On April 20, 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Clembled, were armed with firearms and explosives in the shocking school shooting at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, killing 15 people and injuring 24 others. According to a police investigation afterwards, the two criminals repeatedly quoted some of Nietzsche's representative ideas and proverbs in their private diaries. Whenever society encounters misfortune and disaster, in order to maintain the peace and stability of the public's heart, it is always necessary to find a scapegoat. Thus, in the field of public opinion, Nietzsche's philosophy was once again pushed to the cusp of the storm. According to a popular view, Nietzsche incited people to believe that "God is dead" and advocated the superhuman philosophy of the weak and the strong, which led to all kinds of bloody atrocities in real life... Nietzsche's philosophy should be held accountable not only for the political atrocities of German fascism, but also for the atrocities inspired by terrorists and serial killers.
Arthur Danto, author of Nietzsche as a Philosopher and contemporary American philosopher and art critic, disagrees with this view, and in his view, Nietzsche's obsession with creating radical rhetoric with dramatic effects is misleading for some readers, but his philosophy itself is positive, rigorous, and creative. By applying the technique of analytic philosophy to clarify the meaning of language, it can be fully shown that Nietzsche's philosophy is not intended to teach people to pursue the power to conquer and manipulate everything without a bottom line, but to transcend and overcome the intellectual ills and cultural dilemmas arising from the nihilism prevalent in contemporary intellectual life by advocating a strong creative will.
"God" has come to an end,
Nietzsche simply revealed trends
Any elaborate and complex idea is inevitably simplified and distorted in the process of widespread public dissemination, and Nietzsche's philosophy is no exception. Nietzsche foresaw this possibility even before he fell into a state of madness, so he stressed many times in his works that his qualified readers must be "honest in matters of spirit", must have a courage to face the problem and "face the prohibition", must maintain a "new conscience prepared for the truth that has hitherto remained silent"... Ironically, the banal mind is happy to summarize Nietzsche's philosophical nihilism into a slogan-style standard answer. They hastily believed that Nietzsche had killed God through his radical philosophical critique. Now that God is dead, as Dostoevsky feared in Elder Zosima, there is nothing that cannot be done, leaving behind a world in which power is axiom, and arbitrary power can do whatever it wants, a world that Nietzsche's philosophy of the superman ultimately advocates. An important purpose of Danto's rational reconstruction of Nietzsche's philosophy is to clarify the stigmatized interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy by the above-mentioned popular understanding.
The first thing to clarify is that although Nietzsche said the phrase "God is dead", it was not Nietzsche himself who killed "God", in fact, in Nietzsche's time, "God" has died in the hearts of many so-called believers, and Nietzsche only ruthlessly revealed this development trend. Nietzsche keenly noted that, while the populace was still happy to admit to believing in it, the majority of believers were largely unable to respond forcefully and reasonably to the many challenges facing the Christian faith in modern intellectual and political practice. The reason why gangsters are reluctant to give up their faith is only because their human nature is mostly narcissistic. Even if it is a lie, in the case that a person has believed it for a lifetime, in fact, the truth or falsity of the lie does not matter to them. Denying lies may not be difficult, but it is precisely to deny yourself. As for politicians who speak highly of the Christian faith and are not bound by it in their actions, they are essentially Machiavellians who are obsessed with using their faith to seize power for themselves. Since this belief degenerates into a tool and means of mass debacle, it is difficult to expect them to continue to follow this belief. Thus, Nietzsche, with the help of his madman, loudly proclaimed that "God is dead" and "all of us are murderers", and when faith loses its vitality and becomes a form that shapes the meaning and value of life, even churches that strictly respect and regulate the conduct of sacred ceremonies have become "god's mausoleum and tombstone".
