Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible
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I agree with this, and it really puts the focus on why it is rewarding reading Nietzsche today.
The only thing I miss is the implicit and hidden Spinozism in Nietzsche. Why it matters? - Spinoza can really help with the political aspect. Goal of true democracy and maximum freedom.
Such a reading will see The will to Power as the Spinozian conatus/desire. As for Power, not opressive power of rulers, but the power to live and act. The affirmation as Spinozian affirmation of joy (ie affirmate what makes you grow in such power)
Yes, Nietzsche grasped quite clearly that exceedingly few people have the courage to endure the world "in itself." Most people persist their whole lives trapped in elaborate fantasies. This is something that, Nietszche suspects, has been true since the dawn of time and recognizes it as an essential human characteristic (herd instinct).
Science causes a kind of crisis. ("God is dead.") After millenia of extreme devotion to all manner nonsense (think of the religious wars that plagued Europe) science starts asking some very uncomfortable and very pointed questions. But people will not abandon their fantasies, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Instead they will cling to their fantasies that much harder often with full knowledge that what they "believe" are lies. This metastasizes into fascism [1]. When Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax he knows he's lying, and you know he's lying, and accusing him of lying would be pointless and that's the point. Nietzsche foresaw quite clearly that this would be the crisis of the 20th century and beyong: in the face of science people would become more willing to deceive themselves.
What Nietzsche proposes against this isn't some tired paean to "human excellence." Leiter here gets very literal and selective here. Nietzsche does not think that art or philosophy or dance can stand against the ever rising tide of fascism. It is what motivates these things -- the will to power -- that is the only defense against self-deception. All fantasies are born of fear, a fear of change and growth and death. But there also exists in some men a desire for change and growth and death. (Indeed Nietzsche will come to believe that the will to power is a kind of cosmic necessity.) The only hope that societies have against falling to fascism is cultivating precisely this opposing force which Nietzsche understands not as some mere "will to truth" or "will to excellence" but a far more primal "will to power" that motivates men to plunge into the unknown and confront their own mortality.
[1] "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
There was no nonsense. Or far fewer of it than one imagines.
When the "religious wars" weren't using religious directly as a thin pretext for "let's grab their land", they were about ways to live.
Religion in those days was what lifestyle (or national preferences) are today, and it was used a proxy for that and for defining a national/cultural group (the role that later was played by nations), not for mere theological differences.
The role of the elites is also over-emphasized - such "religious" wars responded to great group enmities and desires for plundering among the peoples, not just some elites manipulating them throu piousness.
In fact tons of similar wars happened in the ancient world between within Greek city states, or between Greece, Persia and other states of the time, where no religion difference was used to justify them (or could be used, as city states had the same religion).
There, in Thucydides for example, the arguments for war are written bare (control of trade routes, plundering, defending their territories, not willing to submit to another ruler, defending their way of life, etc), without needing to resort to any religious causes.
The same things are masked in the lingo of each era -- in late 18-19th centuries it was all about the "glory of the nation", in the 20th century it was all about "promoting communism" or "defending the free world", now it's all about "protecting human rights" etc.
Essentially, Nietzsche is a person who touches very sensitive parts of being human after he analyzed society. He is a person who asked uncomfortable questions about existence in his quest to describe nihilism. Nihilism is the consequence of the loss of morality and the total annihilation of ones values and belief system - and the loss of morality stems from the "death of god" which means that we got to the point (in science) where there were exceedingly small areas of unknowns. Many questions - also about right and wrong - were suddenly more informed due to increasing knowledge.
What makes Nietzsche great is his ability to foresee what this leads to. It's like he knew what will happen in the future. And he tried to give us a solution using "will to power". I'm not necessarily a fan of his solution, but I appreciate it. He's a man who had a positive attitude towards people and society. He wanted to help society. This deep empathy based on insane levels of self-awareness and profundity is what I like about him. Unfortunately, his ideas were not understood properly and used by fascists (the "master race" of the Nazis is built on the definition of ubermensch a.k.a. superman). Which is the reason I really appreciate your comment.
I think that "will to power" is one of many possible solutions. But everyone has to find a solution for the big deep hole of emptiness in their existence. Failing to find a solution leads to nihilism which is a very painful and unpleasant place to be (although it has the advantage that you don't have to take responsibilities - for some people this can feel better than dealing with their emptiness). If we as a society fail to help to give people different solutions for this emptiness, it will lead to a society full of unhappy people who are in quiet despair. We can see that this is already happening.
So Nietzsche talked about a question that hit us hard 100 years after his death. Sometimes we acknowledge when sci-fi authors were able to predict the future. I would like to acknowledge that Nietzsche was able to anticipate our reality based on his knowledge of human nature. In the same realm I would like to thank Sigmund Freud - both shared similar thoughts about the human nature which shows that Nietzsche was also a type of psychologist (before it was a distinct research field). Sigmund Freud once articulated his admiration for Nietzsches work and said that Nietzsches thoughts were amazing in that they captured many thoughts that Freud thought to be true due to his works in psychoanalysis.
But yes, if you achieve a level of self-awareness where you're able to live in a near-nihilistic state and be content with it, it can be quite pleasant, although it's very hard to achieve.
