Analysis Of Friedrich Nietzsche And Sigmund Freud

I felt that Nietzsche depicted a one-sided image of slave morality, instead of finding the good qualities within and there are plenty. And the whole concept of noble morality seems too good to be true. I believe that people who adopt noble morality will have a difficult time “doing as they please” in today’s society because there are consequences for certain actions.

Freud and Nietzsche’s thoughts may be similar, but human nature constantly changes. Freud is more aware, he examines into the past to find reasons that make life more civilized, however Nietzsche is more doubtful, he sees that humans should be led by a hero. Human nature as they both analysis is affected socially; it’s not a separable characteristic. It is knocked by achievements, failures, happiness, desire, pain, and pleasure and not followed as beliefs and traditions. Freud tends to show the inner struggle for the human in his analysis, but Nietzsche shows the outer struggle.

In modern times humans have become susceptible to new psychological illnesses. Nietzsche and Freud both give different interpretations of these illnesses. Freud blames the repression of the libido and its erotic appetite, which goes against societal standards of behavior, as the cause for neurosis. While Nietzsche blames the slave revolt of morality for stopping us from acting out on our animal impulses as the root of bad conscience. It is because of different social contracts that lead the philosophers to come to different understandings of the illnesses, despite having the same prehistoric origin.

Freud claimed that tension caused by the stuggle to repress anti-social instincts eventually was released and caused the social evils he observed. Marx also saw instincts at work but not the tensions and Id that Freud saw, Marx simply credited man's greed and the subsequent oppression of other men as the root to all that was wrong with civilization. It is interesting to note that both Freud and Marx saw conflict but each traced it back to sources each was respectively educated in. Freud was a Psychoanalyst and his understanding of the mind was very conflict oriented. He saw man as a kind of glorified animal who had the same desires and needs as any other animal.

When the weaker people - “the slaves” – are wronged by stronger people – “the masters” – they are unable to avenge themselves and instead feel ressentiment towards them. Their hate of the masters takes the form of ressentiment and becomes a strong and dominant emotion which defines their morality. The idea of ressentiment is crucial in the idea of slave morality as it is the cause of it. Nietzsche explains that “in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world”. Slave morality “is basically a reaction” to master morality so it is necessary to discuss master morality in order to understand slave morality.

Sex and Man's Struggle Against Nature In "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art," Camille Paglia claims nature is inherently stronger than society. "Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power.a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature." (Writing in the Disciplines 572) I agree with the majority of Paglia's opinions, however, I believe that there are points that could have been elaborated on more substantially. In this essay, Paglia states that man is born evil and it is society's job to condition him to be a good, moral person. Paglia would disagree with someone who said the reason a person murdered was because he grew up in a bad section of town, or his home life left something to be desired.

Dostoyevsky instills sympathy for his character through blame on society. He does not hope to condone his character’s actions, only to shift responsibility for Raskolnikov’s mental state on the society that for so long put him down and allowed theories and ideas of getting out of destitution to run rampant in his mind. The irony comes when that same society accepts and understands his cause for wanting to again be normal and function as an effective person. Works Cited Dostoyevsky, Fydor. Crime and Punishment.

The New Testament, however, shifts away from retributive justice and towards a more loving and appealing approach of ‘turn the other cheek.’ J. Rousseau pointed out how man is born free but is everywhere in chains and that law is crucial in society in order to solve the inequality and exploitation that arises from our individual dependency on others. He offers the Hobbesian Social Contract in an attempt to tackle this issue. Despite taking a generally negative view of human nature, the Hobbesian Social Contract theory states that humans lack intrinsic moral value and so must regulate their behaviour in a social contract in order to secure an at least tolerable existence. The primary impulse of the human mind is to compete and so a just law must impose the authority to regulate society and protect us from... ... middle of paper ... ...we could not judge other people because the absence of objectivity would mean that we have no standard to judge it by. This would be dangerous, particularly to matters dealing with punishment, because it would not lead to absolute protection and could potentially advocate any sort of unsafe and not sensible behaviour.

The regulations that are made are not because of a higher power bossing them around, but because of the people in society deciding what is acceptable. Due to Freud’s theory I conclude that due to the repression people in society place upon themselves human beings cause their own unhappiness. Freud says that “it is hard for mankind to be happy...” (24).Though this statement is controversial when looking at texts like the Bible we notice that he may not be wrong. In the book of Genesis and Exodus we constantly are shown these examples that have stood the test of time to prove we have this ability to take these amazing opportunites we are given and turn it into a struggle. Freud would say that this is due to “feelings of inadequacy...” (24).

Only then will slave morality be erased as individuals forge active change. Nietzsche's distaste for modern society is evident as he prods his reader to critique moral values, to question the values of our values (First Essay, 6, p.20). He introduces the concept of superiority of the nobility to the common individual through linguistics. He discovers that the word "good" has the "same conceptual transformation" for "noble" and "aristocratic," whereas "bad" is associated with "common" and "plebeian" (1, 4, p.27-8). With this idea that nobility is in its place for a reason, he moves on to discuss the negatives of a slave morality.