Of course, Nietzsche's statement that "God is dead" does not refer only to the situation of the Christian faith, but to a more profound philosophical implication. As Heidegger points out, "God" here represents the general "supersensory realm" and its various interpretations, representing the "ideals" and "norms", "principles" and "laws", "goals" and "values" that seek to give meaning to the being as a whole. In this context, nihilism means that "the dominant 'supersensory realm' has failed and become empty, so that the being itself has lost its value and meaning". Throughout the history of Western philosophy, the prevailing practice of Western philosophers is that the human subject can grasp the many forms, structures and orders of objective reality through philosophical speculation, and according to the interpretive understanding of these universally valid transcendental truths, many ideals, norms and laws can be constructed that can give the existents overall meaning and value, and through the systematic collation of these transcendental ideals, meanings and values, the worldview and value doctrines advocated by these philosophers can be forged.
However, in Nietzsche's view, human cognition is perspective-oriented, constrained by specific cognitive perspectives, and therefore impossible to have the universal validity advocated by traditional Western philosophers. The relationship between the truth grasped by human beings and the world is not an objective conformity relationship, but a metaphorical relationship of screening and transformation, so human knowledge is not an objective explanation of the external world, but an interpretation of human will and interest, and interpretation is an effective means of becoming a master to rule. Nietzsche profoundly pointed out that all existing things are "constantly being transformed and distorted according to their needs by those in power"; all conquests and victories mean "reinterpretation and re-justification", and in this process of reinterpretation and justification, the previous "meaning" and "purpose" will inevitably be obscured or reconstructed as a justification of the newly acquired dominant order of power. Thus, the absolute truths, absolute values, and absolute ideas of universal validity that traditional philosophers elaborately expound and defend are fundamentally justified in order to justify the different orders of power favored in their hearts. "God" in philosophy is manifested as ideals or ideas that claim to have absolute truth and absolute authority, and that are fanatically followed and blindly worshipped by believers in different epochs, and they constantly construct various "philosophical myths". Nietzsche's philosophical nihilism, on the other hand, is devoted to clarifying in various ways of argumentation that, in the final analysis, there is neither the form, order, or structure discovered by human cognition in the world, nor the meaning, purpose, or value usually presupposed by human morality and belief; they are mere metaphysical fictions invented by man for the convenience of survival, and therefore they do not bring unquestionable absolute authority and absolute power to the ideals or ideas that philosophers want to advocate. For human thought and culture to develop and flourish for a long time, it is necessary to constantly break through the shackles of the web of power carefully woven by this fictional idol.
However, it is not easy to free oneself from the shackles of this web of power, and Nietzsche soberly realized that "we will not be able to free ourselves from God unless we have freed ourselves from grammar", and even through sufficient philosophical argumentation and reflection, people will still replace god with other idols and worship God out of the instinct of language habits and customs in the grammatical position where God is absent, just as the people of Israel worshipped during the period when Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Law. Foolishly worshipping the golden calf as a new idol. According to Danto's interpretation, another important reason for God's death is that the loving God could not bear to see human beings constantly degrading themselves in this relationship of worship of absolute authority, and out of compassion and love for human beings, God chose to let himself die in order to open up more free space for humanity to thrive and prosper. However, humanity, which has become accustomed to idolatry, does not end the worship of many new idols that have replaced God because of God's death. Therefore, for Nietzsche, to overcome this shackle of absolute authority and absolute power, it is not enough to destroy the idols of God, but also to dissolve the tendency of human beings to create various alternative idols through philosophical criticism and cultural criticism, and it is necessary to make human beings fully aware that any alternative idols will not bring real hope to people from the invisible web of power. This means overcoming the cultural and ideological tendencies of modern people to blindly worship alternative idols such as art, science or morality, and for Nietzsche, he needs to focus on overcoming the fanatical admiration of art, especially Wagner's music.
