"From the start Christianity was, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an 'other' or a 'better life'. Hatred of the 'world', the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the 'sabbath of sabbaths' - all of this, along with Christianity's unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a 'will to decline', at the very least a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at a Self-Criticism, 1886, 5
Strong words. As a result Nietzsche has been vilified and ignored for well over a century by those apologists for 'modernism', for 'rationality', for 'utopias' and that unimaginative herd 'control' that formed his targets. It is only now, with the rise of the complexity sciences and our post-modernist viewpoints, in our understanding (at last) of the reality of those aspects of our world actively suppressed by Nietzsche's opponents, that we can see just how far in advance of his times he really was, and how little modern 'Christianity' (and other religions, likewise) have to do with anything 'human', in the way that 'God' originally conceived us perhaps - in the event that you choose to believe that 'he/she or it' did conceive of anything so 'intellectually negative' as modern man at all:
"What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism... For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving towards a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, Preface
The title "The Will to Power" is well known, yet almost nobody knows what it was about. In fact that 'book' is simply a unstructured and somewhat repetitive collection of notes published after his death, and (good as it can be in parts - and it does indeed contain many exquisite passages) it is to his other works that we should really look for his fully developed and argued insights. Here we will however attempt to rehabilitate Nietzsche's overall train of thought somewhat, and compare his more modern-sounding ideas with those of our own complexity sciences and philosophies. We shall look at forms of power, Nietzsche's views of them, and their use and misuse throughout our world today in order to prevent humans 'willing' anything at all, to suppress and control them in such a way as to incite the anger we see bubbling-up, justifiably, in Nietzsche's works, i.e. his invective against the 'bully-boys', the 'hate merchants', the 'dogmatists', the 'totalitarians' - all those supporters of collective fantasies, those intellectualised, yet self-deceitful, reducers of mankind to animal dross.
"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whether he be: statesman, a businessman, an official or a scholar."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 283
The need for this should become clear. We find in complexity science that only agent freedom enables us to maximise fitness, individual freedom will allow us to reach (collectively) that compromise state that we call the 'edge-of-chaos', that creative point of maximum (mutual) emergence and growth. Freedom means the absence of constraint, the absence of control, of a regimented life, of a 'work till you drop' regime, of endless activity - in other words an absence of all those faults so endemic to our current societies.
"Each of us must admit that slaves live more securely and happily than the modern worker in all regards, and that slave labor is very little labor compared to that of the worker."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 457
"How often I see it: that blindly raging industriousness brings riches and honour but at the same time deprives the organs of refinement that makes it possible to enjoy the riches and honour; also that this chief antidote to boredom and to the passions at the same time dulls the senses and makes the spirit resistant to new attractions."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 21
"An old Chinese said he had heard that when
empires were doomed they had many laws."Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 745
We live today on a doomed planet in the throes of 'decay', in the grip of undemocratic 'control-freaks', whether these are corporate, bureaucratic or political in nature - everywhere we look there are people obsessed with controlling us, with 'rules' and 'restrictions' and ever more 'laws', so many in fact that nobody can possibly understand (or even read) all of them, and all are issued by incompetent people who think 'they' know, better than us, how 'we' should or must be forced to behave - based, usually, upon nothing more than their ignorance and arrogance !
"No one who judges, 'in this case everyone would have to act like this' has yet taken five steps towards self-knowledge."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 335
"Man should beware of nothing so much as the growth of that weed called arrogance, which ruins every one of our good harvests... The arrogant man, that is, the one who wants to be more important than he is... always miscalculates... People make one pay for nothing so dearly as humiliation."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 373
"If this is not an age of decay and declining vitality, it is at least one of headlong and arbitrary experimentation - and it is probable that a superabundance of bungled experiments should create an impression as of decay - perhaps even decay itself."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 58
And what are all these 'rules' other than arbitrary experiments ? They are certainly never tested scientific theories (such 'moralities' are, by definition, outside science) and as a result have all sorts of destructive side-effects ! These 'rules' are, in fact, simply used as a (supposedly unchallengable) smokescreen for institutionalised bullying on a massive scale, in other words to support what we must regard as criminal behaviour (demanding 'compliance' with 'menaces') by the 'authorities'. In so far as the people at large oppose these 'laws' (these thefts of power from the individual members of the populace and its transfer into uncontrollable and unaccountable alternative individual hands), all such 'laws' are totally illegitimate, and therefore criminal acts within any 'democratic' state.
"A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also, and this lie creepeth from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people'. It is a lie ! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. Destroyers are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state; they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs... But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth, and whatever it hath it hath stolen."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I, 1882, 11
There is no 'authority' present here at all, since the people didn't explicitly vote for any such laws or 'control', and if they did not (and they actually 'oppose' it no less !) then we have here only a series of deceitful and disgraceful 'con tricks' - we see this (always) as soon as the 'people' flex their collective muscles, their democratic 'will to power', these opportunist 'bullies' then quickly back down, their shallow bluff at claiming any 'authority' having been easily called 'fake'.
"Today, in our time, when the state has an absurdly fat stomach, there is in all fields and departments, in addition to the real workers, also "representatives"... Our modern life is extremely expensive owing to the large number of intermediaries; in an ancient city...one appeared oneself and would not give a hoot to such modern representatives and intermediaries - or a kick !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 75
A hundred years and more later, with considerable state 'obesity' present, the number of these "ne'er-do-wells", as Nietzsche called them, has reached epidemic proportions - over 50% of the population today are involved in 'interfering' in some way, uninvited, in the lives of all the others (and also in each others - in a sort of 'mutual destructivism' sort of 'pact') - all at the expense of the most 'useful' people naturally !
"The soul most self-loving, in which all things have their current and counter-current, their ebb and their flow - oh, how could the loftiest soul fail to have the worst parasites ?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III, 1884, 56/19
"Willing is not desiring, striving, demanding: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding. There is no such thing as 'willing', but only 'willing something': one must not remove aim from the total condition - as epistemologists do."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 668
What then is this strange edifice we call our 'will', to which Nietzsche was so attached ? It is our autonomy, our choice, our actions, our purpose, our subjectivity - the complete opposite of that passive, hands-off, 'detached objectivity' associated with 'rationality', i.e. those millennia of philosophical contemplations about a supposed unchanging dualist world that have achieved, in total, perhaps nothing useful at all.
"In almost all respects, philosophical problems today are again formulated as they were two thousand years ago: how something can arise from its opposite... Historical philosophy... the very youngest of all philosophical methods... has determined... that they are not opposites only exaggerated to be so... based on an error of reason.
A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers... They will not understand that man has evolved... there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 1 & 2
"All that philosophers have handled for millennia have been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive. They kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters - they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections - refutations even. What is does not become; what becomes, is not..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, 'Reason' in Philosophy, 1
Will is what distinguishes us from machines, from reactive animals, and from those 'slaves' that can only follow the orders of others. It is our freedom, our ability to make and implement our own choices, in other words to evolve. We 'will' change, we 'will' a new state, 'will' is our power "to make it so", to implement our values even in the face of adversity and opposition. We must fight for our 'will', for our control over our own lives, it is what drove democracy initially - the command of the rulers by the people, it is what drives today's deceitful anti-democrats - the command of the people by a self-styled elite. It is the cause of strife and of progress, of hate and of love. It is the cause of 'humanity' in all its majesty and foibles.
