I think it’s time I read that. 
Right. In the following quote, Nietzsche drives home his critique of turning the ‘ought to be’ into an ideal standard of flourishing, as someone like Phillipa Foot or Aristotle would do.
Ethics or ‘philosophy of desirability’: ‘It ought to be different’, it shall become different; dissatisfaction would thus be the germ of ethics. One could save oneself firstly by choosing what does not arouse that feeling, secondly by understanding its presumption and silliness: for to demand that something be different from what it is means demanding that everything be different - it includes a damning criticism of the whole - and to this extent .
… Yet life itself is such a demand! To determine what is, what it’s like, appears unutterably higher and more serious than any ‘It ought to be so’: because the latter, as human criticism and presumption, seems condemned from the start to be ridiculous. It expresses a need which demands that the disposition of the world should accord with our human well-being, and the will to do as much as possible towards this task. On the other hand, it was only this demand ‘It ought to be so’ which called forth that other demand, the demand for what is.
Our knowledge of what is, was only the outcome of our asking: ‘How? Is it possible? Why precisely like that?’ Our wonder at the discrepancy between our wishes and the course of the world has led to our becoming acquainted with the course of the world. Perhaps it’s different again: per haps that ‘It ought to be so’, our wish to overwhelm the world, is - - -“
“ Very few people make it clear to themselves what is implied by the stand point of desirability, by every ‘It ought to be so, but it is not’ or even ‘It ought to have been so’: a condemnation of the entire course of things. For in that course nothing is isolated, the smallest element carries the whole, upon your little injustice stands the whole edifice of the future, every criticism of the smallest part condemns the whole as well.
Assuming even that the moral norm, as Kant himself supposed, has never been perfectly fulfilled and remains like a kind of beyond, hanging over reality without ever falling into it: then morality would imply a judgement of the whole, which would, however, permit the question: where does it get its right to this? How does the part come to sit in judgement on the whole? - And if this moral judging and discontent with the real were indeed, as has been claimed, an ineradicable instinct, might that instinct not then be one of the ineradicable stupidities or indeed presumptions of our species? -
But by saying this we’re doing exactly what we rebuke: the standpoint of desirability, of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection - it’s only our concept of ‘perfection’ which loses out. Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things - what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of which have their heads full of what’s desirable?
Might the ‘course of things’ be precisely the ‘Away from here! Away from reality!’, be eternal discontent itself? Might desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be - deus.”
“- a man as he ought to be: that sounds as preposterous to us as: 'A tree as it ought to be.” (Gay Science)
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I tried my best to explain my well-thought-out position to you. My position is coherent and clear. It is not ambiguous. I spend too much time in this thread, and I hope you enjoy your discussion with others. Farewell for now.
Which is not to say that we couldn’t try and approximate it or strive for progress in that direction. But Nietzsche’s point isn’t that we will always fall short of the ideal, it is that the world is already perfect.
Fair enough. I personally find that particular flavour of Niezschean thought a bit incoherent. Not sure what’s actually being talked about, basically in any sentence when someone tries to talk about that kind of thing.
Maybe this is best for a DM, but can you try to ground it for me?
I see all of this as connected. First, I hope we’ll agree that Nietzsche is not writing for everyone. He’s not trying to do away with the guilt of John Q. Public. He doesn’t present the generic rational human being with a “thou should.”
I see his work as inspired by a personal transformation. He was captivated by Schopenhauer’s vision of the horror of the world. He reads Hamlet this way in The Birth of Tragedy. But he came around to affirming existence, including what is horrible and guilty.
He still took from Schopenhauer the idea of the “illusion” of differentiated individuals. Will-to-power updates the demonic will-to-live. An organism doesn’t prioritize mere survival. It wants to “vent its power.” In Darwinian terms, the organism will die in order to reproduce. The artist will die for the life of his or her art.
I would like to address a few issues that were raised early in this thread. Nietzsche’s attack on morality is an attack on beliefs and practices that at one time had been helpful but are now harmful to us. This is related to the concept of self-overcoming. It always has as its goal something historically specific. Something that at some time in the future will have to be overcome by those in the future, because what may be beneficial today may be harmful in the future. Specifically Christianity was at one time man’s way of self-overcoming but it now burdens us with guilt.
In some ways what Nietzsche is advocating is something very old - health of the soul. The sovereign individual does not stand opposed to mankind. He stands between mankind and the last man. Zarathustra is the forerunner of the Übermensch. He leaves his mountain solitude because of his love (eros) for mankind.
I’ve always wondered if he actually did (accept the world on its terms). Schopenhauer’s vision of the universe as a causal monolith, where every piece implies the whole, left him with the idea that you can’t condemn the part without condemning the whole. But he had far from an accepting tone. I think he probably saw that possibility, of accepting everything as it is, but if he ever showed up at that destination, it doesn’t show in his writings.
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Zarathustra, subtitled “A Book for All and None”.
Good point.
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But Nietzsche is not a Darwinian. Nietzsche does want to speak for all of us in arguing that just as the self is a fiction, so is guilt, because you can’t have one without the other. Personally, I am sympathetic to Derrida’s and Heidegger’s notions of guilt. From a paper of mine:
Unconditional forgiveness forgives in the name of a divine or natural moral order that the guilty party is in some sense answerable to, thereby linking this thinking to the normalizing, conformist impetus of conditional forgiveness. Heidegger (2010) explains that this kind of guilt is “defined as a lack, when something which ought to be and can be is missing.” By contrast , postmodernist approaches , as I have characterized them in general terms, decenter the normative basis of ethical values. Grounding situational guilt is an unconditional, primordial form of guilt.
