successes. This illusion is extremely harmful, not because it is an illusion - because there exist salutary and fertile illusions - but because it could transform our victory well into a complete defeat: the defeat, I will say even the eradication of the German spirit, for the benefit of “the German empire”.

morals qualities of the more severe discipline, of quieter obedience do not have anything to see, in no case, with the culture which distinguished, for example, the army Macedonian of the Greek army, which was civilized incomparably. It is thus to coarsely mistake that of speaking about a victory about German civilization and culture and this confusion rests on the fact that in Germany the clear design of the culture was lost. ”

The thought of Nietzsche could seem fundamentally apolitical, however the problem of education and of the success of a field crop haunted it all its life.

Critical of university philosophy

This problem is in the middle of the Out-of-date Considérations : in its third Out-of-date Considerations , it includes criticisms of Schopenhauer against university philosophy. One cannot at the same time serve the State and the Vérité. When the State names “philosophers”, it does it for its power. Nietzsche suspects besides that the true goal of the university is to disgust young people of the power which authenticates it philosophy in the stupefying one constitutes:

“Of a PROMOTION OF DOCTORATE. - “Which is the mission of any higher instruction? - To make of the man a machine. - Which means is necessary it to employ for that? - It is necessary to learn how with the man to be bored. - How one arrives there? - By the notion of the duty. - Which must one present to him like model? - the philologist: he learns how to rough-hew. - Which is the perfect man? - The civil servant of the State. - Which is the philosophy which gives the higher formula for the civil servant of the State? - That of Kant: the civil servant as a thing in oneself, placed on the civil servant as an appearance. ” -”

Thus, the university Philosophie is it tedious, approximate, arbitrary, and is a stove setting of the modern culture. On this subject, Nietzsche quotes the anecdote of the philosopher who requested from a person in mourning the cause of his misfortune; when it had been taught him that a large philosopher had just died, it was astonished: a philosopher? But… it afflicted anybody forever!

How this philosopher, it should be said, according to Nietzsche, that university philosophy does not afflict anybody, and that even is afflicting! The solution to rectify this situation would be then to expel the “philosophers” of the Université, to withdraw their treatment to them to make the sorting, to even persecute them. One would see thus where are the true thinkers, like was Schopenhauer.

Critical of the Philistines of the culture

This criticism of university philosophy is a capital aspect of the criticism which he addresses to those that he calls culture the Philistine and which reveals the miserable state of German civilization, in particular since its military victory over France, which marked victory, according to him, the lamentable end of the history of abêtissement thousand-year-old of Germany.

“- I charged it to the Germans, like philistinism and taste of comfort: but this carelessness is European and “well of today”, not only in morals and Article”

Nietzsche particularly criticizes the illusion which the Germans had, after their victory against France in a 1870, that this military victory also meant cultural victory, superiority of the German culture over the French culture. On the contrary, he affirms that in spite of its defeat, France preserved its cultural domination.

Critical of the Democracy

Nietzsche describes the type of man whom it names democratic ( demokratisch ) like the type representative of the modern ideas; it also describes the place of the democracy in the history, its movement, and the importance which it can have for the future ( the democratic movement ). In addition to this distinction, it should be noticed that Nietzsche employs the word “Democracy” in the years 1876 - 1879 to indicate the democratic State, while democratic quality has, as from the years 1882 - 84, a general direction which indicates a type and can thus apply to nonpolitical realities (like the Art and the Science).

The democratic type is analyzed by Nietzsche in the same way that it analyzes, according to the genealogical method, all the other types: by seeking the structure of the instincts of this type, and the value judgments, or taste , which results from this. Feature typical of taste democratic is egalitarianism, which can to be also called resentment against size , which fights against all that wants to rise, and considers that nobody is better than another. Modern egalitarianism thus cannot, according to Nietzsche, to allow high a Culture of the spirit and maintains solidarity the Ressentiment of the uncultivated ones. The democracy, such as Nietzsche conceives it, is this Idéologie herd which seeks safety and the wellbeing, at the expense of the intellectual superiority, by making him the Guerre, by being made the enemy of all Génie: from where the criticism of the modern education democratic which blocks the intellectual development and produces only cultivated individuals with half, coarse even cruel.

The democratic spirit, such as Nietzsche perceives it, obliging, curious and futile, is variegated and without taste, much ambition with its “small pleasures for the day and its small pleasures for the night”, satisfied with its quiet mediocrity and its bovine happiness:

“Misfortune! Here time when the man cannot give the day any more to a star which dances. Misfortune! Here the time of the more méprisable of the men, which cannot scorn itself even any more.

See! I show you to the last man . ”

Nietzsche refuses this design of an equality between the men (inherited Christianity according to him). This criticism is accompanied by an important nuance, which withdraws Nietzsche from the quality of an absolute opponent to the democratization of Europe; it underlines itself the duplicity of which one can make proof by simulating a wild hatred against the democracy, whereas the projection of this one serves as the entirely opposite aimings.

Indeed, judging that the levelling of the Humanité by egalitarianism is inevitable, Nietzsche conceives the idea that the Europe will have necessarily to federate by destroying nationalisms and economically to unify, and that humanity will be one day managed on a world level (what it invites the domination to come from the Earth):

“- the practical result of this democratization which is always increasing, will be initially the creation of a union of the European people, where each country delimited according to geographical opportunities, will occupy the situation of a canton and will have its specific rights: one will then hold very little account of the historical memories of the people, such as they existed until now, because the direction of piety which surrounds these memories will be uprooted little by little basic in roof, under the reign of the democratic principle, avid of innovations and experiments. ”

All that goes in the direction of a homogenization of the human companies, of a " médiocrisation" social and cultural generalized. This is equivalent for him to the creation of an average citizen, without quality, forming a following herd of the virtues of obedience to the social order, quasi-slaves, satisfied however with their condition (which they wanted). This socialization of the man (planetary gregarism) amounts building a protective wall on a supranational level (with the manner of China) to protect itself from the necessarily external danger, by admitting that the revolutionists (inside) are controlled.

The process of civilization

These criticisms of the modern culture are accompanied by an attempt to reconsider the precise conditions of any civilization. How are the men educated? How did he arrive at the artistic and philosophical genius? That does not astonish us, because we are too much accustomed by the humanistic values of the Occident to regard the man as a given nature good once for all. The reflection on this topic of the culture seems a questioning then on the Animalité of the human being and on the education (discipline, constraints) which is given to him. This animality had been driven back by the religion, morals and philosophy, so that the question of the breeding of the man is remained unconscious, as in the case of the moral will to improve the humanity - which is according to Nietzsche a raising which is not regarded as such, and which refuses to be regarded as tel.

The Morality of the Manners

The process which leads the man to the Civilization starts with the morality of manners: Nietzsche considers the man indeed as a Animal to which one had to learn how to promise by subjecting it to manners and the Loi by a violent and arbitrary raising (from where the Torture, the debt to pay in book flesh). The result is an animal which can hold its Parole, whose Volonté is maintained in the Temps, and who has Conscience that this Faculté is a distinction: the capacity to promise is indeed the expression of the Puissance which one has because of self-control that one acquired. The violence of average the employees by humanity is then abolished by the creation of the autonomous individual, a “on-animal” able to answer of itself, to be determined and to create its own values.

Right

In this process, the role of justice is then to contain the overflows violent one of the Ressentiment and revenge, and to print in the man, if need be by the force, a legal point of view which separates it from its immediate reactions (damages against damages, violence against violence) and leads it to conceive itself like a responsible being in front of the law.

The Droit depends on balance of the forces, i.e. there is no natural contract. Nietzsche takes again on this point the theses of Spinoza on the equivalence of the right and the power.

