19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXXX. Abolish God, Abolish Guilt?

As more sophisticated societies developed from primitive tribes, the sense of indebtedness to their gods continues to grow. IN parallel, the conception of the gods themselves changes. As tribes are unified under despotic rule, their gods become unified until they are consolidated into a single god. The God of Christianity is the “highest potency” god yet developed and correspondingly the feeling of indebtedness and guilt is the greatest in Christianity. Modern society is beginning to become skeptical of Christianity and with this should come a diminution of guilt. A complete and definite victory of atheism may bring about a second innocence devoid of guilt for humanity as a whole.

In section 22 Nietzsche summarizes his hypothesis. Social humanity invented guilt to torture itself. Religion was seized upon to make this self-torture even worse. An entire inventory of instruments of torture was created. Naturalness was rejected in favor of eternal torture of hell. Here we find “an insanity of the will that is without parallel.” Everything humans will is directed against themselves, culminating in a God that assures them of their unworthiness. This is the worst sickness humanity has ever endured. We must turn away in horror from the cry of “love” in the midst of all of this torture.

Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future was published in 1886. It consists of nine “Parts”, each of which is divided into a number of sections, and a set of poems. In the Preface, Nietzsche places the book in the contest of “the fight against Plato, . . . or the fight against the Christian ecclesiastical pressure of millennia.” The “dogmatists error” committed by Plato was his “invention of the pure spirit and the good as such.” The conflict between Europe and Platonism/Christianity has created a dynamic tension, which gives hope of attaining a new goal.

Part One of Beyond Good and Evil is entitled “Prejudices of Philosophers” (or “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”). It begins with the fact that philosophers had had a will to discover the truth. There is a question of the origin of the will to truth, but in investigating the question, one is driven to the more fundamental question as to the value of the will to truth. “Granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance. Nietzsche suggests that he is the first to raise the question of the value of will to truth. He adds that this may be the most risky question that could possibly be raised.

Reading between the lines of what the philosophers say, Nietzsche concludes that all thinking, including philosophical thinking, must be counted among the instinctive functions. “Being conscious” is no more opposed to instinct than being born is opposed to heredity The thinking of the philosopher, then, is secretly influenced by the philosopher’s instincts. Behind al logic are valuations, which in turn are based on “physiological demands, for the maintenance of definite mode of life.” The value of “truth” over illusion and of certainty over uncertainty may only be necessary for human maintenance, but may be only superficial.

It is strange to assert, as Nietzsche does, that the falsehood of an opinion is no objection to it. The important questions about an opinion are whether it is life furthering, life preserving, and species preserving. The falsest opinions serve these functions best. Belief in the eternal and immutable. Reduction of the world to mathematical quantities. To recognize untruth as a condition of life is to go “beyond good and evil,” because it takes conditions of life to be ultimate values.

The philosophers claim to have uncovered their “truths” as the result of the cold application of logical dialectic. In fact, they are merely propounding and defending their real opinions: “their hearts desire abstracted and refined.” They do not admit that it is their prejudices that they parade as “truths.” Kant proposes his “categorical imperative” as if it was the result of dialectical thinking, but instead it expresses the prejudice of an old moralist and ethical preacher. Spinoza packages his own “wisdom” in a mathematical form that is nothing but hocus-pocus.

The Stoics desired to live “according to nature” but nature is indifferent and devoid of all values. Nature is thus contrary to life, which ultimately is al about valuation. If nature were equated to life, then the desire would be the empty imperative to live life according to life. The reality is that the Stoics were attempting to dictate their values to nature. The Stoic “love of truth” turns into a false view of nature. This projection of the values of the philosopher onto everything else is the most spiritual “will to power”: to create the world.

As regards Kant, Kant proclaimed the great discover of synthetic apriori judgments and asked how they are possible. Kant went on to discover a moral faculty to account for moral judgments. His explanation was that they are the product of a “faculty.” But this explanation is empty: such judgments are possible because we have a means for making them. This is like explaining the sleep-inducing property of opium to their power to produce sleep. The German philosophers followed Kant’s procedure enthusiastically, as with Schelling’s “intellectual intuition.” The real explanations for these claims were a felt need to counter the sensualism of the seventeenth century.

As regards Life as Will to Power, Nietzsche contends that living things seek to discharge their strength. “Life itself is will to power” according to Nietzsche. Self-preservation is only a relatively insignificant by-product of the discharge of strength. Thus, self-preservation is not the goal of life. Indeed, teleological principles such as that of self-preservation are superfluous and should be avoided. Spinoza showed that method demands the exclusion of teleological principles.

Philosophers are fond of discovering “immediate certainties” such as: “I think” (Descartes) and “I will” (Schopenhauer). But immediate certainty, absolute knowledge, the thing in itself is contradictions in terms. In the case of “I think” there is a host of connections to the other matters that make its immediacy impossible. What is the origin of the concept of thinking? What is the I? How can the I be the cause of thinking? If the answer is supposed to be given by intuition, we must ask why what is give by intuition is true.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXXIV. Primordial Humanity

Nietzsche’s “tentative expression” of his “hypothesis” concerning the origins of guilt is given beginning in Section 16 and continuing until the end of the essay. The starting point is a hypothesis about human beings in their primitive state, in which their instincts, their unconscious drives, are “allowed free play” and are “discharged” without opposition. These instinct s “hard hitherto been the foundation of his power, his joy, and his awesomeness. The “wild, extravagant instincts” included: Hostility, Cruelty, Delight in Persecution, Excitement and Destruction.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXXIII. Guilt and Punishment

The account of the origins of “freedom” and “responsibility” marks the end of the first essay. The aim of the Second Essay is to account for the origins of a different phenomenon, “guilt” or “bad conscience.” Before revealing their true origins, Nietzsche attempts to refute a different explanation. Guilt arises from punishment. To make his case Nietzsche gives an account of the origin of punishment. He describes it as a form of compensation to the victim of the crime, from the “debtor to the creditor.” Punishment does not instill guilt, but on the contrary it hardens the person punished.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXXII. The Origin of “Freedom” and “Responsibility”

The attributes of strength and weakness are natural, as are all the acts, which are performed through strength and weakness. Common language deceives us into believing that behind every act is a “doer” which can be separated from the act. There is an object, a bolt of lightening, which cause the flash of light to occur. This separation is applied to persons by the weak in the claim that it is the “subject” who is responsible for the act. Thus it is claimed that the strong are free not to act in the way that strong people naturally do. The weak then can claim that they have freely chosen weakness, which is to say that they have chosen to be “good.”

