I agree with you, aspacia - I think the idea that the losers of the war should have won springs from the rich westerner being too happy for his own conscience.
The idea that the world would be better if more people had been massacred is an intellectual frivolity only those who live outside of any necessity can entertain.
Detrop - perhaps you and Sauwelios object to freedom because it is difficult to justify.
“Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra? Clearly, however, shall thine eye answer me: free for what?”
Sigh. I will summarize my exegesis for the sake of clarity.
It is not criminal, from Nietzsche’s perspective, to approach knowledge; it is criminal to approach knowledge and be a Christian.
As philosophy is the mother* of the sciences, the philosopher is the most anti-Christian man. If he calls himself a Christian, he is really the criminal of criminals.
It is the Protestant’s half-heartedness that Nietzsche finds offensive.
What followed after this sentence was no longer part of my exegesis, but a digression which I thought interesting and useful. In any case, I have shown that Jakob’s explanation fails to hit the mark.
*I should rather have written “father of the sciences”: for, although (natural) philosophy is the beginning of science, philosophy should also rule the sciences: see Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 6.
It is not criminal, from Nietzsche’s perspective, to approach knowledge; it is criminal to approach knowledge and be a Christian.
That’s exactly what I said.
As philosophy is the mother* of the sciences, the philosopher is the most anti-Christian man. If he calls himself a Christian, he is really the criminal of criminals.
<i>An assertion, comparable to the conclusion of my argumentation.</i>
It is the Protestant’s half-heartedness that Nietzsche finds offensive.
<i> So now crime is offensive to Nietzsche? So, philosophy is offensive to Nietzsche?</i>
Aspacia, on the last page you told me to “smile,” because you believed you had given decent examples of positive aspects of capitalism and its effect.
I responded suggesting that a contary to capitalism, such as national socialism, might have resulted in a statistically better world had it been installed during WW2.
You then told me I sank to a new low. I told you I don’t support anything, nor that I need to, to make an objective analysis in general regarding political systems and the state of the world at large.
That being said, neither do I want to start another capitalism debate with you. We’ve only done it twenty-six times before, I know, but please let me sit this one out…
Yes Jakob, I’d wager that Sauwelios can play a mean game of D&D. Probably make a damn good dungeon master too.
Please tell me at least you understand what I mean here, Jakob. These extensive elaborations of Christianity and, worse, the interpretations of anti-christians as they set out to do so, amounts to making up something so to have material to rant about. Much of eighteenth century enlightenment was spent doing just that…analyzing ubiquitous pseudo-philosophy (and no…philosophy is not the mother of science…it is a bastardization of science) and metaphysics.
I think both you and Saully are stuck in a meme or an intellectual virus. You lack the capacity to see yourself doing this “philosophy” that you do. You lack some necessary propositional logic, and like Saully, you write diachronically.
If there is anything to be said about Christianty and Hegelean dialectics worth its weight in salt, it would be in the existential polemics of Kierkegaard and the epistemology of Spinoza. In combination, not only is metaphysics and dualism completely abolished but a return to the existential, the real material conditions of existence bearing historical significance, completely free of teleology. The existential is the only actual philosophy…it is what you can consider a hermeneutic scientism…a “marxism” essentially. The lineage you are involved in and your theorizing spawns from a subjective position “in the mix,” so to speak, of a progressive historical dynamic. You are in a reactionary state to the loss of God, as Nietzsche was, and in this panic you attack at shadows; christianity, for one, and the non-aesthetic, the apollo nature, the science which is corse and rigid and without a place for metaphysics. A poet state.
The Nietzschean characterization is the highest expression of anxiety in the face of the absurd. It is a despair which is universal to the condition resentment against the fact that there is no order or purpose. Following the initial reaction, the development of the Nietzschean spirit can often be a cloaking of a shame before oneself which does not permit the individual to admit to the absurdity and purposelessness of existence.
Holding on to faith in power and fate as if that changes purposelessness. This is the inner decree of the Nietzchean. Inventing abysses. There are none, for even they are absurd.
Sauwelios once mentioned the battle for rank between the comedian and the tragedian. The tragic comic is the highest type, while the serious tragic is the inferior. This stage is synonomous with pure nihilism. The comic has transcended the urgency and anxiety from despair and becomes light on his feet and childlike in the face of absurdity.
