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Essay / Nietzsche and Hegel - 838
Nietzsche's master-slave morality describes how moral standards have evolved through the ages, from pre-Scocratic times to the modern era based on Christian beliefs and Jews. In pre-Socratic times, value was dominated and implemented by the ruling class, who considered themselves and what they did to be good. Value was defined in their terms of good: what was good for the main class was good in itself. This notion of value was conceived in the sense of nobility and purity, which included traits such as courage, beauty, will and happiness. The master class said yes to existence and their values affirmed their belief system which, due to their position of control, created their disposition as an elite and influenced the moral standards of their time. Since the masters considered themselves good, they distinguished themselves from weaker individuals, those who did not hold power, as evil. The weaker individuals, called plebeians in pre-Socratic times, according to the master class, were weaker for various reasons. Whether due to their misfortune, victimization in unfortunate circumstances, weak willpower or lack of courage, pride or a combination of any of these despicable or non-virtuous values. According to the ruling class, adherence to these weak values initiated a form of fear within the plebeian, which created a lack of self-esteem and a lack of freedom or self-awareness, considered slavery . According to Nietzsche, a slave revolt in morality begins when the oppressed or slaves begin to reevaluate the values of the oppressors or masters. In the historical process of the West, the reevaluation of morality began through the Jews, who felt resentment towards their oppressors. Resentment referring to middle of paper ...... is an account of the birth of self-awareness through intersubjectivity or integration within culture. It is a dialectical interpretation which acts, for Hegel, as a form of perception of the way in which the self comes to know itself through the other and through historical processes. The master/slave dialectic is one of the first explanations of intersubjectivity and also a lack of intersubjectivity because it is not based on equal recognition. Self-consciousness, for Hegel, is only obtained through recognition by another independent self. The human world is a world based on recognition, and human beings carry within themselves the desire to be recognized by other human beings. Hegel proposes that one cannot become a self-conscious individual without seeing oneself in another, and that each individual bases his existence on a world based on recognition..