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXXI. The Man of Nobility and the Man of Rancor

The values of the noble man and the man of rancor work in opposite ways. The values of the noble re positive and are an affirmation of what he is. The values of the man of rancor are negative and are a condemnation of what someone else (i.e. the noble) is. The noble looks at those below him as merely unhappy and at his enemies as worthy of respect, which is “a bridge to love.” The man of rancor feels the might of those above him and reacts by declaring them “evil.” Any cleverness on the part of the noble is subordinate to his power and thrust of his instincts. A race of men of rancor regards sharp wittedness “an absolutely vital condition for its existence.”

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXX. The Slave-Revolt in Morality

When the priestly caste splits off from the aristocratic, there exists potential for conflict. The priests are physically powerless, but they are the most dangerous opponents because they become great haters. The priestly haters develop intellect as their weapon, which keeps human history from being ‘a dull and stupid thing.’ The Jewish priesthood were able o get their revenge against the powerful b y inverting their values. Wealth, nobility, and power are turned into evil, and only the poor, lowly, and powerless are good. The inversion constituted the slave-revolt in the history of morality. The revolt remains successful and has been forgotten only because of its success.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXIX. The Etymology of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad”

From the point of view of etymology (the study of the origin of words), one can obtain an insight into the genealogy of morality itself. In a number of different languages, the word ‘good’ developed to refer to features of nobility or autocracy. It came to designate the spiritually high-minded or the spiritually privileged. This development runs parallel to that of the word ‘bad’ which refers to features of the base, common, or low. In German the word ‘bad’ (schlecht) is the same as ‘simple’ (schlicht), and is merely descriptive of someone as common in contrast to the nobility. The development has not been noticed due to the destructive prejudice of democracy in modern times.

When the clerical case is the highest caste, they appropriate the word ‘pure’ and detach ‘good’ from social standing. Originally, purity was a matter of simple hygiene, but in the hands of the priestly aristocracy, it is transformed into an unhealthy brooding and emotional explosiveness. The metaphysics of the clergy finds purity b y repudiating the senses. Its discontent is to be ‘cured’ by ‘God’, which is the epitome of purity; pure nothingness. This made the passions dangerous, which in turn made the human being into an interesting animal with the consequence e that the human soul became deep and also became evil for the first time.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXVIII. Goodness and Utility

The first mistake of the English psychologists was to misunderstand the origin of the concept of “good” in utility. Their second mistake as internal to their theory: that goodness was taken to be an intrinsic value because the usefulness of “good” actions was forgotten. Surely, if the actions were so useful, their utility should never be forgotten a more plausible view was taken by Herbert Spencer. He also equates goodness with utility but he claims in addition that this association is never forgotten. It is because the association is made universally that goodness is thought to be an intrinsic value. Although Spencer’s view is wrong, it is at least in itself ‘self-consistent and psychologically tenable” as an explanation.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXVII. The Unhistorical Deduction of the Concept of “Good”

For all their good spirits, the English psychologists failed in their attempt to understand the concept of “good.” They gave an historical explanation of the origin of the concept. Originally, the on-egoistic acts of people are praised and called “good” by their recipients because they found them to be useful to themselves. Then the origin of the praise was forgotten and it became simply routine to praise non-egoistic acts. That which is merely useful to the recipient is erroneously called “good in itself.” The results of the English psychologists are a devaluation of the proudest values of humanity but they do not think historically, because they reflect the idiosyncratic categories of the psychologists; utility, forgetting, routine, and error.
The error of the English psychologists lies in locating the source of the concept “good” in the sentiments of the recipients of actions. Instead, its origin lies in the valuation given by “the noble, mighty, highly placed, and the high minded” to their own actions. A “good action” belongs “to the highest rank, in contradistinction to all that was base, low and plebeian.” A “bad action” is one undertaken out of baseness. This contrast between the actions of the nobles and that of the base depends on the “pathos of distance,” the feeling of superiority of the “higher” over the “lower.” There is no element of utility here, as the noble values spring from their passions, rather from any cool calculation. Nor is there any reason to call “good” with actions hat are not undertaken egoistically, as the herd would have it.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXVI. The English Psychologists

Nietzsche begins the first essay by considering the case of the “English psychologists,” who attempt to explain human behavior through such mechanisms as principles of associations. It would be an offense to human pride if all that is responsible for our mental life is so mechanical. Thus, it is interesting to speculate as to what drives these psychologists to treat the human being in this way. Is it a mean instinct to belittle humanity? Is it the pessimistic gloominess of disillusioned idealists? Is it a turn away from Plato and Christianity? Is it a taste for the strange and paradoxical? Perhaps it is one of these reasons or a bit of them all. Whatever the reason, Nietzsche holds out the hope hat they are “courageous, magnanimous and proud animals,” which hold out the hope of learning the truth, however distasteful it turns out to be.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXV. “On the Genealogy of Morals"

One of Nietzsche’s most widely widely-read books is the 1887 The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack. The book consists of three parts, each of which is self-contained, though fairly closely related with the others. The first part, “Good and Evil” ‘Good and Bad’” attempts to document an “inversion” from noble values into Christian values. The second part, “’Guilt’, ‘Bad Conscience,’ and Related Matters’” tries to show how religion originated through the invention of guilt as a form of self-torment. The third part, “What so ascetic Ideals Mean?” purports to explain how humanity, which suffers naturally and apparently for no reason, adopts suffering itself as the reason for its existence.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXIV. Moral Anti-Realism

In the first section of “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche claims to have been the first to formulate what we now call a moral anti-realist position in which he asserting that there are altogether no moral facts.” It is the task of the philosopher to go “beyond good and evil” according to Nietzsche. Morality and moral judgments are based on the misinterpretation of certain phenomena. They go back to a time when people mistook mere imaginings for truth. However, they are a sign or symptom of the “most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses” The only way to profit from morality is to interpret the “sign language that morality is.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXIII. Humanity Has No Purpose

The philosophies of the past have tried to impart meaning to humanity by describing it as having been made to achieve some end. Bu there is nothing that gives humans the qualities they have including God, society, and not even ourselves as with Kan and Plato. There is no end for which humanity exists. There is no “ideal of humanity”, “ideal of happiness”, “ideal of morality.” The very concept of an “end” is an invention. We are all necessarily connected parts of a whole, whose “value” it is impossible to judge To admit this fact is a great liberation and we redeem the world by denying God.

