In “The Madman,” Nietzsche describes a man going into a town, speaking about his beliefs, and being derided for doing so. However, with further analysis of several elements of the story, a deeper meaning behind the passage becomes clear. Nietzsche argues that morals cannot exist without God, and that atheists must therefore reject morality, and choose what is right and wrong for themselves. Nietzsche does this by using the character of the madman as a mouthpiece to express his own ideas. The first element of the parable that must be examined in order to understand the passage is a symbol, God, which represents morality in the story. The second element to be examined is the madman’s belief that humans have killed God. The implications of this …show more content…
The madman espouses this belief at length in the passage, saying, "We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers!” Here, the madman is speaking metaphorically. Atheists do not believe in God, and thus he is “dead,” and their lack of faith has “killed” him. However, remember that God symbolizes morality in the text, and that the madman believes that morality requires God. Both of these facts imply that because the atheists believe that God does not exist, they must necessarily believe that morality does not exist. The purpose of the madman in coming to the town was to explain to the villagers that without God, there can be no morals, and they are free to do as they wish. However, people do not accept his argument. Like him, they reject God, and yet they continue to cling to the morals of those who do not. Upon realizing that they are not ready to accept his ideas, the madman says “I come too early,” and “I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling. It has not yet reached men’s ears.” These statements show that the madman is certain that it is inevitable that atheists will eventually accept that morality cannot exist without …show more content…
If the idea of morality is abandoned, all actions become permissible. Yet the madman himself says that “there never was a greater event, and on account of it, all who are born after [it] belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!” This statement establishes that the madman actually sees the death of God as a benefit. It may seem unusual to describe the sudden and complete elimination of morality from society in a positive way. However, the attitude of the madman can be explained by a rhetorical question that he poses to the villagers. “Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods merely to seem worthy of [killing God]?” In essence, the madman believes that the death of God will make people directionless, but he also believes that people, out of necessity, will give themselves direction, and decide what is right and wrong for themselves. In summary, Nietzsche, through the character of the madman, argues that morality cannot exist without God, and that atheists must therefore reject morality. If one is to abandon God, one must also abandon the corresponding concepts of “right” and “wrong.” In the parable, the villagers reject this argument, and continue to uphold the same morals they would have if they did believe in God. According to Nietzsche, morals hold people back from being able to choose what is right and wrong for themselves. Furthermore, he believes that it is inevitable that
... passage to suggest the essential role natural evils play in this story: "People who do not believe in God do not, of course, see our living to ourselves as a result of a prehistoric separation from God. But they can be aware – and it is a part of God’s plan of Atonement that they should be aware – that something is pretty wrong and that this wrongness is a consequence of the intrinsic inability of human beings to devise a manner of life that is anything but hideous" (203). Nowhere does experience prove this inability of human beings to escape the hideousness of the world more than in the case of natural disasters. They have existed as long as the human race, and though it may be possible for a person to delude him or herself into believing he or she is living a good life in a seemingly good world, no one can deny the horrible dangers that natural disasters present.
What is madness? Is madness a brain disorder or a chemical imbalance? On the other hand, is it an expressed behavior that is far different from what society would believe is "normal"? Lawrence Durrell addresses these questions when he explores society's response to madness in his short story pair "Zero and Asylum in the Snow," which resembles the nearly incoherent ramblings of a madman. In these stories, Durrell portrays how sane, or lucid, people cannot grasp and understand the concept of madness. This inability to understand madness leads society to fear behavior that is different from "normal," and subsequently, this fear dictates how they deal with it. These responses include putting a name to what they fear and locking it up in an effort to control it. Underlying all, however, Durrell repeatedly raises the question: who should define what is mad?
There are two possible understandings of an experience underwritten by God; either that God was constant and static but our capacity to understand him was limited; or that God was dynamic and exhibited agency and so we could never have a static set of criteria to evaluate truth against. It seems most likely that Nietzsche considered God to be the former arguing that “[m...
Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” includes his theory on man’s development of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche believes that when transitioning from a free-roaming individual to a member of a community, man had to suppress his “will to power,” his natural “instinct of freedom”(59). The governing community threatened its members with punishment for violation of its laws, its “morality of customs,” thereby creating a uniform and predictable man (36). With fear of punishment curtailing his behavior, man was no longer allowed the freedom to indulge his every instinct. He turned his aggressive focus inward, became ashamed of his natural animal instincts, judged himself as inherently evil, and developed a bad conscience (46). Throughout the work, Nietzsche uses decidedly negative terms to describe “bad conscience,” calling it ugly (59), a sickness (60), or an illness (56); leading some to assume that he views “bad conscience” as a bad thing. However, Nietzsche hints at a different view when calling bad conscience a “sickness rather like pregnancy” (60). This analogy equates the pain and suffering of a pregnant woman to the suffering of man when his instincts are repressed. Therefore, just as the pain of pregnancy gives birth to something joyful, Nietzsche’s analogy implies that the negative state of bad conscience may also “give birth” to something positive. Nietzsche hopes for the birth of the “sovereign individual” – a man who is autonomous, not indebted to the morality of custom, and who has regained his free will. An examination of Nietzsche’s theory on the evolution of man’s bad conscience will reveal: even though bad conscience has caused man to turn against himself and has resulted in the stagnation of his will, Ni...
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
Edger Allan Poe, born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts (Biography of Edger Allan Poe). A famous visionary writer and an phenomenal judicious literary critic who is the poet of “The Haunted Palace” (Poe's Life). This poem was first published in April 1839 which eventually was integrated into “The Fall of the House of Usher” written by Roderick Usher (Gerald M. Garmon). As a part of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe once said, “I mean to imply a mind haunted by phantoms – a disordered brain” which he was remarking Usher (Garmon). Poe uses the devices of personification, imagery, and symbolism to reveal the characterizations of destruction and how evil may consume a human being.
