Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a great philosopher , essayist and cultural critic of German origin. His related writings on truth, morality, language, aesthetics, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, consciousness, and the meaning of existence have exerted an enormous influence on Western philosophy and history. intellectual of our days.

Biography of Friedrich Nietzsche

He was born on October 15, 1844 in Röcken a place of the kingdom of Saxony in Prussia . He was born with severe myopia and his father was the Lutheran pastor Karl Ludwig , his mother Francisca Oehler . In 1847, his father was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease and passed away when he was five years old. He moved with his mother and sister to Naumburg , where he lived with his maternal grandmother under the supervision of a local magistrate, Bemhard Dächsel .

In 1854, he was admitted to the renowned Schulpforta , where he studied from 1858 to 1864. After graduation, in 1864, Friedrich Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn to become a pastor like his father.

In 1867 he performed a year of voluntary military service with the Prussian Naumburg artillery. In March 1868 he renounced his German citizenship, remaining officially stateless for the rest of his life. He served on the Prussian side during the Franco-Prussian War as a medical orderly.

In 1869, he was appointed professor of Greek philology at the University of Basel . He began working as a teacher at the age of 24 and retired at 35. His ideas about Christianity and God made him unpresentable before the authorities of the Ministry of Education.

Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a great critic of Western culture and considered that its meaning had always been to repress life in the name of rationalism and morality . His main contribution in terms of thinking was rethinking the values underlying the life developed the doctrine of the will of the power . He thought that traditional values had lost their power in people, which he called passive nihilism . For him, traditional values ​​represented a morality established by weak and resentful people who encouraged behaviors such as submission and conformity.

He was an enemy of the Kantian ethics of duty, the utilitarian and mainly Christian ethics, and he gave more value to a healthy, strong, impulsive life with a will to dominate. All that is weak, sick and unsuccessful is bad, but compassion is definitely the worst evil of all.

Contributions

His main contributions were the following:

• He created the philosophy of the dawn because he believed that young people could change the way of thinking and acting of humanity.
• For Friedrich Nietzsche, art was the salvation of man, beyond morality, good and evil, that is why man must achieve aesthetics and be an artist.
• He contributed to the theory of the Tragic Vision of the World , which explained that life itself and reality have adversities and that man, as a mortal, must act with dignity, facing his destiny as it is presented to him.

Superman theory

This theory told us that man was a superior being , that he had a vigorous, superabundant nature of life and in which the will to power was displayed. This meant that man was a free being with enough courage to be able to create his values , impose his strength and his will . The superman did not believe in equality nor did he allow himself to be convinced, he lived his life with greater love and strength and in order to reach him, a series of transformations had to be passed .

Religion

Friedrich Nietzsche left religion when he was very young when he began to read the documentary hypothesis of the Bible by Professor Wilhelm De Wette , formerly of the University of Basel, who doubted the divine inspiration of the Old Testament . He rejects the Christian God, but at the same time he is a religious thinker precisely because he adopts the analysis of religion as an intellectual construct that addresses the existential problems of pain and death , and gives authority to the ethos that the community creates. He sees Dionysian pantheism as a solution to the problems of pain and death.

Moral

For Nietzsche there are no moral facts , and there is nothing in nature that has value in itself. Rather, to speak of good or evil is to speak of human illusions , of lies that we consider necessary to live by. It tells us that our biological nature forces us to see the world through moral lenses, judging it in terms of good and bad , even though the world is not itself.

According to his thinking, individuals do not have privileges over other animals, but are part of a network that forms the universe and for him the will is not a matter of freedom . Deny that we can be rational deliberators .

Ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche

His ethics is based on self-realization and self- development , it is a purely material ethic in which happiness is understood as the creation of oneself in a game of experiences. He criticizes morality because for him it is a force that lies and corrupts humanity, and uses nihilism as an alternative to accept life and simply live beyond good and evil, rejecting all values ​​and norms of a moral nature and religious.

Works by Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche published his first book ” The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music . ” He was also the author of works such as: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Twilight of the Gods (1888), The Antichrist (1888) , Ecce Homo (1889) and The will to power (1901).

Phrases

Some of the most important phrases are the following:

• Not only those who speak against what they know lie , but also those who speak against what they do not know.
• Whoever fights with monsters, let him take care of turning himself into a monster. When you look long into an abyss , the abyss also looks into you.
• There are no moral phenomena , but only a moral explanation of the phenomena.
• You were once monkeys, and now the man is cuter than any ape.
• Between the sense of guilt and pleasure , pleasure always wins.
• It’s easy to keep things complicated , but difficult to keep things simple.