Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

©2018 of 126 Nietzsche believed that this Christian slave morality vision was threatening to the human spirit and prevented the best and strongest individuals from becoming strong and dominant. He was convinced that humans were destined to evolve to higher forms of being (the overman). The role of the overman is to create values, not to conform to the life-denying values of Christian slave morality. He believed that Jesus was a supreme example of the overman, an individual of great power, influence, and originality. He considered the moral system and religion that was based on Jesus’s life and teaching to be a distorted version of his true message, it is a religion that warns against the sins of ambition, pride, and denomination, precisely those qualities that Nietzsche found to be the purest expression of the will of power. Nietzsche believed that devoting ourselves to God was a wasted effort because God was dead. What he meant by this was the concept of God as an all-powerful dominant entity was being eroded by modern consciousness, the evolving influence of scientific progress, and the increasing faith in humankind’s abilities to solve humankind’s problems without divine intervention. Nietzsche articulates his prophecy about the death of God in his writings entitled The Gay Scienc , he shows his belief in how it is now up 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. 9.10 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 Achieve Page 101