Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity: The Genealogy of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most important philosophers in the tradition of Western thought. He is one of the most artistic, ruthless, and fascinating individuals in Western intellectual history. He saw himself as the end of the Western intellectual tradition. He saw himself as the destroyer of metaphysics he saw himself as the destroyer of Christianity he saw himself as a combined philosopher-artist in the tradition of Plato and offered a comprehensive

critique

of the unconceived Western intellectual tradition. merely or strictly as a philosophical tradition but as a cultural tradition Nietzsche more than anyone was a philosopher of culture, he offered criticism of every element of Western culture and his criticism is notable for its refusal to give in, for its insistence that we reach the psychological heart of the things I would like to talk about in this lecture is Nietzsche's treatment of Christianity and morality, two of the central questions for most philosophers in the Western tradition and particularly important for Nietzsche because, although is something of a megalomaniac, there is some truth to the argument that he is, in fact, the antichrist.

He actually called himself the Antichrist more than once and wrote a book called The Antichrist and what he hoped to do was go beyond Christianity. He literally thought he was going to supplant Jesus in the Western tradition, which is quite a difficult task, no. Many people have that kind of ambition, but Nietzsche was never a violet and in fact he wanted to offer a new set of values, he wanted to offer a new cultural orientation to the West or perhaps reviving an old cultural orientation in the West and wanted to make us confront the half-truths, the lies, the evasions that are characteristic of the life and thinking of almost everyone.

He now he wrote several books that criticized morality in some aspects. The tradition of Western ethics is his main focus and perhaps the most intriguing of these books. o one of the most intriguing books is called Beyond Good and Evil. Now, going beyond good and evil is a rather unusual activity for a philosopher, especially one concerned with morality, but Nietzsche wants to take an extremely skeptical and extremely naturalistic approach toward moral theory and moral assessment and wishes to offer a

critique

of the

christianity

and the values ​​it represents and also supplant it with a new code of

morals

nietzsche

raises an important question that everyone who lives in this modern era, this anti-metaphysical world era has to confront where

christianity

and its moral values ​​come from how is it that the Human beings are conceived as animals, as bipeds without feathers, how is it that they come to have a thing called consciousness, how is it that they make judgments about good and evil that is not characteristic of fish, birds or reptiles.

What is it about human beings that leads them to build moral systems that are in some ways the antithesis of nature? Why do we feel the desire to conflict with nature and make judgments about it? Nietzsche never thinks that he finds the answer in the psyche of the human individual and thinks that we are very peculiar animals, animals with strange attributes that are not natural and that are part of the human condition, but in fact Nietzsche says that most of our elevation of ourselves beyond nature beyond simple facticity is a kind of spurious elevation of ourselves outside and above nature the German term for this is zonderstellung what that means is another position a position somehow outside of nature

nietzsche

wants us to face the fact that we are animals that we are part of nature and that our moral judgments are in fact part of that natural process when looking at christianity nietzsche goes back to the actual history of christianity and asks what it represents Christian morality, whose interests serve And why are these interests disguised?

What is there in the characteristic moral judgments of Christianity that needs to be disguised? What, in other words, is a lie in Christian morality? Notable question Nietzsche's answer is that there are two types of morality and Christianity only represents a particular perspective on the judgments of good and evil and this perspective is the perspective of the herd nietzsche contrasts two types of moral herd morality which are characteristics of the weak the weak the inferior the enslaved i.e. Christianity and the morality of the teachers morality of the warriors the predatory human beings who judge based on their strength and not their weakness.

