2. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

2.1. Nietzsche’s View of the Human Being

In contrast to the view of Kierkegaard, who held that only by standing before God can people become their original selves, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that it is only when they free themselves from faith in God that they can become their original selves.

Nietzsche deplored what he saw as the leveling and demeaning of people in the European society of his time, and he attributed that to the Christian view of the human being. Through its preaching of asceticism, Christianity denied life in this world and, instead, placed ultimate human value in the next world. Moreover, it preached that all people are equal before God. For Nietzsche, such views deprived human beings of their vitality, pulled talented human beings down, and tended to equalize everyone.

In response, Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is dead,” and vehemently attacked Christianity. He felt that it was Christian morality which oppressed human life and the physical body, by means of such concepts as “God” and “soul,” and as a result of its negative view of the reality of life, blocked the way toward the development of stronger people. He felt that Christian morality aided only the weak and the suffering, and he called it a “slave morality.” He also rejected the Christian life of love and spirituality, wholeheartedly affirming, on the contrary, one’s instinct and life.

For Nietzsche, life is the force to grow, or the force to develop. He argued that behind every human action there exists a “will to power” (Wille zur Macht), a will which seeks to increase the individual’s strength. In his words, “Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of those who serve I found the will to be master.” ⁸ He thus rejected Christianity’s “slave morality” and promulgated instead a “master morality,” which made power itself the standard of all values. Nietzsche described the standard of good and evil as follows:

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome…. The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity. ⁹

The ideal of the human being, according to master morality, is the “superman” (Übermensch). The superman is a being that has realized all human potentiality to the utmost limits, and is the embodiment of the will to power. The possibility of the superman lies in the endurance of any kind of pain in life and in the absolute affirmation of life itself. The absolute affirmation of life comes about through one’s acceptance of the idea of “eternal recurrence,” which Nietzsche expresses as, “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being.” ¹⁰ This is the idea that the world repeats itself forever, without any purpose or meaning. The absolute affirmation of life means the endurance of any kind of fate. He said that this becomes possible through “regarding the inevitable as beautiful” and through “loving one’s fate”; thus, he preached the “love of fate” (amor fati).

2.2. A Unification Thought Appraisal of Nietzsche’s View of the Human Being

Nietzsche asserted that Christianity’s extreme emphasis on life after death crippled people’s ability to value their actual everyday life, and so weakened it. His sincere effort in endeavoring to understand the original human nature merits our esteem. His views were an accusation towards, and a warning to, Christianity, which he regarded as having deviated from its original spirit. Nietzsche saw the God of Christianity as a judgmental and otherworldly being, sitting on the high throne of heaven, promising resurrection after death to those who did good, and meting out punishment to those who did evil. What Nietzsche was denouncing, however, was not the teachings of Jesus himself, but rather the teachings of Paul, who had transformed Jesus’ teaching into a teaching that placed too much emphasis on life after death. ¹¹

From the perspective of Unification Thought God is not an otherworldly being who denies reality, while situated in a high place somewhere in heaven. God’s purpose of creation is not only the realization of the Kingdom of Heaven in the world after death, but, more importantly, the prior realization of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. Once the Kingdom of Heaven is established here on earth, those who have experienced life in the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth will subsequently build the Kingdom of Heaven in the spirit world. Jesus’ mission, originally, was the realization of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. Therefore, Nietzsche’s assertion is reasonable in that Jesus’ teaching was changed by Paul into a teaching placing too much emphasis on one’s life after death. Nevertheless, it is also true that, since Jesus was crucified, as a result of the chosen people’s disbelief in him, the extent of the salvation that he was able to accomplish was limited to spiritual salvation, which means that people here in the real, day-to-day world of the flesh continue to live under the yoke of Satan, the subject of evil. Therefore, it was a serious misjudgment for Nietzsche, beyond criticizing Paul, to go so far as to deny Christianity itself, even declaring the death of God.

We can next examine Nietzsche’s assertion that all living beings have a “will to power.” According to Genesis, God gave human beings the blessing to “have dominion over all things” (Gen. 1:28). In other words, God gave human beings the way to become qualified to rule. This implies that the desire to rule (or desire to dominate) is one of the characteristics of the original human nature as endowed by God. The “position” to rule corresponds to the “subject position” among the characteristics of the original human nature, according to Unification Thought. With regard to the subject position, however―as mentioned earlier―true dominion is based on love rather than power. The condition for a human being to exercise dominion is that they must first perfect their personality, centering on God’s Heart, and practice the ethics of love in family life. It is upon that basis, and that basis only, that true dominion can be expressed. Nietzsche, however, was not able to understand about that basis, and thus he stressed only the “will to power.” This is another part of his misunderstanding.

Nietzsche asserted that Christian morality is the morality of the weak, which denies the strong―but this view is misleading. Christianity taught true love in order for people to come to exercise true dominion. People must first fight against the evil forces coming through the instinctive desires of the physical body. These instinctive desires of the body are not evil in themselves, but if fallen people, whose spiritual level of heart is not yet perfect, live according to the instinctive desires of their body, they tend to be dominated by evil forces. Only when the level of heart of the spirit person is raised, whereby the spirit mind comes to have dominion over the physical mind, can the activity of the body be considered good in the true sense.

Emphasizing only the values of the body, instinct and life, Nietzsche neglected the aspects of spirit, love, and reason. In other words, he disregarded the human spirit self. If the spirit self is disregarded, what will remain of the human being? What will remain is nothing but the animal-like physical self. This would certainly drag people down to the level and position of animals. Therefore, even though Nietzsche may be calling on people to become strong, in reality he is actually encouraging them to become animalistic. That is definitely not the level for which God created human beings. Nietzsche’s effort to try to guide people back to their original image should be respected, but the method he proposed for doing so was wrong. A human being is a united being of Sungsang and Hyungsang, with the Sungsang as the subject and the Hyungsang as the object. Nietzsche, however, emphasized only the Hyungsang aspect, neglecting the Sungsang aspect. Still, Nietzsche is to be respected for having issued a warning against those Christians who, because of their ignorance of Jesus’ original purpose of realizing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, had a tendency to think too lightly of the importance of our human life on earth.