It gives insight into the fact that they do this ritual because their ancestors believed that by sacrificing someone every year their crops would be plentiful. Some of the towns are thinking about stopping it and that’s why the old man says that they are fools because he thinks their crops won’t grow and they will have no food for their livestock or money from selling them. Most people in the town now probably don’t even know the saying anymore or don’t even believe in it, but they counting to kill people for that initial reason.
The controversial topic of insanity manifests itself commonly in Romantic writing, and has been one much disputed over time. Some say that people who seem crazy are so above our own level of thought and understanding that we can’t possibly begin to identify with them and that we can find genius in the form of ordinary lunatics who connect to God and divinity in ways “normal” people don’t comprehend. Throughout works such as “The Cask of Amontillado and “The Castaway”, the authors question insanity with ideas that show the possible outcomes when one looks deep inside themselves for a divine spark or intuition. Both of these stories address madness in different forms, and madness itself is Godly experiences gone wrong; the person who receives the divine vision is unable to handle its raw truth.
Slezak, P. "Gods of the State: Atheism, Enlightenment and Barbarity." Politics and Religion in the New Century: Philosophical Reflections (2009): 20. Web. 20 Oct. 2012.
To begin, “On Morality'; is an essay of a woman who travels to Death Valley on an assignment arranged by The American Scholar. “I have been trying to think, because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract way about ‘morality,’ a word I distrust more every day….'; Her task is to generate a piece of work on morality, with which she succeeds notably. She is placed in an area where morality and stories run rampant. Several reports are about; each carried by a beer toting chitchat. More importantly, the region that she is in gains her mind; it allows her to see issues of morality as a certain mindset. The idea she provides says, as human beings, we cannot distinguish “what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’';. Morality has been so distorted by television and press that the definition within the human conscience is lost. This being the case, the only way to distinguish between good or bad is: all actions are sound as long as they do not hurt another person or persons. This is similar to a widely known essay called “Utilitarianism'; [Morality and the Good Life] by J.S. Mills with which he quotes “… actions are right in the proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.';
The question of why bad things happen to good people has perplexed and angered humans throughout history. The most common remedy to ease the confusion is to discover the inflicter of the undeserved suffering and direct the anger at them: the horror felt about the Holocaust can be re-directed in the short term by transforming Adolf Hitler into Lucifer and vilifying him, and, in the long term, can be used as a healing device when it is turned into education to assure that such an atrocity is never repeated. What, however, can be done with the distasteful emotions felt about the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Surely the citizens of those two cities did not themselves directly provoke the government of the United States to deserve the horror of a nuclear attack. Can it be doubted that their sufferings were undeserved and should cause deep sorrow, regret, and anger? Yet for the citizens of the United States to confront these emotions they must also confront the failings of their own government. A similar problem is found in two works of literature, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and the book of Job found in the Tanakh. In each of these works a good man is seen to be suffering at the hand of his god; Prometheus is chained to a rock by Zeus who then sends an eagle to daily eat Prometheus' liver while Job is made destitute and brought to endure physical pain through an agreement between God~ and Satan. To examine the travails of these two men is to discover two vastly different concepts of the relationship between god and man.
Nietzsche was a man who questioned the morality of his time. He dug deep in to what good really meant, and if there was a difference between bad and evil. He sought to look at the world by stepping back and looking at it with out the predisposition of what morality was/is. He looked at what he called slave and noble morality. He looked passed what was on the surface, and gave us many things to digest and discuss. In this paper I will discuss how Nietzsche’s writing can be seen as favoritism towards the noble morality by touching on how he believes the noble morality and slave morality came about, then I will talk about his “birds of prey and lambs” example which shows his fondness of the bird of prey, and I will end with my interpretation
In this essay we will embrace Nietzsche’s philosophy for the sake of the fact that he proposed that God is dead, life is worthless, and fate ultimately surpasses faith. In the end, he provided for many, an alternative philosophy of life that became life affirming. On the other end, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche has many diversions, for a countless number of reasons. Undoubtedly, most of those in disagreement to Nietzsche’s philosophy base their objections on a misperceived threat to their unwavering doctrine of religious faith. To make this evident, we begin with one of philosophy’s most argumentative, yet widely misunderstood quotes.
The belief that morality requires God remains a widely held moral maxim. In particular, it serves as the basic assumption of the Christian fundamentalist's social theory. Fundamentalists claim that all of society's troubles - everything from AIDS to out-of-wedlock pregnancies - are the result of a breakdown in morality and that this breakdown is due to a decline in the belief of God. This paper will look at different examples of how a god could be a bad thing and show that humans can create rules and morals all on their own. It will also touch upon the fact that doing good for the wrong reasons can also be a bad thing for the person.
Nietzsche evaluates the world in terms of how it really is. He recognizes that people are inherently different and frames his philosophy accordingly. This, his philosophical paradigm is superior in terms of its realism. Furthering that argument, Nietzsche also shows that he wants to preserve societal advancement. Nietzsche was primarily concerned what society would stagnate if we settled for mediocrity. While his philosophy may be somewhat elitist, it mandates societal advancement because it allows the elites to rise to the top and push society forward. There is link to Christianity. Societies cannot push forward with this notion of God. Christianity, with its conception of transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient and a just God, denies and negates too much that is valuable in this world. There was a direct link to Christianity and how there was a real manifestation of the will to power and that certain individuals have revealed themselves. He accounts for his own ethics. Nietzsche accounts for all people in society and provides all people the equal opportunity to maximize their own power. While power differences are inevitable based upon individual differences, all people have the same opportunity to Will to Power. This creates the basis of his ethics as