What's Up With Nietzsche?


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 individuals have with God is only a fraction of what makes religion. Religion is a social institution with great power and influence. Like government or school or even norms about what is acceptable in public, the social institution of religion has influence over us regardless of whether we personally agree with its core meaning. It is precisely this influence that the so-called atheists have not escaped. Though they have no belief, they are operating under the institution as if they are Christian. Nietzsche wants us to escape our “herd instinct” and go live our truth (the call to action is pretty confusing). One person pointed out the painting of Nietzsche as the “quintessential nihilist” by some people. I didn’t really get that from either of the texts. But the same person pointed out that Nietzsche maybe doesn’t believe in there being no moral “truths” but rather that we can create our own morality. So maybe I see the nihilism. So yeah? God might be dead. But religion is a very powerful and very convenient way to make people behave.
Moving on from that, what is truth? Is there objective truth? Is everything subjective? Is what’s true for me different from what’s true for you?
I want to start off by standing by my claim that yes, there are objective truths. And some of those probably are objective moral truths (though maybe not). But the class isn’t about me. What does Nietzsche think?
The quote I think best summarizes this reading is “there are many sets of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes—and consequently there are many kinds of “truths,” and consequently there is no truth.”
Perspective is clearly very important to Nietzsche’s understanding of truth. According to him, every set of eyes provides a different “truth.” But since every truth is different there is no universal, set truth. Or at least, we don’t have the ability to understand the truth as it actually is because we can only see it through our perspective.
Here's a song I like

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's Up Nietzsche? Pt. 2

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...
Read more

Dostoevsky Reflection: Freedom and Utopia's

Feodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground was one of my favorite readings since Camus. I was most intrigued by the speaker’s take on free will and how that had to do with him refusing to seek treatment for his illness. There is something in human nature that seems to drive us to self-destruct just because we can. It’s hard to talk about because it’s at times so obviously irrational or selfish that we cannot avoid trying to justify it to ourselves. We tell ourselves we are not going to the doctor because it’s too expensive or we’re too busy or we don’t trust doctors. Sometimes these are in fact our true reasons, but other times we say things like this because it would be ridiculous to explain that we are risking our own lives out of spite. Spite for who? Our doubt? I don’t know if we have free will, though I am inclined to say that we do. But the scariest part of that question for me is not the idea that maybe we don’t have free will, but the fact that there is any doubt ...
Read more

Heidegger: What the Fuck?

Early Childhood Explorations of Da-sein When I was a little kid, I asked my mom if fish went to school. My mom inferred that I had heard the phrase “school of fish” on one of my PBS educational programs, and explained to me that the word school meant different things in these contexts, and that, no, fish do not go to school. But this was not the question I was asking her. Even as kid I knew that fish did not go to school. What I was really asking, without fully realizing, was why fish (an all other non-human animals) didn’t go to school, and why humans did. What was it that drove humans to seek knowledge and education? Why weren’t we satisfied with an understanding of the world that allowed us to survive and not much else? There seems to be something uniquely human about being concerned with questions like why we exist and what our purpose is and what’s going to happen when we die. Heidegger’s ability to give terminology to our existential dread was extremely confusing but onc...
Read more