Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most important philosophers in the tradition of Western thought. He's one of the most artistic and ruthless and fascinating individuals in the intellectual history of the West. He viewed himself as being the end of the Western intellectual tradition.
He saw himself as the destroyer of metaphysics. He saw himself as the destroyer of Christianity. He saw himself as a combination philosopher and a philosopher of the past.
artist in the tradition of Plato, and he offered a comprehensive critique of the Western intellectual tradition, not conceived merely or narrowly as a philosophical tradition, but as a cultural tradition. Nietzsche, more than anyone else, was a philosopher of culture. He offered criticism of every element in Western culture, and his criticism is noteworthy for its refusal to compromise, for his insistence that we get to the psychological heart. art of things. What I'd like to talk about in this lecture is Nietzsche's treatment of Christianity and morality, two of the central questions for most philosophers in the Western tradition, and particularly important for Nietzsche, because although he is something of a megalomaniac, there's a certain amount of truth to the argument that he is, in fact, the Antichrist.
He, in fact, called himself the Antichrist more than once, and he wrote a book called the Antichrist, and what he hoped to do was to get beyond Christianity. He quite literally thought that he was going to supplant Jesus in the Western tradition, which is quite a tall order. Not many people have that sort of ambition, but Nietzsche was never a shrinking violet, and in fact, he wanted to offer a new set of values. He wished to offer a new cultural orientation to the West, or perhaps to revive an old cultural orientation in the West.
and he wished to make us confront the half-truths, the lies, the evasions that are characteristic of almost everyone's life and thought. Now, he wrote several books that criticized morality. In some respects, the tradition of Western ethics is his main target. And perhaps the most intriguing of these books, or one of the most intriguing of these books, is called Beyond Good and Evil. Now, getting beyond good and evil is a rather unusual activity for a philosopher, particularly one concerned with morals.
But Nietzsche wants to take an extremely skeptical and extremely naturalistic approach to moral theory and moral evaluation, and he wishes to offer a criticism of Christianity and the values that it represents, and in addition, to supplant that with a new code of morals. Nietzsche asks an important question, a question that everyone living in this modern age, this one-world, anti-metaphysical age, has to confront, which is, where does Christianity and its moral values come from? How is it that human beings conceived of as animals, as featherless bipeds, how is it that they come to have a thing called a conscience?
How is it that they make judgments of good and evil, which is not characteristic of fish or birds? or reptiles? What is it about human beings which causes them to construct moral systems which are in some respects the antithesis of nature?
Why is it that we feel the desire to conflict with nature and make judgments that nature never does? Nietzsche thinks that he finds the answer in the psyche of the human individual and he thinks that we are very peculiar animals, animals with strange attributes which are not, which are natural and which are part of the human condition, but in fact Nietzsche says that most of our elevation of ourselves beyond nature, beyond simple facticity, is a kind of spurious raising of ourselves outside of and above nature. The German term for this is Sonderstellung. What that means is other position, a position somehow outside of nature. Nietzsche wants us to confront the fact that we are animals.
that we are part of nature and that our moral judgments are in fact part of that natural process. In looking at Christianity, Nietzsche goes back to the actual history of Christianity and asks, what is it that Christian morals represent? Whose interests do they serve?
And why are these interests disguised? What is it about... the moral judgments characteristic of Christianity that needs to be disguised. What is it that, in other words, that's a lie in Christian morals? Remarkable question.
Nietzsche's answer is that there are two kinds of moral judgments. of morality and Christianity only represents one particular perspective on judgments of good and evil and this perspective is the perspective of the herd Nietzsche contrasts two kinds of morals herd morals morals that are characteristic of the weak the feeble the inferior the enslaved which is to say Christianity and master morals morals of warriors the predatory human beings who make judgments on the basis of their strength rather than their weakness. Nietzsche wishes to supplant the herd morals, characteristic of Christianity, characteristic of Western culture for the previous 2,000 years, with new morals, morals that harkens back to the age of the Homeric hero, which harkens back to the aristocratic warrior elite, which is found all over the world, which creates values out of nothing, and which glories in the fact that their judgments can be enforced by the people of the world. in this world, independent of any metaphysical construct.
