Having been a fan of Nietzsche’s for years (I am only seventeen, my first Nietzsche book was Beyond Good and Evil when I was fourteen), it’s always struck me as peculiar how men feel the need to base their moral opinions in some sense of “higher order” or upon some objective “moral authority”.
Why? I fail to see the need for it. Even atheists do it - Communists, for example, cite the “needs of the proletariat” as the basis of their morality. For the fascist, it’s the State. Likewise, the entire idea of “human rights” is equally as baseless - where do these rights come from? How are they quantified?
I hold that a new system is needed, one which isn’t a system at all. It’s time to ground morality to life - but how? That’s where I’m at a loss. Certainly the truth of nihilism isn’t preferable than the fiction of morality, or else Nietzsche wouldn’t have attacked nihilism. Some sense of shared morality is needed; it wouldn’t have been invented otherwise.
I don’t feel moral relatavism is the answer, either. Any ideas?
But it’s obvious, at least to me, that not all actions are of equal worth.
Which is why my interpretation of the Overman seems a bit vague. Nietzsche, to me, doesn’t believe in an individual self (which would be a thing-in-itself); for N, rather, the self is the product of external forces. The Overman would be a perfect product who always wants to do what is most valuable.
At seventeen and with your mind I believe you will do quite well in college. Judging by this and your “Rights” thread, you seem interested in this perplexing question. I’d like to suggest a book for you to balance most everything else you will read. It is called “The Need for Roots” by Simone Weil written shortly before she died.
It is rough stuff but you may, like me, find her perspective extremely challenging. But if you can handle Nietzsche, this won’t be over your head.
I found a summary on Wikipedia. it isn’t the best since it lacks her depth of explanation and some important parts which cannot be avoided in a summary but still, you’ll get the feel for the other side of the argument such as the obligations being more important than rights, the impossibility for man’s nature, due to our reliance on force, to collectively create a functioning healthy society from secular values, and the need for spirituality in politics. All this probably appears repulsive to you now but in college, if you include this other side into a paper on “Rights,” it may make quite a paper.
Simone was astute enough to realize that her suggestions would be an impossibility but I know she knew that just having such ideas out there would serve as food for thought concerning man’s potential and the possibility of a certain amount of good from such thought
That’s incredible. Basically, that was exactly my thought on the matter, if worded a bit more harshly.
‘Rights’ are not a natural property. If we have learned anything at all from history, they are like a garden - in need of nourishment, watering, and protection from the cold.
A person’s rights I think are in proportion to their power. The more power they have, the more rights they have. Groups with less power have less rights. I believe Nietzsche alluded to this in Beyond Good and Evil. I’ll have to get the paragraph when I get home.