Pure nihilism would lead to beings who don't want anything and therefore don't do anything - but even if you want to pee or "achieve nihilism" you stop being a complete nihilist because you start to want something. So it's a catch-22 here. As long as those Zen Nihilists know that they can't achieve pure nihilism and treat it as a goal which can't be reached (like wisdom), I think it can be a good solution (otherwise it could lead to a silly competition where all followers just try to tell everybody how "nihilistic" they are). Not for most of us, but I'm glad you found something.
And of course the great humor of SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-10
Share some comedians, would love to see some new stuff.
Active nihilism is all about "praxis" rather than detachment. The quote from Blade Runner comes to mind:
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy."
Nietzsche would like every human being to burn like Roy Batty. Humanity performing a wild leap into the unknown trying to manifest its evolutionary potential, free from the straightjacket of religion and inherited morality.
In other words, the key word for Buddhism is detachment (passive).
The key word for active forms of nihilism is destruction. The tearing down of established symbols in order to make way for each person to create his own.
1. Suffering exists.
2. Suffering arises from attachment to desires.
3. Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases.
4. Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the Eightfold Path.
A few points:
- Buddhist detachment isn't detachment from everything — it's detachment from desires, which becomes possible when you recognize that suffering underlies all desirable things.
- The point of detachment, and of buddhism at its core, is to reduce suffering. As opposed to passive nihilism, which is "epitomized by resignation" (at least according to google, I had to look it up https://antimodernist.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/active-vs-pas...)
- The next step after detachment is a set of practices to reduce suffering. Some of the most powerful are the compassion (metta) meditations, i.e. "May I be free from suffering, may those near to me be free from suffering, may all beings be free from suffering". Working to reduce the suffering of all beings is the opposite of resignation.
As my own buddhist teacher (Dan Brown, www.pointingoutway.org) explained it to me, many beginning buddhists get stuck on the detachment part, which leads to nihilism, which leads to resignation, which leads to more suffering. In contrast, "properly executed" buddhist detachment leads to practices that reduce suffering (the Eightfold Path).
Hope that helps.
Nietzsche is dead.
Maybe stay out of philosophy then?
I also find it extremely ironic that a person in a different comment is criticizing me for not being able to quickly boil a philosopher’s entire approach down to a few sentences, in a comment where we are arguing about people wrongly boiling Nietzsche down into a few sentences
Can you provide evidence for your claims regarding what "we know [Trump] is lying" about regarding climate science?
The atom bomb and the slaughter proved science is powerful, god nonpresent, and that in either case society had no grand narrative to believe in any longer that wouldn’t be horrifying in the end.
That's hilarious-- you left out the one person who matters in your anecdote: the person who voted for Trump. I see no evidence that could lead you to assert that a Trump voter picked at random would know that Trump was lying about climate change being a hoax.
On the flip side, I've seen a lot of Republican politicians, pundits, and op-ed writers for years repeat the assertion that climate change is a hoax. So many, in fact, that we're now calling it "climate change" instead of "global warming." Why? Because those same demagogues preyed on the layperson's confusion of weather and climate, repeatedly pointing out cold weather days as some kind of refutation of "global warming."
Plus-- fucking climategate! What could possibly be the point of all the money and rhetoric poured into that phony controversy if not to actually convince people climate change is a hoax by muddying the waters?
By positing this broad-- and frankly, untestable-- theory that a metaphysical Nietzshean breakdown is causing Trumpism you actually make it impossible to address the problem. And the problem is that millions of people really do believe something that isn't supported by the broad, overwhelming scientific evidence. That's a tractable-- if depressing-- problem which lies mainly in the disconnect between the primary research and the current portals through which laypeople attempt to learn what the primary research says (if at all). (Also in the low quality of U.S. public education.)
> instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
That way of thinking turns every single case of non-trivial politicking into a form of fascism.
For example: was Jill Stein acting as a fascist when she quite shamelessly hedged on vaccination in order to pander to her anti-vaxxer base?
https://climate.nasa.gov/resources/global-warming/
> Global warming
> Global warming refers to the upward temperature trend across the entire Earth since the early 20th century, and most notably since the late 1970s, due to the increase in fossil fuel emissions since the industrial revolution. Worldwide since 1880, the average surface temperature has gone up by about 0.8 °C (1.4 °F), relative to the mid-20th-century baseline (of 1951-1980).
> Climate change
> Climate change refers to a broad range of global phenomena created predominantly by burning fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere. These phenomena include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, but also encompass changes such as sea level rise; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in flower/plant blooming; and extreme weather events.
Trump supporters know perfectly well that he's lying. There is clear evidence of this [1] if you're willing to look. If you want to see an even more banal example of this dynamic (though there are many) take a look at Hungary today where the most absurd pronouncements are made concerning "Soros" (read: the Jews) and then "clarified" sometimes just a few hours later.
> And the problem is that millions of people really do believe something that isn't supported by the broad, overwhelming scientific evidence.
The problem is impossible to address if you're willing to understand it. It is not the case that these people have been fooled by nefarious industrialists and politicians. The issue here is never about one or two erroneous beliefs that might be corrected with a bit more education. The problem is a culture that deliberately embraces fantasy and self-deception. All the evidence in the world will be dismissed and denied. If it becomes truly impossible to deny it they will turn and instantly settle on some new deception. The result of this process isn't confusion about a single issue but rather a whole imaginary world that is knowingly embraced. It's for this reason that one fantasy about the climate is always accompanied by a whole host of fantasies about everything from immigration to fluoride.