Now, Nietzsche asks, who was it that created Christianity? Well, it's an outgrowth of Judaism, and Judaism is a priestly religion. Christianity is an extension of that, and Christianity in its earliest historical phases appeals to the slave class in Rome. In fact, Christianity is the revolt of the oppressed masses in Rome.
Nietzsche argues that Christianity and its myths was organized so as to articulate the perspective of the slaves, of the inferior, of the feeble. And it was a way of having revenge upon masters, having revenge upon warriors, having revenge upon those who could oppress them, and turning the tables by offering a scale of values that was different from and independent of that of the more powerful. the master class, Nietzsche says that the slaves have their revenge and the triumph of Christianity in the West amounts to the triumph of the slave, of the inferior, of the weak and impoverished.
Think about the ideas or the myths that underlie Christianity. The idea that even in this world, if there's no justice, there's another world, heaven and hell, where God's eternal justice gives everyone what they deserve. Nietzsche says that what this in fact is, is the frustration, the impotence, the anger of slaves transformed into a myth, which allows them to get their revenge on those that oppress them, if not in this world, at least in an unreal world. which offers them some solace in a world of pain and misery. Nietzsche contrasts the morality of Christianity with the morality of the Romans.
The Romans were fierce, independent, warlike men who made their own scale of values based upon power, based upon the desire to dominate. And they showed no reluctance to inflict pain on those they viewed as inferior. And here inferior means not morally inferior in the Christian sense, but physically inferior in terms of practical strength. Nietzsche's new alternative to Christianity will be a resuscitation of the warlike values of the ancient world. And what he hopes will come out of this will be an evaluation of Christianity which allows us to get beyond Christianity.
And the one who is going to succeed Christ as the... the central figure in Western moral theory will be Nietzsche himself. He frequently signed himself as the Antichrist or as Dionysus, another incarnation of the Nietzschean judgment of good and evil.
And in doing this, he raises very disturbing questions about the kind of moral judgments that we make that are still characteristic of this culture and the difficulty of maintaining the traditional judgment. of good and evil, characteristic of the West, in an age in which religion and theology are taken less and less seriously. Now let's think about the idea of getting beyond good and evil. Nietzsche contrasts the slave and the master moralities and he says what's characteristic of Christianity is the distinction between good and evil.
Good in the Christian sense means kindness, lovingness, pity essentially. Nietzsche thinks that Christian morality is a morality of pity which raises to a spurious level of distinction feeling for the weak, the inferior, and the impoverished. We might contrast this with the master morality, which doesn't distinguish between good and evil. In fact, it distinguishes between good and bad, in the sense of capable or incapable. potent or impotent.
That's a totally different judgment of value from that characteristic of Christianity. And in fact, this is the scale of values, this master morality, is the one which Nietzsche expects will produce the highest type of human being. Nietzsche holds the view, which at least in part is borrowed from Darwin, that human beings have no intrinsic value. If you remember that one of the of the great breakthroughs or one of the great contributions of Christianity to the West is the idea that all souls are equal in the sight of God and that all people are equally valued on some level regardless of what their particular skills or capacities are.
Well, Nietzsche says that's a mistake. What that is is the revenge of those that can't do anything. And Nietzsche says if we are ever going to produce anything great in this culture, if we are ever going to produce anything significant in this culture, we must get away from the idea that other people really matter. Elements in the human species which are important are the half dozen great geniuses in any culture.
And he says that Christianity inhibits the development of genius. It inhibits the development of creativity because it is envious. It is a way of mythologizing the envy of those that are incapable, of those that don't have much in the way of capacity. And Nietzsche says if we are to get beyond that, then we must get beyond this morality of pity.
We must get beyond good and evil, back or forward if you want, to the idea that good and bad are the main standards of our moral judgment. So they will... will be none of the conscientiousness characteristic of Christianity, none of the worry about heaven and hell, about God's judgment. This good and bad morality, this master morality, will be strictly oriented towards this world.
It will not be caught up with the problem of conscience. It will not primarily be concerned with the state of one's soul so much as it will be concerned with the state of one's achievements. Nietzsche's judgment of good and bad, this master morality, is oriented towards doing things. The masters are those that achieve. And this is not necessarily to be taken in a political sense, although it can be taken in a political sense.
