If nothing got caught, I am not to blame, there were no fish.
Friday, 18 March 2011
Nietzschean Psychology and Sociology.
In what follows I will attempt to draw out certain Nietzschean fundamentals and speculations regarding human psychology, and to apply these in an attempt to understand ourselves and our social world more accurately and honestly.
I have decided that the "will to power" be largely absent from this solitary dialectic, since it's status is, quite *rightly*, hotly contested. For the present purposes, the concept is not really necessary, and can be seen as addressing, in one form or another, the problems of masochism, asceticism, and various forms of self-negation and self-castigation. Nietzsche's investigation of these phenomena *preceded* his announcement of the WP in *Zarathustra.*
In other words, I consider much of Nietzsche's analysis (especially from *Human, All Too Human* to *The Gay Science*) regarding "power" to be profoundly insightful, subtle, and illuminating. On the other hand, I find no convincing arguments or evidence from Nietzsche (or science) which justifies the later (post *Gay Science*) claims that WP is primordial and omnipresent in all psychology, physiology or nature.
I shall begin by offering a general outline and overview of what is to follow.
Internally:
1. All humans, without a single exception, are necessarily self-serving. 2. This term "self-serving" is misleading, since no unified "self" exists. 3. The "Self" here denotes the totality of our organism (see. TSZ.1.4), and does not refer simply to consciousness. 4. Our organism is structured like an Oligarchy. 5. Our drives are much more fundamental and decisive than our thoughts. 6. Our organism consists of a diverse multiplicity of parts, many of them contradictory. 7. We simply do not know what causes our thoughts, feelings and actions. 8. The Ego is NOT to be confused with the Self. 9. The Ego does NOT represent the totality of our organism. It does not have all the facts at its disposal, and it is not autonomous. 10. The Ego is an instrument of the Self (and the nature of the Self is essentially unknown; hence the "serving" part of "self-serving" is also problematic). 11. Every thought, feeling and action expresses the net identity of the contingent Self at any particular moment.
Externally.
12. Every self-serving Self is inevitably confronted by others self's of the same general nature. 13. In this social environment much sublimation, redirection, self-deception, compromise, alliances, and conflict take place. i.e. much "breadth" and "depth" of soul, much spiritual complexity, is acquired. 14. Every Other represents a potential enemy or ally in negotiating one's way in the world, and every Other has the same relationship to you.
Before continuing, it needs to be said that the position being advocated here appals, depresses, disgusts and horrifies me. This, of course, raises important questions regarding the status of the "will to truth" which I will, however, leave till later. . . But for now it is worth making explicit the chasm that often exists between belief and desire.
To continue: everything said so far can be found not only in Nietzsche, but also, in a slightly different and less developed form, in Pascal (who was, in many respects, a "Christian Nietzsche"!). I agree fully with both of these thinkers that the general picture sketched above is the background reality of our existence, within which all nuance, subtlety and complexity finds its place.
Let us begin with the apparently antithetical concepts "selfishness" and "unselfishness". The latter is commonly understood with reference to the effects or intended effects of our thoughts, feelings and actions on the welfare of others. Here the interests of the self are supposed to be missing, absent, rendered impotent, from the causal antecedents and likely consequences, of our actions.
Unless we grant morality a genuinely metaphysical existence and significance (which we unequivocally don't), there is no reason to entertain this fictitious and incredible binary. We simply lack any credible motivational theory to account for the actions of the self.
Nietzsche addressed this question early on: "A good author, who really cares about his subject, wishes that someone would come and destroy him by representing the same subject more clearly and by answering every last question contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover's faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, if needs be her health, her strength.
But are these all unegoistic states?
Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer's phrase, "impossible and yet real"? Is it not rather clear that in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when some obstinate man says, "I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man's way".
The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above‑mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not "selfless." In morality, man treats himself not as an "individuum," but as a "dividuum." (HAH.57).
And in HATH.133, Nietzsche claims that "No one has ever done anything that was soley for the sake of another and without a personal motive. How indeed could he do anything that was not related to himself, thus without an inner necessity (which simply must have its basis in a personal need)? How could the ego act without ego?"
And later, in Daybreak he states that" If only those actions are moral which are performed for the sake of another and only for his sake, as one definition has it, then there are no moral actions"(D.148).
A brief digression on the thoughts of a few others who share this belief: Socrates held (along with Protagoras) that whatever a man does he always does the "good", as he contingently and imperfectly understands it. If we ignore here Socrates' optimism regarding the possibility of reason to allow us to discriminate more adequately between differing routes and destinations regarding the "good", then the background motivational theory, its inescapable "narcissism", is identical to Nietzsche's position, since we are not permitted to view the Socratic "good" in a Christianised, ascetic light. The same goes for Aristotle and his conception of "virtue". Dostoyevsky too, though he explicitly rejects the Socratic optimism regarding a response to this question, agrees with its founding axiom, that whatever we do, and however it may appear to ourselves and others, we are always seeking our own "advantage" (see Notes from Underground). We also find the Christian Pascal saying the same thing: "All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and others do not is the same desire . . .The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every man, including those who go and hang themselves"(Pensees.148), and, "The ordinary life of men is like that of saints. They all seek satisfaction, and differ only according to the object in which they locate it. Those they call their enemies are those that prevent them etc" (Pensees.275). And, of course we have Spinoza, asserting that "The primary and sole foundation of virtue, or of the proper conduct of life, is to seek our own profit".
For rather obvious reasons, this depiction of humanity has not been short of critics. But what, we must ask, would an alternative motivational theory look like? How would it seek to account for a thought, feeling, or action? How can an organism perform X without some constitutional, some internal preference for X? Without some physiological/cathectic relationship with X, what other factor exists within the organism that can bring about X? The causal antecedents of X must pass through the self, must take place within the self, thus the self cannot be an indifferent and impotent bystander in this process. It must, by definition, be an interested party, otherwise X would not be performed.
The preceding remarks make clear Nietzsche's disbelief in the concept of selflessness. Yet the "selfishness" that remains and is unavoidably omnipresent in all of our activity remains a bewilderingly complex and problematic phenomenon. This is because our interestedness, our advantage, our preferences, can be located in the most diverse and antithetical positions, depending upon our internal constitution and external context and options. Thus we can choose altruism, self-denigration, self-neglect, martyrdom, asceticism, and suicide. This begs the question: who/what is making these choices and why?
From TSZ onwards, there is a part of Nietzsche which wants to explain everything (quite literally) with the WP. For several reasons, I see no good reason to take these speculations seriously. Unfortunately, Nietzsche seems to have succumbed to the failings and temptations of the philosopher that he so profoundly explored in Daybreak 542. We do Nietzsche and ourselves no favours by dignifying his errors. Nor am I impressed by certain scholars who seek to further their career by peddling such empty metaphysical nonsense. Nietzsche, in my view, is badly served by modern academia, whose prevailing instincts and moral intuitions are anything but Nietzschean! How could things be otherwise. Here I agree with Michael Tanner; Nietzsche's vanity may well have been flattered by his eventual acceptance by academia after so many years of neglect, but this elation would have soon passed and been seen by him as a profound defeat. Our present day culture is far more "decadent", far more embracing of the "Last Man", far more in love with "slave morality" than Nietzsche's own time, and our academics have encouraged and facilitated this degradation as much as anyone.
To resume: I reject any metaphysical reading of WP. I also reject WP as the totality in the psychological sphere. However, I do think the concept has great explanatory power as long as we see it as a part, and not the whole, of affective and psychological life. While there is no denying that one Nietzsche is powerfully drawn to the WP in its most ambitious forms, there is also another Nietzsche, who persists till the end, that is more modest and self-critical, and this is the Nietzsche I follow. To return to the question: who/what determines our actions and why?
It is clear that Nietzsche does not believe that consciousness or the will is the answer to this riddle. I find most of his numerous arguments in support of this position completely convincing, and, I may add, I also find that my own personal attempts to seriously confront this question (via self-analysis) leads to the same shocking conclusion; namely, that consciousness and the will explains little or nothing of great consequence (e.g. WP.676). ". . .sufficient reason for understanding that this problem [determining value] is for us an inaccessible problem. When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we establish values" (TI.5.5)
Biologists now inform us that the "meaning" of life has been discovered and that it resides in gene propagation! One wonders what Nietzsche would have made of this, and what adjustments to his work it would have provoked? And yet, there is another sense in which it would have made no significant difference. I say this because Nietzsche's primary concerns are culture, psychology, suffering, meaning, and nobility, and these high level concerns remain what they are regardless of the reality at the lowest level of biological life.
I pause here briefly to note Daniel Dennett's advocacy of the gene's cultural equivilent, "meme's", following the work of Richard Dawkins. Dennett is no fool, but I can't understand the "meme" thesis he champions, and it's not for the wont of trying.
Nietzsche is clear that we simply do not know why we think, feel and act as we do, that these are all resultant states, the genesis and development of which we are largely unaware of. At this point, the WP rears its (conceptually) ugly head. Nietzsche, at times, argues that all motion, all organic being, is a manifestation of WP, and that when a thought, feeling or action occurs, it does so because, at this particular contingent time and place, such a manifestation is the optimal expression of WP that our organism is capable of. There is no denying that Nietzsche was, at times, very committed to this picture. However it's also true that, in my view, he ultimately offers no credible evidence to support it in any coherent fashion. Suffice to say that I don't buy it. What I do buy, however, is that the feeling of "power" (inadequately precise though it is) DOES in fact account for a great deal of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. This deflated sense of WP, as one very important "drive" among others, is, if true, still extremely significant.
But, even when we grant the existence of WP in partly determining our thoughts, feelings and actions, it still leaves us in the dark as to why precisely this, rather than that, thought, feeling and action offered the greatest sensation of WP. The fluidity and plasticity of WP means that it can be found effectively anywhere, in any thought, feeling, and action, no matter how apparently self diminishing.
Weakness, decadence, passivity, self-loathing, altruism, are all, according to Nietzsche, expressions of WP; devout followers of Jainism, just as much as the most violent and predatory barbarians, share the same dispositional substratum. Either forms of self-diminution are merely apparent, merely circuitous routes to our own advancement (however subjectively and contingently identified), or, alternatively: "'Not to seek one's own advantage' - that is merely a moral fig leaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: 'I no longer know how to find my advantage" (TI.Expd.35).
Much of GM can be seen as an elaboration of the position outlined in Daybreak 113's "The striving for distinction" passage, where the violent barbarian, the all-loving God, and the resolute ascetic are seen as manifestations of the same fundamental drive. Unfortunately, by the time of GM and beyond Nietzsche is increasingly a propagandist who, at times, is reluctant to admit that "decadence" is merely as mask of WP, and he tries (pretends) to treat it as an alien substance. However, his intellectual conscience continually reasserts itself, and even in his last years one can find plenty of examples where he explicitly admits the underlying homogeneity of all events.
The point here is that merely saying that we think, feel and act in a way that automatically expresses the self's search for optimising WP doesn't really get us very far, for it's very omnipresence means that in appearing to explain everything it explains almost nothing. It's predictive power is virtually nil. All the theory can do is, after the event, say that WP was (perhaps) the driving force. There is also the not inconsiderable fact that Nietzsche, the man, was contemptuous of almost every manifestation of WP he encountered in the world and history. This is a major reason why I can't take him seriously as an "affirmer". "Affirmer" is precisely what he was not!
Crass domination can be an expression of weakness and the most consistent meekness can be a means of self-assertion. Nietzsche, as a psychologist of the highest rank, knows this better than anyone. If, at bottom, we accept the homogeneity of all events, we immediately encounter the problematic between the part and whole. From the perspective of the totality we can (intellectually, abstractly) affirm the innocence of all becoming. But, as BGE.9 reminds us, we simply can't "live" according to the indifference that Nature really is. As parts we are incapable of mirroring the reality of the whole, and this ensures that our dominant and most cherished evaluations will NOT be rooted in impersonal, objective, actuality. This picture, of course, can be very anxiety provoking but also, for some, liberating. For me it is overwhelmingly the former. But the crucial point is that there are good and inescapable reasons for rejecting the genetic fallacy and for recognising when and why different levels of analysis are appropriate in different contexts (e.g. the will to truth "might be a concealed will to death" (GS.344)). This tension, between the will to truth and the awareness that fruitfulness often depends upon error and ignorance, is everywhere in Nietzsche, and this is the unsettling problem that must afflict every profound thinker.
Here, of course, is where the figure of Zarathustra enters, hoping for the emergence of the Ubermensch who will be able to digest these pebbles and thorns without significant indigestion. I tend to view TSZ and the ubermensch generally as a heroic and heartrending failure. "Ideal and material.- The ideal you envisage is noble, but are you a noble enough stone to be made into such a divine image? Anyway, is your work not that of a barbarous sculptor? Is it not a blasphemy against your ideal?" (GS.215).
For Nietzsche, "actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable" (BGE.287), and "states of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example -every psychologist knows this - are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts" (A.39).
Nietzsche consistently claims that our physiological identity, rather than any dialectic, introspection, or environment, plays the most determining role in our lives, and the importance he attaches to the body, its internal configuration and constitution, begs a number of important questions. Such as: If actions, states of consciousness and beliefs are not to be trusted, are not reliable representations of what the fractured and contingent Self actually wants, how on earth is self-knowledge and self-advancement possible? At this point, BGE.230 & BGE.231 appear to me to be especially significant. Section 230 deals explicitly with "that commanding something", that "fundamental will of the spirit", which, given its "perceived" conditions of preservation and growth, helps determines our behaviour. This behaviour is tailored by what Nietzsche calls our "digestive power" (. . .indeed, 'the spirit' is more like a stomach than anything else"), our capacity to advance, appropriate, assimilate and utilise new experiences in our quest for "the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power".
Those experiences that we can't successfully digest effectively "explains", Nietzsche believes, the predisposition we have for ignorance, stupidity, error, and falsification.
How then, do we account for the "man of knowledge", one who seeks to "translate man back into nature", and who therefore possess "a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience", which rejects edifying and superficial lies and uncovers hard, ugly, repulsive truths and uncertainties, and who therefore says NO when his heart and vanity would most like to say Yes?
"'Why have knowledge at all?' -Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer. . ." (BGE.230).
And the best answer he can find is that: "Learning transforms us, it does that which all nourishment does which does not merely 'preserve' . . . But at the bottom of us, 'right down deep', there is, to be sure, something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decisions and answers to predetermined selected questions. In the case of every cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable 'this is I'. . . One sometimes comes upon certain solutions to problems which inspire strong belief in us; perhaps one henceforth calls the one's 'convictions'. Later - one sees them only as footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem which we are - more correctly, to the great stupidity which we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable 'right down deep'. (BGE.231).
BGE.25. deals with the same problem and demonstrates a painful awareness of a form of the great stupidity to which the thinker is prone in the form of an explicit warning which "addresses itself to the most serious" of his readers who may see themselves as martyrs for truth.
