Finding The Will by Losing One's Self

Nietzsche was a revolutionary author and philosopher who has had a tremendous impact on German culture up through the twentieth century and even today. Nietzsche's views were very unlike the popular and conventional beliefs and practices of his time and nearly all of his published works were, and still are, rather controversial, especially in On the Genealogy of Morals. His philosophies are more than just controversial and unconventional viewpoints, however; they are absolutely extreme and dangerous if taken out of context or misinterpreted. After Nietzsche's death it took very little for his sister to make some slight alterations to his works to go along with Nazi ideology.

Aestheticism was a popular dogma in the late 1800s that centered on the belief that art should exist for beauty alone. This doctrine is defined as an “exaggerated devotion to art, music, or poetry, with indifference to practical matters” and “the acceptance of artistic beauty and taste as a fundamental standard, ethical and other standards being secondary” (“Aestheticism,” def. 1 and 2). In Oscar Wilde’s sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, aestheticism is a fashionable belief accepted by society at the time. Oscar Wilde uses the moral deterioration and ultimate destruction of Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray to emphasize the negative effects of society’s preoccupation with aesthetics and offer a moral for the reader.

Masters and slaves are constantly discussed throughout Nietzsche’s work, but the connection between them is discussed best in his book On the Genealogy of Morality. The first of the three essays outlines two alternate structures for the creation of values, which is credited to masters and the other to slaves.

The problem with Socrates concerns the problem with the role of value and reason. Nietzsche believes that the bulk of philosophers claim that life is a corrupt grievance for mankind. Nietzsche reasoned that these life deniers were decadents of Hellenism, as a symptom of some underlying melancholy. For someone to paint life in such a negative light they must have suffered a great deal through the course of their own life. Furthermore, these no-sayers agreed in various physiological ways and thus adopted the same pessimistic attitudes towards life. Socrates was ugly, alike decadent criminals and by ways of these similarities was decadent as well. Nietzsche also claims ugliness as a physiological symptom of life in its decline supported by studies in phenology.

Nietzsche sees us being trapped in some sort of cave where we have a false perception of ourselves and reality. This somewhat mimics Plato’s Allegory. Nietzsche is saying that we blindly follow people and things. We do what we are learned to do and in some instance never question what or why we are doing them because we were taught not to. Sometimes there would be consequences if one did seek knowledge, so having fear of those consequences caused some people not to do so. Plato said “In order to be free, we need knowledge of what is real.”

In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche aggressively challenges conventional schools of thought dating back to the ancients. Philosophy, as we know it, began over two-thousand years ago in Athens with the birth of Socrates. Socrates introduced the practice of reasoning and dialectics—the art of discourse hoping to bring individuals closer to some universal truth—to an Athenian society that previously held aesthetics, not logic, as indicative of goodness. Socrates revolutionized life in Athens, and by extension, the Western tradition. His beliefs are found in works written centuries after his death. He is heralded as the “father of philosophy.”

Nietzsche starts this second essay by looking at and reviewing the importance of our ability to make and keep promises. To hold yourself and others to a promise means having the need of both a good memory, the ability to remember making said promise and a strong feeling of confidence what will happen next and a long term ability to know you will be able to fulfil said promise. In order for us to make the commitment and have the confidence to do so means that on some level, we must give a feeling and make ourselves into the ideal of becoming in a way predictable, to be able to achieve this we as humans need a set of guideline to follow, certain rules that make this predictability a possibility, the certainty that a set of actions will lead to a set of reactions both internally and externally.

Another main similarity between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Plato is the belief that the greatest individual is not the wealthiest, but the thinker, the artist, the musician, and namely, the philosopher. Both hold the love of wisdom in high regard (although Plato holds it in higher regard that Nietzsche). The goal of this is to pass on the views of one to many, therefore changing the views of society. With or without meaning to, both of these philosophers are trying to evoke a rise in society. Plato and Nietzsche both were suspicious of government and wanted people to be at war with their time. From doing so, they hoped to create a change on an individual’s outlook on life.

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical work, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche has strong opinions on the belief of virtue and instinct. Nietzsche is known to be a controversial philosopher, since he goes against the Christian church and its ideals of human nature and indulgence. Another thinker known to speak of human nature is the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates finds disparity within human nature and knowledge. Both philosophers examine life and its characteristics and what it means to live. However, their opinions on life and how a person should carry their lives is extremely disparate.

Nietzsche regards free will not only to be a philosophical error but also to be a falsification in society (651). Nietzsche suggests that any particular “will” is going to be strong or weak to some actual degree and points out that with “will” there are thoughts and our thoughts can flow and change just as things in the universe flow and change (651). According to Nietzsche, the underlying force driving all change is will and it boils down to a drive for freedom and domination over other things (651). Nietzsche states that we use “the four great errors” constantly to misinterpret reality and thus create many illusions that are used to show the world in a more convenient light for us (651). Nietzsche states that the first error is the most dangerous one, which is mistaking the cause and effect and regards it as an error that is the most recent and yet has been a habit for centuries (651).

We have grown weary of man. Nietzsche wants something better, to believe in human ability once again. Nietzsche’s weariness is based almost entirely in the culmination of ressentiment, the dissolution of Nietzsche’s concept of morality and the prevailing priestly morality. Nietzsche wants to move beyond simple concepts of good and evil, abandon the assessment of individuals through ressentiment, and restore men to their former wonderful ability.

To this effect, I shall explore this text’s connections to Nietzsche's key intellectual influences. First, I shall address the impact of the Schopenhauerian view of the world on The Birth of Tragedy, in particular as regards the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus and the nature and goal of tragic art. Subsequently, I shall refer to the influence of Richard Wagner's thought in order to explore the relationship between metaphysics and art as humanity's "true metaphysical

Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher and held in regard amongst the greatest philosophers of the early part century. He sharpened his philosophical skills through reading the works of the earlier philosophers of the 18th century such as Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and African Spir; however, their works and beliefs were opposite to his own. His primary mentor was Author Schopenhauer, whose belief was that reality was built on the foundation of experience. Such as it is, one of his essays, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, published in 1874, was dedicated to Schopenhauer (Mencken, 2008). In the past two centuries, his work has had authority and influence in both

He believed that in the history of philosophy, many sought to compete with each other’s thoughts in order to find the one true and universal philosophy. But he also argued that each philosopher’s views were integral to the development

In order to compare these great philosophers, it is important that we first of all view their history from an individual perspective.