Humanity and Morality
Friedrich Nietzsche
The madman Where is God? he cried. I’ll tell you! You have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we continually falling? And backwards Nietszche The Gay Science 125
The first important observation concerning Nietzsche’s text is that it is a madman who is asking atheists for the location of God. This idea alone explains a great measure of his work. It is not the madman who is the atheist. The atheists are presented as the logical individuals, laughing at the ideas of the madman. However, we must ask, is he a madman because of his realizations, because he is not an atheist? Is it clarity that has made him mad? The madman seems to understand that without God, mankind will fall. The madman is speaking to atheists, but at no time do we learn that the madman himself is an atheist. Must we assume that the madman is a theist? For this would make sense because he is proclaiming that God has been killed, and this statement can only be held by one who once believed that God was alive. Nietzsche himself was an atheist, and ironically, Nietzsche also descended to madness before his death.
The next critical analysis that must be conducted to understand the text and Nietzsche’s thoughts is to evaluate what exactly the madman means by claiming that they have killed God. God represents myth, superstition, revelation and faith. God is morality and gives order and meaning to life. So, without God, Nietzsche, or more specifically, the madman, claims in his text that the sun, the horizon, and it seems, the existence of humankind, has been, or will be, wiped away by the death of God. Is this a proclamation that in removing God from humankind, we have removed morality? Without morality, can mankind survive? Nietzsche’s later work addresses this, but from this text alone, we are left with these questions. The human being creates what is his or her reality. Through religion, we created, or at least have given an explanation for, the world: God, the sun and the sea. We created God to provide ourselves with morals, restraint and direction. Thus, we have the ability to kill it all, to destroy it. Yet, if we do destroy it, we are destroying morality, or at least morality as it has always been understood by mankind.
Nietzsche leaves the reader with a very serious question: What happens if God is not the source of morality? Would we create our own values? What would those values be like? This is what has made the madman mad. Also, this could also be why the madman has proclaimed that he has come too soon. The madman sought God and found that he had been killed. He is left confused and lost. Would the loss of God leave mankind in a perpetual state of confusion or is there another source of humanness? A source that, according to the madman, mankind is not ready to explore. Is it’s Nietzsche’s goal, and the madman’s goal, to free the atheists from trying to live toward a morality that can be destroyed? In Nietzsche’s further writings, it is the will to power that he claims must be our quest.
George Bataille and Annette Michelson attempted to explain Nietzsche’s madness in writings. Published in 1986, an excerpt explains Nietzsche attempt in this parable as well as Nietzsche’s life: “He who once understood that in madness alone lies man’s completion is led to make a clear choice not between madness and reason but between the lie of a nightmare that justifies snores and the will to self-mastery and victory.”
Sigmund Freud
The super-ego applies the strictest moral standards to the helpless ego which is at its mercy, in general it represents the claims of morality and we realise all at once that our moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension between the ego and super ego. It is a most remarkable experience to see morality, which is supposed to have been given us by God and thus deeply implanted in us, functioning as a periodic phenomenon. Freud New Introductory Letters on Psychoanalysis 60.
Freud described the human personality as having three parts: the ego, the id and the superego. Each of these parts conflict with one another, creating a battlefield for the human being. The id is the instinctual component of the human psyche. It is unconscious but is the primary source of personality. The ego organizes thoughts and represents reason. It is conscious and operates according to reality. The superego is internalization of values and morals. The ego is the conscious person that is motivated by the id and restricted by the superego.
It is the superego that Freud claims to be the source of morality. The superego is developed last and results from values received from the familial and societal structures one is raised. The superego imposes rules upon individuals and strives for perfection. The superego creates guilt and anxiety within the person in order to enforce its rules. These rules are moral rules, according to Freud. Instead of being given by God, they are innate and implanted within us.
The superego attempts to ensure that the id and ego follow particular moral rules. It exists to ensure morality and to maintain order. This means that there is a part of us that is morality, that clearly knows right from wrong. This also presupposes that there is a part of us that is not moral, or that has the desire or capability to act contrary to right. Is it possible, though, that this part, the id, does not know the difference? In not knowing the difference, or in ignoring the superego, the id acts immoral. If the superego is not developed, it is not ignoring the ego, the id is simply acting how it acts. Could this explain the reason that serial killers exist? They do not have the developed superego to impose restrictions on the id, and the id acts as it chooses.
Freud’s approach to morality is quite different than Nietzsche’s in that he does not acknowledge or indicate that the source of morality is God. In fact, Freud notes that it is remarkable to learn that morality is within humans. However, I would give much more credit to Nietzsche in not ignoring God as a source of morality for mankind. As it is true that those who profess morality do so from religious sources. The parent did not make up the moral code for his or he child. The parent of the parent did not make it up either. This moral code had to have been taught and learned. This idea is contrary to Freud’s thought, however. According to Freud, morality is innate, and so is immoral behavior. Yet, interestingly, his argument makes sense to the extent that it explains evil acts and violence.
As noted in other Freud writings, he proclaims that mankind would be better off if he or she were less restricted by the superego, or less moral . This, Freud argued, is because the production of anxiety by the superego is not an ideal state. A sensitive conscience causes discomfort and suffering.
This concept of the three parts of the personality has been studied for years, but has been discredited and replaced by a variety of other theoretical and philosophical discourses. However, there seems to be some sense in this concept. In fact, there has been recent research in the field of metacognition that supports Freud’s superego. Metacognition is the idea of knowing that we know or awareness of our conscious thought processes. Moral metacognition involves thinking about thinking on morality. Although this is not exactly the same as Freud’s superego idea, since the superego does not involve moral reasoning, the moral metacognition analysis has underpinnings of Freud’s theory and may more accurately describe morality in the mind of an individual. This is true because I believe that reasoning must occur when morality questions arise for a person. This reasoning involves more than just the guilt and anxiety imposed by the superego.
References
Babette, B., 2006. Nietzsche's Gay Science. A Companion to Nietzsche, p. 97.
Bataille, G. & Michelson, A., 1986. Nietzsche's Madness. Georges Bataille: Writing on Laughter, Sacrafice,Nietzsche, Un-Knowing, Volume 36, pp. 42-45.
Goldhill, O., 2016. Growing research in neuroscience shows Freud's idea of a superego isn't as wacy as it sounds. Scientific Psyche.
Jones, D. H., 1966. Freud's Theory of Moral Conscience. Philosophy, 41(155), pp. 34-57.
Lacewing, M., n.d. Nietzsche on morality and human nature. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Lapley, D. K. & Stey, P. C., 2011. Id, Ego and Superego. Encyclopedia of Human Behavior.
Siegfried, W., 2014. The Formation and Structure of the Human Psyche. Athene Noctua: Undergraduate Philosophy Journal, Issue 2.
