AHSS 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Beyond Good & Evil (Video Game), Egotism, Themselves
18 Jun 2018
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Department
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Human Security and World Development Week 4, January 31st 2017
Essay: “regurgitate” the text; the moral psychology of the wages of war, undermining moral responses +
3 peer reviewed sources.
How do we shock and overwhelm the moral resources?
Sometimes it’s better to disobey for the betterment of the country
1st part, pick an atrocity that speaks to you, and explain how it could have happened?
2nd how are we going to go forward, and how to prevent it from happening again, how do we strengthen
the moral resources…. Sometimes the situations and institutions overcome it, and change us from
angels to devils
- Unit 3 cont’d
Nietzsche
Integrate suffering, own and accept fate, rather than avoiding, denying and hiding it – with religion and
alcohol
Religion denies the body and bodily pleasure
Wants to go beyond good and evil
Beyond Good & Evil
From the point of view of 19th C Victorian hypocrisy, or if you belong to Judeo-Christian
tradition, or if you are otherwise inspired by Platonic thinking you might define the good person
as meek, helpful, decent, one who shuns physical pleasures and other sins with a view to
salvation in an afterlife.
By extension the evil person is selfish, gives orders, thinks he/she is better than others, looks
only to this life, wallows in debased physical pleasures
If this one’s dichotomy of good and evil, Nietzsche argues that one must reevaluate one’s basic
sense of values and focus on a transvaluation of values to a time before people began to value
weakness and instead adopt the moral value of strength, power, courage and heroism that is
beyond this dichotomy
Master and slave moralities/attitudes
In the mind of the feudal lord a good person is a strong ally, a good friend, someone
able to arouse fear in an enemy, someone who has pride in himself and who has a noble
character
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find more resources at oneclass.com
The weak not worthy of respect
Nietzsche thought that every higher culture had begun with conquest by barbarians, ‘men of
prey still possession of an unbroken strength of will and lust of power’
The nobles came from these barbarians: ‘their superiority lay, not in their physical
strength, but primarily in their psychical – they were more complete human beings
(which, on every level, also means as much as “more complete beasts”)’
The values of the barbarian noble caste, these more complete human beings, were
subverted and replaced by the ’moral’ values of people inferior to them
Nietzsche saw the shift in the concept of goodness, away from aristocratic nobility
towards compassion and love of one’s neighbour, as the catastrophic triumph of the
Judaeo-Christian tradition
The Master Morality
The man Nietzsche admires will overcome guilt and bad conscience, which is the mark of slave
morality, and will want to dominate others
“Egoism” – the faith that “other beings have to subordinate by nature, and sacrifice themselves
to us” – is essential to the noble soul
The attitude is the sign of a health aristocracy, which ‘accepts with a good conscience the
sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sakes have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect
men, to slaves and instruments’
“accordingly, we must agree to the cruel sounding truth that slavery belongs to the essence of
culture;… the wretchedness of struggling men must grow still greater in order to make possible
the production of a world of art for a small number of Olympian men” (Glover 15)
For Nietzsche, any regret about this rests on a sentimental lack of realism
“that lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for
reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs” (Glover 15)
Nietzsche’s version of harness, with its rejection of unmanly compassion, supports the
domination, even the cruel domination, of others
“to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard
saying but an ancient, mighty human, all-too-human principle to which even the apes
might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
man and are as it were, his ‘prelude’. Without cruelty there is no festival … (Glover 16-
17)
The rejection of sympathy for the weak is taken to encompass even participating in their
destruction:
“the weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one
shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the
ill constituted and weak – Christianity: (Glover 16-17)
Will to Power
Drive in all of nature to create and destroy, it is beyond good and evil, without a goal “unless the
joy of the circle is itself a goal” (WP)
“first emerge-“ (The Will to Power 635)
“the will to power is the primitive form of affect and all other affects are only developments of
it” (WP366)
“[Anything which] is a living and not a dying body… will have to be an incarnate will to power, it
will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant – not from any morality or immorality
but because it is living and because life simply is will to power… ‘Exploitation’ … belongs to the
essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which
is after all the will to life” – Beyond Good and Evil, s. 259
Rejecting pleasure as a core motivator, Nietzsche suggests that “every living thing does
everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more –“ (WP367)
The will to power is not power over others, but the feelings of “creative energy and control”
over oneself that are necessary to achieve self-creation, selfdirection and to express individual
creativity.
The will to power explains the fundamental, changing aspect of reality. According to Nietzsche,
everything is in flux, and there is no such thing as fixed being. Matter is always moving and
changing, as are ideas, knowledge, truth and everything else.
All of nature’s creatures are “will to power”, i.e. driven by a desire to expand their vitality and
strength; increase their power and control over their environment
The will to power is like an instinct; it is part of our biological and psychological constitution
It is the ability to live on your own terms and according to your own beliefs, neither following,
nor leading
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Essay: regurgitate the text; the moral psychology of the wages of war, undermining moral responses + Sometimes it"s better to disobey for the betterment of the country. 2nd how are we going to go forward, and how to prevent it from happening again, how do we strengthen the moral resources . Sometimes the situations and institutions overcome it, and change us from angels to devils. Integrate suffering, own and accept fate, rather than avoiding, denying and hiding it with religion and alcohol. By extension the evil person is selfish, gives orders, thinks he/she is better than others, looks only to this life, wallows in debased physical pleasures. In the mind of the feudal lord a good person is a strong ally, a good friend, someone able to arouse fear in an enemy, someone who has pride in himself and who has a noble character.
