BGE commentary

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
21

I don’t agree. For envisioning one needs a creative perspective, for deduction ones just needs logic. A computer can deduce, but not envision.

But there’s as subject, an “I” in the equation, which is a dynamic value, not something explainable in logic.

If I would judge the Jesus by his followers I would have to conclude that he was a genocidal maniac. I think you should go to the source to drink the water pure.

This touches on something fundamental - Nietzsche did not want to ascend into heaven - he did not want harmony or peace - he is an advocate not of the devil, but of force.
As force is prior to form, I consider his form-scepsis as a necessary step to establish a form that does not take away, that does not limit or condemn, that gives force a context to exert itself, instead of an obstacle to overcome. All lasting forms have to do with force, with transmutation, with progression and increase.

22

Wouldn’t that depend on the computer?
Simple minded men
create simple minded things
to do simple minded tasks.

Logic is the determiner of what can be and when understood, a tool.
The explainer is merely a man attempting to use the tool so as to determine what can be, what he envisions from the hope of a dream.
Dream - Present = Task
Logic + Task = Rationale
Hope + Rationale = Vision
Vision + Will = Destiny

Algebraically;
Will + Hope + Dream + Logic - Present = Destiny
Will = Present + Destiny - Hoping - Reasoning - Dreaming
Or perhaps you recognize it more as “will to power” to achieve your destiny from where you are.
But you had to go through the Dreaming, the Hoping, and the Logic in order to “see the path” for the will to take.

But of course, that is just the explanation of the Logic that any well designed computer might follow so as to envision and achieve.

No doubt. As I said, I am not judging the “source”, merely the flavor of the present fruit.
But given 2000 years, I suspect any fruit would get a little over ripe if not perfectly preserved.
So there isn’t a realistic comparison between a Jesus fruit and a Nietzsche fruit for quite a while yet.
But then again, at what point is a lemon expected to ripen to a kiwi?

Hence his limited elucidation.
He apparently realized the significance of survival and such gained his focus. But he apparently didn’t see the very criteria of survival;
“That which remains IN HARMONY, CANNOT perish.”
Why toy with treachery if harmony is critical?

And all of that is still not saying that he wasn’t far more than his current fruits would indicate.
But you asked for what I currently see of him.
I await for what you will eventually see of him.

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[size=90]9.
“According to nature” you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to this indifference? Is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living - estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited - wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life” how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?
In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature - even on nature - and incorporate them in her; you demand that she be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image - as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves - Stoicism is self tyranny - nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic - a piece of nature?
But this is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the causa prima.[/size]

Replace Stoicism with Science.

But what is Nietzscehs saying in the beginning? Again I question: Is this correct?

Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time

Nature cannot be desolate in the sense of infertile - it would npot procreate, not exist.
How is nature wasteful? Law of conservation of energy…
Indifferent? Not to itself.
Without purpose and consideration? Except its self-sustainment.

Nature is hardly as chaotic as Nietzsche suggests here.

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[size=90]10.
The eagerness and subtlety-I might even say, shrewdness- with which the problem of “the real and the apparent world” is to day attacked all over Europe makes one think and wonder; and anyone who hears nothing in the background except a “will to truth,” certainly does not have the best of ears. In rare and isolate instances it may really be the case that such a will to truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician’s ambition to hold a hopeless position, may participate and ultimately prefer even a handful of “certainty” to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities; there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on - and die. But this is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul - however courageous the gestures of such a virtue may look.
It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life. When they side against appearance, and speak of “perspective,” with a new arrogance; when they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the visual evidence that “the earth stands still,” and thus, apparently in good humor, let their securest possession go (for in what does one at present believe more firmly than in one’s body?) -who knows if they are not trying at bottom to win back something that was formerly an even securer possession, something of the ancient domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the “immortal soul,” perhaps “the old God,” in short, ideas by which one could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and cheerfully than by “modern ideas”? There is mistrust of these modern ideas in this attitude, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, unable to endure any longer the bric-a-brac of concepts of the most diverse origin, which is the form in which so-called positivism offers itself on the market today; a disgust of the more fastidious taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters in whom there is nothing new or genuine, except this motleyness. In this, it seems to me, we should agree with these skeptical anti-realists and knowledge microscopists of today: their instinct, which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted - what do their retrograde bypaths concern us! The main thing about them is not that they wish to go back, but that they wish to get - away. A little more strength, flight, courage, and artistic power. and they would want to rise - not return![/size]

These Old Gods were evoked in a world where the body was an impression, part physical, part fantastic, all meaningful.
No practical sense existed that was not sense of the sacred.

More courage and artistic power indeed, also less stupidity, less reducing to assumptions.

