nietzsche

Essay on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
by Charles Glenn

Frederik Nietzsche’s central idea was that everyone desires to be great, in the sense of having the ability to exercise power over himself and others. To achieve this, a person must be able to "free" himself from the moralities and values that have been imposed on him by society and tradition.

Values and morals such as "equality" have no appeal for Nietzsche, at least not at the fundamental level for a given society. For him, describing equality as the fundamental principle of human society is a denial of reality. People are different, with different strengths and abilities, so to limit everyone to one standard does an injustice to both extremes.

Furthermore, the traits which we normally view as amoral or immoral, such as exploitation and injury to others, are part of nature – Nietzsche would like to see society free itself from labeling these things as immoral. For him, exploitation is as natural to man as drinking or eating – merely an organic function of life – to make them taboo is foolish.

One of his fundamental points was the nature of human will. For Nietzsche, human history was largely "mythological," and he holds disdain for the most of the western world’s philosophical thinking. The idea of free will vs. unfree will was ridiculous – for him, there is only strong will vs. weak will. Like Machiavelli, he felt that the stronger a person’s will, the less bound they were by constraints like morality and ethics. Human will was, to him, simply the "will to power," and was universal – everyone holds the desire to exploit, injure and subjugate the world and everything in it. Those who are able to do so without restraint are "more complete," and "whole."

To a man like Nietzsche, the teachings of Christ must have seemed weak and timid. Advocating such things as "turning the other cheek" was unnatural and contemptible. In a sense, Nietszche’s work amounts to little more than a re-hash of Machiavellian "non-ethics," with more support and detail.

It is ironic that he takes the time to criticize the inflated egos of philosophers before him, whose efforts he described as "trying to impose their own morals on nature." The reality is that he does little to hide his own colossal ego, and in fact, seeks no apology for it.