The spiritualization of the instincts

The genealogy shows that the instincts are never éradiqués. The consequence that Nietzsche in the car is that a good action is only one spiritualized bad action, a bad action is only one good action remained with the state of the coarseness and the silly thing of the instinct. Spiritualization thus consists in not fighting against passions, like does it morals in Occident, but fixing a different point of application to them.

The conflict of the sexes

The Sexualité is for Nietzsche a major aspect of the Culture. Also he regarded the relation between the sexes as one of the bases of the spiritualization of the Instinct S and the force of a Civilization. He poses as principle that the Homme S must have for the Femme S a given feeling of possession:

“a deep, deep man of spirit as much as desires, endowed by addition with this major benevolence capable of a severity and a hardness which merge easily with it, such a man can think of the woman only with the manner of a Oriental : it must see in the woman a property, one although it is advisable to lock up, a being predestined with the subjection and which is achieved through her. ”

The man must thus fix the woman to assume and to have its own sexual identity fully, so that an education of the Instinct S, and in particular of sexuality, becomes possible and creative of a high culture. Because if the woman is in the spirit of the man who wishes it a reactive being (the man being the animal fertile, active, creative), i.e. a weak and servile being which can achieve itself only in the constraint, it takes part indirectly in the culture, by causing at the man the Plaisir of dominating, to affirm her desire: the women, notice Nietzsche, manage to be the center of interest of a whole Civilization when the Amour becomes an essential reason for the Art S, which means that the sexual Excitation took a refined form there, esthetic and increasing the pleasure of the life. Thus, if Nietzsche recalls that the role of the women is to put Enfant S at the world and to be an entertainment for the men; their force is precisely in the weakness of their Nature, in the seduction which they exert, and which enables them in their turn to dominate and to form the sensitivity Morale and instinctive male. Not only the women put men at the world, with the clean direction, but the Désir which they cause met a man in the world, with the illustrated direction. Nietzsche does not deny that certain women cannot be exceptional (in the same way that there are exceptional men, but rare).

The equality between men and women is then for Nietzsche a democratic injustice, a Christian Préjugé , an idea which has théologico-morals roots, and which so does not have any relationship with natural reality. Man and woman have one on the other a specific capacity of domination which opposes them and joins together them in turn, and that one cannot equalize without weakening at the same time the man and the woman, because one would thus abolish the fertile fight between the sexes. This capacity of the two sexes has its common root in sexual attraction, this most primitive form of the Will for power and, therefore, the most innocent expression and dionysiaque of the assertion of the Vie. This is why Nietzsche estimates that the emancipation of the woman is accompanied by her moral and intellectual disfigurement: the modern woman is stupid and without interest, because it strips force of its weakness, and tries to acquire male virtues, which makes him lose any beneficial influence on the man. Contrary, although he criticizes this will of emancipation, he estimates that the Western man, by imposing a repressive morals as regards Sexualité, produced a situation of dissatisfaction in the relationship between sexes, of which the woman, and in particular women of exceptions, suffers more especially as conventions do not enable him to appease its intellectual needs and physics as freely as the men.

The great policy

Its thought Politique is centered around the conditions of possibility of the culture ( Cultur ). The inversion of the values is one of these conditions. But Nietzsche wants initially to make work of legislator, and this is why it examines the material conditions of education, the body and the spirit. It is inspired on all these points by the Greek culture (only true culture) and by civilization by India (of which the system of caste can be regarded as a sociological type). This part of its policy generally causes indignation, because it supposes that one proceeds to a breeding conscious of the man. Thus certain commentators (for example Barbara Stiegler) estimate that at the end of its conscious life, Nietzsche hesitated between a active Eugénisme passing by education (a selection social and religious supposed in all company), and the contrary idea that all the forms of life are necessary to the human evolution. B. Stiegler notes however that " the selection nietzschéenne (...) was built in criticism systématique" " Natural selection darwinienne " . The design nietzschéenne of the disease and health is opposed indeed to the concept darwinien of a selection by l'" adaptation" , since the disease itself can be beneficial.

A new selection

Nietzsche did not want to fight against the degeneration as such because it allows the renewal, the expansion of the alive one. The decline can never be eliminated as such; any living being, even extremely, has its moments of decline, weakening.

On the other hand, Nietzsche indicates by the name of " ratés" the individuals who do not support food in this world, and who diffuse pessimistic ideas there, thus obscuring the very whole life. It estimates that one can carry out a selection by the establishment of thoughts such as the Eternal return in opposition to the Christian nihilism . Lenihilism of weak, of that which wants to be avenged for the life on the others, is for all the more unbearable Nietzsche as it is inconsistent because it carries in him a logic of total destruction which one can reveal by violent criticism, in particular of the religion and the modern ideals.

Thus, while founding new hierarchy of values (by the Eternal return), one supports disappearance of weak and of failures (by a revaluation of the instincts, thus removing the bad conscience and the resentment, or by the revalorization of the suicide to which one had given bad conscience), in the same manner that Christianity contributed actively to the extermination of the forts.

According to Nietzsche, the individual himself is a selection process: " A successful man (...) is a principle of selection (...). Well far from going ahead of of it, he attentively examines the excitation which comes to him to lui" . The alive one, just like at Spinoza, must distinguish what is good for him and what is harmful for him.

Inequality and hierarchy

Nietzsche refuses the institutions of the type State, but its thought Politique is not less, in some limiting, hierarchical and uneven. According to him, the safeguarding of the social inequalities generates a mentality of caste from where only can emerge a fertile and élitiste, delivered culture needs and needs for the life. He judges consequently that a class of alive men by the spirit and for the spirit should be protected from the Foule of the poor men. In the years 1870, the judgment of Nietzsche, influenced in particular by the ideas of a rebirth of the Germany, had an unambiguous material direction:

“So that art can develop on a fertile ground, vast and deep, the vast majority must be subjected to the slavery and a life of constraint with the service of the minority and well beyond of the needs limited for its own existence. It must with its costs and by its on-work to exempt this privileged class of the fight for the existence so that the latter can then produce and satisfy a new world of needs. ”

The Esclavage belongs to civilization. However, thereafter, it will define slavery in a direction which one finds in many moralists: the slave is that which does not have spare time to cultivate his faculties. The word slavery indicates an interiorization of an old more brutal irrefutable fact and concerns the vast majority of the men, the workers using their physical forces like the Professor S of Université subjected to their program.

However, Nietzsche evokes starting from there a new possibility when it describes the natural operation of the companies, and that it proposes the brutality of their operation, the fight for the Domination and cruel exploitation:

“to abstain from reciprocally offense, violence and plunder, to recognize the will of others like equal to his, that can give, roughly speaking, a good code of conduct between the individuals, provided that the requirements are carried out (I want to say the real analogy of the forces and the criteria at the individuals and their cohesion inside the same social body). But that one tries to extend the application of this principle, to even make the basic principle of the company of it, and it will appear for what it is, the negation of the life, a principle of dissolution and decline. ”

It considers it indeed possible to spiritualize these Conflit S (in their giving a more subtle form likely to be largely accepted), same manner that the morality of manners had produced a new form of Humanité by average violent ones, to be then abolished in its interiorized result. The democratization of the Europe ensures the eyes of Nietzsche this possibility:

“It seems that the democratization of Europe is a ring in the chain of these enormous prophylactic measurements which are the idea of new times and separate us from the Middle Ages. It is now only that we are at the time of cyclopean constructions! Finally we have the safety of the bases which will in the future make it possible to build without danger! ”

The mediocrity is thus inevitable and essential to the bases of the new businesses. To fight against it (for example while wanting to crush the weak ones with the profit of the forts, or by exacerbating the national feelings) would be a nonsense which would lead to the destruction of the companies:

“It would be completely unworthy of a major spirit to even see an objection in the mediocrity. It is the first need so that there can be exceptions: a high culture depends on it. ”

On this basis, the Hiérarchie that Nietzsche will conceive will be a spiritual hierarchy, and it aims at establishing conditions nelles Institution favorable to a type of men that Nietzsche conceives like goods, pleasant and supremely cultivated:

“Only the most intellectual men have the right of the beauty, of the aspiration to beautiful, they only are kindness and not weakness. ”

“They are the most honourable class of men and that does not exclude that they are at the same time merriest and most pleasant. ”

“the intellectuals who are strongest…”

Each one has Droit S following the power which it has, according to its row, but this idea takes its most elaborate form only when it reaches a degree of spiritualization which carries the spirit at the top of the hierarchy of the values. The thought nietzschéenne of the hierarchy is thus not opposed to a legal protection people, as long as intellectual preeminence is not blocked or is not denied. The equal rights, mainly in the field of the culture, would be a negation of straight and the true source of the injustice which would lead to the depreciation of the culture.

