My surroundings

Politics is played out within the context of a political culture. It was interesting to note that a fashion retailer named 'Hitler' opened recently in India. You can read it here. It was, and remains, an excellent starting point for the construction of an upper-middle class bracket fashion brand. (Think fcuk with more tongue-in-cheek malevolence). Nevertheless, it was closed, for obvious reasons. But more interestingly, it reflects again the need to suppress an ideology that has continued resonance and holds political dangers and pitfalls to the West in a way that is completely unimaginable, even comical, within the cultural context of India.

As an international student studying in UK, it is interesting to observe that the role that liberal dogmatism plays in this cultural context is essentially a reaction formation. Counterintuitively, it is a response not to bourgeoisie conservative ideology, but to social Darwinism, and the implicit longings of purity and supremacy, whatever institutional form it might take (individual, race, state, etc.). Love of the free market, and the success of the free market, is the counterbalancing force, and outlet, to this longing. Love of liberal ideology takes the form of faith. A sensitive and intelligent tyrant could potentially use this deep longing for the ends of an adopted messianic ideology - these possibilities exist richly, at least in my surroundings as I perceive it, in a way that is non-permitted and, more importantly, inconceivable in my home country (in Asia, not India). Here it is living flesh - facism is the repressed unconscious of my surroundings - a fundamental centrifugal force, as it were, among a plurality of competing forces - shallower, but louder, and uncensored, competing forces.

More to the point - if one desires purity, bodily transcendence and supremacy above all else, the distinction between individual and state, subject and object, that characterize superficial dichotomies in standard political discourse will prove empty. One kick and the edifice will crumble. That is why stagnating economic growth in Europe is so worrying.

One can operationalize this idea with Zizek's notion of rendering harmless through integration and humour. This is intuitively obvious. The fact that Indians may joke about Hitler shows that they have transcended Hitler in a way that the West has not. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Disclaimer: This is a obviously a highly subjective treatment, based on narrow exposure.

Quotes 8

"Contrary to these conceptions, what has been happening in the West, I believe, is a widening disjunction between the social structure (the economy, technology, and occupational system) and the culture (the symbolic expression of meanings), each of which is ruled by a different axial principle. The social structure is rooted in functional rationality and efficiency, the culture in the antinomian justification of the enhancement of the self.

The sources of each impulse are quite different. The life-style of the social structure was shaped by the principle of calculation, the rationalization of work and of time, and a linear sense of progress. All of this derived, fundamentally, from the effort to master nature and technics, to substitute wholly new rhythms of life for those bound to the regularities of the season and the diminishing returns of the soil. Technical mastery was in turn fused with a character structure which accepted the idea of delayed gratification, of compulsive dedication to work, of frugality and sobriety, and which was sanctified by the morality of service to God and the proof of self-worth through the idea of respectability. To this extent, bourgeoisie society of the nineteenth century was an integrated whole (?) in which culture, character structure, and economy were infused by a single value system. This was the civilisation of capitalism at its apogee.

Ironically, all these was undermined by capitalism itself. Through mass production and mass consumption, it destroyed the Protestant ethic by zealously promoting a hedonistic way of life. By the middle of the twentieth century capitalism sought to justify (?) itself not by work or property but by the status badges of material possession and the promotion of pleasure. The rising standard of living and the relaxation of morals became ends in themselves as the definition of personal freedom.

The result has been a disjunction within the social structure itself.In the organization of production and work, the system demands provident behaviour, industriousness and self-control, dedication to a career and success. In the realm of consumption, it fosters the attitude of carpe diem, prodigality and display, and the compulsive search for play. But in both realms the system is completely mundane, for any transcendent ethic has vanished.

If the modern social structure - based as it is on technics and metrics - is a distinctively new kind of social organization in human history, then contemporary culture, in its concern with the self, combines the deepest wellsprings of human impulse with the modern antipathy to bourgeoisie society.

The antinomian dimension of culture has been a recurrent feature of human society, in which the dialectic of restraint and release was played out originally in religion and then in the secular moral order itself. The antinomian attitude, in fact, is the repeated effort of the self to reach out beyond: the attain some form of ecstasy (ex-stasis, the leaving of the body), to become self-infinitizing or idolatrous; to assert immortality or omnipotence. It source is the finitude of creaturehood and the denial by the self of the reality of death. It is the radical "I" asserting its imperishable survival against imperious fate...What in the nineteenth century was private and hermetic has become, in the 20th century effulgence of modernism, public and ideological. Contemporary culture, with the victory of modernism, has become anti-institutional and antinomian. Few writers "defend" society or institutions against the "imperial self". The older artistic imagination, however wild, was constrained by the shaping discipline of art. The new sensibility breaks down all genres and denies that there is any distinction between art and life. Art was formerly an experience; now all experience is to be turned into art."

