11/24/10 by Francisco Kondor    

There have been scarce words that have been quoted so many times yet without understanding of its meaning such as these: “God is dead.”  Friedrich Nietzsche wrote these words in the late 1800’s and prophetically pronounced God’s death and the death of an old mindset while proclaiming the new hope of mankind which was in the development of the “superman.”  As ape was to man, or rather, as Nietzsche stated, “an embarrassment,” so would man be to the new era of the “superman.”  As Nietzsche bridged a new era of philosophy from the age of reason, to the twentieth century and the individualism of existentialism, one thing has been lost from Nietzsche, namely, the “superman.”  With the close of World War II and the Facist regiemes, it seemed like all hope was gone for the “superman” who came to be known as the greatest symbol of racism for mankind.  Yet, while Nietzsche’s true idea of the superman has been under attack, Nietzsche’s influence has carried forth into contemporary times save for the meaning, which has become so incredibly lost in society today.

            To properly understand anything about Nietzsche, it is crucial to understand Nietzsche’s place in philosophical history.  Nietzsche has been viewed as an individual who began to bridge Aesthetic philosophy from the legacy of “Rational Philosophy” which came from a long line of thinkers beginning at Socrates and ending in the mid 1800’s with Kant. Philosophers who based themselves on pure reason studied philosophy and metaphysics in their “ivory towers” confined to their small sphere of influence and overbearing language of which the common person could scarcely comprehend.  There were two reasons for this transition.  First and most importantly, Nietzsche wished to break from the philosophic tradition of pure reason.  The way of thinking at that time was that life should be looked at from a completely objective level and judged through the eyes of reason.  However, Nietzsche argues that there is nothing that was to guide reason and that so being, there needs to be an existential answer to understand the nature of morals and humanity which would ultimately lead to the doctrine of the “superman”.  He believes that the beginning of this trend was located in Socrates as the first individual to place reason above the instincts and the self and calls it a “dangerous, life undermining source” (Stambaugh 27). It is critical to understand this point of Nietzsche; by disregarding pure reason, Nietzsche could write in an aesthetic style rather than by being confined to the language of logic that had predominated earlier philosophers at this time.