Conversation Between Henry and Nietzche
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After death, people who don’t believe in religions are not allowed to enter either the heaven or the hell. Since no none have they believed in, eventually no one shall dominate or shelter them. With complete freedom and nothing else, their souls wander around the world endlessly, trying to encounter with some other soul to talk with. And one day there meets the soul of Lord Henry Wotton and the soul of Friedrich Nietzsche.
LORD HENRY: What a pleasure meeting you. It’s hard to believe that I can see you in person one day – or maybe in soul – the intelligent Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher with even greater fame.
NIETZSCHE: I am far from intelligent, even though I am pursuing intelligence and real truth throughout my whole life and death. May I have the honor to know who is the gentlemen standing in front of me?
LORD HENRY: Of course, you don’t know me. When I was published, you were at the edge of psychological breakdown. I am Henry Wotton, an aristocrat in the Victorian culture and also the main character in Oscar Wilde’s philosophical novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is so much entertainment talking to a person who only believe in real truth as an imaginary character. If my existence by any means has offended your values and turned you crazier, please forgive me.
NIETZSCHE: In no means shall I be offended. I completely accept and even have expected a conversation between us – between a real me and an imaginary you. Because in philosophy, such conversations should happen, as “in morality man treats himself not as individuum but as dividuum (Nietzsche 74).” Maybe you are just part of me, asserting opinions that the other parts of me agree or disagree with. Now, do you mind make some comments on morality so that I can tell whether you are me?
LORD HENRY: This sounds ridiculous but I am happy to help you examine your hypothesis. As far as I have observed, morality itself is immoral.
NIETZSCHE: How So?
LORD HENRY: Tell me. Are humans born moral or imperfect and evil?
NIETZSCHE: The latter. I have to admit that “evil is the characterizing expression for man, indeed for every living being one supposes to exist, for a god, for example; human, divine mean the same thing as diabolical, evil (Nietzsche 72).” Humans are born imperfect, but they do have the potential to be changed and cease to be evil.
LORD HENRY: Well, let’s put human’s potential capability on the side and think about the immorality of morality. I say so because, to pursue morality is to deny one’s previous evil self, and to urge morality is to influence others and change their inherent human nature. “All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view. Because to influence a person is to give him ones own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone elses music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize ones nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to ones self (Wilde 19).” They abandon their true-selves and try to fit into a unified framework of being moral. But restraining one’s natural instincts and desires can only result in pain and suffering of self-denial. “I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism … The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals (20).” Therefore, since we are not moral by nature, trying to change ourselves or others moral is immoral by nature.
NIETZSCHE: I see your points and almost completely agree with you.
LORD HENRY: What parts of my argument do you agree?
NIETZSCHE: I agree that morality may lead to sufferings. “Signs of goodness, benevolence, sympathy are received fearfully as a trick, a prelude with a dreadful termination, a means of confusing and outwitting, in short as refined wickedness (Nietzsche 72).”
The terror