Master moralities can also be the moralities of the artist. Master moralities can also be the morality of the thinker, but it has to be the kind of thinker or the kind of artist who despises mere mediocrity, who wants to go beyond and formulate something in this world that creates a justification for his entire society. As Nietzsche says in The Use and Abuse of History, mankind can only be judged by its highest examples. The average human being has no value whatever. Now, Nietzsche also inquires into, The difference is between the warrior aristocrat who generates the master morality and the priest.
And the psychology of the priest is of great concern to Nietzsche. Nietzsche believes that the priestly type and the warrior aristocrat are both, in fact, superior kinds of men. One type is the individual, the Nietzschean hero, who's going to adopt the master morality. The most dangerous opponent to the Nietzschean hero is the one who's going to adopt the master morality. hero, the man who adopts this master morality, is the priest.
The priest is the opposite of the warrior type, and Nietzsche believes that the origin of this distinction lies in the human psyche, that psychological differences are what distinguish these two. Now, both the warrior and the priest have different kinds of the will to power. They just express this will to power. to power differently.
Nietzsche thinks, in fact, that all human beings can be characterized by their desire to dominate themselves, to dominate their environment, and to dominate other people. This puts Nietzsche squarely in the tradition of the sophists, if you think of Calicles and Gorgias in the Platonic dialogue. He's also in the line of Machiavelli, Sade, all of those people who adopt an atheistic perspective and who believe that human life is caught up with the desire to dominate others and to satisfy one's desires to the maximum extent.
Nietzsche supports that idea. Now, the warrior does it in a very straightforward way. takes what he wants without any qualms of conscience. Conscience is an afterthought invented at a much later date.
The warrior just comes in and does what he does because that is his nature. The strong and the weak is the natural distinction. Good and evil is an anti-natural distinction. distinction. And if you think about it, there may be a certain grain of truth in this.
Think of it this way. Think of the distinction between hawks and sparrows. Sparrows eat grains or seeds or whatever, and they're inoffensive birds, and there are quite many of them. But in fact, there's nothing better about eating what sparrows eat as compared to what hawks eat. We don't make moral judgments about hawks and say that they ought not to eat sparrows.
We just recognize that in nature, different things feed in different ways. and predatory behavior is no worse and no better than any other behavior. Nature just is what it is.
Nietzsche wants to force us back into nature. He wants us to re-evaluate our disapproval of the human hawks. In fact, Nietzsche thinks... That we have no more right to judge a warrior or an aristocrat evil than we have a right to judge a hawk evil. And he in fact thinks it doesn't make any more sense.
The world of nature, red in fang and claw, just is what it is. And, as Nietzsche puts it in a beautiful passage, he says, there are no moral phenomena. There are only moral interpretations of phenomena.
A very profound idea. Well, whose values are built into Christianity? The values of the herd, the values of the weak, and that's why it caught on among the underclass in Rome. And the entire history of Western ethics has been extrapolations from this herd morality, which has inhibited the development of our culture.
If we were to go beyond that, we would have to allow for the fact that cruelty may not be an evil, that pity may be a vice. That the desire to dominate other people may be the highest expression of human being, rather than its worst example. And in that respect, Nietzsche is not only connected to Machiavelli and to Sade and... to this office, but if any of you are familiar with the work of Dostoevsky, particularly something like Crime and Punishment, the idea of the singular man, the man that's going to stand outside of good and evil, and where Raskolnikov commits that murder, much the same issues are being discussed in that novel. The question of whether in fact moral judgment is universal or whether it's an arbitrary series of conventions designed by the weak to oppress the strong, strangely enough.
Now, in a book called The Genealogy of Morals, he tries to figure out how it is we got into this predicament, how it is we came to the point where the inferior and the weak could start to make our moral judgments. And he says, first of all, that the initial moral judgments that human beings made came from the warrior aristocrats who imposed their will on the world. This is not only his model of the warrior aristocrat, it's also in some respects his model of the artist. think about and his arguments are very interesting Nietzsche was a philologist and a professor of classical languages and he derives most of his arguments from an inquiry into Latin and German words and what their origins might have been now since I can't presuppose that you know Latin and German let's try English just to see if in fact there's some evidence for this and I think there is think about what a noble action is what makes an action noble well we know that a noble action is a good one I mean if you look it up in the dictionary dictionary, you'll find that it's a term of approval. Is it coincidental that nobility is also a section of the social structure in ancient societies?
