Friedrich Nietzsche - Essay Example

This essay demonstrates that every individual is born with a conscience and only he can choose how to train the same. Doing good deeds for other people and not taking pride in the same helps a man to boost his confidence and gain a favorable social status among his peer group which leads him to increase his levels of self-satisfaction. However, keeping a bad conscience is bad for a person because it involves the usage of negative thinking and forces a man to keep himself busy with negation and depiction of a bad attitude as well as bad vibes to people around him.

It thus deters people away from a person. (Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and R. J. Hollingdale) According to the Genealogy, most of the time, a bad conscience develops due to man’s instinct regarding the thought of freedom. This is suppressed within an individual for a period of time during the course of which a man turns his inside into a place of torture because he is not able to roam the wilderness on the outside because of the certain trappings that he has put himself into in his existence.

Thus, when a man uses the self-destructive capability within himself to attack the symptoms of sickness within himself, his conscience turns ‘bad’ and he shows aggression to and traumatizes himself from within, thus making his conscience turn wild in the process. The possibility of an empty symbol or the will to tread on the path of nothingness was also spoken about heavily by Nietzsche. As per this, the will to negate is known as becoming ‘reactive’ and the will to being active is known as being ‘affirmative’.

All this plays along the lines of ascetics which is one of the branches of nihilism, or nihilism of the higher man or power. The will to do nothing helps to transform active energy to passive and vice versa as an individual takes on the opportunity of looking at reality from different points of view. This will drive nihilism from a state of negation to being reactive and finally affirmative and helps an individual to estimate the rights and wrongs that throng in the environment around him or her.

(Deleuze on Nietzschean Nihilism) Affirmation and reaction help a person to understand and differentiate between good and evil by the power of nihilism as the will to do nothing drives a person to take his actions from being passive and transforms it into the will of the last individual present. This means that a man turns against himself and finally decides to be passive in a situation where he might otherwise be in an active and affirmative state of aggression, which ultimately ends up causing harm and thus is a ‘bad’ thing.