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Spirits Unleashed | What Nietzsche Has to Say About You?

  • Writer: John
    John
  • Jan 10, 2024
  • 12 min read

We must all have used the expression “free spirits” either to describe someone or some libertarian attitude of ours, don’t you agree?


But have you ever stopped to think about where this expression comes from, what it really means to be a free spirit? Which philosopher and philosophical current tried to explain this state of mind?



Rest assured! because today in this video we will explain in my own way what I extracted from this concept when reading Nietzsche's work Human, All Too Human. I didn't seek explanations from big names on the national scene who specialize in Nietzsche, because I don't want to bias my interpretation of the work to leave something unique and personalized for you. I don't want you to trust me, as each of us may have different impressions when reading chapter I of the work. It's not about right or wrong.



I will divide the video into three parts, the first of which we will talk about what Germany was like in the 1870s in which Nietzsche wrote the second book in which he brought the perspective that values ​​are products of culture and history, and have no foundation absolute. These particularly innocent simple interpretations that can change your entire structure of thought, believe me:


Imagine you were given a manual on how to assemble a dresser, the order and the tools needed. This manual is our values, beliefs, laws, dogmas, prejudices. You have two choices, follow the manual faithfully, although sometimes you may get confused with the parts and the assembly order and have to redo it, but the end is always the same, you will assemble your furniture, sometimes not so perfect in terms of tightness. of the screws, or even on some part, but still assembled - as is our life.


However, let's suppose that you look at the manual, but realize that there is another way, you visualize that with a few extra pieces or less removing some of them you can assemble another style of furniture, sometimes you don't have the necessary or suggested tools, you understand the manual, you read it, but you prefer to think for yourself, you are aware of what you are doing, if you need to use the manual, you will, but you will not be in automatic mode or without creativity. That's what values ​​are, a social construction, an instruction that certain behaviors are good for social harmony and others are not, but nothing is an absolute truth, there are no absolute values.


This is how Nietzsche presents his work, which is what we are going to focus on today.



"It demands too much, some told me, it is aimed at men unencumbered by the pressure of harsh duties, it requires fine and delicate intelligences, it needs excess, excess time, limpidity of sky and heart, leisure in the most daring sense - all They are good things that we Germans today do not have and therefore cannot give." - After such a kind answer, my philosophy advises me to remain silent and not continue to ask questions, especially since, in certain cases, as the saying goes, one only remains a philosopher when one remains silent.

That's why we're going to try to explain what Nietzsche created for himself, what these free spirits were, how to navigate this sea of ​​disillusionment?


In the rest of the video we will give a preface about the author and his intention with the book Human Too Much, Human, and finally, we will explain chapter I, what Nietzsche dedicated to explaining what “free spirits” are, how we become people with free souls, the dangers of becoming numb to these concepts and the benefits that we can add to our lives.


In 1878, Germany was a rapidly developing country. The economy was growing, the industrial sector was expanding, and the population was increasing. The country was also undergoing a series of social and cultural changes.


Emperor William I was the head of state, but real power was in the hands of Parliament. The Conservative Party was the dominant party in Parliament, but the Liberal Party was also gaining strength. The steel industry and chemical industry were developing rapidly. The population was urbanizing, and the working class was growing. The feminist movement was also gaining strength. Richard Wagner, one of the most important composers in the history of music, was living in Germany at the time of Friedrich Nietzsche, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered X-rays, literature is imploding and great works and culture were changing. The philosopher was influenced by the climate of change and innovation that permeated the country.



The book Human, All Too Human, was published in 1878, and is considered a transitional work in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. In it, the German philosopher abandons idealism and moralism and adopts a more skeptical and critical perspective.


In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche questions the validity of traditional moral values, such as good, evil, justice and truth. The philosopher also criticizes the idea of ​​progress, which was dominant at the time. For him, progress is an illusion, as humanity is always subject to setbacks and setbacks.


Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche begins to develop his critique of traditional moral values. He worried about fashion if he followed abstract ideas for the simple fact that they demonstrate knowledge, although Nietzsche himself recognized the value of the results of the positive sciences of his time.


For this reason, he warns thatthere is truth and truth, that there is conquest and conquest, but that there is also a safe future for humanity, once it is cleansed of untruths, superstitions, prejudices, imposed and inhuman religion, which is uniquely divine and tyrannical, of lack of freedom, especially of the spirit, of the crystallized historical past, in short, purified of everything that is fantasy, pure imagination, divine, very divine and not very human, too little human.


Nietzsche established some pillars to develop his thought: impression, necessity, assimilation and fiction.


In other words, the impression that gives man the totality of space, time and causality; the need to rely on the primordial chaos of sensations; the assimilation of belief and disbelief into a single psychological resultant; the fiction of the truth-world. This is how Nietzsche delves deeper into the analysis of truth and the world, going back to the past, penetrating the present and envisioning a future.