The cult of idols who replace God,
Not enough to free people from the shackles of absolute power
On August 13, 1876, the first Wagner Festival was held in Bayreuth, and Wagner performed his famous quadrigame Ring of the Nibelungen in this town for the first time, and it is said that the audience from all over Europe exceeded the local population by several times, and even the food supply became a problem. The inaugural Bayreuth Festival meant that Wagner's musical career reached its peak, but it was the clamor and riots created by the audience at the festival that allowed Nietzsche to gradually cool down his fanatical passion for Wagner. Later, when Wagner presented Nietzsche with an exquisite sample of his new play Parsifal, the play extolled the Christian values of chastity and further left Nietzsche with an unpleasant impression of denying life. Since then, Nietzsche has written a series of short essays criticizing and attacking Wagner, and in his view, Wagner's music is not the kind of contemporary art that he expected to carry and carry out the great cultural mission of ancient Greek tragedy.
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Compared with Nietzsche's artistic ideals, it is not difficult to see Wagner's problems. In Nietzsche's view, although Wagner tried to create a tragic hero who confronted cruelty in his musical dramas, his musical dramas did not inspire a Dionysus-style intoxication that transcended the sufferings of life, but a frenzy that incited the low-level tastes of the people. Nietzsche found that Wagner was a brilliant actor who was keenly aware of the excitement that could trigger a motley revelry. These pretentious fanatics do not need thoughts, but only the seemingly noble, deep, mighty worship of power, "whoever makes us fall, who is strong", so Wagner concocted a large number of illusions of power that can stimulate cheap passions according to the needs of the people. Wagner was an illusion-making genius who wanted to give the populace the illusion that he had great power, an effect that his musical drama sought, but "whatever produces this real effect is not real." Nietzsche pointed out with great sharpness that unlike the classical masters such as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, who sincerely loved music creation, Wagner only used music as a means of gaining supreme power in the kingdom of art. Wagner wanted to be the tyrant who dominated everything in the realm of art, but he shrewdly played himself as the new savior, manipulating the minds, bodies, and lives of his ignorant followers in the name of redeeming the soul and inspiring power. The fundamental reason why Wagner violently attacked Christianity in his youth was that he himself wanted to replace it as the savior in the minds of his followers, "If you want to create a new altar, you must destroy the altar of the past"...
Whether or not Nietzsche's sharp criticism of Wagner is true, there has indeed never been a shortage of such "masters" in the history of human art. This also made Nietzsche, who praised art, fiercely oppose the iconoclastic tendencies of art, because the fanatical state acquired by the weak through art is corrupting humanity in a slow and fundamental way, and some artists who aspire to be saviors, even in the highest state of desperation, are only those "religious and philosophical fallacies" that are now known to be wrong. After Nietzsche's disillusionment with Wagner, he turned to science to "fill the vacuum left by art." However, after a meticulous examination of modern technology, Nietzsche keenly discovered that modern technology does not necessarily bring greater freedom and dignity to human beings, that power can make people obediently accept various arbitrary commands in the name of scientific truth, and that it can grasp all kinds of life information accumulated by people from birth to death with the help of monitoring technology. Modern technology has carefully woven a mask of order for power, as long as a person wears this mask, the person outside the mask can not see the true face of the person, and he can borrow the name of the mask to do whatever he wants. Modern technology calls it the safest artificial world created by mankind, but the so-called safest place, from another point of view, is the strongest cage, which is nothing less than an invisible prison for those who have the most dazzling ambitions like Alexander the Great. It is on the basis of this consideration that Nietzsche asserts that since Copernicus, science and technology have not really enhanced human dignity, but rather "most thoroughly broken the reverence for philosophy and opened the door to the instincts of the herd", and gradually put an end to man's "belief in his dignity, uniqueness, and irreplaceability in the hierarchical sequence of creation", "human beings are like falling on a slope ... Get out of the center point faster and faster from now on", roll into "nothingness", roll into "the sense of piercing his nothingness".
