Friedrich Nietzsche and Aristotle were great philosophers of their respective times, but their ideas and beliefs were completely different from each other. The focus of this paper will be on Nietzsche’s critique of Nicomachean Ethics by using On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche had a different outlook on philosophy, especially in historical and goal oriented terms. According to Nietzsche, everything, including virtues, needed to be understood through change and historical development. Aristotle believed that human nature was static while Nietzsche believed that human nature changed over time. Another difference between the philosophers was Aristotle’s teleological understanding of the world. Aristotle was under the impression that a goal-oriented description was needed to understand the world. Nietzsche believed that humanity’s will was always in a state of willing but not towards any specific goal. Aristotle believed that humanity was always trying to achieve happiness. Nietzsche, on the other hand, believed that the human will was never directed towards one universal goal, like happiness, because goals of any kind ignore evolutionary fact and the possibility of change.
Admittedly, the philosophy of the late nineteenth century German Friederich Nietzsche had a profound impact on my world view. I concur with his belief that humans should occupy themselves with living in the reality that is, and not to be preoccupied with fantastic illusions of working towards a great afterlife. Granted, I am still very young, but from what I can see, humans have no universal nature nor do any set of underlying human morals dictate what is right and wrong. And as much as people would like to believe, unfortunately, we do not have free will. Every action carries the weight of a punishment or reward, so in essence, people do things either in fear or in
According to Nietzsche, the right and wrong (good and bad, good and EVIL) are just a type of the concept. Nietzsche explains that from the beginning in his first argument that the “good” did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. It explains that the trait of “good” was really a trait as we know it today, it was actually people who were good themselves, which is Aristocratic who are powerful, high minded and high class people who controls the class below them and also politics in some cases. This was the concept that defined what right and wrongs were because it cleared things out that good was really a trait but the people who were powerful and high class in society, unlike bad which was completely opposite. But over the time
Christianity had become the enemy of life and nature and the church has stifled its followers by turning them into closed minded and weak humans. Nietzsche ultimately believed that religion creates a concept of anti-natural morality which damages our development as humans quite
Over the course of this school year, the resurfacing topic of controversy is morality. Through the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, the darkness of humanity reveals itself. The sad truth this tells is that humans are callous or immoral to fellow man on an individual, national, and even global scale, leading to events that go down in history as atrocities. The international debate this raises, is whether nations, like America, should institute a policy of 'humanitarian military intervention' which is when an independent government fails to deliver human rights to the governed, other countries without permission can intervene with military force. Morality is the focus of the international debate regarding this foreign policy, because that underlying motivation
There is only a strong man in his eyes that the society has progressed from. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says that to keep our society, only powerful people should join together because respecting the weak causes the powerful to become weak, and will result in a weak society. In order to live, the strong crushes the weak to stay dominant because in history the strong are the ones that always win. One of Nietzsche moralities was slave, which was the term that identified the weak individuals. In Nietzsche eyes, people with power exploit the weak, and if the strong honors the weak then the strong will get weaker and destroy the society. Friedrich supported the master morality, stating that dominating people defines good in a person, and that you are masters of other people. He only helped others to better himself, not because he has sympathy on the weak. Nietzsche is just making claims and giving no proof. He assumes the strong makes a better society. He wanted us to look to the past and see the strong always win, and we should not look at the future, at things that will destroy society. Nietzsche believed, only show respect to the strong. He contradicts himself saying there are no standards but creates standards by saying, strong should get their way. He has no logic, just
Nietzsche was a revolutionary author and philosopher who has had a tremendous impact on German culture up through the twentieth century and even today. Nietzsche's views were very unlike the popular and conventional beliefs and practices of his time and nearly all of his published works were, and still are, rather controversial, especially in On the Genealogy of Morals. His philosophies are more than just controversial and unconventional viewpoints, however; they are absolutely extreme and dangerous if taken out of context or misinterpreted. After Nietzsche's death it took very little for his sister to make some slight alterations to his works to go along with Nazi ideology.