Consider the distinction between a noble action and a base action. Who do you think the base are? The base are, in fact, the inferior, the weak, those that take orders rather than give them.
The distinction between noble and base suggests that maybe our judgments of value at the time when these words were coined are, in fact, simply the judgments of value. of important warriors, contrasted with the judgments of people that have to suffer and put up with them. Consider the distinction between being mean and being noble. Well, being mean is a very bad thing nowadays to be mean, but there was a time when to be mean meant that you were essentially a villain. Villain means peasant in its origins.
Give that some thought. Nietzsche has a very profound argument here. Think about something like having Coming from a good family and coming from a bad family. Yes, indeed.
Again, the judgments of power, characteristic of predatory warrior aristocrats, were the actual source, according to Nietzsche, of our judgments of good and evil. To be mean, to be base, to be a villain meant that you were bad. To be noble, to be high-minded as opposed to low-minded, to have high moral standards as opposed to low moral standards, ask yourself where they came from. Nietzsche was the first to say, man to force himself to consider the possibility that what we take to be universal moral distinctions applicable to everyone are in fact a disguised form of the will to power, a way for the weak and the impotent to get back. at the superior by changing these aristocratic valuations, by moving from good and bad to good and evil.
In other words, the invention of evil was a way for the oppressed to strike back at the superior. Nietzsche wants to erase that. He says that's a mistake in Western culture.
That's an, it's a hole or a gap or an inferior part of the Western tradition. And he says that's a mistake in Western culture. And if we want to produce superior human beings, then we have to free them from the shackles of slave morality.
We have to prevent them from being undermined in their achievements or undermined in their aspirations by creating in them the conscience, a conscience which prevents them from achieving what they could. Now here's another very interesting question, and it's very hard to answer. Nietzsche offers us a very provocative conception. Where does conscience come from, and what is it?
Think about that for a moment. If in fact human beings are animals, and I think that Darwin has conclusively shown that to be the case, why are we the only animal with a conscience and where does it come from and what is it? Very difficult question.
Nietzsche's argument is something like this. Human beings have a natural desire to achieve power. They have the will to power. That is characteristic of what makes people go.
Thank you. The usual route that the will to power takes is the desire to dominate other people. There is a natural ruthlessness in people, a desire to take advantage of others, and it pleases people to cause pain.
Hard thing for us to swallow, perhaps, in these days. But with the degree of pain in the world and the degree of evil that we see, to use a word that I might italicize, there may well be something to it. If, in fact, people do like to create pain in others, of course, usually not themselves, what happens when you frustrate this desire?
What happens when you say you can't enslave other people? You can't kill other people and take their possessions. You can't oppress other people because we will stop you.
Well, need to be. Nietzsche says, and this is a fascinating possibility, although I'm not certain if it's true, he says that when people are frustrated in their desire to cause pain to others, the consequence of that is that they decide to start imposing pain on themselves. And this pain that they impose on themselves is called conscience.
A horrifying possibility. In German, the term for the pang of conscience is called Gewissenbisse, which means the bite of conscience. And Nietzsche says essentially that people are predatory animals, and if they can't bite other people, they bite themselves. And when they begin to torture themselves, they find the last possible outlet for this desire to impose pain on the world. If they can't do it to other people, they'll do it to themselves.
Now, this bite of conscience gets progressively worse when priests come on the scene, when the priestly type comes on the scene. It goes from inferior to even more inferior. Because the priests harness...
Slave morality, they harness this morality of the herd and they use it for their own purposes. The priests are the highest example of the herd animal, of the herd type. They have a special set of morals that they keep for themselves and then they rule the herd using using various kinds of myths and various kinds of verbal techniques so that they can have their revenge and so they can oppose the warrior type. Nietzsche sees among the highest types of human beings.
an intrinsic conflict between the priest and the warrior. Nietzsche thinks that the warrior is the kind of person that knows how to forget things. Again, this is an interesting psychological profile and there are many incidentally, if you read the genealogy of morals and beyond good and evil, you'll find that there are many anticipations of Freud, especially the question of conscience and the question of resentment.