Daniel Bell

Quotes 7

"The difficulty with the nineteenth-century conception of scarcity, which has carried over to the twentieth, is its definition of scarcity in physical terms; it was for this reason that abundance was counterposed to scarcity. But scarcity is not a zero-sum term of have or have-not. It is a measure of relative differences of preference at relative cost. In this sense the postulate of scarcity as an analytical concept underlies all of contemporary social science. It states axiomatically that all values are scarce relative to desires, that all resources are scare relative to wants. Economics deals with the allocation of scarce goods, political sociology with the regulation of competition among men for scarce values. To economize is to make the best use of limited resources among competing ends: the specification of the best mix of factors of production (at relative costs) with the most productive techniques (highest utilization) within the most effective scheduling (programming) of the flow of items; the outcome is the largest output at the least cost. For this reason the axial principle of economics is functional rationality. Political sociology is the study of the rules that regulate competition among men for wealth, power and esteem. But men have to accept these rules as fair and right if this competition is to proceed; men seek just authority. For this reason, the axial principle of political life is legitimacy."

***

"Politics, in contemporary society, is the management of social structure. It becomes the regulative mechanism of change. But any political decision necessarily involves some conception of justice, traditional, implicit, and now increasingly explicit. Men accept different principles of justice, or different hierarchies of value, and seek to embody them in social arrangements. Ultimately the differences between social systems lie not in their social structures (the arrangements of reward and privilege around the organization of the economy) but in their ethos. Capitalism was not just a system for the production of commodities, or a new set of occupations, or a new principle of calculation (though it was all of these), but a justification of the primacy of the individual and his self-interest, and of the strategic role of economic freedom in realizing those values through the free market. This is why the economic function became detached from other functions of Western society and was given free rein.

The political ethos of an emerging post-industrial society is communal, insofar as social goals and priorities are defined by, and national policy is directed to, the realization of those goals. It is socializing rather than economic, insofar as the criteria of individual utility and profit maximisation becomes subjected to broader considerations of social welfare and community interest."

Daniel Bell

Quotes 6

"If equality of result is to be the main object of social policy - and it is the heart of the populist reaction against meritocracy - it will demand an entirely new political agenda for the social systems of advanced industrial countries. But no such political demand can ultimately succeed - unless it imposed itself by brute force - without being rooted in some powerful ethical system, and for this reason the concept of equality of result has become the Archimedean point of a major new effort to provide a philosophical foundation - a conception of justice as fairness - for a communal society.

In the nature of human consciousness, a scheme of moral equity is the necessary basis for any social order; for legitimacy to exist, power must be justified. In the end, it is moral ideas - the conception of what is desirable - that shapes history through human aspirations. Western liberal society was "designed" by Locke, Smith, and Bentham on the premise of individual freedoms and the satisfaction of private utilities; these were the axioms whose consequences were to be realized through the market and later through the democratic political system. But that doctrine is crumbling, and the political system is now being geared to the realization not of individual ends but of group and communal needs. Socialism has had political appeal for a century now not so much because of its moral depiction of what the future society would be like, but because of material disparities within disadvantaged classes, the hatred of bourgeoisie society by many intellectuals, and the eschatological vision of a "cunning" of history. But the normative ethic was only implicit; it was never spelt out and justified. The claim for equality of result is a socialist ethic (as equality of opportunity is the liberal ethic), and as a moral basis for society it can finally succeed in obtaining men's allegiance not by material reward but by philosophical justification."

Daniel Bell (1974)

Quotes 5

"The difficulty with the exoteric argument of Illyich - as with so much of modernism - is that it confuses experience, in all its diversities, with knowledge. Experience has to be made conscious, and this is done, as Dewey remarked, "by means of that fusion of old meanings and new knowledge that transfigures both." 'Knowledge' is the selective ordering, and reordering of experience through relevant concepts. (Situational) Reality is not a bounded world, "out there", to be imprinted on the mind as from a mirror, or a flux of experience to be sampled for its novelties according to one's inclination (or its relevance for "me"), but a set of meanings organized by the mind, in terms of categories, which establishes the relations between facts and infers conclusions.

Nor need there be, in principle, a contradiction between a cognitive and an aesthetic mode in which, as alleged, the technocratic orientation is concerned only with the functional and the adversary culture with sensibility - much as this may be true in sociological fact. In the very nature of knowledge, as Dewey observed, there has to be an interplay between the two: the cognitive makes the variety of experience more intelligible by its reduction to conceptual form; the aesthetic makes experience more vivid by its presentation in an expressive mode. The two reinforce each other in a singular way.