Nietzsche himself is prone to this affect:"But there is a kind of denying and destroying that is the discharge of that mighty longing for sanctification and salvation. . . All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied: being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true without falsehood. That is why the truthful man feels that the meaning of his activity is metaphysical, explicable through the laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest sense affirmative: however much all that he does may appear to be destructive of the laws of this life and a crime against them . . . He will, to be sure, destroy his earthly happiness through his courage; he will have to be an enemy to those he loves and to the institutions which produced him; he may not spare men or things even though he suffers when they suffer; he will be misunderstood and for a long time thought an ally of powers he abhors; however much he may strive after justice he is bound, according to the human limitations of his insight, to be unjust: but he may console himself with the words once employed by his great teacher, Schopenhauer: 'A happy life is impossible: the highest that man can attain to is heroic one " (UM.111.4).
Now in GM Nietzsche contends that what "every animal" strives for "instinctively" is "an optimum of favourable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power" (GM.3.7)(cf D.119). This, naturally, applies to the ascetic philosopher just as much as to the vulgar hedonist. The former simply has very different conditions of preservation and growth. This insight is difficult for a serious (and suffering) thinker such as Nietzsche to contemplate and consent to, for it removes much of the "worthy verbal pomp" and "ancient false finery" traditionally associated with the "lover of wisdom"(BGE.231). But for Nietzsche there is no escape from entanglement with "the great stupidity which we are" (BGE.231), and the highest that the philosopher can attain in this predicament is to affirm (viscerally) the concept of "Gay Science".
However, this is easier said than done for Nietzsche, for it necessitates an ironic and rather comical and mocking view of oneself and existence, which can, all too rapidly slide into nihilistic terror and nausea at the falsity, futility and meaningless of all our activity and the whole black comedy of existence. (cf.GS.1).
A student of human nature, confronted by its bewildering plasticity and indirection, by the numerous forms and circuitous routes it can take in conformity with its nature and circumstance, can spend a lifetime in this dark labyrinth and never emerge into the daylight with its solution. Such is the spectrum of human types, of what Nietzsche refers to as "the luxuriance of a prodigal play and change of forms" (T.I.5.6), that the very concept of a "human nature" begins to look too limiting, pragmatic and artificial.
In the absence of a single, unitary and universal summum bonum with which to interpret behaviour, how is self-understanding and the understanding of others possible? Added to this is the fact that the most apparently antithetical behaviours can perhaps be guided by the same causal and teleological forces (e.g. the ascetic and barbarian of D.113 are both motivated by the "striving for distinction"). In the face of this colossal ignorance one is tempted to simply admit defeat and give up, and to understand all historical and contemporary investigations in this domain as idle curiosity and the vanity of children.
On the other hand, it would seem an error to conflate historical and functional complexity with any sort of "transcendence" and "mysticism". Here it is worth remembering that we are entirely an animal, continuous with the rest of the natural world, with every that implies. The wing of a bird, the anatomy of the cheetah, the eye of a frog, for example, are all impressively complex, but there is no reason to endow these artifacts of natural selection with any nobility of purpose or origin. Passages like Daybreak.26. are clear in understanding the "Socratic virtues" as developments and sublimations of strictly animal virtues! "Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal" (D.26).
When we look at the extremes of human behaviour, when we see suicide and martyrdom as forms of self-assertion, when we probe the paradoxes involved in "masochism", and view pronounced forms of altruism as expressions of WP, we are apt to forget that most contemporary behaviour is, relatively speaking, not so mysterious after all. On the contrary, most people seem all too easily understood; and the things they value most deeply are there for even the dullest eyes to see.
Here I shall unambiguously give expression to my inegalitarian sensibility when I state that I consider it proven beyond all doubt "how vulgar and nauseatingly uniform the masses are" and that "inertia, stupidity, mimicry, love and hunger" (and worse besides) are easily witnessed and displayed in distinctly unvarnished forms among the great majority of people. Here is a domain where Nietzsche's "good men never tell the truth" rings truer every day. In my entire life I have never encountered a single "good person" who was not profoundly wounded by the inhumanity, neglect, cruelty and malice of others. Not one. It is, of course, perfectly consistent with this picture that pointing out this obvious truth immediately lowers one's social status in the eyes of most. Even the otherwise admirable Bertrand Russell, to take but one example, was happy to stand with the crowd in his breezy dismissal of Heraclitus' praise of Teutamus because he was of the opinion that "most men are bad"; and this was written just a year or two after the holocaust!
To resume:"No, we do not love humanity" and "We are no humanitarians; we should never dare to permit ourselves to speak of our "love of humanity"; our kind is not actor enough for that" (GS.377). The fact that this level of honesty is nowhere to be found even among most supposedly "Nietzschen scholars" tells me everything I need to know about the norms of academia. The commonest way to continue this mob-appeasing dishonesty is to treat such truth-telling as a "character flaw" or idiosyncratic trait on the part of the speaker. How convenient.
In looking at the contemporary norms of human behaviour Nietzsche's Socratic/animal conflation seems, to me, entirely plausible. In one form or another, we wish to "elude one's pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one's prey" (D.26). These words remind us that we are a political animal, an animal embedded in a social and historical matrix not of our choosing and that it is largely (but not exclusively) in this social environment, and through this social environment, that most of our joys and sufferings take place. It is primarily my relations with other people that determines my success or failure in life; and my evaluation of other (non-personal) things (whether objects or ideas) can usually be traced back to my relations with others, these non-personal objects or ideas are really stand-ins, instruments, representatives, conduits, displacements, of my dependency on others for meaning and value.
Nietzsche emphasises the significance of the body, and in the words of Zarathustra:"I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war, and a peace, a herd and a herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call 'spirit', is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence" (TSZ.1.4), and that "of all forms of intelligence discovered hitherto, 'instinct' is the most intelligent" (BGE.218) (See also GS.11).
This individual body, our unique biological organism, is a fractured unity and our ego and consciousness, our apparently self-representing faculties, are constructs of the body and its configuration. This body, and every part within it, is necessarily and unavoidably selfish (in the manner articulated earlier). It's worth stressing that Nietzsche simply doesn't accept the concept of "selflessness" in any meaningful form whatsoever. However, this revaluation of selfishness must free itself from the ascetic and Christian misrepresentations of humanity that have become so dominant. For, as Henry Staten quite reasonably suggests, this omnipresent narcissism "therefore ceases to mean what it would mean if it has any antithesis" (Nietzsche's Voice. p.182). The dichotomy selfish/selfless is untenable, for genuine "selflessness" is a constitutional impossibility. What we are confronted with instead is forms of selfishness we condone and forms of selfishness we condemn.
However, it must be stressed that: ". . . these things are not said for long ears. Neither does every word belong in every mouth. They are subtle, remote things: sheep's hooves ought not to grasp for them" (TSZ.4.5).
This fractured unity, whose selfishness derives, not from any immorality but simply because it lives (BGE.259)(WP.728), did not choose to be born, did not choose its internal constitution, its parents, nor its historical time and place, and now finds itself embedded within society. The human animal is primarily a social animal, surrounded and confronted by other individuals of similar axiomatic forces.
It is very striking just how far the social world resembles the biological individual in some important respects. No matter how apparently tranquil, consensual, and liberal a society may appear it is necessarily an arena of exploitation, domination, suppression and violence. Any relative equilibrium is, in reality, the expression of power relations between the most powerful groups within the society. There is an order of rank between individual and groups with regards to the power at their disposal, and this fluid disparity between individuals and groups means that all equilibriums are contingent and provisional.
"Once one has achieved a certain degree of independence, one wants more: people arrange themselves according to their degree of force: the individual no longer simply supposes himself the equal of [all] others, he seeks his equals - he distinguishes himself from others. Individualism is followed by the formation of groups and organs; related tendencies join together and become active as a power; between these centers of power friction, war, recognition of one another's forces, reciprocation, approaches, regulation of exchange of services. Finally, an order of rank . . . One desires freedom so long as one does not posses power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still to weak to do so), one desires "justice" i.e. equal power" (WP.784).
And: "The increasing 'humanizing' of this tendency consists in this, that there is an ever subtler sense of how hard it is really to incorporate another: while a crude injury done him certainly demonstrates our power over him, it at the same time estranges his will from us even more - and thus makes him less easy to subjugate" (WP.779).
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on (WP.636).
While I reject completely the notion of WP as "precisely the will of [organic] life" I completely agree with the general picture outlined above, and I think Nietzsche is justified in saying: "Granted this is a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! (BGE.259).
It is worth stating that, in my view, Nietzsche is, at his best, a very great thinker not simply and primarily because of his "cleverness" (plenty of people are "clever") but because of his honesty and clarity on some of the most important questions;and this is, among other things, a moral question.
It needs stressing that nothing I have previously said is dependent upon any strong, metaphysical, ontological, or biological reading of WP, even though, in some of the quotations cited above Nietzsche himself is clearly taking such an possibility seriously. If the strong reading of WP was in any sense credible among living things we should expect it to be most visible in the actions of all other animal and vegetable life, since these "lower" forms of organisms cannot be said to have been "corrupted" by the likes of Plato, asceticism or Judeo-Christian slave morality. It should go without saying that those involved in the detailed study of these organisms do not take Nietzsche's speculations seriously, nor should they. The noble lion, the dreadful and magnificent "blond beast", sitting at the summit of the food chain, simply runs away when confronted by a group of hyenas, and the same principle applies to the "eagles" in GM, who, under certain conditions, mirror the timidity of the "lambs".
It tells us something quite significant about Nietzsche's own physio/psychological make-up that he frequently ignores this very obvious fact. This same fact is easily observable in Thucydides and his depiction of the vicissitudes in the historical culture that Nietzsche loved most, Periclean Athens. Once things start to go significantly wrong for the Athenians, they manifestly cease to be the sort of people Nietzsche claims to admire, and all sorts of depravity, scapegoating, decadence and anxiety come to the fore. Nietzsche can hardly cite a physiological deterioration as the reason for this reversal of character.
And yet, what Thucydides and other realists show us unquestionably is the sheer plasticity of human behaviour, the ubiquity of dissembling, hypocricy and self-interest that characterises all "advanced" societies. But our modern consciousness is so thoroughly corrupted by lies, laziness and errors (some of the beneficial) that it is extremely difficult to describe, let alone evaluate, our own species and conduct, without succumbing to despair or horror or shame or nausea; or, alternatively, without appearing to rehabilitate everything rightly called (if for the wrong reasons) "evil".
"Towards a critique of the big words. - . . . Christianity, the revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words have value only in a fight, as flags; not as realities but as showy words for something quite different (indeed, opposite!)(WP.80).
Or as he states in TI: "Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained . . . As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions . . . promote freedom mightily" (TI.Expd.38).
I can't find fault with either of these quotations; and nothing historical I have ever read, nothing contemporary I have ever witnessed, and no one I have ever met, gives me reason to think otherwise. One of the reasons I love Nietzsche (and I do love him, for all his faults) is that, unlike almost everyone else, there are certain self-edifying, widely propagated lies that he will not peddle.
This begs the question: how did we get here? How did the current form of dishonesty come about?
In addressing these questions I will make use of WP.786, although the substance at issue in what follows can be found throughout Nietzsche's work.
Nietzsche begins with two propositions: the first is that [according to the definitions of morality that dominate] the truth is that "there are no moral actions whatsoever; . . . they are completely imaginary. . . they are altogether impossible". He continues: "Through a psychological misunderstanding, one has invented an antithesis to the motivating forces, and believes one has described another kind of force; one has imagined a primum mobile [first mover] that does not exist at all. According to the valuation that evolved the antithesis "moral" and "immoral" in general, one has to say: there are only immoral intentions and actions".
The second proposition states that "there are neither moral or immoral actions" [according to the dominant understanding of morality], because "free spontaneity" is an illusion.
He proceeds by arguing that the concepts of "selflessness", "unegoistic", and "self-denying" are "all unreal, imaginary", and by pointing out how erroneous it is to posit the "ego" as coexisting with the "non-ego" in any morally meaningful sense. "Here the herd instincts were decisive: nothing is so contrary to this instinct as the sovereignty of the individual. But if the ego is conceived as something in and for itself, then its value must lie in self-negation".
He continues: "one asked: in what actions does man affirm himself most strongly? Around these (sexuality, avarice, lust to rule, cruelty, etc) prohibition, hatred, and contempt were heaped; one believed there were unselfish drives, one condemned all the selfish ones, one demanded the unselfish. As a result: what had one done? One had placed a prohibition upon all the strongest, most natural, indeed the only real drives - henceforth, in order to find an action praiseworthy, one had to deny the presence in it of such drives; - tremendous falsification in psychologicis. Even any kind of "self-satisfaction" had first to be made possible by misunderstanding and construing oneself sub specie boni [under the aspect of the good].
"Conversely, that species that derived its advantage from depriving man of his self-satisfaction (the representatives of the herd instinct; e.g. the priests and philosophers) became subtle and psychologically astute, so as to demonstrate how nonetheless selfishness ruled everywhere. Christian conclusion: "Everything is sin; even our virtues. Absolute reprehensibility of man. The unselfish action is not possible". Original sin. In short, once man had made of his instincts an antithesis to a purely imaginary world of the good, he ended by despising himself as incapable of performing actions that were "good".
"N.B. Christianity thus demonstrates an advance in the sharpening of psychological insight: La Rochefoucauld and Pascal. It grasped the essential equivalence of human actions and their equivalence of value in essentials (- all immoral).
"Now one seriously set about the task of forming men in whom selfishness was dead: -priests, saints. And if one doubted the possibility of becoming "perfect", one did not doubt that one knew what is perfect.
"The psychology of the saint, priest, the "good man" naturally had to be purely phantasmagorical. One had declared the real motives of action bad: in order to still be able to act at all, to prescribe actions, one had to describe as possible and as it were sanctify actions that are utterly impossible. . . [R]age against the instincts of life as "holy", as venerable. . . a morose eye cast on all strong qualities one possessed.
"One advances: the slandered instincts, too, try to create a right for themselves (e.g. Luther's Reformation: coarsest form of moral mendaciousness under the guise of "evangelical freedom") one rebaptized them with holy names;
the slandered instincts try to prove themselves necessary for the existence of the virtuous instincts; one must vivre, pour vivre pour autrui [live, to live for others]: egoism as a means to an end;
"One goes further, one tries to grant both the egoistic and altruistic impulses a right to exist: equal rights for the one as for the other (from the standpoint of utility);
"One goes further, one seeks a higher utility in a preference of the egoistic viewpoint over the altruistic: more useful in relation to happiness of the majority or the progress of mankind etc. Thus: a preponderance of the rights of egoism, but under the perspective of extreme altruism ("collective utility for mankind");
"One tries to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with naturalness, one seeks altruism in the foundations of life; one seeks egoism and altruism as equally founded in the essence of life and nature; one dreams of a disappearance of the antithesis in some future when, owing to continual adaptation, egoism will at the same time be altruism;
"Finally, one grasps that altruistic actions are only a species of egoistic actions - and that the degree to which one loves, spends oneself, proves the degree of individual power and personality. In short, that when one makes men more evil [i.e. more physiologically self-affirming], one makes them better - and that one cannot be one without being the other [cf.BGE.23]. At this point the curtain rises on the dreadful forgery of the psychology of man hitherto" (WP.786).