One might take it for granted that by promoting and advocating ethics and constraining the research behavior of scientists, these trends can be effectively reversed. Ironically, however, those in charge of power often lose their way in their thinking and cover up their incompetence by preaching morality when specific options no longer provide effective means. Nietzsche made it clear that the value of morality should be revalued, and that this should clarify what a person in some moral domination "will become, what force will be promoted, and what force will be suppressed." According to the different types of people that morality intends to cultivate and shape, it is possible to roughly divide the many morals that have prevailed so far into two types: "master morality" and "slave morality.". As Danto emphasizes, these two morals should not be taken literally as the morals held separately by the aristocratic and slave classes in ancient slave societies, when in fact they refer to two people with different qualities and abilities. "Masters" refers to those who are capable, open-minded, clearly have their own ideals and pursuits, and in the process of growing themselves, they also add brilliance and brilliance to human civilization, so they are excellent individuals who have the ability to "impose their own value on this world." The "slave" is a group of "stagnant, blind, tamed, spiritually poor" who lack creative abilities, are closed-minded, short-sighted, and have neither the courage to affirm themselves nor the ability to enrich themselves and the world through active creation. All noble morality arises from "a triumphant self-affirmation," while slave morality leads to the negation of the outside world, others, and the unego, and slave morality always requires an "opposing external environment" and appears in its fictional external stimuli. The weak man does not reflect on himself to seek the cause of his suffering, but instead conceives of an "ugly enemy" through resentment and places all the relevant culprit on this external enemy. And it is this "guilty" person responsible that has become the target of his resentment and dissatisfaction. This emotional catharsis is the greatest self-consolation of these people, the anesthetic that these people involuntarily crave in order to resist any kind of torture...
Nietzsche further argues that these uncreative "slaves", though incapable of creating good things, may have great intentions and ambitions, and under certain historical conditions they may even have great power to assess value in certain areas through intrigue and intrigue. Shakespeare's conspirator Iagul once asked such a sharp question: "Right and wrong in the world are not determined; because of doing a wrong thing and getting the whole world, in his own world, can't right and wrong be reversed?" The moral evaluation made by the "slaves" using their power is precisely in a similar way, re-evaluating the superior talents and excellent qualities of the strong as evil deeds and defects, and then using various moral and religious manipulation methods to make the strong produce strong guilt and self-blame for their excellent qualities and risk-taking behavior. The "slave" is nothing more than a tool for using morality as a tool to defend and discredit the strong for oneself, and moral kidnapping and moral judgment have become a disciplinary means to tame the strong and make the strong obey the various distorted rules set by the slave's morality... When slave morality has the power to dominate all value assessments, it is almost impossible for human beings to truly have the creative vitality of self-renewal and self-transcendence.
It is through these lines of thought that Nietzsche forcefully shows that the cult of idols that replace God is not enough to free people from the shackles of absolute power, and the first step to solve this problem is to dissolve the tendency of human beings to make idols, and then calmly admit that human beings are currently in the "twilight of idols", and human beings need to abandon their unrealistic expectations of various idols and face the many problems and dilemmas they encounter independently. Faced with this situation, the weak form a negative nihilism, and after losing the guidance of their idols, they become the kind of "end-timers" who no longer believe in any supreme ideals and hopes and go with the flow in life. The strong develop a positive nihilism, in which they see new opportunities for development in the "Twilight of the Idols", becoming the kind of "superman" who actively stimulates the creativity of the strong will to realize his intellectual ideals, and Nietzsche regards this superman as the best hope for overcoming the crisis of nihilism.