What has to be common to both is a reliance on judgement - the making of neccessary distinctions and the creation of standards which allow one to sort out the meretricious from the good, the pretentious from the enduring. Knowledge is a product of the self-conscious and renewable comparison and judging of cultural objects and ideas in order to say that something is better than something else (or more complex, or more beautiful, or whatever the standard one seeks to apply), and that something is truer. Inevitably, therefore, knowledge is a form of authority, and education is the process of refining the nature of authoritative judgements. This is the classic, and enduring, rationale of education.

But to this is added a special burden of the post-industrial society. One need not defend the technocratic dimensions of education - its emphasis on specialization and vocationalism - to argue that schooling becomes more necessary than before. By the very fact that there are now many more differentiated ways in which people gain information and have experiences, there is a need for the self-conscious understanding of the processes of conceptualization as the means of organizing one's information in order to gain coherent perspectives on one's experience. A conceptual scheme is a set of consistent terms which groups together diverse attributes of experience or properties of an object, in a higher order of abstraction, in order to relate them to, or distinguish them from, other attributes and properties. To see what is common and what is different about modes of experience, is the function of education. And just as the resolution of identity crisis for individuals is the amalgamation of discordant aspects of growing up into a coherent whole, so is 'knowledge' an organization of experiences, tested against other patterns of experience, in order to create consistent standards of judgement.

The function of the university, in these circumstances, is to relate to each other the modes of conscious inquiry: historical consciousness, which is the encounter with a tradition that can be tested against the present; methodological consciousness, which makes explicit the conceptual grounds of inquiry and its philosophical presuppositions; and individual self-consciousness, which makes one aware of the sources of one's prejudgements and allows one to re-create one's values through the disciplined study of the society. Education is the "reworking" of the materials of the past, without ever wholly surrendering its truths or bending to its pieties. It is a continuing tension, the tension between past and future, mind and sensibility, tradition and experience, which for all its strains and discomforts, is the only source of maintaining the independence of inquiry itself. It is the affirmation of the principle of intellectual and artistic order through the search for relatedness of discordant knowledge."

Daniel Bell

Note 38

Spinning and reverting like a bent backed secretary on a failed project
flailing at the crumpled genepool of weakness and decay
much of misery and envy at the common stophouses and fires that consume fleetingly
much of the Moses-moustache of fishlike ice-worker's and deep-tunneled plays
the carbon wreck of a simple turnstile in a pleated cage
frothing at the columns of a watery human grave. Collapsing, and ruined,
stands a fatal tower. All is death.

Jaws clenched to a tightrope,
I observe her lips. They glow a tippery yellow,
like a sun-blocked notion of an apothecary mind.
You give chase, falling into horror of the emptiness of a caved jaw.
Much like the spinning of the pineapple juice in its industrial vat,
screaming, you drown, a fly in a blunt-edged bottle
of sensousness, death and its endlessness.

This is but hell, you say. What unearthed but roadsigns or dirt,
as you veer, crashing into disappearing treelines,
like a waterfall man, a stupid salmon, a five fingered reaching plump veined fool into the grains of the firmament.
Like an idiot, the world grins in it mirroring misery,
masterfully, you reach the road, tar in your livers,
and retrieving and releasing dirt, feeling its tension against your shoulders
a wounded, collapsing frame.

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche differed greatly in their attitudes towards Mitleid as a moral system, and exploring these differences reveals important disagreements Nietzsche had with his great philosophical teacheri. Mitleid was a concept largely integrated with the psychological theory, the moral system and the metaphysical claims of both philosophers, and the significance of Mitleid can only be fully grasped in these terms. We will attempt to show what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche shared on their views of Mitleid in the first section, before examining their differences in the second.

Mitleid as defined by Schopenhauer involves the “immediate participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it”ii, hence “I suffer directly with him, I feel his woe just as I ordinarily feel my own; and likewise, I directly desire his weal in the same way I otherwise desire my own”.iii For Schopenhauer, the moral value of an action resides in the nature of its motivations, and the “absence of all egotistic motivation is...the criterion of an action of moral worth”iv. Since Mitleid for Schopenhauer is the only means by which we truly adopt someone else’s suffering as our own, accordingly, “it is only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have a moral value, and every action resulting from any other motives has none.v

Agreements about Mitleid will be summarized under two headings. First, they agreed that a morality of Mitleid necessarily requires psychologically-embedded egotistical willing as its precondition; egotism is the starting point of the development of all value judgements in the world.vi For Schopenhauer, the ego-perspective is an individualized representation of an essentially desiring Will, and therefore, it embodies a “natural standpoint”vii which wills its “existence and well-being”viii above all other considerations, elevating it to “colossal proportions”ix. In addition, “To be an end or aim means to be willed”x, and ends “exist only in reference to a will”xi, hence “every good is essentially relative; for it has its essential nature only in relation to a desiring will”xii, absolute good being a “contradiction” and an “impossibility”.xiiixiv Nietzsche takes a similar view, where the “origin of morality” and the “oldest moral judgements”xv are founded on self-interested valuations: “whatever injures me is something evil, whatever benefits me is something good”xvi, and our evaluations are adopted “out of fear”.xvii So egotism constitutes the desiring need, and needs are a precondition for value judgements: value judgements necessarily involving a hierarchization of some needs above others, which become incumbent upon agents to fulfil.

