HCJ 3 – Nietzsche

Nietzsche is pretty much as controversial as you can get when considering philosophers, and is very much on par with Schopenhauer (link to that blog).

WILL TO POWER

Nietzsche believed that the main driving force in the human race is the ‘will to power’. What he means by ‘will to power’ is the sheer force of personality and willingness to do anything to gain power.

But what gives someone the right to power? We can have a revisit to last year’s HCJ topics with different social contract theories:

Hobbes – Leviathan

Rousseau – general will

Machiavelli – Divine right

From these three theories, the one that fits best with Nietzsche’s definition of power is Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Leviathan is made up of the masses.

But what gives this Leviathan the right to power? There is a social contract between the masses and the rulers that if you give up all your rights except your rights to property, life and (something), then the Leviathan will protect you from the anarchy that would inevitably happen if there was no ruler.

The ‘Leviathan’ in Nietzsche’s case would be a superior kind of person called the ‘ubermensch’, and the masses would be the ‘undermensch’.

UBERMENSCH

The people who practise their will to power are called the ubermensch. The ubermensch are strong individuals who find their own way and force their way to the top. ‘Humanity is something that must be overcome’.  The ubermensch are a kind of ‘superhuman’ who are above animalistic human urges and impulses. They do not care about these pursuits of normal people – pleasure, fighting, so on. Suffering is valuable.

He believed that aristocracy was very important as those who were part of it has ubermensch in their lineage, and they therefore come from greatness.

The popular term ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is very much the simplest way to describe Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Examples of Ubermensch are Napoleon, Hitler, Spartan society.

MORALITY AND RELIGION

Nietzsche has a ‘master morality’ which entails that morality is outlined by the consequences of your actions, despite who or what you may have to step on.

This is the opposite of ‘slave morality’ which depends on your sympathy for the lower classes. This is very much what Nietzsche disliked and looked down upon.

Morality as we know, the Christian type of good and bad, is unimportant to Nietzsche – he doesn’t care whether or not you hold the door open for a stranger or if you kill people. He would view Hitler as an ubermensch as he overcame the masses and became very powerful. The fact that he would then go on to kill millions of people is only trivial to Nietzsche.

Religion, to Nietzsche, is weak and pulls you away from reality. In Zarathustra he makes a bold statement that many people remember him by to this day – ‘God is dead’. By this he doesn’t mean it literally in an angsty way, but instead he means that because religious people are so detached from the world (Christian belief in the veil of tears – ‘this life may be bad, but be morally good and you will get what you want in the next life’)

There is slave morality (sympathy for lower classes), and master morality (good or bad consequences, teleological).

Religion promoted a meek and inferior kind of living – veil of tears. Nevermind about this life being bad, the next life will be so much better.

This is similar to Schopenhauer’s ‘will to live’.

Schopenhauer

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had very similar ideology. They both believed that women were evil and useless – Schopenhauer more because they were the bearers of life, and so they are terrible.

The only way to escape this pain which is life is to die. Oblivion is just a way of having glimpses of death.