"The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 349
Preserving our will then is an essential aspect of being human, of being able to employ those higher human abilities, our creativity, our imagination, our skills. But to what end ? Here Nietzsche goes along with our focus on values:
"'Willing': means willing an end. 'An end' includes an evaluation. Whence come evaluations ? Is their basis a firm norm, 'pleasant' or 'painful' ? We have invested things with ends and values:... (thus nothing is valuable 'in itself')."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 260
"The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges 'what harms me, is harmful in itself', he knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 260
Is this just 'self-glorification', as many commentators have claimed ? To an extent certainly, he uses the term himself. Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the men of his day, for those weak human 'slaves' that deny their own humanity, that let themselves be bullied, be controlled by 'masters', that wait patiently to be told what to do... Here today's idea that people can refuse to take any responsibility for their own actions, whilst (completely illogically) demanding that others take responsibility for them is rejected totally - and quite rightly. Expecting these 'other' strong humans to take responsibility, not only for their own behaviours, which they of course relish (i.e. those denied by the 'slaves'), but for those of strangers also is quite absurd, even in principle - self-proclaimed slaves invariably get what they deserve in Nietzsche's view, if they choose never (even) to help themselves !
"The inclination to disparage himself, to let himself be robbed, lied to and exploited, could be the self-effacement of a god among men."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 66
Yet he also affirms that all humans should "think well" of themselves, they should own their freedom of action, for if they do not then they simply pass it on to other humans - who certainly won't care less about them - why should they if the 'slave' doesn't ? His affirmation of the need for a "revaluation of all values" then relates to contrasting the values imposed by 'outsiders' to those relevant to the inner person. He sees a great contrast between these two, as do we. What we 'are' as humans is very different, in Nietzsche's view, to what any 'system' tries to make us into. In this sense we see the rejoicing in that creative individuality that later came to be prominent in non-religious Enlightenment thought - only to watch it sink, once more, into the modern murk of global 'conformity' and, we must say, abject fear.
"All virtues physiological conditions: particularly the principal organic functions considered as necessary, as good. All virtues are really refined passions and enhanced states. Pity and love of mankind as development of the sexual drive. Justice as development of the drive to revenge. Virtue as pleasure in resistance, will to power. Honour as recognition of the similar and equal in power.
My chief proposition: there are no moral phenomena, there is only a moral interpretation of these phenomena. This interpretation itself is of extra-moral origin.
Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture. Because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives... The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men - as well as his great moments of grand harmony - a rare accident even in us !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 255, 258 & 259
These passages sum up the most important insights in Nietzsche's thought and those aspects that put his 'organic' view so out-of-kilter with the 'mechanistic' and 'rationalistic' dogmas of his time (and sadly, these are all still with us today !). Science, in the intervening years, has strongly confirmed all these insights, man is at heart an organic being, neither a machine nor a cool detached 'observer' of a fixed reality, the sociological dogma that man is a 'tabula rasa' (a 'blank slate'), and we all can be made 'equal' by 'social engineering' has been proved to be total (unbiological) nonsense, as has the belief that 'rationality' tames the savage beast - it is that beast !
"What dawns on philosophers last of all: they must no longer accept concepts as a gift, not merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing. Hitherto one has generally trusted one's concepts as if they were a wonderful dowry from some sort of wonderland: but they are, after all, the inheritance from our most remote, most foolish, as well as most intelligent ancestors.
In the Greek philosophers I see a decline of the instincts: otherwise they could not have blundered so far as to posit the conscious state as more valuable... We must in fact seek perfect life where it has become least conscious (i.e. aware of its logic, its reasons, its means and intentions, its utility)."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 409 & 439
Plato's world is a man-created myth, as are the values within it, nor does 'Nature-as-thing' contain any fixed values, only the judgements of organisms like men add any values - based upon our emotions, needs and subjective perspectives - thus all values are contextual and largely subconscious. When we choose to act morally we need to take into account all the effects (involve all the 'stakeholders' as we say today) and not view situations in factual isolation from over-simplified dualist perspectives. This is of course exactly what we have proposed in our 'holarchic ethics' methodology.
"Passion is degraded (1) as if it were only in unseemly cases, and not necessarily and always, the motive force; (2) in as much as it has for its object something of no great value, amusement. The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason.
The most difficult and highest form of man will succeed most rarely: thus the history of philosophy reveals a superabundance of failures, of accidents, and an extremely slow advance; whole millennia intervene and overwhelm what has been achieved; the continuity is broken again and again. It is an appalling history - the history of the highest man, the sage."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 387 & 987
We have seen from a complexity science perspective however just how hard it is to gain and then retain the wisdom that Nietzsche sought, and how far our educational systems ignore this crucial need for nonconformity, for 'free spirits'.
"The educating environment wants to make each man unfree by always presenting him with the smallest number of possibilities."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 228
So let us, once more, from some different viewpoints, learn from one of the wisest, and most passionate, psychologists of his time, some of those 'home truths' still being ignored by people today - we too are 'passionate' about that...
"In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams man would have found no occasion to divide the world. The separation into body and soul is also connected to the oldest views about dreams, as in the assumption of a spiritual apparition, that is, the origin of all belief in ghosts, and probably also in gods."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 5
"The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a consummate artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important part of poetry. We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, I
In your dreams you are free, you can believe in anything at all - no matter how bizarre, the contents are always assumed 'true'. Waking fantasies, our 'abstractions', Nietzsche tells us, have much the same validity, we are so easily deceived. But in your dreams (at least) your 'will' is supreme, you cannot be censored, controlled or bullied - all those nightmares comprise your own monsters. All forms of creativity arise here. The bully boys can, at best, prevent you expressing your innate humanity, good or bad, they can force you perhaps into their prison cage, but they cannot control your thoughts. They cannot, except by physical force, even prevent you expressing these thoughts, in communicating your ideas to others. In the world of today, with global phones and the internet, the people have never been more free, they have never had access to more information, to more ideas, to more collaborators, to more potential choice.
Accessing those choices, is of course a different thing. If you have choices then you are very hard to control - 'they' don't know what you are going to do next, it scares 'them' witless. Hence the obsession these days with standardisation, with 'security' (a euphemism for control - of your every move), with 'monitoring' by 'Big Brother'. Unfortunately 'Big Brother' is a total idiot, the law of 'requisite variety' prevents this control, in fact, ever becoming a reality - even if you let them make the attempt. One of the defining features of bureaucracies of all types is their lack of imagination. To 'standardise' others they must first standardise themselves, and that means removing all forms of 'deviation', all individuality, all creativity or original thought. Big Brother is, in fact, no more than a savage, and vindictive, animal living in its own cage ! In such a 'rent a moron' world nothing 'human' is ever possible - or 'permitted'...
