The Madness of Diogenes

"ἀπείρων ἀρχὴν τῶν ὄντων ἀπείρῳ χρόνῳ οἷς ἐστι κατὰ τὸ χρεών ἀποδιδόναι τίσιν καὶ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τὴν ἀδικίαν κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν."

"He says that the beginning (arche) of beings is the apeiron (the boundless), into which they are destroyed according to necessity; for they give to each other justice and recompense (tisis) for their injustice according to the arrangement of time."

Anaximander, 546 BCE

The Self-Destruction of the Anti-Metaphysicians

Nietzsche’s works are intricately nested within each other—every major work contains elements of all the others, including casually mentioned titles—“Beyond Good and Evil,” “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” and “Ecce Homo” are all referenced in The Joyful Science. The density of his work varies from page to page—he might deliver a page-long diatribe about owning house pets, then spend only two sentences dismissing an entire genre of philosophy. In section 342, he begins outlining Zarathustra as the icon of the Übermensch.

Nietzsche’s megalomania begins to bloom in The Joyful Science, reaching full form in The Twilight of the Idols. He continues his philosophy of negation, confronting every figure of Western philosophy individually, and sometimes in pairs or groups. He calls Christianity “a permanent suicide of reason,” but for the first time, he discusses how the very preoccupation with truth originates in the “peasant morality” of Christianity: “we recognize that we godless and anti-metaphysicians also still take our fire from the fire kindled by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith…”. However, the death of God has already occurred, and Western culture is holding the knife. It was precisely the ruthless insistence on truth that plunged the blade. And this is "the greatest catastrophe to ever befall humanity" because it signifies the death of metaphysics, morality, and humanness. Here, Nietzsche is not yet Dionysus or the Antichrist, but he is Diogenes, standing in Mass with all the people singing the requiem for the dead, yet he alone sings it for the death of God, for he alone has realized it before everyone else.

Nietzsche’s work is particularly prone to many different interpretations—as he wrote himself: “I write in order to be misunderstood.” This is the devastating aspect of Nietzsche; his summaries of these impenetrable philosophers are simple, clear and accurate. His rants make sense. His simple descriptions display an incredible depth of understanding of these thinkers. He can summarize all of Hegel in one sentence, accurately, and speak simply and clearly about the interactions from Leibniz to Descartes, the Stoics to Hegelianism, Wagner to Rousseau, Hume to Schiller, ad infinitum. Pick a philosopher you know well and read his commentary on them. The infuriating thing is that his analysis of them is disturbingly sensible. It’s difficult to accuse him of misreading any of these great philosophers. Certainly, his opinion of their work is open to attack, but he is dogmatically irrational. This asymmetrical, fluid, artistic nature of his work makes it difficult to analyze, refute, or respond to Nietzsche. There is much to say about Nietzsche—that he is amoral, evil, insane, a megalomaniac (all titles he proudly wore), but the one thing that cannot be said is that he is an idiot.

The Joyful Science is perhaps his clearest explanation of his epistemology in relation to his entire philosophic project. Here he writes about the Tautology of Anti-Metaphysical positions, for the very impetus of them is rooted in Metaphysical assumptions (namely, that objective truth matters at all):

“Will to truth" might be a hidden Will to Death… In this way the question: why science? leads back to the moral problem—what is the use of morality at all, if life, nature, history are 'immoral'?... we recognize that we godless and anti-metaphysicians also still take our fire from the fire kindled by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato's faith that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But how, if this just becomes more and more implausible, if nothing more proves to be divine, except error, blindness, lies, - if God himself proves to be our longest lie?

Nietzsche was concerned with the Typology of Civilizations to the point of madness; he was an inverted moral philosopher, who, while emphasizing ideology and values as the framework on which culture is based (here he was still within German Idealism), sought to erase history and reduce humanity back to a primordial state of pre-Socratic power struggles without explicit reliance on metaphysics or transcendent ideas that were “untrue to nature”. His enduring contributions to philosophy are many, but they include understanding the individual as a living plurality in a constant state of change, as an unknowable enigma even to itself, which was in direct opposition to the late German Idealism of his time. His axiom 'Truth serves life' embodies this; rationality must serve the living being and not the other way around. And secondly, his observation that values saturate all perceptual reality, is still critical in challenging the modern surviving pathology of pure Empiricism. Nietzsche considered Thus Spake Zarathustra as his magnum opus, as it represents the Apotheosis of the most ardent elements of his philosophy—a refinement of the 'Eternal Return' (Ewige Wiederkunft) into Nihilism and the 'will-to-power' into the 'Master Morality' of the 'Übermensch'.

Nietzsche's Eulogy dictum "Gott ist tot" is perhaps one of his most misunderstood statements. The death of god to Nietzsche was not a claim of rational Atheism, but a recognition of the new reality that the idea of God has been dead for centuries in the Western world; and because there is simply no way to be authentically human without a relationship with divinity, this reality was profoundly terrifying and signaled the metaphysical extinction of the human race. He did not advocate for the death of god nor want it; he is frequently touted as an apologist of Atheism but he is nothing of the sort. He doesn't broach the subject of the *actual* existence of god but keeps his discussions centered on the consciousness meditation of the "Idea" of god: "God is a Conjecture" he states. Nietzsche here is describing what would be known as the collapse of the Subject-Object paradigm brought on by Humanism and the Enlightenment. Hegel noted this same conceptual death of god Nietzsche describes a century before: "The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea."

In other words, Empiricism (Hegel blames Pascal & co.) collapsed the Subject-Object paradigm and accidentally *killed* the idea of god. For the first time, Qualia saw itself as part of the material universe. Dostoevsky articulates it this way in Karamazov: "We are all in a muddle over there now and all through your science. Once there used to be atoms, five senses, and four elements, and then everything hung together somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we've learned that you've discovered the chemical molecule and protoplasm and the devil knows what, we had to lower our crest."

Hegel went on to warn that these temporary three days of Nihilism—this 'dark night of the soul' must "not be seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption". From Hegel's observations of the nascent Nihilism developing in Europe post-Protestantism, Nietzsche took the dark shadows and ignored the antidotes. Nietzsche was as Anti-Christian as they come, but when you look at his objections, they are primarily against the Platonism that was infused via Augustine; he called Christianity "Platonism for the masses" and referred to himself as an 'inverted Platonist". The errors he points out are not so many historical problems with Christianity as they are problems from the infusion of Platonism, Humanism, and Renaissance Enlightenment into Protestantism. He tells the Christian Theologians: "I go not your way, you despisers of the body! You are not bridges for me to Superman!: (4. Despisers of the body)

Zarathustra’s journey, an inverted Pilgrim’s Progress, is a path out of the “Backworld” of Metaphysics through Nihilism to a new existence that is post-human in order to survive the advent of Nihilism.

Beyond Good, and Still Evil

"Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism "beyond good and evil" announces itself, here that "perversity of mind" comes to word and formula, against which Schopenhauer did not tire of hurling his angriest curses and thunderbolts in advance, - a philosophy that dares to place morality itself in the world of appearances, to degrade it not only under the “appearances" (in the sense of the idealistic terminus techniques), but under the "deceptions," as appearance, delusion, error, interpretation, rectification, art."

The Birth of Tragedy, Chapter 5

Beyond Good and Evil represents the apotheosis of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 'Will-to-Power' and anti-modern moral metaphysics. He argues for a shift to a moral system (which he refers to as an "immorality" in an Apollonian-Dionysian sense) based on the effect of an action on the living being, not based on intention nor any value determined by judgments rooted in history. Jenseits is his sharpest polemic against Christianity and the corresponding Metaethics (albeit, his Anti-Christianity exists primarily as Anti-Semitism as he was fond of Social Darwinism). This new "philosophy of immorality" is bound to 'Perspektivismus' and the Will-to-Power/ Wille zur Macht an idea he adopted and modified from Schopenhauer- which refers to the instinctual knowing and cyclical self-renewal of the individual. The Will-to-Power is a poetic semi-philosophical notion and it is still debated today exactly what he meant by it. This is the best definition of the Wille Zur Macht given by Nietzsche: "...This my Dionysian world of eternal-self-creation, eternal-self-destruction... this my beyond of good and evil, without a goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of the circle... Do you want a name for this world?... This world is the will to power - and nothing else! And you too are this will to power - and nothing else! "// "dies mein Jenseits von Gut und Böse, ohne Ziel, wenn nicht im Glück des Kreises ein Ziel liegt … Wollt ihr einen Namen für diese Welt?... Diese Welt ist der Wille zur Macht – und nichts außerdem! Und auch ihr seid dieser Wille zur Macht – und nichts außerdem!".

Jenseits articulates his hatred of moral and ethical systems most thoroughly. He argues against the remnants of Judeo-Christian Phenomenology in the secular world and for a return to a paleo-morality devoid of absolutes, yet fails to answer basic questions as to how this morality would work in practice. Is it fair to hold that murder is wrong when the murder is simply expressing their Will-to-Power? Nietzsche was the walking, talking definition of a mad genius- who, like his father, succumbed to his mental and physical illnesses before he could enjoy his fame. There is a stroke of genius in Thus Spake Zarathustra and in Beyond Good and Evil, but his philosophy does not take us 'Beyond' to anything beautiful or useful other than Nihilism and Misanthropy.

