​
​​​​​
INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCERS (True Influencers, not the social media talentless attention seekers)
Friedrich Nietzsche
​
This month’s influencer is Friedrich Nietzsche, another German philosopher, and a man who can be considered the successor of last month’s influencer Arthur Schopenhauer, who built on his ideas but came to a very different conclusion.
​
Nietzsche also believed in the metaphysical force called the will, but where Schopenhauer posited the “Wille zum leben” (will to life), and advocated negation of the will, Nietzsche saw this as life-denying pessimism, which he saw as a form of nihilism rooted in Christian values, and instead he wrote of the “Wille zur Macht” (will to power). Where Schopenhauer advised limiting desire and resigning from life to escape suffering, Nietzsche came to advocate embracing suffering as a necessary part of life and growth.
​
Nietzsche was pro-envy; he believed that the negative influence of Christianity had led to the belief that envy was a sin to be overcome, but that it was in fact something we should first accept, then use it as a guide to getting what we want. What we envy is what we should strive to attain, and even if we don’t succeed, as long as we have made a sincere effort, then failure can be accepted with dignity.
​
Envy wasn’t the only failing that Nietzsche attributed to Christianity, he regarded it as “sklavenmoral” (Slave Morality), a creed that denied what people really wanted, which is power and freedom and instead made them meek and submissive repurposing these as virtues but which is what people do not want. This was a major disagreement with the philosophy of Shopenhauer and its limiting of desires and resignation from life which Nietzsche thought fundamentally Christian even if Schopenhauer’s writings were not explicitly so. In Götzen-Dämmerung (1889) Nietzsche argues that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is “anti nature” and leads to nihilism and that his pessimism devalues life.
​
Nietzsche regarded Christianity as one of European civilisation’s great narcotics (as did Karl Marx) along with alcohol, he believed that both numbed the pain of life and made it more bearable and thus prevented people from striving to make the best of their lives. Suffering and discomfort should be used as driving forces towards self fulfillment.
​
Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for the phrase “Gott ist tot” (God is dead) from "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" (1882) by which he meant that theology was no longer a foundation for morality and meaning in Western society due the Enlightenment and scientific advancements that had made belief in God unbelievable, leading to a potential collapse of traditional values and a risk of nihilism.
​
In his book Also sprach Zarathustr (1883) Nietzsche introduced the concept of the Übermensch, a man who has overcome conventional morality and its limitations to create their own values and meaning in a world without God. Nietzsche's theoretical Übermensch is not a tyrannical figure but an ideal of self-mastery, creativity, and the courageous affirmation of life and the material world. This ideal is a goal for humanity to strive towards, particularly in the face of nihilism and the decline of traditional values.
​
While Nietzsche came to reject the philosophical conclusions of Schopenhauer, it was the later who died peacefully in his armchair at the age of 72, while Nietzsche had a mental breakdown in 1889 at the age of 44 and spent the final 11 years of his life in a state of total mental darkness. He required constant care from his family, first in an asylum and later in his mother's and then his sister's homes. He died in 1900 at the age of 55.
​
So as the year draws to its end you can make your New Year Resolution to abandon the “sklavenmoral” that has held you back and strive to become a Nietzschean “Übermensch” who embraces the “Wille zur Macht”.