It's at this (conceptual) point that the positive aspects of Nietzsche's project become necessary; all those longings for a newly naturalised and redeemed humanity. Zarathustra and the "philosopher of the future" are Nietzsche's important, yet (it must be clearly said) meagre and unsatisfactory attempts, to solve this problem (cf. GM.2.24). This is what the beginnings of "translating man back into nature" (BGE.230) looks like. It is the attempt to move beyond the self-loathing of Pascal's Christianity and the self-negation of Schopenhauer, the attempt to attain a "healthy selfishness".
"What? Does that, to speak vulgarly, not mean: God is refuted but the Devil is not -? On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And who the devil compels you to speak vulgarly"(BGE.23).
I think the vast majority of our contemporary society (including most of our intellectuals) are a very, very long way from this revaluation. Our modern world would be effectively unrecognisable if this level of psychological honesty and insight was prevalent. Apart from the brutes among us who must be kept in check ("tamed" as Nietzsche calls it), the overwhelming majority of the "good and the just" (GM.2.23) would equally be against us, to say nothing of the lazy and the mediocre. Too many people have a vested interest in keeping the old lies going, and Nietzsche's hope of us evolving from a moral to a wise mankind still seem a long, long way off.
The most powerful and seductive lie in our contemporary world is the lie of self-negation (as a concept) and the transparently immoral and deceitful forms this hypocrisy now assumes in our overly democratised world.
In BGE.218., Nietzsche suggests that psychologists should not rest content with belittling the bourgeoisie, but should also "carry out vivisection on the the 'good man', on the 'homo bonae voluntatis' [man of goodwill] . . . on yourselves!".
Over a century later and voicing the results of this endeavour are guaranteed to win you few friends among the "good and the just". You're more likely to be ignored, vilified, or misrepresented, thereby aligning you with precisely the sort of "friends" you don't want! The masses now wield so much de facto power (though they seldom realise this) that they must be routinely flattered with the most preposterous lies or shameless omissions.
The "good man", the "progressives", the "humanitarians", the "victims", the "oppressed", the celebrated fighters for "justice", etc, are all, in reality, implicated in the same inevitable schema. All, in one form or another, are "self-affirming", and all are equally subject to the primacy of their desires (e.g. BGE.175).
The argument being advanced in all the preceding remarks here is that there are, quite literally, no exceptions to this rule.
Now, as has been previously argued, this inevitable and constitutionally unavoidable rootedness in the "self" of all thought, feeling and action; this circuitous "narcissism", is most definitely not a "sin", nor a (moral) "flaw", it is simply a natural fact. A thought, feeling or action is not rendered less valuable, worthy, admirable or praiseworthy simply because this "rootedness" is omnipresent. On the contrary, it's precisely the phantasmagorical fiction that effectively posits the existence of a transcendent non-self, a "higher" disembodied self, nevertheless judging the embodied self, that is being wholly rejected.
Now "Ultimately the point is to what end a lie is told" (A.56). The "will to truth" is itself a function of desire, of our perceived conditions of preservation and growth. Thus when the "will to truth" turns its attention to itself, and seeks to account for its origin and status within the self, it finds itself dethroned from its previously lofty location (BGE.230 & 231).
Nietzsche speculates that the "will to truth" might in fact be "a concealed will to death" (GS.344). But any equivalence here can only be accidental, since he, more than anyone, is insistent that all forms of asceticism and altruism are really the circuitous route towards "health, future, growth, power, life" (GS.Preface for 2nd.ed. 2.).
The fruits of the "will to truth" with which we are currently concerned is the omnipresence of what (for the sake of brevity) we'll call "self-interest". Whatever the motives involved in pursuing truth, there seem solid grounds for believing that this motivational theory is correct. Why can't we then simply accept this and move beyond the misplaced moralism that dominates so much intellectual, political and social discourse? Why can't we spend our time and energy more usefully in identifying and promoting benign and robust forms of "self-interest" at the expense of more deleterious expressions?
The short answer is that far too many people in our advanced capitalist societies genuinely don't know any better. It's not a subject they have devoted much time to investigating with any passion and rigour and they generally still judge the morality of an action by its consequences and professed causes rather than with reference to its actual causes within the subject in question.
This then begs the question: why aren't our intellectuals doing their job? Why does this knowledge find it so difficult to escape the walls of academia and the laboratory and gain a robust foothold in the zeitgeist, where it can be openly and intelligently discussed, examined, explored and critiqued?
There are, of course, a few honourable exceptions among intellectuals, but that's precisely what they are - exceptions! Even among Nietzsche scholars such people are exceptions!
The vast majority of intellectuals are content to keep the old moralistic acid going. More, very many are actively involved in promoting these lies.
"Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject. Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less express an opinion: here one has to obey! . . . and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality a s a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been - is that not - immoral?
"- But morality has at its disposal not only every means of intimidation wherewith to keep itself free from critical hands and instruments of torture: its security lies rather in a certain art of enchantment, in which it is a past master -- it knows how to inspire'." With this art it succeeds, often with no more than a single glance, in paralysing the critical will and even enticing it over to its own side; there are even cases where morality can turn the critical will against itself, so that, like the scorpion, it drives the sting into its own body.
"For morality has for ages been master of every diabolical nuance of the art of persuasion: there is no orator, even today, who does not have recourse to its assistance (listen, for example, even to our anarchists: how morally they speak when they want to persuade! In the end they even go so far as to call themselves 'the good and the just'.) (Daybreak. Preface.3.)
Nietzsche here touches on a whole range of barriers to honest enquiry, but I wish here to focus on the social/political pressures involved; "reputation", "the police", and practical authorities generally( i.e. power).
I also wish to draw attention to Nietzsche's low opinion of academics generally. "For non-academics have good reason for a certain general disrespect for universities; they reproach them with being cowardly, since the small ones fear the big ones and the big ones fear public opinion (emphasis added); with failing to take the lead in questions of higher culture but limping slowly and tardily in the rear" (Schop. as Ed.8)
Are these criticisms justified? Is the university afraid of the disapproval of the masses? Does it limp behind externally more powerful forces and happily serve them? In general, I would answer these questions with a resounding Yes!
Now, openly Marxist scholars, for example, abound in our universities; so either capitalists know something very profound that Marxist's do not (otherwise why would their prominent existence be tolerated?), or, alternatively, capitalism rests upon essentially "non-ideological" foundations (i.e. a reluctant pragmatism).
This begs the question: Where is the equivalent voice within the university which directs its accusing finger, not only at economic structures sanctioned by capitalism; but also, and especially, at the vulgarity, pettiness, stupidity, duplicity and "immorality" of so many of its beneficiaries? (to say nothing of the deafening silence that usually accompanies the distinctly illiberal and inegalitarian thoughts and behaviour of any demographic "Other" in academia).
It's essentially no different with a cynical politician or a grubby capitalist; both will take care to maximise their supportive audience, to gain their approval, and to say and do nothing which will alienate and antagonise those in a (collective) position to frustrate their personal progress.
Professional intellectuals can see how the tide of history is going, they know where the momentum is increasingly coming from, and they want to be on the side that's winning. What does truth matter to them?
If one compares the sublime and humanitarian rhetoric that precedes and accompanies such momentous events as the French, American and Russian Revolutions with the resulting equilibrium, it becomes crystal clear that this talk of "justice", "humanity", "altruism" and harmonious inclusiveness is, for the most part, a sham, a barefaced lie.
The obviousness of this fact is there for all to see, yet one rarely comes across an admission of this fact; which is why these words of Nietzsche are worth repeating:
Towards a critique of the big words. - . . . Christianity, the Revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words have value only in a fight, as flags; not as realities but as showy words for something quite different (indeed, opposite!)(WP.80).
We may compare the march of the Left with Nietzsche's analysis of Christianity. Put simply, Jesus (and other similarly constituted individuals) really does want people to love one another, really does want gentleness, forgiveness, altruism to prevail. But the overwhelming majority of humanity can make no use of this doctrine, and so the doctrines and practises of Christianity soon evolve into the complete antithesis, in word and deed, of its nominal founder.
And so it is with most of the Left. A few, an especially small few, really do want humanity to leave behind its stupidity, brutality and inhumanity, they really do want people to love one another and celebrate each other's flourishing. But, for the overwhelming majority of the Left, it means no such thing. It is simply a self-serving hiding place for their laziness, hypocricy and ressentiment.
We can see this farce of historical and psychological interpretation everywhere; in, for example, the events of 1848 and their aftermath. The prevailing interpretation is that those previously holding power did so illegitimately and unjustly. Any successful challenge to this injustice was dignified on moral grounds, as the fight against repression. And then, shock, horror! What happened? Again and again those who successfully scaled the walls of injustice, once sufficiently powerful, immediately pulled up the ladder behind them.
The lesson commonly drawn from this is that the fight for "justice" is incomplete and must be continued anew under the same old moralism; whereas the real lesson couldn't be clearer.
Nietzsche notes that even "The great conquerors have always mouthed the pathetic language of virtue: they have had around them masses in a condition of elevation who wanted to hear only the most elevated language" (D.189).
And in BGE he notes that:"The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we think of this instinct taken to its ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all; or, if they existed, they would suffer from a bad conscience and in order to be able to command would have to practise a deceit upon themselves: the deceit, that is, that they too were only obeying.
"This state of things actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands (commands of ancestors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law or even of God), or even to borrow herd maxims from the herd's way of thinking and appear as `the first servant of the people' for example, or as `instruments of the common good'. (BGE.199).
Thus there are both social and psychological barriers at work in deterring us from obtaining an honest picture of ourselves.
Before proceeding further, it seems appropriate at this point to avoid the possibility of certain kinds of misunderstandings.
I endorse Nietzsche's declaration that "It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool - that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged - but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently" (D.103).
In other words, normativity is certainly not invalidated by the inevitable presence of "self-interest" in our evaluations. But equally, the omnipresence of "self-interest" in all our evaluations does not by any means and in any sense amount to permitting and endorsing all forms of "self-interest". Some of the goals of the "left" I fully support. What I object to is the grounding that is typically offered in support of these aims.
Paraphrasing Shakespeare, I hold firmly to the belief that "reasons, which are as plentiful as berries, are impotent in the world of interests".
This seems so obviously true that one wonders how any moderately educated person could possibly seek to deny it. And yet, almost every socially significant opinion-former actually does deny it!.
We have already touched upon some of the reasons why the proposition that Might Makes Right finds few friends among influential social actors. The individual's laziness, superficiality and vanity all predispose him towards self-deception. In addition, the individual is socially vulnerable when placed among his own kind. This gross numerical inferiority further predisposes him towards compromise, timidity, dissimulation, negotiation and, in particular, group formation.
For I am here arguing that altruism derives from self-interest; that the "will to truth" is an extraordinarily rare event in the life of man and in most people never actually occurs; and that all sociological norms (either de jure or de facto) derive from utterly contingent power-relations within a society; in other words, I am committed to the proposition that, sociologically speaking, Might Makes Right (No other interpretation of historical and contemporary society makes any sense to me).
Given all that I have already said regarding the individual, how then do we account for the various sociological phenomena we see around us? Why isn't life more anarchic, arbitrary, atomistic and violent than it often is?
The essence behind Nietzsche's answer to these questions can be found in three related quotations cited earlier. These three quotation bear repeating:
1. ". . . people arrange themselves according to their degree of force: . . . Individualism is followed by the formation of groups and organs; related tendencies join together and become active as a power; between these centers of power friction, war, recognition of one another's forces, reciprocation, approaches, regulation of exchange of services. Finally, an order of rank . . . One desires freedom so long as one does not posses power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still to weak to do so), one desires "justice" i.e. equal power" (WP.784).
2."The increasing 'humanizing' of this tendency consists in this, that there is an ever subtler sense of how hard it is really to incorporate another: while a crude injury done him certainly demonstrates our power over him, it at the same time estranges his will from us even more - and thus makes him less easy to subjugate" (WP.779).
3.My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on (WP.636).
It seems to me that one can wholly reject any strong (i.e. metaphysical, biological, ontological, omnipresent psychological) reading of WP and still find these words extraordinarily persuasive. This is my position. The concept of "self-interest", however bewilderingly complex its determinate content may be, seems entirely sufficient. The essence behind Nietzsche's words here would be entirely intelligible to Pascal and Thucydides, to name but two notable pre-Nietzschean figures.
In BGE.259 Nietzsche states: "On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be 'no more exploitation' - that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. 'Exploitation' does not pertain to a corrupt, or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function . . . Granted this [the WP] is a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! -". (BGE.259).
Again, although here Nietzsche does indeed advance a strong reading of WP, he also makes clear that the reality of human existence, the omnipresence of 'exploitation' and 'self-interest' is not an inherently dispensable, contingent "moral flaw" but the fatality of life itself. This reality should be visible to any honest investigator, regardless of the status of the WP.
I have yet to encounter a single historian, anthropologist, philosopher, psychologist or ideologue who persuades me that this isn't so. Everything i've read, witnessed and experienced convinces me of this fact.
I applaud Nietzsche for his honesty here. All the more reason, then, for me to register my profound disagreement with him elsewhere. In the previous section he states that a "good and healthy aristocracy . . . therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced [emphasis added] to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments". (BGE.258).
I find the language and tone employed here deeply troubling, politically juvenile, and philosophically irresponsible. One scours Nietzsche's entire text in vain in pursuit of a mature, coherent and credible definition, and justifiable glorification, of his political conception of "aristocracy". Here I agree with Rohde's view that Nietzsche's normative politics are "absurd and ignorant of the world", a fact made painfully visible in e.g., A.57. Much of Nietzsche's antipathy to modernity I share, but it must also be admitted that some of his inegalitarianism derives simply from a mundane and vulgar reactionary impulse.
To resume: although BGE.259 contains a great deal of truth, it also brings to light a confusion or ambiguity that I wish to briefly address (I will deal with this important topic more fully elsewhere).
At the begining of the section Nietzsche suggests that the adoption of egalitarian, altruistic morality is "the will to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay".
This characterisation makes sense as Nietzschean propaganda, but it makes absolutely no sense as Nietzschean philosophical doctrine. Nietzsche, the thinker, is committed to the idea that every living creature is a thoroughgoing egoist unavoidably and innocently seeking its own advantage. "All animals. . . strive instinctively for an optimum combination of favourable conditions which allow them to expend all their energy and achieve their maximum feeling of power . . . " (GM.111.7).
This apparent conflict, between Nietzsche continually holding to this view while simultaneously, in many of the later works, railing against "decadence" is resolved in these words from Twilight of the Idols:
"The best are lacking when egoism begins to be lacking. To chose what is harmful to oneself, to be attracted by 'disinterested' motives, almost constitutes the formulae for decadence. 'Not to seek one's own advantage' - that is merely a moral figleaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: 'I no longer know how to find my advantage'".(TI.Exped.35).
Decadence is, in reality, a moral figleaf, either an inability to discover one's advantage, or a circuitous route to one's own advantage. In either case one is always, unavoidably, seeking one's own advantage.
