Socrates And Nietzsche : Ethics

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 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).

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.

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 stated previously, Nietzsche’s work was both great and highly influential. The Nazis even used his writings as a basis for their beliefs. Nietzsche believed that the greatest societies were always built upon the aristocratic system. Since he believed there

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

Socrates spent his time questioning people about things like virtue, justice, piety and truth. The people Socrates questioned are the people that condemned him to death. Socrates was sentenced to death because people did not like him and they wanted to shut him up for good. There was not any real evidence against Socrates to prove the accusations against him. Socrates was condemned for three major reasons: he told important people exactly what he thought of them, he questioned ideas that had long been the norm, the youth copied his style of questioning for fun, making Athenians think Socrates was teaching the youth to be rebellious. But these reasons were not the charges against him, he was charged with being an atheist and

Wikipedia defines morality as “a system of principles and judgments based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs, by which humans determine whether given actions are right or wrong.” (Wikipedia Morality) Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher thought up of the idea that there are two moralities; The master and slave morality. These define a person by there actions to there world around them and how they handle certain situations they encounter throughout their natural life. I believe he chose these two because they seem to be strong opposites and there are rational.

In Nietzsche’s aphorisms 90-95 and 146-162 he attacks what he believes to be the fundamental basis of the “slave” morality prevalent in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as other religions and societies. From the beginning, he distinguishes the two different types of moralities he believes to exist: the “master morality”, created by rulers of societies, and the “slave” morality, created by the lowest people in societies. The former stresses virtues of the strong and noble while looking down upon the weak and cowardly. This type of morality, however, is not as widespread as the “slave morality” that has been adopted by so many religions. Nietzsche looks through the psychology and logic of

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.

Even though they were separated by thousands of years, hundreds of miles, and different cultures, the philosophical views of Friedrich Nietzsche and Plato can be examined and weighed against each other in many different ways. Friedrich Nietzsche, born in 1844, was a German philosopher whose main goal was to erect a new image for the people and to create a free spirit in them. Plato, born in 427 B.C., was a Greek philosopher whose main goal was to create a new way of thinking about the world itself, knowledge itself, philosophy itself, and the individual. Both philosophers have obvious similarities; their literary style of writing is perhaps the most apparent, but also their desire

Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, wrote on European history and its undergone of harmful development, conditions had never been worse, in the late nineteenth century. Believed institutions and movements were engaged in reducing human beings to a lower level of existence, more common; and that any individual displaying qualities as srenght, could be vilified and shackled. He blamed this on the mineteenth century not have produced many mighty monuments as they were capable of creating. Nietzsche blamed the Jews for the wrong turn in western civviliation The Geneaology of Morals (1887) is Nietzsche’s elaboration of ideas, pertaining European history, concerning ideals.

Religion, truth, morality, and its value to human society has been a topic of great interest to numerous philosophers. Ironically, Friedrich Nietzsche strongly suggests that there is no such thing as morality, no absolute truth, and that religion is much more theoretical than it is actually based on the natural world. He views morality as not existing in nature with neither good nor bad, only useful and harmful. Then, although there is no absolute truth, he believes a main component of truth is the way different perspectives create their own type of truths. This can be observed with master morality and slave morality. Each have their own views on “good” based on each of their positions in society. This then affects their views on morality,

Friedrich Nietzsche is considered one of the Western world’s deepest thinkers because he calls so many things into question. He felt that everyone would benefit greatly by questioning everything. In 1887 he wrote On the Genealogy of Morality to expand on his ideas he expressed through Beyond Good and Evil. On the Genealogy of Morality consists of three different essays that question and critique the value of our moral judgements. The first and the one I will focus on, being ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad,’ in which Nietzsche discusses how goodness is relative to the eye of the beholder. He specifies two different types of groups, the first group being the militaristic and political group, which he has deemed the “masters.” The “masters” view “good” as having the characteristics of strength, power, freedom and achievement. The second group being the “slaves,” which is the group that is controlled by the masters. The slaves viewing “good” as having the characteristics of sympathy, charity, forgiveness, and humility. The characteristics that the “masters” deemed “good,” like strength and power, were used as sources for fear against the “slaves” and thus were deemed evil. He feels that the “slaves” deem the things the “masters” view as good as evil because of the resentment they have.

Political theory is the study of concepts that allows for the analytical study of relationships between political institutions. Over the centuries, political theorists have established renditions of what political theory is. This essay will focus on Plato, Nietzsche, and Aristotle, and their works, which respectively define the concepts of the common good and the significance of philosophers to the welfare of the state, self-deceiving intellect and the power of authority over our intellectual lives, and the concepts of interdependency and the importance of virtue and happiness for a successful political framework.