Nietzsche is one of many European moral relativists, subjectivists and Perspectivists, but what sets him apart is his rejection of the fact-value distinction itself and his emphasis on the utility of the truth, not the objective value. He not only rejected the Judeo-Christian dichotomies of true/ false and good/ bad altogether but sought to replace them with a religion of Untruth; a perfervid Nihilism which seeks to build a new species of 'human'- a race which are their own powerful, creative gods. Not surprisingly, Nietzsche was a professed and passionate Anti-Kantian due to Kant's emphasis on living an ethical life that is considerate of others. He vacillates between criticizing Kant and Schopenhauer throughout BGE. This Judeo-Christian morality gets in the way of "greatness" and "true creation", which were two of Nietzsche's penultimate aims. He writes "It is high time we replace the Kantian question 'how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' With another question: 'why is the belief in such judgments necessary?'" and later "quite apart from the value of such assertions as 'there exists in us a categorical imperative' once can still ask: what does such an assertion say of the man who asserts it?".

His hundreds of pages on Kant are spread across a dozen books, so it is difficult to simply summarize his views—likewise with any other thinker. He stands with Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy of the will against the “Kantian distastefulness” and holds it as the apotheosis of all philosophy up to this point, criticizing it the least. Perhaps the clearest passage is where he calls Kant:

“a punishment for having 'the thing in itself'… stalked by the 'categorical imperative,' and with it in his heart strayed back again to 'God,' 'soul,' freedom,' and 'immortality,' like a fox that strays back into its cage: - and it was his strength and cleverness that had broken this cage! - How? You admire the categorical imperative in you? This 'firmness' of your so-called moral judgment? This 'unconditionality' of the feeling that 'as I do, so must all judge'? Rather admire your selfishness in it!.. selfishness is to feel one's judgment as a general law; and a blind, petty, and undemanding selfishness, in turn, because it betrays the fact that you have not yet discovered yourself.”

Nietzschean philosophy is a negation. Nietzsche was a deconstructivist who never created a systematic philosophy of his own yet criticized every other existing dialectal system. He argued in Aphorisms, making his work incredibly dense and open to various interpretations, and it was this unique 'symbolisch-dichterischer'/ 'Symbolic-Poetic' writing style that sparked his fame. What makes the Nietzschean corpus manageable at all is the fact that he 'philosophized with a hammer' meaning he packed into his sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and works as much meaning as possible by obsessively re-working their arrangement. One of the effects of this is that every one of his works contains the distilled versions of all of his others; reading one of his novels means you have encountered the essentials of his entire corpus.

Most of BGE is his attempt to refute Philosophy's previous history of refusing to "venture into the depths" of Subjectivity:

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live — that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.

One of the perennial criticisms of Nietzsche is that he used a good-evil paradigm to criticize the good-evil paradigm. He argued for an evolution past this dichotomy but created his own frameworks of a dogmatic moral code, something he argued in The Ant-Christ:

“Will to truth" might be a hidden Will to Death… In this way the question: why science? leads back to the moral problem-what is the use of morality at all, if life, nature, history are "immoral"?... we recognize that we godless and anti-metaphysicians, also still take our fire from the fire kindled by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato's faith that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But how, if this just becomes more and more implausible, if nothing more proves to be divine, except error, blindness, lies, - if God himself proves to be our longest lie?

Or as Chesterton put it in 1905 in Heretics, published just a few years after BGE:

Religion is exactly the thing which cannot be left out—because it includes everything... Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about its existence... The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas.

The Shadow of Hegel: Nietzsche’s Inverted Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic

In tracing the origins of morality, the ruthless philosopher-artist surveys all of human history from a Darwinian-historical perspective first, and then from a phenomenological lens. He does not have a Teleological view of the history of Hegel, but rather sees a broken mess of repression and mistakes leading to the modern world, which must all be broken down. His great work is to help society return to a pre-socratic Greek warrior society. This and his following works Beyond Good and Evil and The Twilight of the Idols are “the books of the revaluation of all values”.

Christianity, to Nietzsche, is merely the religion of the revolting peasants of Rome. Christianity is revenge. It is the revenge of the slave class of the Roman empire, a morality of pity that created a distinction between good and evil as a mechanism to repress the strong “world-historical” class. He seeks to replace this “herd morality” of feeble and weak with the “master class”. Goodness is not his goal, only Greatness for it is not the state of one’s soul, but the state of one’s achievements that defines right and wrong. Nietzsche’s morality is not divided between good and evil, but good and bad. The very distinction between Good and Evil is an invention of the weak to oppress the strong. For, he argues, we do not make moral judgments on leopards or hawks killing and causing the suffering of their prey, so why do we judge humans when they express what they are- apex predators? And if we are mere animals, why deny our truest nature?

He writes bluntly that those who are not strong and dominating do not have intrinsic worth: “the average human being has no value whatsoever”. He sees himself in the class of the Homeric hero, the warrior-aristocrat class which creates morality through strength. Here he also writes about the “Aryan conqueror race” and builds the foundational understanding of “Master Morality” used by the Nazis.

This basic dichotomy is inherently a Hegelian undertaking. Nietzsche is using the Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic (The Phenomenology of Spirit), which was utilized by Schopenhauer and Marx, to describe the origin of morality itself. Hegel warned to not de-mysticize these dialectics, but this is exactly what Nietzsche and Marx did. The idea of “world-historical” individuals being unburdened by “normal” morality that applies to commoners also comes from Hegel (Hegel’s only clearly immoral uncharacteristic argument). He sees David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Schopenhauer as champions of the doctrine of sympathetic affections or the benefit of others as the principle of morality, but these thinkers were merely intellectualizing the ethos that has existed since the time of the “French Revolution, and all socialistic systems have placed themselves as if involuntarily on the common ground of these doctrines”. Nietzsche does credit Hegel with some of his philosophy as he sees Hegel as a critical evolution towards Darwin out of Protestantism:

“[Hegel] dared to teach that the species concepts develop apart from one another: with which sentence the minds in Europe were performed to the last great scientific movement, to Darwinism - for without Hegel, no Darwin... Hegel, in particular, was its retarder par excellence… in his grandiose attempt he made to persuade us to the divinity of existence”.

The psychology of the priest (including the Aesthetic and the Saint) is a problem Nietzsche muses on multiple times. The clergy of the Christian religion he sees as a suppressed warrior class; the Priest is the inverse of the amoral warrior type, as both utilize a pure will-to-power, but they are expressed differently. Without the ability to express the will to dominate others, they oppress themselves- they turn this will-zu-macht inward. This understanding of repression is a foreshadowing of Freud’s Repression theories. G.K Chesterton responded to this idea of spirituality being repression in Heretics, as he wrote against Social Darwinism:

“The anchorite rolling on the stones in a frenzy of submission is a healthier person fundamentally than many a sober man in a silk hat who is walking down Cheapside. For many such are good only through a withering knowledge of evil.”

In Untimely Reflections, the essay “Of the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” is against the whole dialectical Hegelian understanding of history. This essay is the most enduring of the four, and is still widely read. Nietzsche admits that something salutary could emanate from historical considerations if the relationship were correct, but he attests to a colossal overvaluation of historical education in general in his time. So Nietzsche is of the opinion not only that history is completely misunderstood, but also that it is vastly overrated in its usefulness and ability to explain the present. This is a break from his early historical-Darwinian causal explanations towards a Phenomenological one.

Human, All too Human, first published in 1878 on the 100th anniversary of Voltaire’s death,  is primarily an “Aphorismensammlung”, a collection of aphorisms. Across 350 small sections, Nietzsche deals with a vast range of topics, some trivial and some ancient- music, various artists including Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the Reformation, reason and logic, German idealism as a whole and the dwindling of Metaphysics.

Human, all too Human, is Nietzsche’s first coordinated attack on Metaphysics itself. He is tremendously dismissive of German Criticism and Idealism and is not interested in being a logician in this tradition but shows a deep understanding of the fields even in his dismissal of it. Moral sentiments he understands in a Darwinian-historical sense, emerging from physical need and cumulated in Metaphysics.

Kant, Shelling, Hegel, and the whole tradition of Germany Philosophy he wipes away in a paragraph, dismissing the problem of the Subject-Object which only arises if one believes in the deluded, mystical platonic divide of Numina/ Phenomena. These Metaphysicians live in “the backworld - with its gray, frosty, infinite mists and shadows.” His veneration of Voltaire and Descartes in the preface is fitting, as he uses a Cartesian One-World understanding of the Self which brings the consciousness out of this “mist”. In the wake of Newton and Darwin, we now know that moral and religious feelings were perceptual mistakes stemming from tribal thinking, and there is no separation between Mind and Matter, which renders the knowability of the external world and the paradoxes of the Thing-in-Itself meaningless:

the supposed depth of metaphysical thoughts is only the strong feeling that sets in with such complicated groups of thoughts but does not vouch for the truth of what is thought in this way. The belief in metaphysics can be explained from the history of the development of the human organism and was also necessary for this development. In the scientific phase, however, humanity no longer needs it…. As soon as religion, art and morality are described in their origin in such a way that one can explain them completely without resorting to the assumption of metaphysical interventions at the beginning and in the course of the path, the strongest interest in the purely theoretical problem of the "thing in itself" and the "appearance" ceases.