Thus we will see him creating a reflection on first and last things, analyzing the history of moral feelings that have permeated all the centuries and millennia of human history, criticizing and recriminating man's religious life, even though he even praises it in certain aspects.


Nietzsche was born Rocken in Germany, on October 15, 1884. His father died when he was five years old. His mother educated him in the strict principles of the Christian religion. He studied theology and classical philosophy at the University of Bonn. He taught Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, from 1868 to 79, leaving because of his illness, receiving 3000 Swiss francs as a pension. This allowed him to travel and finance his publications. He was greatly disappointed when he was unable to complete his marriage with Lou Andreas Salomé, because of syphilis contracted in 1866. After that, increasingly ill, he gave himself over to loneliness and suffering, isolating himself from the world at home in company of his mother and sister, controlling and fervently religious women. Struck by bouts of madness in 1889, he spent his last years in prison, dying on August 25, 1900 in Weimar.



Nietzsche is a philosopher who is not afraid to navigate opposing ideas and return to the basis that he himself contests, restless, persecuting, the type of man who lived bent over himself. Fascinated by everything that shines with life. At the same time that he deconstructed values, he was also religiously trained by his family. Defender of the beauty of life, he was also a fierce critic of all human weakness, which is why he was his own field of research, a tormentor of himself, he was always at war with his thoughts and in this explosive mix of ideas and criticism, he gave us invited us to be free spirits.


Thus, he said, in his preface when talking about himself: “they call my books a school of suspicion, even more so, of contempt, fortunately also of courage, even temerity. Indeed, I myself do not believe that anyone has ever looked upon the world with so deep a suspicion, and not only as an occasional devil's advocate, but also, to speak in theological terms, as an enemy and provocateur of God.”


Therefore, Nietzsche introduces the theme of free spirits, stating that whenever he needed to heal or self-reestablish himself, it was the conviction that I was not the only one to behave like this, to see it this way. It's enough for me to still be alive; and life, moreover, is not an invention of morals; she wants illusion, she lives on illusion.


It was thus, therefore, that Nietzsche created “free spirits” for himself as a kind of companion to keep good things amid illness and isolation. Like brave companions and ghosts, with whom one talks and laughs, and which one sends to the devil, when they become bored, as a substitute for friends who are needed. Prophesying that perhaps one day there would be people beyond their simple imagination in relation to their perception of life.


A free spirit means maturity in how we perceive life, in what we hold as absolute values. It is about building a critical view of yourself, life and dogmas, after having a light awareness of yourself and the nuances and instability that life can offer, being the owner of serenity and plenitude regarding the events around us. return.


Therefore, Nietzsche asks, what is the firmest tether? Which strings are almost impossible to break?


And he himself answers: duties and values.



These, as befits youth, this shyness, and delicacy in the face of everything that is long venerated and worthy, the recognition for the soil in which we grew, the gratitude for the hands that guided us, for the sanctuary in which we learned to pray. This feeling that we must reciprocate, follow without questioning, without thinking about it. These are the hardest ropes to escape.


For this kind of servant, Nietzsche said, liberation comes suddenly like an earthquake, the young soul is suddenly shaken, torn away - it itself does not understand what is happening. It is a violent and dangerous curiosity for an unknown world, a feeling that “I would rather die than live here in this conformity of thought, in this deception of absolute truths.


Nietzsche is talking about things that we think are fundamental and make us live in intellectual misery. For example, take the Inquisition, how religion was used to construct an absolute truth that burning and torturing people was God's will, how people subject themselves to a life of absolute restriction, like Beatism in the hope of being forgiven for a sin they told her to be. How we are influenced by empty political speeches, with music empty of meaning, with egocentric and insecure leaders who belch demagoguery in droves in the press that we follow like sheep to embrace the wolves. It is about this turpitude, this mental anesthesia, that Nietzsche stands as a lighthouse, not to light the way, because he does not propose paths or invite anyone to follow his ideas, Nietzsche is just a catalyst, he provokes reflection, he causes sensation of the first explosion of energy and desire to self-determine, to esteem oneself, this desire for free will. The freed person now seeks to prove his own mastery over things. He prowls around you fiercely, with insatiable greed. It is at this point that people will say that you are crazy, libertine and averse to good old morals.


And so to speak, Nietzsche wrote, without answering his own questions, the concern that feeds the human soul, “what do I put in place of the duties, of my beliefs, of the values ​​that I destroyed?”


“In the depths of his agitations and his overflows - because, along the way, he is restless and disoriented as in a desert - the question mark of an increasingly dangerous curiosity appears. "Can't all values ​​be reversed? And is good perhaps evil? And is God nothing more than an invention and a cunning of the devil? Perhaps, in the final analysis, everything is wrong? And if we are mistaken, we are not for that reason also deceivers? Don't we have to be equally deceitful?" - These are the thoughts that guide you and that lead you astray, always further, always further. Loneliness surrounds and envelops him, always more threatening, more strangling, more poignant, that fearsome goddess and cruel mother of passions - but who knows today what loneliness is?...