Those who have power may not be powerful,
Nor does the powerful have the right
In 1933, Hitler, then Chancellor of Germany, visited the Nietzsche Archives with his usual whip, and Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth, received Hitler warmly. Hitler stayed inside for an hour and a half, and when he came out, his whip was gone, replaced by a Walking Cane given to him by Elizabeth. This may not have been a politically significant event for Hitler, but for scholars who wished to stigmatize Nietzsche's philosophy, they were keen to stimulate the reader's imagination on the basis of such hearsay anecdotes, in an attempt to make Nietzsche the philosophical godfather of German fascism and to equate Nietzsche's "superman" with political ambitions like Hitler. According to Danto's research, Elizabeth, in the process of editing Nietzsche's posthumous manuscript, made many changes to Nietzsche's text to meet the tastes of fascism. But given that Elizabeth herself knew neither philosophy nor any friend who could understand philosophy deeply, and that these alterations did not fundamentally touch Nietzsche's philosophical thought, Danto argued that in order to clarify Nietzsche's superhuman image, one should not overpolitiately interpret nietzsche, but should persist in understanding the concept at the philosophical level. And since supermans manifest themselves in the generative characteristics of the strong will, in order to form a reliable philosophical understanding of the concept of superman, it is first necessary to clarify Nietzsche's concept of the strong will.
Danto points out that the "strong will" is not a psychological concept, but a metaphysical concept, and what it wants to explain is "what exists?" "This metaphysical question. According to the understanding of psychology, the will is the force that produces a certain result, and it pursues the lack of things that can satisfy many desires, but the strong will advocated by Nietzsche does not pursue some kind of lack, on the contrary, the strong will is itself, the will is "beyond itself", it "must surpass itself and dominate itself at the same time". Therefore, a strong will "is tantamount to a stronger will, a will to grow." Further, it needs to be clarified that the strong will is neither the will of the powerful man in particular, nor something that we humans possess, but something that everything in the world and what we ourselves are, and that there is nothing in this world except the strong will and its variations. Nietzsche's understanding of the strong will of the physical world is a dynamic quantity, and "things are the sum of their effects", so that after a force occupies a territory in physical space, it expands outward from the center of this force until it encounters the obstacle of other forces. The magnitude of a force "is defined by the force it exerts and resists," and "it is essentially the will to pursue repression and resist repression."
According to Nietzsche, many forces are condensed into "life" through the process of nutrition, and "life is the strong will". Danto argues that although Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Darwinism, nietzsche's strong will could not be hastily understood and evaluated in the light of the Darwinian point of view. Both emphasize the struggle of life, but Nietzsche believes that the essence of life contains the desire to grow and improve, and the preservation of life serves the improvement of life. The standard of natural selection advocated by Darwinism does not apply to strong will, because the standard of natural selection is only the survival of the fittest, not the survival of the fittest. What contributes to the preservation and continuation of species may not be conducive to the strength and prosperity of individuals, but the actual situation is often "the survival of the strong, and the destruction of the strong"...
Rather than the Narrow Perspective of the Darwinists, who focused solely on the reproduction and survival of species, Nietzsche was more concerned with the vitality of life that constantly expanded and transcended through the strong will. What the strong will constantly seeks is self-overcoming and self-transcendence, that is, the pursuit of a stronger creative force. The strong will "manifests itself at the level of spiritual life in the form of the explanation given to life by man", and art, science, and philosophy "exemplifies the strong will", which is the product of the explanation of the strong will imposing its own "conceptual schema" on this chaotic world. "To brand beings is the highest expression of strong will," as Danto puts it, in this way "we not only organize the world, but we create ourselves." Thus, in the final analysis, "Nietzsche's strong will is the will to pursue creation."
Danto's Nietzsche's research makes it clear that Nietzsche's position often revealed in his exposition of the strong will is that those who have power are not necessarily powerful, and those who are powerful are not necessarily powerful. When the weak seize power through ingenious intrigue and power, they are incapable of doing anything truly valuable, but they have the power to sabotage any truly constructive cause. Mediocre bureaucrats in their hands of power are suspicious and insecure by nature, demanding uniformity for the convenience of rule and administration, pursuing a superficially visible order, viewing many of the creative impulses of the strong will as a great threat to their own power, and suppressing them by imposing various prohibitions. When the creative impulses of the strong will are suppressed by society, they do not disappear out of thin air, but go underground and manifest themselves in a hidden and even distorted way at certain times and occasions...
Nietzsche as a Philosopher
(A) Arthur Danto/
Hao Yuan/Translation
Zhejiang University Press
February 2022
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