In this set of lectures at the University of Chicago, Strauss seeks to explain the crux of Nietzsche’s philosophy. “Nietzsche, as quite a few modern thinkers before him, revolts against God in the name of love of men. We can say they turn from the love of God to love of men.” Strauss goes further. ““God is dead,” that is the thesis. That is different from saying “God is not” or “God does not exist.” “God is dead” means God once lived. Nietzsche’s atheism is a historical atheism.” Nietzsche is concerned about what will become of man stripped to his modernity. “The death of God makes possible this greatest degradation of man, the last man, and this is the greatest threat now…. Christian morality without a Christian God, one herd without a shepherd, that is to say, anarchistic self-complacency combined with the abolition of suffering. Heaven on earth, that is to say, social or political hedonism, utilitarianism…. [Conversely,] the superman is a superhuman man. The superman is then the alternative to the last man.” In Zarathustra, Nietzsche ponders the tenuous essence that has always befallen man, “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.” Strauss explains further Nietzsche’s conceptions of the nature of man, of the self, and of the individual. “The place of God is taken not by the ego but by the self. The self, not the ego, is the core of man. The self wishes to create beyond itself, not the ego, because the ego is not creative; that is to say, the ego as ego is in itself on its way to the superman, in which human creativity reaches its climax…. Nietzsche’s appeal was to the individual, and his concern was with the creativity of the individual, and this is absolutely incompatible with political action.”
Nietzsche is not an egalitarian. He states, “For, to me justice speaks thus: Men are not equal. Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke otherwise?” Strauss explains, “For Nietzsche, inequality is the condition for any high achievement…. Life is will to power—i.e., will to superiority.” The will to power was engaged in an unwinnable fight against the arrow of time. Nietzsche claims, “It was’—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.” Strauss expands, “Man is an animal which cannot forget…. Man lives therefore as much in the past as in the present…. We are also always what we no longer are. Our existence is an imperfectum which can never be perfected. Man cannot forget; hence he sees everywhere becoming, as distinguished from being…. The will desires to be sovereign, to be simply creative, but it depends on the given, that is to say, on the past…. Will to power is not only the essence of man, will to power is the fundamental characteristic of everything living. The will to power doctrine is meant to account for the upward movement in evolution, in human history, without the assumption of a preexisting end…. Nietzsche calls philosophy the most spiritual form of the will to power…. The will to power, as we find it in the organic world and in man most of the time, is an attempt to overpower and incorporate other things. But on the highest stage, the will to power turned against itself.” In “Ecce Homo” Nietzsche reveals, “My task is to prepare a moment of the highest self-consciousness of mankind, a great noon where mankind looks into the future, where mankind leaves the dominion of chance and where it poses the question of the ‘why’ and ‘for what’ for the first time as mankind.”
Nietzsche suggests that all philosophy before him was subjective. Through the lens of historicism, he is able to see the cultural relativism in all prior truths. His is an attempt to step out of history. Or, if not to step out, which would be impossible, at least to acknowledge, the limits imposed on man by being embedded in history. “All knowledge, as [Nietzsche] puts it, is perspectivity. There is not the perspective: all knowledge is relative to a specific perspective, but there are narrower and broader perspectives. Nietzsche’s own doctrine of will to power is meant to correspond to the best or broadest perspective which has emerged hitherto…. The absoluteness of the perspective is established by the fact that life has now for the first time become conscious of itself, that it knows now what it truly is.”
Man is a creature of his own culture. “In Nietzsche’s opinion, a society is not possible without a culture of its own. A culture requires ultimately some commitment, which we may loosely call a religion. This is Nietzsche’s chief concern: a regeneration of man…. I return to the beginning: the death of God and the possibility of the superman; secondly, the death of God and the new understanding of both man and the whole to which man belongs. This new understanding is expressed in the thesis that nature or life is will to power in opposition to eros in the Platonic sense, as striving toward given ends, unchanging ends, transcendent ends. The will to power generates the ends—the will to power in contradistinction to the modern alternative, the will to mere life, because the will to life does not account for the upward thrust, for the overcoming of the lower, for the creativity in evolution. Now the superman is the highest form of the will to power, and therefore the two notions belong together.” Fundamentally attached to Nietzsche’s will to power is his concept of the eternal return. “Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power is the highest form of the most spiritual will to power because it is the first philosophy which is free from the spirit of revenge as he defined it. It does not rebel against becoming and perishing but accepts it and affirms it. It affirms it infinitely. This infinite affirmation of becoming and perishing is the belief in eternal return: no end of becoming, no end of perishing.” Nietzsche has found the only objective purpose for man. “Men have purposes, they set themselves purposes, but the highest purpose they can set for themselves is to be without purpose: simply to be, though to be while knowing. The highest act of creativity, we can therefore say, is the recognition.” Nothing is permanent except for the will to power. “The doctrine of the will to power… is primarily an attempt to understand history. The doctrine of the will to power is an attempt to state, particularly, the ground of historical knowledge, the ground of history. This ground is found in human creativity, and we can provisionally say will to power is primarily human creativity. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power is then the self-consciousness of human creativity and, with good reason, final.”
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