There is a beauty and innocence in this form of submission to the absurd fate of existence, as indeed it is absurd. Be weary of those who regain the spirit of seriousness and have yet to step out of nihilism and a resentment toward the fact that God does not exist.
To summarize, christianity can be traced back to platonic philsophy and is therefore bullshit. Modern metaphysics and nomenclature, etymology, can be traced back to bourgeois origins-- theorists who neglected the scientifc method in establishing a doctrine of anything. We are stuck in a language meme that is completely contingent. Much of the atheistic movement is grounded in illusory motives, all resulting from existential and hermeneutical conditions which Kierkegaard addresses thoroughly.
“As religion becomes more iberal and less an identification with the church, it’s focus shifts from obedience to a centralized political authority (the pope in the case of Catholicism) to an increasinglly uncontrollable and unverifyable authority of God in oneself - it’s ultimate consequence in (the likes of) Spinoza, who rejects all influence from outside as coming from God, arguing that the only holy law man can know is what his body dictates. As God becomes more an object of experience and less of worship, morality grows from public to private. Secular law becomes irrelevant: crime.”
Neither.
“The criminal character of a Christian increases when he approaches knowledge [die Wissenschaft]. The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.”
This means that the philosopher is the one who approaches knowledge most closely.
“What, at bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes—and indeed rather in spite of him than on the basis of his precedent—all philosophers have been making an assault on the ancient soul concept under the cloak of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept—that is to say, an assault on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or openly, anti-Christian”.
[BGE 54.]
“Crime” - and this is where you have misunderstood him - does not mean crime in the usual sense here; it means crime against Nietzsche’s new moral order (otherwise, what would Nietzsche care about assassination attempts on public morality? He would rather encourage them! He would want for them to succeed!). And as for philosophy being offensive:
"My attitude to the past, like that of all lovers of knowledge, is one of great tolerance, that is, magnanimous self-mastery: with gloomy caution I go through the madhouse world of whole millennia, whether it be called “Christianity,” “Christian faith,” or "Christian church"—I am careful not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling changes, breaks out, as soon as I enter modern times, our time. Our time knows better… What was formerly just sick is today indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here begins my nausea.— I look around: not one word has remained of what was formerly called “truth”; we can no longer stand it if a priest as much as uses the word “truth.” If we have even the smallest claim to integrity, we must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope, not merely is wrong in every sentence he speaks, but lies—that he is no longer at liberty to lie from “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest too knows as well as anybody else that there is no longer any “God,” any “sinner,” any “Redeemer"—that “free will” and “moral world order” are lies: seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of the spirit, no longer permits anybody not to know about this… All the concepts of the church have been recognized for what they are, the most malignant counterfeits that exist, the aim of which is to devalue nature and natural values; the priest himself has been recognized for what he is, the most dangerous kind of parasite, the real poison-spider of life… We know, today our conscience knows—, what these uncanny inventions of the priests and the church are really worth, what ends they served in reducing mankind to such a state of self-violation that its sight can arouse nausea: the concepts “beyond,” “Last Judgment,” “immortality of the soul,” and “soul” itself are instruments of torture, systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master… Everybody knows this: and yet everything continues as before. Where has the last feeling of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, an otherwise quite unembarrassed type of man, anti-Christians through and through in their deeds, still call themselves Christians today and attend communion?.. A young prince at the head of his regiments, magnificent as an expression of the selfishness and conceit of his people—but, without any shame, confessing himself a Christian!.. Whom then does Christianity negate? What does it call “world”? That one is a soldier, that one is a judge, that one is a patriot; that one resists, that one sees to one’s honor; that one seeks one’s advantage; that one is proud… Every practice of every moment, every instinct, every valuation that is translated into action is today anti-Christian: what a miscarriage of falseness must modern man be, that he is not ashamed to be called a Christian in spite of all this! — — —”
[AC 38.]
The philosopher is supposed to be the man with the greatest intellectual conscience, the greatest intellectual integrity. This means that, if he confesses himself a Christian, he is the most shameless, the least decent, least self-respecting man, and thereby the most offensive man to Nietzsche’s taste.
