SOCY 151 - Lecture 14 - Nietzsche on Power, Knowledge and
Morality Lecture 14 - Nietzsche on Power, Knowledge and Morality
Today we take a bridge into the twentieth century, constructed
by Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber's critical theory. Each author is
different in important ways, but they also agree on two crucial
points: we must subject our consciousness and assumptions to
critical scrutiny and, along with increasing liberation and
rationalization in some ways, modern society also has repressive
elements. Nietzsche is the oldest of these thinkers; he dies in
1900 and stops working a decade before due to mental illness.
While he was ill, his sister, a proto-Nazi and associate of
Hitler, cared for him. Her control of his papers and how they
were released to the public painted him as a proto-Nazi himself,
but reading his whole oeuvre illuminates that Nietzsche
subjected Judaism and Christianity to the same scrutiny. In The
Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche attempts to use the genealogy
method to be critical of mode