The Nietzschean Core
What is the essence of Nietzsche's teaching?
I have been hosting a series of conversations, called “The Nietzsche Dialogues”, in preparation for an upcoming course on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which starts July 15th 2022. So far I have discussed Nietzsche’s relation to Christianity with the founder of Maniphesto, Paul Robson; I have explored an idiosyncratic tantric / integral interpretation of Nietzsche with the co-creator of The Integral Stage, Layman Pascal; and I have attempted to approach a meta-level of Nietzsche in relation to Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, with rogue Girardian theorist, Thomas Hamelryck.
All of these conversations open up new dimensions or perspectives on Nietzsche as an anti-Christ-like figure, Nietzsche as a tantric patriarch, and Nietzsche as a psychologically unstable genius struggling in the abyss of an emerging secular post-religious world. All of these Nietzsche’s have something to teach us, all of these Nietzsche’s have entire world’s to offer us in the 21st century.
However, there is still a core to Nietzsche as a philosopher, which I think it is important to keep stable or invariant, even if we shift our view on certain aspects of Nietzsche’s character, or certain interpretative possibilities opened up by Nietzsche himself. The point of this article is to identify this “core Nietzsche”, which should be understood at a minimal level, to make significant interventions in the “post-Nietzschean field”, which I discussed at length in a previous post, and which I will be elaborating on in an upcoming Stoa presentation on July 12th.
This core includes five concepts:
Perspectivism: After Death of God, relativistic perspectivity, in relation to esteeming/valuing
Overman: Response to Death of God as absolute goal relative to perspectives, self-overcoming, striving
Will to Power: Inherent desire of life to overcome and expand itself, grand striving to transcend what exists
Master/Slave Morality: Value system born of resentment of actual world, humans enslaved to other perfect world
Eternal Recurrence: Fearful idea of universe repeating endlessly, no redemption possible, must embrace amor fati
The first concept, perspectivism, should crucially not be understood as “all perspectives are equal”, as if Nietzsche was all of a sudden proclaiming a type of flat relativity. Nietzsche was a man who privileged the striving for greatness, irrespective of the field humans valued, and who felt nauseated by humans who were comfortable in “small virtues”. In this way, what Nietzsche was attempting to open up with perspectivism was more a negative fact: Western society based on the metaphysics of Christianity had constructed itself, had engaged in acts of valuing and esteeming, which were organized objectively by a suprasensible other-worldly ground, God:
“Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!” (Prologue — 2)
In the loss of this ground, what we lose is this very ground as an objective orientation, or as an objective grasping/clinging/striving. What we are left with is a field of perspectives hanging over or attempting to navigate, an abyss. One gets a sense that the abyss is objective. Another way of saying this, is that there is no object that one can use as a ground or a navigating tool for this life. There is this life, THIS LIFE, and nothing else to hang on to, grab or grasp, to stable the emotional anxiety (and nausea) that comes up when fully reflecting on this real. Enjoy the ride!
What is crucial here, is that Nietzsche, far from being a nihilist, is perhaps the ultimate anti-nihilist, because he is saying that, irrespective of the fact that God as an objective ground is gone, and all we have is a field of perspectives, this field of perspectives as such, is still responsible for esteeming and valuing. The challenge is enormous: we must still engage in the radical act of esteeming and valuing, even in an abyssal situation, with no guarantee of a happy ending. Or as Slavoj Žižek has stated on several occasions (paraphrased):
‘there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is probably another train heading our direction to wipe us out’.
Nietzsche has a similar view, there is no “end-hope” for you as an individual perspective, but there is a process of esteeming and valuing that allows you to become great, which allows you to become a form of perspective that has never existed before, and which can be used as a stepping stone of esteeming and valuation for other great beings.
The second concept, the overman (also often translated as superman), should be connected to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. For Nietzsche, we do not have a field of perspectives organized by an other-worldly God, but a field of perspectives organized by the potentiality of the overman. The overman is here framed as a process of self-overcoming via the striving for greatness, a form of beyond or inhuman greatness, which pushes or expands the very limits of what we consider human:
“I teach you the overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” (Prologue — 3)
One could even say that the overman is oriented towards what we may consider alien in relation to the human world. The overman creates his own values, the overman creates his own standards of esteeming. Whereas most humans accept the values given by the unconscious metaphysics of society (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, etc.), the overman is someone who may find some wisdom in this tradition or that tradition, but overall, his project is to construct a table that did not exist when he was born. The overman leaves a new table for the others after he dies.
