friedrich nietzsche beyond good and evil and thus spoke zarathustra

Let’s go back to that proclamation, “I think, therefore I am.” For many of Nietzsche’s predecessors, this was an example of what’s called an “immediate certainty” – that is, an idea so obviously true that it doesn’t need to be justified. The key message here is: It’s impossible to do philosophy without making assumptions. This is what Nietzsche meant when he claimed that every philosophy is but an autobiography of the person who created it. They claimed to present the unbiased, indisputable truth, but all they really did was dress up their own prejudices as rational arguments.

To Nietzsche, philosophers were being disingenuous. Even as conscious faith in Christianity was waning in nineteenth-century Western Europe, philosophers continued to take such notions as the “soul” and “morality” for granted in their secular philosophies. In particular, Nietzsche felt that the entire Western philosophical tradition was pervaded by a superstitious faith in the dogmas of Christian theology. And he poked fun at pretty much every philosopher for secretly smuggling prejudices into their philosophies. Ever since the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes proclaimed “I think, therefore I am,” much of Western philosophy has been obsessed with beginning the philosophical process from “first principles” – that is, doing philosophy without taking any unwarranted assumptions for granted.Īs we’ll see, Nietzsche cast doubt on the idea that it’s even possible for a philosophy to avoid presupposing anything.

Friedrich nietzsche beyond good and evil and thus spoke zarathustra