Nietzsche, who wishes to supplant the herd morality characteristic of Christianity, characteristic of Western culture for the last 2000 years, with a new morality that dates back to the era of the Homeric hero that dates back to the aristocratic warrior elite found in everyone, who creates values ​​out of nothing and who boasts of the fact that his judgments can be imposed on this world independently of any metaphysical construction, Nietzsche now asks who he was. that created Christianity well, it is a consequence of Judaism and Judaism is a priestly religion, Christianity is an extension of that and Christianity in its first historical faces appeals to the slave class in Rome, in fact, Christianity is the revolt of the oppressed masses in Rome and Nietzsche maintains. that Christianity and its myths were organized to articulate the slaves' perspective of the inferior of the weak and was a way to get revenge on the masters, get revenge on the warriors, get revenge on those who could oppress them and change the situation by offering them a scale of values ​​that were different from an independent that uh independent of that of the class master Nietzsche says that the slaves have their revenge and the triumph of Christianity in the re in the West is equivalent to the triumph of the slave of the inferior of the weak and impoverished think about the ideas or myths that underlie Christianity the idea that even in this world if there is no justice there is another world, heaven and hell where God's eternal justice gives everyone what they deserve Nietzsche says that this is actually the frustration impotence the anger of the slaves transformed into a myth that allows them to take revenge on those who oppress them, if not in this world at least in an unreal world that offers them some consolation in a world of pain and misery Nietzsche contrasts the morality of Christianity with the

morals

of the romans the romans were fierce independent warrior men who made their own scale of values ​​based on power based on the desire to dominate and showed no reluctance to inflict pain on those they considered inferior and here inferior means not morally inferior in the Christian sense but physically inferior in terms of practical strength.

Nietzsche's new alternative to Christianity will be a revival of the warlike values ​​of the ancient world, and what he hopes will emerge from this will be an evaluation. of Christianity that allows us to go beyond Christianity and the one who will succeed Christ as the central figure in Western morality, er, Western moral theory, will be Nietzsche himself, who frequently signs himself as the antichrist or as Dionysus, another incarnation of the trial of the kneeling chain. of good and evil and, in doing so, raises very disturbing questions about the kind of moral judgments we make that are still characteristic of this culture and the difficulty of maintaining the traditional judgments of good and evil characteristic of the West in a time in which religion and theology are taken less and less seriously now let's think about the idea of ​​going beyond good and evil Nisha contrasts the moralities of the slave and the master and says that what is characteristic of Christianity is the distinction between good and evil, good in the Christian sense means goodness love pity essentially Nietzsche thinks that Christian morality is a morality of pity that elevates the feeling towards the weak, the inferior and the impoverished to a spurious level of distinction.

We could contrast this with higher morality that does not distinguish between good and evil in fact it distinguishes between good and evil in the sense of capable or incapable uh powerful or impotent that is a value judgment totally different from that characteristic of Christianity and of In fact this is the scale of values ​​this master moral is what Nietzsche is expected to produce the highest type of human being. Nietzsche holds the view, at least partly borrowed from Darwin, that human beings have no intrinsic value if one remembers that one of the great advances is one of the great contributions of Christianity.

To the west is the idea that all souls are equal in the eyes of God and that all people are equally valued on some level regardless of what their particular abilities or abilities are. Well, Nietzsche says that's a mistake. What that is is the revenge of those who I can't do anything and Nietzsche says that if we are ever going to produce something great in this culture, if we are ever going to produce something significant in this culture, we must get away from the idea that other People really matter, the only elements in the human being.

