Major Philosophical Theories on History and Human Nature

Immanuel Kant: Nature's Plan in History

Kant attempts to justify how history responds to a thread—a plan proposed by nature that is independent of each man's free decisions. Kant discovers this purpose, or nature's plan, within history. In other words, Kant explains these theses or ideas about this plan within his historical discourse.

Karl Marx: Historical Materialism

The proposed text contains the basic theses or statements of historical materialism, which is the Marxist conception of history.

Ortega y Gasset: The Philosophy of Life

Ortega insists on the reform of philosophy as a study of the radical figure of the universe. This is neither the nature or cosmic being, as the Greeks desired, nor the thinking self or subjective being, as the moderns (Cartesian idealism) wanted. Instead, life is not a new situation, but a dynamic coexistence of the self with things, with the world, and with its circumstances. This requires a new ontology or theory of reality, which is none other than that of Heraclitus, because life is a changing reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Origin of Morality

Nietzsche seeks to investigate the origin of the basic notions of morality, such as good and bad. With an irrationalist's distrust of reason to address the problem of morality, he chooses the right path: returning to the original meaning of good and evil and studying the conceptual change or transformation they have experienced in our culture. Democracy has been one of the causes of such inversion or metamorphosis.

The Priestly Caste and the Inversion of Values

He discusses the antithesis between the priestly caste and the caste of warriors and lords, as well as the table of values peculiar to each caste. It is the impotence of the priestly caste which leads to hatred; this hatred and resentment are the roots of the inversion of values.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Superman

In the foreword to the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the basic idea is as follows: man is a transit and a sunset. By rejecting Western culture—based on the morality of commoners, the capacity of reason, metaphysics, and belief in God—man must pass (transit) to surpass himself and reach the superman. The first is the 'last man' (decadent, the holy, and the wise); the second is the future man, the superman. In Zarathustra's Discourses, he describes the three transformations or metamorphoses of man to reach the superman.