The death of Metaphysics exposes the psychological nature of religious beliefs:

Consequently, all phenomena of religious life are based on mistakes and can only be explained psychologically. Thus, “a certain false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in the interpretation of motives and experiences [...] is the prerequisite for becoming a Christian and feeling the need for salvation. With the insight into this aberration of reason and imagination, one stops being a Christian.

This “awakening” to the illusions of the past is tremendously dangerous. To survive this “transitional cycle” that Western society is currently in, there must be a return to primal art as the expression of the Will-to-Power for “From art one can then pass more easily into a truly liberating philosophical science.” All of religious history is now irrelevant, but the religious wars of the 17th century will pale in comparison to the coming darkness of Nihilism. Luther, to Nietzsche, is a tragicomic, deluded little man who thought he discovered something, but it was all illusion. The Tragicomic nature of the Reformation, the counter-reformation, and the Dispute of Regensburg (1587) all become the folly of Fortuna. He takes the time to construct a theory of the State and law considering the recognition that the theories that the government is based on originate from Metaphysical assumptions. In this follow-through, the scope of this work is similar in breadth to that of Kant- he is trying to destroy and rebuild all Western philosophy upon an anti-metaphysical, scientific foundation that is “true to nature”. The lone wanderer who talks to his shadow is an autobiographical image of Nietzsche’s entire philosophic project which he undertakes alone and outside of any philosophic tradition.

The Shadow of Schopenhauer: The Inevitability of Nihilism

Certainly, Schopenhauer was a natural alternative if one wanted to distance oneself from the trendy, dominant force of Hegel. The Young Hegelian school of thought dominated Germany at this time, and Schopenhauer, who worked under Hegel in Berlin, was famous for building out his entire, massive philosophy work to specifically refute Hegel (whom he resented for having to live in his shadow). In his student years at Leipzig, he notes in his journals that he gravitated to those who also read Schopenhauer favorably:

“Now these two friends were the first to whom I directed the full current of a Schopenhauerian battery, because I could judge that they were receptive to such views. From then on, the three of us felt strongly connected by the magic of one name.”

The influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche cannot be overstated, and one should not read Nietzsche without first understanding Schopenhauer and his Will-to-Live. Nietzsche does not hide this influence, he routinely calls himself Schopenhauer's disciple throughout his works, including writing a 1871 The Relation of Schopenhauer", where he acknowledges Schopenhauer's impact on his early philosophical development, particularly in terms of his pessimistic worldview and emphasis on the will as the driving force of existence.

Untimely Reflections is a collection of four essays written by Nietzsche between 1873 and 1876, which aimed to provide a critique of contemporary culture and society from a philosophical perspective. The essays, titled "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer," "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," "Schopenhauer as Educator" and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" are considered to be some of Nietzsche's earliest and most important works, as they laid the foundation for many of his later ideas. Untimely Reflections is an important step between his early writings to his later major works. These four essays provide an early exploration of Nietzsche's critique of traditional moral genealogy religion, and his rejection of the notion of a "transcendent" reality; "It is our task to overcome morality, not to purify or improve it."

His first essay against David Friedrich Strauss defends Schopenhauer through criticizing Strauss's anti-Schopenhauer “secularized piety” and accuses him of a parasitic relationship to the German classics. He uses Ad Hominems frequently- calling Strauss a “Bildungsphiliste”/ “Educational Philistine”. Strauss was a beloved writer at the time so this caused quite a stir, but Nietzsche was a philosophic honey badger who attacked everything, eventually turning even on his beloved Schopenhauer.

The third essay of Untimely Reflections, “Schopenhauer as educator”, is one of Nietzsche's philosophical defense of his teacher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he recognizes and acknowledges as one of his major educators. Nietzsche calls “an educator” anyone whose geniuses helped people to free themselves from external and superficial trivialities and identities. What Nietzsche particularly appreciates about Schopenhauer is his truthfulness - even in suffering - and his love of truth. In the mirror of this love of truth, Nietzsche finds himself. From Schopenhauer, Nietzsche pulls the importance of individuality, absolute allegiance to truth and self-overcoming. Nietzsche writes here "Man is something that should be overcome." He believed that true freedom and self-actualization could only be achieved by breaking free from traditional values and creating one's own morality, for in the collapse of the Subject-Object paradigm brought on by the death of God, the illusion of Metaphysics dissipates and the Will is left agentless. Here he notes "There is no 'I' who wills", a sentence he repeats in several other works.

In 1866 in a letter to Carl von Gersdorff (a school-time friend that he met in 1858 at Pforta State School), the still-churchgoing Nietzsche writes of Schopenhauer's powerful pull away from orthodox Christianity, the same pull that swept Tolstoy out of Russian Orthodoxy (he was excommunicated for denying the divinity of Christ). But in Nietzsche's case, Schopenhauer's influence led him to one of the most impressive cases of anti-Christian Nihilism that history can provide:

If Christianity means "faith in a historical event or in a historical person," then I have nothing to do with this Christianity. If, however, it is briefly called need of redemption, then I can highly appreciate it and do not even resent that it tries to discipline the philosophers: as they are too few against the immense mass of those in need of redemption, moreover made of the same material. Yes, and if all those who practice philosophy were followers of Schopenhauer! But all too often behind the mask of the philosopher lies the high majesty of the "will" which seeks to put its self-glorification into action. If the philosophers rule, then to plêthos would be lost, if this mass rules, as now, then it is still up to the philosopher, raro in gurgite vasto, dicha allôn like Aeschylus, phroneein. It is, however, most annoying for us to hold back our still young and vigorous Schopenhauer-thoughts in such a half-spoken way and to have this unfortunate difference between theory and practice always weighing on our hearts.

And in paragraph 463 of The Will to Power:

My preparers: Schopenhauer: To what extent I deepened pessimism and, through the invention of its highest antithesis, first brought it completely to my senses.

Then: the higher Europeans, forerunners of big politics.

Then: the Greeks and their origins.

Nietzsche accepted Schopenhauer’s bleak analysis of the condition of man, but offered a more hopeful path towards survival; becoming post-human, and abandoning all ideas of “right” and “wrong”. Nietzsche did not read Schopenhauer’s Pessimism as a resignation to a hopeless future, but as the starting point for plotting a path out of the inevitable Nihilism. From Schopenhauer’s Will-zu-Leben comes Nietzsche’s Will-zu-Macht.

The Shadow of Feuerbach: Materialistic Hegelianism 

He who has no more supernatural desires, has also no more supernatural beings.

Feuerbach 1845, The Essence of Religion

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both take their satirical distichons about religion from Feuerbach, and every aspect of Marxism can be found here in Marx's favorite Philosopher. Stalin, in his 1906 book "Anarchism or Socialism", discusses Feuerbach:

"If the dialectical method originates from Hegel, then the materialist theory is a development of the materialism of Feuerbach. This is well known to anarchists, and they try to use the shortcomings of Hegel and Feuerbach in order to denigrate the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. With regard to Hegel and the dialectical method, we have already pointed out that such tricks of the anarchists cannot prove anything other than their own ignorance. The same must be said regarding their attacks on Feuerbach and materialist theory."

Nietzsche and Marx shared a critical influence in their youth while engaging the dominant philosophy of the Young Hegelians. Both Feuerbach and Nietzsche shared a deep skepticism of religion, rooted in their experiences being raised Protestant, though their critiques differed significantly in their implications. Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" argues that gods are projections of human essence, an anthropological approach that reduces the divine to the human, while Nietzsche, taking up this anthropocentric critique, radicalized it further in his assertion that "God is dead," a declaration that sought not only to humanize the divine, but to annihilate the very basis of the divine as a moral and existential compass.

In their readings of Hegel, both philosophers saw an opportunity to reverse idealistic abstraction into a more grounded, human-centered philosophy, but Nietzsche would eventually part ways with both Hegel and Feuerbach, seeking a more nihilistic and individualistic approach based on Schopenhauer’s ultra-realism and deep Pessimism.

Nietzsche's departure from Feuerbach's thought is most evident in their conceptualization of human potential and the future. Feuerbach, while centering humanity in his thought, maintained an optimistic belief in human rationality and communal bonds as the salvation of society. Nietzsche, on the other hand, introduced the concept of the Übermensch, a vision of a future humanity which rejects the genealogy of morals and “heard morality” of religion, reflecting a more radical individualism that Feuerbach would likely have criticized as dangerously nihilistic.

Feuerbach's emphasis on human sensory experience and his critique of religious alienation helped pave the way for Nietzsche's exploration of the psychological underpinnings of human behavior and morality. Nietzsche's transformation of Feuerbach's humanism into a more existential inquiry marks a significant philosophical evolution, but also the inevitable and obvious continuation of a dialogue initiated by Feuerbach.