19th Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

XXII. The Error of Free Will

The essay “The Four Great Errors” in Twilight of the Idols catalogues four efforts concerning causality. The error of “free will” is a foul artifice of the theologians. Its aim is to impart ‘responsibility” for one’s actions which can only be atoned through the priest. The search for responsibility generally is the result of wishing to judge and punish specific actions. Thus the “will” was created by ancient priests to allow for themselves or God the right to punish. So that every act could be judged for its guilt, every act had to have its origin located in consciousness. The modern “immoralists” are trying to cleanse the world of the concept of guilt. Naturally, it is the priests and their concept of a “moral world-order” that pose the greatest obstacles to this attempt to cure humanity of its sickness.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XXI. Summary of the Case Against Rationalism

• The reasons that “this” world has been called “apparent” are in fact the reasons why that world is real, while the existence of any other world cannot be demonstrated.

• The so-called “true” world is merely a “moral-optical illusion,” and the criteria for its existence are in fact criteria for not=being.

• The only reason for favoring an otherworldly “better” life is as revenge against real life.

• The distinction between an “apparent” world and a “true” world is only a symbol of the decline of life.

• It may be thought that the artist’s esteem for appearance over reality makes him decadent.

• But the “appearance” of the artist is just a selective and corrected duplication of the real world.

• The tragic artist in particular is Dionysius and says, “Yes” to even the terrible in life.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XX. The Influence of Language on Our Thinking

Nietzsche diagnoses the cause of the rationalist bias in favor of “thinghood” to the origins of language. Language originated when psychology was in its more rudimentary form. There is everywhere a doer and a doing for instance. The doer is the Ego and the cause is the will. This initial notion of an ego is generalized to that of substance, which is the origin of the concept “thing.” Philosophers later found that the categories of “thinghood” can be handled with security, and so they made them apriori, since experience contradicts them. The final result of the error was the claim that because we have reasons, humans must belong in the divine realm of “being.” “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” says Nietzsche.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XIX. How the Philosophers Invented “God”

A second idiosyncratic aspect of philosophers confuses the last with the first. The rationalist’s philosophers begin with the highest concepts, when they would be at the end if they could be reached at all: the good, the true; and the perfect. Since being is static for these philosophers, the “highest” concepts could not have emerged from the “lower” ones. Because they cannot come to be, they must be treated as causes in themselves. Since these “highest” concepts must conform perfectly with one another, they are all located in a single being, the “most real being”, “God.” The human race has paid dearly for this web spinning by the philosophers.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

D. Real Science and Pseudo-Science

The senses are magnificent instruments of observation according to Nietzsche. The nose is more sensitive than a spectroscope, yet it has not been taken seriously b philosophers. Science is fruitful on to the extent that it accepts the testimony of the senses, extends their reach, and thinks through them. Would be sciences that disregard the senses falsify the world such as metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology. The “formal sciences” of logic and mathematics do not deal with reality at all. Logic is namely a system of conventions for using signs. Mathematics is merely applied logic.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

C. The “Apparent” and the “True” Worlds

A philosopher who embraced the senses and becoming in the face of the tendency of rationalism is Heraclitus. He did think that the senses are deceptive, but only because they present objects as being relatively permanent, while all things in reality are in flux. Nietzsche claims against Heraclitus and the Eleatic defenders of being” that the senses are not deceptive at all. Any claim to permanence, substance, thing hood, etc. in the world is based on an interpretation of what the senses present. The senses present the “apparent” world as it is, with its becoming passing away, and in general change. Nietzsche contends that the real product of the deception of reason is the “true” world of which the “apparent” world is supposed to be a distortion.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

B. Concept-Mummies

Philosophers are idiosyncratic in that they are opposed to anything temporal that involves becoming. They believe that they are showing respect for a subject when they treat it as something eternal, but in reality, they are only draining the life out of whatever they d-historicize, turning living concepts into “concept-mummies.” They search for “being” which they oppose absolutely to becoming, but it eludes their grasp. Desperate for something to blame they charge the senses with being deceptive and hiding the “true” world. They particularly despise the body, that whose end the senses serve, and which behaves as if it were real.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

A. “Reason” in Philosophy

The section of Twilight of the Idols entitled “’Reason in Philosophy’” contains an attack on the rationalism that characterizes most Western philosophy. This rationalism traffics in lifeless concepts and forever seeks the “being” that excludes becoming. Unable to find “being,” it blames the senses for presenting a world of mere “appearances.” It also attempts to begin its investigations with the most abstract concepts, which are considered “higher” and are more highly valued. This tendency shows up in the philosophy of the Greeks, the Indians, and the Christians. Nietzsche criticizes these rationalist methods and advocates the primacy of appearances over “being.”

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XVIII. Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer was one of Nietzsche’s last works, completed in 1888 and published in 1889. Its original title was, Psychologists Leisure, or the Idle Hours of Psychologists. The final title was a parody of Richard Wagner’s opera title Twilight of the Gods. The book contains a number of short pieces—some very short—and a lengthier essay entitled, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man.” We will examine one short essay and two excerpts from longer essays.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XVII. What “Knowledge” Really Is

Ordinary people seeking “knowledge” are in reality asking comfort in the familiar. “What is strange is to be traced back to something known.” Philosophers have understood nothing more of knowledge than that with which we are “at home.” We rejoice in knowledge because it releases us from the grip of fear. The Hegelian location of knowledge in “the idea” is a manifestation of this tendency. Philosophers seek to move “outward” from the most familiar—“the facts of consciousness.” But this is a fundamental error, because what we are used to is what is most difficult to know.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XVI. Consciousness and Knowledge