"He who possesses strength divests himself of mind."Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 14
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication... All kinds of intoxication, however different their origins, have the power to do this...
The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfection. This compulsion to transform into the perfect is - art."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 8 & 9
Perfection is of course a myth, yet we certainly know 'better' from 'worst'. All art goes further, it expands our humanity, we grow (perhaps) as a result, if we understand what it can say to us. Our power can diminish however as well as enhance, and today we see (far too often) art in decline, being used for destructive and trivialising 'nasty' purposes rather than for uplifting ones.
"But things are so much the worst even for superior artists: for are they not, almost all of them, perishing from a lack of inner discipline ? They are no longer tyrannized over from without by the church's tables of absolute values or those of a court; thus they also no longer learn to develop their "inner tyrants", their will. And what is true of artists is true in a higher and more fateful sense of philosophers. For where are there free spirits today ?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 464
Yet who is actually 'free' today ? Well those who can give to others or to themselves without restraint, without 'ulterior motives' (which, of course, tie you to 'their' response !). Only one class of people seem to qualify here...
"Love gives the greatest feeling of power. To grasp to what extent not man in general but a certain species of man speaks here... this means no morality, obedience or activity produces that feeling of power that love produces; one does nothing bad from love, one does much more than one would do from obedience and virtue... Being helpful and useful and caring for others continually arouses the feeling of power..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 176
Just what is it that, despite all attempts at nastiness, all forms of oppression, leaves people able to delight unconditionally in each other, in other words to 'love' ? In a word, it is trust. In every other form of interaction, in every other form of so called 'sharing', there is a deceit, a form of distrustfulness, an attempt to 'use' the other as a 'means'. Only in true love is this absent, in this state is it 'unthinkable' that we should even attempt to 'harm', 'lie to' or 'manipulate' our 'beloved'. Here 'synergy' truly reigns, here (and only here) can we escape that evil of control, that instrumental use of others for our selfish ends. When we 'love', we accept the 'other' on their own terms, we respect them as individuals, with their own 'intrinsic' and irreplaceable values, we see them as 'Gods', as worthy of being placed upon a pinnacle, as so very 'special' in themselves. We see them as true 'humans'.
"Love has been falsified as surrender (and altruism), while it is an appropriation or a bestowal following from a super-abundance of personality. Only the most complete persons can love; the depersonalised, the 'objective', are the worst lovers (- one only has to ask the girls !)."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 296
This outgoing or 'gushing' nature of love is true in a sense even for the 'rulers', whose antipathy to others does not prevent them being 'synergic' with their family or peers, as in forms of group bonding like 'old-boy networks', the masons or 'gentlemen's' clubs - nests of mutual admiration, support, loyalty and, we must say, 'love'. We might even add (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) the 'love of money for its own sake' to the list, along with similar ideologies where the 'abstraction' can do no wrong...
"Art thou a slave ? Then thou canst not be a friend.
Art thou a tyrant ? Then thou canst not have friends."Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I, 1882, 14
This suggests that a 'middle way' is necessary, i.e. an heterarchy and not an hierarchy. What is important here is the idea that by associating horizontally with others we increase power in itself, we add to our choices, so that old adage, "every man for himself" that lies behind most simplistic interpretations of Nietzsche's 'will' (and its endless manifestation in today's 'selfish' hierarchical world) is a false belief. It is, in fact, this 'synergy' that allows a collective of the individually weak to oppose the individually strong - 'connecting synergistically' works...
"Lift up your hearts my brethren, high, higher ! And do not forget your legs ! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers, and better still if ye stand upon your heads !
This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: to you my brethren, do I cast this crown ! Laughing have I consecrated: ye higher men, learn, pray you - to laugh !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part IV, 1885, 19 & 20
Being happy is a powerful state - you are beyond control ! For what is the purpose of allowing others to control you ? You think you will find happiness that way, they tempt you to a 'better life', if you will just obey them. But if you are already happy then they are useless, you are already self-content, not striving for endless 'tomorrows', not 'buying' their means to a promised (and illusory) end. You live life, you enjoy life, you are not susceptible to 'manipulation'. Perhaps that is why we have so much misery in our world, why those 'claiming' power (stealing it by deceit really) arrange for the status-quo to continue. After all, if 'they' ever solved the problems they claim to address on your behalf, and everyone was then 'happy', then they would be out of their cosy jobs, redundant - they are constantly 'rewarded for failure' - a very modern stupidity it seems, but then perhaps not...
"Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy
has an interest in the enemy's staying alive."Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 531
But 'being happy' is, in fact, an internal state of mind, and is thus dependent upon 'belief' not upon 'facts' or upon material 'things'. Rich people are rarely really happy (despite their pretence), they have too much to lose, thus they must live within their own self-created prisons - their 'gated' communities ! Worry, stress, envy, fear (all 'states of mind'), etch away at our happiness, our joy in life.
"The lovely human beast seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well; it becomes 'serious' ! And 'where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing' - that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all 'gay science'. Well then, let us prove it a prejudice !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 327
If we are happy, and also scientifically aware, then we can laugh at the ravings of the control freaks, their deceits and incompetences, their hates and prejudices, their attempts to bully. If you don't need them (and you never do) then they are impotent, and you are free. Belief in your own power to control and understand your life is all that is needed, together with a refusal to pay any serious attention to those miserable people who try to pretend they have taken it from you (you certainly didn't give it to them, you can't - it's still in your head). Laugh these terrible 'actors' off the world stage...
"The reasons and intents behind habits are invented only when some people start attacking the habits and asking for reasons and intents. Here we have the great dishonesty of conservatives of all times - they are the add-on-liars."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 29
It is so much easier to just go with the flow, to continue to behave as we have always behaved. We love to feel secure in our cosy little world. So when our views are questioned, our immediate reaction is defensive, we think we must justify our behaviours - or die as self-respecting humans. So we distort the facts, invent 'reasons' after-the-fact, create smokescreens of delusion to prevent at all costs it becoming known that our behaviours have no grounding - they are simply unevaluated 'habits'. We act to wall in our mores and norms, making it even more difficult then to objectively evaluate them. This fear of change, of even trying out (the scientific testing of) new ideas, can have a powerful stabilising effect on society, but of course it also prevents growth, it stagnates mankind and keeps everyone 'in their place'.
"I approve of any form of scepticism to which I can reply "Let's try it"Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 51
"Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase in power. The meaning of "knowledge": here, as in the case of "good" or "beautiful", the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behaviour on it."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 480
Thus knowledge is a very personal thing. It is what helps us to make decisions, to decide which actions are worthwhile and when to carry them out. It is not, as so many of his contemporary philosophers maintained, something 'abstract' and detached from the world or the observer. Once we take knowledge to be something that can stand on its own then we emasculate it, we make it a pure fantasy, of no possible use to mankind. This error, which we still make today in our schools, divorces philosophy, and its arch value 'truth', away from science, it breaks apart what was once called 'natural philosophy' and puts in its place one of the most 'unnatural' creations man ever gestated...