The species that are important are the half dozen great geniuses in any culture and it says that Christianity inhibits the development of genius inhibits the development of creativity because it is envious is a way of mythologizing the envy of those who are incapable of those who are no, um, that doesn't have much capacity and Nietzsche says that if we want to go beyond that, then we must go beyond this morality of compassion, we must go beyond good and evil, backwards or forwards, yes. You want the idea that good and bad are the main standards of our moral judgment, so there will be no conscientiousness characteristic of Christianity, no concern for heaven and hell by God's judgment, this good and bad morality, this master morality will be strictly oriented towards this world. getting caught up in the problem of conscience will not be primarily concerned with the state of the soul but rather with the state of one's achievements Nietzsche's judgment on good and evil this teacher's morality is oriented toward doing the things that the masters make those who achieve and this should not necessarily be taken in a political sense although it can be taken in a political sense the master moralities can also be the moralities of the artist the master moralities can also be the morality of the thinker but it has to be the type of thinker or the type of artist who despises mere mediocrity who wants to go further and formulate something in this world that creates a justification for his entire society as Nietzsche says in the use and abuse of history humanity can only be judged by his highest examples the average human being has no value now nietzsche also investigates the differences between the warrior aristocrat who generates the morality of the teacher and the priest and the psychology of the priest is of great concern to nietzsche nietzsche believes that the priestly type and the war and the aristocratic warrior are in fact superior types of men one type is the individual the niche hero who is going to adopt the master morality the most dangerous opponent for the niche hero the man who adopts this master morality is the priest the priest It is the opposite of the warrior type and Nietzsche believes that the origin of this distinction lies in the human psyche that psychological differences are what distinguish these two now both the warrior and the priest have different types of will to power they simply express this will to power. power differently nietzsche thinks about The fact that all human beings can be characterized by their desire to dominate themselves, to dominate their environment and to dominate other people, this places nature squarely in the tradition of the sophists, If you think about the calculation and the beauty of the Platonic dialogues, hey, it is also in the line of Machiavelli Saad all those people who adopt an atheist perspective and who believe that human life is trapped in the desire to dominate others and to satisfy one's desires to the maximum degree nietzsche supports that idea now the warrior does it in a very direct way the way the warrior takes what he wants without any scruples of conscience conscience is an afterthought invented at a much later date the warrior just goes in and does what he does because that is his nature the strong and the weak is the natural distinction between good and evil an unnatural distinction and if you think about it there may be a certain grain of truth in this, think about it this way think about the distinction between hawks and sparrows sparrows eat grains or seeds or whatever and they are harmless birds and there are quite a few of them, but in fact there is nothing better about eating what sparrows eat compared to what birds eat. falcons.

We don't make moral judgments about hawks and say they shouldn't eat sparrows. We simply recognize that different things are fed in nature. in different ways and predatory behavior is no worse or better than any other behavior nature is simply what nietzsche wants us to do wants to force us to return to nature wants us to reevaluate our disapproval of human hawks in fact nietzsche thinks we don't we have more right to judge awarrior or an evil aristocrat than we have to judge an evil falcon and he, in fact, thinks that it makes no more sense that the world of nature read with fangs and claws simply be what it is and as Nietzsche expresses it in a beautiful passage, it says that there are no moral phenomena, there are only moral interpretations of the phenomena, a very profound idea, whose values ​​are integrated into Christianity, the values ​​of the flock, the values ​​of the weak and that is why it became popular among the lower class in Rome and the entire history of Western ethics have been extrapolations of this herd morality that has inhibited the development of our culture.

If we were to go beyond that, we would have to take into account the fact that cruelty may not be an evil , that compassion can be a vice, that the desire to dominate other people can be the highest expression of the human being and not its worst example, and in that respect Nietzsche is not only connected with Machiavelli and Saad and the sophists but if Any of you are familiar with Dostoevsky's work particularly something like crime and punishment the idea of ​​the singular man the man who will be outside of Good and Evil, remember that Raskolnikov commits that murder.

In that novel, almost the same themes are discussed: the question of whether moral judgment is actually universal or whether it is an arbitrary series of conventions designed by the weak to oppress the strong, something quite strange now in a book called The Genealogy of morality, tries to discover how we got to this situation, how we got to the point where the inferior and the weak could begin to make our moral judgments and says, first of all, that the initial moral judgments that human created beings come from the warrior aristocrats who imposed their will on the world.

This is not only her model of a war aristocrat, but also, in some respects, his model of an artist. He thinks and his arguments are very interesting. Nietzsche was a philologist and professor of classical languages ​​and he derives most of his arguments from research into Latin and German words and what their origins might have been now, since I can't presuppose that you know Latin and German, let's try English just to see if there is actually any evidence for this and I think you have to think about what a noble action is, what makes an action noble.