The result of this account of self-consciousness is that what we know or believe is merely what is of utility to the human race. In fact, we do not even know that it is useful. It may be that we have stupidly regarded as useful what will one day lead to the demise of humanity. The account does not oppose subject and object, which is the realm of epistemology-itself just a matter of grammar or “popular metaphysics.” Nor does it oppose appearance and thing in itself, which is a distinction we are not entitled to make.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XV. The Herd Mentality

The social nature of communication and its product self-consciousness has a crucial consequence for self-understanding. Despite our attempts to understand or know ourselves, we can only be self-conscious on terms that are products of society at large. So in attempting to become self-conscious, we become conscious instead of our “averageness.” In this way, our perspective on ourselves is the perspective of the herd. While our actions re in fact individual and unique, when we “translate them into consciousness,” they do not appear to be so. “Everything which becomes consciousness becomes just thereby shallow, meager, relatively stupid.” In fact, highly developed self-consciousness has become a disease in modern Europe.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XIV. Enduring Errors
Throughout human history, there have been a number of erroneous articles of faith that have been transmitted through the generations because of their utility. These include the ideas that there are enduring things, are equal things, are things, substances, and bodies, a thing is as it appears, our will is free, and what is god for me is also absolute good. The strength of these convictions is based not on their truth, but on “their antiquity, their embodiment, and their character as conditions of life.

A. Truth and Knowledge

The errors just listed became codified as “knowledge.” Through logic, they became the standard of the “true” and the “false.” For example, logic provides forms for judging enduring things as having properties, as being identical to one another, etc. Those who looked to life itself rather than “knowledge” for their beliefs were dismissed as mad. It was only very late that “deniers and doubters” of the errors came forth. Truth itself, as opposed to the “true” and “false” knowledge, then emerged as “the most impotent form of knowledge.

B. The Eleatics

The ancient Eleatic philosophers sought to counter the errors by denying the existence of changing things that are as they appear to be. But they did not do so from the standpoint of life. Rather, they falsified life by regarding themselves as having the same qualities as being itself: impersonality and unchanging permanence. They denied the role of impulse in cognition. They viewed reason “generally as an entirely free and self-originating activity.” However, their methods were invalid and their ends suspect.

C. The Intellectual Struggle

The “subtler sincerity and skepticism” made the Eleatics “impossible.” The skepticism pitted against one another opposing positions that were at least compatible with the ancient errors. There was room for argument concerning which is more useful for life. But there was also room for argument concerning what is irrelevant to life. Thus, there arose a kind of intellectual game, a struggle to attain “the truth.” This game became itself a kind of impulse and need. AS a result, “examination, denial, distrust and contradiction became forces.” This leads to the all-important clash in the thinker between these forces and the ancient errors.

D. Origin of the Logical

The fundamental tenet of logic is that different things can be brought under the same concept and are in this sense “the same.” It is opposed to the real truth- that there is no sameness of things in the world. The identification of merely similar things as “the same” merely has survival value, as when choosing what to eat. To be more circumspect in one’s judgments is dangerous to life. The impulses underlying logic, which struggle with one another in our judgments, are “in themselves very illogical or unjust.” Thus, logic has its origin in the illogical, though this fact is concealed.

E. Cause and Effect

One of the ancient errors is the doctrine of cause and effect. It is said that one thing happens because of something else and that the latter explains the former. However, all that we can really give is a description of one thing happening after something else. In order to make the description, we isolate a few features of what happens and ignore the rest. These features are conceptualizations that we make, and so we describe ourselves rather than explaining the world. The true way of describing change would require recognizing the “infinite number of processes” that escape our attention in the apparently abrupt transition from one state to another, which is contrary to the notion of cause and effect.

F. The Origin of Self-Consciousness

Leibniz had suggested in the seventeenth century that most human mental activity is not self-conscious. We are capable of thinking, feeling, willing, remembering, and in general “acting” without referring these activities to ourselves. Since self0consciousness is in this ay superfluous, the question arises as to its purpose. The answer is that self-consciousness is a necessary condition for communication. Although self-consciousness allows the individual to communicate his personal needs, communication is primarily a phenomenon of whole societies. Elaborate systems of communication were developed and self-consciousness developed with them, only to be squandered by artists, preachers, etc.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XIII. Novelty in the World

It is not the case that the world “eternally creates something new.” This claim anticipates Nietzsche’s hypothesis of “eternal recurrence” in Section 341, according to which the apparently “new” is simply a re-cycled version of what has existed before. In fact there is nothing at all in the world that is eternal. Even belief in matter, which is supposed to be the eternal subject of all change, is “just another error.” This error is just as erroneous as the belief by Parmenides and his followers that there is an eternal being, which is identified with God.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

XII. Foresight and Precaution

The death of God also has consequences for our view of the natural world, which is full of “shadows of God.” We must remain on guard against allowing these “shadows” to falsify our understanding of nature. It is only when nature becomes entirely “undeified” that we will be able to “naturalize ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed as nature.” The bulk of Section 109 consists of a list of ways in which nature is “deified”, along with the reasons for being on our guard against them. There are several ways of viewing the natural world against which we should be on our guard: as a living thing, as a machine, as an imitation of humanity, as subject to “laws”, as containing enduring substances. Each of these in some way is a consequence of trying to relate the natural world to some divinity.

A. The World as Organism

The organisms we perceive only on “the crust of the earth” are interpreted as being the essential, the universal and the eternal. But themselves are actually only derivative, rare, and accidental.

B. The World as a Machine

A machine is constructed with a view toward a single end, but there is no discernible end for the existence of the world. The model of the world as a machine is the observed universe. But the “astral arrangement in which we live is an exception” and its order should not be regarded as typical. The universe as a whole is chaotic, lacking in “order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called.” The order we find is not even “lucky” as this implies the assignment of blame or praise to the universe, which cannot be praised or blamed.

C. The World as Governed by Law

There is no moral order of the world. In fact, there are only necessities in nature. But the necessities are not based on such things as “commands,” and what acts from necessity does not obey. There is no chance in the world. Chance is only what occurs outside the framework of design but there I no design in the world.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

VIII. Nietzsche’s Literary Work

Nietzsche was trained in classical philology, which would hold the contemporary designation “classics.” His first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) attempted to explain Greek art and more generally Greek culture in a way that gives insight into the state of German culture. His 1878 work Human, All Too Human, initiated a steady stream of books that were philosophical, psychological, historical and cultural in content. These works were written in several literary forms, including essays, aphorisms, and poetry. In 1901 his sister published as The Will to Power, which was a collection of his notes from 1883-1888. She published in 1908 his autobiography Ecce Homo.