"The valuation "I believe that this and that is so" as the essence of truth. In valuations are expressed conditions of preservation and growth. All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth. Trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, therefore the valuation of logic, proves only their usefulness for life, proved by experience - not that something is true."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 507
"Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. That is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed. From which it follows that a drive rules here that is capable of employing both means. firstly falsification, then the implementation of its own point of view: logic does not spring from will to truth.."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 512
"So it is with mathematics, which would certainly not have originated if it had been known from the beginning that there is no exactly straight line in nature, no real circle, no absolute measure"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 11
This insight that logic does not give us truth but falsity still sounds strange today, and certainly contradicts two millennia of philosophical belief. Yet many 'certainties' claimed by philosophers, on the basis of their 'logic', have subsequently been proved by science to be quite false. Nietzsche's claim is thus vindicated, and today we know the reason why. The world is interconnected and does not come in disjoint categories, it is fuzzy and any logic used must reflect this premise - which 'Aristotelian' or 'Boolean' logic (with its 'law' of the 'excluded middle') fails to do. In philosophy if any premise is false then the conclusion does not hold 'logically'. We must look very closely at all claims to logical 'fact' to see just what has been left out, what ignored, what over-simplified so that a false claim can be made to sound true...
"That meditating on things human, all too human (or, as the learned phrase goes, "psychological observation"') is one of the means by which man can ease life's burdens; that by exercising this art, one can secure presence of mind in difficult situations and entertainment amid boring surroundings... Why do people let the richest and most harmless source of entertainment get away from them ?
We can survey the consequences very clearly, many examples having proven how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually start from a false explanation of certain human actions and feelings, how an erroneous analysis of so-called selfless behaviour, for example, can be the basis for false ethics, for whose sake religious and mythological confusion are then drawn in, and finally how the shadows of these sad spirits also fall upon physics and the entire contemplation of the world."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 35 & 37
Looking inward, at ourselves, rather than outwards, at our world, can highlight many of our most basic errors, as Nietzsche saw so clearly. Everything we believe about the world comes from within, from our own minds and from the internal minds of those with whom we associate, whether as teachers, peers or 'experts'. And we think it is conscious truth...
"One takes consciousness to be a given determinate magnitude ! One denies its growth and intermittences ! This ridiculous overestimation and misapprehension of consciousness has the very useful consequence that an all-too-rapid development of consciousness was prevented. Since they thought they already possessed it, human beings did not take much trouble to acquire it - and things are no different today ! The task of assimilating knowledge and making it instinctive is still quite new; it is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is yet barely discernible - it is a task seen only by those who have understood that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness refers to errors !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 11
In modern psychology we are beginning to realise that our decisions, our values, our ethics, are not in fact conscious but are subconscious - largely associated with our emotions. Thus Nietzsche's insight that they must be 'instinctive' is largely correct. We need to use our consciousness to analyse how we actually behave, and not rely on conscious delusions that 'rationally' deceive us about our motives. The power of meditation to do this is well known in the East, yet in Western 'civilisation' it is seemingly regarded as irrelevant to knowledge - a strange stance indeed ! Despite Descartes' "I think therefore I am" maxim, the dualist stance then immediately forgot about the internal "I", and became obsessed by the external "it" - and thus we come to science...
"The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g., 'warm and cold') where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity, has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, 1886, 67
"One will seldom go wrong to attribute extreme actions to vanity,
moderate ones to habit, and petty ones to fear."Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 74
Telling the truth is highly unpopular, especially when it contradicts the deceits perpetrated by the bullies. But what actions can we now take, if we are to follow Nietzsche's directions ? We seem to have no good options left ! This tells us that 'absolute truth' is a myth. All our claims to be speaking such are false.
"Truth: this, according to my way of thinking, does not necessarily denote the antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental cases only the posture of various errors in relation to one another."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 535
'Truth' is only ever valid relative to something worst, everything we say is biased, it is phrased in such a way as to serve our (personal) needs, our values, our prejudices. Given this, what are we to do ? Be honest ! Understand that we cannot bluff our way through life, we cannot live the pretence that we are always 'right', that our science is 'true'.
"Consequently 'will to truth' does not mean 'I do not want to let myself be deceived' but - there are no alternatives - 'I will not deceive, even myself'; and with that we stand on moral ground... But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests - that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire too, from the flame lit by the thousand year faith..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 344
This is the real 'will to truth', the humility of fallibility that Nietzsche certainly recognised - but cared not a damn about !
"There is a profound illusion which first entered the world in the person of Socrates - the unshakeable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being. This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinctual accompaniment to science and repeatedly takes it to its limits, where it must become art: which is the true perspective of this mechanism."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, 15
Science is an art, as all top scientists know instinctively (even if their more plodding 'technician' colleagues think the opposite !), it is about looking at the world through new eyes, seeing it with new perspectives. Thus, as Nietzsche realised, it is a myth, maybe a useful one, but a myth nethertheless. All our ideas are such myths, some are more helpful than others, some of these we collectively call science, but to deify any of them as 'truth' and then to worship them is as big a delusion as any other form of idolatry. This religion, called 'scientism' pervades far too much of today's reality, and its power is correspondingly misused, both to set up 'experts' as Gods (regardless on which subject they speak) and then to bully people into accepting their 'beliefs', as unchallengable 'fact', when they are, to say the least, highly 'questionable' - and perhaps complete and utter socially destructive rubbish...
"If someone has mastered one subject, it usually has made him a complete amateur in most other subjects; but people judge just the reverse..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 361
"Yet without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power: only a horizon surrounded by myths can unify an entire cultural movement. Myth alone rescues all the powers of imagination and their Apolline dream from their aimless wanderings. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent, and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, 23
If we are to grow, we need our myths - our scientific knowledge of the 'benzene ring' was triggered, for example, by the ancient myth of the snake eating its own tail. All discovery, all progress, needs new myths, new analogies, new associations. The more of these we have, i.e. the richer our culture, then the better our science must become, the more imaginative our ideas, the more new avenues we find to explore. The 'rationality' that science destroys myths is thus shown to be 'irrational', yet another self-contradiction inherent within science. Science, as a cultural movement, simply renames myths and then isolates them from their context and meaning - but we still love our myths, e.g. the 'just-so' stories of evolutionary theory or the 'big-bang'. In fact, since scientific theories are invariably simplifications, and always falsifiable, they are never logically 'true', and so are always myths in themselves !
"Those who know they are deep strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem deep to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd takes everything whose ground it cannot see to be deep: it is so timid and so reluctant to go into the water."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 173
In our world of misleading advertising and 'spin' obsessed politics this 'truth' stands out clearly. Even within academia the attempt to sound clever, by using pretentious and obscure language (seen clearly in the writings of the postmodern 'literati' !) is endemic. This withholding of 'clarity' seems to give the speaker power over the rest, knowledge being power. But to what effect ? The belief in erroneous and deceitful views then prevails ! Clarity is the only true educational power, since only that can lead to correct actions and beliefs.
