Nietzsche and the Superman

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche has four themes nihilism, lessonity, the allow to power, and eternal recurrence. It is important to know and to understand first these themes so as to comprehend the value of Nietzsche proclaiming the jumble to be a super part.Nietzsche perceives nihilism as the product of an accelerating corrosion of religious and cultural beliefs at the flavour of Eu cockroachan civilization at the end of the 19th century. Thinkers during the Enlightenment period, who uphold the supremacy of reason everyplace faith, argufy supernatural truths, demanding explanations of the afterlife, the soul, and God that atomic number 18 amenable to human logic and the senses. This mode of thinking sternly challenge and influence to undermine the basic tenets of Christianity and European culture.The statement of Nietzsche, God is dead, is the greatest expression of nihilism. From a viewpoint that God is n unmatched existent, Nietzsche sees mans life as characterized by an aimless relativity that is experienced by him in every sphere of reality cultural, political, historical, and philosophical. God, considered to be a supreme value, no longer exists. When the highest determine consequently become devalued or rejected, nihilism emerges. A case in point, if a supreme value is non-existent, what is there that serves as basis for the existence of things? Man is therefore change to arrive at certainty about knowledge of reality or of his world.The highest values become devalued not in the sense that man knowingly confronts an eternal abyss in fear and agitate, nevertheless the highest values simply no longer exist. These values no longer preserve influence. Man accepts this fount not with stoic resignation but in total unaw argonness (Magnus, 1978 11). Man lives in a guild, and is bound by its conventions. When he is born, given to him ar his race or ethnicity, status, and social occasion to fulfill in alliance. Man takes these things an d lives his life according to these, often d unmatched unconsciously.The second theme of Nietzsches philosophy is the compass and slave worship. The master chasteity is born out of higher qualities inherent in the greatest men. clean judgments are made according to the qualities of the person and not to his actions. A statuesque statesman is always deemed good, psyche who is worth emulating. On the one hand, slave morality is an almost unconscious condition that holds sway all over the vast majority of men. The moral standard is that which is useful or beneficial for the many or for the community.The noble statesman, who is deemed good by the standards of master morality, is judged as vile according to the standards of slave morality. Majority of men are suspicious of the leaders that rule over them, and are influenced not immediately because their actions but by their role of ruling over the majority. This value system is an unfortunate vestige of millennia-old social and re ligious systems, which perpetuate superannuated and corrupt moral values such as humility, sympathy, and the like (Magnus, 1978).Nihilism is a life without depth. It is a life of endless wandering, moreover with the fact that man is often unconscious of it. Man hence has to be made to see that this nihilism is the form of life that he has become. He has become a slave, who is one among the many. He must come to know that he lives a passive nihilism, submitting to the fate of the many, and must get the best this, which is to become a master. He must overcome himself. Indeed to change mans nihilistic idea, he has to change his habitual way of viewing the world. He has to transform his way of understanding religions, moral behavior, language, and political and social institutions of which he is a part (Magnus, 1978 12). This is where the superman of Nietzsche gains significance.Since the highest values no longer exert influence, Nietzsche proclaims that men cause to struggle to beco me the superman. The superman represents ascending to life, self-overcoming, self-possession, and is to be contrasted with decadence, decomposition, and weakness. As an idealized type, he represents the highest possible integration of intelligence, strength of character and will, autonomy, passion, taste and perhaps counterbalance of physical prowess (Magnus, 1978 34).The line of work of the superman is to become individuated in an extreme degree and thus to jump on high above morality and the herd morality. Man has to question conventional truths that have been accepted by society, and for him to in fact rise above these truths. He has to formulate those high values for himself, and thus end his aimless wandering.There are three steps that Nietzsche espouses in struggling to become a superman. In his book Thus mouth Zarathustra, Nietzsche portrays this struggle as the metamorphoses of the camel, the lion, and the child. First is that one must exert a will to power which is show in that persons extinguishing of his nihilism and in a profound reevaluation of traditional moral ideas and the creation of radical new concepts. For this to be realized, one has to be immersed as an active agent with the bodily structure in which one finds himself. Referring to the camel, it submits to burdensome labor. It offers itself to be employed in order for society to attain its good. In doing this, the camel realizes itself and acknowledges its value in that society.Upon realizing that ones value or worth is endowed by society instead of emanating from oneself, the will to power must also manifest itself destructively in the form of an abomination and total rejection of the moral and social ideas