IX. Nietzsche and Christianity.

Like Marx and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche rejected Christianity. Although his views on Christianity appear here and there throughout his philosophical works, they are systematically developed in The Ant-Christ, which was published in 1895, after he had become insane. Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity were not directed at Jesus, but rather at the religion created by his followers. Nietzsche wrote, “In truth there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross” (The Antichrist, section 39). Nietzsche viewed Christianity as a socio-cultural phenomenon. His chief criticism was that it has a debilitating effect on the people who are under its sway.

X. The Joyful Wisdom

Nietzsche published The Joyful Wisdom, with a prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix in Songs in 1882. More recently, the title has been translated as The Gay Science. Nietzsche described the goal of the book as “to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit.” The book was the last in a “series” of books with this goal, the others being Human, All Too-Human (1887), The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880), and Dawn: Thoughts about the Prejudices of Morality (1881). The book consists of 63 rhymes, 383 very short essays, and 14 songs.

XI. The Death of God

Nietzsche’s famous proclamation that “God is dead” appears first in Section 108 of The Joyful Wisdom. In this section, entitled “New Struggles”, Nietzsche states that the “shadow” of the dead God will remain and will terrorize humans for millennia to come. It is “we”, the free spirits, who will have to overcome the shadow of the dead God. IN section 343, “What Our Cheerfulness Signifies,” Nietzsche describes the death of God as “the belief in the Christian has become unworthy of belief.” He welcomes the new unbelief as opening up new horizons. One specific consequence of the death of God is that “our entire European morality, which is based on faith in God, is undermined.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

E. Remarks Suggesting that Truth Exists

Nietzsche suggests on a number of occasions that truth does actually exist. For instance,

“That it does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces – absolute lack of intellectual integrity” (Will to Power, 172)

Further,

“What is the price of moral improvement? —Unhinging of reason, reduction of all motives to fear and hope (punishment and reward); dependence upon a priestly guardianship, upon pedantic formalities which claim to express a divine will; the implanting of a ‘conscience’ which sets a false knowing in place of testing and experiment” (Will to Power, 14).

And,

“How much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth does a spirit date? —This became for me the real standard of value. Error is cowardice, every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward oneself—Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipate experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. It wants rather to cross over the opposite of this—to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection –it wants the eternal circulation:--the same things the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence—my formula for this is amor fati or love of fate. It is part of this state to perceive not merely the necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability; and not their desirability merely in relation to the sides hitherto affirmed (perhaps as their complement or precondition), but for their own sake as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence, in which its will finds clearer expression.” (Will to Power, 104).

F. Summary

It appears that these remarks indicate that Nietzsche recognized two kinds of truth. ON the one hand there is ordinary truth, which he despises, and on the other hand there is Dionysian truth based upon change, adventure, danger, and the fullness of life.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

C. What Truth Is

For Nietzsche, truth is a way of keeping the herd in check (Will to Power, 277). Actually though the herd has a hatred for the truthful, or that which is beyond the simple (Will to Power, 285). The will to truth is a tool of the Will to Power (Will to Power, 285). Nietzsche writes,

“The so called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer: the senses, the memory, the instincts, etc., have developed as a consequence of this drive. The quickest possible reduction of the phenomena, economy, the accumulation of the spoils of knowledge (Will to Power, 423). “The methods of truth were not invented from motives of truth, but from motives of power, of wanting to be superior. ‘How is truth perceived?’ By the feeling of enhanced power” (Will to Power, 455)

Knowledge works as a tool of power and hence it is plain that it creases with every increase of power according to Nietzsche. The view that truth is found and that ignorance and error are at an end is one of the most potent seductions existing since “truth” is therefore more fateful than error and ignorance. Truth may be viewed as a necessary error, a perspectival appearance, or a showy word (Beyond Good and Evil, 4; Will to Power, 15; Will to Power, 80).

D. Determining the Value of Truth and Falsity (Appearance)

A variety of quotes demonstrate Nietzsche’s conclusions on the subject of the value of truth and false:

“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life preserving, perhaps even species cultivating” (Beyond Good and Evil, 4)

And,

“The antagonism between the ‘true world,’ as revealed by pessimism, ad a world possible or life-here one must test the rights of truth. It is necessary to measure the meaning of all these ideal drives against life to grasp what this antagonism really is: the struggle of sickly, despairing life that cleaves to a bdhond, with healthier more stupid and mendacious, ricer, less degenerate life. Therefore it is not ‘truth’ instruggle withlife but onekindof life in struggle with another” (Will to Power, 592)
And,

“But truth does not count as the supreme value, eenless as the supreme power. The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming and change (to objectified deception) here counts as more profound, primeval, metaphysical tan the will to truth, to reality, to mere appearance-the last is itself merely a form of the will to illusion” (Will to Power, 853).

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

B. Motivations For Seeking Knowledge and Asserting Truth

The so-called “seekers of truth” who “suffer for truth’s sake,” such as Spinoza, are really society’s outcasts seeking vengeance. (Beyond Good and Evil, 25). Nietzsche writes:

“In other cases, it is personal rancor that drives them (“martyrs to truth”) into the domain of problems—they combat problems in order to be right against particular people. But it is revenge above all that science has been able to employ—the revenge of the oppressed by the prevailing truth. . . . Truth, that is to say, the scientific method, was grasped and promoted by those who divined it in a weapon of war—an instrument of destruction—To make their opposition honorable, they needed, moreover, an apparatus similar in kind to that used by those they were attacking: -- they adopted the concept of ‘truth’ just as ostentatiously and unconditionally as their opponents—they became fanatics, at least they posed as such, because no other pose was taken seriously” (Will to Power, 457)

For Nietzsche, where there is genuinely disinterested scholarship this is a sign that the knowledge acquired is really of little importance to the scholar or it may be the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul (Beyond Good and Evil, 6, 10) Truth is a way of appealing to and controlling the herd. Nietzsche proposes, “The demand for truthfulness presupposes the knowability and stability of the person. In fact, however it is the object of education to create in the herd member a definite faith concerning the nature of man. It first invents this faith and then demands “truthfulness.” (Will to Power, 277) By promoting and cultivating “truthfulness” among “equals”, the fear of deception by and the mistrust of others is circumvented. “What is true” constitutes a question where an explanation is given which causes the minimum of spiritual effort. (Will to Power, 278, 279) Nietzsche argues that metaphysicians create a “real world” in order to express hatred for a world that makes them suffer (Will to Power, 579).