Second, that seemingly altruistic acts may stem from egotistic motivations, and are therefore, properly speaking, not morally good. Schopenhauer states that “in themselves, all deeds are merely empty figures, and only the [compassionate] disposition that leads to them gives them moral significance”xviii, but because this disposition “lies in the depth of our inner nature…we can hardly ever pronounce a correct moral judgement on the actions of others, and rarely on our own.”xix Nietzsche develops this view further. He sees motives for acts as “epistemically opaque”xx, and that “in no single instance, has the distance between knowledge and deed ever yet been bridged.”xxi This is because the motives for an act – the “actual clash of motives” when we perform the act, is “something completely invisible to us, of which we are unconscious”, and we “confuse the clash of motives with our [conscious] comparison of the possible consequences of different actions”.xxii Therefore it is impossible to give a conclusive moral judgement on any act. In addition, the egoism of Mitleid manifests itself, through its preoccupation with the mental state of the agent, not the sufferer, and its primary motivation, the “impulse for pleasure – pleasure arises in viewing a contrast to our situation, in the very idea of being able to help if only we so desired, in the thought of praise and gratitude, in the very activity of helping insofar as it is successful, thus allowing the performer to delight in himself”xxiii, and also by “fear's easily stimulated imagination...[and] a quick vanity which is offended when something happens that they could prevent”xxiv, also a pleasure in exercising “superiority” over the “degraded” recipient, that becomes a form of “charitable revenge”xxv, and finally, Mitleid involves “thinking about ourselves, no longer consciously, to be sure, but very powerfully so unconsciously”xxvi. The selflessness of Mitleid is only a pretence; Mitleid is merely part of our effort to recover psychological balance. Therefore, insofar as the motivations to act remain essentially grounded in the natural standpoint of the agent, it is difficult to give a precise account of how an altruistic intent can take root in the human mind at all, and consequently what real altruism, psychologically-speaking, really means; a difficulty which Schopenhauer called “the mystery of ethics”.xxvii

I will now highlight some of the concerns Nietzsche had with Schopenhauer’s morality of Mitleid.

1) It is necessarily based on a metaphysical support
2) It is based on self-deception and dissimulation, becoming a cover for the egoistic drives, thereby privileging one type of egoism above others arbitrarily
3) Mitleid as emotional obstacle to the free spirit's independence from conventional morality, also a distraction to free spirits, draining the human spirit, perturbing quietude
4) It falsely lays claim to being the sole morality
5) It creates a culture of decay
6) It is based on a pessimistic narrative of salvation, opposed to his Dionysian narrative of development
7) It breeds renunciatory ideals


The reliance of the morality of Mitleid on metaphysical support can be conceived in terms of two problems:

1) If the phenomenon of Mitleid requires egotistical willing as its precondition, how is it possible to derive an idea of 'the good', distinct from mere satisfaction of the will, and to locate it within the mutual interactions, in human relationships, of egotistical wills?
2) Second, if we are unable to give a psychological account of how altruistic intents are possible, and given the deceptive nature of consciously-represented motives, why do we suppose that real altruism is possible at all?

Unless we are able to give an account of how real altruism is possible, we are forced into two undesirable options: a) no good exists in the world, or b) the good derives from egoistical motives. Schopenhauer acknowledges these problems by claiming that his morality cannot be explained in psychological terms, and is necessarily founded on his metaphysicsxxviii, which involves a mystical-insight-based interpretation about our abilities to transcend the egoistical standpoint. This act of transcendence constitutes 'the good' because it intuits the truth: it pierces the veil of Maya and sees the oneness of all living things.xxix

