Nietzsche: Where Does Morality Come From?(2/3)
Description
Is there such a thing as right and wrong, or is morality a fabrication of social and evolutionary design? Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hobbes and Rousseau, believed that morality is a social construct. Contemporary atheist philosophers, like Paul Kurtz and Michael Ruse, are convinced that evolutionary biology is responsible for a sense of morality. Judeo-Christian thinkers throughout millennia have said that moral laws require a moral law giver. And Friedrich Nietzsche dismisses the entire conversation, arguing that all morals are illusory constraints adopted by weak willed peons.
Favorite Quote
“Let us articulate that new claim: we need a critique of all moral values; the intrinsic worth of these values must, first of all, be called in question. To this end we need to know the conditions from which those values have sprung and how they have developed and changed: morality as consequence, symptom, mask, tartuferie, sickness, misunderstanding; but, also, morality as cause, remedy, stimulant, inhibition, poison. . . The intrinsic worth of these values was taken for granted as a fact of experience and put beyond question. Nobody, up to now, has doubted that the ‘good’ man represented a higher value than the ‘evil,’ in terms of promoting and benefiting mankind generally, even taking the long view. But suppose the exact opposite were true. What if the ‘good’ man represents not merely a retrogression but even a danger, a temptation, a narcotic drug enabling the present to live at the expense of the future? More comfortable, less hazardous, perhaps, but also baser, more petty––so that morality itself would be responsible for man, as a species, failing to reach the peak of magnificence of which he is capable? What if morality should turn out to be the danger of dangers?”
–– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Francis Golffing, (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 155.
Episode Notes
- The featured painting is an oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich, painted in 1818. It is titled, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” I selected it because it is widely considered one of the greatest masterpieces from the Romantic Era––an era that was destroyed by the horrors of the 20th century. Furthermore, it seems to beautifully symbolize man as Nietzsche sees him. A lone wanderer navigating a mysterious and unknown future. The tone and color matches Nietzsche’s work brilliantly.
- The featured piece is by Hanz Liszt, a Hungarian composer of the 19th century and contemporary of Nietzsche. The piece, Sonata in B Minor, is one of the most influential and powerful sonatas after Beethoven’s. Similarly to the chosen artwork, it, too, marks the best and last one of its kind before the death of Romanticism after World War 1.