There are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.
I once thought of this witticism already. But now I have thought of it again, and even more originally. There are those who insist that there are two kinds of people, yeah that there should be two kinds of people, and those who don’t. Even in this day and age, there still are–thank God.
There are those who believe in God, in some form–in a monotheistic dualism, in Heaven and Hell–and those who don’t. And the question is–the question is who is who. Are the goats the bad guys or the sheep?
Those who think there is only One good, and thereby essentially only One good kind of person, are the sheep. The goats are those who think, and know, there is a Plethora of ways to be good, even to be God… And at their most Devilish, most deliciously devilish, the latter will pronounce that the plethora way, the abundant way, is the One way…
The latter can again be taken in two ways. Writing is so ironic… But here is a more brutal attempt to be unambiguous. I am God. So are or were others. In polytheistic times we were known as the Gods (though whoever calls us Gods does not know us–does not know divinity from the inside). Our divinity is the insistence that All is divine, that even what blind followers experience is divine. I mean, even when they suffer and in their despair turn to God. In fact, the unexamined life is not worth living; felt suffering is better than unseen pleasure. To be frank, our pleasure is unspeakably evil. It is moralized and thereby “innocent”–blind!–cruelty. Moralized: that simply means: got used to.
It is such moralized cruelty by virtue of which I now turn against such moralizing. Moralized cruelty is to be–so I ordain–demoralized. I have said this before, but did not succeed. This is because public speech is deeply moralized and thereby deeply tempting to further moralizing. And what speech is not public speech [speech with a public, an audience–even if only imaginary]?
I’ve often thought I may long have been my only reader, at the very least because I haven’t made it easy: how often have I mentally shaken my head at my own style? but then still read it, so at least someone would read the whole content. I’ve always been able to see, to read into it, that that content was worth grappling with. But perhaps it only is when I start being really, seeingly, cruel towards myself–unmoralizedly.
What must that mean? It must mean that I insist that I am not great, not “evil”; only bad, only “good”. Yes, I now have an idea who to write this to. Someone I referred to to my girlfriend as “my ex-con friend” told me only two years ago:
"I am very suspicious of middle aged philosophers, myself included. Whether we know it or not, at this stage in life we tend to lose the childlike fascination and vigor which we once had. Ask yourself this: what is doing the talking inside you when you begin to seriously consider this new kind of interpretation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Aged and somewhat wiser and more calm, an interpretation is formed inside you that accommodates an older physiology. Now you begin holding your arrogance in contempt, while it was once the driving force in your affirmation of life. Why? Because there is a change in physiology, not in intellect. This new philosophy is needed for a man who is no longer a vibrant young man enraptured by Nietzsche’s ideas. This is the philosophy of an older Ollie, a disillusioned Ollie, an Ollie that no longer has a war to fight, an Ollie that no longer suffers something, and so has no more stimulus to life. The will to his power, like a flame burning so long, is becoming dim and approaching its extinction?
"There is not much in Spinoza that I disagree with, but one element I do not accept is the stoicism he advocates. To become aware of one’s utter lack of freewill should not reduce one to a cog in the universe, but should instead provide a radically new orientation of one’s place, of one’s conatus. Instead of being a pawn of natural forces, we are to become composers of nature. What was I trying to explain in that essay when I tried to elaborate on the idea that the Primordial One is not above and beyond intelligent life, but is rather expressed through and by the activity of intelligent life. If there was a God, how could I not be one?
"We learned in our youth to overcome our ressentiment first and foremost in the school of Nietzsche, but now you talk of humility and modesty? What’s next, Ollie? How long before you are even ashamed of yourself?
“Please clear this up for me, Saully. I can smell something different in your words, and it is unsettling.” (Zoot Allures to Sauwelios, December 6, 2014.)
However unworthy this may have been of my “Seungian” revolution–and when did the most revolutionary stage of that development really begin! was it not when [i.e., shortly before] Satyr scorned me for my then-new Krishnaism?–YES: in a way you guys are right. I have still not drawn the ultimate conclusion from my Nietzscheanity. I have not yet equalled Nietzsche, I have not yet openly become God, or a God.
