Reading Qs for 5/15
May 13, 20081. Nietzsche begins part two with a contrast between humans and other animals. What is the distinction?
2. What is the relationship between memory, forgetting, promises and responsibility?
3. Why might Nietzsche argue that morality actually makes us less responsible?
4. How does Nietzsche think we have developed our sense of responsibility/promises?
5. How does Nietzsche describe reason? (926-7)
6. What, according to Nietzsche, is a “bad conscience”? (927)
7. What is the logic of debt, according to Nietzsche? Why does he describe it as cruel?
8. Nietzsche describes humans variously as the interesting animal, the calculating animal, the valuing animal. How do these characteristics of human beings relate to power?
9. How does Nietzsche explain the rise of punishment and the penal system? How does it relate to ressentiment?
10. What is the relationship between punishment and a turn inward? (939)
11. What does Nietzsche have to say about the moral value of the “unegoistic” inidividual? (941)
12. What does Nietzsche mean when he says that bad conscience is an illness “but an illness as pregnancy is an illness”? (941)
13. On 945 Nietzsche addresses the relationship between creation and destruction. Do you see any parallels with the passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra (distributed in class)?
