Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Assignment 3

Nietzsche was born in Leipzig on October 15th 1844. He was named after king Friedrich William IV. Nietzsche is classified as a German philosopher. His work remains controversial. There is and has been a lot of disagreement about his interpretions. He often gave critiques on Christians. God is dead is one of is most famous pronouncements. Also his notions about über and Untermensch has been used by politicians many times after his dead (Nietzsche, 2002).

Nietzsche calls himself an immoralist and had critiques on Christianity, Kantianism and utilitarianism. His desire was to bring a natural source of value in the impulses of life itself. "We own great style of architecture in Asia and Egypt to astrology and its supernatural claims (Nietzsche, 2002). In all of his works Nietzsche puts the master-slave morality in a central place. In Beyond good and evil he subscribes the contrast between good and bad, life afferming and life denying: strength, health, power which can be associated with masters and characteristics which attend to bad aspects: weak, sick and pathetic. Those can be associated with slaves.

Slave-morality, in contrast, comes about as a reaction to master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; evil seen as worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-morality born out of the ressentiment of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness."

Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. In Nietzsche's eyes, modern Europe, and its Christianity, exists in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both values contradictorily determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans (who are "motley"). Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which Nietzsche deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. However, Nietzsche cautions that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law." A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are."

Nietzsche, F. (2002) Beyond good and evil. Cambridge: University press.