Nietzsche’s “Bible-Believing” Roots

Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Feuerbach were all products of Germany’s Protestant ethos. Nietzsche's father was the Lutheran pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, and his mother was the daughter of another Protestant Pastor. Since the reformation, the Nietzsche family was always recorded as being Protestant, with an unusually high proportion of Protestant Pastors in his lineage. Nietzsche’s father died at the age of 35, when the young Nietzsche was only 5, so his impact was minimal on his development, but his entire upbringing was within the Protestant milieu with a pietistic orientation. This shows throughout his whole philosopher, as the image of Christianity he attacks (and also thanks for paving the way to Materialism) is the version he grew up in; individualistic, Sola Scriptura Protestantism.

Nietzsche studied Protestant theology at the University of Bonn, where he “focused for a while on the philological side of gospel criticism and New Testament source research. In addition to these theological forays, I was a listener in the philological and archaeological seminars.” Here he turned against studying theology and towards classical philology, moving to Leipzig with his friend Friedrich Ritschl, to the disappointment of his Lutheran mother.

Nietzsche stated in his later letters that the only two Christians he ever respected were the Roman Catholic Scientist Blaise Pascal, and the Existentialist Eastern Orthodox writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. No "Bible believing" Christian made this list. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche saw Protestants, especially the self-deceptive low-church variety that view themselves as "simply Christian" and "non-denominational" as Atheists who don't know they are Atheists yet. Nietzsche loved Protestants because without Luther and his disciples, there would be no Atheism as we know it, and no re-evaluation of all morality. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both remarked that they owe their adult Atheism to their childhood belief in Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide.

Discovering the depth of the lie of Luther and of the romanticized Protestant re-construction of Reformation history was also one of the things that drove young Nietzsche away from faith:

"after a long time, I am unable to say something admiring in an honest way... the falsified Protestant historical construction, in which we have been taught to believe, is not talking. At the moment it seems to me nothing more than a matter of national taste in North and South that we prefer Luther as a man to Ignaz Loyola! I was too disgusted by Luther's atrocious, haughty, gallic and envious ranting, who was not at all at ease when he could not spit with rage at someone. Certainly you are right with the "promotion of the European democratization" by Luther, but certainly this furious enemy of the peasants (who called them to kill like mad dogs and especially shouted to the princes that now one could acquire the kingdom of heaven by slaughtering and strangling peasant cattle) was one of the most involuntary promoters of the same." (Letter to his friend Peter Gast, 1879)

Nietzsche’s Nihilism, which he defined as “the highest values devalue themselves” is deeply linked to the Subjectivity of the Reformation. Heidegger documents this path from the Great Schism to Luther to the “renunciation of all values” carefully, just like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer do:

The diminished authority of God and the teaching authority of the church is replaced by the authority of conscience, by the authority of reason. Against this, the social instinct rises. The flight from the world into the supersensible is replaced by historical progress. The otherworldly goal of eternal bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of most people. The cultivation of the cult of religion is replaced by the enthusiasm for the creation of a culture or for the spread of civilization. The creative, formerly the own of the biblical God, becomes the distinction of the human activity. Its creation finally passes over into business.

What in such a way wants to bring itself to the place of the supersensible world, are modifications of the Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world, which has taken over its scheme of the ordo, the graduated order of being, from the Hellenistic-Jewish world, whose basic structure was founded in the beginning of the occidental metaphysics by Plato. 

The area for the essence and the event of nihilism is metaphysics itself, always provided that by this name we do not mean a doctrine or even only a special discipline of philosophy, but think of the basic structure of being in the whole, as far as this is distinguished into a sensuous and a supersensuous world and the latter is carried and determined by the latter. Metaphysics is the historical space in which it becomes a fate that the supersensible world, the ideas, God, the moral law, the authority of reason, the progress, the happiness of most people, the culture, the civilization lose their building power and become void. We call this decay of the supersensible its decay. Therefore, unbelief in the sense of apostasy from the Christian doctrine of faith is never the essence and the reason, but always only a consequence of nihilism; for it could be that Christianity itself is a consequence and outgrowth of nihilism.

Nietzsche & the Nazis

Max Oehler, a Nazi sympathizer and friend of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, worked at the foundation created by her called the Nietzsche Archive. Here he used Nietzsche’s works to argue for the Nazi regime, including Human, All too Human. Ever since then Nietzsche’s connection to the Nazi regime has been debated, with various thinkers ascribing different levels of blame to him.

First, Nietzsche is proudly amoral. He believed that morality itself is an illusion- that right and wrong are social constructs created by weak people to restrain the rightful rule of the world-historical “great” people. Christianity had established a “Slave Morality” to bind the truely great and restrict their raw creative power. He is unapologetic in stating that Genocide is neither “right” nor “wrong” but inevitable, and practiced a highly philosophized version of Social Darwinism, so in this alone it is proper to ascribe great immorality to Nietzsche. But he was a symptom of the Nihilism which was already gripping Post-Luther Germany in his day. He did not create Nihilism but intellectualized it- the term itself was coined by a friend (and intellectual rival) of Dostoevsky- the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The Nazi thinkers loved Nietzsche and argued their cause from his writings, but they did this to all of the great thinkers.

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche diatribes about the superiority of the “Aryan conqueror race”. He routinely referred to "lesser, weak, non-creative, non-enlightened “herd” people as parasites that should be culled, sterilized, or enslaved. And although he strongly criticized Anti-Semitism at points, his philosophy was deeply racist as he adopted a philosophic version of Social Darwinism. Nationalsozialismus thinkers ignored Nietzsche's anti-government and anti-Nationalism diatribes (replacing these elements with a caricature of Hegel's high view of a strong government) and founded their Anthropology of Arian genetic perfection on Nietzsche's' concept of Übermensch. Unknowingly foreshadowing his execution at Flossenbürg, Saint Bonhoeffer pointed out in his thesis on German Idealism and Nietzsche (written at Tübingen) that there is a very short distance between "There is no God but people" (Nietzsche, 1883) and "There is no God but the German people" (Hitler, 1943). Nietzsche’s belief that there is no morality apart from the expression of strength was a foundation of Naziism.

Nietzsche may have admired the Nazi's adoption of Will-to-Power, as Heidegger did, but Nietzsche was born an individual and died an individual. He was fiercely authentic, fiercely honest, and a tenacious enemy of collectivism. As far as the contents of Naziism, he was fiercely condemnatory of anti-semitism at points. His ideas were used as an instrument of Naziism, but as far as Nietzsche himself, he would have died before joining a fascist movement. There is no popular movement, art, or philosophy that Nietzsche did not despise- he criticized every movement and every aspect of popular culture. He despised all forms of Socialism and thought Nationalism pathetic, so it is hard to imagine him being a meek acolyte of National-Socialism.

As critical as he is of German philosophy’s hubris in metaphysical projects, his oceanic view of a unified human history is tied directly to this tradition. The Nazi philosopher and “architect” of the regime, Alfred Rosenberg, gets his “Race-Soul” from a perversion of the Kanto-Hegelian Weltgeist and much of his categorization. The basic dialectical view of progressive, rational history the Nazis held is deeply Hegelian. But in Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer, this unified view of humanness is a cause for brotherhood and love for all humans throughout all time, for we all share the same Spirit, regardless of race or other superficial distinction. In Nietzsche, history has no Telos, only the Will has an Eschatology. Rosenberg perfectly inverts this Weltbild in the same way that Nietzsche did and uses it as a tool of hate and division; he manipulates it into a vertical hierarchy. Hitler is the Nietzschean hero to him. Rosenberg reflects Nietzsche's hatred for "orthodox" Christianity and how it makes people weak, emotional, and "crippled" with morals and ethics, as well as his "trans-humanist" ethos (the anthropological Telos to evolve into something post-human). He borrows the lexicon of this trans-humanism like the will-to-power/ Wille zur Macht, "übermensch"/ super-people and "üntermench"/Inferior-people. The Nazis fancied themselves as the realization of Nietzsche's mythical Superman. But the explicit similarities stop at their hate for the "Platonism for the masses" and love of intellectualized Misanthropy. Nietzsche passionately condemned racism writ large and specifically anti-Semitism (he called the Jewish population the best thing about Germany). He bore down his formidable intellect against Anti-Semites in Germany. Still, it was clear to all philosophers at the time that the Nazis were following in the footsteps of Nietzsche. Rosenberg notes that the Catholic Church condemned Nazism as being godlessly Nietzschean:

Die römisch-katholische Kirche muß nach ihrem Wesen zu dieser zweiten Gebärde des Antichrist noch unversöhnlicher stehen als zum radikalen Sozialismus. Denn dort ist ein Wille zum Menschen, hier nur ein Wille zur Machte.

The Roman Catholic Church, according to its nature, must stand even more irreconcilably to this second gesture of the Antichrist than to radical socialism. For there is a will to man, here only a will to power.