Then why state there is nothing wrong with genocide, and pull my name into your comment? Your disclaimer did not work detrop, as you have often stated the masses need to be controlled in various posts.
Chuckle, perhaps, if you do not pull me into your comments regarding dictatorships, and not having to put up with the regulated capitalist aspacia.
“It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!”… One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation…”
[The Genealogy, first treatise, section 7.]
Nietzsche again inverts this inverted value-equation; he again inverts the Natural Order of Rank. The Jews had turned it 180 degrees, had stood truth on its head; Nietzsche turns it another 180 degrees, so that truth is stood on her feet again.
“The order of castes, the supreme, the dominant law, is merely the sanction of a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no “modern idea” has any power. In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery. Nature, not Manu, distinguishes the pre-eminently spiritual ones, those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one respect nor in the other, the mediocre ones—the last as the great majority, the first as the elite.”
[AC 57.]
These three castes correspond to sattva, rajas, and tamas respectively. Rajas I should like to translate as “will to power”: the warriors are distinguished by the strength of their will to power; the mediocre are distinguished by the weakness of it; and the highest, the Brahmanas [those who represent the deification of power], by the supreme strength of it:
“The erotic fascination inspired by the ascetic issues from his painful attempt to tame the will, a project that paradoxically requires of him a superhuman strength of will”.
[Daniel Conway, Love’s labor’s lost.]
Seriously though is not “overcoming” and moving beyond Nietzsche not the first thing a good Nietzschian should be doing is saying so long Nietzsche.
I never really could concieve of Nietzsche debating like we do in ILP with long strings of the quoted spittle of other “great men” dribbling out of his mouth.
Surely his greatness was his striving to “dis” almost EVERY system/philosopher that went before
(even if it gets ridculous as per Twilight of the Idols)
and then of course i follow with a quote for the “great man” - oh dear
Flee, my friend, into thy solitude! I see thee deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Flies in the Market Place (of ideas?!)
That quote is from Zarathustra’s speech Of the Flies in the Market-Place. And this forum is, of course, also a market-place. And indeed, I am stung all over with the stings of little men! And I am myself, perhaps, a “great man”:
“In the world even the best things are worthless without those who represent them: those representers, the people call great men.”
[ibid.]
But I do not only represent Nietzsche; I also represent myself. I am myself a deviser of new values. What you see here is the camel, who is commanded by the dragon to carry his teaching into the market-place. But next to the dragon is the child, next to Odhinn there is Tyr. The camel’s the servant, the lion’s the warrior, but above them is the Dragon Child!
My interpretation of the passage was based on the idea that Nietzsche encourages the approach of knowlegde and the disobedience to public morality regardless of the name one gives it; I interpreted cirminal as an honorary title. According to you, Nietzsche thinks of one who does this as lofty, save when he does it under the name of Christianity - then it is criminal against his (Nietzsche’s) morality.
I will give Nietzsche the benefit of the doubt and stand by my own interpretation.
As you estimate my thinking based on my manic corrspondences with Sauwelios I can’t blame you for making the judgements you make. But they are as misguided as the correspondences you read. Let me explain something about myself, as I must seem a very disturbed and deprived entity.
I have never been obsessed with Christianity, just interested in a mystical experimental sense like I have been in islam, zen, yoga, kabbalah, etc. I care not for morality - am very bad at it when I pretend I do - I think healthy morality is generated effortlessly by the healthy individual and all struggle with it is both symptom and a cause of bad health. I am not a Nietzschean either, although when I am in agony, I recognize myself in Zarathustra when he speaks of the redemption from suffering by creation. (when I am not in agony I don’t think in terms of Nietzsche, but he has been a trustworthy friend through the valley of metasphysics) In reality (as opposed to around this coffeetable) my expression is ultra-existential and hence easily makes a turn for the absurd. I will post a link of a video I once made in my signature soon to make clear something about that. Think I’ll call it ‘The Hammer’. It illustrates the birth of nihilism in my mind born of psychedelic horror and death, and my struggle with it.
I will look closer at Kierkegaard at your recommendation. I always liked the feel of the guy but have only read fragments. What do you recommend?
That the latter is nonsense can easily be appreciated: by sketching the case that public morality encourages the approach of knowledge.
