no 23 | friedrich wilhelm nietzsche
You can't get very far in a Philosophy degree without butting heads with Nietzsche: the unfortunate playboy for all things anti-Christian, anti-conformist, or anti-anything. You don't believe in anything? Must be Nietzsche's fault. Pissed off at your parents? You can probably quote Nietzsche. Mad at God? Well, you get the idea. The problem with studying Nietzsche is that he has an unfortunate mythology surrounding him. While the Christians and Modernists were calling him a nihilist (which has regrettably stuck), he was dishing out the same accusation back (especially towards the Buddhists though, yes, Nietzsche was just as anti-Buddhist as he was anti-Christian). Holding a "Nietzchean" philosophy among most circles continues to be a negative or even dangerous perspective. I, like many others that have spent a fair amount of time studying Nietzsche, could write a book concerning the discrepancies between Nietzsche's works and the Nietzsche of popular culture. Since this, however, is not the purpose of this particular piece, I will not get into any specifics.
In my top 25 most influential persons list there will be several existentialist, or "proto-existentialist" (such as Nietzsche), thinkers, all for various reasons. Nietzsche finds himself not as prominent on my list due to the lack of common ground with his worldview. He makes the list, however, because it was Nietzsche who first attracted me to existentialist thinking - a way of thinking about things very differently than I originally had. Once I had started reading about Nietzsche, many things that I had previously started to question made sense. I desperately wanted to consider myself a rationalist, but the harder I tried the more I realized that the objective truths I so desperately wanted to contain and comprehend simply faded into obscurity. Enter Nietzsche.
The nineteenth-century German was more of an anti-philosopher than he was a philosopher. There is little analytical philosophy to be found in Nietzsche's works, and his conclusions are rarely the result of traditional logic. The moral philosophies of the Judeo-Christian traditions, Kant, and Bentham were cast aside by Nietzsche's "will to power" as attempt to derail the "slave moralities" Nietzsche perceived throughout humankind's history. The ideas of the "slave morality" and the "will to power" (along with other goodies such as "God is dead"), are just some of the fallouts of Nietzsche's overarching perspectivism. The reason that Nietzsche came to play such an influential role in my own philosophy was this concept of perspectivism. Granted, I would gut it and warp it into my own paradigm, but the distinction between perspectivism, relativism, and objectivism would become crucial to my thinking.
In layperson's terms, objectivism is the idea that humans, using their various tools of perception, are capable of translating the objective facts of reality (it is erroneous to conflate objectivism with philosophical realism). Relativism, on the other hand, states that their are no absolute truths, moral or otherwise, and all forms of judgment must be based on historical or cultural contexts. Nietzsche's perspectivism, however, understands that humans make judgments (i.e. form ideas, concepts, etc.) based on our individual circumstances. Whether there is an objective reality or not is of little concern, as we are constantly competing to persuade other individuals and society as a whole of our own perspective.
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.
-Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The ideas of absolutism, objectivism, relativism, and the like are hence subject to the perceiver. Truth is relative, not in truth itself, but relative in the sense of degrees of validity based on circumstantial grounds that cannot be simplified to "truth" and "not truth." Rather, the perceiver(s) is/are able to say whether something is [more] truthful or [probably] truthful without complete certainty of the truthfulness.
I must qualify, however, that one of the key aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy that is impossible to accept for myself is the philosophy of social hierarchy. His blasts against Christian had more to do with his greivence against the humble Christ than anything else. Pity and humility, according to Nietzsche, were degenerations of the human condition that were created by religious weaklings so that they could overpower those who are socially superior. I find it strange, however, that a warped version of Calvinist thinking in the United States, especially in the last generation by "prosperity gospel" messages, has used Christianity to advance the sort of morality that Nietzsche advocated.