In this sense, Nietzsche cannot be seen as a type of humanist (which perhaps happens in certain Marxist or existentialist interpretations). Nietzsche is an alienist. Nietzsche is an alienist in the sense that he wants to call out of the human the most extreme dimensions of the human, he wants humans to overcome themselves, to overcome what we think of as our identity, to be rather intimately entangled with the inhuman dimension of being. We should be as reflectively disgusted with what we are, as many are disgusted at the base level instinctual mediation of animal life. We should strive to be a being that is disgusted by what we were, and in the presencing or actualization of the alien, found something that is inherently the most valuable object the universe has ever produced (only to be imminently transcended by what is following your lead).
The third concept, the will to power, is what makes all of this possible. For Nietzsche, the base level “metaphysics” (if we can call it that) of the universe is the will to power (which is a type of inherent energy dynamic). The will to power is not, as it is often misinterpreted, a will to overpowering other beings, or mastering other beings. This would even be a paradoxical form of slavery, and a reified objectification of an unconscious will to power in search of what does not exist: a perfect object. In fact, for Nietzsche, in its unconscious manifestation, the will to power does divide itself up into Masters and Slaves, Leaders and Followers, Commanders and Soldiers, or even, Men and Women, and so forth. In this dividing up, there is the setting up of a certain system of good and evil which is identified with by the unreflective. But this is all unconscious striving, and not the overman’s striving.
The overman’s striving, in making his own values, of figuring out his own good and evil, makes the will to power conscious:
“Your will and your values you set upon the river of becoming; what the people believe to be good and evil reveals to me an ancient will to power. […] This will itself, the will to power — [there] unexhausted […] life sacrifices itself — for power!” (On Self-Overcoming)
What the will to power is most closely connected with is a dynamic internal to this life for more power in the expansion of life, more power in the transcending of what exists. How the overman expands life and transcends what exists is by internalizing the master-slave dynamic, or the leading-following dynamic, or even, the masculine-feminine dynamic within oneself. What the unconscious human projects outside of themselves, the overman wrestles with inside himself. That is why the overman is always, and first and foremost, in a self-war. As Nietzsche says somewhere, what is hardest is to command great things, but what is even harder than the hardest, is to follow one’s own great commands.
With the fourth concept, Master/Slave Morality, we can already see why so many would find it more attractive to become enslaved to a given morality, as opposed to walking the path of the overman. In the unconscious manifestation of the will to power, it is as if human beings become trapped into a metaphysical container which has been set up for them to not expand life and transcend the given. The most extreme, and in Nietzsche’s view, the most pernicious form of these metaphysical containers, are the forms that project the perfect world, or the best world, or the truest reality, into an other world that you will only reach in death, i.e. an “after-life”.
“So I too once cast my delusion beyond humans, like all hinterworldly. Beyond humans in truth? Oh my brothers, this god that I created was of human make and madness, like all gods! Human he was, and only a poor flake of human and ego.” (On the Hinterworldly)
Of course, here we find Nietzsche’s zero-level critique and negation of Christian metaphysics, that is the “two-world mythology” of a secular Earthly world, and a supernatural Heavenly world. For Nietzsche, this metaphysics is set up by the “hinterworldly” (i.e. despisers of the body, lovers of the after-life) as a will to truth which murders truth itself. What he juxtaposes against this will to truth is the will to power, which he sees as connected to life, and which, he states, is “on the heels” of the will to truth as what is more truthful than what people claim as truth. In essence, Nietzsche is saying that it is the human ego which projects an other world, because it is too difficult, and involves too much struggle, to really be with the truth of the body, and to strive with the body for our greatest capacities and potentials beyond our self. It is in this context that we should understand why Nietzsche proclaims we “break the tables” of the given morals, and “create new tables”, which reflect real life experience, and hard won virtues from striving in this world.
