When1: 1872
When2: 1901
Who: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm]
What: philosopher
Where: Germany/Basel, Switzerland
works\ Birth of Tragedy [1872]; Untimely Meditations [1874]; Human, All too Human [1878]; Gay Science [1882 and 1887]; Thus Spake Zarathustra [1883 to 1885]; Beyond Good and Evil [1886]; On the Genealogy of Morals [1887]; Twilight of the Gods or Twilight of the Idols [1888]; Case of Wagner [1888]; Antichrist [1888]; Ecce Homo or Behold Mankind or Behold Humanity [1888]; Will to Power [1901]
Detail: He lived 1844 to 1900. Schopenhauer influenced him.
Aesthetics
Art can have restraint {Apollonian} or be free {Dionysian}.
Epistemology
People cannot know truth. All things are in flux, including truth. Therefore, all things must have continual study from many perspectives, accounting for all cases and situations.
Ethics
Values should depend on world as it is, humans as they are, and all their possibilities. Morals are always changing as world and people change.
People should accept material world and human life as they are. People should express their instincts, be fully alive, have desire for power, and exercise power. People should feel free, powerful, creative, and independent {overman} {superman}, by intellectually controlling and exercising their will-to-power as much as possible. For supermen, good and evil are meaningless.
The best morality for the present time is morality for masters and free, independent persons. Only the strong ought to survive and/or rule. Anything that delays arrival of the supermen is wrong or goes against nature.
Conventional morals and society are just escapes for the weak. People deny that anything is important or any action has significance {nihilism, Nietzsche}. Nihilism, old values, old interpretations, and old thinking ways, such as theology and metaphysics, are slave or herd morality for the powerless and weary. For example, the old value of sympathy perpetuates the unfit. Old values make people sensitive to injury, inferiority, oppression, frustration, or humiliation, and they react to them with hatred, tricks, and dishonesty {resentment} {slave mentality}.
Old values should have re-examination {transvaluation} {revaluation} to find relations to creative and powerful life values.
Will and intellect oppose each other. People that can only will must suffer, as things thwart their will or they conflict with others. Intellect should control will and engage in creative, powerful, and life-affirming activities.
Truth and happiness are not important, only expression of will-to-power.
Metaphysics
Irrational-force interactions {will-to-power} have no objective purposes and no structure and create and maintain physical and biological worlds.
"God is dead" and does not exist.
Mind
People can only will. Therefore, they must suffer.
Politics
Society can develop people's awareness and activity.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Mind
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Date Modified: 2022.0224