We know that a noble action is good. I mean, if you look it up in the dictionary, you'll find that it's a term of approval. It is a coincidence that the nobility is also a section of the social structure in ancient societies. Consider the distinction between a noble action and a vile action. Who believes that the vile are the vile are in fact the inferior, the weak, those who receive orders instead of giving them? The distinction between noble and low suggests that perhaps our value judgments at the time these words were coined are actually simply the judgments of great warriors in contrast to the judgments of people who have to suffer and endure them.

Consider the distinction between being. being bad and being noble well being being bad today is a very bad thing, but there was a time when being bad meant you were essentially a villain villain means peasant in his origins, think Nietzsche has a very deep argument here. about something like coming from a good family and coming from a bad family. Yes, again, the power judgments characteristic of predatory warrior aristocrats were the real source, according to Nietzsche, of our judgments about good and evil. Being bad Being vile Being a villain meant you were bad Being noble Being haughty instead of humble Having high moral standards instead of low moral standards Wondering where they came from Nietzsche was the first man who forced himself to consider the possibility that what we consider Universal moral distinctions applicable to everyone are actually a disguised form of will to power, a way for the weak and powerless to take revenge on the superior by changing these aristocratic valuations, moving from good and evil to good and evil.

Evil, in other words, the invention of evil was a way for the oppressed to counterattack the superior. Nietzsche wants to erase that, he says, that it is a mistake in Western culture, that it is a uh and it is a hole or a gap or an inferior part of Western culture. tradition and if we want to produce superior human beings then we have to free them from the chains of slave morality, we have to prevent their achievements or their aspirations from being undermined by creating in them the consciousness that prevents them from achieving what they could now here is another very interesting question and it's very difficult to answer nietzsche offers a very provocative conception of where consciousness comes from and what it's like to think about that for a moment if in fact human beings are animals and i think darwin has been conclusively shown to be that way why We are the only animal with a conscience and where it comes from and what it is is very difficult to ask.

Nietzsche's argument goes something like this. Human beings have a natural desire to achieve power. They have the will to power. that is characteristic of what makes people go and the usual route that the will to power takes is the desire to dominate other people there is a natural cruelty in people a desire to take advantage of others and people like to cause pain something difficult for us It may be difficult to swallow these days, but with the degree of pain in the world and the degree of evil that we see, to use a word I could italicize, there may well be something to it if in fact at the People like to create pain in others.

Of course, they're usually not themselves. What happens when you frustrate this desire? What happens when you say you can't enslave other people? You can't kill other people and take their possessions. You can't oppress other people because we will stop you. Well, Nietzsche says this. It's a fascinating possibility, although I'm not sure it's true. He says that when people become frustrated in their desire to cause pain to others, the consequence is that they decide to start imposing the pain on themselves and the pain they put on themselves. It is called conscience a horrible possibility in German the term for the pain of conscience is called gevissenbisse which means the bite of conscience and Nietzsche's essentially says that people are predatory animals and if they cannot bite other people, they bite themselves themselves and when they begin to torture themselves they find the last possible way out of this desire to impose pain on the world if they cannot do it to others they will do it to themselves now this remorse of conscience progressively worsens when the priests enter the scene When the priestly type enters the scene it goes from bad it goes from inferior to even more inferior because the priests take advantage of the slave morality they take advantage of this herd morality and use it for their own purposes the priests are the highest example of the herd animal Those of the type of flock have a special set of morals that they maintain for themselves and then they rule the flock using various types of myths and various types of verbal techniques in order to take revenge and thus be able to oppose the warrior type that Nietzsche sees. among the highest types of human beings there is an intrinsic conflict between the priest and the warrior nietzsche thinks that the warrior is the type of person who knows how to forget things again this is an interesting psychological profile and there are many by the way if you read the

genealogy

of morality and beyond good and evil, you will find that there are many anticipations of fraud, especially the question of conscience and the question of resentment.

