moralhod Morality in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Morality in The Heart of Darkness

"I trust I shall be forgiven the discovery that all moral philosophy hitherto was boring and belonged among the soporifics" (Nietzsche 561). Maybe so, but the issue of moral philosophy has been discussed though out time and provides a significant element in Conrad's story Heart of Darkness. In general, the timeless discussion traces back to the first philosophical writings of Plato and transcends from general religious grounds to general applications and codes of behavior espoused by Kant and Mills. These individuals and lines of thought try to establish a 'good' code of behavior based on something: a benevolent god, extensible codes similar to The Golden Rule, or even relativistic collective opinion. Later, in the eighteen hundreds though the turn of the century, popular thought turned around and attacked such codes though works such as Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Nietzsche's various works like Beyond Good and Evil. In more modern times a kind of balancing of those two streams leads to what Richard Garner describes as amorality, or the discarding of a moral system altogether. Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness while his contemporaries were denouncing objective moralities, incorporates much of these philosophies and uses the work as a demonstrative system for a unique morality.

Developing a moral system generally runs into quite a few problems; mainly, and this affects systems of morality based on Judeo-Christian religious principles, that evil exists in the world. A morality based on a Judeo-Christian God enters into a conflict between the omnibenelovence and that existence, for how could an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenelovent god allow evil to exis...

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...strate his own thoughts of a relativistic morality.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.

Garner, Richard. The Experience of Philosophy. Ed. Daniel Kolak, Raymond Martin. Belmont California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996.

Guerard, Albert J. The Journey Within. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.

Kant, Immanuel. The Experience of Philosophy. Ed. Daniel Kolak, Raymond Martin. Belmont California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Marianne Cowan. Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1955.

Plato. The four Socratic dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934.