Fear Morality
Fear and Morality in Nietzsche
Nietzsche believed that there was no real ethic and that since there was no moral without fear, that there were no true morals. The problem with this is how he developed this idea. This paper first breaks down how Nietzsche theorized morality, and then gives two cases to refute his assertions.
Nietzsche's Theory of Morality
From the beginning of his diatribe, Nietzsche shows that he has had a superior intellect from the time he was very young, and he is thus, the supposition has to be, uniquely qualified to judge ethics and morality. He wrote his very first treatise on morality at the "tender" age of thirteen (Nietzsche 1). His views of ethics were shaped by his method of questioning, determining answers, and then building more questions based on these answers, until, he says, "at last I had my own country, my own soil, a totally secluded, flowering, blooming world, a secret garden" (Nietzsche 1). Out of this secluded world he built the frame for his beliefs concerning ethics.
This is not to say that everything that Nietzsche said was wrong. His basic stance is that of "the victor makes the history." He believed that there was no ethic, no morality and no truly discernible good because these had all been determined by the ruling and intellectual, the aristocratic, class. Ethics were the ones set up by those who ruled, so, of course, they would set the ethic as one in which they were right in their actions rather than what is truly, universally thought of as good. His argument can even be...
It is possibly a skewed stance, but it is one that has been popular.
From a reading of Nietzsche's views, to be found in "On the Genealogy of Morals," it is apparent that he does not believe that true morals, or what pass for morals in humanity, are as a result of fear. He believes that this fear does come from the poor being downtrodden by the rich and powerful for many centuries (he makes special mention of the Jews -- contemptuously), but, in general, he lays this tendency to believe that "good" people perform their works out of fear, at the feet of religion (Nietzsche 5). He says that people are fearful of God and thus they do what He would consider good works because they fear some type of metaphysical reprisal. Nietzsche had already said, in the Preface, that he "gave that honor to God, as is reasonable, and made him the father of evil," meaning that in his childish, or more accurately teenage, mind he believed that it could be shown that God was the father of evil and thus to be feared (Nietzsche 1). Because of this fear of a higher being, people, who want to aspire to something better than their life on Earth is, started to obey the morals and the ethic that they found in the Bible. Like Hume, Nietzsche believed that people were not good inherently. This goodness was something that was learned, and that it was scared into them from the time that they were children. Given that Nietzsche was of German ancestry, it…