Nietzsche takes again on its account the old opposition between the otium and the negotium , giving an account of the statute different from work and the leisure (the school for the old ones). Only the work of the mass of “poor” allows the leisure of the “elites” which can then be devoted to the direction of the company. The question being of knowing if this distribution of roles is mutually authorized or on the contrary, imposed…

It comes out from its policy that strongest, which is those which live by the Esprit and which requires for that for a hierarchical company, may find it beneficial to find protections against the resentment that they cause, but that they may find it beneficial also weakest with to protect (which are weak from the point of view of their spirit), and this in order to preserve and to develop the values related on the spirit and art, by drawing aside the possible causes of Ressentiment and Vengeance against the Culture. But the difficulty is such, that Nietzsche thought more once of founding a learned society with the variation of the world; thus the hierarchy about which Nietzsche speaks conceives just as easily as a difference of row in the field of the spirit which does not have a direct influence on the course of the companies. It will be also led to conceive the Surhomme like a man living with the variation, and with which it is important little to have an effective political power (see further, the section Surhomme).

The philosopher

This elitism, of which Nietzsche sees the highest form in a class of men living for the spirit, the conduit to place the philosopher at the highest row in the development of the Culture. This place is very early the subject of the reflections of Nietzsche: it had thus had the project to write a book on the philosopher, whereas he was still professor, and there us remain many fragments about it. To that are added the works not published (like Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen and Das Verhältnis der Schopenhauerischen Philosophie zu einer deutschen Cultur ), and of many passages of the Out-of-date Considérations .

To include/understand the place granted to the philosopher by Nietzsche, it is first of all necessary to think the reports/ratios of philosophy, the Art and the Science.

Philosophy, Science and Art

The Philosophe is a type of man of which the Instinct dominating is, according to Nietzsche, a selective instinct of knowledge . He is opposed in that, in some limiting, with the intemperance of the science, which is for him a form of cruelty related to the Démocratie. Are thus opposite, as types, the Savant and the philosopher: the first does not make distinction in what it has to know, its activity does not have anything personal; the extreme caricature of science is the scholarship, form of " savoir" who does not inform but, on the contrary, deforms the Esprit and is to him a burden. The mass of what is to be known indeed infinite and is led to the Désespoir of the Connaissance.

This opposition appears initially in the work of Nietzsche by a criticism of the history and Philologie (let us recall that it was itself professor of philology):

“" Remainder I hate all that does nothing but inform me, without increasing my activity or animating it directement." They are there words of Goethe by which, like Ceterum censeo courageously expressed, will be able to begin our consideration on the value and the not-value from the historical studies. One will expose to it why teaching, without vivification, why the science which paralyzes the activity, why the history, invaluable superfluity of knowledge and luxury article, must be seriously, according to the word of Goethe, an object of hatred, - because we still currently miss the EC what there is of more necessary, because superfluity is the enemy of the necessary one. Admittedly, we need the history, but otherwise than for of the idler walker in the garden does not need science, whatever the scorn that this one throws, the top of his size, on our needs and our needs hard and without grace. That means that we need the history to live and act, and not to divert us nonchalamment life and action, or for enjoliver egoistic life and the loose and bad action. We want to serve the history only as it serves the life. But there is a way of considering the history and of making history thanks to which the life étiole and degenerates. It is there a phenomenon which it is now necessary as much as painful making known, according to the singular symptoms of our time. ”

So the philosopher is closer to the Artiste, insofar as it synthesizes what it knows, i.e. produced a simplification of the reality which has an esthetic character with the service of the life and culture.

Philosophy and civilization

(to be made)…

The philosopher legislator

The philosopher is according to Nietzsche the expression of highest the human Will for power. It is as such as it is also a Législateur. But Nietzsche does not have a voluntarist design of the Politique; it is not a question to impose by the force an order to which the men should conform. This voluntarism generally concerns the moral Fanatisme. Nietzsche supports quite to the contrary that the influence of the Idée S is such, that it can even extend and develop on Siècle S over millenia. It is the case, for example, of the thought of the Eternal return: it is not a political program which a party or a mode should apply; it is not a question either to make a criterion of it to get rid actively of declining and to establish an order of the forts.

The idea of Nietzsche is that the introduction of new thoughts into the course of the Histoire is suitable for transform it. Thus it is thought of the Eternal return.

Selection of the values

Within the framework of this large Political, the legislator is an artist of the Humanité which selects its material by forging Valeur S: Nietzsche thinks thus the Eternal return like a tool of breeding and selection. There is thus well, in this direction, a form of Eugénisme, which must allow the advent of the Surhomme. If Nietzsche incontestably evokes the prospect for a destruction of the failures, this destruction is actually a self-destruction .

Who are indeed, for Nietzsche, those which it calls the " ratés" ? It is those which interpret the world morally, and which cannot consequently support to live there (because, we saw it, the world and its moral interpretation is contradicted), short these are those that the nihilism corrodes. It is not thus no need for an aggressive policy (which would be a form of decline), but only for one selection of interpretations. To include/understand it, let us take an example: a man, in the Antiquity, having learned the doctrines from Plato, committed suicide because it estimated that one did not have to await natural death to know this better world describes by the Philosophe. Here is a practical and consequent nihilism, which is also a form of Eugénisme by the influence of the ideas. This is why one will find at Nietzsche a praise of the Suicide, and a setting in scene consolatrice of dead the freely selected, that he opposes to the horrible setting in scene of the Mort and his moral torments in the Christianisme: it is necessary to feel free to commit suicide, because it is thus a service which one goes to oneself, and which one also returns to the others when the Vie became unbearable. Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra mentions that it is necessary to know “to die at the most point of its rise”, when it is impossible to be exceeded, and by doing that, our image and our power will not be deteriorated by the years that it would have remained for to us to live (and to degrade itself).

Consequently, Nietzsche raises the following questions:

can the nihilist crisis be precipitated?
which type of values would it make it possible to overcome this crisis?

Naturalization of the man

A possible answer to the second question consists in wondering whether it is possible to naturalize the man, by extirpating the idealistic practices which diverted the sensitive society men, of the Ground .

Since the Morale of weak overcame, should it be understood that by the criticism of this morals and the reflections on the culture, Nietzsche aspires to a return to old forms of Civilization, with all the aspects violent ones and cruel? It is necessary to answer not; however old times, for Nietzsche, are always possible because it belongs to the human Will for power to be exerted with violence since it is not the object of another force which contains it and diverts it towards more refined cultural expressions. Far from wishing violence for itself, Nietzsche notes that it is natural, and that it belongs to us to cultivate it in a direction or another.

Since the morals of the Ressentiment was essential, it would be absurd to make as if it had not had any influence. Dawn , where he proposes to substitute a natural morals for the Christian morals, which would preserve for example some practical of the Vertu, but in their giving different goals and means. Nietzsche attempts to define a naturalization of the Homme which would pass by a spiritualization of the Pulsion S: for example, the absolute Abstinence, developed by morals, becomes a relative abstinence which makes it possible to concentrate and to increase the intellectual forces. Hatred can be transformed into love of its enemies, if one includes/understands the natural need for the adversity.