> For example: was Jill Stein acting as a fascist when she quite shamelessly hedged on vaccination in order to pander to her anti-vaxxer base?
As Nietzsche understood it individuals don't "act fascist" rather it's a sickness that attacks culture. A culture where politicians have to bend the knee to such nonsense is not healthy. I would hope this is obvious.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2017/7/10/15928438/fact-checks-political...
I think your comment is not exactly incorrect, but misleading in terms of what Nietzsche meant. Most of Nietzsche's commentary about the death of God is not about what we would call the religious aspect (in fact, Nietzsche praised religious wars as demonstrating that the masses had 'advanced'), but the fact that the death of God undermined the entire Western system of thought, including and particularly that of atheists. The famous "God is dead" passage is targeted at atheists - it is the atheists who do not understand what they've done!
And, rather than being opposed to "self-deception", Nietzsche says that it is likely necessary for life. He does not call for a defense against self-deception (and in fact, what he does call for on many occasions, he often points out is for the exception, and not the rule.)
> Consequently, “will to truth” does not mean “I will not let myself be deceived” but—there is no choice—“I will not deceive, not even myself”: and with this we are on the ground of morality. For one should ask oneself carefully: “Why don’t you want to deceive?” especially if it should appear—and it certainly does appear—that life depends on appearance; I mean, on error, simulation, deception, self-deception; and when life has, as a matter of fact, always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi .Such an intent, charitably interpreted, could perhaps be quixotism, a little enthusiastic impudence; but it could also be something worse, namely, a destructive principle, hostile to life. “Will to truth”—that might be concealed will to death.
> Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem, “For what end any morality at all” if life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this "other world" - look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? - But one will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it always remains a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we devotees of knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire too from the flame which the faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine.
I have sat down with an unbelievably large number of people studying Nietzsche, as I was a teaching assistant for an undergraduate class on his work. Time and time again, I would be pointing out the basic, fundamental misunderstandings; The world view of the typical American Christian cloud their ability to think clearly about the basic nature of Nietzsche's perspective. They literally can't think logically straight, and bend meaning word by word with personal emotional criticism interlaced with "fear for their soul". They are intellectually handicapped, their thoughts are so interlaced with variations of fear.
Otherwise it's difficult to question everything you thought you knew about anything. Normally it's not a pleasant experience. That is the reason that so-called enlightenment happens only to those who had big inner struggles after many years of reflection.
In a Freudian way their unconscious side protects them from threats attacking their mental health. Knowing what's right and wrong is necessary to do anything with reason. If you accept the fact that there is no right and wrong, you can definitely lose some motivation which is detrimental to the incentive system that our consciousness gets trained with.
It's therefore rational for most people to reject those ideas (although they don't necessarily can reflect on this level). I wouldn't call it "intellectually handicapped", I would say their mental processes protect them very well from thoughts that could lead to a loss of their values and belief system. Otherwise it sounds so negative although it's a rational thing to do for the consciousness. Normally your incentive system is not "I want to know the whole damn truth", it's "I want a happy and fulfilled life, want to feel good about myself and achieve something". Cognitive biases help us to achieve those goals. It just seems irrational from external point of views because of missing profundity in the analysis of the psyche of the other person. They're perfectly logical w.r.t. the incentive system.
I was about 20 years old, and had lost several important friends while also briefly dropping out of college. Saw Nietzsche on a bookshelf while making an effort to continue my education independently as I saved money. I was young enough to earnestly jump into pursuing "the whole damn truth," and my mental health be damned. Cue years of unrelenting depressiveness, self-absorption, solipsism, fragile and tragic romantic relationships, etc.
I completely agree, and I think a lot of people who don't "get" Nietzsche are actually reacting to his ideas perfectly rationally with respect to their (not necessarily anti-intellectual) values in life. I for one would have been much more fortunate to have studied him in an academic setting, with a group of peers. I recall reading once that Nietzsche's ideas are valuable insofar as one finds a resistance to them.
Recently I've dropped out of college, I was lonely in school and even nowadays, had several relationships that didn't last long and were painful. I've endured the pain of existence until I was able to comprehend it. I still feel this suffering every time I choose to feel.
I'm 20 years old now. I know how to help myself, but maybe there are things you want to say to your younger self. Maybe I can invite you to see this as a chance.
It does get better.
One thing that helped was leaving the negative environment. Also, some of my angst sprang from the disempowerment of youth; having more power ($$, or in Spanish, effectivo) to control the world around you makes most life problems easier to deal with. Philosophically, I became something of a Stoic: this may be the worst of all possible worlds, but there's not really much value in being depressed about it. You are not in control of the world, but you are in control of your reaction to it, and as long as the world is absurd one may as well laugh. However, the ultimate key to my depression was simply self-acceptance. Try to make peace with your demons; they're just another aspect of you.
I doubt if your life and mine have many true parallels, but that was my path out of darkness. I hope that you may find peace, and the warmth of good feeling.
