Hi everyone, I have a philosophy essay on Marx and Nietzsche. There are 3 questions and you may only need to answer ONLY ONE topic for a total of no more than 3-4 pages essay (explain to the reader as best you can only to the degree to inform the reader).

Answer ONLY ONE!

1) Marx and Engels claim that “The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle.” (The Communist Manifesto). Classes exist because of the “political economy” (capitalism). PROVIDE QUOTATIONS from the text of the Manuscripts.

Form a coherent essay in which you answer the following:

• What is labor for Plato? Re: education/nature – the practical. Explain.
• What is labor for Marx? (Alienation, objectification, estrangement). Explain/describe.
• Without capitalism and the class structure, human nature, Marx claims, “will be enriched”.
• Do you think this claim is valid? Do you think Plato’s Republic offers a better chance of enrichment?

2) Form a coherent essay in which you answer the following:

• What is human nature for Nietzsche? Explain/describe.
• What does human nature mean in terms of Nietzsche’s central desire to “go beyond good and evil”? See Twilight of the Idols.
• If “God is dead” what would that mean for Augustine’s Christian philosophy? PROVIDE Quotations from the text of Twilight.
• Lastly, What do you think?

3) Form a coherent essay in which you answer the following:

• What is Nietzsche’s theory of The Overman? Explain/describe.
• An Overman, Nietzsche says, will “remain faithful to the earth”.
• In other words, there will be no desire or need for the soul, God, immortality, heaven.
• “None of these fictions can solve the problem of the value of existence,” asserts Nietzsche.

It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds – this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more…this created all gods and afterworlds…

Many sick people have always been among the poetizers and God-cravers; furiously they hate the lover of knowledge and that youngest among the virtues, which is called ‘honesty’…

Listen rather, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body; that is a more honest and purer voice. More honestly and purely speaks the healthy body that is perfect and perpendicular: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth. (Zarathustra)

Respond to these three:

• Critically reflect/analyze the above text from Nietzsche.

• What do you think of Nietzsche’s claim?
• Is there a “value to existence”? Explain what it might be.

I have attached the essay instruction, Twilight of the idols – nietzsche reading, and Marx-Manyscripts.