Primordial guilt “does not occur occasionally in Dasein, attached to it as a dark quality that it could get rid of if it made sufficient progress.”(Heidegger 2010). Instead, “Da-sein is guilty in the ground of its being.” The underlying supposition here is that guilt and the unjust are not lapses or failures of justice and the ethical but their condition of possibility.
As Derrida(2015) puts it:
“I must ask forgiveness for (the fact of ) being just. Because it is unjust to be just. I always betray someone to be just…”
This acknowledgment serves to affirm the irreducible basis of angry blame as I have defined it, the belief that all human action contains a kernel of inherent violence, arbitrariness, alterity, qualitative otherness, polarization. This kernel is the condition of possibility of evil. I forgive the other just as I forgive myself and ask others to forgive me, because I am always guilty, I always “mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what I mean (to say)” (Derrida 1988, p.61). The condition of possibility of evil is existence itself.
“…existence, or consciousness, or the ‘‘I,‘’ before any determined fault is at fault and in the process, consequently, of asking at least implicitly for forgiveness for the simple fact, finally, of being there.” “It is not simply a moral, ethical, or religious experience, but simply in order to go on and to produce the synthesis that you need to be yourself, and to identify yourself through time, you have to forgive yourself constantly. Forgiveness then is part of the temporal constitution of the ego, self-forgiveness.”(Derrida 2015).
In my view, interpretations like this take us rather far away from Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche was still, in many respects, a modern thinker, and he was trying to understand how morality could be built in a world where God is dead and morality is not given in advance. This is a world in which man is forced to create morality and the foundation of his existence by himself.
Post-structuralists, however, taking advantage of the fact that they have no clearly defined foundation of their own, can make almost anyone into their ally. Deleuze, for example, did not only take Nietzsche as an ally, but even Leibniz.
But post-structuralists are doing almost the direct opposite of Nietzsche. They are trying to arrange life after modernity, and every deconstructive gesture in Nietzsche is immediately read as if Nietzsche were their ally. Yet Nietzsche’s deconstruction of morality had a completely different meaning from theirs.
It seems to me that here too you are taking too post-structuralist an approach. For Nietzsche, this is not a liberating illusion. Rather, the Übermensch accepts his solitude and becomes truly free from the crowd, instead of accepting the loss of individuality as a kind of insight, in a post-structuralist style.
Guilt doesn’t make much sense in the absence of free will, which Nietzsche rejected. His views on that were influenced by Schopenhauer.
As an actual person, I’d say ( agreeing with you, I think ) that he had high moods and low moods. I imagine that the passages that I’d call his “strongest” were written by Nietzsche in an ecstatic and affirmative state.
Just for context, I don’t at all idolize Nietzsche. He’s a crazy poet, who sometimes dropped some killer lines. At other times he’s an unbearable jackass.
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To me the situation is messier than that. Who was Shakespeare, for instance ? Where does poetic power come from ? I suggest that a single soul can become a collision of voices.
Not in an obvious way, but more perhaps than he would like to be. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is a great book, sort of like Schopenhauer for those who don’t need Pepsi in their bourbon. I razz Schopenhauer for his Kantian candy-coating.
I like this, and I also don’t see it as far from what I initially intended. To be an actual, specific personality is to be “immediately guilty.” Personality itself is sin, but exuberance is beauty.
Note that all deviation, all novelty, threatens others. Virtue is perhaps more obnoxious than vice.
Interesting, I can see that element, but doesn’t this leave out a fundamental difference between notions of Will and idealism on the one hand, and materialism and existential nihilism on the other? Is Dawkins even a pessimist? Isn’t the odd upbeat ending of The Selfish Gene, a claim that, through reflection and culture, we can transcend the constraints of our evolutionary history and choose altruism and beauty over a purely Spencerian struggle for survival? Is this a half-arsed version of self-overcoming?
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I’m trying to dig beneath the icing. Schopenhauer, a gloomy atheist, didn’t have access to Darwin but saw the demonic and irrational “will-to-live” all through nature. This “irrational essence” is the “truth” under a layer of representation.
Dawkins also gives us a nasty truth, primarily in terms of math. What we celebrate as beautiful self-sacrifice is “really” just a selfish gene solving an optimization problem. Dawkins’ scientific work suggests or implies a dark vision of the world. Blind mechanism rules in a regime of evil or amoral platonism.
But Dawkins as reactionary Enlightenment hero, Everyman’s Voltaire, saving the world from superstition, is of course optimistic rather than fatalistic. He’s like David Strauss, the revolutionary theologian critiqued in an early essay by Nietzsche, precisely for a shallow Socratic optimism. Not because it’s uncool to be cheerful, but because it’s a bit dense to think the old structures are secure when the foundations have been shattered.
Personally I can live with it, but I’m also not a political optimist who thinks the “problem” with the species is religion. Instead, I take Dawkins’ scientific work seriously. The “problem” is game-theoretical. We have not evolved to understand the end of the runway. It’s like asking a fish to think the end of water.
A life worth wanting is peaceful coexistence with others. It includes morality (e.g. we negotiate and balance different interests).
In case negotiations don’t work and a war breaks out, then I’d choose a quick end (atom bomb or surrender). To end the war and make life worth wanting.
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