Nietzsche thinks that resentment, the hatred of being oppressed, is the source of slave morality and that the priest takes that resentment. he formulates it in a mythological way and uses it to orchestrate and control the pack so that they can oppose any superiority among those who would break the moral rules among the would-be warriors. Now what makes the priestly type so dangerous is the fact that they can dominate the culture and that they have chosen the wrong path, they have chosen slave morality and they have absolutized that the consequence of absolutizing that is that it seems that there is no possibility of reintroducing the master morality without a complete and deep critique of the culture. and that's what Nietzsche thinks he is, that's what it means for Nietzsche to be the antichrist, it's not just the antichrist, it's a mythological sense, he literally takes it as a mark of distinction, it shows what a free thinker he is, Nietzsche is willing to say Not only is he the antichrist, but he thinks that this is the best development in culture since the time of Jesus.

It is time for us to return to a morality that allows the development of superior people. Now Nietzsche's argument here is very disturbing. It is disturbing in Its consequences are disturbing because in a way it rocks the moral boat for us, but Nietzsche's criticism goes even further: he wants to investigate not only the question of pain and the desire of people to impose pain on others and, if not to others, also to themselves. He wants to see the arguments about suffering presented by the priests of Christianity if you remember he holds the opinion that God is providential who oversees the entire world and then I believe the phrases not a sparrow falls but God knows well Nietzsche thinks that this was invented so that Suffering can be justified and explained and in some respects there is some truth in that part of what Christianity does is explain away or at least account for the fact of human suffering by saying that God certainly has some plan, although we don't know what that plan is, surely it is there because the kind of god we have decided to build, the kind of god we believe in, is the kind of god, he is a good god, a loving god, the kind of god who would never do it. do something bad, since he would never do anything bad, the suffering that results must have a meaning and Nietzsche believes that the worst thing that the priestly element did to human culture was to sell people the idea that suffering has a meaning. meaning.

Nietzsche says that everyone has no meaning that the world is a moral chaos that suffering has no meaning and the idea that suffering has meaning only makes suffering infinitely worse it is not difficult to see why it was bad for weak and the weak had to put up with the strong who had to put up with having things stolen from them, being murdered, being raped and being tortured, which was bad because of the simple physical pain, because any natural calamity is bad, but the priestly idea of ​​attributing meaning to this suffering makes it much greater. worse because if there is a god in heaven who is in fact supervising this whole procedure the reason why suffering must follow us why evil must befall us lies in ourselves we are somehow responsible for it we bring it on ourselves. what does this mean this increases infinitely? our suffering not only because the weak and weak continue to be tortured, murdered, raped and mutilated, but it is also their fault, what a horrible change, what a terrible addition to the suffering they already have after recovering from a terrible encounter with warrior aristocrats with those who are beyond good and evil, then you must live with the fact that you brought it on yourself and guilt enters the world after the superior, after the strong, after the ruthless have finished you , after they have caused their minimal pain. you have to add the pain of conscience means that you are going to impose the pain on yourself this development is one of the worst turning points in the history of western culture according to nietzsche and in that sense nietzsche believes that it is freeing us from the shackles of self-imposed misery and for all his madness, there is a certain degree of coherence to this argument and it is difficult to know what he is right about, how much of this we should accept and how much of this is just speculation that we might never really have much idea about it, so let's stop and think about it for a second.

My suspicion is that Nietzsche is probably wrong in his argument that good and evil come or that our judgments about good and evil and good and evil come from the distinction. exclusively of masters and slaves the distinction between good and evil is probably much older than the aristocratic social structures that are found relatively late in human development perhaps two or three thousand BC. For the most part what I'm most likely to attribute to it are feelings of pleasure and pain, my assumption is again speculating on Allah Nietzsche, which would be very much in the Nietzschean tradition that probably having a full stomach was a good feeling and being hungry was a bad feeling, probably breaking your leg was a bad feeling and being healthy was a good feeling and These may come before judgments about good and evil based on aristocratic social structures, but the fact is that after As these initial judgments of pleasure and pain become our judgments of moral value, there is an overlapping layer of aristocratic moral judgments in our culture and in our society. our language I think the distinction between noble and vile, between noble and mean, between high moral values ​​and low moral values ​​establishes that with a good degree of plausibility now, what should we make of this judgment?