Please don’t put your words into my mouth. Nietzsche usually thinks of the criminal as the strong man under unfavorable circumstances. These “unfavorable circumstances” are, of course, slave morality. The criminal is a master, [note the comma] who naturally does not fit in the Proteus-bed of slave morality (“One law for the lion & ox is oppression”). So Nietzsche’s heart goes out to these criminals, but not to the slaves who are not fit for master morality. If public morality reflects master morality, its criminals, such as Christians (but not only these), are anything but lofty.
How magnanimous of you.
I have shown that you do not understand all of Nietzsche. Be a man and be magnanimous enough to acknowledge that.
Nihilistic knowledge? Certainly not: that is the basis of Nietzsche’s morality.
I have never mentioned anything of the sort. I mean, I have mentioned a Nietzschean order (which is implied in the passage in question), but I have never said that a man of knowledge should violate this.
Or wait: I see what you mean now. A man of knowledge violates this order, which is based on knowledge, by confessing himself a Christian. It is a sin against the integrity of the spirit.
It was you who challenged me, remember? I have accepted your challenge, and provided a passage that you do not understand. That you fail to acknowledge this does not take away from this fact.
I have got the idea of starting a book study of The Antichristian in the Essays and Theses forum. Maybe that will illumine your mind.
It is, by the way, a Procrustes-bed, not a Proteus-bed.
I found a key within a key in the passage in question! The key to that passage was:
“The criminal character of a Christian increases when he approaches knowledge [die Wissenschaft].”
“The criminal character of a Christian” is “das Verbrecherische im Christ-sein” in German - “what is criminal in [or: “about”] being a Christian”! So what is criminal consists here in being a Christian, not in approaching knowledge.
Given what we know of the “truth,” how is what you are suggesting not itself a synthesis? Or is that your point?
No, Rome is very nihilistic, and thus the point about Christianity.
Also, the example of Jesus is one who actually resists human authority in the name of truth. In other words, Jesus is about democracy and the masses inherently, ie, the meek shall inherit… Very much a subtext about the polis/demos and against the notion of a Caesar/Republic with a very limited conception of the “citizen.”
Also, I think the example of the Godhead and the Alpha/Omega is clearly an attempt to make a usable dialectic for combining the reality of the human, original sin, with the ideal of the human.
Jesus makes a nice thesis for the ubermensch antithesis. Neither example is workable in reality, neither is truly “human.”
I wasn’t sure if it counted as a synthesis when I wrote it since it is more of a middle road without an actual fusion of nuclei. I tend to think in terms of was and clash, release of blind new energy when I think of synthesis, Perhaps that is too dramatic.
What do you mean by nihilistic here? My understanding fo nihilism does not apply to Rome - nihilism as belief in nothing, thinking that there is no point to exsitence. Rome was built with great love for the world, and especially itself. It still is a monument to existence.
I can see your point, but that subtext is, I think, not objectively present in the Bible. The New Testament makes no mention of politics at all - it simply scetches worldy affairs as unimportant. Of course it was an actual threat to the authority of the Caesar - so much that he had to become a Christian in the end.
What is significant to me is that the art of the Augustus period, when Christianity was no factor, is of the highest standard of Roman craft and aesthetic - closely resembling the classical Greek period, whereas in the Constantine period it had fallen to a degenerate state.
The mob of figures below are from Constantine period, the circles above are ripped from an arch from a much earlier period. The interest in art seems to have been almost entirely lost. My point is that I consider the factual Christian influence on Rome as degenerative - in terms of art at least. No wonder, with the emphasize on the afterlife. Id sooner call Rome under Constantine nihilistic than under Augustus.
I think the gnostic Christian wrotings are by far the most useful to this dialectic. For one thing, they involve Mother Earth as opposed to the father in Heaven - a polarity absent in the final donctrine. I think the Bible has been mostly effective in securing the power of Caesar, who became the pope - as a representant of the Holy.
With this difference that the Ubermensch is a goal, whereas Jesus is (supposedly) a historic figure.
Nietzsche is not very clear about the Ubermensch. Sometimes he is the robust Caesar type, sometimes he is the sensitive hermit who flees from the stenches of the mob.
Then again - Jesus is also different in every description of him.