Nietzsche thinks that resentment, the hatred of being oppressed, is the source of slave moralities and that the priest takes that resentment, formulates it in a mythological way and uses that to orchestrate and control the herd so that they can be opposed to any superiority among those that would break moral rules, among the would-be warriors. Now, what makes the priestly type so dangerous? is the fact that they can dominate culture and that they have chosen the wrong path.
They have chosen the slave moralities and they have absolutized that. The consequence of absolutizing that is that it seems that there is no possibility of reintroducing master morality without a complete and thoroughgoing critique of the culture, and that is what Nietzsche thinks he is. That's what it means for Nietzsche to be the Antichrist.
He's not just the Antichrist in some mythological sense. He literally takes that as a mark of distinction. It shows just what a free thinker he is. Nietzsche is willing to say not only is he the Antichrist, but that he thinks that that's the best development in culture since the time of Jesus. It's about time that we got back to a morality which would allow for the development of superior people.
Now Nietzsche's argument here is very disturbing. It's disturbing in its consequences. It's disturbing because it kind of rocks the moral boat for us.
But Nietzsche's critique goes even further than this. He wants to investigate not just the question of pain and people's desire to impose pain on others, and if not on others, then on themselves. He wants to look at the arguments about suffering made by the priests.
Christianity, if you remember, holds the view that God is providential, that he supervises the entire world, and that, I believe the phrase is, not a sparrow falls, but God knows about it. Well, Nietzsche thinks that this was invented so that suffering could be justified and could be explained. And in some respects, there's a certain amount of truth in that, that part of what Christianity does is explain, or at least explain away, the fact of human suffering by saying that God doubtless has some plan, although we don't know what it is. what that plan is, it surely is there because the kind of God we've decided to construct, the kind of God we believe in, is the kind of God, is a good God, a loving God, the kind of God that would never do anything evil.
Since he would never do anything evil, the suffering that you get must have a meaning. And Nietzsche thinks the worst thing that the priestly element ever did to human culture was to sell people on the idea that suffering has meaning. Nietzsche says that the entire world is completely meaningless, that the world is meaningless world is moral chaos, that suffering has no meaning, and the idea that suffering has meaning just makes suffering infinitely worse.
It's not hard to see why. It was bad when weak, feeble people had to put up with the strong, had to put up with having things stolen from them, with being murdered and raped and tortured. That was bad because of simple physical pain, for the reason that any natural calamity is bad. But the priestly idea of attaching a meaning to this suffering makes it all that much worse, because if there is a God in heaven who is in fact supervising this entire procedure, The reason why suffering must follow us, why evil must befall us, lies in ourselves.
We are somehow responsible for it. We brought it upon ourselves. What does this mean?
This infinitely increases our suffering, because not only are the weak and the feeble still being tortured and killed and raped and maimed, but in addition to that, it's their fault. What a horrible turnaround. What a dreadful addition to the suffering they already have. After you recover from a terrible encounter with warrior aristocrats, with those who are beyond good and evil, then you must live with the fact that you brought it on yourself, and guilt enters the world.
After the superior, after the strong, after the ruthless have finished with you, after they've caused their modicum of pain, you have to add to it. The bite of conscience means you're going to impose pain on yourself. This development is one of the worst turning points in the history of Western culture, according to Nietzsche. And in that respect, Nietzsche believes that he is liberating us from the shackles of a self-imposed... misery.
And for all his madness, there is a certain degree of coherence in this argument. And it is hard to know where he's correct, how much of this we should accept, and how much of it is just speculation that we could never really have much of an idea about. So let's stop and think about it for a second.
My suspicion is that Nietzsche is probably wrong in This argument that good and bad come, or that our judgments of good and bad and good and evil, come from the distinction exclusively of masters and slaves. Probably the distinction between good and bad is much older than aristocratic social structures, which are relatively late in human development, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 B.C. for the most part.
What it most likely is attached to is feelings of pleasure and pain. My guess is, again, just speculating a la Nietzsche, which would be very much in the Nietzschean... tradition, that probably a full stomach was a good feeling and going hungry was a bad feeling.
Probably breaking your leg was a bad feeling and being healthy was a good feeling. And these may well go before judgments of good and bad based upon aristocratic social structures. But the fact remains that after these initial judgments of pleasure and pain got turned into our judgments of moral value, there is a superimposed layer of aristocratic moral judgments in our culture and in our language. I think that the distinction between noble and base, between noble and mean, between high moral values and low moral values, establishes that with a good degree of plausibility.
