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a new way of looking at... philosophy >> good and bad vs. good and evil - 1 |
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your resident nietzsche psuedo-expert is here again to discuss mad fritz's insight. again, for the record, i don't hold the same views as the man himself, but i do find insight where i can. so, i feel it's my duty to bring this insight to you.
two concepts need to be spelled out shortly before proceeding into this article. the first is nietzsche's will to power. it's a complex concept, but the short form is that everyone has an inert desire for power, a desire to control yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. the second concept is the absence of god as an overseeing presence rewarding or punishing us in the afterlife based on our present actions. i will draw heavily on nietzsche's essay "first treatise: 'good and bad,' 'good and evil'." nietzsche first discusses the origin of the two concepts. in the beginning (nietzsche would appreciate that irony), morality was defined in terms of good and bad only. the equation "good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of god" defined how one defined themselves as good. if you were good, then you were noble. if you were noble, then you were powerful. so on and so forth until the noble were the beloved of god. religion, in particular judaism, brought about the inversion of this equation to bring them more power. reversing the steps, we have "beloved of god = happy = beautiful = powerful = noble = good". if you are beloved of god, then you are happy. if you are happy, then you are beautiful. so on and so forth until the beloved of god are the good. this inversion creates the concept of good and evil. god became the overseer of this world to determine your place in the next. the lower class defined themselves immediately as the beloved of god. once god was brought into the world, you had a choice: live like we do, go to heaven. live like they (the noble) do, go to hell. this built power as the lower class as invariably the populous class, and with the coming of jesus christ and the overthrow of noble power in ancient rome, good and evil became solidified in our lives. people no longer want to be good in the good and bad sense, but good in the good and evil sense, which made the noble evil. therefore, people started doing things that the noble did not. wealth was never accumulated by the lower class. noble beauty became vanity. holding outright power was looked at as evil. what does all this mean, really? well, aside from all the anti-religious sentiment, it hits upon an interesting distinction between good in the good and bad sense and good in the good and evil sense. the noble class of old defined good by what they were, had, and were able to do. the lower class defined good by what they were not. they defined themselves by the actions they don't take. the strings of "thou shalt not" in the decalogue and the rest of the law books of the old testament further put forth this important concept: the nobel good defined themselves by what they were, and the new good defined themselves by what they were not. 1 | 2 |