Pandaemoni
Valued Senior Member
Nietzsche is also important in the rise of modern moral relativism (through his influence on the existentialists).
He felt that given the variety of people and situations they face that imposing a single ethical system on them was ultimately a form of dogmatism. At best, it displayed those things that the inventor of the system thought were important and gave an insight into that person or culture as a whole at the time they created it. At worst, though, it bound people to rules that might well be inapplicable to or counterproductive in the situations in which they find themselves, especially if they did not realize that "should" be constantly reevaluating such inherited systems in light of new experiences and circumstances and in light of their own personal inclinations.
The greatest people are those who ruthlessly dig into their own assumptions, preconceptions and prejudices in order to discard those that do not stand to scrutiny.
He recognized that this kind of extensive self-analysis and individualism will lead each person to his or her own separate sense of how to behave (and in that sense places that person "beyond ethics" in a certain sense, as all such decisions are individualized and hence hard to systematize). He also knew that it would alienate one who practices it from the society in which he lived, and that no one takes it to that extreme as a result (hence, he said he waits for his "Übermenschen" because they did not yet exist).
I also personally liked the notion of the "will to power" as a more satisfying explanation of life than the earlier concept of the "will to live" (used by Schopenhauer, amongst others) as being a little too meager a drive on which to base a theory of human nature. Admittedly, when I first read Nietzsche, I conceptualized the "will to power" a bit too naively as a "desire to dominate and conquer" (which not everyone has, and which Nature in general doesn't have at all), and I have in any event long since abandoned it as the organizing principle by which I try to conceptualize human nature (indeed, though, it applied to all of Nature itself, in Nietzsche's view), but I do see it as an interesting step beyond the basic views of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
(As a purely predictive theory of human and animal nature, I have begun to fall back more and more on simple marginal utility theory in recent years, despite not really liking that when I first learned it).
He felt that given the variety of people and situations they face that imposing a single ethical system on them was ultimately a form of dogmatism. At best, it displayed those things that the inventor of the system thought were important and gave an insight into that person or culture as a whole at the time they created it. At worst, though, it bound people to rules that might well be inapplicable to or counterproductive in the situations in which they find themselves, especially if they did not realize that "should" be constantly reevaluating such inherited systems in light of new experiences and circumstances and in light of their own personal inclinations.
The greatest people are those who ruthlessly dig into their own assumptions, preconceptions and prejudices in order to discard those that do not stand to scrutiny.
He recognized that this kind of extensive self-analysis and individualism will lead each person to his or her own separate sense of how to behave (and in that sense places that person "beyond ethics" in a certain sense, as all such decisions are individualized and hence hard to systematize). He also knew that it would alienate one who practices it from the society in which he lived, and that no one takes it to that extreme as a result (hence, he said he waits for his "Übermenschen" because they did not yet exist).
I also personally liked the notion of the "will to power" as a more satisfying explanation of life than the earlier concept of the "will to live" (used by Schopenhauer, amongst others) as being a little too meager a drive on which to base a theory of human nature. Admittedly, when I first read Nietzsche, I conceptualized the "will to power" a bit too naively as a "desire to dominate and conquer" (which not everyone has, and which Nature in general doesn't have at all), and I have in any event long since abandoned it as the organizing principle by which I try to conceptualize human nature (indeed, though, it applied to all of Nature itself, in Nietzsche's view), but I do see it as an interesting step beyond the basic views of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
(As a purely predictive theory of human and animal nature, I have begun to fall back more and more on simple marginal utility theory in recent years, despite not really liking that when I first learned it).
