The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

[PDF] Now I have referred already from time to time to Nietzsche's philosophy, but this is really a misnomer. The word 'philosophy' doesn't really apply to Nietzsche's thought, or to his thinking as we perhaps ought to say. Nietzsche elaborated, he excogitated, he struck out as it were a number of ideas, brilliant, illuminating ideas, and these ideas, certainly the leading ideas amongst them, hang together, they belong together. But at the same time, Nietzsche certainly did not aim at elaborating a logically consistent interpretation of the whole of existence, of the whole of experience. He certainly did not aim at building up a system of philosophy. This is, of course, what his great predecessors had done or tried to do. This was what Kant tried to do, what Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and Schopenhauer tried to do, before Nietzsche. But Nietzsche did not attempt to do anything of that sort. He was not a systematic philosopher. He was not a system builder, he did not aspire to erect one gigantic edifice of thought within which everything could be accommodated. That was not his aspiration, that was not his ambition. Indeed Nietzsche was opposed to this sort of approach, to this sort of method. And he went so far as to declare, in one of this works, that 'the will to system is a will to lack of integrity'. This is one of his very iconoclastic thoughts indeed. And this lack or this absence of, or this indifference to, this opposition to system, to system building, is reflected in his works, in his writings, especially in the later ones. With the exception of Thus Spake Zarathustra, all of Nietzsche's later writings are simply strings of aphorisms, short sharp sayings; or rather some are longer and others are shorter. And Nietzsche, we may say, is the master of the aphorism. No one else has been able, it seems, to say so much in so few words, to shed so much light within such a short space as Nietzsche. He is absolutely the master of this particular type of composition, this particular type of literary approach. We might even say that Nietzsche in this field, the field of the aphorism, has absolutely no rival at all, with the possible exception of William Blake, who hasn't left us very many but he has left us a whole series of them in that little work, The Proverbs of Hell, a section of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. And the Proverbs of Hell, one might say, compares with Nietzsche. They are perhaps even more condensed than Nietzsche himself, but there is only this one work of Blake's in this particular form. As he got older Blake, unlike Nietzsche, tended to become rather more, perhaps we shouldn't use such a disrespectful word, rather more long-winded. He wrote The Proverbs of Hell when he was a comparatively young man. But Nietzsche, as he got older, as he wrote more, became more and more aphoristic, more and more brilliant also, more and more pungent, more and more lambent, more and more lightning-like, and more and more devastating and iconoclastic. So that his aphorisms are very often like thunder-claps or like blows.

Now this aphoristic approach on the part of Nietzsche is not accidental. This lack of system, this indifference to system, is not accidental. One might even say that the aphoristic approach is of the essence of Nietzsche's method. He is aphoristic not because he can't be systematic but because he chooses to be aphoristic, because he thinks that this is the right approach. We might even go so far as to say that in this respect Nietzsche is a bit Zen-like. Some of Nietzsche's aphorisms are not unlike, at least in spirit if not in actual content, some of the utterances, some of the sayings of the Zen masters of China and Japan. Each aphorism of Nietzsche penetrates, we may say, deeply into existence, into reality, from a particular point of view, from a particular direction; and each stands as it were on its own merits, on its own feet. The truth of one aphorism is not dependent on the truth of some other aphorism. They are not logically connected in this way. You may recollect that Coleridge said of Kean's acting, 'Seeing him was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning'. And one can say much the same thing of Nietzsche. One can say that reading Nietzsche is rather like trying to make out a landscape, the landscape of existence itself, human existence itself, with the held of flashes of lightning; and these flashes of lightning are the aphorisms. We read an aphorism and for an instant, just by means of those few lines, those few dozen words, it is as though everything was brilliantly illuminated, we see everything clearly from that particular point of view, that particular angle. And then after that, absolute darkness. We read another aphorism and then another flash from another quarter, from another direction, and once again everything is clear, everything is lit up, everything is revealed, but after that, again, darkness. And all these flashes, these aphorisms, show us as it were different pictures. We know, in a sense, in a way, that all the pictures that are revealed to us by these flashes, by these aphorisms, refer to the same landscape, but it is difficult if not impossible to piece them all together as a coherent whole, into one complete, all-embracing picture. And this is very much how it is with Nietzsche. His writings make, we may say, very inspiring reading but they are very difficult indeed to expound systematically. We are now concerned with only one flash, and that one of the brightest of Nietzsche's flashes. Or we might say we are concerned with, at the most, two or three flashes.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Superman:

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Superman.
2. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
3. * The Superman, the Overman or Übermench.
4. Thus spake Zarathustra.
5. Man is something to be overcome.
6. Giving style to one’s character.
7. The will to power.
8. The Higher Evolution and the Overman.

By Urgyen Sangharakshita.

[in French] [Introduction] [Buddha] [Buddhism] [Meditation] [Sangharakshita] [FWBO] [the Centre].

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Dernière mise à jour:
21 juillet, 2008.