Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead: new values must be created.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900, Germany · Switzerland · Italy) : nietzschean philosophy (perspectivism). Our values have a history: the morality of "good" and "evil" was born, he argues, from the resentment of the weak. With the "death of God", these values lose their foundation: they must be re-evaluated, and new values created that say yes to life, without any world beyond. On AskPhilosophy: 6 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
He asked a question no one had asked so bluntly: what is the value of our values? Existentialism, psychoanalysis, Foucault and postmodern thought owe him a great deal.
His times
A professor of philology in Basel at 24, he left the university for health reasons and wrote while wandering between Switzerland and Italy. He collapsed in 1889 and never recovered. His antisemitic sister later distorted his work.
His positions
click a row to see the evidence"God is dead" is not a proof: it states that belief in God no longer grounds European culture, and announces its dizzying consequences.
There is only a perspectival seeing, a perspectival "knowing": all knowledge starts from a viewpoint and from affects.
No absolute truth detached from a viewpoint; perspectivism replaces the idea of knowledge "in itself".
"I am body entirely, and nothing else": the soul is only a word for something about the body.
He rejects free will as "self-causation", but also determinism: "in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills".
There are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
A fierce critic of faith, but also of philosophers' "pure" reason: he values the body, instincts and life.
No meaning is given from above: meaning must be created. "The Superman is the meaning of the earth."
Man is neither good nor bad: he is "something that shall be overcome".
Scorns egalitarianism and German nationalism; read sometimes as aristocratic, sometimes as individualist. His appropriation by Nazism went through his sister's falsifications.
Neither duty nor consequences: a "revaluation of all values" in the service of a stronger life.