Sample Essay On Nietzsche - Tertullian's Tartuffery From Genealogy Of Morals

The question of good and bad, good and evil is the issue of Friedrich Nietzsche’s First and Second Essay from the “Genealogy of Morals”, which criticizes the Tertullian Tartuffery argument on Christian values. The philosopher indicates that the positive human values are linguistically and stylistically associated with the aristocratic classes, which by extension implies that the powerful ones are the beholders of the good, while the weak and oppressed are the representatives of the bad and evil. Nietzsche enters dangerous deliberations on racial purity, religious weakness or decreased morality standards through a perceived education in the spirit of the guilt and duty that make his assumptions controversial and questionable.
In the Genealogy of Morals the philosopher defends the noble men, the aristocrats, the Arians, the winners for their morals, which Nietzsche considers to be pure and good by their nature. In contrast, the mediocre people or slaves, the dark skinned and the ones who have not succeed in life are thought to challenge the noble people’s goodness by poising their nature with their thoughts made up by their resentments (Nietzsche 27).
Nietzsche is comparing the relationship between the winners and the losers with the connection between birds of prey and lambs, wherein the lambs hate the birds of prey because they kill and eat them, while the birds of prey love the lambs because of their good taste. By defending the aristocracy for their natural morals characterized by victimizing the poor, Nietzsche agrees with the suppressive and abusive exert of authority of the powerful classes over the weak ones. However, as he further deploys his thoughts, Nietzsche imagines a conversation with Mr. Daredevil Curiosity who spies on the weak men and patronizes their Christianity and religious values in the afterlife or Judgment Day (32). Rightfully, Nietzsche’s perception of the poor, oppressed people as weakness is entitled, as they hide the fear for revenge for their sufferings in compassion and live for the After Life and not for their current existence. What the philosopher later explains is that the Christianity belongs not only to the poor, but to all those who let themselves carried away by the Tertullian theology of a Heavenly Kingdom. Nietzsche discusses about the freedom of choosing whether to be a lamb or a bird of prey (30), describing people’s deliberate choice to be lambs, when they were born as birds of prey, as a signs of weakness.
The philosopher criticizes the Christian faith for its mediocrity, deploring the world that has been defeated by the Judaic values that praise poverty, weakness, the fear of the afterlife and a moral life based on exploring the feelings of guilt and duty (Nietzsche 71). While these particular values delineate the weakness and worships the power of the most over the fewer, Nietzsche pushes his Christianity criticism up to the point wherein he praises the racial purity and the power of the few, noble men, over the majority. This belief depicts a sense of superiority, praising a world of the Arians, wherein the resentment of the oppressed ones, or their Christian values, should be extinct in order to save the naturalness of humanity. In this racist existence, solely the aristocracy is worth living, according to Nietzsche.
The proponent of this essay agrees with Nietzsche’s belief that Christian religion promotes deceiving values that weaken humans, but the philosopher’s distributive attribution of good and bad or good and evil based on social class and race is discriminative and abusive. Should individuals decide to be weak or strong human beings, their morals should not be affected by whether they are dark-skinned or white-skinned but whether they harm or help others.

Works Cited

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Print.