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

VII. Nietzsche on Knowledge and Truth

A. What Truth is Not

Nietzsche asserts that truth is not the objectively realm as determined by reason. Reason is just a form of rationalization to justify our instincts and inspirations. He writes that most of the consciousness thinking of a philosophy is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts (Beyond Good and Evil, 3). He contends that philosophers are childish and dishonest insofar as they attribute to “cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic” what is really based upon inspiration (Beyond Good and Evil, 5). Philosophers make the mistake of distrusting the evidence of their own bodies, their securest possessions in favor of reason (Beyond Good and Evil, 10). “The more abstract t the truth is that you would teach the more you have to seduce the senses to it” (Beyond Good and Evil, 128). “All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses” (Beyond Good and Evil, 134). He writes,

“All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp-alive. When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. Death changes old age, and here must be mere appearance, there must be some deception, which prevents us from perceiving that which has being where is the deceiver? We have found him, ‘they cry ecstatically; ‘it is the senses’. These senses, which are so immoral in other ways, too, deceive us concerning the true world. Moral let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becomings from history, from lies; history is nothing but faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say No to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of mankind they are all ‘mob.’ Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies.” (The Twilight of Idols)

Truth cannot be founding what is common and universal, as logic and reason demand. (Will to Power, 512 and Beyond Good and Evil, 43). Logic, reason, and knowledge produce convictions (Will to Power, 521-52). Logic and the categories of reason produce “expedient falsification” (Will to Power, 584). Nietzsche records, “There would be nothing that could be called knowledge if thought did not first re-form the world in this way into ‘things,’ into what is self-identical. Only because there is thought is there untruth” (Will to Power, 574). Truth is created, not discovered. He contends, “One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws (a world of identical cases) as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world or ourselves in which existence is made possible: we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensive, etc., for us” (Will to Power, 521). Truth is therefore not something there that might be found or discovered but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process Will to Power, 552). He writes,

“Life is ought to inspire confidence: the task thus imposed is tremendous. To solve it, man must be a liar by natural; he must be above all an artist. And he is one: metaphysics, religion, morality, science—al of them only products of his will to art, to lie, to flight from ‘truth’, to negation of ‘truth.’” (Will to Power, 583).

Logic and knowledge produce being whereas becoming is the actual state of things according to Nietzsche (Will to Power, 517). Truth does not consist of beliefs certified by faith or conviction. You can talk about the right to conviction and the courage to attack your convictions, but the presence of conviction is no mark of truth (Kaufman’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 354-54).

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

B. God is Dead We have Killed him – you and I!” (From The Joyful Wisdom) Nietzsche he asserts that we have lowered the noble concept of God to mediocrity and have thereby slain the idea of God. As regards Nietzsche’s atheism,

“It is a mater of course with me, from instinct, I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy upon us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us; you shall not think.” (Twilight of the Idols, ch. I, 1)

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

VI. God and Religion

A. Christianity

The strongest and most successful advocate of slave morality is the Christian church that, by teaching the virtues of love, self-sacrifice, and humility, distorts the nature of life and thereby makes human beings something far less than what they can be. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche asserts,

“With this I complete my indictment and pronounce my judgment: I condemn Christianity. I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible accusation that has ever been uttered. I say that it is the worst of possible corruptions that it seeks to effect the ultimate corruption, the most dreadful corruption. The Christian Church has befouled everything with its touch; it has reversed every sound value, turned every truth into a lie, and every impulse of integrity it has stigmatized with baseness. Then let no one date to speak to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! By its inmost necessity it must stand forever opposed to the effort to abolish suffering; for it battens upon suffering-it requires and it creates suffering to ensure its continuance. The canker of sin, for example, it was the church which first conferred this misery upon mankind: of the ‘equality of souls before God’ – this utter lie, this excuse for the rancor of all base minds, this bombshell concept bursting out in modern religiousness and subversion of human discipline-this is non other than Christian dynamite . . .. The humanitarian blessings of Christianity indeed! My view of so-called humanitarianism of Christianity is that it contradicts true humanism: It splits the human core with the art of self-pollution, the desire to escape from actuality at all costs, a mistrust of al healthy instincts, a contempt for them even.” In passing, we should note that he has almost equally barbed remarks regarding philosophers, the Germans, the Jews, the Anti-Semites, the English men and women, and common people and scientists in other passages of his works and so he does not single out Christianity alone for virulent criticism. Although Nietzsche attacks Christianity he expresses some respect for Jesus.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

E. Freedom

Nietzsche does not want to do away with freedom. He demands an authentic freedom, however, as opposed to a phony freedom of universal equality. Noble persons, the superior persons, should be free to take risks, to strive for great accomplishments, to suffer and even to sacrifice themselves. Freedom of this sort, which Nietzsche considers to be true freedom, cannot be extended to everyone without cheapening it since the herd is incapable of being truly free.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

D. Society (Primarily from The Will to Power)

Middle class values, Christianity, democracy, socialism all exhibit the leveling that he abhors. Equality is a “poisonous doctrine” that commands us to treat unequals equally and thereby destroys the truer notion of justice based upon merit. Within society, there must be an order of rank so that inferior people, the herd, do not think of themselves as equal to their superiors. “Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody else’s equal. ‘At bottom we are all herd and mob.’” The parliament government and freedom of press, upon which democracy prides itself, “are the means whereby cattle become masters.”

