Week 6 -- Nietzsche Continued

Will to Power

I don’t believe its true that the sole goal of all human beings is to gain power. I can think of a number of people who would not have any sort of happiness with a large amount of power, and would rather leave the control to someone else.

Intrinsic Goodness

I don’t think there is intrinsic goodness, much like I don’t think there is intrinsic evil. All actions can be seen as being a percentage of good and evil, at least to make things simpler. So we could say that an action is 60% good and 40% bad, or vice versa.

A Necessary Power

I can understand the concept of necessary power – of a necessary relationship between master and slave. But I am not sure what the real-life example of it should be. Certainly, it would make sense that it would be something within economics, as our world has only so many natural resources. The system of capitalism always requires someone to be on the bottom, and so this might be relevant.

Slavery as a choice

Didn’t know we were going to bring Kanye into this. But really, I can understand the idea of existential slavery being, in a sense, voluntary. It comes back to what I said some posts ago about the relationship between free will and determinism. If you take the role that’s given to you, rather than fighting for a better one, that can be seen as an aspect of voluntary existential slavery. However, I feel like at some point calling it “voluntary” is a bit pointless, as if you’re indoctrinated into the role it becomes much harder to get into the mindset that other possible roles even exist.

What is the purpose of consciousness?

Consciousness is what makes us an individual, and so I can only assume that this is its main goal. Why we would need consciousness is its own question.

Why do we need consciousness?

To answer this, I’ll start out by saying that – to make things simpler – we’ll consider that every (at the very least) mammal experiences at least some level of consciousness. And if we know that consciousness makes us an individual, then it can be said that all mammals are meant to be treated as individuals. Now, the tricky question is why mammals need to be individuals, which I believe holds an answer outside our current understanding.

Does consciousness make preferences/decisions less personal?

This was one point of Nietzsche’s that I simply did not understand. It seems as though, to me, consciousness makes decisions more personal, not less personal. Decisions are decisions onto themselves; however, the thought process behind those decisions, via the conscious, creates the individual touch of the decision.

Eternal Recurrence

This topic I feel like can’t be touched, because whether it is a blessing or a curse depends entirely upon the circumstances in which it is occurring. If you are recalling previous instances of recurrence, then I would call this a curse solely to do the tediousness of being stuck in the same day/lifetime. However, I would say if you did not recall previous instances, that this would be a fairly neutral occurrence.