Now, what are we to make of this judgment? What happens when we go beyond good and evil? And this is a delicate and difficult question.
Nietzsche, in a book called The Antichrist, which he modestly... named after himself one would think, he describes his procedure as philosophizing with a hammer. And that's a very intriguing idea because it shows the destructiveness of his philosophy, the skepticism of it, and the gleeful malice that's in it.
And I think it's worth considering the fact that philosophizing with a hammer very easily shades over into intellectual vandalism. And it may be that not everything that can be broken ought to be broken. And it is not entirely clear that the Antichrist offers us more as a moral alternative than the Christian ethics.
But his willingness to ask questions about it, I think, is what makes Nietzsche of enduring significance to our culture. For all the madness, for all the evil that's built into it, it's probably the most significant moral development since, oh, I don't know, the Enlightenment anyway. And in terms of its artistic qualities, I think that...
Nietzsche is probably in the same league as Plato, and as a great poet philosopher, Nietzsche and Plato are the two greatest figures who combine art and philosophy. Those of you who have read Nietzsche will know that his critical capacity is awesome and his artistic capacity is quite great. You would not find that primarily in his poems or in the songs that he writes.
Most of the art that he creates directly is quite inferior, but his prose poetry is the greatest in the German language and probably the greatest in the Western tradition. Now, when we finish up with the priest and we find the liabilities of the priest, when we find that perhaps the priestly type has in fact been selling us a dangerous set of myths, we wonder if we can go back to the warrior. Probably not, except in a sublimated sense. If we were to take the will to power, turn it into something perhaps not as catastrophic as, I don't know, Aryan war makers or superior brutish types.
It may be that the type of the philosopher, that the type of the artist, is in fact the warrior type, the individual who needs no moral code to create his own conception of good and bad. That this type is what can come out of a revaluation of all values, and that, I believe, is what is advantageous in Nietzsche. The difficulty is how we will know when we really are beyond good and evil rather than beyond good and evil. rather than being beneath good and evil.
Many of Nietzsche's friends and his philosophical admirers have tried to shield Nietzsche from the criticism that he's a proto-Nazi. And in fact, I don't think it works. I think in fact Nietzsche is a proto-Nazi. There's a strong tinge of racism in his work. There is a strong tinge of refined cruelty in his work.
And insofar as this was misused in the 20th century by the Nazis and by other racially-oriented hate groups, I think Nietzsche is at least in part to blame. Those who like Nietzsche's work, who want to shield him from this criticism, will point out with considerable justification that he would have nothing but contempt for the misuse of his work in this century, but it won't entirely absolve him of the results of his statements, because after all, Nietzsche would have had contempt for everybody, whether they adopt his position or not. So, I would say that the warrior type very easily...
...shades over into the barbarian. And Nietzsche, as he puts it beautifully, says, I write in order to be misinterpreted. And if we only have a series of misinterpretations of Nietzsche, because he thinks that there is no one canonical interpretation, well then, it seems to me that he should bear the brunt of responsibility for everything, both good and bad, that comes out of his work. And if we live in a Nietzschean age, It seems to me that we have to find some way of tempering it with whatever it is that is good from the Western intellectual tradition.
And if we can't agree as to what we want to call undesirable, whether it's good, whether it's bad or evil, whether it's the master conception of what's undesirable or the slave conception, we may perhaps be able to create a sense of the good which goes beyond the dichotomy between the two, which allows us to create some sort of overlap between them. Perhaps it would be possible, as Nietzsche says, to create an artistic Socrates, a moral Socrates who is able to both combine the strength of the artist with the mythological capacities of the priest, who is willing to connect his individual judgment with the concern for what is good for the species. And I think Nietzsche himself would not have entirely disagreed with that.
If one is going to create a beautiful artistic philosophy the way Nietzsche does, We have to allow him a certain poetic license. If we are willing to allow Plato's poetry and Plato's myths a certain degree of consideration and a certain degree of leeway for interpretation, perhaps if we did that with Nietzsche, we would come up with a more fertile reading. When you get a chance to read Nietzsche, and of all the philosophers I have taught in this series of lectures, I strongly and most strongly recommend that you do get a look at Nietzsche.