Generally, the old virtues can thus be reinterpreted, while removing the reactive elements which they contained or from which they resulted. The prospect for this revaluation is that of the great health.

Great health and casuistry of selfishness

(to be made)

The selection and the objective of the naturalization of the man pose two problems: which are the ideas which will have the strongest selective value? Can one pose an end with this selection of interpretations? The Eternal return comes to answer the first question, the Superman at the second.

Eternal return and Superman

The policy of Nietzsche contains two concepts among most important of its thought: the Eternal return like means of selection, and the Superman like ideal end.

The heaviest thought

Nietzsche establishes a hierarchy between the thoughts: the thoughts are more or less selective. If he judges the Eternal return the heaviest thought, it is because it has the discriminating ethical range most extreme. It is for this reason that it belongs to its political and moral philosophy. But very thought has a discriminating value with varied degrees, as for example the Mécanisme which is more selective than the Finalisme because it removes the Idéalisme.

It is necessary to start by noticing that the Eternal return is distinguished from all the old cyclic designs (like exposed in the texts brahmanic): if the law of the karma binds the future existence of a being to its last existence (the reincarnation is used to repair the errors of a last existence), Nietzsche denies any debt and any fault, and conceives to become to it cyclic across good and badly.

This ethical and cosmological assumption that one already finds at Héraclite and the Stoïciens, can be deduced from the concept of Will for power by admitting certain axioms; Nietzsche indeed endeavoured to show the plausible character of its assumption:

the to be exists, the universe never not reaching a final state, there does not have a goal (from where the rejection of any mechanical model);
consequently, the universe did not become, which means that it forever started to become (rejection of the Créationnisme);
the universe being finished, the idea of an infinite force is absurd and would take back with the Religion; will for power being a quantity of force of which the Univers is composed of a finished number, considering the Temps is infinite, all the possible combinations must be able to return an infinite number of times.

For Nietzsche the scientific validity of this cosmological assumption does not have any importance, very thought - metaphysical as scientific - is interpretation of the world: there does not exist objective fact, of truth or absolute directions, independently of the subject. The value of a representation is thus not measured with its adequacy with alleged reality but with its capacity to support the development of the power as a life, with its selectivity, its interest as a ethical reality , interpretation normative, higher or lower. Nietzsche knows that its cosmology is probably erroneous, that does not go in contradiction with its thought praising the merits of “the error”; “if the doctrines of the eternal return are developed as a error, that means that its value does not depend on its scientificity”.

The value of the doctrines of the Eternal return comes not from his bases but from its implications: “If to become it is a vast cycle, all is also invaluable, eternal, necessary. ” The scientific aspect of these doctrines is a “appreciation”, not an additional guarantee of its validity, but an additional reason to believe in it. Nietzsche provides it to support adhesion with these doctrines in one time that it knows positivist.

The Nihilism, in this thought, is a normal state, and not only one symptom of weakness vis-a-vis the nonsense of the Existence. Face with the Eternal return, selective thought by this extreme nihilism, two attitudes can be adopted, as the Gai Knowledge indicates it. When that having said not to the life thinks the Eternal return, its resignation is reinforced, it is frightened with the prospect that what it flees in the consolations metaphysics and others back worlds will afflict it eternally; when the Eternal return is thought by that having said yes to the life, its acceptance of the life is reinforced, its Will for power is then maximum. The Surhomme occurs thus, which accepts and likes reality such as it is, where the idealist flees it by it liking such as it would have or could have been.

“ the formidable weight. - Which this would be if, day or night, a demon once followed you in most solitary of your lonelinesses and said you: “This life, such as you currently live it, such as you lived it, it will be necessary that you revive it once again, and an innumerable quantity of time; and there will be in it nothing again, on the contrary! it is necessary that each pain and each joy, each thought and each sigh, all the infinitely great and the infinitely small of your life return for you, and all that in the same continuation and the same order - and also this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and also this moment and myself. The eternal sand glass of the existence will be turned over always again - and you with him, dust of dust! ” - Wouldn't you throw you against ground while squeaking of the teeth and you would not curse the demon which would speak thus? Or you already lived an extraordinary moment where you would answer him: “You are a god, and never I did not hear more divine thing! the question “you want that once again and an innumerable quantity of time”, this question, in all and for all, would weigh on all your actions of a formidable weight! Or then how much you the life would have to be liked, that you like yourself more to wish another thing but this supreme and eternal confirmation! -”

Transvaluation of the values and surhumanity

The Eternal return must lead “more to wish another thing ”: it is the Amor fati which delivers us Ressentiment. The Philosophie of Nietzsche is based on this metamorphosis of the desire which induces a transformation of the values required by the observation that “the most intimate gasoline of the to be is the will for power”. This Pensée must make it possible to exceed the man, not to eliminate it, and to give up the old idols by which the man hoped for another world and wished another thing . Transvaluation consists in thinking beyond good and badly, whereas all the former philosophers thought within the limits of idealistic morals.

The Superman

See detailed article: Superman

Concept of Superman (which appears little in the texts with share in Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra ) draft what would become the man, while being delivered of the Ressentiment of the Morale and by incarnating the most intense assertion of the Vie, the Eternal return. The prefix “on”, abundantly used by Nietzsche to indicate a process of Transfiguration, of modification of the structure of the instincts (the Homme is thus a on-animal ), means this transformation of the human being; it acts less than one ontological increase that in a manner of perceiving and of judging the world. There is not however one beyond the man and remains human, too human, not being new “in oneself” not idealized being used as model.

As opposed to what one often believes, the Surhomme is not a man surpuissant , physically or intellectually:

“the word “Superman” whose I used to indicate a type of an absolute perfection, in opposition to “the modern” men, with the “brave men” people, the Christians and other nihilists, and who, in the mouth of Zarathoustra, was to give to reflect, this word was almost always employed with a perfect frankness with the profit of the values whose character of Zarathoustra illustrates the opposite, to indicate “the idealistic” type of a higher race men, half “holy”, half “geniuses”… about it, other erudite asses suspected me of Darwinism; one has even desired to find at the origin of my creation the “worship of the heroes” of Carlyle, “this false unconscious coiner”, whereas I had taken a malicious pleasure of not to hold account. ”

It is a possible and desired evolution of the man: “(…) the Man is a thing which must be exceeded. I.e. the Man is a bridge and not a term (…) ”. The action of the man is not diverted any more by a thought and a theological or metaphysical morals (…) but by the assent of sound eternal return .

The Inversion of all the values

It should first of all be noted that there is a difficulty in the translation of the German expression which was returned several manners in French:

Umwertung outward journey Werte :

Inversion of all the values;
Inversion of all the values;
Transvaluation of all the values.

One twice finds in the German expression the radical Wert- ; the prefix Um- means return, a skirting. The expression could then be translated by revaluation of all the values.

