Nietzsche the Ideas That Morals

¶ … Nietzsche

The ideas that morals are not absolute, but part of a structured genealogy or progression from absolute moral certainly to certainty absolutely nothing, no certainty at all, should not be regarded as frightening. Of course, the idea that 'God is dead' may sound frightening to the ears. To the philosopher's readership, this idea, no doubt was particularly shocking. But the fact that such antitheist sentiments are more accepted today is 'proof' of Nietzsche's theory that morals do not exist impermeably for all time, but shift and change, depending upon circumstance and temperament of society.

Furthermore, according to Nietzsche, in a world where the concept of God is useless or dead, one is oddly free in one's cultural and intellectual milieu -- when one is forced to question the norms of right and wrong that have structured one's personal or cultural life, and deems those norms to be lacking in the current moral universe, then one finds one's self terribly free to think what one will, and to question whatever one desires to question -- and thus to fulfill one's full potential as a human being and a thinking, questioning human mind.

The death of God and value propositions thus sows the seeds of what will become, after the German philosopher's death, the beginnings of postmodernism's relativistic moral understanding of cultural life and existentialism's freedom of understanding the human condition after the horrors of World War II. Nietzsche may be seen as the first modern thinker, as he states that rather than seeking absolutes that cannot be defined outside of historical and social environments, one must seek to understand morals in a context, of a historical moment rather than something that will stand for all time. He criticizes the reactive quality of the philosophers before him that presupposed God and took preexisting thought as a touchstone or template -- cast away all certainty, he argued, to achieve clarity and rigor of true moral thought, however immoral this may seem.