The real question, therefore, is why is Nietzsche so against modernity? If every adopted societal value system necessarily reflects the perceived conditions of preservation and growth between the dominant power groups within a society (e.g. GS.116), it must surely follow that the adoption of various forms of "slave morality", after slavery has been abolished, must be perceived as beneficial to those advocating them? (cf.GM.1.9).
Yes, Nietzsche admits, but they are benefiting the wrong kinds of people! They are making it difficult or impossible for the types of people Nietzsche values to flourish. The dominant values of modernity are conducive to the flourishing of the "Last Man". And this, it seems to me, certainly in the "west", is almost inevitably our fate. We are, in my opinion, fast approaching this animalistic bliss. I will subsequently outline why Nietzsche (and I) think this development represents a genuine disaster, and why most other people do not.
I have decided to allocate the exploration of the "Last Man" and modernity its own thread, which I will begin asap (i've recently been fleshing out the "Caesar" thread).
I will attempt, in my next post here, to summarise the most important points already argued.
To resume: while many thinkers have emphasised the role played by group identity in shaping events, Nietzsche, by contrast, emphasises the primacy of the individual, no matter how enmeshed he/she appears to be in the herd, or in ideologies of any kind.
So for Nietzsche, the individual only appears to be committed unconditionally to an identity outside himself. Marx, for example, had famously declared that "all history is the history of class struggle", and others have emphasised conflicts between various group identities in one form or another, be it nationality, ethnicity, religious doctrine, political ideology, gender, sexuality, etc.
Most of the literature and rhetoric surrounding these conflicts is apt to give the misleading impression that such affiliations, commitments and communities are somehow more essential, more valuable, more significant to the individual, than the individual him/herself. This fiction is, after all, part of their seductive capacity . . .
But for Nietzsche, these group affiliations, in regard to their affective, emotional, psychological and apparently practical attachments, are, in the final analysis, actually nominal, conditional, contingent, prudent, expedient - in a word, these group identities, when they are not the result of concrete necessity, are actually self-serving instruments. At the bottom of all these attachments, no matter how sincerely and innocently experienced, is the (innocently and unavoidably) self-affirming individual.
(A comparison may be drawn here with modern evolutionary theory, in which the species, or the group, is, despite all appearances to the contrary, not the paramount beneficiary of events, but the perpetuation of the gene itself. The group and the individual is now viewed as an instrument of the genes, a carrier, a vehicle, through which the genes propagate themselves).
The self-affirming individual, however, as I have previously argued, is not to be confused with vulgar hedonism or narcissism. We have seen that, for Nietzsche, the very concept of "egoism" is built upon a twofold fiction: the fiction of a stable, unified, self-identical "ego" as being identical with the totality of the body; and, the fiction of consciousness, in the form of an autonomous causal power. And, we have also seen that the 'self-affirming self' frequently manifests itself in ways that bring pain and tears to the unfortunate individual.
In the Gay Science he writes: "Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function . . . Morality is the herd instinct in the individual" (GS.116). And in GS.354 he suggests that "consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature". There are very many similar remarks to be found in Nietzsche, testifying to the enormous power of the herd, but, it needs to be remembered and stressed that all individuals (the weak and the strong) are, for often different reasons, predisposed to the formation of groups precisely because of the benefits and opportunities they provide. Schopenhauer's tale of the porcupines come to mind here, and none of this is to deny that the group also necessarily inflicts deep and painful wounds upon the individual.
There is also the fact, despairingly familiar to Nietzsche, that, as D.S. Wilson and E.O. Wilson state "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary", and Game Theory has sought to developed and expanded upon the basic sentiment behind these lines. Indeed, it's not difficult to see why natural selection would (contingently) favour the social instincts being strengthened.
Thus while there is much truth in Nietzsche's claim that "the strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate" (GM.111.18), it needs to be stressed that the "weak" are just as liable to the same fragmentary tendencies, given the appropriate conditions and opportunities.
It also needs stressing that the strong have their own reasons for looking favourably on the predisposition towards group formation (e.g. "Among the strongest . . . an instinctive self-involvement with a great quantum of power to which one is able to give direction: the hero, the prophet, the Caesar, the saviour, the shepherd; (- sexual love, too, belongs here: it desires to overpower, to take possession, and it appears as self-surrender. Fundamentally it is only love of one's 'instrument' . . .WP.776).
"Fundamentally it is only love of one's instrument"! How much profundity and explanatory power lies in this single sentence. As he says in BGE.175: "Ultimately one loves one's desires and not that which is desired".
This is an extraordinarily deflationary, corrosive, anxiety-provoking and ugly fact, perhaps one of the ugliest facts in existence. Yet it remains, I believe, a fact. I will not, for the present, concentrate on the horrors of this fact but simply attempt to follow through on its sociological logic.
Thus the net calculation made is that individuals have sufficiently good reasons to prefer the herd, despite the wounds membership inflicts, over the fate of the isolated, solitary individual. Man is indeed, overwhelmingly, a "political animal". Given all the crucial factors that lie beyond the individuals control; the sheer contingency of being born, of occupying any particular historical and social time and place, our upbringing, our singular biological and anatomical endowment; and, more generally our susceptibility to "the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to", what else would we expect from the individual?
How does the human individual, which Nietzsche calls the "most endangered animal" (GS.354), protect and advance him/herself in this overwhelmingly hostile and dangerous environment, keeping in mind that much of this hostility and danger now comes from other people?
Nietzsche knows that even the strongest are not strong enough. For even "The strongest and most fortunate are weak when opposed by organised herd instincts . . . by the vast majority . . . I see how the lower preponderate through their numbers, their shrewdness, their cunning"(WP.685).
I earlier noted that for Nietzsche "people arrange themselves according to their degree of force: . . . Individualism is followed by the formation of groups and organs; related tendencies join together and become active as a power; between these centers of power friction, war, recognition of one another's forces, reciprocation, approaches, regulation of exchange of services. Finally, an order of rank" (WP.784).
These few words seem to me to identify a general truth of tremendous significance and applicability. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that everything essential is already present in these few sentences. Here is the truth in a nutshell, and everything else is the development, elaboration, sublimation, and extrapolation of this fundamental truth.
Nietzsche, like other realists, adheres to the Might Makes Right perspective. In the preface of the Genealogy he refers the reader to HATH. 92, The Wanderer, 26, and Daybreak 112, in support of his Thucydidean perspective. The thesis being advanced is this: the prevailing conceptions of Right, whether de facto or de jure, is an expression of the currently existing power relations within a society.
Of course, any currently dominant power-relation that attains a significant degree of stability and equilibrium is nevertheless always in some degree of flux, and thus represents a contingent configuration of force. External factors aside, this instability occurs for the reason that those currently wielding significant power and those without significant power, ceteris paribus, seek more; and, just as significantly, those specific individuals inhabiting any group themselves represent distinctly unequal sources of power within the group (and, of course, within these divisions, further inequality resides, ad infinitum, until we reach the unique and singular (but internally fractured) individual. There is never any actual, literal, equality, however similar, unified and coherent the interests of individual members of the group may appear to be. Dissent and desertion is an ever present possibility within every union because each individual will, in the final analysis, have differently configured conditions of preservation and growth.
This inevitable, necessary inequality means that all groups are fractured to a greater or lesser extent. There is also, of course, the additional complication that there are various forms of power (wealth, physical force, cunning, strategic location, numerical significance, ideological influence, etc) whose potency rises and falls in various contexts and circumstances. Only the unique circumstances surrounding every event will determine which forms of power will prevail, for no form of power is a priori guaranteed success.
Yet despite the constant flux of events and the relatively transient nature of established hegemonies, despite the rise and fall of individuals, parties, and ideologies one thing remains constant: that the prevailing norms at any particular time and place reflect a compromise between the currently most powerful social actors.
This, it must be emphasised, has got nothing at all to do with any so-called Left/Right descriptive or normative concepts, but is "the primordial fact of all history" (BGE.259. cf BGE.188). This principle applies to all functioning communities. The "liberal-left" especially is almost universally dishonest on this point, but i'll leave my nausea regarding most of the so-called "liberal-left" for another occasion . . .
While the details of this question are forbiddingly difficult and complex, the underlying principle is perfectly clear and simple: how is one to respond to those who offer, in both word and deed, passionate and/or principled rejections of your conceptions of permissibility? And, on what authority is your suppression of deviancy to be grounded? Anyone who imagines they can answer these two questions without recourse to lies or persecution would, I suggest, by that act alone, dwarf all the intellectual and moral accomplishments of previous mankind. I see not the slightest prospect of this feat being accomplished, so there's no need to dwell further on this universal, trans-historical failure. This is not, of course, to peddle the dangerous stupidity that all lies and persecution are on the same moral and intellectual footing, quite the contrary. But it is to assert that no conceivable polity is possible without these vices, in one form or another.
The state can't do with recourse to such things as ". . . the whole sly and cunning art of the police and the prosecutor. Not to mention the fundamental theft, assault, insult, imprisonment, torture, murder . . . which appear in a pronounced manner in the various forms of punishment - all actions now in no way condemned and dismissed as such by his [the criminal's] judges, but only from a certain perspective and in terms of a certain application" (GM.11.14. see also e.g. BGE.186 & BGE.188). The state doesn't renounce vice, on the contrary, it seeks to monopolise and regulate it.
There is much resistance to acknowledging this ugly fact, even among moral philosophers. The "fundamental proposition" of ethics, advocated even by Schopenhauer and said by him to be universally affirmed by "all philosophers of ethics", is this: "harm no one, rather help everyone as much as you are able". But this proposition simply lacks the much sought after "rational ground" and bedrock; and this alleged "foundation of ethics", whose rational justification has been sought in vain "for centuries", is dismissed by Nietzsche as "insipidly false and sentimental" (BGE.186).
And the ultimate reason for this dismissal is that for Nietzsche: "No egoism at all exists that remains within itself and does not encroach - consequently, that 'allowable', 'morally indifferent' egoism of which you speak does not exist at all. 'One furthers one's ego always at the expense of others'; 'Life always lives at the expense of other life' - he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself" (WP.369. cf. GS.14).
"Basic principle: only individuals feel themselves responsible. Multiplicities are invented in order to do things for which the individual lacks the courage. It is for just this reason that all communalities and societies are a hundred times more upright and instructive about the nature of man than the individual, who is too weak to have the courage for his own desires. The whole of 'altruism' reveals itself as the prudence of the private man: societies are not 'altruistic' towards one another. The commandment to love one's neighbour has never yet been extended to include one's actual neighbour. . . 'Society' has never regarded virtue as anything but a means to strength, power, and order" (WP.716).
"How does it happen that the state will do a host of things that the individual would never countenance? - Through division of responsibility, of command, and of execution. Through the interposition of the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism and loyalty. Through upholding pride, severity, strength, hatred, revenge - in short, all typical characteristics that contradict the herd type"(WP.717).
The community rests upon the idea that it is worth more than the individual. The community will also find it necessary and useful to use both hard and soft power in advancing its goals; employing so many sticks, so many carrots. The wonderful 1886 preface to Daybreak (3), for example, is especially eloquent on this twofold methodology, stressing not only the coercive and intrusive methods used by the dominant power to enforce its will, but also its desire and ability to ensure that its own dictates are internalised in the psychology and conscience of its citizens.
But, what needs to be constantly kept in mind regarding this distinction between external and internal compliance is that "every so-called 'external compulsion' is nothing more than the internal compulsion of fear and pain"(WS.23).
This principle also applies, naturally, to every interaction between the individual and all those entities, be they physical or abstract, capable of helping or harming him in his journey through life; all those people, groups, classes, organisations, unions, guilds, castes, tribes, nationalities, ethnicities, principles, religions and ideologies vying for protection or ascendancy. Socialisation and group formation are instruments through which the individual seeks to protect and advance himself (see especially GS.23 and BGE.262 ).
I am not talking here about "Corporatism", as a contrived, formal and explicit arrangement. That would be to put the cart before the horse, and imply some sort of natural and "organic" configuration of society. On the contrary, what i'm drawing attention to is the inherent plasticity, contingency and opportunism that takes precedence over pre-established communities sharing common interests. This is why history is replete with examples of poacher-turned-gamekeeper and, vice versa, both at the level of individuals and entire communities.
Every behavioural and moral choice of the individual is an expression of the perceived conditions of preservation and growth, given the relevant factors at any specific time, for "All animals, including la bête philosophe [the philosophical beast], strive instinctively for an optimal combination of favourable conditions which allow them to expend all their energy and achieve their maximum feeling of power; equally instinctively, and with a fine sense of smell which is 'higher than any reason', all animals loathe any kind of trouble-maker or obstacle which either actually obstructs their path to this optimum combination or has the potential to do so (- I am not talking here about their path to happiness, but their path to power, to action, to the most powerful action, which is in most cases actually the path to unhappiness" (GM.111.7).
Since I have now outlined, in the most general terms, everything I consider essential regarding these issues, here seems as good a place as any to stop.
If anyone has any considered objections to what I have offered here, I will do my best to address them. Otherwise, this thread is finished.
P.S. By way of clarification - in the 7th last post I used a quotation from D.S and E.O Wilson regarding "selfishness" and groups. As i've argued throughout this thread, the individual is only attracted to groups for his own entirely selfish reasons; there is no attachment to groups as such, the attachment is prudential and instrumental, regardless of what appears in consciousness.
In other words, the quotation should not be interpreted as endorsing group selection within the confines of evolutionary biology, something which both Wilson's in question actually do. I am an inadequately informed layman regarding modern evolutionary biology, but I know enough to know that almost all serious scientific opinion on this issue resides with the proponents of gene theory, and against both Wilson's.
I already made this point earlier in the same post but I wanted to avoid any possible confusion.
I'd like to end with a general remark regarding the totality of this thread. The structure and pace of my narrative has been very uneven here (something i'm trying to minimise in future), owing largely to the sporadic nature of my ability to add content to this blog. I have also interspersed things with my own, sometimes emphatic opinions, which will not be to music to every reader's ears. I could also have articulated things more impressively. All of these faults are real and all are my responsibility.
Nevertheless, it is my view that despite these flaws and deficiencies there are very many parts of this thread that are of the very highest quality, coherence, relevance and importance. I would, indeed, go so far as to claim that some of these parts are more insightful and profound than very many educated people will encounter in an entire lifetime of reading and thinking. All of these exemplary parts have Nietzsche as their author. If I didn't hold this view I would have stopped reading him a very long time ago. The fact that many of these parts never see the light of day in most intellectual circles is, truly, a wonder to behold, and is testimony to the wisdom that lies behind all ignorance, superficiality and life itself.
"Oh, those humans! They knew how to live . . . Those humans were superficial - out of profundity".