Of what does consist the inversion of the values? Nietzsche does not make of it any complete talk, always remained with the state of project:

“What can only being our doctrines? - That nobody gives to the man his qualities, neither God, neither the company, neither his/her parents and its ancestors, nor itself (- the nonsense of the “idea”, refuted lastly, was taught, under the name of “understandable freedom”, by Kant and perhaps already by Plato). Nobody is responsible owing to the fact that the man exists, that it is formed of such or such way, that it is under such conditions, in such medium. The fate of its being is not to separate from the fate of all that was and all that will be. The man is not the consequence of a clean intention, a will, a goal; with him one does not carry out a test to reach a “ideal of humanity”, a “ideal of happiness”, or a “ideal of morality”, - it is absurd to want to make deviate its being towards an unspecified goal. We invented the idea of “goal”: in reality the “goal” misses… One is necessary, one is a piece of destiny, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole, - there is nothing which could judge, to measure, compare, to condemn our existence, because would be there to judge, measure, compare and condemn the whole… But there is nothing apart from the whole! - Nobody can be made any more responsible, the categories to be it cannot be any more brought back to a main cause, the world is any more one unit, neither like sensitive world, nor like “spirit”: that only is the great delivery, - by there the innocence of becoming is restored… The idea of “God” was until now the greatest objection against the existence… We deny God, we deny the responsibility as a God: by there only we save the world. -”

Basically, Nietzsche states three réquisits essential which makes it possible to determine the expression of revaluation of the values (cf the Twilight of the idols , " Four large erreurs") :

the abandonment of the Responsibility (of a voluntary Causality): all is innocent.
the abandonment of all Cause first (and of the idea of God): there is no to be, the world does not have a ultimate direction.
the abandonment of the interpreted unit of the world (sensitive or spiritual): the Univers is in becoming.

With final, the man does not depend any more only of itself and natural process which maintains it in life. Renonçant with the cultural asset of the sin, renonçant even in the heredity of innate, Nietzsche tries to invent or find an innocent man in a world in becoming, kind of Adam terrestrial.

The Art

Art is at the same time first (to interpret, to know, it is to make work of Artiste) and the last (the superman is an embellishment of the human Pulsion S). Art is the expression of a primitive human impulse, that to create Forme S. It is thus not surprising that it is for Nietzsche the only factor justifying the Vie.

Apollo and Dionysos

The first publication of Nietzsche concerning its thought of art is the Birth of the tragedy . In this work, he opposes and associates the opposite figures of intoxication: dionysiaque and Apollinian. The first is the intoxication of the instinct, the primitive pleasure of the absence of reason controlling the acts, the innocence of freedom and the emotion:

“In the science of the mysteries the pain is sanctified: the " work of enfantement" returning the pain crowned, - all that is to become and growth, all that guarantees the future requires the pain… So that there is the eternal joy of creation, so that the will of life continues eternally by itself it is necessary also that there are the " pains of the enfantement" … The word Dionysos means all that: I do not know symbolism higher than this Greek symbolism, that of the festivals dionysiennes. By him the deepest instinct of the life, that of the life to come, eternal life is translated in a religious way, - the way even of the life, procreation, as the sacred way… It is only Christianity, with its bottom of resentment against the life, which made sexuality something of impure: it throws mud on the beginning, on the condition first of our life…”

The second appears the work of the reason which tries to mask nature by the culture, by inventing standards, symmetries, in order to celebrate the idea of beautiful by an esthetic transformation of the acts and world, jokes with the vision.

These the first two figures have esthetic expressions which are clean for them:

“That means the oppositions of ideas between Apollinian and dionysien, which I introduced into esthetics, both regarded as categories of intoxication? - Apollinian intoxication produces before all the irritation of the eye which gives to the eye faculty of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the poet epic are visionaries par excellence. In the state dionysien, on the other hand, all the emotive system is irritated and amplified: so that it discharges from only one blow all its means of expression, by expelling its force of imitation, reproduction, transfiguration, of metamorphosis, any species of mimicry and art of imitation. ”

But one of the first forms of art in which Nietzsche was interested (in Birth of the tragedy ) is the Tragédie which joins together the Apollinian one and the dionysien.

The tragedy

The Greek tragedy is for Nietzsche the expression of an essential aspect of the Greek culture: the pessimism of the force. For this reason, she testifies to a culture successful up to a certain point, that to which testify in particular the philosophers Présocratiques.

The Tragédie is born according to Nietzsche from the dionysiaque orgiasme: incomprehensible externalizations of the popular impulses . The men are in extase; they feel bewitched by the god.

The ancient tragedy is the coupling of two impulses symbolized by gods (Apollo and Dionysos) who fight themselves unceasingly. These two gods express themselves originally as forces of the Nature which do without the work of the Artiste. They spout out within the Rêve and of is delirious. The opposition of these forces should not be exaggerated: they produce quite different effects, but have some common points. In last works of Nietzsche, these forces even seem to be absorptive in the only dionysiaque element, so much so that certain commentators could support that the dionysiaque one was the original element from which the Apollinian one is only derived.

Apollo is the brilliant god, prophet, who represent the visual arts, the dream, beautiful appearance, the Plaisir of the forms. This Beauté of appearance does not exclude the Représentation of Sentiment S unpleasant. But the esthetic character which emerges some embellishes the life, and encourages the Homme S with living. It is there for Nietzsche its aspect necessary: without Apollo, the life would not be worthy to be lived.

The Esthétique of Apollo is measurement, the calm one of wisdom, the grace. In the middle of the storms of the Existence, the solar and peaceful aspect of Apollo is sublime .

Dionysos is intoxication, intoxication of the Narcotique S, the Printemps which abolishes the subjectivity of the insane of Dionysos . Dionysos is the pleasure of spontaneously superabundant nature. The dionysiaque principle dissolves individuality and makes it possible the man to join again with nature and humanity: it is the mystery of originating which bewitches all the beings and make them dance all together. The man becomes the work of art of a God.

“the psychology of the orgiasme like feeling of life and overflowing force, within the limits of which the pain even acts like stimulant, gave me the key for the idea of the tragic feeling, which was ignored as well by Aristote as by our pessimists. The tragedy is so distant to show something for the pessimism of Hellènes within the meaning of Schopenhauer which it could rather be regarded as its final refutation, like its judgment. The assertion of the life, even in its strangest problems and most difficult; will of life, amusing in the sacrifice of its highest types, with its own inexhaustible character - it is what I called dionysien, it is in that I believed to recognize the discussion thread towards the psychology of the tragic poet. ”

Decline of the tragedy

The Tragédie died tragically; its anguish has name Euripide . This one has in common with the Poète S of the new comedy, to make enter the spectacle of the daily life on the scene. Whereas the old tragedies represented the heroes whose idealization raises the heart of the spectator, the tragedy of Euripide represents the commun run, bottom, it is a mirror rhetoric of the life of the spectators who contemplate themselves there. Thus Euripide it popularized the tragedy, while making speak the people:

“I introduced on the scene of the domestic things, which are usual and familiar”.

He thus believed to fight against the Décadence of the tragedy, which, according to Nietzsche, had actually already died. Extremely of this belief, he believed that the effect of the Art was not adapted to the Athenian public. He conceived a form of art then, like the law of a rationalist Esthétique: All must be about the understanding so that all can be heard. Euripide considers thus in manner criticizes all the parts of art: the Myth, the dramatic structure, the Music, the Language, etc

For example, Euripide reveals all the intrigue in the Prolog of its parts, contrary to Eschyle and Sophocle, which, in the first scenes, subtly makes include/understand with the spectators what must occur.

Thus Euripide is he the first playwright to conceive a conscious esthetics: “All must be conscious to be beautiful”, principle which does it near to Socrate. The decline of the tragedy is expressed in the parts of Euripide, friend of Socrate, which one reports that it helped the playwright for the composition of his works. However Socrate was, in the tragedy, and the musical drama in general, the element of its dissolution. Socrate is according to Nietzsche a character anti-tragedy.

Nietzsche distinguishes several features of the evolution of the tragedy which show the decline of it:

scholarship, conscious knowledge: art loses its dionysiaque impulse. The balance of the tragic fight is broken;
the spectacle becomes a play of failures, a middle-class intrigue, where the reasoning and the examination are introduced:

“such feelings, it is however me which inculcated them in those, by introducing into art the reasoning and the examination; so that from now on one can design all things, distinguish, and in particular hold his house, his fields and his cattle better than before while looking at there well: " How is this business? Why? What good is it? Who? Where? How? What? Who took that to me? " ”

the Rhétorique overrides the dialog: the characters become talkative and artificial;
the Dialectique invades the heroes of the scene;
the spirit of the music is lost;
Euripide introduces the spectator into the tragedy: this spectator, it is Socrate.