"Good writers have two things in common; they prefer to be understood rather than admired and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 1886, 138
"Ultimately no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for... In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing...
When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1908, Why I Write Such Excellent Books, 1 & 3
In traditional 'education' the view prevails that the mind is a blank slate that can be imprinted with new knowledge. This is psychologically incorrect and Nietzsche's insight is correct. For ideas to be understood they must be related to experience, and to this end examples from our daily lives are invaluable - it is these that gain us the necessary understanding and clarity. Of course to convey clear ideas the author has to understand them themselves - so many wafflers simply do not have any deep understanding of their subjects...
"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto ? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it - has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering ?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 225
Whilst it is true that without 'stress' we have no incentive to do anything different, is that a justification for 'suffering' as a 'virtue' ? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not. We do not require to 'suffer' in order to be able to think of improvements in our world, in fact 'suffering' is also debilitating, it distracts us from creative thought, e.g. when we are in pain. A happy medium is needed here. If our world is 'perfect' then we will stagnate as humans, if we are brainwashed to think it is perfect ("the best of all possible worlds") when it is not, then the same will happen. But very little imagination is required to see through either pretence, so our scope for improvement is still vast, with or without explicit 'suffering', even in the 'Buddhist' sense.
"In social dialogue, three quarters of all questions and answers are framed in order to hurt the participants a little bit; this is why many men thirst after society so much: it gives them a feeling of their strength. In these countless, but very small doses, malevolence takes effect as one of life's powerful stimulants..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 50
Some of the more inadequate however get addicted to such forms of stimulation...
"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful !"Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part II, 1883, 29
Taking delight in imposing pain on others is sometimes called sadism. In theory it is a 'bad thing', yet it is so pervasive in the attitudes of bureaucrats as to be pathological.
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.
Moral judgement and condemnation is the favourite form of revenge of the spiritually limited on those who are less so, likewise a form of compensation for their having been neglected by nature, finally an occasion for acquiring spirit and becoming refined - malice spiritualizes."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 156 & 219
"Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offence in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart's content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 62
Petty bullies abound in all our institutions, 'little Hitlers' who delight in abusing power they were never democratically given, in making life hell for as many as possible, in imposing 'punishments' out of all proportion to the scale of the supposed 'infringement', in persecuting all those who remain 'free', who haven't 'joined' them in their 'cage' of suppression and obedience, who dare to be 'different'. In their sad reversal of the role of 'public servant' we (in their, inadequacy tainted, view) serve them, but of course we have to pay them too ! Suffering this sort of malicious behaviour, from 'servants' is an absurdity, and the proliferation of their numbers now means that there are more bullies than sane men ! These petty busybodies cannot resist interfering in matters which are not their concern, and for which they have absolutely zero expertise or sense of responsibility, tolerating them is obviously quite mad.
"One speaks of the "profound injustice" of the social pact; as if the fact that this man is born in favourable circumstances, that in unfavourable ones, were in itself an injustice, or even that it is unjust that this man is born with these qualities, that man with those... The underprivileged, the decedents of all kinds are in revolt on account of themselves and need victims so as not to quench their thirst for destruction by destroying themselves... How can I help it that I am wretched ! But somebody must be responsible, otherwise it would be unbearable !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 765
Hence the modern view that everything wrong with you is someone else's fault !
"Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.
For what is freedom ? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance which divides us."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 38
Are there any bigger bullies in the world today than the supposed "representatives" in 'democratic' countries, who disenfranchise their own people, declare war on nations that don't share their deceits, bully all and sundry in a obsession with imposing their own lack of meaningful values on others ? Being 'liberal', it seems, means nothing more than the freedom to bully, to be intolerant, to be nasty, to behave as animals let out of the cage - it is very much a one-way liberty ! Whilst this 'power' to suppress is often attributed to Nietzsche's 'will', that is a major error, the small-minded don't ever feature in his philosophy, quite the opposite in fact, he just expects them to stay in their place and let him get on with his life...
"Whereas: true heroism consists, in not fighting under the banner of sacrifice, devotion, disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all - "This is what I am; this is what I want: - you can go to hell !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 349
Freedom means that 'we' act, as individuals, not 'them', in our stead, it ensures that genius is not subservient to the mindlessness and stupidity of the vain - collectively or individually.
"Datum: the oppressed, the lowly, the great masses of slaves and semi-slaves desire power.
First step: they make themselves free - they ransom themselves, in imagination at first, they recognize one another, they prevail.
Second step: they enter into battle, they demand recognition, equal rights, 'justice'.
Third step: they demand privileges (they draw the representatives of power over to their side).
Fourth step: they demand exclusive power, and they get it."Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 215
Nietzsche sees three groups involved here. The 'oppressed of all kinds', the 'mediocre of all kinds' and the 'discontented and sick of all kinds'. What he says happens, and we see it very clearly today, is that at first a genuine fight against the current power-brokers (the 'nobility') takes place; then the fight continues against the 'exceptional' - the privileged in talent; then continues even against the natural values of any society (e.g. trust, tolerance, diversity). Thus what starts as a justified struggle reverses and becomes its opposite, the 'power-brokers' reverse sides and regain control, but this time that control harms those best fit to help society grow. The 'unimaginative' come to dominate, then the 'incompetents' come to dominate, finally the 'nasties' come to dominate...
In such a society, any sort of personal talent is prejudicially regarded as something to be despised by the 'have-it-nots' and real freedom disintegrates. From a laudable attempt to free people to use their own abilities, we then see the attempt to stop those (who already were) continuing to use their innate abilities, and finally to prevent anyone escaping the deadening stupor of the worldview of the resentful sick...
"There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly.
We, who have a different faith - we, to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form associated with political organization in decay, but also a form assumed by man in decay, that is to say in diminishment, in process of becoming mediocre and losing his value: whither must we direct our hopes ? Towards new philosophers, we have no other choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse 'eternal values'."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 201 & 203
Nietzsche hated the very idea of 'democracy', the "herd instinct" as he called it. And, as practised by so many fools worldwide, he was right. Using 'democracy' to bring down the genius, to level the playing field, to 'standardise' humanity (in other words to use it as a doctrine of obsessive 'jealousy' - i.e. hate for those 'better-off'), or to treat even the 'bad' too well (a doctrine of 'guilt' or reverse-'jealousy' - hate for 'self' or 'normals' instead), is perhaps the biggest and most self-destructive crime there is - it 'sells-out' the whole of humanity at once !
