The Historical Nature of Human Beings for Freud & Nietzsche.
Nietzsche and Freud both give us distinctive ways of thinking about the historical nature of human beings, individually and collectively. Both use morality as the basis for their argument and at their core, struggle with the concept, how it came to exist in society, and how it came to govern our present. While the present is the subject for Nietzsche and Freud, both still delve into the past of both society and the individual to explain their disparate definitions of morality and what these interpretations mean for their contemporaries. For Nietzsche, morality is a concept developed by society. His "thesis, particularly that of slave morality, is one of the operation of desire, and of history. " He argues, "Morality challenges the belief in age which adds up to the challenge in the belief that excellence can emerge from democracy. " Thus, for Nietzsche, "democracy is a regression to progress. " On the other hand, for Freud morality is a natural process existing in the individual before he joins society, and in human relations before civilization. Evidently, Nietzsche sees the past as an explanation for the continuing development of morality, whereas Freud sees the past as a direct continuum from the original existence of morality. .
Nietzsche Argument.
Nietzsche begins his argument by saying that he does not believe that the origin of any past can be discovered from the present, or indeed that the origin itself exists in its pure form . In fact, his goal in "The Genealogy of Morals" is to counter the belief that moral values such as good and evil existed before men constructed them. He declares:.
"Everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically interpreted by those in power in terms of fresh intentions, all processes in the organic world are processes of interpretation in the course of which the earlier meaning and purpose are necessarily either obscured or lost.
