Published on 15 Sep 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Hao Tran
htran170@ivc.edu
Intro to Philosophy
Notes: Phil 1
● Justice as pleasure
○ We have seen that punishment is vauled for the pleasure we derive from it. From
the original debtor/creditor relationship, this extends to communities and
societies. As part of a community, we are protected from the outseide. We feel a
sense of unity and safety.
○ But when we decide that someone has dome something wrong to the community,
then this person is pushed outside of the community and becomes an outlaw, an
outsider. Against that person we can do whatever we want
● This is not the same as justice as revenge
○ Jutsice as revenge entails that i do to you something comparable to what you have
done to me. This would entail considerations of fairness and rationality that
nietzsche thinks absurd.
○ We create evil people so that against them we can vent all our aggressiveness,
regardless of consideration of fairness and justice.
● The will ot power
○ We are part of nature
○ All happening in the organic world is an overpowering, a becoming-lord-over”
○ Will to power is “the essence of life” and the instinct of freedom
● The origins of bad conscience
○ Insead of expressing our will ot power and natural aggresiveness in the world, we
turn it against ourselves.
○ All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inwards
- this is what i call the internalizing of man, thus first grows in man that which he
later calls his ‘soul’
○ Bad conscience arises with the repression of instincts.
○ Nietzsche takes this bad conscience to be a sickness. Modern europeans are sick
animals.
● Again
○ And what about the pleasure we experience in selflessness, in self-sacrifice?
Nietzsche thinks it comes from cruelty imposed on ourselves
● God
○ Humans created the idea of god
○ Why?
○ In order to justify our self-torture, we create a god who tells us to be the opposite
of what we actually are