Wagner and music

Wagner is studied by Nietzsche (in the case Wagner in particular) like a typical case of the Modernité; the comprehension of the type-setter makes it possible to make the light on the Psychologie of the modern man. Wagner represents thus, a typical case of Romantisme which finishes in the adulation of the cross ( Parsifal ).

Physiology of art

Nietzsche does not have, strictly speaking, of Esthétique; its theses on the origin of art are primarily of order physiological:

“So that there is art, so that there are an action or an unspecified esthetic contemplation, a preliminary physiological condition is essential: intoxication. It is necessary initially that intoxication raised the irritability of all the machine: otherwise art is impossible. All the species of intoxications, were conditioned most variously possible, have power of art: before all the intoxication of the sexual excitation, this form of the oldest intoxication and most primitive. In the same way the intoxication which accompanies all the great desires, all great emotions; the intoxication of the festival, the fight, the act of bravery, the victory, all the extreme movements; the intoxication of cruelty; the intoxication of the destruction, intoxication under certain weather influences, for example intoxication of spring, or under the influence of opiates; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an accumulated and dilated will. - Essence in intoxication it is the feeling of the increased force and plenitude. Under the empire of this feeling one gives up oneself with the things, one forces them to take us, one forces them, - this process is called: to idealize. ”

Physiology of beautiful

Art is born from a feeling of intoxication, of a communicative excitation. These physiological and psychic states do not have bonds necessary with the beautiful one. That does not prevent from making a physiology of the beauty and ugliness:

“Nothing is beautiful, it has there only the man who is beautiful: on this naivety rests any esthetics, it is its first truth. There let us add as of the access the second: nothing is ugly if it is not the man who degenerates, - with that the empire of the esthetic judgments is circumscribed. - From the physiological point of view, all that is ugly weakens and saddens the man. That makes it think of the decomposition, the danger, the impotence. It loses force definitely there. One can measure with the dynamometer the effect of the ugliness. ”

The assertion of the life by art

Generally, Nietzsche preaches the assertion of the life, a total and merry assertion of the life (i.e. an assertion of the pleasure and suffering), even in all that it has of problems and worrying, until in its most dangerous recesses.

By Art, one should not hear only the works of art, but, generally, which, in the Homme, tends to create forms, and to prefer the pleasure of the surface and illusion. In this direction, art is opposed to science, and, to a lesser extent, with philosophy, although these two last activities also have an esthetic dimension. To include/understand the affirmative force of art, it should be understood that our Vie, in the least of its aspects, holds more Illusion, Rêve and Mensonge, that " Truth " :

“O sancta simplicitas! What a singular simplification, what a false point of view the man puts in his life! One cannot by of be astonished enough when once one opened the eyes on this wonder! How we very made clearly, and free, and light around us! How we knew to give to our directions the free access of all that is surface, to our spirit a divine dash towards the espiègleries and the paralogisms! How, as of the access, we knew to preserve our ignorance to enjoy a hardly comprehensible freedom, to enjoy the lack scruple, improvidence, bravery and serenity of the life, to enjoy the life! And it is only on these bases, consequently solid and inébranlables of ignorance, that science could be built until now, the will to still know on the basis of a will much more powerful, the will of ignorance, uncertainty, lie! ”

Oh Mensch ! Gieb Acht!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht ?

``Ich schlief, ich schlief -,

``Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht: -

``Die Welt STI tief,

``Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

``Tief STI ihr Weh -,

``Lust - tiefer noch als Herzeleid:

``Weh spricht : Vergeh!

``Doch ale Lust will Ewigkeit

``will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!

Readings of Nietzsche and other influences on its thought

Although Nietzsche quotes only seldom the authors who inspire it or to which he is opposed, it is an important aspect for the study of its works. Nietzsche knew indeed, either directly, or indirectly, all the authors, thinkers, scientists and artists of his time. Its readings are thus very wide. Itself pointed out, at the time of the publication of Beyond good and badly , that a vast culture was necessary to seize and judge value of this work.

So for certain commentators (like Barbara Stiegler, Nietzsche and biology ) it appears almost excluded to include/understand all the importance of the theses of Nietzsche, if one is unaware of what nourished its thought.

In its youth, Nietzsche reads in particular Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauß, Ralph Waldo Emerson ( Essais , of which, for example, Self-confidence ; the ideas of this last test can be compared with educational Schopenhauer ), Lord Byron ( Manfred ), Hölderlin, Schopenhauer ( the world like will and representation ).

The whole of its thought can be brought closer, either to show the source of it, or to show the oppositions of them, with authors as varied as:

Philosophers

Héraclite (for the negation of the to be, but Nietzsche remains being wary with regard to the Logos héraclitéen), Empédocle (Nietzsche planned to compose a poetic work entitled Empédocle ; the character of Zarathoustra can be brought closer about it) Plato (beyond the critic of the platonism, Plato is for Nietzsche the great figure of the legislator), Épicure (according to Nietzsche, a anti-Christian), Montaigne, Pascal, Kant, Rochefoucauld, Schopenhauer, Espinas, Victor Brochard, Stirner (probable but not some), Friedrich-Albert Lange ( Histoire of the materialism ), Eugen Dühring (example of the Ressentiment of the Justice conceived like Vengeance), von Hartmann , Herbert Spencer (dangerous introduction of the biologism into morals), Guyau, Excavated, Paul Rée.

Artists

Horace (more the great classic), Shakespeare (especially for the character of Brutus, in Jules César ) Goethe (model of the individual like totality), Schiller, Hœlderlin, Kleist, Stendhal, Tolstoï, Dostoievski (for its psychological acuity), Heinrich Heine, Wagner, Bizet.

Scientists

Ernst Haeckel (Nietzsche criticizes its Monisme which introduces concepts metaphysics into biology), Wilhelm Roux ( Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus , 1881; it is the work which the most inspired Nietzsche for its design of biology, of the body, sound identity and for the questioning of the modern concept of prone), Francis Galton ( Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development ), Nägeli, Ribot ( Diseases of the will ), Charles Darwin ( the Origin of the species by the natural selection ).

Historians

Salluste, Jacob Burckhardt (Greece and Rebirth), Paul Deussen ( India ), Ernest Renan ( Life of Jesus ), Taine.

Influences of the French culture

It was interested much in the French literature, and in particular in the moralists; let us quote: Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Vauvenargues, Montaigne, Pascal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Brothers Goncourt. Supporting a traditional design of the Art, he admires the clearness of the French style, qualities of psychologists of the French novelists (Maupassant), and he was not indifferent to Molière and Racine. But its greater model was incontestably Corneille, example of painter of the will.

Politicians

Among the politicians that Nietzsche admired (in any case for some their character traits, admirations of Nietzsche being seldom unconditional), let us quote: Périclès (condensed cosmos), Alexandre (Dionysos makes flesh), Jules César, Empereur Frederic II of the Holy roman Empire, César Borgia, Napoleon.

Posterity and topicality of Nietzsche

The philosophy of Nietzsche had a very great influence at the 20th century. This influence relates to especially the continental Philosophie. At the end of its life, and the beginning of the 20th century, they are especially artists who were interested in his thought (Khalil Gibran, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Nikos Kazantzakis, Thomas Mann, Albert Schweitzer). Its design of the animal man determined by the saving in its instincts also influenced Freud. Its thought had of sound living an influence in Scandinavia (Brandes - the “discoverer” of Nietzsche which made conferences on him in 1888, Strindberg). This influence, as of the end of the 19th century extended then in France (translation of Henri Albert), with the Italy, the Poland, the Russia and the England.