Nietzsche himself would have hated Rosenberg and his pathetic pandering to the state, and even his Racism, but it is difficult to read the Nazi philosophers and not see how different of an ideology it would have been without the influence of Nietzsche- the idea of the re-evaluation of all morals is a thread that runs throughout. He cannot be absolved from contributing to the horrors of the 20th century.

That Individual: The Inverted Kierkegaardian Pathos

In his initial declaration of war against Metaphysics in Human, All too Human, Nietzsche writes “the will is ashamed of the intellect.” This initial foray into Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the force of the will finally manifest itself as the Willen zur Macht here in The Scarlet Daybreak. Through this lens, he takes on the whole of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian moral continuum. He considers religious experience, particularly Christianity, as a psychopathological phenomenon, an idea he articulates in every single one of his works. His perspective shifts from a Darwinian-Historical in Human, All too Human, to a more phenomenological-psychological approach here in The Scarlet Dawn.

As an early work, nearly all the 575 aphorisms here are polemic, seeking to destroy the sure foundation of western philosophy to build a new order. He is also realizing here that with the collapse of the Subject-Object paradigm, the meaninglessness of life emerges, so this One-World philosophy commits suicide by eradicating truth as a value in the first place. Nietzsche deconstructs Kant's Transcendental Aesthetics and argues that instead of human knowledge being limited by forms of perception and categories of the mind, the Psychological-Biological limitations paired with the will to know forms these boundaries.

This philosophy of negation seeks to tear down the majestic moral edifice which was created by the fanaticism of Rousseau and Kant. His arguments are not linear rational arguments like the writings of those he is attacking, as he is not a logician, but an anti-rationalist, for in the absence of God, and thus Metaphysics, there are no a priori starting points for logical arguments to proceed from. Thus, reality must be rooted in the Will, not merely the Intellect. He is replacing logos as the central animating energy of human existence with raw, material, and Machiavellian Power. In the absence of the Nous, Noetic energy is merely the force of the will.

There is a disillusion on the horizon, Nietzsche argued, and great horrors will befall humanity after the death of God. He saw before humanity an abysmal Eternal Return (Ewige Wiederkunft) that must be resisted somehow, a great Nothingness which Order must be brought forth out of. To build a foundation of a society that is “true to nature”, he sees himself as the replacement of Jesus himself. The German Philosophers from Shelling to Schopenhauer were all guilty of hubris merely for the oceanic scope of their philosophic projects. But Nietzsche outdoes them all, calling himself greater than Socrates, Plato, and Jesus and making claims to be the end of western philosophy itself. Nietzsche could be dismissed as a Megalomaniac if he wasn’t one of the greatest prose writers of the German language and one of the most influential thinkers to ever live.

Nietzsche, as the self-described Miltonic inversion of Job, a neo-Prometheus, the anti-Christ he declares himself proudly, chose the other side of Either/Or. He is an inverted Kierkegaard, displaying the same fierce and unyielding individualism that Kierkegaard did. Both men died alone, their genius misunderstood, sacrificing their well-being for their crusades.

This Kierkegaardian energy Nietzsche has ironically endeared Nietzsche’s penultimate, eternal enemies to him: Christian theologians. The fundamentalist, low-church Protestant types may accept that Nietzsche was their enemy (usually by ignoring him or making poorly constructed logical arguments in reply but never by actually reading him), but for the more orthodox types, Nietzsche gained their admiration through his ferocious, unyielding dedication to the truth even to the point of insanity and self-destruction. This Kierkegaardian trait of self-sacrifice in the service of truth is ironically, pretty damn Christian of Nietzsche.

Tragi-Comic Megalomania of the “Religion of the Superman”

The AntiChrist is the apotheosis of his arguments against Christianity, as well as his personal Megalomania. As the title suggests, Nietzsche sees himself as the Anti-Christ (or the Anti-Christian, as “Christian” is spelled “Christ” in German), the enemy of Socrates and the Disciple of Socrates- Christ. He truly believed that he was going to replace Jesus in the Western world. Nietzsche is oceanic in his attempt to solve philosophy itself, as Hegel and many Continental philosophers did, but here takes it to an entirely different place. As the self-described Miltonic inversion of Job, a neo-Prometheus, the self-described Anti-Christ, he believed it was his duty to help the West undo thousands of years of history and return to a pre-Socratic Greek warrior society. This is realized through a restoration of amoral teleology with the Will-Zu-Macht, the Will to Power, to a return to a Pagan Greco-Roman culture. He never hid his hatred for Christianity, a hatred he mentions in The Scarlet Daybreak as an emotional reaction, not intellectual:

Herewith I am at the end and speak my judgment. I condemn Christianity, I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all charges that ever an accuser has put into his mouth. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions, it has had the will to the last even possible corruption.

The Antichrist is layered with Socratic irony, Humic Heteronomity and oxymorons nearly like a religious text. In keeping with normative philosophic endeavors, he is clearly filled with a type of professional jealousy here. As Schopenhauer hated his fellow professor at the University of Berlin, Hegel, so Nietzsche hated Socrates. For everything wrong with Socrates, Nietzsche saw the apotheosis of everything wrong with Socrates within the Prototype of Christ. This reversion to a pre-Socratic world would be characterized by great suffering For the death of God is the death of Metaphysics, and the death of metaphysics is the death of the will-to-truth, teleology and purpose entirely. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both see only two paths for humanity: return to an enchanted, mystical Christianity, or descend into Nihilism. And as the Antichrist, he is attempting to guide humanity out of the coming Nihilism and back to a primal state of raw will-to-power. To do this, Christianity must be removed as it's insistence on absolute morality in dependent of power is in the way. In other words, Nietzsche needed to replace Logos as the chief animating force of reality with material power.

The endstate of his 'Will to power', 'Übermensch' and 'Eternal Return' is the metaphysical death of 'Humanness' itself. Upon this anti-theistic trans-humanism, he built a philosophy that could not possibly lead to an end other than Genocide. Nietzsche himself explicitly advocated for the mass murder of "lesser" humans through his belief in Social Darwinism- writing in a notebook from 1884 that the new ruling class of 'supermen' must shape the future by controlling breeding and "destroying millions of failures".

And here is perhaps the greatest way he is a proto-Nazi. He routinely referred to "lesser" non-creative non-enlightened people as parasites that should be culled, sterilized, or enslaved. And although he strongly criticized anti-Semitism at points, his philosophy was deeply racist as he adopted a philosophic version of Social Darwinism. Nationalsozialismus thinkers ignored Nietzsche's anti-government and anti-Nationalism diatribes (replacing these elements with a caricature of Hegel's high view of a strong government) and founded their Anthropology of Arian genetic perfection on Nietzsche's' concept of Übermensch. Unknowingly foreshadowing his execution at Flossenbürg, Saint Bonhoeffer pointed out in his Thesis on German Idealism and Nietzsche (written at Tübingen) that there is a very short distance between "There is no God but people" (Nietzsche, 1883) and "There is no God but the German people" (Hitler, 1943).

G.K. Chesterton, an early reader of Nietzsche and also an unconventional philosopher-artist, responds to Nietzsche's inverted, paradoxical misanthropy just 4 years after his death which he called the “religion of the Superman”:

Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds... Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. 

But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth: it is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

And when Nietzsche says, "A new commandment I give to you, 'be hard,'" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, 'be dead.'

Heidegger and the Inevitability of Metaphysics

Heidegger's early involvement with the Nazis, and his cowardly doxing of his Jewish friend Edmund Husserl to whom he dedicated his magnum opus Being and Time to, can be understood by browsing the titles of his academic works: the most commonly reoccurring name is Nietzsche. Heidegger was one of the most robust interpreters of Nietzsche in the 20th century. They both had a fixation on the Pre-Socratic philosophers and their mediations on the nature of Being.

Heidegger echoes Nietzsche that human philosophy has been all downhill since the pre-Socratics, and like Nietzsche, disregards all of Continental Philosophy, but necessarily binds his philosophic project within the amalgamations and antinomies of the continentals. There has been little to no progress in the field of philosophy since the time of Aristotle to him. Heidegger rejects both Metaphysics and Anti-Metaphysics, and wants to drive us towards a primordial state, like Nietzsche, but not towards a super-human state of raw creative power, but towards pre-Socratic innocence and engagement with the only essential question, the question of Being. He wants humanity to return to the ancient modes of thinking, which lay at the bedrock of civilization, a return to a sort of de-mythologized garden of Eden. He is the enigmatic result of Nihilism clashing with Existentialism; Anti-Metaphysics seeking purpose within Metaphysics. There are few answers in Heidegger, which is rather the point, but there are a handful of good questions.

Heidegger's treatment of Nietzsche reveals a deeper answer to this question of why he sided with the Nazis than mere self-interest. As a Nietzschean, Heidegger sought a primordial return to a state of pure creative will and to be free of the tyranny of the genealogy of Christian morals. From his Nietzschean foxhole, the Nazis looked like the Super-men that would bring about this shift. Across his career, Heidegger engaged Nietzsche's works more than any other modern philosopher, writing some of the most authoritative tomes on Nietzsche and his work. Heidegger was enchanted by Zarathustra, the man beyond Good and Evil, the man who has transcended humanness. Heidegger, likewise, saw the Catholicism of his youth as a disease, and the movement towards trans-humanism as the medicine. In his early work on Duns Scotus, he praises Nietzsche:

Nietzsche, in his relentlessly harsh way of thinking and vivid ability to depict, summed up this determination of all philosophy from the subject in the well-known formula of the "drive that philosophizes".

