Friedrich Nietzsche's Political Philosophies

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                 10/05/2009

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Political Philosophies

 “God is dead” (Kaufmann, 1974, p532), with these words, Friedrich Nietzsche ensured his place among the most memorable philosophers in history.  This phrase ranks alongside Descartes “Cogito, ergo sum” or in English, “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes, 1850, p24) as one of the most important in western philosophy.

Among his critics, Irving Zeitlin writes, echoing Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), “...if God is dead, everything is permitted.  The danger of this kind of moral nihilism Nietzsche nowhere takes into consideration” (2004, p57).   Zeitlin, like many others, points out that clearly the “death” of God has had a disastrous effect on the twentieth century.

Nietzsche's most influential work was Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in four parts between 1883 and 1885.  In this ambitious work, he depicted the fictitious Zarathustra as a charismatic teacher whose appearance heralds the redemption of the modern world.  Zarathustra is best known for his controversial teaching of the Übermensch (or “overman”), whom he proposes as “the meaning of the earth.”  Were his auditors to embrace this untimely teaching, Zarathustra insists, they would be prepared finally to emerge from the shadow of the dead God and take their rightful place as the legislators of the future. In doing so, they would shed the burden imposed on them by the resentful, ascetic morality that they have inherited from its twin sources, Christianity and Platonism.  Zarathustra's teaching of the Übermensch thus conveys the promise of a life predicated on a love of the body and an aspiration to noble values.

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Nietzsche intensifies his attack on conventional morality in his next two books, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).  In both works he rehearses his influential distinction between master (or noble) morality and slave morality.  Whereas the master morality takes its shape and direction from an originating act of self-affirmation, by means of which the master deems “good” everything about and pertaining to him, the slave morality originates in the slave's designation of his tormentors as “evil.”  Only as an afterthought, and in contrast to his “evil” oppressors, does the slave deem himself “good.”  According to Nietzsche, ...

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