hitherto believed by mankind.In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphoses occurs, here the whole step becomes a lion which would conquer its freedom and be master in its induce desert. Here it seeks out its get going master it wants to fight and its last god for ultimate victory it wants to fight with the great dragon. (Nietzsche, 2006 14)Referring to the lion, it projects pride, strength, autonomy, and passion to cast and to distinguish itself among the many. It strives to dominate or to be above the rest.My brothers, why is there a need in the spirit for the lion? to create new valuesthat is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred No even to duty for that my brothers the lion is needed. (Nietzsche, 2006 15)Last is that one must perpetually strike himself in an act of self-overcoming. The will to power is a struggle both against oneself and other men that have adhered to conventions in society. Referring to the child, he is free from internal constraints. He is emancipated from the cares of this world.my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do?A child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first scratchment, a sacred Yes. For the gam e of creation, my brothers, a sacred Yes is needed the spirit now wills its own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world. (Nietzsche, 2006 15)A child creates and possesses his own values and sees the world according to these values. To become a child, to have a freedom like his, this is man has to struggle for.The last theme in Nietzches philosophy is eternal recurrence. This is his central and most known philosophical idea. This his conviction that at some time in the future another individual would be born with precisely the same thought-processes and experiences as himself. Furthermore, Nietzsches principle of love of fate is purely antithetical to religion rather than live your life in preparation for such supernatural illusions as heaven, one must rather embrace this life and wish every feature and moment of it to be retell forever, since only this life exist and none other. This idea may be horrifying and paralyzing for most battalion but it i s a necessary conviction for the attainment of full individuation.IIThe struggle to become a superman arises from an external force, that is social structures, and from an internal force, that is emanating from the individual. Man is born free, yet he is situated in a massive and oppressive social structure, which limits and alienates his activities. He lives with a set of beliefs and values that influence his thoughts and actions. hardly are these beliefs and values that he adheres to are instilled consciously by him? Not all, and even most of these beliefs and values are already present when he was born. He is born in a family, baptized or inducted into a particular religion, taught with customs and traditions of his native place, bounded to the laws of his people or nation, and the like.As he matures, he takes these beliefs and values into himself without much evaluation since these are what he got to grow up with and such are the conventions that his society got used to live wi th. He is born a peasant or a working class. He would be taught or trained to be a worker would have a family and would pass his eruditeness to his children. He would unfortunately die a peasant or a working class. This is what usually happens to man. This is the swearword of the many.Is man totally free then? The answer is that an individual has the capacity to go beyond the present, to move toward the future. Man has the capacity to contain and decide for himself. What he does ought to be determined by him and not by the social laws or larger social structures wherein he is situated. Though he lives in a society, he is not bounded by its conventions. Man has the prerogative for transcendence, the surpassing of the given.Freedom however demands that man be responsible for it. It is simply to take the consequences of choice. People are free to choose for themselves or to decide for their lives. They are responsible for everything they do. They have no excuses for the outcomes of their choice. And that is the reel responsibilities of freedom, which cause anguish to some while a blood of optimism to those who see their fate in their hands.The struggle to become a superman involves that anguish because due to the staggering resonsbilities of freedom. Friedrich Nietzsche in his work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has wroteThe Superman is the meaning of the Earth. Let your will say The Superman shall be the meaning of the Earth I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the Earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary so away with them (Nietzsche, 20064)It is a challenge to question a universal system of thought that reveals what is true, right, beautiful, and so on that led to the closure of philosophy and the human sciences. It is to challenge convention.Man is a rope stretched between the anim al and the Superman a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfarign, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. I love him who lived in order to know, and seek to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seek he his own down-going. (Nietzsche, 2006 6)Life is a theatre, and we are the actors. We can choose to play our own roles, and not be determined by the roles that are given to us by society. That is the Superman.REFERENCES Magnus, Bernard (1978). Nietzsches Existential Imperative.United States Indiana University Press.Nietzche, F. (2006 ed.) Thus Spoke Zarathustra.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.