Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche and “God is Dead” I. Introduction “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (The Gay Science 120) When first being introduced to Nietzsche, a person may infer that his idea, the “death of God”, is literal. The phrase does not mean there was an actual God who existed at one point and then died in a literal sense. When Nietzsche said this, he was implying that God died in modern society, the values of religion lost their dominance, and religion no longer fulfills the role…

be influenced by Nietzsche theory of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s explains the theory of eternal recurrence in “The Gay Science” as; “ This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable amount of times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.” (Nietzsche, 272) It is…

My Thoughts: To me, it seems like Nietzsche is saying here that the fact that most of us would not be content to relive our lives exactly as they are, over and over, should clue us in that we need to change our behavior. Maybe the very consideration of whether or not we’d be content to experience things exactly the same way again could help us to act in ways that make us more “benevolent toward life.” My Thoughts: This passage confused me a little bit. I can understand the suffering by those…

Nietzsche is one of Foucault’s more repetitive and positive reference points in some of his writings. In a close look at both Foucault and Nietzsche, one would find a profound use of criticizing power of the will thesis and using other historical thinkers such as Freudian and Marxist beliefs and ideas. Both philosophers, Foucault and Nietzche had a longing to articulate and speak out about concepts and theories like rhizome and other conventionally perceived concepts and ideas that pertain to…

vicious cycle to spread the “sickness” throughout the population. Nietzsche notes that a key problem of the ascetic ideals is it’s infectious nature. The best response he sees his through his idea of “perspectivism”. With Nietzsche’s answer, he addresses the same ideal to a “more noble” life in a way that Augustine saw absolute faith as way to salvation. However, there two ideas have several differences. For Nietzsche,…

thinkers. It seems that Nietzsche would problematize the allegory of the den, in this respect, to no end. From a Nietzschean perspective, the relativity of our values, and the ways they merely reflect the power dynamics and social and political undercurrents of our age, begs the question of their effect on our reason (Nietzsche, 1989, p.46-47). The supposed ‘good’ or ‘moral worth’ of philosophical inquiry, implied by Plato in the allegory of the den, is something that Nietzsche would have to…

Ryan Harter Essay I “We are unknown to ourselves...We have never looked at ourselves," says Nietzsche in the prologue to On the Genealogy of Morals. In order to understand ourselves, we need to examine at our values--how we acquired them, and the legitimacy, or value, of that original acquisition. Nietzsche thinks that we can find the foundations of our moral beliefs if we can develop an accurate genealogy. There's a history of ideas about what's good and what isn't good, and by tracking that…

dissect Nietzsche view of the will to power. As with Schopenhauer Nietzsche sees all things are based off of our primal will. Everything that is, is caused by this will. There are some key difference between Schopenhauer’s view of the will and Nietzsche’s view of the will. The topic is quite large and deserves its own thesis but the basics are that Schopenhauer’s view of will lead him to believe that the best way to exist is to give up, that your existence is solely suffering. Nietzsche in his…

Seminal German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche published On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life in 1874. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben in the original German, the work is also often translated as “The Use and Misuse of History for Life.” The seventy-page work is packed with philosophical inquiries into the role historical knowledge plays in an individual’s life and how this knowledge can best be used to improve one’s wellbeing. It is the second work in a…

According to Nietzsche, The first essay in his book “Genealogy of Morality’’ that there are two kinds of morals that is master morality and the slave morality. For master morality, good is the powerful beautiful, and glorious while bad is the weak and the ugly. Slave morality on the other hand call the masters evil for having no reservations on how they use their power over the weak. This therefore makes the compassionate and the respectful weak good. What Nietzsche seeks to establish is that…