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[size=90]
11.
It seems to me that today attempts are made everywhere to diver attention from the actual influence Kant exerted on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his table of categories; with that in his hand he said: “This is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.”
Let us only understand this “could be”! He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty for synthetic judgments a priori. Suppose he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover, if possible, something still prouder - at all events “new faculties”!
But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant asked himself - and what really is his answer? “By virtue of a faculty” but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were actually beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man - for at that time the Germans were still moral and not yet addicted to Realpolitik.
The honeymoon of German philosophy arrived. All the young theologians of the Tübingen seminary went into the bushes - all looking for “faculties.” And what did they not find - in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the German spirit, to which romanticism, the malignant fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between “finding” and “inventing”! Above all, a faculty for the “surpra-sensible”: Schelling christened it intellectual intuition, and thus gratified the most heartfelt cravings of the Germans, whose cravings were at bottom pious. One can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and enthusiastic movement, which was really youthfulness, however boldly it disguised itself in hoary and senile concepts, than to take it seriously or worse, to treat it with moral indignation. Enough, one grew older and the dream vanished. A time came when people scratched their heads, and they still scratch them today. One had been dreaming, and first and foremost - old Kant. “By virtue of a faculty” - he had said, or at least meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? “By virtue of a faculty,” namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,

Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.

But such replies belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” by another question, “Why is belief in such judgments necessary?” - and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that! Or to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgments a priori should not “be possible” at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.
Finally, to call to mind the enormous influence that “German philosophy” - I hope you understand its right to quotation marks - has exercised throughout the whole of Europe, there is no doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva had a share in it: it was a delight to the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurantists of all nations, to find, thanks to German philosophy, an antidote to the still predominant sensualism which overflowed from the last century into this, in short - “sensus assoupire.”[/size]

Definitions of a prior synthetic judgment stripped of cultural tartufferies:
-The conditions brought about by evolution of self-sustaining and procreating entities from atom to the level of complexity of self-reference where the phenomenon ideation occurs.
-The interpretation by which one by necessity approaches the world: interpretation in terms of ones own constitution, elements one is unable not to include in all interpretations. Elements of interpretation securing it is in fact interpretation, making reality ones own.

A priori synthetic judgment: “I am”.

That in fact there can be morals proposed by this does not mean they are included or described by it.

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[size=90]12.
So far as the materialistic atomism is concerned, it belongs with the most effectively refuted things we have, and perhaps nowadays in Europe no scholar remains so unscholarly that he still ascribes a serious meaning to it other than for convenient hand-and-household use (that is, as an abbreviated way of expressing oneself)—thanks primarily to that Pole Boscovich, who, together with the Pole Copernicus, has so far been the greatest and most victorious opponent of appearances. For while Copernicus convinced us to believe, contrary to all our senses, that the earth did not stand still, Boscovich taught us to renounce the belief in the final thing which made the earth “stand firm,” the belief in “stuff,” in “material,” in what was left of the earth, in atomic particles. It was the greatest triumph over the senses which has ever been achieved on earth so far.* But we must go even further and also declare war, a relentless war to the bitter end, against the “atomistic need,” which still carries on a dangerous afterlife in places where no one suspects, like that celebrated “metaphysical need.”—We must at the start also get rid of that other and more disastrous atomism, which Christianity has taught best and longest, the atomism of the soul. With this phrase let me be permitted to designate the belief which assumes that the soul is something indestructible, eternal, indivisible—like a monad, like an atomon. We should rid scientific knowledge of this belief! Just between us, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” itself and to renounce one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses, as habitually happens with the clumsiness of the naturalists, who hardly touch upon “the soul” without losing it. But the way to new versions and refinements of the hypothesis of the soul stands open: and ideas like “mortal soul”‘ and “soul as the multiplicity of the subject” and “soul as the social structure of drives and affects” from now on want to have civil rights in scientific knowledge. While the new psychologist is preparing an end to superstition, which so far has flourished with an almost tropical lushness in the way the soul has been imagined, at the same time he has naturally pushed himself, as it were, into a new desert and a new mistrust—it may be the case that the older psychologists had a more comfortable and happier time—; finally, however, he knows that in that very process he himself is condemned also to invent, and —who knows?—perhaps to discover .[/size]

Unwarranted distinction between reality and appearance. Who is to say that, because atoms are reducible to forces, they are not real? He would deny that the universe could be formed into what it is now because atoms are formed from force.

“The soul” simply means “structural integrity”. Whether this structure is approached and interpreted by itself as physical, moral, aesthetic or elsewhise does not matter - when something has a “soul” this means that it has an inherent tendency to sustain itself.

This self-sustaining tendency and the means by which it is realized (valuation, the activity manifesting the tendency) constitute the ‘‘essence’’ of a ‘‘being’’. Without atomism there is no diversity of subject, no subject, no experience, no being or becoming, no time or space.

