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Nietzsche's Overman

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Richard Taylor, an ethicist said, “Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are truly just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning (Ethics, Faith, and Reason 7).” Does this effect that religion is the only way to explain morality? Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that morality itself wasn’t necessary. Mere Cardus said, “Envy is – Nietzsche recognized – an essential part of life. Yet the lingering effects of Christianity generally teach to feel ashamed of our envious feelings. They seem an indication of evil. So we hide them from ourselves and others. Yet there is nothing wrong with envy, …show more content…

It was an explanation of the meaning of life. If this explanation was accepted it would strike the very core of society and even the very core of our beings; it would affect every minute aspect of our lives; every action we take is linked to it. You can identify why it is imperative that we address this theory. Nietzsche’s explanation of the life’s meaning was that either it was your destiny to be the superman or you must serve him. He said, "Behold, I teach you the Overman. The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.” (Thus spoke Zarathustra 3). He is saying the Overman is the reason for our existence, and that belief in God or the supernatural is not simply unfounded, but pernicious. This view of life’s logical conclusion is that morality is irrelevant. If that statement seems overblown, look at what he said. Nietzsche said, “No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically "unjust," since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive and cannot be conceived otherwise” (Genealogy of Morals

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One of Krakauer’s strongest tools in supporting his argument comes from the use of epigraphs. Krakauer begins every chapter with an epigraph; some are brief and concise, while others are an entire page. Nevertheless, each epigraph has a specific location for a specific reason. Quoting various fragments, including “...a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning in life, not [entirely or even chiefly] dependent upon relationships.” (61) sounds eerily similar to McCandless’ logic.

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“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” (Martin Luther King Jr). Love is the invisible force that wakes you up in the morning and puts you back to sleep, hoping to relive the moment again, or in a simpler sense, it might be random acts of kindness among people that makes up happy, selfless communities. Or it might be a deadly trap for the weak when its powers are abused, but whatever the case, love is important for everyday customs and habits.

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Jealousy and greed live inside of everybody to an extent. In general, human nature wants more then one has or has the

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yet how can the end of life be evil if no one is dissatisfied. Second, once someone is dead there is nothing left, so who is there to suffer? Third, if the time before we were born wasn’t horrible how can the period after death be? His replies to these objections are as follows. The experiences of a person whether they are bad or good can depend on their history, not just the current state there in.

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That Nietzsche is merely making observations on the different types of moralities. However, Nietzsche is a noble moral himself and he can very well relate to the noble morals. He actually praises the noble morals by explaining how successful they are, or in in his own words he says, “The noble human being lives with himself in confidence and openness”(Nietzsche 20). He also associated the word “good” with the noble because they are “inward” in a sense that they react to their surroundings and adapt themselves and move forward instead of trying to change the way things are.

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Throughout Nietzsche’s “Morality as Anti-Nature,” he is constantly slandering organized religion, to make the point that it inhibits his idea of morality. He claims that “church is hostile to life,” because Christianity aims to turn one against passions, which is natural to humans, religion is forcing one to become anti-natural. An example he uses is ascetics, people who live without any traces of the passions in their life, due to their supposedly higher sense of religious morality. Furthermore, he goes on to speculate more about the nature of man, saying “how naïve it is altogether to say: “Man ought to be such and such!” Since organized religion is demanding for man to change, they are asking for everything to change; man is going against

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The overman is someone who is free from all the prejudices and moralities of human society, and who creates his own values and purpose, and obeys no laws except the ones he gives himself (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, n. d.). Due to God is dead, and so people do not believe in God’s rules anymore, the overman must create a new world and we should focus on this life. Zarathustra

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Somehow there is metaphysical powers or power pulling all the strings behind the world. Nietzsche started to question religion at the young age of 13, later to completely reject it altogether. The common belief at that time was that god was the origin of our morality; god determined what was good and what was bad or evil. Nietzsche rejected this idea of our morality. With this in mind, Nietzsche questions whether the common belief that god is the origin of morality has helped or hindered our development as a society.

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Until recently I didn’t truly recognize that I was allowed to view God as something other than pictures and paintings I had seen that depicted God as an old white man in the sky. I had this preconceived notion of God heading into my freshman year of college. Throughout the semester my eye’s were opened. My mind wasn’t introduced to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the “Three Metamorphoses” until the first week of class. Nietzsche explains that in order for us to really become religiously aware we need to stop being the weight bearing, accepting “camels” of society.1 Nietzsche goes on to say “But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.

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In this sense, at the outset of GM Nietzsche frames its Leitfragen as ‘[…] under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess? Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity?’ (GM 3). Along the same lines, a bit later he adds that ‘[…] we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question – and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed […]’ (GM6).

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The driving force behind Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche’s claim that if we fully come to understand the nature of our innate psychology, we will come to the realization that traditional philosophical methods are corrupt as well as the assumptions that they are founded on. Although Nietzsche does not present this claim in the form of a clear argument (with premises, supporting arguments, and a definite conclusion) I believe his main points can be derived from the preface and part one, particularly aphorism 23. The following are what I believe to be the main points that N makes in BGE and from which the claims in the following parts (2-9) stem from. However, it is important to first insert the caveat that the form in which I present N ‘s claim is one that he himself would object to.

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In some respect, we can see here one of the seeds of Nietzsche’s later intuitions, and I believe there is no harm in employing them to elucidate this point. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil (from here on BGE), morality is described as a perspective which produces a narrowing of one’s own horizon. Morality, far from telling the truth about the world, is simply an expression of good faith toward the moral view of a particular group. Therefore, all that moralists do is in fact to argue in favour of a perspective which is grounded on their own prejudice and seeks secretly to confirm them

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874 Words | 4 Pages

For the humanist who truly wants to find the source that grounds her affirmation that we are invested with intrinsic value and purpose, the fact that God serves as that grounding brings her home. It brings her to true humanism” (104). If there were no objective to morality then that would mean that we would have to redefine purpose. There is no moral value without God.

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519 Words | 3 Pages

His main argument lies within the universal ideas of language. Language itself is an arbitrary invention made by humans, and if humans can’t fully understand and reach the level of truth that they often believe they do, what truth is there in the words we speak? The thing about language, as discussed by Nietzsche, is that it is incredibly vague and overused. This is the whole reason as to why certain words or phrases are considered to be hackneyed and repetitive. A word can mean a single concept within a language, yet take a unique physical form in reality.

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929 Words | 4 Pages

Good morality is achievable without an outside influence, and religion may, in fact, take away from human morality by influencing a person into doing what is considered to be right as a way of earning a reward in the afterlife rather than just doing what is right for the sake of doing what is good in the world. Though religion itself can be considered a moral guideline, this may not be the complete truth. The concept of morality is that of doing what is right without expectations for reward. Religion generally has a reward system for doing good deeds.

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