Introduction to Philosophy

Achieve Test Prep: Philosophy

to humans to create meaning in life and a moral code to live by. The brave and fearless overmen welcome this challenge and the weak and insecure undermen fear and resist it. In Nietzsche’s writing entitled Beyond Good and Evil , he discussed how the majority of individuals are weak, insecure, and lacking in determination and believes that they conspire to create a system of values to drag down superior individuals and keep them in check. When universalized, the values of compassion, kindness, and empathy have the cumulative effect of denying life and the fundamental principle that powers all life, the will to power. Although conventional society condemns exploitation as an evil, Nietzsche views it as a necessary consequence of the will to power that it is essential for the survival of the species. Nietzsche believed that the ultimate moral good is an individual’s striving to exert his or her will to power to the fullest possible extent. Sartre: Authenticity and Ethical Responsibility Sartre believed that becoming an authentic individual is the ethical ideal we should strive to achieve and authenticity means fully accepting the fact that we are condemned to be free, completely responsible for every action we take in life. We create ourselves through our daily choices and those choices are free and we can depend only on ourselves to determine the right choice to make because God does not exist, and there are no absolute moral codes that apply to all people. There are no reliable guidelines to instruct us as to what we should do, as we are alone and abandoned in a callous and uncaring universe with only ourselves as resources. According to Sartre, when you make a choice, you are not simply creating and defining yourself as a person; you are also creating and defining your image of the way all humans should be. For Sartre, there are no absolute moral standards or duties that transcend the individual: Our choices rest solely on our own shoulders guided our own spontaneous and unrestricted ability to choose freely. Sartre believed that no person does evil intentionally in his writing titled Existentialism Is a Humanism , he states, “To choose to be this or that is to affirm as the same time the value of what we chose, because we can never chose evil. We always chose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.” Sartre realized that many people are terrified by the prospect of such absolute freedom and complete responsibility. Their response is to flee, to escape from this life sentence of freedom and responsibility. Thus, refusal to accept responsibility creates inauthenticity. Inauthentic individuals deny their freedom, attempt to surrender their freedom to others, passively let outside forces shape their lives, or pretend that the formation of their characters was beyond their control. They lack the courage to accept themselves as self-creators, creating a false image of themselves that they present to the world as real, a mask concealing their weak and trembling selves and they refuse to acknowledge their responsibility of legislating for all humankind by the choices that they make.

Per Sartre, all such efforts to escape from freedom and responsibility are doomed because we are condemned to be free and our efforts to escape succeed only in creating inauthentic selves with no hope of living meaningful lives. The only way to live genuinely authentic lie is to embrace your freedom, acknowledge your responsibility, and face the profound existential emotions of abandonment,

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