Nietzsche total rejection of the sacred and the total rejection of metaphysics, is a type of self-deceptive metaphysics, according to Heidegger. This also includes Marx and the other “pure” Materialists. He writes that Nietzsche’s Nihilism is itself is a type of Theology that should be understood by Christians as a call to self-examination and a return to the concept of Being, not as some antipodal enemy:

Nihilism in Nietzsche's sense is therefore not at all the same as the merely negatively presented condition that one can no longer believe in the Christian God of the biblical revelation, just as Nietzsche does not understand Christianity as the Christian life that once and for a short time existed before the writing of the Gospels and before Paul's missionary propaganda. For Nietzsche, Christianity is the historical, worldly-political appearance of the church and its claim to power within the formation of Western mankind and its modern culture. Christianity in this sense and Christianity of the new-Nietzsche's word *God is dead* testamentary faith are not the same. Even a non-Christian life can affirm Christianity and use it as a power factor, just as, conversely, a Christian life does not necessarily need Christianity. Therefore, an argument with Christianity is by no means and necessarily a fight against Christianity, just as little as a criticism of theology is already a criticism of faith, whose interpretation theology should be. One moves in the lowlands of the world as long as one disregards these essential distinctions.

Nietzsche was the perfect inverse of Kierkegaard, who literally believed himself to be the Anti-Christ, and who advocated for "eradicating millions of failures" in the goal of Trans-Humanism. Perhaps we should disregard Nietzsche's perspectives on morality, considering his pro-genocide positions. But with Heidegger, there is no attempt at moral philosophy, for herd morality asserts trans-personal absolutes, and "good" and "evil" are Christian beliefs that must be eliminated. Clearly, despite Heidegger's condemnation of Christianity as viewing himself, like Nietzsche, as it's enemy, he kept the Phenomenological structure and only substituted the contents. Being sounds an awful lot like de-personallized Theism, and "thrownness" a de-mythologized Fall of Mankind. In his 1929 "What is Metaphysics?", he admits that Ontology has a Theological nature, but argues that it has a trans-religious nature that preceded this facade: "The theological character of ontology is not based on the fact that the Greek metaphysics was later taken up by the ecclesiastical theology of Christianity and was transformed by it.". Still, this depersonalization and de-divinization of Christian Phenomenological concepts is in keeping with Nietzsche and the other Nazi philosophers, but with Heidegger, he should have known better.

Descartes and the Inversion of Metaphysics

Heidegger believed that the entire modern metaphysics, Nietzsche included, holds in the interpretation of being and truth initiated by Descartes.

The word "God is dead" means: the supersensible world is without active power. It does not give life. Metaphysics, i.e. for Nietzsche the occidental philosophy understood as Platonism, is finished. Nietzsche understands his own philosophy as the counter-movement against metaphysics, i.e. form. against Platonism. As a mere counter-movement, however, it necessarily remains, like all anti-, bound up in the essence of what it is against. Nietzsche's countermovement against metaphysics is as the mere inversion of this the hopeless entanglement in metaphysics, in such a way that this ties itself off against its essence and as metaphysics is never able to think its own essence.

Descartes' quest for Epistemological certainty laid the groundwork with his methodological doubt and famous conclusion, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). This assertion marks a crucial shift toward a framework that privileges mind over matter, establishing a dualism that sees the thinking self as the primary basis of knowledge and existence. Descartes' emphasis on doubt and the thinking subject not only inaugurated modern philosophy, but also set the stage for a rigorous exploration of consciousness that would be central to both Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Writing centuries after Descartes, Nietzsche took a more radical approach- deliberately trying to deconstruct all foundations of knowledge. While Descartes sought a groundwork for certain knowledge, Nietzsche questioned the very possibility of truth in light of Materialistic Nihilism. Deeply skeptical of the assumptions inherent in rationalist traditions, his philosophy proposed that truth and morality are constructs shaped by human needs and power dynamics. Nietzsche's perspectivism suggests that all knowledge is contingent and driven by the will to power, an idea that disrupts Cartesian certainty by emphasizing the interpretive nature of human experience and the unreliability of any fixed perspective. Nietzsche attacked Descartes as a false rationalist in Der Wille zur Macht (aphorism 483):

"It is thought: consequently there is thinking": this is what Cartesius' argument amounts to. But this means that our belief in the concept of substance is already assumed to be "true a priori": - that, if there is thought, there must be something "that thinks", is simply a formulation of our grammatical habit, which presupposes a doer for a doer. In short, a logical-metaphysical postulate is already made here - and not merely stated... In the way of Cartesius one does not arrive at something absolutely certain, but only at a fact of a very strong faith.

If one reduces the proposition to "it is thought, consequently there are thoughts", one has a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought", is not affected, - namely, in this form the "apparentness" of thought cannot be rejected. What Cartesius wanted, however, is that thought not only has an apparent reality, but a reality in itself. [...] a belief can be a condition of life and still be false.

Heidegger, whose thought echoes both Descartes' inquiry into Being and Nietzsche's critique of truth, offers a further twist by focusing on the concept of "being" itself. Heidegger's analysis of "Dasein" or being-there emphasizes the fundamental nature of human existence as being-in-the-world, a direct counterpoint to Cartesian dualism. Unlike Descartes, who begins with the self-contained subject, Heidegger begins with the existential condition of being embedded in the world, an approach that resonates with Nietzsche's idea of life as a fundamental interpretive activity in which individuals must create meaning within the confines of their existential realities. Heidegger writes in his 1931 Plato’s Doctrine of Truth:

As far as "value" and the interpretation on "values" carry Nietzsche's metaphysics and this in the unconditional form of a "revaluation of all values, Nietzsche is also, because he lacks any knowledge of the metaphysical origin of "value", the most unrestrained Platonist within the history of occidental metaphysics. In his understanding of value as the condition of enabling "life" set by "life itself", Nietzsche has captured the essence of αγα&όν more unprejudiced than those who pursue the groundless misconception of "intrinsically valid values".

Nietzsche and Heidegger both shared a particularly odd obsession with the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander (in German “aneinander”), despite only have a one-sentence fragment of his works. From this single sentence, both philosophers extrapolated a vast universe. Nietzsche, in his pure Philology days as a student at the University of Leipzig, published multiple essays on Pre-Socratic Greek texts, including the phrase of Anaximander in his 1867 Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger all agree: it was all downhill since Socrates, although the path back to this “only question that matters”, i.e. the question of Being, they disagree on.

Absolute metaphysics, with its reversals by Marx and Nietzsche, belongs to the history of the truth of being. What originates from it cannot be met or even eliminated by refutations. It can only be taken up, if its truth is initially hidden back in being itself and withdrawn from the area of a mere human opinion. All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish. The dispute between the thinkers is the "loving dispute" of the thing itself. It helps them alternately into the simple affiliation to the same, from which they find the proper in the destiny of being.

Heidegger criticized Nietzsche as being a false materialist. In his Letters on Humanism, 1946, Heidegger muses:

In this nearness, in the clearing of the "there", the human being dwells as the insistent, without being able today already to experience and to take over this dwelling specifically. The nearness of "being", as which the "there" of Dasein is, is thought of from "being and time" in the speech about Hölderlin's elegy "Heimkunft" (1943), taken from the poem of the singer said in his letter about "humanism" and called the "homeland" from the experience of the forgetfulness of being. This word is thought here in an essential sense, not patriotic, not nationalistic, but being-historical. At the same time, the essence of the homeland is named with the intention to denote the homelessness of modern man from the essence of the history of being. Nietzsche was the last to experience this homelessness. He was not able to find any other way out of it within metaphysics than the inversion of metaphysics. But this is the completion of the hopelessness.

The Dialectal Negation of Aesthetics through the Synthesis of Opposites in Tragedy

The Birth of Tragedy has two different subtitles from two editions- first "from the spirit of music" and the second "Hellenism or Pessimism". Composed from essays written from 1869-71, it was first printed in Leipzig in 1872 under the title "Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik”. In 1886, the same publisher printed a new edition under the title "Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus" with a second preface "Versuch einer Selbstkritik” where he criticizes his work. Both Prefaces are included here.

Nietzsche published this work at the age of 27 after his service in the armed forces. He writes in his self-critical 1886 autobiography Ecce Homo “one would not dream that it was begun under the thunders of the Battle of Wörth. I have thought through these problems before the walls of Metz, in cold September nights, during the service of nursing; one could rather believe that the writing is fifty years older.” He is criticizing the classic view of the classics from Schiller and Goethe, who also mythologized the Greek tragedy, but viewed it as positive. Likewise, in his later works, he pushed back against Schopenhauer's idea that the Greeks were Pessimists who used music and myth to survive: The tragedy is precisely the proof that the Greeks were not pessimists: Schopenhauer made a mistake here, as he made a mistake in everything.” Both authentic music and tragic myth are expressions of the Dionysian.

