Neitzche

The ideas and methods of Friedrich Nietzsche are the ideas and methods of modern thought. His is, arguably, the first philosophical voice of modern philosophy: the first to truly face the world without presupposition, the first to question everything that we have believed and that has enabled us to live for millennia. God, truth, "the good," morality, equality, democracy, reason itself: all are cast before the cold - or not so cold - eye of his scrutiny and none emerges the same Ð'- some must die, some must humble themselves, some must run in fright - but none escapes examination. Nietzsche revolutionized both the lexicon and the style of philosophical thought. As magnificent as the writing of the Pre-Socratics, of Plato, of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer can be, nothing prepared the world for the writing of Nietzsche; and no one came before him in opening up the scope of philosophical questioning to the entire range of human nature. In the eyes of Freud, he is the first psychoanalyst; he structured the primacy of language. The idea of "perspective," which revolutionized the study of man, is his; he created the method of immanent critique. The man who "philosophized with a hammer," who exhorted the "free spirits of Europe" to "smash the old tables of value," who wrote the obituary of God, for "a people is but a detour of nature to produce five or six men... and then, yes, to get beyond them as well." (Clive. pg. 43) Nietzsche's work has the impact of an opened fire door - perhaps the door to hell itself, and one is easily lost among the hundreds of experiments in thought which Nietzsche has outlined - almost any one of them is enough to deeply shake the world of any one of us. To become comfortable in Nietzsche's work would be the work of a lifetime. Even as one begins to locate the beginnings of structure in his work, the work itself undermines them.

One hundred years after his death, and in spite of world fame on an order that must strike any reader as absurd, Nietzsche's is still a voice in the wilderness. Soren Kierkegaard dedicated his works, perhaps not all that hopefully, to "the one;" Nietzsche's most famous book Also Sprach Zarathustra is subtitled, "A Book for Everyone and No One." With his insight into the human psyche, Nietzsche recognized that, in some fundamental way, regardless of how many might encounter his thought, his insights and discoveries were his alone, and that the way of the student can never ultimately be the way of the thinker. As he said, "He but poorly repays his teacher who always remains a pupil." (Heller. pg. 67)

Yet the fact remains that Nietzsche's effect on western history and culture has been profound, astonishingly widespread and enduring. It would be impossible to identify another thinker who has so fundamentally altered the outlook of intellectual possibility for a new age - and there was perhaps no more delightful prospect to Nietzsche than to maximize human possibility. Instead of a "coterie of timid magistri preening in the cloak of the master," (Porter, pg. 134) Nietzsche opened the way for the likes of the greatest creative spirits of modern times, artists and philosophers alike. For anyone who takes the Nietzschean philosophy seriously, the vast range of his influences, and the even vaster applicability of his thought, must be a source of real disquiet. At the same time, it suggests that Nietzsche sounds the depth of the human spirit Ð'- any human spirit. One can find in Nietzsche what it had never before been possible to find in a thinker: oneself.

Nietzsche's greatest contribution to philosophy is widely considered to be his book, Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche opens with the provocative question, "Supposing truth is a womanÐ'--what then?" (Nietzsche/Kauffman, pg. 1) Well supposing truth to be a woman is to suppose truth to be illusory. Nietzsche uses the metaphysics of the genders as a launch pad in exploring the subtleties of truth. Platonism and Christianity, amongst other dogmatic philosophies, claim to have grasped truth in its absolute essence. Nietzsche, however, poses the following question: how can we be so sure about the truthfulness these philosophies speak of when we cannot even understand the mysteries between man and woman? Nietzsche wants a new type of philosophizing, thereby overthrowing all dogmatic philosophy in the name of philosophical and spiritual freedom. He does this by exploring man's dependence on antithetical ideas; these ideas then give rise to man's inclination towards truth.

Truth manifests itself in consciousness as a symbolic representation, i.e. language. For Nietzsche, truth is the embodiment of something outside of our perceptions, that is to say, it is only in our thinking that we are able to impose structural order into an otherwise unstructured world. Thus, truth is never an exact replica of the external world. It is will-to-truth that drives us beyond these philosophical dogmas making us question the validity of their teachings. This will-to-truth keeps us driving for something new; consequently we never fully accept truth values. All truth contains an element of deception, and so the question might be why do we even want truth to begin with? Nietzsche