"Every individual may be regarded as representing either the ascending or descending line of life. When one has decided which, one has thereby established a cannon for the value of his egoism. If he represents the ascending line his value is in fact extraordinary - and for the sake of the life-collective, which with him takes a step forward, the care expanded on his preservation, on the creation of optimum conditions for him, may be extreme... If he represents the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickening... then he can be accorded little value, and elementary fairness demands that he takes away as little as possible from the well-constituted. He is not better than a parasite on them..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 33
This 'negative-sum' or passive misuse of the entire 'democratic' concept, this attempt to always 'take-away', to destroy diversity, to destroy initiative, to destroy freedom under its very name is an hypocrisy of massive proportions (the 'leaders', strangely, seem always to be 'immunised' from the effects of their own levelling dogmas...). Democracy is, or should be, the 'positive-sum' or active freeing of the people from outside control, not their enslavement to evil dogmas and the unimaginative, and usually incompetent, beliefs of arrogant fools and bullies - those parasites.
"Europe would have to resolve to become equally threatening, namely to acquire a single will by means of a new caste dominating all Europe, a protracted terrible will of its own which could set its objectives thousands of years ahead... The time for petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth - the compulsion to grand politics."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 208
"What I mean to say is that the democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants - in every sense of the word, including the most spiritual."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 242
And so the prophesies come to pass, in the massive 'federal' bully of the bureaucratic 'European Union' Superstate (which is only held together by deceit and irresponsibility - the complete suppression of individual power...), and the massive 'federal' bully of the American 'Transnational Corporation' (which is only held together by deceit and irresponsibility - the complete suppression of individual power...). Think of the most hideous scenarios you can imagine. And lo and behold, there are tyrannical idiots enough to bring them into being, and to pretend that they are not only 'good' but absolutely 'essential'... And the masses are stupid enough to let them ! No wonder Nietzsche was so contemptuous of the 'herd animal'. Orwell himself would have been so very 'proud' (sic!) of the new mindless 'Eurasia' and 'Oceania', and what then of the growing (and still communist maybe) 'Eastasia' - with whom will they 'ally' in the (so anticipated it seems) wars with Muslim 'Mideastia' to come ? No shortage of 'anti-Christ's around today, even if they don't remotely resemble Nietzsche's spiritually enlightened 'noble' sort - or do they ?
"The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings (which on every level, also means as much as 'more complete beasts').
The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is however, that it does not feel itself to be a function (of the monarchy or of the commonwealth) but as their meaning and supreme justification - that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 257 & 258
Nothing changes it seems, in the extent of Mankind's stupidity...
"Not one of these ponderous herd animals with their uneasy conscience (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as the cause of the general welfare) want to know or scent that the 'general welfare' is not an ideal or a goal, or a concept that can be grasped at all, but only an emetic - that what is right for one cannot by any means therefore be right for another, that the demand for one morality for all is detrimental to precisely the higher men, in short that there exists an order of rank between man and man, consequently also between morality and morality."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 228
Whether we regard Nietzsche's 'rank' in vertical (class) or horizontal (talent) terms, we must recognise today that any absolute, 'everywhere applicable' morality is antithetical to our multicultural societies. Attempts to 'bully' others into following your own (largely baseless) 'convictions' are extremely undemocratic, to say the least, and can well be regarded as forms of violence or even 'declarations of war' on others - as we see today in the mutual antagonism of U.S. versus Arab interests and cultures. Yet these major conflicts only obscure the same prejudicial behaviours that are also evident everywhere else, visible at so many different social levels.
"If one has not passed through various convictions, but remains caught in the net of his first belief, he is in all events, because of this unchangeability, a representative of backward cultures... who reaches for any means to enforce his opinion because he simply cannot understand that there have to be other opinions.
Clever people may learn the results of science as much as they like, one still sees from their conversation... that they lack the scientific spirit. They do not have that instinctive mistrust of the wrong ways of thinking... For them it is enough to find any one hypothesis... and think that puts an end to it.... If a matter is unexplained, they become excited at the first notion resembling an explanation that enters their brain; this always has the worst consequences, especially in the realm of politics."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 632 & 635
The obsession and delusion, in all quarters, that 'we' are right (or 'good') and 'they' are wrong (or 'evil'), shows an intolerance and hatred of diversity and alternatives (not to mention real science) that is so mind-numbing, so destructive of creativity, as to prove suicidal (literally in many cases !).
"This - is now my way. Where is yours ? Thus did I answer those who asked me 'the way'. For the way - it doth not exist !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III, 1884, 55
If we cannot learn from each other's differences, if we cannot tolerate or even recognise alternatives, if we are 'immune' to criticism, then we cannot it seems manage to learn anything at all, and we will remain for all time arrogant 'savages', without the slightest hope of 'redemption' or 'forgiveness' - regardless of whether whatever form of future life or 'afterlife' that we wish to imagine actually exists... There will be no 'Supermen'.
"Hatred of egoism, whether it be one's own (as with Christians) or another's (as with socialists), is thus revealed as a value judgement under the predominating influence of revenge... In both cases we are in the presence of invalids who feel better for crying out, for whom defamation is a relief."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 373
"The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of 'aim', the concept of 'utility' or the concept of 'truth'. Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not 'true' is 'false'. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly; the categories 'aim', 'unity', 'being' which we used to project some value into the world - we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.
Conclusion: The faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 12
What is happening here ? Nietzsche tells us that our dreams are mistaken, that all our beliefs are false. This is just what we find in post-modernist thought - our 'certainties', those 'absolute truths' simply do not (and never did) exist. But there is more to come, and it is central to his philosophy:
"Presupposition of this hypothesis: that there is no 'truth', that there is no absolute nature of things, nor a 'thing-in-itself' This too is merely nihilism - even the most extreme nihilism. It places the values of things precisely in the lack of any reality corresponding to these values and in their being merely a symptom of strength on the part of the value-positers, a simplification for the sake of life."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 13
"Perhaps we will recognise then that the thing-in-itself deserves an Homeric laugh, in that it seemed to be so much, indeed everything, and is actually empty, that is, empty of meaning."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 16
Here we hit the mark with a bang. No things ? Just, in fact what quantum theory tells us ! Despite the sad clinging of so many scientists to the materialist view of reality - it simply doesn't exist ! But if there is no value at all in things, then where does it lie ?
"Values and their changes are related to increases in power of those positing the values. The measure of unbelief, of permitted 'freedom of the spirit' as an expression of an increase in power. 'Nihilism' an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life - partly destructive, partly ironic."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 14
But this sort of observation is unwelcome, we try to resist it:
"The nihilistic question 'for what?' is rooted in the old tradition of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside - by some superhuman authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and tasks. The authority of conscience now steps up front... Or the authority of reason... Or the social instinct (the herd). Or history... One wants to get around the will, the willing of a goal, the risk of positing a goal for oneself; one wants to rid oneself of the responsibility..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 20
And here we have it, the crisis we have today, the running away from personal responsibility, from ourselves, our emptiness, our vacuity.
"The nihilist's eye idealizes in the direction of ugliness and is unfaithful to his memories... And what he does not do for himself, he will also not do for the whole of mankind: he lets it drop.
Nihilism. It is ambiguous.
A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.
B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction - as active nihilism. Its opposite: the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness... so the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration - and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic etc."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 21, 22 and 23
Sound familiar ? And the result ?
