Week 5 -- Nietzsche


Christian Morality
I could certainly see most western law being based around Christian texts, much like how Islamic law shaped the Middle East and Confucianist principles shaped Asia. And since, from a relativist perspective, law shapes the culture’s morality (and vice versa), it makes sense for me to believe that there is an inherently Christian morality that has existed within western states (though perhaps over time has gotten to become more secular).

The Greater Being
I don’t think that we could understand how the consciousness of a Greater Being. It seems as though our consciousness is the purest distilling of our own nature. The imagery of something beyond consciousness is very foggy, at the least.

Acting according to consciousness
I believe that we wish to act according to our consciousness, but often fail to. This failure is due to a mix of instinct, anxiety, and other outside factors that cause us to not quite want to act up to our conscious.
At the same time, I believe that the conscious represents our ideal being, since we all wish to act according to it. Thus, could it be that a person who acts solely according to their consciousness is what Nietzsche calls the Ubermensch.

Objective truths
This is a topic I discussed a bit last week, so I’ll just use this as a refresh: my personal definition of Truth is that there are certain Truths which exist that hold the laws of our natural universe, though I do not believe we as human beings could ever find these truths.

Truth and morality
I believe there could be some chance that certain moral constructs could be Truths, in the same way where there might be truths in Art. However, I believe that these may be derived truths, occurring as a factor of another Truth which exists within Nature.

Truth and reason
While we may never get specifically to know a Truth, I do believe that we can get closer to a Truth through using Reason, and when we do get closer to a Truth, we learn more about our universe. Thus, it should be a goal of individuals to use reason to find out Truths.

Proving falsity
One could make the argument that proving things to be false does bring us closer to the Truth. While we may not be able to prove something is True, we can continue proving things false, and perhaps then there is a point where if we prove all possible sets of non-answers to be False, then we could get the truth. This does make me wonder, however, if we can truly prove something is false as well.

Purpose of seeking truth
A human, or perhaps universe, purpose of seeking truth could be a possibility. That is, if we are satisfied with the idea that all our collective individual goals on earth are to seek the fundamental truths of our universe. I could see someone in this case saying “No, I wish my goal to be a lot more simple” or “No, I don’t care about what the universe holds” and I believe both of these answers as well as answers similar to them are all justified.

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