Are Nietzsche And Arendt Critic Of Human Nature?

Nietzsche is widely known as a critic of religion. In fact, he talks in depth about morality in regards to religion in his essays about the genealogy of morals. But the problem is not within religion itself or within morals. The problem is involved in the combination of the two to create society’s understanding of morality through a very religious lens. In fact, Nietzsche has criticism for almost any set of morals constructed by a group of individuals and meant to be applied to society as a whole. True morality, according to Nietzsche, requires a separation from these group dynamic views of morality- or at least a sincere look into where they originated and why they persist- and a movement towards a more introverted, and intrinsically personalized understanding of what morals mean in spite of the fact that “the normative force to which every member of society is exposed, in the form of obligations, codes of behavior, and other moral rules and guidelines, is disproportionally high” (Korfmacher 6).

Arendt explains that the ultimate power of a totalitarian government is the acceptance of the ideology being propagated. The laws that are put into place in totalitarian government are not to empower the people and protect their rights. Instead, the laws tell the people what they must do, not what they must not do. Arendt tells how the law of nature is the foundation for Hitler's Nazis, and the law of history for Russia's communist regimes. According to Arendt, both the Nazi and communist regimes maintained that those laws gave them justification for their cruelty. These laws of nature and history are not permanent or stable. They are in motion to keep history and nature moving, so that it progresses without ever stopping. <p>Arendt claims that these laws of motion sustain the terror fueling the totalitarian government. Arendt says that terror is the realization and execution of these laws with nothing standing in its way. Throughout the selection, Arendt speaks of terror. Terror is essential for the state to keep its power, or else it will fall. According to Arendt, in a totalitarian state terror terminates individuality among the people. Individual men become a mass of humankind, in the eyes of the state. "Terror exists neither for nor against men", claims Arendt, "it substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly

Friedrich Nietzsche’s own skepticism symbolized the secular changes in contemporary Western civilization, in which he details mankind’s break away from faith into a new rule of chaos. In Book 5 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche establishes that “God is dead”, meaning that modern Europe has abandoned religion in favor of rationality and science (Nietzsche 279). From this death, the birth of a ‘new’ infinite blossoms in which the world is open to an unlimited amount of interpretations that do not rely on the solid foundations of faith in religion or science. However, in contrast to the other philosophers of his age such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Nietzsche deviates from the omniscient determinism of history towards a

Arendt simply points out that in order for total terror to be inflicted the Nazis had to do away with all opposition. The lack of opposition would give the Nazis, perhaps, a sense of security while they executed millions of people.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a prominent German philosopher in the 19th century is one of the most well-read philosophers of the past two-centuries. His ideas regarding morality and nature continue to be discussed and debated to this day among scholars of all beliefs.

The most alarming thing about Arendt's book is that she is able to make a compelling case that the greatest evils of mankind are committed by ordinary people. Her work forces one to look at the world and realize that the Holocaust was not an isolated incident committed by blood thirsty sociopaths. One must realize that the decision making processes that created an environment accepting of the "Final Solution" is still alive an well today as it has been throughout history. The weight of personal moral choice

In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche aggressively challenges conventional schools of thought dating back to the ancients. Philosophy, as we know it, began over two-thousand years ago in Athens with the birth of Socrates. Socrates introduced the practice of reasoning and dialectics—the art of discourse hoping to bring individuals closer to some universal truth—to an Athenian society that previously held aesthetics, not logic, as indicative of goodness. Socrates revolutionized life in Athens, and by extension, the Western tradition. His beliefs are found in works written centuries after his death. He is heralded as the “father of philosophy.”

