The Fault of the Greatest Evil in This Entire World

Authenticity and Evil By Adam Seeman The fault of the greatest evil in this entire world, of all those murdered throughout the years en masse, is also at the fault of the greatest innovation and good in the world: authenticity. Evil occurs when an authentic individual develops a noble-slave morality because of their paradoxical feelings of ressentiment and strength resulting from a deep existential loneliness. An authentic man acts on the feelings of being alone amongst an inauthentic society and attempts to remove the cause of his loneliness. This deep existential loneliness creates feels of Nietzsche’s slave and noble morality, which combine and can be see most profoundly in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. This explanation contrasts with Hannah Arendt’s conclusion for the Holocaust and instead places the blame at the exercise of authenticity and the noble-slave morality in pursuit of the destruction of inauthenticity. Authenticity leads to existential loneliness, which leads to the noble-slave morality, which leads to evil. First and foremost, a proper definition of authenticity must be arrived upon before the argument may continue. Authenticity emerges from existentialism and is commonly held to mean that an individual is staying true to oneself, and is able to define oneself separate from outside distinctions. Another important definition of authenticity is that it is a unique quality of certain individuals; if everyone was authentic, such a definition would be meaningless. As for the path to authenticity, Kierkegaard proposed that there were “three levels of existence-the aesthetic, ethical, and religious 1 ” and that “one at the religious level would be called upon to do something that goes against the universal norm 2 ” while Heidegger proposed that “Only by taking 1 Barrett, William. Irrationa l Man: a Study in Existential Philosophy . Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Print. 2 Ibid.

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The Fault of the Greatest Evil in This Entire World