Here, Nietzsche raises two problems. First, Schopenhauer's metaphysics features a circularity: he claims that compassion is possible by appealing to his metaphysics, however, his metaphysics depends on the possibility of compassion or pure aesthetic contemplation.xxx It is on these grounds that Nietzsche rejects the Schopenhauerian interpretation – not its entire possibility, but its credibility.xxxi Second, we can no longer rely on metaphysical theories in a post-Kantian world: “One could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities...it is certain that knowledge of it will be the most useless of all knowledge.”xxxii Nietzsche proposes a replacement of Schopenhauerian metaphysics with a naturalistic drive-psychology; and this interpretation leaves open the possibility of truly altruistic acts, but in return, it effectively historicizes the development of the moral mode of evaluation as an adaptive instrument of societyxxxiii, where 'the good' as based on a transcendent principle is abolished, and the basis of morality of Mitleid along with it. Hence for Nietzsche, the morality of Mitleid is as groundless as all other moral ideals that rely on transcendental justification; the litmus test for the adoption of a morality becomes the second-order value to which the morality and its disciplining capabilities are employed; the “value of values”.xxxiv

Secondly, Mitleid is a means of exploiting the suffering of others to gain power over them, hence becoming a cover for an other-dependent egoism that thrives on the suffering of others, while masquerading as altruism. For Nietzsche, psychological probity reveals that the primary human motivation of self-interestxxxv translates into a social psychology whose primary driving force is the acquisition of power.xxxvi Mitleid is “a life-preserving power that makes existence bearable” by “meting out superiority in small doses”xxxvii, and in Dawn 133, Nietzsche contrasts Stoic virtues with Mitleid as “egotism of a type different from the compassionate.”xxxviii The egotism of Mitleid thrives on the suffering of others, allowing us to “gloat over the terror of the misfortunate man” to “walk away feeling satisfied and elevated”xxxix in a voyeurism that eases the experience of our own suffering. Therefore it is both the deceptive nature of Mitleid, and the reactive nature of Mitleidxl, which Nietzsche holds in contempt. Its dependence on the suffering of others means that it is in its long-term interest to promote suffering – it is partly in this sense that Nietzsche writes in Dawn 134: “Compassion...creates suffering.”xlixlii But his real target is not the tainted innocence of Mitleid and its deceptions as such, but our failure to appreciate the dangers of a morality of Mitleid.

Nietzsche turns his polemic aim on the morality of Mitleid as sociological and historical phenomena. He views the ideals of morality at any given historical period as contingent social constructs whose present forms must be traced to the struggle for ideological dominance among different classes, groups or institutions, mediated by factors such as economics, environment, etc.xliii Morality is the means by which to make man a function of society,xliv with society defined as an organizational means to achieve a certain set of ends, collectively defined as ultimate or necessary. So, Nietzsche dissects the value of the morality of Mitleid and the ideals it implies or tends to create, and finds them dangerous, inhibiting, limiting, and conducive to pessimism and cultural decay.

First, Mitleid posits an immediate value judgement on the presence of suffering – pain is 'bad', while comfort is 'good' - a “religion of comfortableness”xlv - thereby elevating the importance of short-term hedonistic affects, experiences, and value judgements above long-term considerations of self-cultivation, or development of the species.xlvi This aligns itself with the tendency of modern “commercial society”xlvii to strengthen, emphasize, and commoditize human needs and experiences; to integrate individuals into a socially cohesive whole; and to posit security as the highest possible social goalxlviii, thereby sacrificing Stoic virtues, genuine individuality, and creative human-species developmentxlix. In doing so, it marshals individuals into a conformity of the affects and the common “fog of opinions” developed by playing to these affectsl, thereby encroaching on the requirements of autonomous, individual self-cultivation.li The morality of Mitleid, embedded within these social trends, becomes another instrument for adapting the individual to fit the needs of the throng – a “herd morality”lii.

Furthermore, it gives the weak, hedonistic, or pessimistic kinds of man leverage over the strong, the creative, and the well-constituted, for its bids the latter to sensitize themselves to their own suffering and to concern themselves with the suffering of others, thereby serving up distractions to arduous creative tasks and conjuring up paralyzing forces to those whose job is to healliii. In addition, suffering is an affect relative to one's sensitiveness to it, and to the purpose and meaning to which one views it as directed towards.liv A morality of suffering breeds oversensitivity towards suffering in general. This results in three dangers: the net increase in felt sufferinglv, the decay of manlvi, and the breeding of renunciatory ideals.

Very briefly, a word on renunciatory ideals. While Nietzsche advocates the Dionysian ideal, through which an affirmation of life is made possiblelvii – the ideal associated with an overabundance of creative energies – Schopenhauer advocates a pessimistic ideal of the denial of the will-to-lifelviii – this will defined as the futile craving after transient, illusory and insatiable goals, which leads to suffering.lix This distinction is couched by Nietzsche in physiological terms: his “Dionystic” philosophy is for the strong and healthy, and Schopenhauer’s “will to nothingness” is for the weak and the sicklx. For Nietzsche, “Life” involves a self-overcoming and mastery of the conditions of one’s existence - conditions which potentially include the limiting effects of moral ideals – while for Schopenhauer, salvation from life requires a regime of renunciation of human needs, to stem the futility of willinglxi. Hence for Schopenhauer the morality of Mitleid is good because it renounces the egotistic standpoint and its accordant willing, but for Nietzsche it breeds pity and nausea, the two dangers that lead to nihilism, the last manlxii, and the extinction of man.

