double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font. Please include a cover page with name and the name of the course at the beginning of paper
PHI 151
ETHICS AND THE GOOD LIFE
Title: Polytheism and the Plurality of Values in Nietzsche and Weber
Topic: In Science as a Vocation, Max Weber writes “if you take pure experience as your starting point, you will end up in polytheism. This is to put it superficially and it sounds paradoxical, but it contains some truth…And it is a truism that something can be true although and because it is neither beautiful nor scared, nor good. But these are merely the most basic instances of this conflict between the gods of different systems and values.” (pp. 22-23).
In this paper, you are to discuss how, in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche presents the reader with an account of the history of morals that replaces Kant’s description of a single Moral Law with an account of the plurality of conflicting sets of values. How does the death of the “Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far” prepare the way for a new ideal, “the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive)?” In the aphorism “On the Three Metamorphoses of the Sprit” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, why does Nietzsche claim that the human spirit must change from a lion to a child? What can the child do that even the lion could not do?
In Science as a Vocation, Max Weber says that ever since Nietzsche we have known “that something can be true although and because it is neither beautiful not sacred, nor good. But these are merely the most basic instances of this conflict between the gods of the different systems and values.” Why does Weber speak of a new polytheism where “conflict rages between different gods and it will go on for all time. It is as it was in antiquity before the world had been divested of the magic of its gods and demons, only in a different sense?” What is the main difference between ancient polytheism and this new polytheism? Where does Weber place Christianity and Christendom in this historical sequence? What does he mean when he says: “The destiny of our culture, however, is that we shall once again become more clearly conscious of this situation after a millennium in which our allegedly or supposedly exclusive reliance on the glorious pathos of the Christian ethic had blinded us to it?”
Format: Four to five pages, TYPED, double-spaced, New Times Roman, 12 point font. Your paper must include a title page with the paper title, your name, and the course title. Be sure to proofread your paper for any typographical or grammatical errors. You will be held accountable for the quality of your writing as well as for the content of the paper.
Sources: The only sources needed are Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, the two handouts, On the Three Metamorphoses of the Sprit and The madman, and Weber, Science as a Vocation. The inclusion of material in your paper not found in these readings