Socialism, “the tyranny of the meanest and most brainless,” denies life itself by cutting off growth-either (1) by preventing needed decay or (2) by attacking the desire for more possessions. Regarding needed decay, in The Will to Power, Nietzsche argues that “Decay, decline, and waste, are per se in no way open to objection: they are the natural consequences of life and vital growth. The phenomenon of decadence is just as necessary to life as advance or progress is: we are not in a position, which enables us to suppress it. On the contrary, reason would have it retain its rights.” It is disgraceful for socialist thinkers to envision a future society that would eliminate vice, disease, prostitution, crime, and poverty. “Failure and deformities” are a normal accompaniment of bold and energetic social advancement. Any socialist attempt to restructure society by restructuring its institutions so as to create a better life for all is as impossible as it is life denying. Institutions lack the power to create a utopia; and even the attempt stunts the growth of life.

Regarding the desire for more possessions, he says, “There will always be too many people of property for socialism ever to signify anything more than an attack of illness: and these people of property are like one man with one faith, ‘one must possess something in order to be some one.’” This however is the oldest and most wholesome of all instincts; I should add: ‘one must desire more than one has in order to become more’ since this is the teaching which life itself preaches to al living things: the morality of Development.”

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

C. The Will to Power

The “last man” signifies the suppression of our most fundamental instinct, the will to power, and the triumph of subhuman mediocrity. We cannot deny this instinct’s existence or force without denying life itself: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is Will to Power.” More elaborately in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche insists,

‘Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange, weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation; but why should one forever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each others as equal – it takes place in every healthy aristocracy—must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavor to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy – not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives and because life is precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter; people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which ‘the exploiting character’ is to be absent: --that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life. – Granting that as a theory this is a novelty – as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!” (Beyond Good and Evil, 259)

He attacks all philosophical or religious positions that advocate suppression of the drive for power. This drive for power can exhibit itself I many different ways – in war and government, of course, but also in preaching from a pulpit, in writing prose or poetry (As does Nietzsche), in achieving self-control, in punishing children who defy parental desires, in taking risks, or in educating oneself. He does not use the will to power as the ground and limit of a universal moral code.

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

B. The Last Man

What angers and frustrates Nietzsche is the fear that we may one day witness the appearance of the last man when no one any longer strives to surpass oneself, when everyone wants the same things, when no one takes risks or lets their work involve any deep suffering, when everyone seeks pleasures in moderation, when everyone wants to be equal to everyone else, when no one wants to rule or obey, when no one wants to be either rich or poor, when no one wants to quarrel to long or too harshly lest, “their digestion might be upset.” “No herdsman and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same; whoever feels different goes to the insane asylum.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5).

19th Century Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

V. Human Nature and Society

A. Human Nature

Nietzsche insists that human beings constitute a transitional, not a final stage of development. Consequently, human beings cannot become too complacent about or satisfied with their achievements without endangering their claim to be human. They must constantly strive to surpass themselves and to prepare the way for what Nietzsche calls “the superman” or “overman” if they want to avoid slipping back to a subhuman level.

In the prologue to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (Prologue 4), Zarathustra says,

“Man is a rope, stretched between beast and Superman – a rope across an abyss,
a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he transcends and descends.”

Risks, suffering, sacrifice, reevaluation of values, indomitable spirit, self-assertion, and a willingness to face life without rancor are evident when true human beings act. In effect, humanity itself resides with the noble person.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

II. Morality

A. Master/Slave Morality

There is a master morality according to Nietzsche, which is exhibited by noble persons who choose for themselves what is valuable, and a slave morality exhibited by the weak persons who inculcate mediocrity in order to protect themselves from superior persons. Thus master morality is based upon choice, whereas slave morality is based upon resentment and fear. Of the noble person, Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil,

“The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: ‘What is injurious to me is injurious in itself;’ he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values. He honors whatever he recognizes in himself. Such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow: The Noble man also helps the unfortunate, but nor, or scarcely, out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super-abundance of power. The noble man honors in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. “Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast,” says an old Scandinavian Saga; it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking Such type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: ‘He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one.’ The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which see precisely in sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in desinterestessement, the characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity and irony towards ‘selflessness,’ belongs as definitely to noble quality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in the presence of sympathy and the ‘warm heart.’” (Beyond Good and Evil, 260) No action is objectively and automatically right or wrong within the master morality. Thus, for example, the characteristic attributes of slave morality, such as pity, selflessness, compassion, humility, and love of neighbor, are not objectively and automatically wrong. A noble person, too, can exhibit these attributes, so long as they originate through self-assertion, not through resentment and fear.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

I. Life

Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran minister and was also the son of a Lutheran minister. His mother was the daughter of a Lutheran minister. His father died of mental illness due to what was termed “a softening of the brain” when Nietzsche was 4 years old. Nietzsche was raised in a household consisting of his mother, his younger sister, his father’s mother, and two maiden aunts. He was educated at Bonn and Leipzig. At some point he was supportive of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Due to the influence of his favorite teacher, Frederick Ritschl, he was appointed as professor at the University of Basel when he was 24 years of age, being awarded a doctoral degree without having to write or defend a dissertation. He taught at Basel from 1869-1879 and in 1870 he served as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War, contracting both diphtheria and dysentery. During his teaching years and throughout most of his life he suffered from migraine headaches and gastric pains which were severe enough to induce vomiting. His illnesses were a primary factor in his giving up teaching. He published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. During the 1870’s he was a friend of Richard Wagner and was also in love with Wagner’s wife Cosima. Nietzsche and Wagner both were extremely egoistic and they found themselves at odd as time passed. Nietzsche especially disliked anti-Semitism, Berman nationalism, and Wagner’s favorable use of Christianity in Parsifal. In 1882, Nietzsche met and formed a brief friendship with Lou Salome, who established herself as a friend of celebrities. His major works after The Birth of Tragedy, include, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Human All Too Human, The Joyful Wisdom, Twilight of Idols, Ecce Homo, The Antichrist, and The Will to Power. The Will to Power is a posthumous collection of notes written between 1864 and 1888. His last works, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, may show some early signs of mental illness, but they cannot be discounted as philosophy. IN January 1889, he collapsed on a street and was insane for the remainder of his life. It is generally held that the insanity resulted from tertiary syphilis, which was contracted when Nietzsche may have visited a brother as a student. He is regarded to have been sexually celibate nearly all of his life. His sister who apparently changed some of his writings after his death was married to the leading anti-Semite in Germany and she took control of his literary estate after his death.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

II. Philosophy

Wollstonecraft’s lasting place in the history of philosophy rests upon her work entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. This work constitutes a classical feminist text. In the work she appealed to egalitarian social philosophy as the basis for the creation and preservation of equal rights and opportunities for women. The foundation of morality in all human beings, according to Wollstonecraft, whether male or female, is their common possession of the faculty of reason and rationality. Wollstonecraft argued that women must claim their equality by accepting its unemotional dictates. Excessive concerns for thing such as romantic love and physical desirability are not the natural conditions of female existence, according to Wollstonecraft. These are the socially imposed means by which male domination enslaves women. Further, the work entitled Maria or the Wrongs of Woman develops similar themes but in a fictional setting. The work shows that the plight of working women differs from imprisonment.