"The lower species ('herd', 'mass', 'society') unlearns modesty and blows up its needs into cosmic and metaphysical values. In this way the whole of existence is vulgarised: in so far as the mass is dominant it bullies the exceptions, so they lose their faith in themselves and become nihilists."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 27-2
We can look beyond Nietzsche's prejudices here (e.g. his invalid belief that 'aristocrats' and 'others' were different species even !) to see the deeper meaning, i.e. that crassness destroys creativity. That the true nature of 'man' is lost, swamped by the vulgarness of the 'lowest common denominator'; which in today's world relates to nothing more than pure greed (the 'animal feeding frenzy' associated with the delusional belief that 'profit is all' and that any possible deceit which gets more of it should be relished), a crassness which has destroyed all our other human values - especially that essential social prop 'trust'... Nihilism indeed.
"Full of clattering buffoons is the market-place - and the people glory in their great men ! These are for them the masters of the hour... Away from the market-place and from fame taketh place all that is great; away from the market-place and from fame have ever dwelt the devisors of new values."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I, 1882, 12
"When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives that are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 201
Getting beyond the usual one-dimensional judgements, "beyond good and evil" as Nietzsche puts it, means attention to context, and in the context of 'man' we must see that the entire idea of 'average' so loved by the 'herd' is a myth. There is no such thing, we all have multiple values, each with different strengths, so no two people have ever been the same, none have ever been 'average'.
"Moral valuation has resulted in the greatest obtuseness of judgement: the value of a man in himself is underrated, almost overlooked, almost denied.
That the course of things makes its way independently of the approval of the great majority: that is why a few astonishing things have insinuated themselves on the earth."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 878 & 885
As usual though, Nietzsche rather exaggerates his cause, suggesting that the 'Superman' need not be restricted by any considerations concerning the effects of his actions on the majority (or any minority). Whilst we need not go so far, recognising that negative effects will feedback on the perpetrator too (in a way Nietzsche seems to ignore), we can nethertheless understand that current 'moralities' (those 'constraints' upon our actions) may well be faulty and destructive, and based upon untenable delusions and forms of ignorant suppression.
"When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident... Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism; it possesses truth only if God is truth - it stands or falls with the belief in God."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 5
"The Church combats the passions with excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its 'cure' is castration. It never asks: "How can one spiritualise, beautify, deify a desire?"... But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Morality as Anti-Nature, 1
Christianity, with its fundamental belief in 'original sin' - the view that humans are, in their essence, 'flawed' and 'unclean' and thus need to transcend and escape these aspects of their natures, leads to a debilitating self-contempt and innate fear of such subjects. Thus the prejudices we so often see within our societies, regarding such issues as 'sensuality' and 'emotions', generally may relate, not to valid concerns, but often to simple fears of the 'unknown', of the unforeseeable and possibly 'corrupting' consequences of our actions.
"Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle, any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear... That something already known, experienced, inscribed in the memory is posited as cause is the first consequence of this need. The new, the unexperienced, the strange is excluded from being cause."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, The Four Great Errors, 5
Such limiting prejudices are, however, yet further attempts by the 'control-freaks' in our world to prevent situations arising that are beyond their control, or that of their 'system of laws' - regardless of whether these actually benefit the people involved - or even that of the 'herd' ! In any situation, it is only the people affected that are relevant to any decision, any 'outsider' influence in these cases, is objectionable at best, and criminal bullying at worst. "Let the people decide their own fate, let us be 'masters' of ourselves" and the consequences - as we might, and should demand, for (as Nietzsche says, disparagingly, of the opposite view):
"In this way the famous "conscience" is at last created: an inner voice which does not measure the value of every action with regard to its consequences, but with regard to its intention and the degree to which this intention conforms to the 'laws'"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 141
"Expressed in a formula one might say: every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, The 'Improvers' of Mankind, 5
These 'means' reduce all human activity to a sham, arbitrary 'rules' replace anything to do with reality and ignore the real results of our actions. It is from this perspective that Nietzsche rejects the whole 'Christian' deceit:
"We possess the classical model in specifically Aryan forms: we may therefore hold the best-endowed and most reflective species of man responsible for the most fundamental lie that has ever been told. That lie has been copied almost everywhere: Aryan influence has corrupted all the world."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 142
"The Church is precisely that against which Jesus preached and against what he taught his disciples to fight"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 168
"Christianity is still possible at any time. It is not tied to any of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name: it requires neither the doctrine of a personal God, nor that of sin, nor that of immortality, nor that of redemption, nor that of faith; it has absolutely no need of metaphysics, and even less of asceticism, even less of a Christian "natural science". Christianity is a way of life, not a system of beliefs. It tells us how to act, not what we ought to believe."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 212
"For this is how religions tend to die: the mythic premises of a religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth. The feeling for myths dies and is replaced by religious claims to foundations in history."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, 10
"Tales of My death have been greatly exaggerated" as God might say... Yet the essential nature of Nietzsche's critique here remains sound. We do indeed see myths taken too seriously, we see 'religion' perverted into a form of 'control-freakery' with no freedom of belief, of thought, of possible progress, a denial even of knowledge and science itself. This strangulation of religious thought, this total rejection of evolution or change in any form, destroys free-will, that supposed 'special' gift of God to humans. It thus rejects God in itself, whilst pretending otherwise. Thus it wasn't Nietzsche who killed God, but the fundamentalists, who rejected (and still do) the beauty of His creation - the world-in-itself. It is if we have presented to us a 'mystery play', which is repeated, endlessly, without the slightest variation or emotion by the most wooden of actors - who could possibly love that ? If God has no real followers, then He must, inevitably, wither away...
"What does all the world know at present ? asked Zarathustra. Perhaps that the old God no longer liveth, in whom all the world once believed ? Thou sayest it, answered the old man sorrowfully. And I served that old God until his last hour... He was a hidden God, full of secrecy. Whoever extolled him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge ? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital. When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful and built himself a hell for the delights of his favourites. At last however he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful... and one day he suffocated of his all-too-great pity."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part IV, 1885, 66
"If Christianity were right in its tenets of... the danger of an eternal damnation, it would be a sign of stupidity not... to work exclusively on one's own salvation... Assuming he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure... and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878, 116
If such religions must self-destruct then, under the many self-contradictions Nietzsche highlights, then what should replace them ? The personal 'will to power' of course !
"I call an animal, a species, an individual depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, it prefers, what is harmful to it... I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuance, for accumulation of forces, for power, where the will to power is lacking there is decline. My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the supreme values of mankind - that values of decline, nihilistic values hold sway under the holiest names.
