Deciding on a Book
I'm familiar with Confucius and Nietzsche after reading parts of Good: An Introduction to Ethics in Graphic Design by Lucienne Roberts as research for COP, so it made sense to do the brief on one of these because of the familiarity with their thoughts.
The ideas of Confucius that the book speaks about is that the behaviour of people in power slowly instills itself in the behaviour of the people. Given the state of politics and the media at the moment, I find this idea to be somewhat outdated.
"In a world in which the only values are individual values, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche thus suggested that it is necessary to overcome the external forces of social morality and to act 'authentically' on values to which you are absolutely committed. These values are part of your nature, and to act on them is to be free." (Roberts, 2006, p71)
The above extract from Roberts' book interested me in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, because it suggests that part of freedom is doing what you think is right, which might not necessarily align with what society suggests is right.
I did some background research on both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and found that Nietzsche was critical of Christianity, as he thought that religion was often a way of protecting the weak and holding back the strong.
Because of these beliefs, Nietzsche is sometimes considered to be the philosopher of Naziism, which I find a bit worrying given my liking for the above quote from Roberts' book. From this quote alone it doesn't seem fair to blame Nietzsche for inspiring Hitler, but reading The Antichrist will help me establish this more.
My Understanding of The Antichrist
Nietzsche’s philosophy was one that promotes self-thought. He argued that Christianity punished those that thought for themselves because Christian values continued to be upheld in society. This, he philosophised, was a herd mentality that protected the weak and punished the strong. One of his key issues was that Christianity, being a religion of pity, allowed suffering and pity to become infectious, holding people back from developing their own values through hope. There are various points throughout the book where he speaks against nationalism.
Background Understanding on Nietzsche and The Antichrist
Friedrich Nietzsche is most famous for his declaration that “God is dead”. He was a heavy critic of Christianity, and was unable to accept that, even though many in society had gone past the stage of believing in God, Christian values were still withheld as the ideas of ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
His father (a priest) and baby brother died when he was young. Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity began here, as he couldn’t understand why a God that his father served for so long would punish him in such a way that caused him to die prematurely.
After Nietzsche’s mental health took a turn for the worse and he died in 1900, his sister Elisabeth took and altered some of his previous work and unpublished notes to make it appear that Nietzsche was anti-Semitic, as she and her husband were both nationalists. Elisabeth went on to be a prominent supporter of Hitler. Because of this, Nietzsche is often (wrongly) considered to be the main philosopher being the Third Reich, despite him against nationalism in his writings.
BBC Documentary - Human, All Too Human - Link Here
Patheos.com - A God Torn to Pieces - Link Here
Princeton University Press - Nietzsche, The Godfather of Fascism? - Link Here
The Telegraph Online - 'Criminal' manipulation of Nietzsche - Link Here
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