Nietzsche Morality Essay

What is morality? There are many different views on what morality really is, but the one I find to be closest to the truth is Nietzsche’s view. Nietzsche completely reevaluated all of the values tied to morality and concluded that there is little true value in this world. Morality has always seemed to be complex and always been kept in a very limited “box”. Nietzsche goes beyond the normal limits and out of the “box” morality has been kept in. Nietzsche believed that there is no truth, just beliefs. Morality is just another belief. All beliefs are just interpretations or ways of looking at the world. Everything is a perspective. How I might view morality or what I might consider to be moral may be and probably will be very different from how someone else’s views. Nietzsche does not think we truly understand morality or the history of it. This is primarily where he believes other philosophers have gone wrong when trying to understand and describe what morality is. Nietzsche says, “As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all them is by nature unhistorical…” (Nietzsche, 25). Nietzsche believed that historically there were two types of morality: slave morality and master morality. Nietzsche says that, “It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values…” (Nietzsche, 26). How we view morality now along with many other things has changed over the course of time. Nietzsche calls this conceptual transformation. Nietzsche says, “Thus one also imagined that punishment was devised for punishment. But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function…” (Nie...

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... part of this human nature to be cruel. It does us good to see others suffer. It is even better when we make others suffer. Nietzsche uses hell as a demonstration of this. Nietzsche says, “…there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise and its “eternal bliss” the inscription “I too was created by eternal hate”…” (Nietzsche, 49). I had never looked at humans being this way or hell being this way, before reading Nietzsche’s book on morality. He makes an excellent point though, that I have to agree with. I have to disagree with the idea that we have free will. We are constantly told what we should do, how we should act, etc. If we do otherwise, we get punished for it. People are constantly forcing their beliefs on one another. Morality is just another belief that has been twisted and transformed over time and forced upon us.