I can relate.
> However, the ultimate key to my depression was simply self-acceptance.
This is so important. Learning to love oneself is such a difficult task but so rewarding in the end.
Thanks for sharing your story, it was very inspiring.
> I hope that you may find peace, and the warmth of good feeling.
I'll try to remember to allow myself to find peace in hard times. I hope that you can feel the love and warmth in your life.
Your story gives hope. I feel blessed that you told us your philosophical journey. Have a great day!
If we believe that suffering is valuable for the excellence of humanity (not just for individual human beings), it seems to justify a political system that actively neglects the welfare of its citizens. To say nothing of the intellectual dishonesty of claims that suffering builds character when said from the vantage point of those who can choose not to suffer.
In the end, I actually think Nietzsche's political philosophy is wholly compatible with something resembling the modern welfare state: insofar as we can understand suffering to be valuable, it is only so when it is an active, human choice. Those forced into such a position may find themselves closer to "the whole damn truth", but only incidentally. And human experience is rooted in the choosing. The power of Martin Luther's oft-(mis)attributed "Here I stand, I can do no other" is not in its truth -- he obviously could have done otherwise, but he chose not to. Without the capacity to make those decisions for ourselves, to be allowed to decide that truth is worth the loss of happiness, achievement, fulfillment, we are never ourselves truly human. That some (many? most?) may decide the 'easier' path of herd morality doesn't change this: we are, by virtue of our humanity, able to elect not to be human. That so many do is a tragedy, yes, but an understandable one; and the possibility and fact of this tragedy gives meaning to the choice itself.
I think most of them truly don't realize how self-delusional this phrase really is because their own experiences confirm their beliefs (they were able to work hard and achieve something). So I don't think that most of them are purposely intellectually dishonest but just lack awareness.
- - -
> Without the capacity to make those decisions for ourselves, to be allowed to decide that truth is worth the loss of happiness, achievement, fulfillment, we are never ourselves truly human.
I like the small discussion about being human, although I can't agree with the position that we're "truly human" because of our ability to choose. This is a philosophical and subjective question, but basically I think that humans can have inherent value (based on ones belief system) even if we would find all the mechanisms in their decision making process and can predict what they do. I think that humans can be "truly human" even if we find out that free will is an illusion. I believe this, because "being human" is a definition made by humans and it wouldn't be very helpful to see ourselves as worthless just because we don't have real choices (using the assumption that free will is an illusion here - this doesn't mean that I necessarily think it is). It can be that people see humans as worthless, but they don't need the "ability to make choices" as an excuse for their misanthropy, beliefs or nihilism. There are many ways to achieve that.
Therefore it's likely that you'll change your definition of being human (and their inherent value) as soon as research shows us that free will and choices are mostly illusions because our thoughts are based on deterministic processes.
Some days I feel this charitable. Others not. Usually I suspect they're too intelligent for a lack of awareness to be a good enough excuse: there comes a point where ignorance becomes willful. Then again, this is precisely the problem we're talking about here: when our cognitive biases are so comfortable that our brains erect strong defenses to keep intruders out.
---
I probably should have avoided being categorical with my comments on choice. While the capacity for such a choice appears to be unique to the human being, I am not entirely convinced it is, but that has more to do with intuitions about nonhuman minds rather than any sort of certainty. However I am incredibly cautious about the kind of research into free will that you're talking about, because, even if I doubt the inevitably of the endpoint you suggest, it remains an attempt to transform the human being into a calculation, into a process, and that reduces our affairs into mere administration. It's one of the (productive?) contradictions in my own thought that I am constantly pushing up against: my politics are such that I see the value in that kind of bureaucratic management, but my philosophy is such that I see it as dehumanizing. There is no natural equilibrium to be had here, so our duty is one of rebalancing, of maintaining the scales between the unique capacity for human choice and ensuring the conditions of life that are necessary for our biology.
While I don't defend his expression skills I just want to emphasize how hard it is to anticipate what people 100 years in the future will think about your ideas. And the interpretations and emotions which those people use while reading the texts.
The hard part about Nietzsche is being able to let your mind absorb the thoughts without interfering with your own values and belief system. But I guess it's not a secret that it's hard for people to listen without simultaneously judging something.
> Nietzsche wasn't very good at expressing what he meant.
His earliest works are lucid. As his disease progressed his work approaches rambling nonsense.
Goethe was a polymath and statesman, much more involved in the world of human intercourse than Nietzsche. A regret of mine is having read too much Nietzsche and not enough Goethe back when I had an excellent command of German.
Definitely worth it to freshen up your memory. I hope you find some time to do it. Although I kind of disagree with the view that Goethes thoughts are "more important" than Nietzsches'. Both sometimes contain astonishing levels of obviousness (used here with negative connotation) and both have works which are hyped due to their names.
I recently (re)read something very interesting about 'obviousness' in philosophical writings. The idea was that when a claim is obvious, it is because you are not the target audience for that claim. For example, you live in a world where Sartre lived and wrote and had an impact; the ideas that he wanted to convey are no longer novel, at least partly because he conveyed them and they became part of the culture. (Though even today, there are likely people to whom the claims are not so obvious as they are to you.) The essay starts off talking about claims that are obviously wrong, not obviously right, but later applies the same reasoning to obviously right claims. I am going to abandon an attempt to summarize a 1000-word essay. Just go read it.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philoso...