Hence Nietzsche's solution of Mitfreunde and laughter should be read as the counter-prescription to Schopenhauer's Mitleid and renunciation of will-to-life. Human relations ought to be conducive to the project of life-affirmation, and joy, not suffering, should be shared by over-full individuals.lxiii
Laughter, for Nietzsche, is the “epigram on the death of a feeling”lxiv, and (all) humour is the distillation of a process of suffering, of understanding, and transcendence of a tragic situation; divine comedy laughs away the tragedy of being-as-such.lxv Nietzsche therefore sets man a more difficult task: to overcome the horror of existence in a post-teleological, post-metaphysical world – and to learn to laugh.

1 GM, Preface 5, pg. 19
2 BM pg 144
3 Bm pg 143
4 Bm pg 140
5 Bm pg 144
6 For Kant, we are to examine, through a priori concepts, the formal conditions of the possibility of value judgements and any mode of evaluation (Sachs: “Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Towards a Naturalized Theory of Autonomy.” (2008), pg.96), without undue concern for the sphere of what actually happens – the motivating question being, how is the synthetic a priori categorical imperative possible? For Schopenhauer, ethics is approached through the “explanation and interpretation of what actually happens, in order to arrive at a comprehension of it.”(BM/52), the motivating question being, how is the empirically observable phenomenon of the moral act possible? Nietzsche's approach to morality operated largely within the problems raised by the Schopenhauerian framework operating in a naturalistic setting, as opposed to a metaphysical one.
7 WWR I pg 332
8 Bm pg 131
9 Bm pg 133
10 Bm pg 95
11 Bm pg 95
12 WWR I pg 362
13 WWR I pg 362
14 For Schopenhauer, “the meaning of the concept good...denotes the fitness or suitableness of an object to any definite effort of the will, therefore everything agreeable to the will, and fulfilling the will's purpose, is thought of through the concept good...[while] bad, denotes everything that is not agreeable to the striving of the will in each case”. (WWR I, pg. 360)
15 Dawn Note 102, pg 70
16 Dawn Note 102, pg 70
17 Dawn Note 104, pg 71
18 WWR I pg. 369
19 WWR I pg. 369
20 KAP: Notes on Compassion
21 Dawn 116, pg 86
22 Dawn 129. Pg. 96
23 Dawn 133, pg 102
24 Dawn 133, pg 102
25 Dawn 138, pg 106
26 Dawn 133, pg 102
27 Bm 144
28 Bm 144
29 For Schopenhauer, “to be just, noble, and benevolent is nothing but to translate my metaphysics into actions”, and proceeds from the “immediate and intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical identity of all beings”. (WWRII, pg 600-601)
30 More precisely, his claims that compassion is possible are based on an intuitive knowing that the veil of Maya has been transcended, but this interpretation of the experience of the revelatory insight is dependent on a metaphysical account that provides a framework for understanding the experience, and must therefore precede and cannot be given within it. In BGE 188, Nietzsche writes: “we suspect any thinker who wants to prove something – that they always knew in advance that which was supposed to result from the most rigorous cogitation.”
31 See Dawn 103: “I deny morality in the same way I deny alchemy, which is to say, I deny its presuppositions, not however that there were alchemists who did believe in these presuppositions and acted in accordance with them.”
32 HH9, pg 15
33 See WS40: Actions “performed first with a view to common utility have been performed by later generations for other motives”, fear, habit, benevolence and vanity, among others - “such actions, whose basic motive, that of utility, has been forgotten, are then called moral actions, not because they are performed out of these other motives, but because they are not performed from any conscious reason of utility. But this “hatred of utility which becomes visible here” points to the fact that the “hearth of morality...has had to struggle too long and too hard against the self-interest and self-will of the individual not at last to rate any other motive morally higher than utility. Thus it comes to appear that morality has not grown out of utility; while it is originally social utility, which had great difficulty in asserting itself against all individual private utilities and making itself more highly respected.”
34 GM, Preface Section 6, pg 20
35 Or more precisely, the egoism of the drives that constitute the self.
36 See GM Second Essay, Section 12, pg 76: “To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be “unjust”, since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought at all without this character...from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent on power and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power.
37 Dawn 136, pg 105
38 Dawn 133, pg 102
39 Dawn 224, pg 165
40 Although not explicitly written, it is clear, in the GM, that the morality of Mitleid could potentially serve the purpose in general of moralities built on ressentiments and the “slave revolt in morality”, which are initiated to establish “the weak” over “the strong”. See GMI Section 10, also Section
41 Dawn 134, pg 103
42 Of course, Nietzsche acknowledges redeeming qualities in compassionate acts, including the possibility of genuine altruism, and I think he would agree with Schopenhauer that Mitleid represents a higher position, in terms of mental discipline, than a narrow egoism defined by a hedonistic calculus, or the basest forms of utilitarianism; also the art and science of living today. It is in this sense that conventional morality has an important role to play, to temper our appetites and to recognize material suffering in the world. But it is here that one has to situate Nietzsche’s antimoral prescriptions within the very different roles he envisages for conventional morality and his form of esoteric morality, in the economy of the drives.
43 See GM, Preface Section 6: “There is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which morality grew, under which they evolved and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison.)”
44 Dawn 132, pg 100
45 GS 338, pg 270
46 For Nietzsche, in GS4 pg. 79: “the strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to preserve humanity, again and again they relumed the passions that were going to sleep...and they reawakened again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled men to pit opinion against opinion, model against model.”
47 Dawn 174, pg127
48 Dawn 173, pg126
49 GS4 pg. 79; “What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit – the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is exploited, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.”
50 Dawn 105, pg 72
51 KAP, Notes on Compassion
52 GS 116, pg 174
53 See Dawn 134, pg 104: “but whosever wishes to serve as physician to humanity in any sense whatsoever will have to be very cautious with regard to that sentiment- it lames him in all decisive moments and paralyzes his knowledge and his benevolent delicate hand.
54 GMIII, Section 28, pg 162
56 See GS 338, pg 269: On the happiness of man: “Happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together, or remain small together….but the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.” On suffering as an accompaniment to growth and self-cultivation: “The whole economy of soul and the balance effected by distress, the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed – all such things that may be involved in distress.” On Mitleid’s effect on man, see GMIII Section 14: “The sick are man's greatest danger, not the evil, not the beasts of prey. Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed – it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves.”
57 See GS370, where the Dionysian is “He that is richest in the fullness of life...an overflowing energy that is pregnant with the future.” See EH, “Birth of Tragedy”, Section 2: “I was the first to see the real opposition: the degenerating instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the philosophy of Plato, and all of idealism as typical forms) versus a formula for the highest affirmation, born of over-fullness, a a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence.” See also EH, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, Section 6: “He that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the “most abysmal idea”, nevertheless do not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence – but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen - “Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes.” - But this is the concept of the Dionysus once again.”
58 WWR I, pg. 380
59 See WWRI, pg. 380: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entagled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing , or which he sees near him, and sets out to run over the path.”
60 GS III Section 28, pg. 163
61 WWR I, pg. 393
62 GM III, Section 14, pg. 122
63 GS 338, pg. 271. See also WS350, pg.393.
64 HH. II: AOM.202, pg. 261
65 GS1, pg 74: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth – to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius for that.”

