Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche and Its Influence on Jim Morrisons Life
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The masterpiece Beyond Good and Evil was created in Nietzsches most prolific period, when he was mostly enthusiastic with power, strength, individuality, and life.
Nietzsche was probably the strongest critic of morality: “Vital and invaluable in each morality is the fact that it is a long-term compulsion ” (93, translation mine). He broke off moral tradition and proposed instead, often mutually exclusive, his own ideology of “new thinking” – mankind is grounded only due to a birth of a genius and the flourishing of culture. He clearly distinguished between morality of lords and morality of slaves, which is a crucial point of the division of people into the strong and the weak. The basic difference of “low” and “high souls” is “the desire of freedom and instinct of happiness” (181). He glorified the strong saying that “enormous things are for enormous people” (48), or that “independence is a feature of very few people – this is a privilege of the strong” (38). Dignity, honor, firmness, ruthlessness belong to the features which Nietzsche adored. Individuals of such qualities should have a right to execute their priority and, thus, only the lords can dictate morality. He was the first to have coined the term “superman”, a person devoid of weak and low qualities. He disdained “a coward, a fearful, a petty-minded a dog kind of a man, who allowed others to mishandle him …” (179).
Nietzsche proclaimed egoism by claiming that “common good” denied itself, for everything that was common was of low quality. He charged morality with fiction, because ethics said about not egoistic things and behaviors, and such non-egoistic phenomena practically did not exist.
The philosopher reckoned that people should have will: “A human being wants foremost and gives vent to his power – life itself is a will of power …” (21). Those devoid of the will are called “rotten inside” and, according to Nietzsche, it would be better for them if they died as early as possible to spare suffering and unpleasant views.
Generally, Nietzsche simply wanted to live in accordance with laws of nature – lords should rule and slaves should be subordinated to their masters.
Commonsensical Jim Morrison was able to differentiate which aspects of Nietzschean philosophy would fit in with his philosophy. However, he chose some of them carelessly, as Ray Manzarek reminisced: “it was Friedrich Nietzsche, who killed Jim Morrison” (Hopkins, Sugerman 106). Jim adopted many elements of Nietzschean philosophy about strength, lif, and individualism but refused to treat certain groups of people as unworthy of living.
Morrison accepted German vision on the division of people, but more with indulgency. He knew that there were people willing to, but afraid to, live, and those, who did not realize their lives due to a system. Jim selectively accepted Nietzschean segregation. Morrison agreed with the statement that “a social structure consisting of many souls” (26) can be ruled and ordered, but he preferred to use masses to conduct experiments on them and to test them (see 1.2. for different kinds of tests Jim applied his “testers”), ot to try to convert them into true living life.
Jim entirely “ingested” Nietzsches view on “the power of moral superstition, which makes harm, limits, blinds, and deforms” (29). Morrison hated systems, norms, schemes. He dreaded anything that limited his freedom. Following Nietzsches viewpoint that: “Each exquisite man by instinct aims at a stronghold and a secret, where he is rescued from the crowd, from many …” (35), Morrison regarded poetry as his stronghold, far away from the fake and illogical morality of the masses. No external factors limited his writing and nobody investigated the properness and correctness of his poems.
Nietzsche noticed that