I used the word because this obviousness leads to boredom for some readers and I can see how both writers have obvious statements (from today's point of view) in them. That this is entirely subjective and based on the knowledge and self-awareness of the reader was never questioned, although I agree that I wasn't clear about it.
- And there is another dimension which was the reason for me to use the word with negative connotation: Sometimes Goethe just wrote about his wishes and desires towards a woman and some people try to see a lot more in some of his works (this is entirely subjective). It's like some of Kafkas works which can be interpreted quite clearly using his biography. But I don't want to start a discussion about the difference between interpretation and what the author tried to say. Many experts interpret works without considering the biography of the author and see the work of someone as something which stands on its own. I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I slightly favor methods that analyze texts based on the biography of the writers. But I can also understand why this is not necessary for a good interpretation.
If your idea was true then 3rd world countries where the rich have vast wealth and cheap resources would have the best economies.
Your armchair supply side trickle down economic theory doesn't hold up. You should question what you hear on conservative news outlets.
The problem with your reductio ad absurdum is that the rich in such countries do not create wealth. Their economies are aptly described as crony-capitalism for this reason. It's a redistribution of sovereign wealth (resources) rather than the creation of wealth.
Your argument more broadly is that wealth is created by the needs of the market. But I think that you cannot ascribe it to any particular one of the things you listed. Regardless of who determines those needs, someone also needs to fulfill such needs. On top of someone to fulfill the needs, you need capital to fund the venture too. Thus, you end up with a small number of very rich people who use their capital to fuel wealth creation.
I don't know that the full thrust of the parent is correct, but he's not totally wrong either. You may need a middle class, but you need the other classes, however transient, as well.
And that the rich...create the wealth by investing capitol?
The makers create both the value and the wealth as I see it.
What the makers need is just capitol...capitol the rich are hoarding in their clammy pocketbooks. It seems rich people are an completely interchangable obstacle to obtain capitol.
8 houses and a private jet that could be funding makers that provide value to the human race.
I don't see the purpose the rich serve other than an obstacle.
Aligning those three groups through a set of compromises is the American System, or at least the postwar one that created the greatest explosion of wealth in human history.
Look up wages vs productivity. We have an almost exact date for the collapse of that system: 1971-1974.
What happened? I don't know. There are many candidates: the Nixon Shock (end of Bretton Woods), the opening of outsourcing as a way to break labor (and thus the middle class) allowing the upper classes to economically "defect," the rise of automation, or something else.
What's your preference?
Yeah right on. It's a complicated argument with both sides right to some degree. I'm just not a fan of pure trickle down Ann Rayndian economics. It feels like it's leaving alot of important details out of the equation. I don't believe in wealth creators. I believe in an ecosystem of human beings where some have the luck and/or opportunity to fill certain needs at a certain point in time of the ecosystem to make more resources.
Neitzsche's argument seems sufficiently abstract that in can be interpreted to apply to what ever group of people you want.
There is a very small elite group that through inheritance from robber barons, family connections, fraud, luck, favoritism, and several other reasons came into prominence.
Wealth is created by those working for them (without workers they'd create shit, not to mention die in a week, because they can't even tie their own shoes), and from those creating new technological innovations, which are very seldom the same who benefit financially from them (and, again, without whom, those elites would create jack-shit).
Then there's the market -- the middle class of buyers, themselves hard working people -- without whom there would also be zero wealth for the elites.
Atlas shrugged, but he's an entitled jerk, who has others carrying the globe for him while he takes the credit.
Sorry, couldn't resist a good joke. I'm just a mere mortal (although I like ancient philosophy).
I’ve just said the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard on the topic, and I’m still bored with it.
Thanks, I chuckled. It's true that the conversation contains a big amount of things that are obvious and trivial as soon as somebody understands them.
Maybe you could make it more interesting if you start to question your own existence, but it's definitely possible that you don't have the problems that most people have with this topic. In this case you found a shortcut to enlightenment. Congratulations! (this is no sarcasm. I like how you interact with those ideas and still believe they're boring af).
Non sum, ergo non cogito?
For example, why is rape wrong? Easily answered with God: because he said so. With out God, well, you don't have an answer. You can say, "Because it impinges on the rights of the victim." To which one will reply, "Why should I care about the victim?" This will cycle until one person is honest enough to admit, "Because if you rape, the force of the masses will descend on you to the point of pains or death." Might makes right (so too for God).
With man, the uneasiness is that we are fickle. We will only defend those we wish to. We know that fundamentally we can't trust each other. We know that we are each out for our own. We can lie and say, "She loves me. Or they wouldn't do that." These are all lies. The Germans were fairly good people until they weren't. The Russians and Chinese too. The government was a kind father until it exterminated millions with the, at least, tacit consent of millions more.
That, dear friend, is your world. That is why you don't need to read Plato first. Plato is predicated on a world view of constants and moral weight: the Forms. Nietzsche shows those don't exist. The only thing remaining is the stark reality that reality and all its trappings don't matter for all is simply matter. It is neither good nor bad. The only rule is that made of the strongest material to crush the wills of others to submission. Whoever bears that scepter has the right to make moral.
