Nietzscheanism
from 1878
Values have a history, that history is not flattering, and finding out where a value came from changes what it can claim.
- Active
- from 1878
- Where
- Nowhere in particular; he had no post and no school
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Genealogy. Moral values are not discoveries but creations with a traceable ancestry, and the question is not whether they are true but what kind of life produced them and what kind they produce.
What it held
Nietzsche's method is historical in an unusual sense. He does not argue that a value is false; he asks who benefited from it becoming a value, and what condition of life it expresses. Good once meant noble and its opposite was contemptible; the current sense, in which good opposes evil, he traces to a reversal made by those with no power to act, whose ressentiment turned the inability to strike back into a merit.
The death of God is a diagnosis rather than a boast. The passage is spoken by a madman whom nobody understands, and the point is that Europe has abandoned the foundation of its values without noticing that everything resting on it must go too. Nihilism is what follows, and it is the problem rather than the position.
Eternal recurrence is offered as a test rather than a cosmology: if this life returned unchanged, endlessly, could you affirm it? Amor fati is the answer he wants — not resignation but wanting what happened.
He wrote aphoristically, kept no school, went irreversibly mad at forty-four, and left his notebooks to be assembled by a sister who forged and rearranged them for purposes he had explicitly repudiated.
How it argued
Genealogy, aphorism and psychological unmasking, with deliberate refusal of systematic form on the grounds that systems are a failure of integrity.
What it was arguing against
Christian morality, Kantian duty, utilitarianism, Hegel's history, democratic egalitarianism, and — with unusual venom — German nationalism and antisemitism.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the will to power is a metaphysics or a psychology. What the Übermensch is meant to be. How much of the Nachlass represents his views, given the state of the notebooks.
Common misconceptions
That he was a proto-Nazi. He broke with Wagner over antisemitism, wrote contemptuously of German nationalism, and his sister — an actual antisemite — edited the posthumous material to serve it. The distortion took decades of scholarship to undo.
How it began
A classicist appointed to a chair at twenty-four, who left academia at thirty-four in poor health and spent a decade writing in boarding houses.
What became of it
Living, and claimed by nearly everyone. His reception is a case study in how badly a body of work can be handled.
Lasting influence
Freud, Weber, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. Also literature, on a scale few philosophers reach.
Why it still matters
Genealogy as a method — asking where a concept came from as a way of testing its authority — is standard practice in several disciplines, and Foucault made it central.
Put another way
A hammer used for sounding, to find which idols are hollow.
Where to start
The Genealogy. It has a thesis and it argues it, which makes it the best introduction despite the reputation.
The surprising bit
The Will to Power is not a book he wrote. It was assembled from discarded notebook fragments by his sister and an editor, arranged to suit them, and for fifty years it was read as his masterwork.
In their own words
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.
Connections
- Answers
- Lebensphilosophie
The verdict
The most misappropriated philosopher in the canon, and one of the very few who is a great writer as well.