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Ok, I am STARTING to follow How does this apply to the review?clearspira wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 2:33 pm To be above good and evil is someone who does not believe that good and evil exists - or at least - someone who does not believe that these things exist FOR THEM. This is primarily a nihilistic or sociopathic way of thinking. But in its lesser form could be applied to the anti-hero or Byronic hero character archetype. Someone who fully knows the difference but is willing to kill an innocent if it means the successful completion of some greater goal.
The only reference I can find to ''beyond good and evil'' is a book by Frederick Nietzsche entitled... ''Beyond Good and Evil.'' He argues that our concept of good and evil are nothing more than culturally constructed and enforced concepts rather than actually being objectively true. Slavery would be a very good example of this. Today it is the true height of evil - no one who is ''good'' would enslave a person and the very notion of the opposite being true is unthinkable. Rewind through most of history however and it was a perfectly acceptable way of doing things - some people were just meant to be enslaved and some people were just meant to be rulers. The idea that they ''always knew it was wrong'' is a modern idea and bears no resemblance to what the average person standing in Athens 3000 years ago would have thought. And you can apply this to just about anything that we today would find reprehensible.
The truth is that whilst ''beyond good and evil'' has definitely been more true in practice over the years, someone who is ''above good and evil'' has also never been praised either. The Ten Commandments for example demonstrate that certain things such as murder have always been considered wrong even if that did not necessarily stop us from finding excuses to do it. Human beings are a jumbled mess of contradictions.
One problem with this line of thinking, it devalues the work of anti-slavery advocates or abolitionists throughout history. In U.S. history the Quakers are of note for their advocacy of ending slavery because it's inherently wrong to treat another person like property. The U.S. (rightfully) gets flak for ending the ownership of slaves in comparison to other countries and I'm not going to argue for thousands of years slavery was considered acceptable. But for as long as there has been slavery there has been slave rebellions and even those who assisted in those rebellions. Maybe some of that assistance was from a mercenary standpoint but maybe others assisted from a stance of goodwill.clearspira wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 2:33 pm To be above good and evil is someone who does not believe that good and evil exists - or at least - someone who does not believe that these things exist FOR THEM. This is primarily a nihilistic or sociopathic way of thinking. But in its lesser form could be applied to the anti-hero or Byronic hero character archetype. Someone who fully knows the difference but is willing to kill an innocent if it means the successful completion of some greater goal.
The only reference I can find to ''beyond good and evil'' is a book by Frederick Nietzsche entitled... ''Beyond Good and Evil.'' He argues that our concept of good and evil are nothing more than culturally constructed and enforced concepts rather than actually being objectively true. Slavery would be a very good example of this. Today it is the true height of evil - no one who is ''good'' would enslave a person and the very notion of the opposite being true is unthinkable. Rewind through most of history however and it was a perfectly acceptable way of doing things - some people were just meant to be enslaved and some people were just meant to be rulers. The idea that they ''always knew it was wrong'' is a modern idea and bears no resemblance to what the average person standing in Athens 3000 years ago would have thought. And you can apply this to just about anything that we today would find reprehensible.
The truth is that whilst ''beyond good and evil'' has definitely been more true in practice over the years, someone who is ''above good and evil'' has also never been praised either. The Ten Commandments for example demonstrate that certain things such as murder have always been considered wrong even if that did not necessarily stop us from finding excuses to do it. Human beings are a jumbled mess of contradictions.