Here Nietzsche articulates a semi-Hegelian tragic dichotomy of pre-cosmogonic energy underlying all human struggle made manifest most explicitly in Greek tragedy. For the Greeks understood most clearly the forces which were driving the ethos of their civilization, finding a balance between chaos and order. It is a suspiciously metaphysical description of the origins of human culture from a man who believed it was his purpose as a “world-historical” individual to destroy the lie of the existence of Metaphysics. For as much as he criticized German Critical and Idealistic Philosophy of German, he shared an unwavering admiration for the Greek Philosophers, nearly to the point of worship.

The unity of opposites of the rational Apollos, the chaotic Dionysian in Tragedy is the highest dichotomy in the Hellenistic ability to find existential expression through art. This idea explicitly centers on Wagner and Schopenhauer, and the preface explicitly addresses Wagner. As much as he praises Wagner here, he would later criticize his music only two years later in “Human, All too Human”, and then write entire essays condemning Wagner. “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” Is one of Nietzsche’ early defenses of Wagner, written for the Bayreuth Festival. Here Nietzsche praises the revolutionary spirit of Wagner, but essentially calls him a dilettante This criticism intensified exponentially across Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner culminating in two denunciations of him- “Der Fall Wagner” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner”. Nietzsche wrote, "Wagner's art is not a mirror of the world, but a weapon in the fight against it." Nietzsche believed that Wagner's art, which was often seen as a representation of the German nation, was a form of nihilism and life-denying. He aimed to distance himself from the ideas of Wagner and to establish his own philosophy. There is certainly a great amount of professional jealousy throughout Nietzsche’s works.

Both authentic music and tragic myth are expressions of the Dionysian, hence the multiple subtitles this work has had. In mimicry of Schopenhauer, music is a metaphysical expression of the “will-to-live” which he would later re-tool as the “will-to-power”. This is the beginning of his lifelong crusade against Metaphysics through a return to a primal and anti-metaphysical understanding of Aesthetics:

denn nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt
//

because only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified

Albert Camus and the Eternal Return in Absurdism 

Nietzsche understands by nihilism the devaluation of the previous uppermost values. But Nietzsche stands at the same time affirmatively to nihilism in the sense of a "revaluation of all previous values". The name nihilism therefore remains ambiguous and, seen in the extremes, at first always ambiguous, insofar as it describes the mere devaluation of the previous highest values, but then at the same time means the unconditional counter-movement to devaluation.

Holzweg, Heidegger

Many aspects of Nietzsche’s historical, biological and psychological arguments still hold up today. His analysis of morality is often entirely consistent, impressively logical, triumphantly poetic, deeply beautiful, and truly evil. I have no concern about Nietzsche the intellectual; I maintain enormous concern about Nietzsche the man and his deliberate desire to see the end of 'Humanness' itself.

Camus built his inverted version of Kierkegaardian Absurdity upon this particular version of Nihilism derived from the Eternal Return (Ewige Wiederkunft); where he built upon Nietzsche's attempt to find a reason to live in the inherent meaninglessness of the post-pietistic life. Yet Nietzsche's Zarathustra- his penultimate enlightened Übermensch- sees his telos as eternal unhappiness in a life sustained by the sheer elemental force of the will. Camus' Übermensch- Sisyphus (iterated as Meursault in The Stranger), attempts to find happiness by living in a disconnected anti-existentialism relying upon the sensual hedonism off of the struggles of life; Camus, in his staggering cowardice, side-steps the questions Nietzsche confrunted head-on. Camus is a de-evolution and weakened version of Nietzsche.  

To Nietzsche, the anodyne of existential angst and the suffering it brings is the act of Creation: "Creating- that is the great salvation from suffering". To Camus, it is emotionalized hedonism that one escapes the crushing weight of the Absurd universe. Camus' pseudo-nihilism is not an evolution but a de-evolution of Nietzsche's. At least Nietzsche had the moral fortitude to recognize and accept eternal suffering might very well be the result of non-theistic life if a "Superman" society cannot be formed. Nietzsche wrote: "so findet der Übermensch in seinem schöpferischen Akt der Selbstvervollkommnung seine Selbstbestätigung, die ihn die „ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen“ bejahen lässt, dass sein Leben so ist, wie es ist, selbst wenn es sich auf ewig wiederholen würde."// "so the superman finds his self-affirmation in his creative act of self-perfection, which allows him to affirm the 'eternal return of the same', that his life is as it is, even if it belongs forever."

But this idea of the 'Eternal Return' is the same recursive Tautology at the heart of Western Nihilism; even the Hedonistic semi-Nihilism of Camus. And so we must imagine Sisyphus spiritually dead, as Zarathustra was, stuck in a hellish Tautology of eternal self-worship.

Nietzsche set himself to the task of upending every perspective tirelessly and fanatically; even if it meant his own unhappiness (and it did- he suffered tremendously throughout his life and died in agony). Camus, while he indeed moves 'beyond' Good and Evil, stops short and resigns himself only to the 'Sense-Certainty' fallacy of materialistic hedonism; he will not follow Nietzsche into the abyss and follow through to the rational, prosaic conclusion of his Anti-Theist premises; Camus and his Absurdists want to be happy at all costs, even if it means cognitive dissonance. Despite Camus lifting certain elements of his Absurd Man from Nietzsche’s Super Man, Nietzsche's condemnation of the man who "accepts the gentle indifference of the universe" is quite severe and applies perfectly to Absurdism:

Do you want to live 'according to nature? O you noble Stoics, what fake words! Think about nature as the Being that it is- extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown - imagine this indifference itself as a power - how could you live in accordance with this indifference? 

Nietzsche's 'world-affirming' man lives "with a tremendous and proud self-possession" (BGE 284) just like Camus' Absurd Man. But unlike the Absurd Man, Superman does not believe in comfortable platitudes and happiness. For happiness, as Nietzsche proved in word and deed, is the enemy of Greatness. One must imagine Sisyphus dead.

Jung and the Metapsychological Forces

At first glance, Jung's Anima/Animus dichotomy correlates strongly to Nietzsche’s emphasis on the Greco-Roman contrast of the Apollarion & Dionysian he pulled out of Hegel and Holderlin. They are both psycho-spiritual masculine/feminine contrasts, important to the emergence and creation of art, and both have powerful, unseen sway on humanity. Left unchecked, these morally agnostic pairs can destroy the individual in a tragedy or lead to a Renaissance. But the Anima/Animus is a set of Chthonic, abstract, vaguely anthropomorphized meta-archetypes residing outside of the individual in the Collective Unconscious- the raw material from which Individualizations form into guiding Archetypes-, while the Apollonian/ Dionysian are a pair of opposite impulses within the individual. Nietzsche’s pair is obvious to the individual and resides in the emotional state; Jung's resides in the deepest recesses of the Shadow self, and their shape can only be seen when looking across the millennia at many millions of Psyches. It's nearly impossible for a single individual to notice their motive influence. This Yin-Yang pair Jung calls the Syzygy (Greek for marriage).

But there is much that can be correlated to Nietzsche's works: both Jung and Nietzsche prophetically predicted that the end of the Christian era brought on by the advent of Protestantism would be replaced by Chaos, predicting the Holodomor and Holocaust. As Christ is the Archetype of the Self, the post-Protestant breakup of the Christian Ethos descends western culture into hysteria, and placebo religions (Socio-Political dogma, Astrology, etc). Jung writes: "the destruction of the God-image is followed by the annulment of the human personality. Materialistic atheism with its utopian chimeras forms the religion of all those rationalistic movements which delegate the freedom of personality to the masses and thereby extinguish it."

Nietzsche and Jung are both concerned with the genealogy of morals and the problem of dichotomies, particularly good and evil. Nietzsche's solution is to become post-human, the Ubermensch. Jung's solution is to return to a ritualistic relationship with the ancient Archetypes and re-enchant reality. Nietzsche articulates poetically the reality that parts of the mind are autonomous from conscious control, something Jung expands upon psychologically. The anima and animus are autonomous meta-patterns because "The causal factors determining his psychic existence reside largely in unconscious processes outside consciousness".

Nietzsche himself did not like the dialectal nature of the birth of Tragedy, but it is the beginning of his Nihilistic philosophy which Dostoevsky inadvertently responded to in his art simultaneously. Nietzsche would say of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment “Dostoevsky is the only psychologist I have anything left to learn from”. Unfortunately, he died before he could read more about Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky never knew of him. Both men were responding to Hegel and post-enlightenment rationality. He notes in Ecce Homo that this work is a recognition of the Nihilism which had already befallen western civilization:

[The Birth of Tragedy] smells suspiciously Hegelian, it is afflicted only in some formulas with the corpse-perfume of Schopenhauer… It is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it negates all aesthetic values - the only values that the "Birth of Tragedy" recognizes are nihilistic in the most profound sense, while in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit of affirmation is reached.