It's not an evolutionarily stable strategy. [1]
By that I mean, if we had a society where rape was normal, and sex was largely a nonconsensual thing, meaning there would be more violence, women would develop adaptations to prevent being raped, and more energy would be spent on the prevention of unwanted procreation, and the the gene pool would be less fit for survival than one without the rape gene.
But merely having a society full of non-rapists isn't enough either: the first serial rapist to come along would invade the gene pool by raping others and spreading the gene that encodes this "rape others" behavior, and within so many generations the gene pool would be full of rapists.
To have an ESS, our behavior would have to be encoded with a "don't rape others, but also don't tolerate others who do rape" strategy, which would increase a society's fitness for survival, and be more resilient against an invading strategy.
Calling rape "immoral" is a good shorthand because "morals" are basically a formal way of defining the whole "don't do this, and don't tolerate others who do" concept in a way that humans can understand. But at the end of the day morals are just an abstraction that we've had to create in order to be more successful as a social species. Religion may have helped as well... to me these things are extended phenotypes for our genes that have been selected for over eons to keep our gene pool at a stable equilibrium.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy...
If different species (with different evolutionary strategies) also have different moralities, would this not be a strong hint towards morality being based on evolution?
Not neccesarily. In a small society, a serial rapist would be hunted and killed quickly or forced to run away. In both cases, his children would struggle to survive without the food and protection provided by a father. Many of they would starve and not survive to reach the adulthood.
This is exactly the non sequitur that I pointed out. Not even a God’s say-so could change “objective” morality, if it existed. He can change the sea to red, but he can’t change what “red” is in any meaningful way.
Also, the quote has the other suspicious feature of this trope: it assumes that that which is objective is knowable, even tautologically obvious and workable in every case. It’s the “simple matter of programming” of the amateur philosophical world.
My point here is not about the relatively boring questions of God’s existence or of the nature of morality. My point is that those conversations are psychological, not philosophical. They’re the sublimated terror at the unbearable lightness of being, to borrow a titular phrase, which is so raw and unprocessed that it manifests in a hysterical inability to see the absurdity of appealing to objectivity as a proxy for control over existential circumstance. This is how God died. Not by mere disbelief, but by the realization that not even He could animate either values or morals.
That's something I never understood about God as an argument for objective morality. What makes God's values objective? If God says x is immoral, isn't that just his personal opinion?
The fact that he is all-powerful and can punish you for not agreeing with him simply makes him a cosmic dictator - you'll be following his rules not because they are objective moral truths, but because you want to avoid punishment.
I don't see how it would be impossible to disagree with the creator's morality, in the same manner as you can disagree with your parents' despite them "creating" you, or with the laws of your country despite them having the power to punish you for not following them.
You're forgetting that the Abrahamic conception of God also includes infinite knowledge, infinite wisdom, and infinite benevolence in addition to omnipotence. If one ignores the logical problems that entails, then it's not hard to see how the will of such a being is, by definition, morally correct.
Then you have the Fall. After that, humans are bent, distorted. The situation now is like having a bent ruler. You place it beside an unbent ruler, and the bent ruler often says "I'm straight; it's the other ruler that's bent". That is, humans use their fallen morality to judge God's morality, rather than using God's morality to judge their own.
God's values aren't objective. For them to be objective, there has to be something besides God to judge them by - something more authoritative than God. But God's values are valid for humans made in his image.
If the Intender did not exist there would be no objective morality because final ends would be merely illusions. All morality would therefore be subjective to the (local) intenders and would involve a "will to power".
Or did I misunderstand?
EDIT: Crazy down voting in this comment thread.
The Gay Science is a great and accessible read - I recommend the Kaufmann translation, personally. It contains Nietzsche's views on a lot of subjects.
I would also add that he makes clear his preferences are just that, preferences. A major point of his moral philosophy is that morality is not objective, but a social behavior, the "herd instinct in the individual."
Though it would be easy to think, the last man, as Nietzsche describes them, are people who above all want everyone in society to be happy and without pain, being equal and without hardship. The Übermensch, the opposite, is someone or a society which constantly works to learn something new, to "can do", to enrich oneself and attempt to go beyond their own limitations.
I think my Ethics teacher put it "trying to interpret master/slave morality or the Übermensch as a political instrument is misguided at best, harmful at worst".
Nietzsche himself, to my knowledge, has hinted at his dislike for capitalism, communism or socialism, money or work. But part of his musings are that these are merely subjective standpoints and that there is no objectively right option here.
In summary, you could probably say that Nietzsche wasn't against elite-oriented capitalism in the sense that he did not reject it as viewpoint, it's subjective so it's a correct option.
It's probably just an academic brain-fart. They see Trump as some kind of aberration rather than business-as-usual, so he gets woven into almost everything these days.
This hedonistic life is exemplified by Trump and Twitter and how we don’t struggle. Instead, we tweet, voice opinions and continue with our happiness maximizing lives.
The author is suggesting that since we live in a culture that maximizes happiness, the nihilists were right. In this world, according to Neitzsche, humans can not achieve excellence.
I agree that it’s a rather abrupt point made at the very end. Probably something the author will expand upon in his book.