Dream Notes

So I was in this lecture on psychoanalysis given by Jung and there were 3 Brit Indians sitting on my left. During question time one of them asked if technology in dream content affected the confessionary interpretation. Collins went on with a very long question of his own in his nasal, self-defeating voice which nobody hears or cares to. I was trying to avoid someone; the lecture hall emptied; I remained, thinking, finally some peace to ponder my questions and collect my thoughts.

I was on holiday with my parents in a Malaysian jungle resort. Apparently I must have been out wandering alone on the resort grounds, because when I reached the lobby, I found that I had known all along that I was checking out with my parents, and had my luggage with me. I left something in the room, went to get it, but I had to return to the rooms again after that to take the keys for checkout. Damn. Its a long walk back and forth and I should have done everything in one walk. I was just tired of going back to the chalet, for some reason.

Apparently we were being led in an assembly - or was it the beginning of an exercise? - by a figure in the image of ben tan. During this exercise he made several remarks of which i cannot remember, and asked a question which caused several people to leave. One of them had a distinctive socila awkward guy look: with white headphones cupped over his head and the usual detached absorption, and a white cap that hung with a pointed end over his forehead. He strolled away with the desolate yet seeming confidence of one who no longer cared. Apparently, when a second one left, from the silence of ben tan, we knew that they had been performing mastabatory handjobs on each other, and the remarks and questions were directed as half accusatory, half joking comments on them as an indication that he knew. Apparently I followed them in that weird shift of perspective, and saw one of them disappearing behind the grove around the school gates. I proceeded to the library on the right, full of empty tables and unfinished work, and with disjointed theories.

