This relationship to the future highlights why nearly all philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche do not regard ‘The Genealogy’ as a literal historical account. Furthermore, Zimmerman’s analysis of Nietzsche as having a Hegelian notion of negation seems to be supported by Nietzsche’s method of analysis in the Genealogy itself. In aiming to discover the origin of moral values Nietzsche strips back the layers of interpretation which had condescended over older interpretations of Christianity until he is closer to the origin. In a process which could be considered as dialectical negation in reverse. Overall, therefore there are highly compelling reasons to regard this to be the dominant aim of Nietzsche in writing the Genealogy.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche attempts to overcome Schopenhauer’s nihilism by appealing to the ancient Greeks. But before explaining the Greek’s response to the suffering, it is important to further explain Schopenhauer’s response. Schopenhauer argues that the source of suffering is what he calls the will or what is more commonly understood as desire. If we don’t get what we want, then we are in pain. If we do get what we want, then we become bored.
[GS 352] Nietzsche believed this to be a form of nihilism because mankind valued precisely what was halting his advancement. With this in mind, Nietzsche began his bold movement towards the revaluation of all values. We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined?. [What if] morality itself were to blame if man, as a species, never reached his highest potential power and splendour? [GM P 6] In this essay I will first look at several reasons for the necessity of a revaluation of all values.
In this essay I will particularly focus upon the first essay of Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morals that, through the use of metaphoric and dramatic language, cites ‘ressentiment’ as the catalyst of our modern day morals. I will primarily outline Nietzsche’s argument (with particular focus upon his metaphor of the workshop in section 12), secondly identify some internal inconsistencies in his argument (looking in particular at his slightly confusing portrayal of ‘masters’ and ‘slaves), and finally attempt to salvage Nietzsche’s argument through a re-evaluation of how to interpret his writing (appealing to Christopher Janaway’s interpretation of the Genealogy of Morals). Nietzsche’s Mr. Daredevil-Curiosity report Let us briefly suppose that I recently bought a new gold watch. I was particularly happy that my watch was made of the finest, and rarest, gold in the area. Suppose, though, that one day I passed the factory where it was made, and ... ... middle of paper ... ...e’s rhetoric, we must not take all the small details so seriously such as the exact characterisation of the Slave and Master Race.
Nietzsche's Portraiture: Wagner as Worthy Opponent ABSTRACT: Richard Wagner always represented for Nietzsche the Germany of that time. By examining Nietzsche's relationship to Wagner throughout his writings, one is also examining Nietzsche's relationship to his culture of birth. I focus on the writings from the late period in order to clarify Nietzsche's view of his own project regarding German culture. I show that Nietzsche created a portrait of Wagner in which the composer was a worthy opponent-someone with whom he disagreed but viewed as an equal. Wagner was such an opponent because he represented the disease of decadence which plagued the culture and from which Nietzsche suffered for a time, but of which he also cured himself.
Nazis and Nietzsche During the latter parts of the Nineteenth Century, the German existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a great deal on his ideas of morality, values, and life. His writings were controversial, but they greatly affected European thought. It can be argued that Nietzschean philosophy was a contributing factor in the rise of what is considered our world's most awful empire, the Third Reich. ‹Such a stance is based on the fact that there are very similar currents in thought between the philosophy and the empire. ‹ For example, history will, one would hope, never forget the atrocity that was the Holocaust.
Nietzsche says, “As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all them is by nature unhistorical…” (Nietzsche, 25). Nietzsche believed that historically there were two types of morality: slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche says that, “It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values…” (Nietzsche, 26). How we view morality now along with many other things has changed over the course of time. Nietzsche calls this conceptual transformation.
In Thought Memo 5, I criticized Friedrich Nietzsche for his inflammatory dismissal of Socrates. While at first I was not receptive to Nietzsche, I later recognized that Nietzsche was demonstrating a trait in which is of great use if we are to transform ourselves with the hope of transforming the world. I grasped onto the idea of questioning what we assume to be so concrete that we fail to give a second thought. The immediate topic of contention was the legitimacy of Socrates as a great Philosopher. Nietzsche claimed in Twilight of the Idols Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer, that “we have to be cunning, sharp, clear at all costs: every acquiescence to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward…” (Nietzsche 16).
It should not be surprising to us that a man who had little good to say about anything (other than himself and the things he liked) would criticize the greater portion of the history of any art form, but what is interesting -- and, moreover, an instance of a particular mistake which seems to have afflicted others as well -- is the reason he gives for his displeasure. According to Nietzsche, worthwhile tragedy perished even before the fall of ancient Greece, and the cause of its demise was the rise of reason. As he says in The Birth of Tragedy, "When after all a new genre sprung into being which honored tragedy as its parent, the child was seen with dismay to bear indeed the features of its mother, but of its mother during her long death struggle. The death struggle of tragedy had been fought by Euripides . .
Walter Kaufmann provides a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's philosophy in his work Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, a book which Thomas Mann called "a work of great superiority over everything previously achieved in Nietzsche criticism and interpretation." Kaufmann outlines several essential characteristics of the overman throughout the work. Perhaps the most important, and most central, characteristic of the overman is that the overman is one who has overcome his nature as a normal man. "Man is something that shall be overcome" is a phrase that occurs throughout Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a work which (it seems to me) most completely developed the idea of the overman of all of Nietzsche's books. (Zarathustra, I, Preface, 3) For Nietzsche, the vast majority of people have no value.