The final concept, the eternal recurrence, is often, if not as a rule, presented as a fearful idea, always accompanied by a tortured reflective wrestling with the possibility that there are no real possibilities, and that everything is the same, and that all is pointless. Here is the first time Nietzsche brings the idea to our attention in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
“This gateway […] has two faces. Two paths come together here; no one has yet walked them to the end. This long lane back: it lasts an eternity. And that long lane outward — that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths[.]. The name of the gateway is inscribed at the top: ‘Moment’. […] Do you believe […] that these paths contradict each other eternally?’ —” (On the Vision and the Riddle)
What is really going on here with the concept of the eternal recurrence? The first thing to note is that he is presenting to you a contradiction of time. The contradiction of time is that “the past” (‘long lane back’) and “the future” (‘long lane outward’), underneath the “gateway of the moment”, have never been actually walked, or observed, in their totality. If they did extend forever, then possibility would be exhausted because everything that could have happened, already happened in the past and would be repeated in the future; if they did not extend forever, then do they meet each other into a circle that completes both past and future, eternally? Nietzsche seems to suggest that both possibilities are wrong or unlikely or even… undesirable. The idea that time is a circle, that past and future meet each other and complete each other, is something Nietzsche explicitly rejects as “too easy”. The idea that everything repeats eternally, and that all possibility, consequently, is exhausted, is also something that he seems to dislike strongly, even to the point of nausea.
What is most important here, is that the idea is presented with the weight of paradox. The idea of the eternal recurrence is presented so that you must struggle with yourself now (in this ‘Moment’). The idea is that if things do repeat forever, then what you are doing now, is something you will have to endure forever. Can you endure what you are now, eternally? Nietzsche’s idea is that, for those living in small virtues, it would be impossible to bare such a weight, and thus, would be a motivation to strive for greatness. Or alternatively, for those living and striving for greatness, the idea of the eternal return would be even more motivation to break the circle. The idea is that they would prove by their very being that possibility has not yet been exhausted; that there is still the possibility for something that has never occurred before, that there is still the possibility to give birth to a never before existing greatness.
So here we have the core Nietzsche, or the Nietzschean core.
Perspectivism: After Death of God, relativistic perspectivity, in relation to esteeming/valuing
Overman: Response to Death of God as absolute goal relative to perspectives, self-overcoming, striving
Will to Power: Inherent desire of life to overcome and expand itself, grand striving to transcend what exists
Master/Slave Morality: Value system born of resentment of actual world, humans enslaved to other perfect world
Eternal Recurrence: Fearful idea of universe repeating endlessly, no redemption possible, must embrace amor fati
What I hope I was able to make clear is that, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a relativism where anything goes or anything is accepted, but rather that a field of perspectives exists objectively in an abyssal relation to esteeming and valuing; that Nietzsche’s overman is what now centers our being as a potentiality for greatness in the very act of life striving to overcome what it is now; that Nietzsche’s will to power is not an act of overpowering others in a superficial or shallow way, but a connection to the very source of life’s truth for the power to command great things inside oneself, and also to be able to follow one’s own great commands; that Nietzsche’s Master/Slave Morality is not exclusively about Christianity, but more about the way human beings can get caught or trapped into given metaphysical structures, the worst of which, set up the idea of an other world that is the truest or realest world which you will only know when you die in the after-life; and finally, that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is not necessarily about an objective fact of the universe repeating itself eternally, but more an existential weight that forces the thinker to bare the weight of what he is actually repeating, and also a challenge to the thinker, to give birth to what has never existed, i.e. to break the circle.
This Nietzschean core should be understood well before one wades into the waters of the post-Nietzschean interpretive field. If you are interested in diving more into this Nietzschean core, or the post-Nietzschean interpretive field, I will be starting a course on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra on July 15th 2022. You can find out more about this course offer at Philosophy Portal.
Beautifully written and compelling: you’ve convinced me that the secret to understanding Nietzsche is a Hegelian lens, which is utterly fascinating and sorely lacking from the history of philosophy. This is pioneering work.