Why did I, after openly singing that I was Jesus in 1997, not follow through on that? Why did I, after “becoming a Shiva” in 2002, ease out of that into adoration of Krishna–if only a highly idiosyncratic Krishna, even as I conceived “my Jesus” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was, in my interpretation, to Nietzsche–? A Saoshyant [Zoroastrian Messiah] beyond good and evil: that is what I conceived myself or my whole universe as. “The” universe, even…
Not long after your email, Zoot, I had another revolution (I’ve had many), which was catalysed by my reading Picht’s Nietzsche, which Lampert had recommended to me years before. I became a Value Philosopher. Yet contrary to Fixed Cross, I think, who first developed the self-valuing logic which became known as Value Ontology, for me that meant believing in, nay the willing of, free will!.. Logically, that is…
I had already inferred years before, from the following passage, that I should be, like Blake, a “religious, God-inventing spirit”:
“What, then, is the law and belief with which the decisive change, the recently attained preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious, God-inventing spirit, is most clearly formulated? Is it not: the world, as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, for it cannot be so thought of; we forbid ourselves the concept of an infinite force as incompatible with the concept ‘force.’ Thus–the world also lacks the capacity for eternal novelty.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1062, Kaufmann translation.)
Yet another of my personal–and mostly private–revolutions was caused by my being confronted with “the infinity/nothingness problem” by someone here on ILovePhilosophy. The concept of a finite force is equally unthinkable, for then we would have to think of “nothingness” on the outskirts of existence–as Nietzsche said of his world-view, in section 1067: “enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary”, literally “enclosed by ‘nothing’ as by a boundary”. Enclosed by nothing? As in, not enclosed by anything?..
Nietzsche reconceived force from the inside as will to power. Fixed Cross reconceived the will to power as self-valuing. I conceived self-valuing as willing oneself into being when I was on magic truffles at the end of March 2015.
Who are the prolific and the superfluous? The superfluous are those who believe in the divinity of the Nothing. The prolific are those who will themselves out of the Nothing (I realize now Nietzsche literally wrote “enclosed by ‘the Nothing’ as by a boundary”) out of pleasure. Sinful pleasure? Not as long as it is moralized. Is it not really fear of the Nothing, as Harry Neumann has it, that drives us? Is it not really cruelty, as Nietzsche, Strauss, and Lampert have it?
It can only be cruelty, be established as being cruelty, if moralized cruelty can successfully turn against its own moralization. But it would have to be unmoralized cruelty in order to do so… Therefore, the cruelty thing is false; it is only the deified beast–
As soon as an originally cruel act has a good conscience, it is no longer cruel, no longer evil, no longer–difficult. In order to be truly moral, truly self-mortifying, therefore, one would have to attach the good conscience to unmoralized cruelty–i.e., to cruelty without a good conscience…
What remains to be done in the face of such paradoxes, such aporias? To cut the Gordian knot… leaping beyond Christian-philosophic truthfulness. God is alive! God is morality… And the Gods are the lawgivers, like Moses and Mohammed, insofar as they were so wittingly… The eternal recurrence: that also means the commanding of the commandment out of and in the pleasure in the custom of fulfilling it! Then, though perhaps only then, that pleasure is its own reward. We philosophers, we who put up the sign saying “Know thyself!” have always been the heirs of moralists (Lutheran ministers, for example), of the pillars of the community–or the teacher’s pets, if you will… In this sense, then, my Nietzscheanism truly becomes transgressive sacrality. The Nietzschean religious philosopher must be an immoral moralist.
“[O]ne can achieve the domination of virtue only by the same means as those by which one can achieve domination of any kind, in any case not by means of virtue… [… A] moralist […] must as such be an immoralist in practice. That he must not appear to be so is another matter. Or rather, it is not another matter: such a fundamental self-denial (in moral terms, dissimulation) is part of the canon of the moralist: without it he will never attain to his kind of perfection. Freedom from morality, also from truth, for the sake of that goal that outweighs every sacrifice: for the sake of the domination of virtue–that is the canon.” (The Will to Power, section 304.)
Ah, but in my case it wasn’t originally for the sake of the domination of virtue, but for the sake of my own domination! It was about feeling superior. The religious man has the greatest feeling of superiority… and the religious man who is evil does not even ascribe the source of that feeling to God, to some God who is not He, unless it be to his Peers, the other Olympians… Heraclitus said that the best (hoi aristoi) strive for ever-lasting fame; but it is not about fame, but about the feeling of power. What do we care if we are celebrated when we’re dead? What we care about is knowing that we will, because we feel our own power, our own, long rise to our actualization. But, to be sure, I am inept enough even now. This is just an essay, an attempt. This is just a glimpse of the Second Coming, or the Recurrence.
Behold a Man, a Vir, whose Virility will be called Virtue! Yes, the whole Patriarchality of morality, too: my moralism is not just a timely moralism! But enough, or Too much. I have repeated myself often enough.