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.” Nietzsche was one of the first modern philosophers to rebel against rationalism and when World War I came about, the revolution against religion truly became a legitimate statement. Friedrich Nietzsche strongly believed that many of those that practiced religion were led to the acceptance of slave morality. Religion had always played a fundamental role in society as it sets strict boundaries and standards of what is morally correct and incorrect. However, Nietzsche claims that, “Human nature is always driven by “ ‘the will to power’ ”, but religion will tell one otherwise, saying that one should forbid their bad desires. In Nietzsche’s

In your answer be sure to discuss Arendt’s theory of Eichmann as both “thoughtless” and “terrifyingly normal” and her contention that we should understand evil as “banal”. Finally, comment on why the book might still resonate today. What might it say about how we understand responsibility and the way we think of, and address, the broad category of “crimes against

Before any of these issues can be undertaken, a brief biography on Arendt’s life would certainly be practical. Hanna Arendt was born October 14, 1906 in Hanover, Germany in 1906 to Jewish parents. She studied Philosophy at the University of Marburg where she met Martin Heidegger, her professor and mentor with whom she began an affair (Berkowitz, Roger.). Heidegger later began a heavy affiliation with the Nazi. He not only supported Hitler’s

According to Rosenfeld Arendt “famously gets a lot of her past wrong” (Rosenfeld 220). However, Rosenfeld’s study of Arendt’s work is not to find error rather depict the history of the writing of the French enlightenment. The “Truth in Politics” written by Arendt “provides a tour of various ancient and early modern thinkers, from Herodotus to Spinoza to James Madison, and of events in the profound and recent past to name a few” (qtd. in Rosenfeld 221).

Arendt was very judgmental of Eichmann because she claimed that he was unable to think for himself and had the tendency to obey orders and conform without critical evaluation of his actions. She further asserted that throughout Eichmann’s life he was always trying to define himself and that he ended up joining the S.S. purely out of coincidence, “… it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision”. When it came to the final solution of the Jewish question, Eichmann acted in a kind of “Pontius Pilate” manner . Here, Arendt insists that Eichmann willingly and consciously followed the solution of the elite Civil Service of deporting Jews into concentration camps and then killing them and that it was at this moment that he made the moral choice to remain in these “bloody matters”. Moreover, when the Israeli government provided psychologists to examine Eichmann, they found no trace of mental illness and no evidence of abnormal personality, “… half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as normal…” .

As seen in the following scenes right in the beginning when Hannah Arendt was at the table with her old friend Kurt Blumenfeld just after Eichmann’s had expressed he had no part with the murder of Jews. Many Jewish people around them start expressing anger toward some of Hannah Arendt’s statements. As the camera moves around the table some Jews are stating that Eichmann is lying and Arendt disagrees , Even Blumenfeld believes that Arendt is falling in Eichmann’s trap. This scene starts to show the radical thinking of Arendt. Later on in the movie after Arendt has wrote the the article for the New Yorker , the hatred toward her from many jews exploded. This is expressed strongly in the scene where the porter gives Arendt a letter “on behalf

In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt articulates a vision of totalitarianism that is juxtaposed against her own conceptions of freedom and the purpose of humanity. In this contrasting however, she ignores her own recognition that the meanings of such concepts are intimately tied with the narrative of a given society or group. As a result, this essay will argue that Arendt’s claim that totalitarianism destroys freedom as a living political reality is unjustified, and that instead totalitarianism gives a meaning to freedom that is informed by the collapse of ultimate concepts such as the law of History and the law of Nature into the sphere of man. To show this, we will explore the way Arendt lays the seeds of the

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (Gay Science, 126) This harsh statement remains among Friedrich Nietzsche’s most powerful and disturbing quotes, spoken by a proclaimed Madman to a crowd of disbelievers. After making this claim, the Madman becomes horrified by his audience’s ignorance, noting that “This tremendous event is still on its way.” This has an effect of suspending the Madman’s message in time, expanding its audience infinitely, for the event of God’s death could still be on its way. Therefore, nearly 150 years after these words were written, we must ask ourselves, does God remain dead, and has our modern society killed him? This is a haunting and disturbing question, but in many ways our society does resemble Nietzsche’s masses. However, it also resembles the Madman himself, due to its inherent individualism.