Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

In regards to my own views on ethics and morals, I identify with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. I became pleasantly surprised with how accurate the philosopher test was as I started to research Nietzsche, and I found myself agreeing with nearly everything he believed in. His master/slave morality, eternal recurrence theory, disregard of modern culture, and sense of self-mastery intrigued me and captivated me in ways no other ethical principles have before.

Nietzsche’s master and slave morality is a really interesting concept that makes a lot of sense to me. It states that people higher in power, like people with wealth and a higher social class, set the values for good and bad. The master morality has the ideology that anything that is good is helpful, and anything that is bad is harmful. The slave morality combats the master morality, believing it is evil, therefore slave morality is seen as good. Good increases the utility for the whole of the group, not just the strong and wealthy, and there is no concept of bad, only evil, which decreases the utility of the group. I find this oddly fascinating… but it makes complete logical sense if you think about it long and hard enough. 

The theory of eternal recurrence is one of Nietzsche's most interesting and slightly confusing ideas. It's his idea that the universe goes through cycles of recurrence and it will continue to go through cycles for an infinite number of times through infinite time and space. It's something that I discovered that was worth mentioning, but it's a bit confusing to describe in detail. I highly recommend you guys look into it, but heres a passage from his book The Gay Science that can sum the idea up better than I can:

"What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your lonliest lonliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it...'"

Possibly one of my favorite things about Nietzsche is his disregard for modern culture and his belief that people should focus on themselves. Nietzsche believed that mass culture induces conformity and leads to a lack of human progression, so it's best to overcome and avoid it. In order to do this, humans need to achieve a sense of "Will to Power" which creates a focus on the self and achieving self-mastery. Nietzsche believes that humans need to be selfish and have passions in order to have virtues, and having virtues is the way to have a productive, healthy society. 

“Once you had passions and called them evil. But now you have only your virtues: they grew out of your passions. You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys. And though you were of the race of the hot-tempered, or of the voluptuous, or of the fanatical, or the vindictive; All your passions in the end became virtues, and all your devils angels.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra

In my opinion, Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the greatest philosophers of our time. He developed ingenious ideas and is aware that humans need to focus on themselves and develop passions in order to advance in society. He created the idea of Master and Slave morality, thought about the possibility of eternal recurrence, rejects conformity and mass culture, and is aware of the importance an individual's uniqueness has on society. I personally identify with all of these ideas (well, maybe not eternal recurrence, but it was way too cool of a theory to not mention) and I'm thrilled that I had a chance to see where these ideas originated.