Nietzsche: Moving Beyond Good and Evil Essay -- Philosophy Philosophic

Nietzsche: Moving Beyond Good and Evil We have grown weary of man. Nietzsche wants something better, to believe in human ability once again. Nietzsche’s weariness is based almost entirely in the culmination of ressentiment, the dissolution of Nietzsche’s concept of morality and the prevailing priestly morality. Nietzsche wants to move beyond simple concepts of good and evil, abandon the assessment of individuals through ressentiment, and restore men to their former wonderful ability. Nietzsche begins his discussion of good and moral with an etymological assessment of the designations of â€Å"good† coined in various languages. He â€Å"found they all led back to the same conceptual transformation—that everywhere ‘noble,’ ‘aristocratic’ in the social sense, is the basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’†¦ developed†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Nietzsche 909). Instead of looking forward at the achievement for morality, Nietzsche looks backward, trying to find origins and causes of progression. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that strength implies morality, that superiority implies the good man. The powerful nobles, through pathos of difference, construed plebeians and slaves as bad, because of their inferiority in every sense of the word. From this concept of the pathos of difference was born the priestly morality, wherein the nobles were construed in an altogether di fferent and less favorable light. The origins of the priestly morality came from hatred and jealousy. â€Å"It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenuous hat... ... slave morality that has choked the world ever since its inception. Nietzsche has been able to lift himself above the constraints of ressentiment in order to comprehend more fully what a truly great man is, and from what he has seen, he has been disgusted with the individual, wholly disappointed in human beings. He recognizes the nearly endless potential of the human mind, but must sadly turn away from the horror before his eyes that allows the poor, the meek, and the less able to command the respect of society. According to the general public, the birds of prey have become enemies to the world because of their perfect sight, their sharp claws, and their unequivocal ability. Nietzsche sees the lambs as the enemies to the world, the lambs who gaze up at the birds of prey with ressentiment and argue that it is better to be mediocre, it is far more just to be ordinary.