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ReplyDeleteI have decided that the "will to power" be largely absent from this solitary dialectic, since it's status is, quite *rightly*, hotly contested. For the present purposes, the concept is not really necessary, and can be seen as addressing, in one form or another, the problems of masochism, asceticism, and various forms of self-negation and self-castigation. Nietzsche's investigation of these phenomena *preceded* his announcement of the WP in *Zarathustra.*
ReplyDeleteIn other words, I consider much of Nietzsche's analysis (especially from *Human, All Too Human* to *The Gay Science*) regarding "power" to be profoundly insightful, subtle, and illuminating. On the other hand, I find no convincing arguments or evidence from Nietzsche (or science) which justifies the later (post *Gay Science*) claims that WP is primordial and omnipresent in all psychology, physiology or nature.
I shall begin by offering a general outline and overview of what is to follow.
Internally:
1. All humans, without a single exception, are necessarily self-serving.
2. This term "self-serving" is misleading, since no unified "self" exists.
3. The "Self" here denotes the totality of our organism (see. TSZ.1.4), and does not refer simply to consciousness.
4. Our organism is structured like an Oligarchy.
5. Our drives are much more fundamental and decisive than our thoughts.
6. Our organism consists of a diverse multiplicity of parts, many of them contradictory.
7. We simply do not know what causes our thoughts, feelings and actions.
8. The Ego is NOT to be confused with the Self.
9. The Ego does NOT represent the totality of our organism. It does not have all the facts at its disposal, and it is not autonomous.
10. The Ego is an instrument of the Self (and the nature of the Self is essentially unknown; hence the "serving" part of "self-serving" is also problematic).
11. Every thought, feeling and action expresses the net identity of the contingent Self at any particular moment.
Externally.
12. Every self-serving Self is inevitably confronted by others self's of the same general nature.
13. In this social environment much sublimation, redirection, self-deception, compromise, alliances, and conflict take place. i.e. much "breadth" and "depth" of soul, much spiritual complexity, is acquired.
14. Every Other represents a potential enemy or ally in negotiating one's way in the world, and every Other has the same relationship to you.
Before continuing, it needs to be said that the position being advocated here appals, depresses, disgusts and horrifies me. This, of course, raises important questions regarding the status of the "will to truth" which I will, however, leave till later. . . But for now it is worth making explicit the chasm that often exists between belief and desire.
ReplyDeleteTo continue: everything said so far can be found not only in Nietzsche, but also, in a slightly different and less developed form, in Pascal (who was, in many respects, a "Christian Nietzsche"!). I agree fully with both of these thinkers that the general picture sketched above is the background reality of our existence, within which all nuance, subtlety and complexity finds its place.
Let us begin with the apparently antithetical concepts "selfishness" and "unselfishness". The latter is commonly understood with reference to the effects or intended effects of our thoughts, feelings and actions on the welfare of others. Here the interests of the self are supposed to be missing, absent, rendered impotent, from the causal antecedents and likely consequences, of our actions.
Unless we grant morality a genuinely metaphysical existence and significance (which we unequivocally don't), there is no reason to entertain this fictitious and incredible binary. We simply lack any credible motivational theory to account for the actions of the self.
Nietzsche addressed this question early on: "A good author, who really cares about his subject, wishes that someone would come and destroy him by representing the same subject more clearly and by answering every last question contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover's faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, if needs be her health, her strength.
But are these all unegoistic states?
Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer's phrase, "impossible and yet real"? Is it not rather clear that in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when some obstinate man says, "I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man's way".
The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above‑mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not "selfless." In morality, man treats himself not as an "individuum," but as a "dividuum." (HAH.57).
And in HATH.133, Nietzsche claims that "No one has ever done anything that was soley for the sake of another and without a personal motive. How indeed could he do anything that was not related to himself, thus without an inner necessity (which simply must have its basis in a personal need)? How could the ego act without ego?"
ReplyDeleteAnd later, in Daybreak he states that" If only those actions are moral which are performed for the sake of another and only for his sake, as one definition has it, then there are no moral actions"(D.148).
A brief digression on the thoughts of a few others who share this belief: Socrates held (along with Protagoras) that whatever a man does he always does the "good", as he contingently and imperfectly understands it. If we ignore here Socrates' optimism regarding the possibility of reason to allow us to discriminate more adequately between differing routes and destinations regarding the "good", then the background motivational theory, its inescapable "narcissism", is identical to Nietzsche's position, since we are not permitted to view the Socratic "good" in a Christianised, ascetic light. The same goes for Aristotle and his conception of "virtue". Dostoyevsky too, though he explicitly rejects the Socratic optimism regarding a response to this question, agrees with its founding axiom, that whatever we do, and however it may appear to ourselves and others, we are always seeking our own "advantage" (see Notes from Underground). We also find the Christian Pascal saying the same thing: "All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and others do not is the same desire . . .The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every man, including those who go and hang themselves"(Pensees.148), and, "The ordinary life of men is like that of saints. They all seek satisfaction, and differ only according to the object in which they locate it. Those they call their enemies are those that prevent them etc" (Pensees.275). And, of course we have Spinoza, asserting that "The primary and sole foundation of virtue, or of the proper conduct of life, is to seek our own profit".
For rather obvious reasons, this depiction of humanity has not been short of critics. But what, we must ask, would an alternative motivational theory look like? How would it seek to account for a thought, feeling, or action? How can an organism perform X without some constitutional, some internal preference for X? Without some physiological/cathectic relationship with X, what other factor exists within the organism that can bring about X? The causal antecedents of X must pass through the self, must take place within the self, thus the self cannot be an indifferent and impotent bystander in this process. It must, by definition, be an interested party, otherwise X would not be performed.
The preceding remarks make clear Nietzsche's disbelief in the concept of selflessness. Yet the "selfishness" that remains and is unavoidably omnipresent in all of our activity remains a bewilderingly complex and problematic phenomenon. This is because our interestedness, our advantage, our preferences, can be located in the most diverse and antithetical positions, depending upon our internal constitution and external context and options. Thus we can choose altruism, self-denigration, self-neglect, martyrdom, asceticism, and suicide. This begs the question: who/what is making these choices and why?
ReplyDeleteFrom TSZ onwards, there is a part of Nietzsche which wants to explain everything (quite literally) with the WP. For several reasons, I see no good reason to take these speculations seriously. Unfortunately, Nietzsche seems to have succumbed to the failings and temptations of the philosopher that he so profoundly explored in Daybreak 542. We do Nietzsche and ourselves no favours by dignifying his errors. Nor am I impressed by certain scholars who seek to further their career by peddling such empty metaphysical nonsense. Nietzsche, in my view, is badly served by modern academia, whose prevailing instincts and moral intuitions are anything but Nietzschean! How could things be otherwise. Here I agree with Michael Tanner; Nietzsche's vanity may well have been flattered by his eventual acceptance by academia after so many years of neglect, but this elation would have soon passed and been seen by him as a profound defeat. Our present day culture is far more "decadent", far more embracing of the "Last Man", far more in love with "slave morality" than Nietzsche's own time, and our academics have encouraged and facilitated this degradation as much as anyone.
To resume: I reject any metaphysical reading of WP. I also reject WP as the totality in the psychological sphere. However, I do think the concept has great explanatory power as long as we see it as a part, and not the whole, of affective and psychological life. While there is no denying that one Nietzsche is powerfully drawn to the WP in its most ambitious forms, there is also another Nietzsche, who persists till the end, that is more modest and self-critical, and this is the Nietzsche I follow. To return to the question: who/what determines our actions and why?
It is clear that Nietzsche does not believe that consciousness or the will is the answer to this riddle. I find most of his numerous arguments in support of this position completely convincing, and, I may add, I also find that my own personal attempts to seriously confront this question (via self-analysis) leads to the same shocking conclusion; namely, that consciousness and the will explains little or nothing of great consequence (e.g. WP.676). ". . .sufficient reason for understanding that this problem [determining value] is for us an inaccessible problem. When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we establish values" (TI.5.5)
Biologists now inform us that the "meaning" of life has been discovered and that it resides in gene propagation! One wonders what Nietzsche would have made of this, and what adjustments to his work it would have provoked? And yet, there is another sense in which it would have made no significant difference. I say this because Nietzsche's primary concerns are culture, psychology, suffering, meaning, and nobility, and these high level concerns remain what they are regardless of the reality at the lowest level of biological life.
I pause here briefly to note Daniel Dennett's advocacy of the gene's cultural equivilent, "meme's", following the work of Richard Dawkins. Dennett is no fool, but I can't understand the "meme" thesis he champions, and it's not for the wont of trying.
Nietzsche is clear that we simply do not know why we think, feel and act as we do, that these are all resultant states, the genesis and development of which we are largely unaware of. At this point, the WP rears its (conceptually) ugly head. Nietzsche, at times, argues that all motion, all organic being, is a manifestation of WP, and that when a thought, feeling or action occurs, it does so because, at this particular contingent time and place, such a manifestation is the optimal expression of WP that our organism is capable of. There is no denying that Nietzsche was, at times, very committed to this picture. However it's also true that, in my view, he ultimately offers no credible evidence to support it in any coherent fashion. Suffice to say that I don't buy it. What I do buy, however, is that the feeling of "power" (inadequately precise though it is) DOES in fact account for a great deal of our actions, thoughts, and feelings. This deflated sense of WP, as one very important "drive" among others, is, if true, still extremely significant.
ReplyDeleteBut, even when we grant the existence of WP in partly determining our thoughts, feelings and actions, it still leaves us in the dark as to why precisely this, rather than that, thought, feeling and action offered the greatest sensation of WP. The fluidity and plasticity of WP means that it can be found effectively anywhere, in any thought, feeling, and action, no matter how apparently self diminishing.
Weakness, decadence, passivity, self-loathing, altruism, are all, according to Nietzsche, expressions of WP; devout followers of Jainism, just as much as the most violent and predatory barbarians, share the same dispositional substratum. Either forms of self-diminution are merely apparent, merely circuitous routes to our own advancement (however subjectively and contingently identified), or, alternatively: "'Not to seek one's own advantage' - that is merely a moral fig leaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: 'I no longer know how to find my advantage" (TI.Expd.35).
Much of GM can be seen as an elaboration of the position outlined in Daybreak 113's "The striving for distinction" passage, where the violent barbarian, the all-loving God, and the resolute ascetic are seen as manifestations of the same fundamental drive. Unfortunately, by the time of GM and beyond Nietzsche is increasingly a propagandist who, at times, is reluctant to admit that "decadence" is merely as mask of WP, and he tries (pretends) to treat it as an alien substance. However, his intellectual conscience continually reasserts itself, and even in his last years one can find plenty of examples where he explicitly admits the underlying homogeneity of all events.
The point here is that merely saying that we think, feel and act in a way that automatically expresses the self's search for optimising WP doesn't really get us very far, for it's very omnipresence means that in appearing to explain everything it explains almost nothing. It's predictive power is virtually nil. All the theory can do is, after the event, say that WP was (perhaps) the driving force. There is also the not inconsiderable fact that Nietzsche, the man, was contemptuous of almost every manifestation of WP he encountered in the world and history. This is a major reason why I can't take him seriously as an "affirmer". "Affirmer" is precisely what he was not!
Crass domination can be an expression of weakness and the most consistent meekness can be a means of self-assertion. Nietzsche, as a psychologist of the highest rank, knows this better than anyone. If, at bottom, we accept the homogeneity of all events, we immediately encounter the problematic between the part and whole. From the perspective of the totality we can (intellectually, abstractly) affirm the innocence of all becoming. But, as BGE.9 reminds us, we simply can't "live" according to the indifference that Nature really is. As parts we are incapable of mirroring the reality of the whole, and this ensures that our dominant and most cherished evaluations will NOT be rooted in impersonal, objective, actuality. This picture, of course, can be very anxiety provoking but also, for some, liberating. For me it is overwhelmingly the former. But the crucial point is that there are good and inescapable reasons for rejecting the genetic fallacy and for recognising when and why different levels of analysis are appropriate in different contexts (e.g. the will to truth "might be a concealed will to death" (GS.344)). This tension, between the will to truth and the awareness that fruitfulness often depends upon error and ignorance, is everywhere in Nietzsche, and this is the unsettling problem that must afflict every profound thinker.
ReplyDeleteHere, of course, is where the figure of Zarathustra enters, hoping for the emergence of the Ubermensch who will be able to digest these pebbles and thorns without significant indigestion. I tend to view TSZ and the ubermensch generally as a heroic and heartrending failure. "Ideal and material.- The ideal you envisage is noble, but are you a noble enough stone to be made into such a divine image? Anyway, is your work not that of a barbarous sculptor? Is it not a blasphemy against your ideal?" (GS.215).
For Nietzsche, "actions are always ambiguous, always unfathomable" (BGE.287), and "states of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example -every psychologist knows this - are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts" (A.39).
ReplyDeleteNietzsche consistently claims that our physiological identity, rather than any dialectic, introspection, or environment, plays the most determining role in our lives, and the importance he attaches to the body, its internal configuration and constitution, begs a number of important questions. Such as: If actions, states of consciousness and beliefs are not to be trusted, are not reliable representations of what the fractured and contingent Self actually wants, how on earth is self-knowledge and self-advancement possible? At this point, BGE.230 & BGE.231 appear to me to be especially significant. Section 230 deals explicitly with "that commanding something", that "fundamental will of the spirit", which, given its "perceived" conditions of preservation and growth, helps determines our behaviour. This behaviour is tailored by what Nietzsche calls our "digestive power" (. . .indeed, 'the spirit' is more like a stomach than anything else"), our capacity to advance, appropriate, assimilate and utilise new experiences in our quest for "the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power".
Those experiences that we can't successfully digest effectively "explains", Nietzsche believes, the predisposition we have for ignorance, stupidity, error, and falsification.
How then, do we account for the "man of knowledge", one who seeks to "translate man back into nature", and who therefore possess "a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience", which rejects edifying and superficial lies and uncovers hard, ugly, repulsive truths and uncertainties, and who therefore says NO when his heart and vanity would most like to say Yes?
"'Why have knowledge at all?' -Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer. . ." (BGE.230).
And the best answer he can find is that: "Learning transforms us, it does that which all nourishment does which does not merely 'preserve' . . . But at the bottom of us, 'right down deep', there is, to be sure, something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decisions and answers to predetermined selected questions. In the case of every cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable 'this is I'. . . One sometimes comes upon certain solutions to problems which inspire strong belief in us; perhaps one henceforth calls the one's 'convictions'. Later - one sees them only as footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem which we are - more correctly, to the great stupidity which we are, to our spiritual fate, to the unteachable 'right down deep'. (BGE.231).
BGE.25. deals with the same problem and demonstrates a painful awareness of a form of the great stupidity to which the thinker is prone in the form of an explicit warning which "addresses itself to the most serious" of his readers who may see themselves as martyrs for truth.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche himself is prone to this affect:"But there is a kind of denying and destroying that is the discharge of that mighty longing for sanctification and salvation. . . All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied: being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true without falsehood. That is why the truthful man feels that the meaning of his activity is metaphysical, explicable through the laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest sense affirmative: however much all that he does may appear to be destructive of the laws of this life and a crime against them . . . He will, to be sure, destroy his earthly happiness through his courage; he will have to be an enemy to those he loves and to the institutions which produced him; he may not spare men or things even though he suffers when they suffer; he will be misunderstood and for a long time thought an ally of powers he abhors; however much he may strive after justice he is bound, according to the human limitations of his insight, to be unjust: but he may console himself with the words once employed by his great teacher, Schopenhauer: 'A happy life is impossible: the highest that man can attain to is heroic one " (UM.111.4).
