Rachel's Existentialism Crisis

Power is an incredibly motivating force. Power gives one the ability to achieve most other things that might motivate us; whether that be money, success, influence. Power is instrumental in all of that. According to Nietzsche, power is also instrumental in morality. Morality, as he says, started with people, not actions. And who were these people? The powerful. Nietzsche is not saying that certain people were inherently more powerful than others. In fact, Nietzsche does not believe in inherent morality at all. Nietzsche is saying that people were acting, and it was powerful people who had the influence to name actions moral or immoral. They acted and were able to call those actions moral, in their own best interest, and they were also able to punish those who acted in ways that went against their interest, thus imposing their morality onto others. This process had nothing to do with actual, inherent morals, but had everything to do with power. At this point, I’m pretty much on...

After bumming around all of Fall break, what a relief it was to come back to existentialism with some light topics: the death (nay, the murder) of God and the nature of truth. Is God dead? And did we kill him? If God is in fact dead, we certainly must have killed him. Humans, after all, are the only animals known to worship any deity, so only we can kill God. There seems to be at least two parts to the death of God: the spiritual and the practical. In the story, the spiritual is what the madman seems to think we have killed. We have all killed the sacred, moral relationship we had with a benevolent God. Nowadays, it seems that times have changed and religion does not provide the same moral backbone it once did. Not as many people go to church and the spirituality that is practiced tends to be less organized. When Nietzsche wrote this, he also was in the beginnings of a shift in society’s values and the importance religion played in those values. But the personal relationship indi...

A question I struggled with while reading The Fall was whether Jean-Baptiste’s honesty even somewhat made up for the general shittiness of his personality. During discussion, the group presenting pulled up the quote about types of people: “those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both the lying and the hidden.” The class then split up based on which category we would put Jean-Baptiste into. My initial instinct was that he liked the lying and the hidden; to me he’s a clear manipulator. Even when he’s being honest, it’s a farce. He uses this supposed honesty to make it seem like it’s okay that he’s human garbage. At first, I thought his “honesty” meant nothing if he’s only being honest for manipulative reasons. However, after hearing the other side out, I felt less sure in my opinion. Maybe I hadn’t given him enough credit? Maybe he is truly repentant. Maybe his honesty i...