Free A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes by Witold Gombrowicz, Benjamin Ivry Page A

a morality of the weak imposed on the strong, harmful to the human race and, therefore, immoral.
    Of course, this attitude was revolutionary and turned all the value systems upside down.
    Nietzsche—and this is his major distinction from Schopenhauer— is on the side of LIFE .
    I point out to you that human thinking, beginning with Kant, increasingly looks for life, evolution, or existence.There is a deep concern of the mind which begins to distrust abstract systems and feels life itself is increasingly threatened.
    Now, Nietzsche, already in his first work on the source of Greek tragedy, set Dionysus (god of wine, of orgies, and of vital ecstasy) against Apollo (god of tranquillity, of esthetics, and of contemplation).In Greek tragedy, it is the chorus who represented Dionysus, while Apollo expressed himself through dialogue.
    Dionysus is the strength of the human race, of life, while Apollo is the individual, weak and mortal.
    This opposition between Apollo and Dionysus still appears today.Example: Beethoven.Nietzsche considers pessimism to be a weakness, condemned by life and optimism, a superficial (Canadian!) thing. *
    What remains?
    A leap into the depths: it is tragic optimism which remains for man, adoration of life and of its cruel laws, despite all the weakness of the individual.
    In Greece, it is Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who represent the equilibrium condemned by Nietzsche, while Euripides and Aristophanes proclaim vital law.
    Here it is necessary to provide a secondary clarification: why is Greece so important for us?Because in Greece, for the first time, rational man comes to fruition, man formed by Reason.So that is why Greek philosophy and art become so important for us, because all of Europe and modern humanity come from Greece.
    Nietzsche’s strength consisted of an extremely perspicacious and cruel critique of all our ideas, of the human soul, of morality and of philosophy.He demonstrated that philosophical thought does not come to fruition outside of life, as if philosophers looked at the world and its evolution from a distance, but this thought is bathed in life and always expresses life when it is not falsified.
    Nietzsche was a great forerunner in this sense, although he appropriated much from Schopenhauer, especially that which concerns freedom of instinct, even if in a completely opposite sense.
    For Nietzsche, life is not good, but we are condemned to life.This leads to paradoxes, such as hisadmiration for cruelty, harshness (without mercy), and for the whip, weapons.A “military” philosophy.
    In Nietzsche, we find three dominant concepts.
    In Zarathustra (of which he sold only forty copies and gave seven of them as gifts):1.God is dead.This means that humanity has reached its maturity.Faith in God is already anachronistic.Man ends up all alone in the cosmos.Nothing but life.
    2.(Stupid idea.) The ideal of the superman.Man is a transient phenomenon that must be overtaken.Man is thus problematic.He is a bridge and not an end in himself.
    His notion of man: we are nothing more than a means to reach a higher being.Now, love and devotion for this future man, the superman, are more important than love of others.
    3.The Eternal Return.
    This is originally an idea of scientific origin, born on the one hand from the notion of infinite time, and on the other, from the idea of causality.
    Entropy.Loss of energy through radiation.
    Nietzsche starts from an original cause which produces all the other causes, cause-effects, etc.
    Automatic process from cause to effect, thanks to which we arrive at the present moment.
    This will be exceeded by other cause-effects and finally will vanish, and again the first cause will return, etc., and we shall arrive again at the same situation.
    As time is infinite, this will repeat itself eternally.
    This is a naïve and outmoded idea, because the idea of causality works only in the phenomenological world; it can be useful for science and can be verified through