The pathos that develops out of this is called faith: closing one's eye with respect to oneself for good and all so as not to suffer from the sight of incurable falsity... theologians stretch out their hands after power, let us be in no doubt what at bottom is taking place every time: the will to the end, the nihilistic will wants power..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1894, 6 & 9
This then comes once more to the crux of the matter, Nietzsche recognises the hypocrisy here, the claim by religious leaders to deny the world, will and power - yet their behaviour in 'lording' it over their believers belies this (titles like "My Lord Bishop" say it all). This fundamental and deceitful pretence, seen in (almost) every religion (not just Christianity) is a living lie, covering up a delusion, the worship of a 'false', nay a 'fictitious' reality...
"Let us not undervalue this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a 'revaluation of all values' - an incarnate declaration of war and victory over all ancient conceptions of 'true' and 'untrue'. The most valuable insights are the last to be discovered; but the most valuable insights are methods.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point... This purely fictitious world is distinguished from the world of dreams, very much to its disadvantage, by the fact that the latter mirrors actuality, while the former falsifies, devalues and denies actuality."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1894, 13 &15
But we did say 'almost' every religion, and Nietzsche recognises this also:"That it does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces - absolute lack of intellectual integrity. Everything is justified, lies, slander, the most shameless forgery, if it serves to raise the temperature - until one 'believes'."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 172
"Buddhism is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity - it has a heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems in its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept 'God' is already abolished by the time it arrives... it no longer speaks of the 'struggle against sin' but, quite in accordance with reality, the 'struggle against suffering'."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1894, 20
To live is to act, to have some 'method' of living. If we do not act positively then the world decays (the 'second law of thermodynamics'). When we do act the world changes - cause and effect. Yet our simplistic view of this usually fails to take into account that what we call 'cause' is only one of a number of simultaneous influences always present:
"Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces... There is an infinite number of processes that elude us... An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment - that is saw the stream of the event - would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 112
Nietzsche's fundamental 'dynamical' insight, that life is a 'process' (which is only now penetrating the consciousness of most people, yet is supported by our complexity sciences) also implies that we must actively improve our lives, for if we do not then our faculties will decline in quality, we will become useless and atrophied - just as muscles will do if they are not used. As far as religion tries to deny these facts it becomes false; as far as humans try to mimic an 'unchanging' God then they also become false and self-destructive. This applies also when we do act but lie about it (always negative actions), or do the opposite and claim to act but remain inactive (allowing decay) !
"There is nothing more terrible than a barbaric slave class that has learned to consider its existence an injustice and sets about taking its revenge, not only on its own behalf, but on behalf of all past generations."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, 18
Like all such geniuses, Nietzsche had his dark side, his overbearing love of 'aristocracy' (superior by birth or 'blood') and the view that they could do no wrong; his deterministic (and somewhat inconsistent !) rejection of 'free-will'; his hate of democracy and his belief that the masses deserved and should rest content in their slavery (as they were naturally 'inferior'); his antipathy to 'institutionalised' Christianity; his demonological characterisation of whole peoples like the English, French and Germans into stereotypes; his love of 'glorious' war; his disdain for all women and so on (even the mismatch between what he 'said' and how he 'lived'), these views all give much scope for the self-righteous vilification that he has suffered over the years, despite the fact that they all have elements of truth within them. Yet the reverse is true, it seems, of that anti-Semitic accusation so regularly made of him, in his own mature words:
"The Jews are beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living in Europe... they are longing to be finally settled, permitted, respected somewhere... for which it would perhaps be a good idea to eject the anti-Semitic ranters from the country... It is plain that the stronger and already more firmly formed types of the new Germanism could enter into relations with them with the least hesitation..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, 251
Yet, like we see in all such (personality based) and usually one-dimensional critiques - whether right or wrong, the 'baby' is thrown out with the 'bathwater'. His many insights into the human condition, and into the limitations and deceits of 'rationality' still stand proud today and have largely been validated by science and by recent events. His masterly analysis of nihilism and its causes, and his insistence that we humans must make our own values are both especially relevant to today's world.
"In the tremendous multiplicity of events within an organism, the part which becomes conscious to us is a mere means: and the little bit of 'virtue', 'selflessness' and similar fictions are refuted radically by the total balance of events. We should study our organism in all its immorality."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1901, 674
In science we are increasingly finding that the delusion of 'objectivity' is untenable, and that there is no 'world-out-there', divorced from our perception and construction of it - both 'complex systems' insights that Nietzsche held, both still irrationally rejected by so many (even today) who call themselves 'rational' and 'educated'. Our delusions are so very hard to shake-off it seems. Yet we see the results of this failure to 'grow-as-people' all around us, we seem instead to prefer decay in our 'Brave New World'...
"Culture and the state - one should not deceive oneself over this - are antagonists: the 'cultural state' is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 1888, What the Germans Lack, 4
Where are those magnificences that marked earlier eras, those creations in the 'grand style' ? Today we have noise-polluted 'shopping malls' in place of chant-filled 'cathedrals', dirt-stained concrete 'office blocks' in place of ornate marble 'public buildings', 'piles of bricks' in place of 'sculpture', ugly forests of 'road-signs' in place of 'park' vistas... Where is the beauty, the joy, the love, the self-respect ? Where, even, is that 'nobility', that sense of 'noblese oblige' (the feudal obligation to care for the 'peasants' or for those 'slaves') that (despite their other failings) lifted the often imaginative aristocracy beyond the dishonour, deceitfulness and selfish greed so endemic to our arrogantly third-rate (so called) 'leaders' today ?
"Is it at last understood, is there a desire to understand, what the Renaissance was ? The revaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with every expedient, with every instinct, with genius of every kind, to bring about the victory of the opposing values, the noble values..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 1894, 61
The many quotes we have included here show the value of Nietzsche's 'active' philosophy, and thus we return to where we started, with Nietzsche showing just how far in advance of his times (and maybe ours still) he really was...
"And how far we still are from the time when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life join with scientific thought so that a higher organic system will develop in relation to which the scholar, the physician, the artist and the lawmaker, as we now know them, would have to appear as paltry antiquities !"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1887, 113
Such wisdom, as I hope I have demonstrated Nietzsche possessed (more than his contemporaries, more than many of ours), never goes out of date, we make many of the very same observations today in our science. What is lost, continually it seems, is the ability to make use of such wisdom. But even when Nietzsche got it wrong, he did so with a verve and passion that echoes those past eras - of men with 'will'... Sadly missed.
(by order of the 'Galactic Council')
Quotations taken from the following editions and translations:
Assorted Opinions and Maxims - in A Nietzsche Reader. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin 1977.
Attempt at a Self-Criticism - in The Birth of Tragedy. Shaun Whiteside. Penguin 2003.
Beyond Good and Evil. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin 2003.
Ecce Homo - in A Nietzsche Reader. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin 1977.
Human, All Too Human. Marion Faber & Stephen Lehmann. Penguin 1984.
The Birth of Tragedy. Shaun Whiteside. Penguin 2003.
The Gay Science. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge University Press 2001
The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin 2003.
The Wanderer and his Shadow - in A Nietzsche Reader. R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin 1977.
The Will to Power. Walter Kauffman & R.J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books 1968.
Thus Spake Zarathustra. Thomas Common. Wordsworth Editions 1997.