So in Nietzsche's view, the person Trump is doing pretty well because he doesn't seem to follow anybody. But Trump's fans would be his textbook example of how mankind is losing its way.
It seems very few people realize what is going on. It's no accident the world was told to be round in the 1500s, because in order to make people believe we are pointless small little hairy apes, you first have to create the understanding that we are not special and have no purpose.
Let the downvoting begin :) Hacker news readers are usually unable to even consider things like what I said. It's natural to assume people like me are just dumb, but reality is not that easy.
By romanticizing the world this way, it all becomes so much easier, it's an easier pill to swallow because it's a bitter taste that we are familiar with. And there is an allure of sweetness behind the taste, the idea that ultimately there is an inherent wonderful good truth waiting, just around the corner.
But it's ultimately an illusion, there is no grand conspiracy, and when there carpet comes down we find only empty space behind it. It can be both terrifying and liberating to accept that.
I'm a hard-core geek, programmer, tinkerer since I got my first computer in 1985 or so. I'm working as a data engineer and cloud architect currently. My IQ is fine and I dont believe in fairies :)
All I did was research the history of our societies. Who controls what, who benefits from what, stuff like that. And there is actually a big conspiracy going on when it comes to our world view and our place in this world. There are sites purely set up for propaganda, like flat earth society, who explains gravity with "yeah so the world is currently traveling upwards at a constant rate, and that is gravity"... Lol :) Nobody actually believes that. It's just to turn people off from the idea, and it's working. It's been the Google number one hit since like forever, and it's designed that way :)
All this makes sense if you understand what the purpose is, but people usually spend like 10 minutes, go to the wrong sites, and laugh it off :)
Go to Eric dubays videos on YouTube, go through the ones where he goes through how things are working according to flat earth theories. Its highly interesting. There see more than one way to explain what we see.
Anyone who did something complex should have seen that clearly. We as a whole civilization are just an uncontrollable mess.
Like, he thinks that summer happens at the same time across most of the planet and that the fake science explains seasons with the elliptical orbit of the earth (this is commonly noted as a misconception¹).
Please stop spouting this nonsense here.
1. https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/seasons-causes.html
1. Suicide (not widely advocated for in philosophy circles)
2. A leap of faith (essentially to impart your own meaning to life)
3. Embrace of the meaninglessness
It seems to me like you may be advocating for the 3rd option? Logically speaking, it’s equally as valid as the other two, but it does have one major shortcoming in that it doesn’t naturally lead to any conclusions. Personally I see more value in the 2nd option, but it does come with the added baggage of settling on or coming up with your own values system.
Common to all of these is a specific narrative, a foundational belief that deep down, once you wash away the topsoil, it all makes sense, that there is an unshakeable and unmovable bedrock waiting. Sure, there is sand and water shaking our feet today, but deep below awaits solidity and surety. That ultimately, Truth is our steadfast ally. And that the only real way to find meaning and sanity is to root yourself to that bedrock.
But what happens that day when we dig down and find nothing? When we realize that we are floating aimlessly in space towards nowhere, untethered from all meaning? If we have tied all our worth, thoughts, and values to that imaginary rock then we'll have nothing left.
To properly arrive at the leap of faith, you need to first accept that there are no universal truths. Then you can choose some axioms to base meaning on, and build outwards from there. I don’t believe that this approach is truly that orthodox, even if it may arrive at a similar destination to not asking the question to begin with.
There is no universal truth anywhere in life. Even empiricism is based on our subjective experiences, and rationalism is also flawed in exactly the same way. Life itself doesn’t offer any bedrock of truth, but that doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist. You can take the leap of faith and create your own truth in life.
I think what you’re talking about would be better described as a personal truth, which _is_ a leap of faith.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
I'm actually confused about two things:
First are you implying the world is flat or some other theory?
Secondly, Why does a round earth imply we are insignificant. It seems the shape of a rock in space is irrelevant to our importance.
How do you know yourself that you're not dumb?
Would be an easy life!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
As an atheist I actually read the thoughts of some church intellectuals, for example once something from some bishop in the Vatican, that I can completely agree with. In the end sayings like "God helps those who help themselves" go in the same direction as my atheist attitude: You are responsible for yourself, don't look "up" and blame others (incl. "god"). I think the religious interpretation would be something like "since God is inside you and par of you, to look inside yourself is all it takes to see" (my own words/interpretation).
I don't think the line of separation is between religion and atheism, I can find plenty of religious people I can completely agree with, the label "God" of e.g. a religious astronomer and physicist is so "meta" that it is not in the way. Even in history (of religion) I find plenty of attempts that end up in a similar place to what I as an atheist could come up with.
It fits much better the way humans operate - which is a distributed network of specialized individuals. Give every individual a chance to discover their own place for themselves. This is compatible with religious views if/since they assume that "God is within you", so there is no need to look for meaning externally, just do what you have to do - which to me seems totally identical to what a real atheist would come up with. If you restrict humans from using their own judgment it's like telling the brain not to use its own judgment, which was produced based on the inputs that that specific brain collected over its lifetime. This makes sense if you think some brains are defective and need to be controlled form elsewhere.