But, in the the Thirties, works of Nietzsche were recovered by the Italian Nazis and fascists. It is starting from the the Sixties that Nietzsche became a reference for many French intellectuals, in reaction in particular to the hegelianism dominating.

It is only starting from the Colli-Montinari edition that all the commentators could reach the notebooks of Nietzsche, instead of resorting to editions of posthumous fragments which did not respect the chronological order, and which were presented sometimes as the unfinished work of Nietzsche that it would not have had time to finish. These editions, faulty and nonscientific by their selective character, proved to be mystifications, since it is established since the the Thirties that Nietzsche had given up the idea to write a sum of sound " système" (see Will for power ).

Among the great names influenced by him: Alfred Adler, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Khalil Gibran, Andre Gide, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Nikos Kazantzakis, Andre Malraux, Thomas Mann, To groove Maria Rilke, max Scheler, Muhammad Iqbal, Albert Schweitzer, Peter Sloterdijk, August Strindberg, Paul Valéry, Rudolf Steiner .

These last years, especially in the French intellectual mediums, following the arrival of philosophers known as new (largely in reaction against the ideology of left) the philosophy of Nietzsche tends to being rejected into the field of barbarian anti-humanism. But of many researchers of all the Europe still work with the interpretation of Nietzsche, as the site HyperNietzsche shows it, and its thought remains current for many philosophers who wonder about the gasoline of Western civilization and his future considered to be often worrying. Paul Valadier note thus, in 2003, in a postface with the one of its studies on Nietzsche going back to 1979, that Nietzsche was not only one fashion of the years 1960 and 70, but which it continues to be read and studied with the 21e century, as testify some to the specialized magazines like the Nietzsche Studien in Germany, and the New Nietzsche Studies with the the United States.

Falsifications

See Will for power for a detailed talk of the falsification of this book.

The texts of Nietzsche underwent many handling, and were used extremely various manners before being finally published scientifically by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari.

Nationalism, Nazism and Fascism

The writings of Nietzsche, thirty years after its death, were used as guarantee with the Nazi regime, as many other traditional of the German culture (Goethe did not have either good opinion of the German Vertu S). This use was however possible only at the price of a falsification of the texts, whose Alfred Baümler was one of the principal craftsmen, and of a judgment of some of the aspects of its thought which the Nazis perceived like anti-Germanic and philosemitic.

The doctrines of Nietzsche criticize the idea of a control of the individual of exception to the mass. Beside a real contempt for the democratic systems (aspect exploited by the Nazi regime) insofar as egalitarianism claims to be essential in any field, it exists at Nietzsche an at least equivalent contempt for the totalitarian systems, which exhaust the people and dispossess them of their future by destroying the germs of the culture. Nietzsche also expressed its contempt of the racial ideologies (he speaks thus about “stove setting of the races”), and denounces without ambiguity the plots of the myth Aryen (“Aryan clumsiness” which exists only by one falsification of the history). There exists thus of many aphorisms in which Nietzsche denounces the various aspects of what was going to become the Italian Fascisme and the Nazism: the strong State, the Anti-semitism, the Racism, the Nationalism, the Militarism, the Populisme, etc

For example, Nietzsche written in the Traveller and his shade , in 1878:

“Everywhere where ignorance, the dirtiness and the superstition are still usual, everywhere where the trade is weak, miserable agriculture, the powerful clergy, one still meets the national costumes. ”

The national spirit, which is expressed in traditional costumes, thus exists only by the poverty and the ignorance of people dominated by a caste whose interest is to maintain the population in misery.

In 1882, in the Merry Knowledge , it develops the same opinion:

“but in addition we are well far from being enough “German” - such as one employs “the German” word today - to be the spokesperson of the nationalism and the hatred of the races, to be able to delight us by the national evils of heart and the poisoning of the blood, which make that in Europe people barricade themselves against the other as if forty separated them. For that we are too free of any prevention, too malicious, too delicate, us travelled also too much: we prefer of much living in the mountains, with the variation, “out-of-date”, in centuries last or future, this was only to save the quiet rage to us, to what the spectacle of a policy would condemn us which makes the spirit German sterile, since it makes it conceited, and which is moreover one small policy: - doesn't it need, so that its own creation does not collapse at once not built, to draw up itself between two hatreds mortals? isn't it forced to want to perpetuate the parcelling out of Europe in small States? ”

In a recension of a translation of posthumous texts of Nietzsche going back to 1935 , Henri Sée writes that these texts show in an obvious way that Nietzsche condemns nationalism, racism and the anti-semitism.

Following these writings where it overpowers the Germans, the Reich (which it perceives like a degradation) and all the forms of nationalism, the divergences of the sister of Nietzsche and alleged “the written precursory ones” of the Nazism and Fascism do not have any more any direction, for the case Nietzsche.

Anti-semitism

The assumption according to which Nietzsche was Antisémite was the subject of many polemics, and was finally refuted, in particular by Sarah Kofman, in the contempt of the Jews , where it counts all the texts of Nietzsche speaking about this subject (see also Yirmiyahu Yovel, Jews according to Hegel and Nietzsche , which arrives at the same conclusions). See also the opinion of a rabin on this question: Discussion with Reb Weisfish. On this point, according to Yirmiyahu Yovel, one can summarize the position of Nietzsche thus, by affirming that Nietzsche is not only anti-anti-semite , but which it has a moderate and complex vision of the history of the Peuple Juif:

- Nietzsche tests a great admiration for the biblical period which expresses according to him the design of the most sublime morals, quite higher than any other culture;

- Nietzsche severely criticizes the priests of the period of the second temple; according to him, the Jewish priests contributed to reverse the natural hierarchy of the values, and, in that, they were vindicatory and dangerous. Criticisms against the Jewish priests of this period are very violent, and these are the criticisms which are used to denounce their character judged anti-semite.

- With regard to the Diaspora, the Jews for Nietzsche are qualified much for the major problems of philosophy than any other people: they have, in Europe, the intellectual superiority. Nietzsche recognizes the decisive importance of the Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages for Western civilization. He was also delighted to see that one found Jews among his first readers, whereas he saw with a certain dislike how its works were interpreted by Germans. After its death, many Jewish intellectuals were interested in its works.

Here some texts on this question:

“And this is why us others, the artists, between the spectators and the philosophers, we have for the Jews - recognition. ”

“They Jewish never ceased themselves being accepted called the largest things and the virtues of all those which suffer did not cease avoiding them. The way in which they honor their fathers and their children, the reason who governs their marriages and their marital manners distinguish them among all Europeans. ”

“While passing: all the problem of the Juifs exists only within the limits of the national States, in the sense that there their activity and their higher intelligence, the capital of spirit and of will that they lengthily piled up from generation to generation at the school of the misfortune, must manage to generally prevail in a measurement which wakes up the desire and hatred, so that in almost all the nations of now - and that more especially as they is given more of the airs of nationalism - is propagated this impertinence of the press which consists in leading the Jews to the slaughter-house like the scapegoats of all the public and deprived possible evils. As soon as it is not any more question of preserving nations, but to produce and raise a race interfered Europeans as strong as possible, the Jew is an ingredient as useful and as desirable as any other national vestige. Any nation, any man refers unpleasant, even dangerous: it is cruelty to want that the Jew makes exception. It may be even that these features present at his place a particular degree of danger and horror; perhaps the young Jewish small-time speculator is it all in all the invention more feeling reluctant of mankind. Despite everything, I would like to know until where, in a general recapitulation, one will not have to push the indulgence towards people which, not without our fault with all, has among all the people have the most painful history, and with which one owes the noblest man (Christ), wise the most just (Spinoza), the most powerful book and the moral law most tributary of the world. Moreover: in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the curtain of the Asian clouds weighed heavily on Europe, they were free thinkers, scientists, Jewish doctors which maintained the flag of the lights and the independence of mind under the personal constraint hardest, and which defended Europe against Asia; it is with their efforts which we owe mainly that an explanation of the world more natural, more reasonable, and in any case freed from the myth, finally could seize again the victory, and that the chain of the civilization, which attaches to us now in the lights of Antiquity gréco-Roman, remained uninterrupted. If Christianity did everything to orientalize the Occident, it is the Judaism which especially contributed to occidentalize it again: what returns, in a certain direction, to make mission and history of Europe a continuation of the Greek history . ”