Nietzsche continues: From this unhealthy isolation, to that mature freedom of the spirit, which is also self-mastery and discipline of the heart and which allows access to multiple and opposing ways of thinking; until that inner state, saturated and full of excess riches, which excludes the danger of the spirit losing itself, so to speak, in its own ways and becoming intoxicated in some corner; up to that overabundance of plastic, healing, educational and restorative energies, which is precisely the sign of great health, that overabundance that gives the free spirit the dangerous privilege of being able to live as an experience and give itself up to adventure: the privilege of mastery of the free spirit!


In other words, a free individual may be able to learn from negative experiences, rather than letting themselves be brought down by them. He is able to connect with people from different cultures and perspectives, instead of isolating himself in his own world, as well as reinventing himself and adapting to new situations, instead of clinging to the past and superstitions that have no meaning for human life. .


Mature freedom of the spirit is a goal worth pursuing. It can help us live a fuller life.


There is an intermediate state there, a feeling of bird's-eye freedom, bird's-eye view, bird's-eye daring, a combination in which ambition and tender contempt are linked. A "free spirit" - this cold word expression does well in this condition, it almost warms. We already live, no longer in the bonds of love and hate, without yes, without no, voluntarily close, voluntarily far, preferably escaping, evading, taking flight, sometimes running away, sometimes flying upwards; one is unaccustomed to it, like anyone who has ever seen an immense diversity of objects beneath them, and one becomes the opposite of those who worry about things that do not concern them.


The free spirit no longer cares…


However, there is a warning that Nietzsche leaves to distracted spirits, that is, the danger of arrogance and ego, the search for freedom becoming its own paradoxical current. For example, in attacking Christian values ​​we may feel so confident of our false intellectual superiority, so fascinated by believing and thinking as a free spirit that we may be being frivolous and deluded with what we have taken to put in place, i.e., I tadorn the attackto the bases cristãs fursimplefact of being, and I repudiate everything, without questioning,just to be from against. I.e,shovel mekillsimple,It isjust like that birr brotherSo who wants thelollipop from the youngest, butwhen he succeeds, he remains dissatisfied, whichI give back yours. 


Nietzsche traces a path by deciphering the phases that free spirits go through before becoming their own masters. First we saw the understanding that not everything is what it seems to be, that there is truth and truth, and nothing is absolute. Secondly, we see that understanding this is like a punch in the stomach, we become dizzy, looking for something to hold on to, we want to believe in what holds us back, we feel bad for escaping the herd. Thirdly, comes doubt and happiness for realizing that there is no going back, that once awakened, we would face judgments and the distressing issue of not knowing what we would put in place by subverting the already established order.


Now comes the fourth phase, healing, that is, the free spirit approaches life again; slowly, it is true, almost recalcitrant, almost suspicious.



Around him everything becomes warmer, more golden, so to speak, feeling and sympathy acquire depth, gentle winds of all kinds cross over him. He almost has the impression that for the first time his eyes are opening to the things that are close by. He is perplexed and sits in silence: where was he then? He casts back a look of recognition for his travels, for his hardness and his alienation from himself, for his looks into the distance and for his birdlike flights in the cold heights. It's good not to have remained like an affectionate and sad lazy person always "at home", always "by your side"! He was out of his mind; there is no doubt.


The free spirit, increasingly free, begins to reveal itself as the enigma of that great liberation that until then had waited, obscure, suspicious, almost untouchable, in its memory. If, for a long time, he barely dared to ask himself: "Why so far away? Are I alone? Renouncing everything I respected? Renouncing that self-respect? Why this hardness, this distrust, this hatred of my own virtues? "


Now he dares, asks out loud and even hears something in response. "You should become master of yourself, master of your own virtues. Before, they were masters of you, but they can only be your instruments alongside other Instruments. You should have dominion over your pros and your contras and learn the art of seizing them and dispensing them according to your superior objective of the moment.You should learn to take the element of perspective that is in all evaluation.


You should learn to grasp the necessary injustice that subsists in every pro and con, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by perspective and its injustice. Above all, you should see with your own eyes where injustice is always greatest, namely: where life has its most petty, most restricted, poorest, most rudimentary development and where, however, it cannot help but become itself. for the purpose and measure of things and, for the sake of their subsistence, stealthily, pettily and incessantly crush and call into question what is noblest, greatest, richest - you should see with your own eyes the problem of hierarchy and the way in which power, right and breadth of perspective grow together as they rise" "You should" - that's enough, the free spirit knows from now on what "should" he obeyed and also what his power is now, what only now is his allowed...


This is how the free spirit gives itself an answer to this enigma of liberation and ends it. What happened to me, he says, must happen to everyone in whom a mission wants to take his body and "come into the world".


Admitting that the problem of hierarchy is the one that we free spirits can say is our problem: until finally we free spirits have the right to say, "Here's a new problem! Here's a long ladder, on whose steps we ourselves sit and climb - steps which we ourselves were at one time!


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