(1844-1900)
Friedrich Nietzsche was a
passionate individualist who ridiculed the notion of a collective
spirit. Nietzsche was a literary philosopher and poet. He trained
as a philologist. He was fascinated with the sophists, and his
work The History of the Greeks exposed the dark side of
Hellenism.
Nietzsche scorned the notion of morality. He argued that moral codes were designed to protect the weak. As a result he despised Christianity and Democracy espousing what he called Aristocratic Anarchism. He felt that true virtue was something that was limited to the aristocratic minority. He argued that true virtue was not prudent or profitable. It harmed, infirmed, and isolated its possessor, because one with true virtue must be willing to inflict and endure pain. Thus, True Virtue was limited to the ideal established by the Homeric tradition.
While he wasn't a nationalist or an anti-Semite, his ideas were used by the Nazis because his ideologies fit nicely with Aryan Super-Race propaganda. He disliked women and Christianity. He felt that Christianity doesn't distinguish one man from the other. He felt that the teachings of the church valued repentance and redemption while denying pride, war, anger, revenge, passion, and other key aspects of humanity.
Nietzsche's biggest contribution is his critique of knowledge. He argued that philosophy is constructed, based on suasive arguments rather than truth. Nietzsche held that all knowledge is founded on interpretation: "there are no facts, only interpretations." Through this he argues that there is no "real world" apart from language as we must use language to interpret (and thus know) what we see.
He argued that all knowledge originates in language: "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors." Thus, there is nothing that is not rhetoric.
Nietzsche holds that Knowledge is animated by the "will to power" and made dominant with rhetorical skill. He sees this as a fundamental human impulse. This idea reduces all knowledge to one's command of the language. Since our interpretation is the key to knowledge, the person with the best rhetorical skills, then creates reality. "Words produce a number of fictions, the totality of which we call the world of reality."
He continues this by arguing that there is no philosophy apart from rhetoric, and no knowledge of any sort apart from rhetoric. All knowledge, philosophy, belief systems are rhetorical games of power.
Finally, he argues that there is no interoperation without prior interpretation: