Nietzsche & Nihilism

Nihilism is not a concept, which suddenly sprang to life in modern philosophy, as Stumpf notes, but has roots in the work of Gorgias in the era Socrates. Gorgias, affected by the Sophists and their skepticism, finally took a radical view of truth, which ended with his giving up philosophy and concluding that there was no truth at all. He specifically decided that nothing exists, that if anything does exist it is in any case incomprehensible, and that even if in some way it could be considered comprehensible, it was nevertheless not capable of being communicated. He left philosophy for the teaching of rhetoric, using methods of persuasion and suggestion for whatever purposes he chose. Stumpf writes:

Although he did not specifically formulate the same nihilistic attitude towards ethics as he had towards the question of truth, it was inevitable that such a moral nihilism would be the logical outcome of the progressive radicalism of the Sophists (Stumpf 36).

The nihilism of Nietzsche had less to do with a personal ethic or a personal sense of truth than with a world-wide level of reality, a consciousness on the social level, which would be revolutionized by the advent of nihilism related to the concept of the "death" of God. Nietzsche himself was an atheist and clearly considered himself capable of dealing with a world in which God was considered to be absent, but h

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transcending himself through philosophy or aesthetics or, perhaps, even through religion insofar as religion is institutionalized and ritualized and isolated from true spiritual transformation. The problem with Nietzsche's efforts to transcend the nihilism of the death of God is that the prescriptions he offers for that transcendence can be so easily misunderstood and therefore abused. That is, Nietzsche was trying to say that it would take a complete revolutionary overhaul of all our concepts of ourselves and others if we were to avoid becoming desperate animals without our God. It would take work and discipline which would have to become our priorities in life, as Zarathustra declared in his last words: "Fellow-suffering! Fellow-suffering with the higher men!" he cried out, and his countenance changed into brass. "Well! That û- hath had its time! My suffering and my fellow suffering û- what matter about them! Do I strive after happiness? I strive after work" (Nietzsche 325). And in "Beyond Good and Evil" Nietzsche writes that, regarding the transcendence of traditional morality: It cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for one's neighbor, and all self- renunciation-morality, must be merc
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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