I Had This Exact Same Blog In A Previous Life

This week was interesting. I got the chance to nervously present a section on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality.  It was a difficult task to completely comprehend the material, my section on Bad Conscience in particular. I read through it many times, as well as interpretations of the text online, but I kept having new revelations on the material, even 10 minutes prior to the presentation. 

Nietzsche can be a bit ambiguous in my opinion. I was unaware, for instance, that he was writing with a sarcastic tone when he referred to “free will.”  Apparently Nietzsche would be a proponent of determinism, as demonstrated by his theory of Eternal Recurrence.  What a heavy topic eternal recurrence is. It makes theoretical sense that if time is infinite, then eventually our lives would repeat themselves. He asks us to imagine that at some point in our life, some demon comes down and tells us we will live our entire life over again exactly how it was. The question is would this information please you or cause you despair. Personally, the idea is frightening for I have experienced some things that I would never want to go through again. But at the same time there are the pleasantries i’ve experienced in my life. For me, this information is simply an opportunity to re-evaluate your life, perhaps change the way you live, and also to change the way you appreciate your past. 

One thing that’s daunting, however, is the idea that your life really is predetermined.  That everything you have done and everything you were going to do, was going to happen regardless of any choice that was made. I’ve been in arguments with my brother about free will versus determinism and it typically seems like an endless debate.  Does it really make a difference if we choose our actions or were destined to make those actions?  One might argue that if everything is predetermined, then what is the point of getting out of bed if you have no choice?  But then if you followed up on that though, would you have been destined to come to this conclusion, or did your belief influence your choice of staying in bed all day? Either way the end result is the same, it becomes a frustrating brain exercise.

Finally I would like to talk a bit about morality and this bad conscience Nietzsche describes. First off, he makes the bold claim that there are only two types of morality, that of the Master and Slave. Master moralists consider their own virtues to be what’s good, and everything that’s weak, poor, and ugly to be bad. The slave moralist on the contrary sees everything that the master moralist considers good to be evil, and good is to be compassionate and selfless. My problem with this, is that it is hard for me to believe that the history of morality can be clumped in to two categories.  There is much more to morality than two “cliques.”

My favorite part of Nietzsche this far has been his theory of bad conscience. The very thing that makes the human animal such miserable and cursed creature. The fact that we have this conscience that obstructs our animal instincts. Sometimes I like to think i’ve experienced this bad conscience. Every time I make a statement and think to myself, “wow, that sounded egocentric.”  Why should that bother me? Why shouldn’t I be egocentric? Why should my conscience tell me it’s wrong to be selfish, when my instincts beg for it. Nietzsche calls bad conscience a sickness, and he gives it a bad rap, but there is some promise in it. Like the title of one of his books, Nietzsche wants to move beyond good and evil. Although it might seem like he prefers the natural human, I believe Nietzsche believed that man would eventually evolve, and have no need for morality. Would the next step in man’s evolution be the ubermensch? If so when will this  next step take place?  It’s been over 100 years since his death, yet we still seem stuck in this “bridge” phase.