Nietzsche’s Critique of European Culture Professor Lloyd Kramer University of NC, Chapel Hill

Nietzsche’s Criticism 1.Nietzsche[N] death marks a real transition in Introduces discussions of language, truth, power, and criticisms of democracy 2.Represents an especially influential critique of the Enlightenment 2.N was a willing participant in the debate about the meaning and legacy of the Enlightenment 1.Accepts that rel. is flawed and man is creative 2.Rejects faith in Reason and Universal truths 3.Will to power not Reason was the key Trait 4.N was much embraced by those looking for alternatives to the Enlightenment 5.N was a basis for Fascism

3. N shared belief that modern society had become mediocre and empty and argued for a heroic leap forward to the self rather than to God or the Elite 1.God is dead, those that embrace rel and elite culture deaden their creativity 2.Darwin shows we are biologic creatures without any greater meaning 3.Only human drives and will can overcome the emptiness of modern life 4.Rel, nationalism, democracy, consumerism can’t help with mediocrity of life – certainly not socialism 5.Only the few will be able to move beyond the mediocre

1.Background/Biography: Dad went mad and died 1.Raised by Mother and aunts – pop. psych. Says this made him resent women 2.Considered a brilliant young scholar, became a tenured professor at an early age but quite at the age of 34 3.Syphilis? 4.Lived in isolation and traveled writing about a crises in European life 1.Developed a critique of European tradition and a philosophy of heroic individual morality 2.Wrote in non-traditional ways-aphorisms 3.Evaluated philosophers based on humor

1.Modern European culture dominated by the masses and their herd culture 1.Concern for conformity and comfort 2.Suppress any challenge to mediocrity 3.Described the ideal hero who could create their own values and truths citing the Greek ideal 4.Bourgeois materialism and democratic culture had destroyed the true life affirming vision of the exceptional – not ordinary – person 5.Christian values dehumanize by denying natural instincts and drives 1.Greeks had got it right by accepting the part of life that is passionate/Dionysian 2.Plato and Socrates screwed up by suppressing the instinctual and replacing it with rationality/Apollonian 3.Christianity took the repression of healthy in life a step further by insisting on an ethical system that favors the weak over the strong 4.Christianity is thus anti-human and escapist

1.Christianity was an expression of people’s will to power but a distorted one 1.Science destroyed classic conceptions of divinity 2.Moderns didn’t really believe in God – God is dead, not truly a part of life but people continue to hang onto it in a cliché way 3.This is nihilism – don’t believe in what you say you do and no one will admit it 4.Nationalism, socialism, liberalism, anti-Semitism… are expressions of people’s nihilism – the symptoms of not believing in anything 5.To achieve growth, to solve the crises people must face facts that the old truths no longer attain 1.New thinkers must move beyond to new truths derived from the drives and passions of heroic individuals 6.Very few can face these tough facts and create their own truths and values –their own moral truths 1.New life affirming thinkers are the overmen who rise above the herd 7.Nietzsche represents an end in a cycle of European thought that began with great optimism with the French Rev. and form a host of problems that define 20 th Cen. thought

Question to Answer: How was Nietzsche’s work a reaction to the triumphs and ideals of liberal society that developed from the Enlightenment, the French And American Revolutions and the trend toward mass democracy, and a culture of shared material progress that marked the later half of the 19 th Century?