A Response from the Poet of Petersburg: Dostoevsky on Nietzsche

Both men were responding to the Zeitgeist of their day, unaware of each other. Both men predicted the bloodshed of the 20th century with shocking accuracy. We have in Dostoevsky an inadvertent reply to Nietzsche's transhumanism that is so specific and so detailed, it reads like a response to Nietzsche. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche can be read as a pair of antinomies, as their philosophic projects wrapped in artful expression have identical, inverse mirrored forms. Nietzsche writes in his letters:

In Zurich I visited the excellent Fräulein von Schirnhofer, who had just returned from Paris, uncertain about her future, intentions, prospects, but, like me, raving about Dostoyevsky.

I absolutely believe your words about Dostoevsky; I appreciate him, on the other hand, as the most valuable psychological material I know - I am grateful to him in a strange way, however much he goes against my lowest instincts.

Nietzsche read Dostoevsky (probably Crime & Punishment) later in life after he developed his own philosophy, but not the other way around. Although Dostoevsky did speak German and had a love of German authors like Schiller & Goethe, Nietzsche published after Dostoevsky, and his works were only popular post-mortem so Dostoevsky never had the chance. But Dostoevsky's works were becoming widely read during Nietzsche's lifetime. In Twilight of the Idols we have his only mention of Dostoevsky within his works. His opinion is paradoxically glowing: “[Dostoevsky’s] the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn”, and that he “ranks amongst the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life". This is ironic because the two could not be more different in their Metaphysical conclusions, which he mentions in his later letters.

Because Dostoevsky was so well-read on central European philosophy and particularly the Germans, Dostoevsky inadvertently responded to Nietzsche's Nihilism and hyper-subjective anti-morality, particularly in his 1871 Demons and Crime and Punishment. If only Nietzsche had read Dostoevsky in his formative years, we might have not ended up with a different Nietzsche than the bitter, anti-moralist Nihilist history remembers him as.

The pair share a common focus on suffering, transformation, and a belief in the irrationality of humankind. But in their conclusions, they are as opposite as possible. Dost landed in the light of dogmatic Orthodoxy; Nietzsche in the profoundly black, eternally meaningless Night of Nihilism. There is a surprising agreement in first principles, however, between the Nihilists, Absurdists, and the historical Christian thinkers. Both criticize Rationalism from an Existentialist vision; the sophistry of perception and the unknowable nature of the enigmatic core of consciousness. Rationality fails in its analysis on something as complex and ineffable as the ever-expanding universe of history and the observation of it by living beings created out of it. Dostoevsky is a dramatist, Nietzsche is a philosophizer first, but Nietzsche chose to express his greatest attacks through drama; he considered Zarathustra's tales to be his greatest work, followed by BGE.

Utopianism, expressed through Altruistic Utilitarianism and authoritarian Socialism, was a target of both. Nietzsche professed Dostoevsky's point in Notes from the Underground in parallel, and repeats this point by Dostoevsky throughout his works: "And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive, in other words, only what is conducive to welfare, is for the advantage of man? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond as suffering. To care only for well-being is to be positively ill-breed." But writers mulled on the ontological problem of the individual living in a fundamentally agnostic material universe, and both located the path forward as being in the metaphysical power of the individual to will into existence a reality of its own making.

While Nietzsche asserted the death of God as a great truth- it was a truth he shuddered at and mourned. He wrote in one of his notebooks "He who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere. He must either deny it or create it." The tortured tension of this dichotomy would inevitably lead to his Nihilism and his hope in a 'Superman' race which would create new art again and become God. For he agreed with Dostoevsky that the immediate and inevitable filling of the void created by the abandonment of a metaphysical relationship with the knowable revelation of a Transcendental Goodness would be a kind of bloody Totalitarianism unknown by humankind until the 20th century. Both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche predicted a turn towards Totalitarianism in post-Christian societies to escape the crippling dark nights of Nihilism. Nietzsche here describes all western politics from Dostoevsky's time to the present personality cults of Progressivism; an agnostic non-believer who places no higher moral authority above them must descend into Nihilism- Absurdist, illogical denialist Nihilism (Camus, Baldwin) or authentic, honest despair at close of day.

On this he agrees with Dostoevsky; there is no hope for humanity without Theism, but Nietzsche embraces the abyss and accepts the death and posits the end of humankind might even be desirable if not beautiful. Dostoevsky will not go quietly into that good night and lights a sole candle before an icon of the Thanthropos and the Theotokos; placing his hope in the repentance of future dreamers. Nietzsche wants mankind to transform into a new species altogether to escape this godless future- while Dostoevsky argues for a return to authentic humanness.

We have in Besy (Demons, 1871) echoes of what would have been Dostoevsky's reply to Beyond Good and Evil (1888), if he had read it, specifically the solution of a turn towards the 'Will to power" with what Dostoevsky called "Self-Will". We know Nietzsche's "Will to Power" did not come from Dostoevsky's "Self-will" but Dostoevsky's Nihilistic, Atheistic characters perfectly articulate Nietzsche's primary arguments, and Dostoevsky responds:

“If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will."

"Self-will? And why is it your duty?"

"Because the will has all become mine. Can it be that no one on the whole planet, having ended God and believed in self-will, dares to proclaim self-will to the fullest point? It's as if a poor man received an inheritance, got scared, and doesn't dare go near the bag, thinking he's too weak to own it. I want to proclaim self-will. I may be the only one, but I'll do it."Do it, then."

"It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is--for me to kill myself...to kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will, and there's the whole of you in that. I am not you: I want the highest point and will kill myself...It is my duty to proclaim unbelief."

Kirillov was pacing the room.

"For me, no idea is higher than that of 'there is no God'. The history of mankind is on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God, to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now. I alone for the first time in world history did not want to invent God. Let them know once and for all.”

In Karamazov, Dostoevsky articulates the disease which infects Nietzsche: "I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular." Nietzsche begins with a crazed love of mankind; and ends in genocide. One of Nietzsche's final statements at the end of BGE, which he meant as a condemnation, I pin to Dostoevsky's chest proudly:

The saint's pity is a pity for the dirt of the human, all too human. (BGE 278).

Dostoevsky was a Saint 'for the dirt’ of the human- for those who suffer; a quiet and elemental voice from the Siberian tundra to answer the pseudo-cosmogonic misanthropy of Nietzsche. Between Ivan Karamazov and Zarathustra, we have what constitutes the closest thing we could have to a conversion between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Nietzsche fulfilled Dostoevsky's prophecy articulated in The Brothers Karamazov (published a decade before Thus Spake Zarathustra) by the Gentleman-Devil of Ivan's lucid dreaming.

Nietzsche believed and taught exactly what the personified Devil does in The Brothers Karamazov within Thus Spake Zarathustra. The devil argues for Nihilism from the exact same basis- the ancient idea of the 'Eternal Return' (Ewige Wiederkunft)- as Nietzsche does. The Gentleman-Devil tells Ivan: "Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament,' then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious-[…] As soon as men have all of them denied God- and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass- the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what's more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew."

Nietzsche boasts "when I saw my devil, I found him serious, though, profound, solemn.. Now there danceth a god in me." (7. Reading and writing). In Karamazov, Book II, Chapter 9, Dostoevsky mentions this Superman: "What's more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if he is the only one in the whole world, and promoted to his new position, he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the old slaveman, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands, the place is holy. Where I stand will be at once the foremost place... 'all things are lawful' and that's the end of it!"

Ivan's Gentleman-Devil views himself in the same anti-moralistic Faustian paradox which Zarathustra does: "Mephistopheles declared to Faust that he desired evil, but did only good. Well, he can say what he likes, it's quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all creation who loves the truth and genuinely desires good." Here Zarathustra personifies the fact that Nietzsche hated religious leaders but viewed himself as one; he hated philosophy by espoused specific philosophic concepts; he hated dogma but preached with omnipotent dogma; he hated value judgements yet passed judgements on everything and everyone; he hated the good/bad and true/false dichotomies, but invariably used them throughout his philosophy. And in regard to the denial of god necessitating Nihilism (ie the incarnation of the devil- the pervasive lack of intrinsic meaning) as Nietzsche predicted, the Devil told Ivan:

"As soon as you disbelieve in me completely, you'll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality."

Nietzsche was the expression of the ethos of his day. He is the anti-Milton: he understands the situation perfectly, but he would rather reign in hell. In Karamazov alone, the fact that Ivan's fever-induced lucid encounter with the Gentleman-devil is nearly a word-for-word with Nietzsche’s ideology displays this well; the concept of the Eternal Return, Übermensch, Will-to-Power, Master/ Slave Morality and Nihilism are all explicitly articulated in The Brothers Karamazov- which is a single test case which demonstrates well that none of Nietzsche's ideas are really unique- he simply articulated the Po-Protestant Nihilism of his day into a more potent version- the “Geneva virtues” as Dostoevsky calls them. Chesterton argues that Milton “beat the heretics at their heresy”, and here Dostoevsky beat the Nihilists at their Nihilism. Dostoevsky unwittingly created an 'iron man' version of Nietzsche's misanthropic Nihilism and responded to it thoroughly.