When you do, keep this in mind. Nietzsche has one particular trope which is characteristic of him which runs through all his work. And it's analogous to the one trope which is central to Socrates. If Socrates is the man of inimitable irony, the man who constantly says ironic statements that can be interpreted as the opposite of what he says, Nietzsche's typical trope is the oxymoron. An oxymoron is something like cold fire or hot ice.
It's to use words in the opposite way that they are to be interpreted literally. Nietzschean oxymoron is what makes his poetry so moving. And perhaps the idea that he writes in order to be misinterpreted is that kind of oxymoron.
Perhaps the idea that the distinction between good and evil and good and bad is an unbridgeable distinction can also be seen as an oxymoronic construction. Nietzsche's treatment of the warrior, Nietzsche's treatment of the priest, if it's not persuasive historically and I think as a historian, I think ultimately he's wrong, it is persuasive poetically. And I would think, and I would ask you to consider the fact that poetic persuasiveness may itself be an oxymoron. Nietzsche believes that having undermined the Western intellectual tradition by having abolished metaphysics, by having abolished the plausibility of Christianity, what he's done is created a new blank slate for us. And if the slate isn't entirely blank, well, let's not hold Nietzsche entirely responsible for that.
Let's allow for the fact that poetry, and Nietzsche's strong point is the fact that he is a great prose poet, that poetry offers us a multitude of possible interpretations, and that by offering us a liberation from dogma, a liberation from metaphysics, by offering us a kind of poetry which can create new value, which can create new human superiority, which can create a new and finer culture, that Nietzsche has in fact done our culture a great service. However much madness or evil or megalomania is built into the Nietzschean conception of the world, he is surely the greatest philosopher of the last hundred years, and the remainder of the 20th century philosophical tradition would be inconceivable without him. Nietzsche is one of the great forerunners of existentialism. Nietzsche is certainly the first person to articulate the nihilism that threatened our culture as Christianity had to recede after the attack made by modern natural science in the late 19th century. Nietzsche is not, in that respect, the cause of the breakup.
of Western religion. He's not the cause of the breakup of Western metaphysics. Nietzsche just articulates it.
You may think of Nietzsche, to take a poetic figure, as a kind of seismograph. He's the first and most sensitive writer who sees that the continents of our thought are shifting. And rather than causing it, he tells us about it.
And in telling us about it, he forces us to confront something that sooner or later we would have to confront. And insofar as he does a lot of the intellectual dirty work for us, insofar as he's willing to be the Antichrist, as he's willing to take upon himself the responsibility for questioning the very foundational elements of our culture, he's one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived. So whatever his liabilities, and I think there are many, because he's an anti-Semite, he's a racist, he's a misogynist.
There are many evils in Nietzsche's work. But, like it or not, he forces us to think in ways that we would not think otherwise. He forces us to consider closely ourselves and to ask ourselves, how honest are we when we are alone, much less when we are with other people?
He asks us not only to have the courage of our convictions. Nietzsche asks, no, he demands, that we have the courage to question our convictions, which is a much rarer human quality. Insofar as our convictions will stand up to this kind of critical scrutiny, Nietzsche can be thought of as one of the high points in Western culture.
The idea of ruthless self-criticism is quintessentially Greek. Nietzsche wants us to... Nietzsche wants to bring us back to the earlier, higher, finer conception of human beings, characteristic of the non-Socratic Greeks. If you could think of one particular figure that Nietzsche wishes to supplant in philosophy as opposed to religion, That would be Socrates. Nietzsche is the new Socrates, the Socrates of art, the Socrates of the individual, the Socrates of subjectivity.
What he has in common with Socrates is the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions. What he has in common with Socrates is a willingness to ask. Questions about issues that no one feels very comfortable with. And what's more important about Nietzsche is that his answers are intrinsically provisional. Just like Socrates, Nietzsche says everything is always open to question and always will be.
Nietzsche calls us not to any dogma but to a higher and finer kind of life. And insofar as we are heeding that Socratic call, Nietzsche, who would be the anti-Socrates, is in fact part of the Socratic tradition as well. The fact that he is both a Socrates and an anti-Socrates is a perfectly Nietzschean oxymoron.