Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• His eccentric way of thinking is linked to the modernist desire to shock the middle classes and create something new
  • his philosophy is central to modern and postmodern desire to rethink the assumptions of Western traditions
• Critic of Christianity and of Platonic philosophy
• -Influenced by [[Arthur Schonpenhauer]] and [[Richard Wagner]]
  • But later rejected Wagner when he converted to Christianity and expressed anti-semitic views
  • His sister took care of him in the last ten years of his life because of his mental illness
    • she also edited her works and did so according to her own anti-Semitic and pro-Aryan views, which led to the later appropriation of Nietzsche’s works by the Nazis
      • some aspects of his work do resonate with National Socialism and others contradict itIn grappling with Nietzsche’s work, one must recognise his influence on the Nazis, while also understanding the reach of his work regarding modernism, existentialism and post-structuralism

On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense (1873)

• Published in his lifetime
• It has influenced postsructuralist thinkers such as [[Jacques Derrida]] in the 1970s.
• In it, he targets the epistemological foundations of Western philosophy
• Since plato and with few exceptions, this discipline has been committed to determine a fixed truth that is independent of human mind
• Nietzsche states there is nothing we can know without the lens of human perception
  • we cannot judge which perceptions represent the world accurately without the intervention of this lens
  • then, why is the search of truth so pivotal for humans?
    • because truth is a useful illusion that serves the basic desire to survive and gives people self-confidence
  • Nietzsche points to the role of language in human cognition, an aspect of the essay which has been very influential among literary theorists
    • the outer world affects the human perception, but we translate that experience in human terms by naming it
    • this "first metaphor" introduces a unbridgeable gap
    • thus, subject and object are different spheres
    • then, language continues to add nonrepresentational additions (supplements)
    • a second metaphor occurs when we use the same concept to refer to multiple experiences which took place at different points in time
      • concepts thus erase our awareness of differences (this idea is influential for poststructuralism)
  • once this illusion of a non-contingent truth is removed, what can humans do?
    • stoicism: we are alone in the world, but we preserve a dignified equilibrium amidst all life subjects us to.
    • nihilistic denial of the world as evil: Christianity
    • Nietzsche offers a third alternative: a joyous stepping into the vacuum created by this death of truth, God, or any other metaphor created by Western thought
      • celebration of creativity of concepts amidst an always shifting environment
      • artists are a great example of this joyous response to the challenge of shedding the illusion of truth

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• Nietzsche states that the human intellect is insubstantial and transitory, yet its own possessor regards it as the center of the universe

• Most generally, intellect deceives humans

• Perception cannot lead to truth, it can only receive stimuli

• The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

  • In this essay, Nietzsche focuses on pre-Platonic Greek thought, whose artistic forms and worldview he prefers
    • other nineteenth century thinkers such as [[Matthew Arnold]] return to the pre-Socractic Greeks for principles to counter modernity
  • Nietszche states that only as an aesthetic phenomenon (that is, a phenomenon mediated by perception) do existence and the world appear justified
  • Life is only worthy if we experience strong feelings and sensations
  • there is a short step from the aesthetic as sensation to the aesthetic as art. Art is the field of heightened sensation
    • other theorists have focused on the spectator, but Nietzsche focuses on the artist joy in the struggle to dominate materials
  • His theory has often been read as promoting individualism and the idea of a transcendent genius
  • But this is not everything, human suffering is also central to his theory.
    • Humans are subjected to a world that predates them and which is far more powerful than the self
    • Greek tragedy offers a glimpse to a primordial unity prior to individuation
    • Individuation is necessary for artistic creation
      • The chaos of Dionysian nondifferentiation can only be expressed by the Apollonian semblance (conveyed by words and images)
        • The great thing about Greek tragedy is that is does not consider that the Apollonian semblance is the truth
          • there is a need, expressed in Prometheus, to establish an existence apart from the primordial unity
    • the tension between the fact that we can only experience the universe as individuals, and the fact that individuation separates us from the universe, brings us an inevitable suffering
      • Nietzsche states we must affirm that suffering
      • if we believe that suffering is not evitable, tragedy dies and life is the justified not an aesthetic phenomenon, but because justice has been done
        • comedic endings bring justice, thus for Nietzsche it is comedians like Euripides who are to blame for the death of the tragic worldview in ancient Greece
        • Socrates and Plato then posit that it is possible to achieve universal truths and thus comfort through reason
        • Nietzsche later attacks Christianity for its comic vision
          • Aryan versus Semitic views on wrongdoing and sins respectively, feminine and masculine, which is highly problematic
          • wrongdoing is not avoidable while sin is, and which if avoided, leads to no suffering
          • but for Nietzsche, we must have strength to love life even if it entails suffering and indeed suggests that we are most alive when we suffer

• For many later thinkers, Nietzsche’s methods are just as important as his views

  • [[Paul Ricouer]] called him, together with [[Karl Marx]] and [[Sigmund Freud]] one of the founders of the "hermeneutics of suspicion"
    • we must not take any pronouncement at face value
    • we must discover its genealogy before understanding the meaning of an utterance
    • revision of dominant worldviews