Michael Furgiuele

HIST 616

Spring 2005

Fourth Examination

Dr. R. Luehrs, Instructor

 

What does Lloyd Kramer mean by the “Heroic Critic” of mass society, and how does Friedrich Nietzsche fit this description?  In your analysis of Nietzsche discuss his criticism of Darwinism; his opposition to tradition religious and philosophic believes; and his concept of the ‘will to power’.  Include in your discussion references to specific passages in Twilight of the Idols.

 

 

From our lectures, study guides and review of Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols; we are able to synthesize the understanding of a new form of philosophic thought that rejected the ideas of pure religion and reason in favor of understanding the role of the individual and his inner perceptions.  In addition, we learn of new theories that revolutionized the ideas of the Enlightenment and moved thought into the twentieth-century and a drive to understand the mind as the basis for human thought and development.

 

Dr. Kramer discussed the evolution of ideas at the end of the nineteenth-century as “a growing belief in the value of majority rule and in the decisive shaping power of collective identities, such as nationality, class or race” (Kramer, 2001, p.53).  As philosophers and theorists accepted the idea that human progress as stifled and individuality as repressed by social and religious groupings, idealists created ideas against conformity and suggested a return to individual powers and ideals.  The ‘Heroic Critic’ of society is the individual who embraced their individuality and rejected their “mediocrity of modern bourgeois life” (Kramer, 2001, p.53).  The ‘Heroic Critic’ rejected  the ideas generated throughout the Enlightenment including Liberalism which moved individual rights into a more methodical social setting, and utilitarianism that purported the “the greatest good for the greatest number” (Kramer, 2001, p.54).  This new hero embraced independent thought and feelings and educated people to the dangers that mediocrity, conformity, and collective thought on society (lecture 23). 

 

Several philosophers identified with this new form of individual and wrote critiques against society, religion, and politics in order to awaken the people to new dangers of stagnation and a loss of cultural and individual identity.  Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the theorists who actively – and boldly – defied the normal understanding of science, life and religion to provide a warning to society.  Nietzsche “challenged the scientific confidence in reason, the expanding modern belief in democratic political institutions and traditional Christian conceptions of morality” (Kramer, 2001, p.58).  Nietzsche’s philosophy warned us “our era is sterile, decaying, weak, confused, filled with self-hatred and psychological breakdown” (Luehrs, 2005, p.28).  His views were extremely unpopular since they defied the enlightened conclusion of progress and reason as well as their apparent attack against religious foundations. 

 

At the core of Nietzsche’s theory was his idea of ‘will to power’ that was the unique powers of the individual above those of society, religion and politics, in shapping, the future and empowering their lives against the mediocrity of the time. While the will to power is possible of the strong over the weak, “the most gratifying exercise of the will to power comes from mastery of oneself, self-overcoming” (Luehrs, 2005, p.29).   It is conceivable and foreseeable that the strong shall overpower the weak, but to be able to identify and overcome one’s own mediocrity was paramount to being free.  The heroic man is not driven by designs for society, religion or politics, but acts against these institutions in finding his inner-self.  Nietzsche sought to return to the ancients and embraced the ideals of the Renaissance for that reason.  Socrates and his Socratic Method was a great dichotomy for Nietzsche.  On one side, Nietzsche saw him as “exaggerated, buffo, caricature, everything is at the same hidden, reserved, subterranean” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.40). His method seemed to deny man total freedom to think and act independently.  However, Socrates also “exercised fascination as this extreme case – his fear-inspiring ugliness expressed it for every eye to see: he fascinated even more, it goes without saying, as the answer, as the solution, as the apparent cure for this case” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.43).  Nietzsche called his dialectical process as a means to “devitalize his opponent’s intellect” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.40). In a return to pre-Socratic Methods, man was free and explored and recharged the instinctual drives that brought understanding (lecture 24).  To Nietzsche, the current state of “the ancient Greek ideal of independent strong-willed persons had been destroyed by bourgeois materialism and post-revolutionary democratic culture” (Kramer, 2001, p.60).   

Nietzsche respected the ability for a person to move out of his conformity within society.  He valued the life of the artist above those of science.  Artists were free to find their own, inner expressions and were not afraid to become “the Overman, the creative genius who pursues excellence” (Luehrs, 2005, p.30).  There is an internal struggle within the artist class that appealed to Nietzsche.  The duplicity of the mind over the body, the struggle against conformity and subjectivity inspired him. 

The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.  Pride, victory over weight and gravity, the will to power, seek to render themselves visible in a building; architecture is a kind of rhetoric of power, now persuasive, even cajoling in form, now loftily imperious. The highest feeling of power and security finds expression in that which possesses grand style.  Power which no longer required proving; which disdains to please; which is slow to answer; which is conscious of no witness around it; which lives oblivious of the existence of an opposition; which reposes in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws: this is what speaks of itself in the form of grand style (Nietzsche, 2003, p.85).