If you believe in the network (and its emergent properties incl. those of self-correction) and that 3rd party control, that does not have the same data available as the controlled brain, somehow makes better decisions (one might say: controlled economy vs. market economy is an example), than you want to let them make their own decisions. Note that this is about aggregate outcome - in either scenario there will of course be errors. The question is which is better in total, and those who ask for "freedom" should as far as I can see be in the camp of those who let individuals make decisions based on their own experiences (data).
That means for a (more) optimal outcome it is better when people are able to decide for themselves what their own respective "meaning of life" is. Restricting it by setting a "global standard for all" is the opposite of freedom, and whether you are religious or not, in both cases "look within yourself!" is where it's at.
One mistake often seen as the first thought when discussing the issue of no external meaning is to conclude something extremely negative, like "then I can just commit suicide". Why??? You have freedom! Yes you can conclude that - but you may equally decide that learning to play the violin and playing at concerts is your goal. It makes no logical sense to bind a negative outcome to the freedom given to the discovery that there is no external meaning. While you are alive, and you don't need to philosophize about what "alive" means", you may just as well have some fun.
A note about what would happen if you actually found the "Higher purpose", e.g. if we indeed had been "created": Does that really solve anything? You only shifted the problem somewhere else. What's the purpose of that "higher power"? You can ask all those questions about the higher level just the same. A higher power solves and explains nothing.
> … the powers that be…
This turn of phrase has a special property in my life. I have noticed that whenever someone says this, invariably the rest of the conversation will become a guilt trip without any actionable advice or concrete learnings. There will be a lot of confusion, bad feelings, and if you try to empathise, you will feel bad. But think on it as you might, for days, weeks or months: you will not find anything you learned can be used to actually change your actions or behavior.
The only other phrase I know to share this property, is "let me finish". When you hear or say that, time to hit the eject button.
So it is with your comment. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I change my way of thinking to improve this? All that happens is I feel bad. Ok: feeling bad can mean you are learning something uncomfortable. But what?
I reject this idea of "powers that be." Who do you mean? Kissinger? The Koch brothers? The Clinton foundation? Soros? Xi Jinping? OPEC? The pope (which one)? Genghis Khan? "The powers that be" sounds cool because it is vague. Everyone can fill in their preferred group of bogeymen. We all have at least one. But once you start being explicit, it comes falling apart.
I also reject this idea that somehow, there is an evil controlling power which can manage to steer us all in some dystopian direction of consumerism and obediance "for the sake of it". Of what? Money? For whom? Oil? Groceries? Walmart? "Big Coal"? And how? By curbing innovation society-wide, but somehow still raising the GDP? Again: start looking for specifics, and the idea begins to unravel.
The world is more disjoint and segregated than this suggests. It is hard to control. There is a lot of emergent behaviour. Society evolves, and I have not seen evidence that it is not merely chaos theory at work. Our intuition for evil controlling overlords is likely to be false, based purely on the human bias for narrative. We look for narrative everywhere. For example, look at how ingrained and persistent the idea of "mother nature", and "why". "What is the point of ticks?" Nothing. They just exist. "Who designed this culture of obedience, benefiting the .01%?" Nobody, it emerged from a system of independent agents choosing what they desired most at every point in time.
Look, there is probably a parallel universe somewhere where Evil Corp infuses a steady dose of consumerism and obedience in the school systems because of some imagined long term amortised benefit, through... trickle up economics?... increasing their bottom line. And I bet that loads of people did and do try to sway society in limited, concrete ways (accepting smoking, denying global warming, thinking prop comedy is funny). But I doubt that we are the subject of a massive conspiracy to influence our entire society's style of thinking about.. everything. There are too many moving parts, and too many independent actors. Most people are not evil. We just inherit it all from the previous generation, tweak some things, and pass it on.
Evolution. Not intelligent design.
What purpose do we have? What higher being put us on this planet, deciding that we are special in this universe? Who designed the world such that we are at the center?
There is simply no evidence that we have purpose. That someone made us for something special. Or that we are the center of anything.
Compared to the vastness of the universe, we are utterly insignificant. The tiniest of slivers of earth is hospitable to us, go up or down by more than a few kilometers and you need machines to survive. Even Earth itself, the rock we stand on, is not hospitable to life in majority.
That is not a grand conspiracy from the powers above, they are bound to the same insignificance. However bad a politician may be, how much evil they commit, does not objectively matter. The universe at large does not care.
However, as Nietzsche does lay out, this does not mean there is no meaning to life or joy. Rather, the universe will not provide you with a meaning to life. Or purpose. You have to create purpose and meaning yourself. Recognize that every human on this planet must create meaning, purpose, morals, ethics and so many other things for themselves and themselves only.
There is no grand truth that murder is evil, we decided murder is evil. Same for any other crime or injustice. Or immoral actions. We must decide these things are evil, in our intuitive understanding of evil.
As the character Death puts it in the Discworld novels; "[...] TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
There is a lot of manipulation though but most of it is short term tactical towards candidates and products.
Some of it is longer term and more strategically ideological but it is still pretty focused and much of it funded by billionaires - Koch, Soros types, etc. The billionaires do fight and that is why so many people pick particular ideoligcal billionaires to see as masters behind the curtains, such as Koch (coal), Adelson (Israel), Mercer (Trump, brexit) or Soros ("open society").