What's going onWhen do we go beyond good and evil? This is a delicate and difficult question. Nietzsche in a book called The Antichrist which he modestly named after him, one might think that he describes his procedure as philosophizing with a hammer and that is a very intriguing idea because it shows the destructiveness of his philosophy and the skepticism towards it. and the cheerful malice there is in it and I think it is worth considering the fact that philosophizing with a hammer very easily turns into intellectual vandalism and it may be that not everything that can be broken should be broken and it is not at all clear that The Antichrist offers us more of a moral alternative to Christ than Christian ethics, but I think his willingness to ask questions about it is what makes Nietzsche of lasting importance to our culture, for all the madness, for all the evil. that he has built in, is probably the most significant moral development since I don't know the Enlightenment anyway and, in terms of his artistic qualities, I think Nietzsche is probably in the same league as Plato and, as a great poet, philosopher , Nietzsche and Plato are the two most important figures who combine art. and philosophy, those of you who have read Nietzsche will know that his critical capacity is amazing and his artistic capacity is quite great.

You won't find that mainly in the poems of his or in the songs that he writes, most of the art that he creates directly is quite inferior, but the poetry of his prose of his. is the greatest in the German language and probably the greatest in the Western tradition now that we are done with the priest and find the responsibilities of the priest, when we discover that perhaps the priestly guy has been selling us a dangerous set of myths. We wonder if we can go back to the warrior, probably not, except in a sublimated sense, if we were to take the will to power and turn it into something maybe not as catastrophic as, I don't know, the Aryan war makers or the superior brutal types that They may be. that the type of philosopher that the type of artist is actually the warrior type, the individual who does not need any moral code to create his own conception of good and evil, that this type is what can emerge from a reevaluation of all the values ​​and that I believe is what is advantageous in nature, the difficulty is how we will know when we are truly beyond good and evil rather than below good and evil.

Many of Nietzsche's friends and philosophical admirers have tried to protect Nietzsche from criticism that he is a proto. -Nazi and in fact I don't think it works I think in fact Nietzsche is a proto-Nazi there is a strong undertone of racism in his work there is a strong undertone of refined cruelty in his work and to the extent that this was misused in the 20th century for the Nazis and other racially oriented hate groups, I believe Nietzsche is at least partly to blame. Those who like Nietzsche's work and want to protect her from this criticism will point out with considerable justification that he would feel nothing but contempt for the misuse of his work in this century, but it will not completely absolve him of the results of his statements. because after all, Nietzsche would have despised everyone, whether they like it or not, whether they take his position or not, so I would say that the warrior type In truth, very easily becomes a barbarian and Nietzsche, as he beautifully puts it, I write to be misinterpreted and if we just have a series of misinterpretations of Nietzsche because he thinks there is no canonical interpretation, then it seems to me. that he should bear the brunt of the responsibility for everything good and good and bad that arises from his work and if we live in an age niche it seems to me that we have to find some way to temper it with whatever that is good from the Western intellectual tradition and if we cannot agree on what we want to call undesirable, whether it is good, whether it is bad or evil, whether it is the master conception of what is undesirable or the slave conception, perhaps we can create a meaning of good that goes beyond the dichotomy between the two and that allows us to create some kind of overlap between them perhaps it would be possible, as Nietzsche says, to create an artistic Socrates, a moral Socrates who is capable of combining both the force of the artist with the mythological capabilities of the priest who is willing to connect his individual judgment with concern for what is good for the species and I think Nietzsche himself would not have entirely disagreed with that if you are going to create a beautiful artistic philosophy , the way Nietzsche does we have to allow him a certain poetic license if we are willing to allow Plato's poetry and his myths a certain degree of consideration and a certain degree of freedom of interpretation, perhaps if we did that with Nietzsche We would come to a more Fertile Reading solution when you have the opportunity to read Nietzsche and all the philosophers I have taught in this lecture series.