Now in GM Nietzsche contends that what "every animal" strives for "instinctively" is "an optimum of favourable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power" (GM.3.7)(cf D.119). This, naturally, applies to the ascetic philosopher just as much as to the vulgar hedonist. The former simply has very different conditions of preservation and growth. This insight is difficult for a serious (and suffering) thinker such as Nietzsche to contemplate and consent to, for it removes much of the "worthy verbal pomp" and "ancient false finery" traditionally associated with the "lover of wisdom"(BGE.231). But for Nietzsche there is no escape from entanglement with "the great stupidity which we are" (BGE.231), and the highest that the philosopher can attain in this predicament is to affirm (viscerally) the concept of "Gay Science".
However, this is easier said than done for Nietzsche, for it necessitates an ironic and rather comical and mocking view of oneself and existence, which can, all too rapidly slide into nihilistic terror and nausea at the falsity, futility and meaningless of all our activity and the whole black comedy of existence. (cf.GS.1).
A student of human nature, confronted by its bewildering plasticity and indirection, by the numerous forms and circuitous routes it can take in conformity with its nature and circumstance, can spend a lifetime in this dark labyrinth and never emerge into the daylight with its solution. Such is the spectrum of human types, of what Nietzsche refers to as "the luxuriance of a prodigal play and change of forms" (T.I.5.6), that the very concept of a "human nature" begins to look too limiting, pragmatic and artificial.
ReplyDeleteIn the absence of a single, unitary and universal summum bonum with which to interpret behaviour, how is self-understanding and the understanding of others possible? Added to this is the fact that the most apparently antithetical behaviours can perhaps be guided by the same causal and teleological forces (e.g. the ascetic and barbarian of D.113 are both motivated by the "striving for distinction"). In the face of this colossal ignorance one is tempted to simply admit defeat and give up, and to understand all historical and contemporary investigations in this domain as idle curiosity and the vanity of children.
On the other hand, it would seem an error to conflate historical and functional complexity with any sort of "transcendence" and "mysticism". Here it is worth remembering that we are entirely an animal, continuous with the rest of the natural world, with every that implies. The wing of a bird, the anatomy of the cheetah, the eye of a frog, for example, are all impressively complex, but there is no reason to endow these artifacts of natural selection with any nobility of purpose or origin. Passages like Daybreak.26. are clear in understanding the "Socratic virtues" as developments and sublimations of strictly animal virtues! "Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal" (D.26).
When we look at the extremes of human behaviour, when we see suicide and martyrdom as forms of self-assertion, when we probe the paradoxes involved in "masochism", and view pronounced forms of altruism as expressions of WP, we are apt to forget that most contemporary behaviour is, relatively speaking, not so mysterious after all. On the contrary, most people seem all too easily understood; and the things they value most deeply are there for even the dullest eyes to see.
Here I shall unambiguously give expression to my inegalitarian sensibility when I state that I consider it proven beyond all doubt "how vulgar and nauseatingly uniform the masses are" and that "inertia, stupidity, mimicry, love and hunger" (and worse besides) are easily witnessed and displayed in distinctly unvarnished forms among the great majority of people. Here is a domain where Nietzsche's "good men never tell the truth" rings truer every day. In my entire life I have never encountered a single "good person" who was not profoundly wounded by the inhumanity, neglect, cruelty and malice of others. Not one. It is, of course, perfectly consistent with this picture that pointing out this obvious truth immediately lowers one's social status in the eyes of most. Even the otherwise admirable Bertrand Russell, to take but one example, was happy to stand with the crowd in his breezy dismissal of Heraclitus' praise of Teutamus because he was of the opinion that "most men are bad"; and this was written just a year or two after the holocaust!
To resume:"No, we do not love humanity" and "We are no humanitarians; we should never dare to permit ourselves to speak of our "love of humanity"; our kind is not actor enough for that" (GS.377). The fact that this level of honesty is nowhere to be found even among most supposedly "Nietzschen scholars" tells me everything I need to know about the norms of academia. The commonest way to continue this mob-appeasing dishonesty is to treat such truth-telling as a "character flaw" or idiosyncratic trait on the part of the speaker. How convenient.
ReplyDeleteIn looking at the contemporary norms of human behaviour Nietzsche's Socratic/animal conflation seems, to me, entirely plausible. In one form or another, we wish to "elude one's pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one's prey" (D.26). These words remind us that we are a political animal, an animal embedded in a social and historical matrix not of our choosing and that it is largely (but not exclusively) in this social environment, and through this social environment, that most of our joys and sufferings take place. It is primarily my relations with other people that determines my success or failure in life; and my evaluation of other (non-personal) things (whether objects or ideas) can usually be traced back to my relations with others, these non-personal objects or ideas are really stand-ins, instruments, representatives, conduits, displacements, of my dependency on others for meaning and value.
Nietzsche emphasises the significance of the body, and in the words of Zarathustra:"I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war, and a peace, a herd and a herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call 'spirit', is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence" (TSZ.1.4), and that "of all forms of intelligence discovered hitherto, 'instinct' is the most intelligent" (BGE.218) (See also GS.11).
ReplyDeleteThis individual body, our unique biological organism, is a fractured unity and our ego and consciousness, our apparently self-representing faculties, are constructs of the body and its configuration. This body, and every part within it, is necessarily and unavoidably selfish (in the manner articulated earlier). It's worth stressing that Nietzsche simply doesn't accept the concept of "selflessness" in any meaningful form whatsoever. However, this revaluation of selfishness must free itself from the ascetic and Christian misrepresentations of humanity that have become so dominant. For, as Henry Staten quite reasonably suggests, this omnipresent narcissism "therefore ceases to mean what it would mean if it has any antithesis" (Nietzsche's Voice. p.182). The dichotomy selfish/selfless is untenable, for genuine "selflessness" is a constitutional impossibility. What we are confronted with instead is forms of selfishness we condone and forms of selfishness we condemn.
However, it must be stressed that: ". . . these things are not said for long ears. Neither does every word belong in every mouth. They are subtle, remote things: sheep's hooves ought not to grasp for them" (TSZ.4.5).
This fractured unity, whose selfishness derives, not from any immorality but simply because it lives (BGE.259)(WP.728), did not choose to be born, did not choose its internal constitution, its parents, nor its historical time and place, and now finds itself embedded within society. The human animal is primarily a social animal, surrounded and confronted by other individuals of similar axiomatic forces.
It is very striking just how far the social world resembles the biological individual in some important respects. No matter how apparently tranquil, consensual, and liberal a society may appear it is necessarily an arena of exploitation, domination, suppression and violence. Any relative equilibrium is, in reality, the expression of power relations between the most powerful groups within the society. There is an order of rank between individual and groups with regards to the power at their disposal, and this fluid disparity between individuals and groups means that all equilibriums are contingent and provisional.
"Once one has achieved a certain degree of independence, one wants more: people arrange themselves according to their degree of force: the individual no longer simply supposes himself the equal of [all] others, he seeks his equals - he distinguishes himself from others. Individualism is followed by the formation of groups and organs; related tendencies join together and become active as a power; between these centers of power friction, war, recognition of one another's forces, reciprocation, approaches, regulation of exchange of services. Finally, an order of rank . . . One desires freedom so long as one does not posses power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still to weak to do so), one desires "justice" i.e. equal power" (WP.784).
ReplyDeleteAnd: "The increasing 'humanizing' of this tendency consists in this, that there is an ever subtler sense of how hard it is really to incorporate another: while a crude injury done him certainly demonstrates our power over him, it at the same time estranges his will from us even more - and thus makes him less easy to subjugate" (WP.779).
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on (WP.636).
While I reject completely the notion of WP as "precisely the will of [organic] life" I completely agree with the general picture outlined above, and I think Nietzsche is justified in saying: "Granted this is a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! (BGE.259).
It is worth stating that, in my view, Nietzsche is, at his best, a very great thinker not simply and primarily because of his "cleverness" (plenty of people are "clever") but because of his honesty and clarity on some of the most important questions;and this is, among other things, a moral question.
It needs stressing that nothing I have previously said is dependent upon any strong, metaphysical, ontological, or biological reading of WP, even though, in some of the quotations cited above Nietzsche himself is clearly taking such an possibility seriously. If the strong reading of WP was in any sense credible among living things we should expect it to be most visible in the actions of all other animal and vegetable life, since these "lower" forms of organisms cannot be said to have been "corrupted" by the likes of Plato, asceticism or Judeo-Christian slave morality. It should go without saying that those involved in the detailed study of these organisms do not take Nietzsche's speculations seriously, nor should they. The noble lion, the dreadful and magnificent "blond beast", sitting at the summit of the food chain, simply runs away when confronted by a group of hyenas, and the same principle applies to the "eagles" in GM, who, under certain conditions, mirror the timidity of the "lambs".
ReplyDeleteIt tells us something quite significant about Nietzsche's own physio/psychological make-up that he frequently ignores this very obvious fact. This same fact is easily observable in Thucydides and his depiction of the vicissitudes in the historical culture that Nietzsche loved most, Periclean Athens. Once things start to go significantly wrong for the Athenians, they manifestly cease to be the sort of people Nietzsche claims to admire, and all sorts of depravity, scapegoating, decadence and anxiety come to the fore. Nietzsche can hardly cite a physiological deterioration as the reason for this reversal of character.
And yet, what Thucydides and other realists show us unquestionably is the sheer plasticity of human behaviour, the ubiquity of dissembling, hypocricy and self-interest that characterises all "advanced" societies. But our modern consciousness is so thoroughly corrupted by lies, laziness and errors (some of the beneficial) that it is extremely difficult to describe, let alone evaluate, our own species and conduct, without succumbing to despair or horror or shame or nausea; or, alternatively, without appearing to rehabilitate everything rightly called (if for the wrong reasons) "evil".
"Towards a critique of the big words. - . . . Christianity, the revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words have value only in a fight, as flags; not as realities but as showy words for something quite different (indeed, opposite!)(WP.80).
ReplyDeleteOr as he states in TI: "Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained . . . As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions . . . promote freedom mightily" (TI.Expd.38).
I can't find fault with either of these quotations; and nothing historical I have ever read, nothing contemporary I have ever witnessed, and no one I have ever met, gives me reason to think otherwise. One of the reasons I love Nietzsche (and I do love him, for all his faults) is that, unlike almost everyone else, there are certain self-edifying, widely propagated lies that he will not peddle.
This begs the question: how did we get here? How did the current form of dishonesty come about?
In addressing these questions I will make use of WP.786, although the substance at issue in what follows can be found throughout Nietzsche's work.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche begins with two propositions: the first is that [according to the definitions of morality that dominate] the truth is that "there are no moral actions whatsoever; . . . they are completely imaginary. . . they are altogether impossible". He continues: "Through a psychological misunderstanding, one has invented an antithesis to the motivating forces, and believes one has described another kind of force; one has imagined a primum mobile [first mover] that does not exist at all. According to the valuation that evolved the antithesis "moral" and "immoral" in general, one has to say: there are only immoral intentions and actions".
The second proposition states that "there are neither moral or immoral actions" [according to the dominant understanding of morality], because "free spontaneity" is an illusion.
He proceeds by arguing that the concepts of "selflessness", "unegoistic", and "self-denying" are "all unreal, imaginary", and by pointing out how erroneous it is to posit the "ego" as coexisting with the "non-ego" in any morally meaningful sense. "Here the herd instincts were decisive: nothing is so contrary to this instinct as the sovereignty of the individual. But if the ego is conceived as something in and for itself, then its value must lie in self-negation".
He continues: "one asked: in what actions does man affirm himself most strongly? Around these (sexuality, avarice, lust to rule, cruelty, etc) prohibition, hatred, and contempt were heaped; one believed there were unselfish drives, one condemned all the selfish ones, one demanded the unselfish. As a result: what had one done? One had placed a prohibition upon all the strongest, most natural, indeed the only real drives - henceforth, in order to find an action praiseworthy, one had to deny the presence in it of such drives; - tremendous falsification in psychologicis. Even any kind of "self-satisfaction" had first to be made possible by misunderstanding and construing oneself sub specie boni [under the aspect of the good].
"Conversely, that species that derived its advantage from depriving man of his self-satisfaction (the representatives of the herd instinct; e.g. the priests and philosophers) became subtle and psychologically astute, so as to demonstrate how nonetheless selfishness ruled everywhere. Christian conclusion: "Everything is sin; even our virtues. Absolute reprehensibility of man. The unselfish action is not possible". Original sin. In short, once man had made of his instincts an antithesis to a purely imaginary world of the good, he ended by despising himself as incapable of performing actions that were "good".
"N.B. Christianity thus demonstrates an advance in the sharpening of psychological insight: La Rochefoucauld and Pascal. It grasped the essential equivalence of human actions and their equivalence of value in essentials (- all immoral).
"Now one seriously set about the task of forming men in whom selfishness was dead: -priests, saints. And if one doubted the possibility of becoming "perfect", one did not doubt that one knew what is perfect.
"The psychology of the saint, priest, the "good man" naturally had to be purely phantasmagorical. One had declared the real motives of action bad: in order to still be able to act at all, to prescribe actions, one had to describe as possible and as it were sanctify actions that are utterly impossible. . . [R]age against the instincts of life as "holy", as venerable. . . a morose eye cast on all strong qualities one possessed.
"One advances: the slandered instincts, too, try to create a right for themselves (e.g. Luther's Reformation: coarsest form of moral mendaciousness under the guise of "evangelical freedom") one rebaptized them with holy names;
ReplyDeletethe slandered instincts try to prove themselves necessary for the existence of the virtuous instincts; one must vivre, pour vivre pour autrui [live, to live for others]: egoism as a means to an end;
"One goes further, one tries to grant both the egoistic and altruistic impulses a right to exist: equal rights for the one as for the other (from the standpoint of utility);
"One goes further, one seeks a higher utility in a preference of the egoistic viewpoint over the altruistic: more useful in relation to happiness of the majority or the progress of mankind etc. Thus: a preponderance of the rights of egoism, but under the perspective of extreme altruism ("collective utility for mankind");
"One tries to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with naturalness, one seeks altruism in the foundations of life; one seeks egoism and altruism as equally founded in the essence of life and nature; one dreams of a disappearance of the antithesis in some future when, owing to continual adaptation, egoism will at the same time be altruism;
"Finally, one grasps that altruistic actions are only a species of egoistic actions - and that the degree to which one loves, spends oneself, proves the degree of individual power and personality. In short, that when one makes men more evil [i.e. more physiologically self-affirming], one makes them better - and that one cannot be one without being the other [cf.BGE.23]. At this point the curtain rises on the dreadful forgery of the psychology of man hitherto" (WP.786).
