A Nietzsche Reader Book

With Nietzsche's emphasis on the will-to-power and its manifestation in the Superman, it's easy enough to see him as the "bad boy" of philosophy, as a rebel who resonates, even though he may be extreme. In this selection of Nietzsche's "mature" writings, it's possible to interpret Nietzsche in a less extreme way.

Nietzsche yells out that God is dead and he's glad for that. Christianity shuts us down, tells us we are bad and tells us how to be good. Christianity is his primary target, but he's also against our tribal life that creates conformity (the herd mentality). Philosophers are prime targets as well. Plato, Kant and others insist on a universality that buries the individual. The will-to-power is about the will-to-live, to seek what we need and to defend against what we don't need. Collectively, life is "appropriation" and "self-preservation." There is nothing wrong with animal instincts he says, but there is everything wrong with religious, social, and ethical rules that tell us that we are bad beings.

At least in these selections, Nietzsche goes one step further. In a near Freud-like insight, he seems to be saying that when we are suppressed by external forces, we turn that repressed will-to-live energy against ourselves. This harms us and is harmful to others. Now we become dangerous. We take our anger out on others, through manipulation, domination, cruelty, etc. Power itself is not bad; the will-to-power is the essence of our being. But when life energy is repressed it comes out as a negative, as power to assert the self at the expense of others. "All instincts which do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inwards," he writes, "all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backwards against man himself." But then they are expressed outward, as transformed, negative energy, expressed as "Enmity, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction…as the consequence of a forcible sundering from his animal past."

Mostly, Nietzsche's emphasis is on those social forces that create a weak man. The dangerous social effects of repressed animal man are less clear. What may also be implied is that our animal instincts for self-preservation are benign. Leave man alone Nietzsche seems to be saying and he will do just fine. If man is not affirmatively social and compassionate he, at least, will not do harm. The repressed man is the man who should be overcome. And this is what Nietzsche, the existentialist, advocates: We are free to create our future and to be who we are meant to be.