After Reading part of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
While reading this unconventional and provocative texts, I have many questions and one question is especially intriguing: since Karl Marx, who we read last week, lived in the same era as Nietzsche, what is the difference between these two world’s greatest thinkers in 19th century?
The first great difference that I find is they have different belief on causes of history. Marx, following Hegel's view of history, believes that history has certain law. Things happen under the frame of this law. And he concludes that history is a history of class struggles. It is largely based on economic theory. Therefore, it is materialistic. However, Nietzsche is saying that this is a superficial way to understand. “The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its "intelligible character"—it would simply be "Will to Power," and nothing else” (36, Nietzsche). Nietzsche proposes that those historic laws are also motivated by will to power. So it is the human instincts that push the history. So for Nietzsche, history is caused, not materialistically, but instinctively. So Nietzsche challenges the materialistic view on history which constitutes a foundation for communism belief for Marx’s philosophy. But there is a much more opposite difference regarding Marx’s communism: the definition on “people”. Essentially, the communism lies in an important assumption that is all men are born equally. It is the social structure that deprive the proletarians off. If all men are born not equally, then it follows the belief that bourgeois are born to be bourgeois and proletarians are doomed to be proletarians. And the final aim for communism is to create a society with no class distinction: all men are born in the equal class. However, Nietzsche believes the opposite: he believes that common people are like “herding-animals” (202,Nietzsche) and there exists “select man” who “strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority” (26, Nietzsche). So Nietzsche proposes this class distinction directly that there must be men who are selected to become “New Philosopher” while the common people are just like animals. As he said,“how could there be a ‘common good’! The expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small value” (44, Nietzsche). Therefore, for Nietzsche, there is a class distinction that the selected man should dominate the commons. This goes directly challenging the very foundation of people in Marx’s communism. Nietzsche also denounces any democratic movement as “an inheritance of a Christian movement” which he denounces as renunciation of freedom (202, Nietzsche). He thinks there must not be equal rights in the society since “ultimately opposition to EVERY right, for when all are equal, no one needs ‘rights’ any longer”(202). Therefore, communism as an ultimate democratic belief is constantly criticized here and every foundation of Communism is challenged in Nietzsche’s view.
To sum up, although Marx and Nietzsche never comment directly on each other, I believe if it really happens, it would be a rival relation. However, after I analyze Nietzsche’s views on communism, I found a more interesting aspect of Nietzsche, that is in his book he questions everything. He questions religion, he questions German language, morality, noble man and even science. But in the meantime, he never seems to propose the truth because he questions what he proposes by himself. He just questions everything and sometimes I even find self-contradictory parts within a chapter. But because of this contradiction, I begin to realize that what Nietzsche may want to convey is that truth may not be absolute. Maybe truth itself is self-contradictory and it depends on how we look at them. Therefore, we should constantly change our perspectives and try to approach the so called truth with more attempts. As he said in his view of “future philosophers” : “these philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as "tempters" (42).
Works Cited:
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Helen Zimmern. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 2015. E-book.