It's at this (conceptual) point that the positive aspects of Nietzsche's project become necessary; all those longings for a newly naturalised and redeemed humanity. Zarathustra and the "philosopher of the future" are Nietzsche's important, yet (it must be clearly said) meagre and unsatisfactory attempts, to solve this problem (cf. GM.2.24). This is what the beginnings of "translating man back into nature" (BGE.230) looks like. It is the attempt to move beyond the self-loathing of Pascal's Christianity and the self-negation of Schopenhauer, the attempt to attain a "healthy selfishness".
"What? Does that, to speak vulgarly, not mean: God is refuted but the Devil is not -? On the contrary! On the contrary, my friends! And who the devil compels you to speak vulgarly"(BGE.23).
I think the vast majority of our contemporary society (including most of our intellectuals) are a very, very long way from this revaluation. Our modern world would be effectively unrecognisable if this level of psychological honesty and insight was prevalent. Apart from the brutes among us who must be kept in check ("tamed" as Nietzsche calls it), the overwhelming majority of the "good and the just" (GM.2.23) would equally be against us, to say nothing of the lazy and the mediocre. Too many people have a vested interest in keeping the old lies going, and Nietzsche's hope of us evolving from a moral to a wise mankind still seem a long, long way off.
The most powerful and seductive lie in our contemporary world is the lie of self-negation (as a concept) and the transparently immoral and deceitful forms this hypocrisy now assumes in our overly democratised world.
ReplyDeleteIn BGE.218., Nietzsche suggests that psychologists should not rest content with belittling the bourgeoisie, but should also "carry out vivisection on the the 'good man', on the 'homo bonae voluntatis' [man of goodwill] . . . on yourselves!".
Over a century later and voicing the results of this endeavour are guaranteed to win you few friends among the "good and the just". You're more likely to be ignored, vilified, or misrepresented, thereby aligning you with precisely the sort of "friends" you don't want! The masses now wield so much de facto power (though they seldom realise this) that they must be routinely flattered with the most preposterous lies or shameless omissions.
The "good man", the "progressives", the "humanitarians", the "victims", the "oppressed", the celebrated fighters for "justice", etc, are all, in reality, implicated in the same inevitable schema. All, in one form or another, are "self-affirming", and all are equally subject to the primacy of their desires (e.g. BGE.175).
The argument being advanced in all the preceding remarks here is that there are, quite literally, no exceptions to this rule.
Now, as has been previously argued, this inevitable and constitutionally unavoidable rootedness in the "self" of all thought, feeling and action; this circuitous "narcissism", is most definitely not a "sin", nor a (moral) "flaw", it is simply a natural fact. A thought, feeling or action is not rendered less valuable, worthy, admirable or praiseworthy simply because this "rootedness" is omnipresent. On the contrary, it's precisely the phantasmagorical fiction that effectively posits the existence of a transcendent non-self, a "higher" disembodied self, nevertheless judging the embodied self, that is being wholly rejected.
Now "Ultimately the point is to what end a lie is told" (A.56). The "will to truth" is itself a function of desire, of our perceived conditions of preservation and growth. Thus when the "will to truth" turns its attention to itself, and seeks to account for its origin and status within the self, it finds itself dethroned from its previously lofty location (BGE.230 & 231).
ReplyDeleteNietzsche speculates that the "will to truth" might in fact be "a concealed will to death" (GS.344). But any equivalence here can only be accidental, since he, more than anyone, is insistent that all forms of asceticism and altruism are really the circuitous route towards "health, future, growth, power, life" (GS.Preface for 2nd.ed. 2.).
The fruits of the "will to truth" with which we are currently concerned is the omnipresence of what (for the sake of brevity) we'll call "self-interest". Whatever the motives involved in pursuing truth, there seem solid grounds for believing that this motivational theory is correct. Why can't we then simply accept this and move beyond the misplaced moralism that dominates so much intellectual, political and social discourse? Why can't we spend our time and energy more usefully in identifying and promoting benign and robust forms of "self-interest" at the expense of more deleterious expressions?
The short answer is that far too many people in our advanced capitalist societies genuinely don't know any better. It's not a subject they have devoted much time to investigating with any passion and rigour and they generally still judge the morality of an action by its consequences and professed causes rather than with reference to its actual causes within the subject in question.
This then begs the question: why aren't our intellectuals doing their job? Why does this knowledge find it so difficult to escape the walls of academia and the laboratory and gain a robust foothold in the zeitgeist, where it can be openly and intelligently discussed, examined, explored and critiqued?
There are, of course, a few honourable exceptions among intellectuals, but that's precisely what they are - exceptions! Even among Nietzsche scholars such people are exceptions!
The vast majority of intellectuals are content to keep the old moralistic acid going. More, very many are actively involved in promoting these lies.
Nietzsche says:
ReplyDelete"Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject. Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less express an opinion: here one has to obey! . . . and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality a s a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been - is that not - immoral?
"- But morality has at its disposal not only every means of intimidation wherewith to keep itself free from critical hands and instruments of torture: its security lies rather in a certain art of enchantment, in which it is a past master -- it knows how to inspire'." With this art it succeeds, often with no more than a single glance, in paralysing the critical will and even enticing it over to its own side; there are even cases where morality can turn the critical will against itself, so that, like the scorpion, it drives the sting into its own body.
"For morality has for ages been master of every diabolical nuance of the art of persuasion: there is no orator, even today, who does not have recourse to its assistance (listen, for example, even to our anarchists: how morally they speak when they want to persuade! In the end they even go so far as to call themselves 'the good and the just'.) (Daybreak. Preface.3.)
Nietzsche here touches on a whole range of barriers to honest enquiry, but I wish here to focus on the social/political pressures involved; "reputation", "the police", and practical authorities generally( i.e. power).
I also wish to draw attention to Nietzsche's low opinion of academics generally. "For non-academics have good reason for a certain general disrespect for universities; they reproach them with being cowardly, since the small ones fear the big ones and the big ones fear public opinion (emphasis added); with failing to take the lead in questions of higher culture but limping slowly and tardily in the rear" (Schop. as Ed.8)
Are these criticisms justified? Is the university afraid of the disapproval of the masses? Does it limp behind externally more powerful forces and happily serve them? In general, I would answer these questions with a resounding Yes!
Now, openly Marxist scholars, for example, abound in our universities; so either capitalists know something very profound that Marxist's do not (otherwise why would their prominent existence be tolerated?), or, alternatively, capitalism rests upon essentially "non-ideological" foundations (i.e. a reluctant pragmatism).
This begs the question: Where is the equivalent voice within the university which directs its accusing finger, not only at economic structures sanctioned by capitalism; but also, and especially, at the vulgarity, pettiness, stupidity, duplicity and "immorality" of so many of its beneficiaries? (to say nothing of the deafening silence that usually accompanies the distinctly illiberal and inegalitarian thoughts and behaviour of any demographic "Other" in academia).
It's essentially no different with a cynical politician or a grubby capitalist; both will take care to maximise their supportive audience, to gain their approval, and to say and do nothing which will alienate and antagonise those in a (collective) position to frustrate their personal progress.
Professional intellectuals can see how the tide of history is going, they know where the momentum is increasingly coming from, and they want to be on the side that's winning. What does truth matter to them?
If one compares the sublime and humanitarian rhetoric that precedes and accompanies such momentous events as the French, American and Russian Revolutions with the resulting equilibrium, it becomes crystal clear that this talk of "justice", "humanity", "altruism" and harmonious inclusiveness is, for the most part, a sham, a barefaced lie.
ReplyDeleteThe obviousness of this fact is there for all to see, yet one rarely comes across an admission of this fact; which is why these words of Nietzsche are worth repeating:
Towards a critique of the big words. - . . . Christianity, the Revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words have value only in a fight, as flags; not as realities but as showy words for something quite different (indeed, opposite!)(WP.80).
We may compare the march of the Left with Nietzsche's analysis of Christianity. Put simply, Jesus (and other similarly constituted individuals) really does want people to love one another, really does want gentleness, forgiveness, altruism to prevail. But the overwhelming majority of humanity can make no use of this doctrine, and so the doctrines and practises of Christianity soon evolve into the complete antithesis, in word and deed, of its nominal founder.
And so it is with most of the Left. A few, an especially small few, really do want humanity to leave behind its stupidity, brutality and inhumanity, they really do want people to love one another and celebrate each other's flourishing. But, for the overwhelming majority of the Left, it means no such thing. It is simply a self-serving hiding place for their laziness, hypocricy and ressentiment.
We can see this farce of historical and psychological interpretation everywhere; in, for example, the events of 1848 and their aftermath. The prevailing interpretation is that those previously holding power did so illegitimately and unjustly. Any successful challenge to this injustice was dignified on moral grounds, as the fight against repression. And then, shock, horror! What happened? Again and again those who successfully scaled the walls of injustice, once sufficiently powerful, immediately pulled up the ladder behind them.
ReplyDeleteThe lesson commonly drawn from this is that the fight for "justice" is incomplete and must be continued anew under the same old moralism; whereas the real lesson couldn't be clearer.
Nietzsche notes that even "The great conquerors have always mouthed the pathetic language of virtue: they have had around them masses in a condition of elevation who wanted to hear only the most elevated language" (D.189).
And in BGE he notes that:"The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we think of this instinct taken to its ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all; or, if they existed, they would suffer from a bad conscience and in order to be able to command would have to practise a deceit upon themselves: the deceit, that is, that they too were only obeying.
"This state of things actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands (commands of ancestors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law or even of God), or even to borrow herd maxims from the herd's way of thinking and appear as `the first servant of the people' for example, or as `instruments of the common good'. (BGE.199).
Thus there are both social and psychological barriers at work in deterring us from obtaining an honest picture of ourselves.
Before proceeding further, it seems appropriate at this point to avoid the possibility of certain kinds of misunderstandings.
ReplyDeleteI endorse Nietzsche's declaration that "It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool - that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged - but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently" (D.103).
In other words, normativity is certainly not invalidated by the inevitable presence of "self-interest" in our evaluations. But equally, the omnipresence of "self-interest" in all our evaluations does not by any means and in any sense amount to permitting and endorsing all forms of "self-interest". Some of the goals of the "left" I fully support. What I object to is the grounding that is typically offered in support of these aims.
Paraphrasing Shakespeare, I hold firmly to the belief that "reasons, which are as plentiful as berries, are impotent in the world of interests".
ReplyDeleteThis seems so obviously true that one wonders how any moderately educated person could possibly seek to deny it. And yet, almost every socially significant opinion-former actually does deny it!.
We have already touched upon some of the reasons why the proposition that Might Makes Right finds few friends among influential social actors. The individual's laziness, superficiality and vanity all predispose him towards self-deception. In addition, the individual is socially vulnerable when placed among his own kind. This gross numerical inferiority further predisposes him towards compromise, timidity, dissimulation, negotiation and, in particular, group formation.
For I am here arguing that altruism derives from self-interest; that the "will to truth" is an extraordinarily rare event in the life of man and in most people never actually occurs; and that all sociological norms (either de jure or de facto) derive from utterly contingent power-relations within a society; in other words, I am committed to the proposition that, sociologically speaking, Might Makes Right (No other interpretation of historical and contemporary society makes any sense to me).
Given all that I have already said regarding the individual, how then do we account for the various sociological phenomena we see around us? Why isn't life more anarchic, arbitrary, atomistic and violent than it often is?
The essence behind Nietzsche's answer to these questions can be found in three related quotations cited earlier. These three quotation bear repeating:
1. ". . . people arrange themselves according to their degree of force: . . . Individualism is followed by the formation of groups and organs; related tendencies join together and become active as a power; between these centers of power friction, war, recognition of one another's forces, reciprocation, approaches, regulation of exchange of services. Finally, an order of rank . . . One desires freedom so long as one does not posses power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still to weak to do so), one desires "justice" i.e. equal power" (WP.784).
ReplyDelete2."The increasing 'humanizing' of this tendency consists in this, that there is an ever subtler sense of how hard it is really to incorporate another: while a crude injury done him certainly demonstrates our power over him, it at the same time estranges his will from us even more - and thus makes him less easy to subjugate" (WP.779).
3.My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on (WP.636).
It seems to me that one can wholly reject any strong (i.e. metaphysical, biological, ontological, omnipresent psychological) reading of WP and still find these words extraordinarily persuasive. This is my position. The concept of "self-interest", however bewilderingly complex its determinate content may be, seems entirely sufficient. The essence behind Nietzsche's words here would be entirely intelligible to Pascal and Thucydides, to name but two notable pre-Nietzschean figures.
In BGE.259 Nietzsche states: "On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be 'no more exploitation' - that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. 'Exploitation' does not pertain to a corrupt, or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function . . . Granted this [the WP] is a novelty as a theory - as a reality it is the primordial fact of all history: let us be at least that honest with ourselves! -". (BGE.259).
ReplyDeleteAgain, although here Nietzsche does indeed advance a strong reading of WP, he also makes clear that the reality of human existence, the omnipresence of 'exploitation' and 'self-interest' is not an inherently dispensable, contingent "moral flaw" but the fatality of life itself. This reality should be visible to any honest investigator, regardless of the status of the WP.
I have yet to encounter a single historian, anthropologist, philosopher, psychologist or ideologue who persuades me that this isn't so. Everything i've read, witnessed and experienced convinces me of this fact.
I applaud Nietzsche for his honesty here. All the more reason, then, for me to register my profound disagreement with him elsewhere. In the previous section he states that a "good and healthy aristocracy . . . therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced [emphasis added] to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments". (BGE.258).
I find the language and tone employed here deeply troubling, politically juvenile, and philosophically irresponsible. One scours Nietzsche's entire text in vain in pursuit of a mature, coherent and credible definition, and justifiable glorification, of his political conception of "aristocracy". Here I agree with Rohde's view that Nietzsche's normative politics are "absurd and ignorant of the world", a fact made painfully visible in e.g., A.57. Much of Nietzsche's antipathy to modernity I share, but it must also be admitted that some of his inegalitarianism derives simply from a mundane and vulgar reactionary impulse.
To resume: although BGE.259 contains a great deal of truth, it also brings to light a confusion or ambiguity that I wish to briefly address (I will deal with this important topic more fully elsewhere).
ReplyDeleteAt the begining of the section Nietzsche suggests that the adoption of egalitarian, altruistic morality is "the will to the denial of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay".
This characterisation makes sense as Nietzschean propaganda, but it makes absolutely no sense as Nietzschean philosophical doctrine. Nietzsche, the thinker, is committed to the idea that every living creature is a thoroughgoing egoist unavoidably and innocently seeking its own advantage. "All animals. . . strive instinctively for an optimum combination of favourable conditions which allow them to expend all their energy and achieve their maximum feeling of power . . . " (GM.111.7).
This apparent conflict, between Nietzsche continually holding to this view while simultaneously, in many of the later works, railing against "decadence" is resolved in these words from Twilight of the Idols:
"The best are lacking when egoism begins to be lacking. To chose what is harmful to oneself, to be attracted by 'disinterested' motives, almost constitutes the formulae for decadence. 'Not to seek one's own advantage' - that is merely a moral figleaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: 'I no longer know how to find my advantage'".(TI.Exped.35).
