Caspar David Friedrich

I am writing about Nietzsche’s ideas on what makes us human in which he explains the over man and the three transformations. I will also discuses Sarte’s belief what the purpose of human life is. Nietzsche is an existentialist that wrote a passage based on the human transformation in three stages. Sarte is also an existentialist that believes existentialism is humanism. Nietzsche describes his theory of existentialism through multiple metamorphoses. He stresses in his passage that these…

Adam Smith states that, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Smith is meaning that not every society is fair; there will be people who are “flourishing and happy” and some of the people will be “poor and miserable.” It is very difficult to have a society in which every person is happy. There is a large gap between the rich and the poor in America. The rich makes up one percent of America’s population. That one…

In “The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage” Girard invokes a powerful opponent of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, in order to support his main argument that “no one has achieved success in making the concern for victims ‘outdated,’ and this is because it’s the only thing in our world that is not the creation of current fashion” (177). Girard is opposed to the Nietzschean disdain for mercy and antipathy towards the weak and victims, but Girard considers Nietzsche a genius since the German…

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves – so how are we supposed to find ourselves?” begins Friedrich Nietzsche in the preface of his book, On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 3). In this statement, Nietzsche illustrates our lack of self-questioning and self-knowledge, criticizing man for treating the value of moral values “as given, as factual, beyond all questioning” (Nietzsche 8). He places the origin and development of our…

Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and John Stuart Mill are three authors who tackle the topic of freedom in unique ways, but their messages are fundamentally the same and further the ideas that we encountered in the esoteric texts as well as in The Matrix, most prominent of which is the claim that our freedom is simply an illusion. These texts differ from the esoteric texts in that they do not try to get us to believe in religious ideology, however they still suggest ways for us to better our lives.…

An Inspector Calls is a play written by Dramatist J.B Priestley in 1945. Priestley was a left-wing socialist and this was one of the factors which influenced him to write this play. Even though the play was written in 1945, it was actually set in 1912, right before the start of the First World War. It is set in the spring of 1912 at the Brumley home of the Birlings, a prosperous industrial family in the North Midlands, getting involved in the death of a woman named Eva Smith. The Inspector uses…

The categorical imperative, to Immanuel Kant, is an overarching principle of acting towards others the way you would like for them to treat everybody else; a slight furtherance of the ‘Golden Rule’(Where your actions are based upon the way you would like them to treat you). The categorical imperative creates a moral basis based upon one’s understanding of their own individuality coupled with an empathetic understanding of those around them, based upon their precepts that they’ve come to…

Different “Ways of Seeing” In the essay, “Ways of Seeing,” John Berger applies Marxism to art history. Marxism is the social, economic and political theory formed by Karl Marx. It deals with class struggle and the oppression of the lower classes by the upper classes. In the essay, Berger focuses on using Marxist methodology, when he analyzes and explains an artist named Frans Hal. Berger uses Hals paintings to demonstrate the structure of social classes, and their struggles to give an idea of…

However, if – as I have discussed above – Nietzsche claims that all of reality is Will to Power, then to show what it means to be in general is to show what it means to be as Will to Power. Of course it could be pointed out that Parkes is talking about human beings and Nietzsche about the overhuman. However, I believe that can be said for the latter is valid for the former. As mentioned above, in EH Nietzsche claims that because of his great health Zarathustra ‘is reality itself’ insofar as he…

In his second essay in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche discusses the creditor/debtor relationship, the resulting bad conscience and most importantly the sovereign individual, “liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supra moral” (Nietzsche 59). In fact, Nietzsche further emphasizes that a sovereign person has a “power over oneself and over fate” (Nietzsche 60). I find Nietzsche’s description of this superhuman, sovereign state of mind both interesting and perplexing. I…