Lecture Notes: Nietzsche PDF

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Professor MacMuMullan, notes on Nietzsche from Week 9 of class...

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Nietzsche Notes “The Will to Power and the Birth of Tragedy” Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant  Nietzsche, like Kant, questioned inherited beliefs  However, Nietzsche rejected Kant’s emphasis on reason o Kant: reason is the key to freedom o Nietzsche: the key to freedom was passion, or as he puts it the will to power The Will to Power  Texts we treat as simple and unified (The Bible or The Republic) were actually edited from fragments  This is why he famously said “There is no original text”  All texts are the result of a conscious decision to include certain things and exclude others  Emperor Constantine and “The Word of God” o The Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are IN o The Gospels of Phillip, Thomas, Mary and Truth are “false teachings”  All our “truths” are products of similar selective choices  This insight led Nietzsche to turn towards sophistry and to argue that: o There is no truth to the world o All Knowledge is a kind of Lie Language Lies  Language works by suppressing the differences between things and reifying certain similarities  Since language lies, our goal is not to tell the truth, but to lie creatively in a way that affirms life and passion The Herd and Der Ubermensch  We must choose between the life of the herd and the life Der Ubermensch  The herd animal repeats the lies of the herd—they live, think, act, and die just like everyone else  Der Ubermensch or “The Over-Man” lives to express the will to power or the urge to freedom o He lies “creatively,” for the sake of expressing the human passion inside himself Master and Slave Moralities  Nietzsche argued that the Superman lives for “Master Morality”  Most people are afraid of their power of just want animal comfort, and therefore settle for “Slave morality”  Ancient societies had “Master Moralities” where

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o Good = strong or “of noble character” o Bad = common or low o “Good” is the good of the Master Socratic Philosophy and Christianity infected the world with “Slave Morality” o Good = weak or meek (absence of strength) o Evil = strong or mean to the weak o “Good” is good for the weak (utility)

The Antichrist  What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man  What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness  What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome Apollonian and Dionysian  The Will to Power calls on us to live aesthetically (according to a sense of beauty or style) and not morally  The aesthetic ideal that Nietzsche saw was the balance of the Apollonian and the Dionysian Apollonian  Represents the ordering power within us, which restrains and focuses the raw power of the Dionysian  It is seen in the “Plastic Arts” like sculpture  It defines the individual as a knowing subject that is distinct from the object  It emphasizes the individual over the collective  “Person-as-Artist”  Apollonian insight emerges from religious dream of the Gods The Dionysiac  Represents the raw power of life which is insane, frantic, joyous, sexual and very dangerous  It is manifested in music (especially festival music)  It defines the individual as a feeling subject joined with the object  “Person-as-Art”  The Dionysiac insight emerges from intoxication at orgies where participants join the becoming through sex and music Balance  Each person must acknowledge and balance these forces in the service of living a beautiful life Eternal Recurrence:

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If you had to relive the same life over knowing everything that would happen to you...