I highly recommend you take a look at Nietzsche when you keep this in mind. Nietzsche has one trophy in particular. which is characteristic of him, which runs through all of his work and is analogous to the central trophy for Socrates, if Socrates is the man of inimitable irony, the man who constantly says ironic statements that can be interpreted as the opposite of what Nietzsche says . The typical trophy is the oxymeron and the oxymeron is something like cold fire or hot ice, it is using the words in the opposite way than they often do or they must be interpreted literally in a niche and the oxymoron is what makes his poetry so moving and maybe the idea.

What he writes to be misinterpreted is that kind of oxymoron. Perhaps the idea that the distinction between good and evil and good and evil is an insurmountable distinction can also be seen as a contradictory construction. Nietzsche's treatment of the warrior Nietzsche's treatment of the priest is not historically persuasive and I think as a historian I think he is ultimately wrong, it is poetically persuasive and I would think and ask you to consider the fact that poetic persuasion can itself be a oxymoron. Nietzsche believes that having undermined the Western intellectual tradition by having abolished metaphysics by having abolished the plausibility of Christianity what he has done is create a new blank slate for us and if the slate is not completely blank then let's not make Nietzsche completely responsible for that, let us admit the fact that Nietzsche's poetry and force The point is the fact that he is a great prose poet, that poetry offers us a multitude of possible interpretations and that, by offering us a liberation from dogma, a liberation from metaphysics, by offering us a type of poetry that can create new values, that can create new human values. superiority that can create a new and better culture, Nietzsche has in fact done a great service to our culture, no matter how much madness, evil or megalomania is incorporated into the niche conception of the world, he is surely the greatest philosopher of recent times. one hundred years and the rest. of the philosophical tradition of the 20th century would be inconceivable without him Nietzsche is one of the great precursors of existentialism Nietzsche is undoubtedly the first person to articulate the nihilism that threatened our culture when Christianity had to retreat after the attack of modern natural sciences in Nietzsche of the late 19th century is not in that sense the cause of the disintegration of Western religion.

It is not the cause of the disintegration of Western metaphysics. Nietzsche simply articulates it. Nietzsche can be thought of as taking a poetic figure as a kind of seismograph. He is the first and most sensitive writer who sees that the continents of our thinking are changing and instead of provoking it, he tells us about it and by telling us he forces us to face something that sooner or later we would have to face and to the extent that he does so. much of the intellectual dirty work for us, to the extent that he is willing to be the antichrist, as he is willing to take responsibility for questioning the fundamental elements of our culture, he is one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, whatever his responsibilities and I think there are many because he is an anti-Semite, he is a racist, he is a misogynist, there are many evils in Nietzsche's work, but whether we like it or not, he forces us to think in ways that we would not otherwise think. , forces us to consider carefully. ourselves and ask ourselves how honest we are when we are alone and much less when we are with other people asks us not only to have the courage of our convictions Nietzsche's question does not require that we have the courage to question our convictions which is a very human quality. rarer to the extent that our convictions withstand this kind of critical scrutiny.

Nietzsche can be considered one of the high points of Western culture. the idea of ​​ruthless self-criticism is essentially Greek. Nietzsche wants us to bring ourselves, he wants to bring us. Let us return to the earlier higher and finer conception of human beings, characteristic of the non-Socratic Greeks, if one could think of a particular figure that Nietzsche wishes to supplant in philosophy as opposed to religion, that would be Socrates. Nietzsche is the new Socrates, the Socrates of art. the Socrates of the individual the Socrates of subjectivity what he has in common with Socrates is the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions what he has in common with Socrates is the willingness to ask questions about topics that no one feels very comfortable with and what is Most importantly Nietzsche is that his answers are inherently provisional just as Socrates Nietzsche says that everything is always open to question and always will be.

Nietzsche does not call us to any dogma but to a higher and finer type of life and to the extent that Let's pay attention to that Socratic call that would be the anti-Socrates, it is in fact part of the Socratic tradition and the fact that he is both a Socrates and an anti-Socrates is a perfectly Nikian occimaron