Nietzsche starts this second essay by looking at and reviewing the importance of our ability to make and keep promises. To hold yourself and others to a promise means having the need of both a good memory, the ability to remember making said promise and a strong feeling of confidence what will happen next and a long term ability to know you will be able to fulfil said promise. In order for us to make the commitment and have the confidence to do so means that on some level, we must give a feeling and make ourselves into the ideal of becoming in a way predictable, to be able to achieve this we as humans need a set of guideline to follow, certain rules that make this predictability a possibility, the certainty that a set of actions will lead to a set of reactions both internally and externally.
They both see the values of society as being a result of and necessary for civilization, rather than natural phenomena. Both theorists see guilt as stemming from a restriction of humanity’s natural urges, Nietzsche believing that it was a tool used by the priests to control the masses. Freud on the other hand thought it developed from a repression of humanity’s aggression towards one another. Equally, Freud and Nietzsche show a similar disdain for religion, the former seeing it as a delusional, infantile way to limit the pain and suffering that existence brings with it and the latter, due to what he sees as the transvaluation of values that the Judeo-Christian religions have brought about and the perceived cultural inaction that stems from this. As well as this, Nietzsche disliked the apparent inherited debt that comes with Christianity and the obligated guilt from Christ’s
What Nietzsche means by religion being “anti-Nature” is that the set of moral laws set by religion goes against human instinct and against life. He feels that a set moral code makes humans hostile and cease to live life to the fullness. He also feels that the moral code is corrupted by priests and legislators. Nietzsche also argues that stupidity in uncontrolled passions may have been the reason for the preventative moral code.
To Nietzsche, good and evil are always subjective, but I believe that there is one thing in this world full of ambiguity and fogginess that is always good. That thing is the power of human love; and furthermore expressing that love through unwavering love of our fellow man. Raw human love cannot possibly be evil. It is the purest, most basic, and most important human emotion to master. If everyone would just love each other despite our different interpretations of good and evil, the world would be a much better place. I think that no matter what religion or culture someone is raised in, love of one another is always regarded as good. Sometimes we all need to be reminded to love our fellow humans regardless of our religion, political outlook, and ideas of good and evil because they are subjective. Love exists beyond good and evil.
What Nietzsche means when he says what’s now good is considered bad, and what was once bad now considered good is that the things we would consider bad like, pain weakness, theft,
From my division of the aphorism and the above stated explanations of each section, it could be inferred that Nietzsche is a moral relativism protagonist. His statement: “there are no moral facts at all”, reveals such classification. A probable significance of what he means by “moral” is, the concern with the principles of right and wrong behavior. Affirming my apprehension of his words, Nietzsche states his belief regarding the philosophers, as follows; “they place themselves beyond good and evil”. In any
Nietzsche shares a similar view of man. The important thing in man is his potential; man is striving but for something different, Ubermensch or superman. It represents man constantly striving to overcome himself and become a man whose values are independent from societal conceptions of good and evil. Ubermensch must be willing and able to reject what he is now to become something different and never become content with present values. Similar to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche sees life as a series of stages that take man from the herd to Ubermensch. The first step for man to achieve Ubermensch is to overcome a collective herd view of values because they are not bridges to Ubermensch. Once this herd is overcome, man can begin to concentrate on overcoming himself.
Have you ever asked yourself where your conscience comes from? The feeling that takes a hold of you when you do what you feel is wrong. This feeling is almost like a consequence when you tell a lie or commit a crime. Your conscience helps you sort out the good and bad and feels your mind with sorrow when you see a sad story on the news or gives you the initiative to donate money to a contribution. But where does it come from. Is it something you are naturally born with, taught over time or given to you by a higher power? This argument leads to the existence of moral values by many philosophers including William Lane Craig. One of his excerpts argues that if there is an existence of moral values, which some people agree,