Friedrich Nietzsche
From RationalWiki
"Nietzsche is Dead" - God
"I come again, with this Sun, with this Earth, with this Eagle, with this Serpent, not to a new Life, or a better Life, or an akin Life: - I come again eternally to this identical and same Life, in the Greatest and also in the Smallest, that I will teach again the Eternal Return of all things. - that I will again speak the word of the great Midday of Earth and Man, that I will announce again to men the Übermensch."
"Nietzsche is pietzche but Sartre is smartre"
Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was an eccentric German man who wrote some of the most egotistical philosophy ever. He was not a Nazi (he thought anti-Semitism should be "utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind"), though his sister was, and she pretty much quote mined and rewrote some of his scattered notes into the book The Will to Power in order to jive with her ideology. He was an atheist, and thus is a commonly-demonized bogeyman. "God is dead...and we have killed him" is his famous quote on the matter, even if he did have to put it in the mouth of a madman.
Much of Ayn Rand's philosophy and morals are blatantly ripped off from him. She acknowledged his early influence, but then spent a lot of time trying to show why she was different. She not only failed in this endeavor, but proved herself to be a complete idiot in the process.
According to this, Nietzsche was corrupted to his twistedopinion beliefs purely because of "Darwin's teachings", claiming that Darwinism "had a way of corrupting the beliefs of all who submitted to it". WTF? This is particularly silly, since Nietzsche had very little time for Darwin - condemning him in his later works as being one of the "English psychologists" - Nietzsche believed in some sense that mankind was favoring the weaker and weaker (typified by the slave morality of Judaism and - to a greater extent - Christianity), and that Darwin was actually too optimistic. Nietzsche's rather prophetic writings about the Superman envision not some kind of genetic drift to the Superman, but a determined individual crossing the bridge and becoming the "overman" in their own life.
As it happens, Nietzsche was a rather complex man (what do you expect from one of the greatest philosophers in Western history?), and his opinions are rather hard to pin down. His fundamental concern was nihilism, specifically how all of Western civilization is (to his mind) dominated by it. In Nietzsche's view, the West is and has been for two thousand years fundamentally nihilist. This might sound odd, but if one follows his logic it makes a kind of sense. He argues that Platonism and Christianity (which he regarded as vulgarized Platonism) were nihilistic by positing the existence of a metaphysical "true world" beyond the reach of the human senses, and that the world detectable by the human senses is merely apparent (for a fuller discussion, see Wikipedia's article on the Divided Line). By positing such a "true world," the ancient Platonists and Christians devalued the world in which we live by dismissing it as merely "apparent," essentially saying that it does not exist.
At this point, his primary definition of nihilism comes into play: "that the highest values devaluate themselves." You see, Nietzsche was deeply concerned with values (he was the first person to use the term "values" in a social rather than economic context), and he argued that the fundamental values of society usually end up attacking themselves until there is nothing left. In the West, he identifies truthfulness as the driving value of its history (did we mention that, like any good 19th-century German philosopher, he was a historicist?): Christian morality values truthfulness very highly (perhaps not quite so highly as Zoroastrianism, but it's up there), and this value of truthfulness developed in Western civilization to the creation of modern science. However, in time, science turned against its Christian forebear, finding that its discoveries about the truth of the objective Universe made belief in Christianity unbelievable (or at least difficult). And thus was born the modern age, in which Christianity dies slowly at the feet of its child, modern science.
Yet the old morality of Christianity remains (or so Nietzsche claims), albeit unsupported by the old God who had created them. Thus enters the age of incomplete nihilism, where the Christian values, particularly the value of truth, remain current despite the death of the Christian God. Yet the other god, the god of modern science remains, applying herself to human beings and creating the churches of liberal democracy, capitalism, and socialism. All aim towards a sort of Heaven on Earth (albeit, in the capitalist and liberal democratic forms, a deeply imperfect Heaven), and thus devalue the now. And the god of modern Science (to Nietzsche) is Herself subject to criticism. For one thing, the modern scientist still believes in a "true world" distinct from an "apparent world," but the "true world" is now a material one of subatomic particles and invisible forces rather than a spiritual one of Forms, gods, and souls. In other words, science remains metaphysical. For another, the distinction between facts and value judgments eats at itself (no matter how much Max Weber complains), because the very seeking after truth that characterizes modern Science implies a value judgment about truth: that the truth is good. Yet, by Science's own admission, value judgments cannot be known, and thus are all equally false (from Nietzsche's perspective). So why pursue the truth? And thus comes radical/complete nihilism.
Whither then? Nietzsche probably had some ideas, which he may or may not have intended to publish in a book entitled The Will to Power, but he went insane before he could tell anyone. His Nazi sister published a compilation of his notes by that title in 1901 (right after his death), but it's unclear whether he would have wanted it that way.