Wollstonecraft wrote extensively on the degradation of women. She contends that if reason is an “emanation of divinity,” then it must be the same in men and women. And if we women live by “wit and cunning” it must be because these have been substituted for an understanding (VRW, 53). Knowledge consists in “the power of generalizing ideas of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations.” (VRW, 54) And without the cultivation of knowledge and understanding, women are closed off from the foundations of virtue.

“The men who pride themselves upon paying arbitrary insolent respect to the sex, with the most scrupulous exactness, are most inclined to tyrannize over and despise the very weakness they cherish.” (VRW, 55) Women are given food and clothes without working for them but have to surrender in exchange their health, liberty and the acquisition of virtue (VRW, 56). By showing trivial attentions toward women, men insultingly support their own superiority (VRW, 57).

While abilities and virtues are cultivated in men and they can improve themselves through effort, this is not the case with women (VRW, 57) Consequently, women take on the follies and vices of civilization without the useful fruit (VRW, 61). The rich are in a similar situation. Women are plunged into “meannesses, cares and sorrows” due to the “prevailing opinion that they were created to feel rather than to reason” (VRW, 62) “Without knowledge, there can be no morality” (VRW, 63 and reason is necessary for women to perform their duties properly (VRW, 64) “Most of the evils of life arise from a desire of present enjoyment that outruns itself: (VRW, 73) and this is why when women lose their husband’s attentions after the initial excitement of marriage wears off, there are problems. The present education of women, at best, leaves them romantic and inconstant and at worst, vain and mean. (VRW, 75)

“Humanity to animals should be particularly cultivated as part of national education . . . The habitual cruelty is first caught at school, where it is one of the rare sports of boys to torment the miserable brutes that fall in their way. The transition, as they grow up, from barbarity to brutes to domestic tyranny over wives, children, and servants is very easy. Justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it extends to the whole creation; nay, I believe that it may be delivered as an axiom, that those who can see pain, unmoved will soon learn to inflict it.” (VRW, 178)

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

I. Life

Wollstonecraft grew up in London in a family with an abusive father and a submissive mother. In 1786, she published a book entitled, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, based on her experiences teaching in a village school near London. She operated the school with two of her sisters, but the school had to close. During 1786-1787, she was a governess in Ireland, but the experience did not go well. In 1787, she moved to London with a manuscript for a novel, Maria, which was published in 1788 by Joseph Johnson, a publisher willing to publish radical views. In London, she met the writers Thomas Paine and William Godwin. A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. Late in 1792, she went to Paris, where she met and fell in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imray. They had a child, but Imray eventually abandoned her, which led to a period during which she made two attempts at suicide. An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in December 1794. Back in England, she entered a relationship with and later married William Godwin. She died of an infection some 2 weeks after giving birth to their first child, Mary Godwin, later to become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

II. Influence

Although most known for living a scandalous life, her contributions to feminism have attracted recognition in the latter half of the 20th century.

19th Century Philosophers: Mill

IX. Views on Women (Based upon his work, The Subjection of Women)

A. Basic Position

“That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes, the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.” Questions about the natural abilities and inclinations of women should be settled in free and open competition, once the present advantages enjoyed by men have been removed. Most of the usual claims about women, used to justify their lower status, such as their willingness to be submissive, their voluntary desire to be just wives and mothers, their mental inferiority are speculative claims rather than established truths. Even if true now, the claims are unreliable because of the artificial social circumstances (generally set up to the advantage of men) that often govern and control women’s attitudes. Many women do not accept this voluntary subjection, as growing evidence in different places shows. Natural and social circumstances, such as the woman’s near total dependence upon a man in marriage, hinder women’s rebellion against the power of men.

B. Historical Situation

The power of men over women is a historical remnant of the rule of force as the primary principle of social life. The pattern of fixed social hierarchies characteristic of the past, for example with respect to states and slavery, gives way to freedom, mobility, and equality as human progress continues (and the same should happen with respect women).

C. Dispelling Misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Establishing the rights of women is unnecessary because they are able to exert their power in other ways. The response to this misunderstanding lies in Mill’s assertion that power is not adequate compensation for loss of freedom or for the denial on warranted rights. In addition, women should not have to resort to other means than merely asserting their rights. Further, even if women possess respect and dignity due to the good will of most men and due to the often favorable relations within a marriage, this situation does not always occur and laws need to be set up not to protect us from the majority of people of good will but rather from the minority who would do us harm.

Misunderstanding: Women lack the originality to produce great scientific or artistic works. Mill’s response to this misunderstanding lies in his assertion that the social circumstances of women have not provided them with the opportunities to dedicate their lives to a profession in the ways that have been open to men.

D. Advantages to Human Beings generally likely to follow from the liberation of women.

There are essentially three of the advantages. First, the liberation of women will result in greater social justice according to Mill. Further, such liberation will have the consequence of “doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.” Finally, the outcome of such liberation will be the enhancement of the moral influence of women.

E. Miscellaneous

It is strange that a country can deny women the right to vote on the grounds that they are incapable of meeting political duties when the whole country was ruled by women (such as Queen Elizabeth I). Although nothing should prevent women from developing their abilities in a profession while in a marriage, it is desirable that women not have to support a family financially, since their commitment to a marriage involves considerable commitment to the management of a household and to raising a family. Society’s cultivating a tendency in boys to think of themselves as naturally, or inherently, superior to girls perverts the whole manner of existence of the man, both as an individual and as a social being. Society’s cultivating devotion to self-sacrifice in a woman exacts from her an unremitting restraint of the whole of her natural inclinations and the sole return it makes to her for what often deserves the name of a martyrdom is consideration from her husband and other family members.