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    Nietzsche in 60 Minutes
    Nietzsche in 60 Minutes
    Nietzsche in 60 Minutes
    Ebook170 pages1 hour

    Nietzsche in 60 Minutes

    By Walther Ziegler

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    Nietzsche has the reputation of being the most provocative and controversial of all philosophers. What he demanded of humanity was something tremendous: that we should develop beyond ourselves and become "overmen". Formerly, we could draw a meaning for our lives from religion. But this is no longer possible because, as Nietzsche says: "God is dead!" This brief dictum has echoed around the world. Man, Nietzsche argues, has freed himself, with the rise of the natural sciences, from all belief in a "beyond" and now has, for the first time, the chance to take his existence into his own hands. Most human beings, however, prove unable to fill the gap in their lives that the "death of God" has left. They continue to seek salvation in such new gods, or idols, as nationalism, socialism, racism, or capitalism. But instead of slipping into the blind worship of these new gods, or "godlets", we need - so argues Nietzsche - rather to trust in our own selves, allow our own "will to power" to unfold, and become "overmen".
    Just as flowers stretch up toward the sun and animals seek constantly after nourishment, we human beings too must struggle every day to secure our lives and render them richer and more intense. In daily life, conducting this struggle must always mean, in part, conducting it at other people's expense: whoever, for example, applies for a job as a manager and gets it will necessarily cause bitter disappointment among those who applied and failed. "One furthers one's ego always at the expense of others", writes Nietzsche. But "will to power" finds a whole series of very different forms of expression. The artist, the father of a family, the politician, the businessman, the employee, indeed every one of us individually, must find his or her own highly personal and particular path to self-development. "Become who you are!"
    "Nietzsche in 60 Minutes" explains his exhilarating philosophy step by step making use of some 160 of the most important passages from his works.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks on Demand
    Release dateJul 10, 2018
    ISBN9783752889758
    Nietzsche in 60 Minutes
    Author

    Walther Ziegler

    Walther Ziegler est professeur d'université et docteur en philosophie. En tant que correspondant à l'étranger, reporter et directeur de l'information de la chaîne de télévision allemande ProSieben, il a produit des films sur tous les continents. Ses reportages ont été récompensés par plusieurs prix. En 2007, il a prit la direction de la « Medienakademie » à Munich, une Université des Sciences Appliquées et y forme depuis des cinéastes et des journalistes. Il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages philosophiques, qui ont été publiés en plusieurs langues dans le monde entier. En sa qualité de journaliste de longue date, il parvient à résumer la pensée complexe des grands philosophes de manière passionnante et accessible à tous.

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      Book preview

      Nietzsche in 60 Minutes - Walther Ziegler

      My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

      My special thanks go to my translator

      Dr Alexander Reynolds.

      Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

      Contents

      Nietzsche’s Great Discovery

      Nietzsche’s Central Idea

      The Dionysian Principle and the Apollonian Principle

      The Emergence of Slave Morality: How Judaism and Christianity Betrayed Life

      The Origin of Bad Conscience

      Truth as Beams and Boards and Illusion of Language

      Will to Power as the Essential Feature of All Life

      The Overman – Facets of a New Art of Living

      The Eternal Recurrence

      Of What Use Is Nietzsche’s Discovery for Us Today?

      Is Nietzsche Right? – Is Humanity Not Complete Without Evil?

      The Dionysian Life – Trusting One’s Feelings

      Become Who You Are!

      The Three Steps on the Path to the Overman

      Say Yes to Life – Embrace Life’s Joys and Also Its Sorrows!

      Bibliographical References

      Nietzsche’s Great Discovery

      Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has the reputation of being the darkest, most radical and most controversial of all philosophers. The darkest because he was deeply sceptical of all that had hitherto given solace, moral security and hope to human beings; the most radical because he dared to tear up by the roots all that had seemed, for centuries, most valid and most permanent; and the most controversial because his provocative philosophy has, even today, as many rancorous critics as it has passionate adherents.

      Nietzsche’s work is more than just a milestone in the history of philosophy. It is like a flash of summer lightning, a sea-change in humankind’s own perception of itself. Its core idea has imbedded itself deep in modern consciousness. In just one short sentence he enunciated what has remained the abiding problem of all Western civilization right up to the present day:

      The phrase is known all around the world, even to those who know nothing of Nietzsche. Because with it Nietzsche gives concise expression to a feeling that seized humankind in the age that saw the rise of the natural sciences and has not let go of us since. It is a feeling that culminates in the atheism prevalent in modern mass society and forces us to pose entirely anew the question of what sense and meaning our lives can have. But this death of God that Nietzsche proclaims in his magnum opus of 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is not a single event but rather a process which throws its own shadows ahead of it:

      For almost two thousand years Christianity seemed able to explain the whole nature of the world; for the same long period human beings could feel secure in the sense of being God’s creatures. Nietzsche was one of the first to sense that this old worldpicture was about to suffer an irrevocable collapse.

      Nietzsche’s contemporary Darwin had just recently developed his theory of evolution, according to which Man was no creature of God but just a higher mammal. Marx, around this time, was exhorting humanity to finally take its destiny into its own hands. Physics, medicine and the other natural sciences, meanwhile, were going from strength to strength. All that was not scientifically provable was called into question: divine creation; immaculate conception; finally, even God Himself. But it was not just scientists and researchers, Nietzsche argues, but all of us together who gradually took away from God His world-explaining power:

      Nietzsche calls himself an immoralist and an anti-Christian. On one possible English rendering of the title of one of his major late works, he even goes so far to calls himself the Antichrist. But his core idea consists in more than just a critique of Christianity and morality. Rather, he is interested above all in one question: how is humankind to go on if that belief in a beyond which had sustained us is doomed to lose all force in the two centuries to come? What happens when nihilism gains the ascendancy and the spiritual shelter provided by religion is irrecoverably lost?

      What Nietzsche poses here is the great question of identity in the age of the advent of nihilism. With the death of God such principles as the Ten Commandments, piety and humility also lose their power to order and structure our world. Are there any values left, then, that are worth living and dying for?

      It is because this question is such a burningly topical one that Nietzsche is often called the first post-modern thinker. Why post-modern? The modern age was still sustained by the optimism and the expectation of progress of the Enlightenment. Such thinkers as Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant, Locke and Hume had already aspired to free humankind of superstition and religious humility. But Nietzsche is more radical. He goes one large step farther and asks: what is to happen once we have freed ourselves of these things? Once all mythical and religious world-images have been destroyed, what is it that still gives life meaning? His answer is a rigorously consistent one:

      We have, then, the tremendous task of setting for ourselves those goals which shall, in future, be pursued across the whole earth. This is the great freedom that has become ours after the death of God. But – so Nietzsche argues – instead of becoming aware of this freedom and making use of it, we human beings have immediately set about making for ourselves new gods, new idols, which promise us the shelter and directing force we have lost. The small-minded – so Nietzsche’s prognosis – will turn, in lieu of the divine, to hundreds of thousands of more material promises of salvation. He saw the future as one in which people would run blindly after nationalism, socialism, racism or the supposed blessings of modern capitalism and democracy. Nietzsche’s critique of this new idolatry is astonishingly farsighted. As a convinced European he was particularly

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