Is Nietzsche The Answer?

To a certain extent, I agree with that and, as Keith Woods points out in the video, the post-modern age is basically a Nietzschean one: God is dead and has been replaced by the secular gods of materialism yet there’s no superman on the horizon to set things right. Hence, Nietzschenism is not going to save us from the ill effects of the modern world. If anything, Nietzsche understands nihilism very well but he offers no solution to it. He’s compelling in that he makes a case for why the world - its power structures and human relations – is the way it is but then he hits a dead end.

And contrary to what many Nietzscheans think, Christianity ISN’T the problem – it was never the problem because real Christianity has never existed, at least in our lifetime; rather, only a postmodern version or interpretation of Christianity exists. In that, I prefer Dostoevsky to Nietzsche. Dostoevsky’s ideas were grounded in absolutism not relativism. In Dostoevsky’s mind, good and evil existed, morality was universal and Christianity was the best philosophy that mankind had come up with thus far (despite its shortcomings); in Nietzsche’s mind, there were no absolutes and morality was an ever-changing thing. If we accept the idea that morality doesn’t exist and nothing is absolute and everything is in constant change then nihilism wins hands down and we might as well open up the Gulags and human slaughterhouses again and allow the strong to crush the weak. In a world without absolutes and moral boundaries, anything can and will be allowed.

Fascists and far right thinkers like Nietzsche because of the will to power thing. Atheists, leftists and liberals like him (I believe) because of his relativism. While Nietzsche was extremely critical of German nationalists in his lifetime (he even went so far as to claim Polish ancestry in order to send that message home) and his breakup with Wagner was to a large extent over the Jewish question, he was no liberal or Judeophile either! Nietzsche believed that Jews were a merchant race grounded in money (and little more) and that liberalism was basically Christianity without God. His biggest criticism of the Jews was that they created Christianity in the first place (and yet followed a different religion) and Christianity was a slave religion that made European people weak and subservient. I both agree and disagree with Nietzsche’s feelings about Christianity. In its early incarnations, Christianity helped to shape the West and the Church was all powerful (and hardly in the hands of Jews); in later incarnations, Christianity lost its vigor and became corrupted and the Reformation did little to change that. (As an aside, I might add that Martin Luther, himself an anti-Semite, created a new version of Christianity that would serve Jewish interests to no end. Protestant evangelicals are now the biggest propagators of Zionism this side of the Holy Land!!)

I read 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' a few years ago.


I'm not sure my meager brain could comprehend what it was all about but it kept me interested.