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[size=90]13.
Physiologists should think carefully about setting up the drive to preserve the self as the cardinal drive in an organic being. Above everything else, something living wants to release its power—living itself is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of that. In short, here as everywhere, beware of extraneous teleological principles! The drive for self-preservation is one such principle (we have Spinoza’s inconsistency to thank for it—). For the essential principle of economy must hold—that’s what method demands.
[/size]

Ah! But only those living things to which their release of power amounts in their self-preservation and procreation continue to exist - and to release!
So whereas it is true that expending is prior to containing - that containment is a particular kind of expending - containment is necessary to all beings, organic or not.

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[size=90]14.
Nowadays in perhaps five or six heads the idea is dawning that even physics is only an interpretation and explication of the world (for our benefit, if I may be permitted to say so) and not an explanation of the world. But to the extent it rests upon a faith in the senses, it counts for more and must continue to count for more for a long time yet, that is, as an explanation. Physics has eyes and fingers on its side; it has appearance and tangibility on its side. That works magically on an age with basically plebeian taste—persuasively and convincingly—indeed, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensuality. What is clear, what is “explained”? Only whatever lets itself be seen and felt—every problem has to be pushed that far. By contrast, the reluctance to accept obvious evidence of the senses constituted the magic of the Platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking—perhaps among human beings who enjoyed even stronger and more discriminating senses than our contemporaries have, but who knew how to experience a higher triumph in remaining master of these senses and to do this by means of the pale, cool, gray, conceptual nets which they threw over the colourful confusion of sense, the rabble of the senses, as Plato called them. That form of enjoyment in overcoming this world and interpreting the world in the manner of Plato was different from the one which today’s physicists offer us, as well as the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological workers, with their principle of the “smallest possible force” and the greatest possible stupidity. “Where human beings have nothing more to look at and to grip, there they have also no more to seek out”—that is, of course, an imperative different from the Platonic one, but nonetheless for a crude, diligent race of mechanics and bridge builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do, it might be precisely the right imperative.[/size]

Central issue, gateway to a philosophy of the future. Perhaps it still has not found ground in more than five or six heads. The belief that physics is explanation is more ubiquitous than belief in God ever was - it is even considered evident. Whereas all that is evindent is that physics constantly demands explanation. Physics develops in a continuous attempt to explain itself, and as a consequence changes the world.

29

“Imposition [of] the objective on human valuation. This objectivity, as it had been established, turned to become the questioner of man.”

Which was the point - to discover morality.

30

The first chapter in Beyond Good and Evil might be the most explosive philosophical bomb ever dropped on the many unsuspecting souls that dare to read it. Then again, much of Nietzsche is dropping bombs, and that’s what he truly excelled at.

His solutions to the way out of the wreckage, however, are rather lame.

31

Yeah, this is because it was his historical task to diagnose the problems. Now it is our historical task to create the medicines.

32

Medicine is the DNA machine

33

In terms of bombs he explodes in the unsuspecting soul, you can’t do better than Twilight of the Idols:

(Beginning of the book):

Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols

PREFACE

Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with
immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. Excess strength alone is the proof of strength.

A revaluation of all values: this question mark, so black, so huge that it casts a shadow over the man who puts it down — such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sunlight at every opportunity to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper to do this; every “case” is a case of luck. Especially, war. War has always been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too introspective, too profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal. A maxim, the origin of which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my motto:

Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. [“The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound.”]

Another mode of convalescence (in certain situations even more to my liking) is sounding out idols. There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my “evil eye” upon this world; that is also my “evil ear.” Finally to pose questions with a hammer, and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound that can only come from bloated entrails — what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would remain silent must finally speak out.

This essay — the title betrays it — is above all a recreation, a spot of sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a psychologist. Perhaps a new war, too? And are new idols sounded out? This little essay is a great declaration of war; and regarding the sounding out of idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are no idols that are older, more assured, more puffed-up — and none more hollow. That does not prevent them from being those in which people have the most faith; nor does one ever say “idol,” especially not in the most distinguished instance.

MAXIMS AND ARROWS

1 Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Is psychology a vice?

2 Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face
what he already knows.

3 To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher.

4 “All truth is simple.” Is that not a double lie?

5 I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires
moderation in knowledge as in other things.

6 In our own wild nature we find the best recreation from our un-nature, from our spirituality.

7 What? Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man’s?

8 Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

34

Agreed.

Unfortunately many people seem to look at Nietzsche’s words as gospel (I used to be one of them) and so they look at his solutions as gospel as well. Imo that’s a recipe for disaster.

35

What are Nietzsche’s solutions?

36

It is no small irony that Nietzscheans, so called, turn Nietzsche’s writings into a religion. Nietzsche himself would have laughed mightily at this.

37

You must be talking about Fixed.

38

If you think Fixed Cross has turned Nietzsche into a religion, then you don’t understand him at all.

39

Well, he’s clearly a hedonist. That much I understand.

40

No, you don’t.