Nietzsche

For me, this article was wacky. Yes, I understood the gist of it, but it was also a bit random. The first section seemed to have nothing to do with the rest. But then I thought about it. Nietzsche writes about psychologists and what they do. Well, after a brief moment, I realized that it fits the rest of our reading in a post-conventional way.

Psychologists explore the way the mind works. Psychologists seek the truth, in methods that consist of disproving themselves as well as proving themselves.

According to Nietzsche, historians lack historical spirit, which is to say, they either have no morals, or they contradict their own morals. People once praised usefulness, if you were useful, you were considered a good person. If a person was useful, he was praised. But, the person had to be considered a good person in the eyes of society. In other words, in order to be good, you had to be useful, but in order to be useful, you had to be good, and in order to be good, you had to be noble. The nobles decided this by basing it on your social status, intelligence, your money. But they were lazy, the nobles were lazy. So the only useful people were the damn peasants. (in your face!)

Though it seems that there is still that psychological contradiction. What is right for one person isn’t always right for another. Then there’s the whole post-conventionalism thing. You there are rules, but they’re stupid, and you don’t care, so you break them…..those rules aren’t right for you.

But we still have to deal with the fact that the judgment of good is not defendable because of the fact that some people are post-conventional, and what is right for one person isn’t for another. Thus, no one, Absolutely NO ONE, can defend what is good and what is not good.

And the funny thing is, is that in many cultures, the word good has that same meaning of social status. But why is it that nobility meant a person was good? Why was there that segregation of the truthful noble man and the lying common man? Was it really real? Nietzsche proposes that those who were considered to be noble were the Celtics, the white men of Europe, rather than the coloured man.

Nietzsche also suggests that the social superiority was tied into the spiritual superiority. That the pure and impure were symbolic. That the priest, through religious acts and religious purity caused pathological disease because of the old Biblical teachings. This suggests that the priests need to be careful in their ideas and sophistication as human beings.

For me, I don’t agree. I agree with the post-conventionalism and psychological contradiction because it’s true. I speak from experience, but the rest just does not fall into place for me…