The anti-semites are for him the incarnation of the ugliest resentment:

“Since Wagner was in Germany it dropped little by little to all that I mistake - and even with the anti-semitism. ”

“I then to suffer them either, these new speculators in idealism, these anti-semites who today are made the Christian, Aryan eye and catch and by an abuse exasperating the trick of the most banal agitator, I want to say the moral installation, seek to raise the element " animal with cornes" of people. ”

“the anti-semitism is one “of the morbidest aberrations of the stupefied car-contemplation and very little justified of German Reich. ”

“some time ago, certain Theodor Fritsch of Leipzig wrote to me. In Germany, there does not exist more impudent race and cretin only these anti-semites. ”

In some cases, Nietzsche used rhetoric anti-semite of its time, by reversing some however the range: for example, taking the slogan anti-semite literally that there were too many Jews in Germany, Nietzsche estimates that the solution would perhaps consist in expelling the anti-semites (and not Jews thus), so that such a feeling of hostility disappears, and that the Jewish culture can benefit with the German culture and the Europe. It remains that Nietzsche uses sometimes commonplaces anti-semites (the image of the rich Jew for example, but in a positive direction, contrary to the pejorative direction given by the anti-semites; nevertheless, that remains a stereotype, even positively used), but it forever destined for any Haine towards the Jews, being given the idea that it was done of their decisive importance for the future of the Occident.

It should finally be stressed that the anti-semites tried to recover Nietzsche of alive sound; he wrote with his sister these remarks that one can judge premonitory:

“Nobody knows me sufficiently; and my history of these fifteen last years is a enigma for everyone. No one of my " amis" does not know how one makes me good nor how one makes me evil. (...) It is you, my poor LAMA, which ace does one of greatest silly things the, and for you, and me. Your marriage with an anti-semite chief expresses for all my way of being a distance which always fills up me rancour and of melancholy. (...) Because, see you, my good LAMA, it is for me a question of honor to observe towards the anti-semitism an absolutely clear and unambiguous attitude, to know: that of the opposition, as I do it in my writings. One overpowered me in last times of letters and sheets anti-semites; my repulsion for this party (which would like only too to be prevailed of my name!) is as marked as possible, but my relationship with Förster and the consequence of the anti-semitism of my former editor does not cease making accept the followers of this unpleasant party which I must be one as of theirs. How much that harms to me and harmed to me, you cannot make you an idea of it. The German press chokes my writings under silence. (...) My abstention wakes up the mistrust of all at the place of my character as if I disavowed as a public a thing which I support in secrecy and I can nothing make to prevent that the sheets anti-semites use the name of " Zarathoustra" : this impotence already almost made me sick several times. ”

And he writes with his mother:

“This party anti-semites rotted with my continuation my editor, my reputation, my sister, my friends - nothing feels reluctant more with my tendencies than this sequence of the name of Nietzsche to that of anti-semites such as E. Dühring: I thus should not be held rigor to employ to it self-defense. I will put violently at the door at home whoever will suspect me on this point. ”

In the thousands of pages of its two works entitled Nietzsche (1961), the philosopher Heidegger does not mention only one frame of mind of Nietzsche on the question of the anti-semitism. However Georges Bataille since 1937 in the review Acéphale points out a maxim of Nietzsche (written in capitals): “Not to attend anybody who is implied in this shameless stove setting of the races. ”

According to Jean-Pierre Faye, it is enough to deviate from the rumors and the approximations to be indicated on the true opinion of Nietzsche. Then, while excavating in the text appears another portrait, that of Nietzsche visionary, which vociferates since 1885 against the “madness of Reich” ( Reichs-Narrheit ), and the “unbalance Aryan chattering”

“With the devil their croaking! ”, “the most hateful noise comes from some anti-semites. ”

“It is really not in Germany of clicks more shameless and more stupid than these anti-semites. This rabble dares to have in the mouth the name Zarathoustra. Dislike! Dislike! Dislike! ”

Current location

Taking into account the complexity of the Thought of Nietzsche, sometimes contradictory Interpretation S that one can make if one attentively does not read all the texts of Nietzsche, of falsifications sources of errors (see Will for power ) and of the philosophical orientation of the ones and others, one can schematically divide the commentators into two groups:

those which took again Nietzsche by leaving side, according to the reproach usually formulated by the second group, the anti-humanistic aspects explicit and particularly hard (inequality of the men, a certain form of Eugénisme, the big role of the force in the policy with the detriment of the Raison, etc).
those which see in Nietzsche an author who contributes to the advent of the Fascisme and the Nazisme, and which it is reproached for not taking account of passages which distinguish it from these forms of Totalitarisme, to make thought beyond good and badly an inevitable apology for the Violence and destruction, whereas it is a question according to them of thinking the world even in his morally insupportable aspects (violence of the policy, social and Community selection like natural facts, etc).

Works

detailed List: Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy at the time of the Greek tragedy
Birth of the tragedy ( Die Geburt der Tragödie ) (1871 - January 1872)
Truth and lie with the extra-moral direction (unfinished) (1873)
out-of-date Considerations ( Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen ) (1873 - 1876)
Human, too human ( Menschliches, Allzumenschliches ) (1878)
Dawn ( Morgenröte ) (1881)
the Merry Knowledge ( Die fröhliche Wissenschaft ) (1882 and 1887)
Ainsi spoke (or spoke) Zarathoustra ( Also sprach Zarathustra ), (1885)
Beyond good and badly ( Jenseits von Gut und Böse ) (1886)
Généalogie of morals ( Zur Genealogie der Moral ) (1887)
the Case Wagner ( Der Fall Wagner ) (1888 )
Panegyrics of Dionysos (1888)
the Twilight of the idols ( Götzen-Dämmerung ) (1888, published in January 1889)
Nietzsche against Wagner ( Nietzsche countered Wagner , published in February 1889)
the Antichrist ( Der Antichrist ) (1888, published in November 1894)
Ecce homo (1888, published in April 1908)
posthumous Fragments (1854 - 1889)
Will for power (established collection by the sister of the philosopher)

Editions

The edition which currently refers (and which contains a register of the fragments intended for the Will for power ):

Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (abbreviation: KGW ), Hg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. Berlin und New York 1967.
Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (abbreviation: KSA ), Hg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. München und New York 1980. ISBN 3-423-59044-0.
French Translation: Friedrich Nietzsche, complete philosophical Works , XVII volumes (abbreviation: FP ), Gallimard.

Bibliography set of themes

This bibliography set of themes returns towards the site of the library of Weimar (where are the Nietzsche files). For a brief bibliography, to see Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and bibliography

Metaphysical Art
Eternal return
Will for power

Various documents

Library of Friedrich Nietzsche

A quotation randomly

See too

External bonds

The bonds below are reduced to essence (texts and articles of commentators).

Texts

→ Books in French with the format ebook
→ German Texts on Gutenberg
→ HyperNietzsche: Some manuscripts, transcriptions, articles
→ Works of Friedrich Nietzsche on Wikisource: edition Henri Albert
→ Wiki Nietzsche: edition Henri Albert commentée
→ The Nietzsche Chanel: Colli-Montinari edition (in German and English)
→ Nietzsche with the letter: Translations of lettres

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