Decadence is, in reality, a moral figleaf, either an inability to discover one's advantage, or a circuitous route to one's own advantage. In either case one is always, unavoidably, seeking one's own advantage.
The real question, therefore, is why is Nietzsche so against modernity? If every adopted societal value system necessarily reflects the perceived conditions of preservation and growth between the dominant power groups within a society (e.g. GS.116), it must surely follow that the adoption of various forms of "slave morality", after slavery has been abolished, must be perceived as beneficial to those advocating them? (cf.GM.1.9).
Yes, Nietzsche admits, but they are benefiting the wrong kinds of people! They are making it difficult or impossible for the types of people Nietzsche values to flourish. The dominant values of modernity are conducive to the flourishing of the "Last Man". And this, it seems to me, certainly in the "west", is almost inevitably our fate. We are, in my opinion, fast approaching this animalistic bliss. I will subsequently outline why Nietzsche (and I) think this development represents a genuine disaster, and why most other people do not.
I have decided to allocate the exploration of the "Last Man" and modernity its own thread, which I will begin asap (i've recently been fleshing out the "Caesar" thread).
ReplyDeleteI will attempt, in my next post here, to summarise the most important points already argued.
To resume: while many thinkers have emphasised the role played by group identity in shaping events, Nietzsche, by contrast, emphasises the primacy of the individual, no matter how enmeshed he/she appears to be in the herd, or in ideologies of any kind.
ReplyDeleteSo for Nietzsche, the individual only appears to be committed unconditionally to an identity outside himself. Marx, for example, had famously declared that "all history is the history of class struggle", and others have emphasised conflicts between various group identities in one form or another, be it nationality, ethnicity, religious doctrine, political ideology, gender, sexuality, etc.
Most of the literature and rhetoric surrounding these conflicts is apt to give the misleading impression that such affiliations, commitments and communities are somehow more essential, more valuable, more significant to the individual, than the individual him/herself. This fiction is, after all, part of their seductive capacity . . .
But for Nietzsche, these group affiliations, in regard to their affective, emotional, psychological and apparently practical attachments, are, in the final analysis, actually nominal, conditional, contingent, prudent, expedient - in a word, these group identities, when they are not the result of concrete necessity, are actually self-serving instruments. At the bottom of all these attachments, no matter how sincerely and innocently experienced, is the (innocently and unavoidably) self-affirming individual.
(A comparison may be drawn here with modern evolutionary theory, in which the species, or the group, is, despite all appearances to the contrary, not the paramount beneficiary of events, but the perpetuation of the gene itself. The group and the individual is now viewed as an instrument of the genes, a carrier, a vehicle, through which the genes propagate themselves).
The self-affirming individual, however, as I have previously argued, is not to be confused with vulgar hedonism or narcissism. We have seen that, for Nietzsche, the very concept of "egoism" is built upon a twofold fiction: the fiction of a stable, unified, self-identical "ego" as being identical with the totality of the body; and, the fiction of consciousness, in the form of an autonomous causal power. And, we have also seen that the 'self-affirming self' frequently manifests itself in ways that bring pain and tears to the unfortunate individual.
In the Gay Science he writes: "Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function . . . Morality is the herd instinct in the individual" (GS.116). And in GS.354 he suggests that "consciousness does not really belong to man's individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature". There are very many similar remarks to be found in Nietzsche, testifying to the enormous power of the herd, but, it needs to be remembered and stressed that all individuals (the weak and the strong) are, for often different reasons, predisposed to the formation of groups precisely because of the benefits and opportunities they provide. Schopenhauer's tale of the porcupines come to mind here, and none of this is to deny that the group also necessarily inflicts deep and painful wounds upon the individual.
There is also the fact, despairingly familiar to Nietzsche, that, as D.S. Wilson and E.O. Wilson state "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary", and Game Theory has sought to developed and expanded upon the basic sentiment behind these lines. Indeed, it's not difficult to see why natural selection would (contingently) favour the social instincts being strengthened.
Thus while there is much truth in Nietzsche's claim that "the strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate" (GM.111.18), it needs to be stressed that the "weak" are just as liable to the same fragmentary tendencies, given the appropriate conditions and opportunities.
ReplyDeleteIt also needs stressing that the strong have their own reasons for looking favourably on the predisposition towards group formation (e.g. "Among the strongest . . . an instinctive self-involvement with a great quantum of power to which one is able to give direction: the hero, the prophet, the Caesar, the saviour, the shepherd; (- sexual love, too, belongs here: it desires to overpower, to take possession, and it appears as self-surrender. Fundamentally it is only love of one's 'instrument' . . .WP.776).
"Fundamentally it is only love of one's instrument"! How much profundity and explanatory power lies in this single sentence. As he says in BGE.175: "Ultimately one loves one's desires and not that which is desired".
This is an extraordinarily deflationary, corrosive, anxiety-provoking and ugly fact, perhaps one of the ugliest facts in existence. Yet it remains, I believe, a fact. I will not, for the present, concentrate on the horrors of this fact but simply attempt to follow through on its sociological logic.
Thus the net calculation made is that individuals have sufficiently good reasons to prefer the herd, despite the wounds membership inflicts, over the fate of the isolated, solitary individual. Man is indeed, overwhelmingly, a "political animal". Given all the crucial factors that lie beyond the individuals control; the sheer contingency of being born, of occupying any particular historical and social time and place, our upbringing, our singular biological and anatomical endowment; and, more generally our susceptibility to "the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to", what else would we expect from the individual?
ReplyDeleteHow does the human individual, which Nietzsche calls the "most endangered animal" (GS.354), protect and advance him/herself in this overwhelmingly hostile and dangerous environment, keeping in mind that much of this hostility and danger now comes from other people?
Nietzsche knows that even the strongest are not strong enough. For even "The strongest and most fortunate are weak when opposed by organised herd instincts . . . by the vast majority . . . I see how the lower preponderate through their numbers, their shrewdness, their cunning"(WP.685).
I earlier noted that for Nietzsche "people arrange themselves according to their degree of force: . . . Individualism is followed by the formation of groups and organs; related tendencies join together and become active as a power; between these centers of power friction, war, recognition of one another's forces, reciprocation, approaches, regulation of exchange of services. Finally, an order of rank" (WP.784).
These few words seem to me to identify a general truth of tremendous significance and applicability. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that everything essential is already present in these few sentences. Here is the truth in a nutshell, and everything else is the development, elaboration, sublimation, and extrapolation of this fundamental truth.
Nietzsche, like other realists, adheres to the Might Makes Right perspective. In the preface of the Genealogy he refers the reader to HATH. 92, The Wanderer, 26, and Daybreak 112, in support of his Thucydidean perspective. The thesis being advanced is this: the prevailing conceptions of Right, whether de facto or de jure, is an expression of the currently existing power relations within a society.
Of course, any currently dominant power-relation that attains a significant degree of stability and equilibrium is nevertheless always in some degree of flux, and thus represents a contingent configuration of force. External factors aside, this instability occurs for the reason that those currently wielding significant power and those without significant power, ceteris paribus, seek more; and, just as significantly, those specific individuals inhabiting any group themselves represent distinctly unequal sources of power within the group (and, of course, within these divisions, further inequality resides, ad infinitum, until we reach the unique and singular (but internally fractured) individual. There is never any actual, literal, equality, however similar, unified and coherent the interests of individual members of the group may appear to be. Dissent and desertion is an ever present possibility within every union because each individual will, in the final analysis, have differently configured conditions of preservation and growth.
This inevitable, necessary inequality means that all groups are fractured to a greater or lesser extent. There is also, of course, the additional complication that there are various forms of power (wealth, physical force, cunning, strategic location, numerical significance, ideological influence, etc) whose potency rises and falls in various contexts and circumstances. Only the unique circumstances surrounding every event will determine which forms of power will prevail, for no form of power is a priori guaranteed success.
ReplyDeleteYet despite the constant flux of events and the relatively transient nature of established hegemonies, despite the rise and fall of individuals, parties, and ideologies one thing remains constant: that the prevailing norms at any particular time and place reflect a compromise between the currently most powerful social actors.
This, it must be emphasised, has got nothing at all to do with any so-called Left/Right descriptive or normative concepts, but is "the primordial fact of all history" (BGE.259. cf BGE.188). This principle applies to all functioning communities. The "liberal-left" especially is almost universally dishonest on this point, but i'll leave my nausea regarding most of the so-called "liberal-left" for another occasion . . .
While the details of this question are forbiddingly difficult and complex, the underlying principle is perfectly clear and simple: how is one to respond to those who offer, in both word and deed, passionate and/or principled rejections of your conceptions of permissibility? And, on what authority is your suppression of deviancy to be grounded? Anyone who imagines they can answer these two questions without recourse to lies or persecution would, I suggest, by that act alone, dwarf all the intellectual and moral accomplishments of previous mankind. I see not the slightest prospect of this feat being accomplished, so there's no need to dwell further on this universal, trans-historical failure. This is not, of course, to peddle the dangerous stupidity that all lies and persecution are on the same moral and intellectual footing, quite the contrary. But it is to assert that no conceivable polity is possible without these vices, in one form or another.
The state can't do with recourse to such things as ". . . the whole sly and cunning art of the police and the prosecutor. Not to mention the fundamental theft, assault, insult, imprisonment, torture, murder . . . which appear in a pronounced manner in the various forms of punishment - all actions now in no way condemned and dismissed as such by his [the criminal's] judges, but only from a certain perspective and in terms of a certain application" (GM.11.14. see also e.g. BGE.186 & BGE.188). The state doesn't renounce vice, on the contrary, it seeks to monopolise and regulate it.
There is much resistance to acknowledging this ugly fact, even among moral philosophers. The "fundamental proposition" of ethics, advocated even by Schopenhauer and said by him to be universally affirmed by "all philosophers of ethics", is this: "harm no one, rather help everyone as much as you are able". But this proposition simply lacks the much sought after "rational ground" and bedrock; and this alleged "foundation of ethics", whose rational justification has been sought in vain "for centuries", is dismissed by Nietzsche as "insipidly false and sentimental" (BGE.186).
ReplyDeleteAnd the ultimate reason for this dismissal is that for Nietzsche: "No egoism at all exists that remains within itself and does not encroach - consequently, that 'allowable', 'morally indifferent' egoism of which you speak does not exist at all. 'One furthers one's ego always at the expense of others'; 'Life always lives at the expense of other life' - he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself" (WP.369. cf. GS.14).
"Basic principle: only individuals feel themselves responsible. Multiplicities are invented in order to do things for which the individual lacks the courage. It is for just this reason that all communalities and societies are a hundred times more upright and instructive about the nature of man than the individual, who is too weak to have the courage for his own desires. The whole of 'altruism' reveals itself as the prudence of the private man: societies are not 'altruistic' towards one another. The commandment to love one's neighbour has never yet been extended to include one's actual neighbour. . . 'Society' has never regarded virtue as anything but a means to strength, power, and order" (WP.716).
"How does it happen that the state will do a host of things that the individual would never countenance? - Through division of responsibility, of command, and of execution. Through the interposition of the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism and loyalty. Through upholding pride, severity, strength, hatred, revenge - in short, all typical characteristics that contradict the herd type"(WP.717).
The community rests upon the idea that it is worth more than the individual. The community will also find it necessary and useful to use both hard and soft power in advancing its goals; employing so many sticks, so many carrots. The wonderful 1886 preface to Daybreak (3), for example, is especially eloquent on this twofold methodology, stressing not only the coercive and intrusive methods used by the dominant power to enforce its will, but also its desire and ability to ensure that its own dictates are internalised in the psychology and conscience of its citizens.
ReplyDeleteBut, what needs to be constantly kept in mind regarding this distinction between external and internal compliance is that "every so-called 'external compulsion' is nothing more than the internal compulsion of fear and pain"(WS.23).
This principle also applies, naturally, to every interaction between the individual and all those entities, be they physical or abstract, capable of helping or harming him in his journey through life; all those people, groups, classes, organisations, unions, guilds, castes, tribes, nationalities, ethnicities, principles, religions and ideologies vying for protection or ascendancy. Socialisation and group formation are instruments through which the individual seeks to protect and advance himself (see especially GS.23 and BGE.262 ).
I am not talking here about "Corporatism", as a contrived, formal and explicit arrangement. That would be to put the cart before the horse, and imply some sort of natural and "organic" configuration of society. On the contrary, what i'm drawing attention to is the inherent plasticity, contingency and opportunism that takes precedence over pre-established communities sharing common interests. This is why history is replete with examples of poacher-turned-gamekeeper and, vice versa, both at the level of individuals and entire communities.
Every behavioural and moral choice of the individual is an expression of the perceived conditions of preservation and growth, given the relevant factors at any specific time, for "All animals, including la bête philosophe [the philosophical beast], strive instinctively for an optimal combination of favourable conditions which allow them to expend all their energy and achieve their maximum feeling of power; equally instinctively, and with a fine sense of smell which is 'higher than any reason', all animals loathe any kind of trouble-maker or obstacle which either actually obstructs their path to this optimum combination or has the potential to do so (- I am not talking here about their path to happiness, but their path to power, to action, to the most powerful action, which is in most cases actually the path to unhappiness" (GM.111.7).
Since I have now outlined, in the most general terms, everything I consider essential regarding these issues, here seems as good a place as any to stop.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone has any considered objections to what I have offered here, I will do my best to address them. Otherwise, this thread is finished.
P.S. By way of clarification - in the 7th last post I used a quotation from D.S and E.O Wilson regarding "selfishness" and groups. As i've argued throughout this thread, the individual is only attracted to groups for his own entirely selfish reasons; there is no attachment to groups as such, the attachment is prudential and instrumental, regardless of what appears in consciousness.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the quotation should not be interpreted as endorsing group selection within the confines of evolutionary biology, something which both Wilson's in question actually do. I am an inadequately informed layman regarding modern evolutionary biology, but I know enough to know that almost all serious scientific opinion on this issue resides with the proponents of gene theory, and against both Wilson's.
I already made this point earlier in the same post but I wanted to avoid any possible confusion.
I'd like to end with a general remark regarding the totality of this thread. The structure and pace of my narrative has been very uneven here (something i'm trying to minimise in future), owing largely to the sporadic nature of my ability to add content to this blog. I have also interspersed things with my own, sometimes emphatic opinions, which will not be to music to every reader's ears. I could also have articulated things more impressively. All of these faults are real and all are my responsibility.
Nevertheless, it is my view that despite these flaws and deficiencies there are very many parts of this thread that are of the very highest quality, coherence, relevance and importance. I would, indeed, go so far as to claim that some of these parts are more insightful and profound than very many educated people will encounter in an entire lifetime of reading and thinking. All of these exemplary parts have Nietzsche as their author. If I didn't hold this view I would have stopped reading him a very long time ago. The fact that many of these parts never see the light of day in most intellectual circles is, truly, a wonder to behold, and is testimony to the wisdom that lies behind all ignorance, superficiality and life itself.
"Oh, those humans! They knew how to live . . . Those humans were superficial - out of profundity".
Amen.