Monday, December 12, 2011

Nietzsche: Questions everyone moustache themselves

Secular, as you probably already know from reading the other posts, means without God. Nothing reminds me of Nietzsche than the words "without God". Frederick Nietzsche was born in the year 1844 in a small German town. His father was a Lutheran priest and he himself studied theology in university. By the end of his life, Nietzsche found himself a full 180 degrees from his Christian roots.

Nietzsche was extremely opposed to the mainstream forms of morality in his time, especially Christian morality and Kantism. The opus of Nietzsche's work in philosophy is known as the master-slave morality. His theory was that society was separated into two different classes of people, Master and Slave, and with them their own schools of morality. The people in the class of master are people in the position of power, above the rest of society. That means the slave in this dynamic is the rest of society; subject to a different set of moral rules. The slave morality is what we all have learned about morality; sympathy and empathy are good, being superior and independent is bad. The master morality, conversely, does not have a definitive right or wrong, but rather the values are made by the independent master for his/herself.

With the master-slave dynamic in mind, Nietzsche argued that true moral actions cannot exist while both schools of morality coexist. In other words, the true path is nihilism. Nihilism is a dirty word to most philosophers because it simply deciding that life has no meaning, right, wrong, good, bad etc. Nihilism and philosophy are essentially matter and anti-matter in the sense that when they combine, there's just catastrophic explosions and no progress is made.

7 comments:

  1. I like the idea about nihilism. Thanks for the read!

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  2. Nice read here! Following for this and your other amazing posts!

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  3. Nietzsche.. I had something about him in my school ;>

    FOLLOWED

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  4. Love Nietzsche. The man had some great points.
    Following!

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  5. Indeed a good read

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  6. "Questions everyone moustache themselves"
    Ok, I did giggle, good one :)
    Been wanting to read his works for quite a while, but have been busy in university, thanks for reminding me of him! Following :)

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