 

Philosophy, not religion or science would provide the best understanding of man’s existence and hope for a revived spirit.  To Nietzsche, God was dead for “modern science had destroyed the classical explanations for God, and modern people no longer really believed in God” (Kramer, 2001, p.61). Religion reinforced the hollow existence of man.  Religion was another institution, which demanded man to relinquish the ancient ideas of inquisition, debate and discussion.  By reinforcing the teachings of self-denial and immorality, the church drained the individual spirit from man.   By rationalizing that “God sees into the heart’ it denies the deepest and the highest desires of like and takes God for the enemy of life… The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate…Life is at an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.55).  Nietzsche’s view of church dogma showed that he understood the rationality of religion in the world, but sought to identify it as a crutch that was both abused by the Church over the people and as a sin of the people against their own will to power.  To Nietzsche, the church was like “the struggle with the beast, making it sick can be the only means of making it weak.  This the Church understood: it corrupted the human being, it weakened him – but it claimed to have ‘improved’ him (Nietzsche, 2003, p.67).  The church was therefore, the height of conformity against which Nietzsche fought.  Man’s dependence on religion removed all self-worth and perspective, and “it denies value to life in this world, promising future bliss in a mythical afterlife, when in fact the present moment is all that we have” (Luehrs, 2005, p.31).  People conformed to the ideas of scientific evidence or to the religious doctrine, which reinforced a central will against the ‘will to power’ of the individual.  Without an individual spirit, man was descending into a decadent reflection of nihilism where views are defenseless and useless (lecture 24).

 

Nietzsche’s ideas were written in a post-Darwinian age (lecture 24) where “human beings were biological creatures and that the human will was the only real force in personal and cultural life” (Kramer, 2001, p.59).  Nietzsche’s writings, however, also criticized Darwin for contributing to an age where ‘God is dead’. 

 

Charles Darwin formulated his theory on the evolution of man over a twenty-year period of time and used the foundations that “grew out of his studies of geology and Malthusian population theories, as well as his own travel experience in South America” (Kramer, 2001, p.43).  Christian dogma defined creation as divine and that all creatures had a place in nature where the key was harmony.  Darwin shattered this idea, suggesting that man evolved from lower species over a period of millions of years. He based this on his study of geology and his belief “that the natural processes we now see in the world – climate, winds, oceans, rivers, fire, and so on – had always been changing the earth’s surface” (Kramer, 2001, p.45) and was not the orderly hierarchy of man and nature as religion described.  Further, Darwin identified with the sociological significance of Thomas Malthus who suggested that limited resources would spur a struggle and through that struggle, only the fittest would survive (lecture 21).  After combining these attributes, Darwin established his hypothesis “that all species change and evolve, but only some variations or changes are truly useful for survival” (Kramer, 2001, p.46) and those changes lead to natural selection.

 

Darwin’s theories and his book, On the Origin of the Species, hit at the heart of the problem that Nietzsche discussed – that man had replaced God with science.  By stating that man developed from lower species and through struggle developed into our current state, “Darwinian man is no longer the possessor of a spark of the divine; he is only an animal, distinguished from other beasts by being better organized and more sophisticated” (Luehrs, 2005, p.28).  However, Darwinian science, alone, did not cast out God.  It was industry, business, materialism, and conformity, which moved God out of existence and replaced Him with reason and pure science.  To Nietzsche, “the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality – where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power (Nietzsche, 2003, p.86).  As Darwin focused on a struggle, that retained the strong over the weak, Nietzsche understood that the weak would succumb to the powerful – but that “Darwin forgot the mind: the weak possess more mind…To acquire mind one must need mind – one loses it when one no longer needs it.  He who possesses strength divest himself of mind” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.87), warning Darwin and other theorists that the will to power was a strong factor in determining survivability.

 

            In addition to his criticism of the church, Nietzsche also rejected the ideas of several economic and political structures.  For man to be free from conformity and decadence, he must not be structured.  Democracy and Socialism are both forms of government, which show mutual dependence, and a relinquishing of self-rights in favor the common good.  These structures “smothered cultural greatness” (Luehrs, 2005, p.31) and removed the critical, independent thought required of Nietzsche’s hero.

 

            In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche attacked conformity, religion, governmental foundations, and the false philosophies, which rejected individual thoughts and interpretations.  As suggested by the title, “the idols being false gods, our obsolete philosophic systems, outdated moral principles, and defunct religious beliefs” (Luehrs, 2005, p.33).  Reason alone was insufficient to provide understanding.  The world was not in the beyond and afterlife, but in the here and now.  “’Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses.  The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.46) 

                       

            Nietzsche represented Kramer’s ‘Heroic Critic’ – a man who was beyond the reach of convention and who actively warned society about its decay through laziness and complacency in science and conformist thought.  Nietzsche rejected both anonymity and conformity with his ‘will to power’ concept where man is empowered by himself to act and think freely.  By rejecting the conventions of formal religious institutions and communal governments such as socialism and democracy, man can” escape from sense-deception, from becoming, from history, from falsehood” (Nietzsche, 2003, p.45).