We were attempting to get something done, like destroying a castle, or saving someone. Apparently I was supposed to go into this room on the right that had a vent on the courtyard corridor to spy on something or to enter into something. It was surprisingly easy, and I just walked in. Then doug came in a super loud way, and I had to remove the bedsheets and quilt covers off the bed I was in to remove any evidence of my being there. Somehow I knew and kept telling myself that they will be here in 5 minutes, they will be here in 5 minutes. Me and doug got that done very quickly, and we were fine.

A vivid dream. In a house with the old family, but apparently we were living by a river with a depth of about 8 metres. Strangely, the house was built such that the ground floor fronted the waters of the river itself in the style of an aquarium - we could see the sealife and the odd fish or two. Well, the dykes upriver opened at a certain fixed time daily. Perhaps that was the reason for a daily rise in the river levels, which we did expect well in advance. Well, I saw an influx of fish at the time, and then a shark swam past the windows. It was in a predatory mood. This was shocking as the river was filled with bathers and rowers, and I thought of the danger that accrued to them by what, by all accounts, must seem like a lemon shark, ie, maneater, in what was largely considered an urban canal. I am now standing at the bridge, watching the bathers and rowers, and half-fearing, half-triumphant at the lurking danger.

Facebook Thoughts 2

The question: is facebook a fad or a permanent fixture of the internet? To me, social networking is not a fad. As its natural conclusion, it will displace google, and mobile-network services (eg. sms, calls).

Fad:

1) The social-communication functions which facebook optimizes can be performed more effectively with mobile connections. Also, it does not introduce fundamental changes in the demands of the way we communicate over the web.

- Facebook is essentially a form of entertainment, whose medium are memes, photos, quotes, and 9gag links. These are fads. Counter: Facebook shares these. It can conceivably integrate new fads.

Permanent fixture:

1) Facebook connectivity is structural. Social information-sharing will become the main engine of information-distribution on the internet. The evolution of this information sharing will depend largely on the share options provided by Facebook.

2) The internet is an information bank. Information-acquisition is either personal or social. Personal information acquisition is conditioned by individual conditions. You need to research something - go to google. You want entertainment - go to youtube, and so on. Facebook is different. You do not know what you want when you go to Facebook. So unlike google or youtube, there is no initial goal. Why? Because the information I get on facebook is socially conditioned, a forum of friends. I am part of that social condition. Joining that social condition is called facebooking.

(Anything phenomenologically 'Real' is social, or personified. Facebook personifies the Internet as lifestyle space, makes it Real in that sense. The benefit is that this personification is precisely a corresponding mimicry of the real-world social.)

So we are in conversation in an imaginary space of friends. What kinds of ideals do Facebook represent, socially? Who is facebook? A memorable conversation with your best friend? The best night out? The desire to idealize social space.

3) The oligopolisation of information over the internet. The decreasing role of Google search and small sites. Personal expression converging in public mediums and forms. The culturalization of the web accelerates with the concentration of expression in a series of facebookable forms, providing fresh principles for creativity. Very quick cycles of forms, requiring new updates and options.

Fad? No. At worst a slow decline.

Note 36

Interesting. It is precisely the cannot-be-said of the framework which rules we apply but as yet cannot uncover or identify, that constitutes the ground of thought.

Brain science as the new historical consciousness.

Neuroscience and its subset explanatory psychologies as the major force reshaping the way man develops the coordinates of the background reality that conditions his worldview. It can create new possibilities which are presently inconceivable from an intuitive standpoint from which to reframe our approaches to thinking about thought itself.

Note 35

footloose

i feel these hands that carry the world
i feel the clouds of dust that swirl around things
moving, shifting
you fall to the ground, feeling the tracks as
the pebbles bleed your fingers,
and the train moves.

So the milky current,
like the best food you've tasted,
or the waves that seem to wash and clean,
salting your hair as it breathed
from the cool dark belly of its ocean depths
unlocks threatens like a loosing promise
sliding like madness in a dream
but the trees ring forth spring
like an absurd parody.

You dance. Footsteps on the receding floor,
the rhythms grow louder as the head
swirls in a cloud of dust.
Witness the madness! The sickness!
You say, as the fifty pence ale
gurgles like a purifier in your throat,
turning brains into wishing wells
and coins into lies.

The dirt on the floor.
Bent and broken glass stuck in your shoes,
you reach to vacuum them away.
What? It weighs a ton, like the matter in
the brain, the accumulated
sickness of thousands of years of life,
stored in a citrus moment,
burning away like acid,
emitting a sparkling glow,
a molotov personality crashing into the fashion-shop windows of truth,
before some father-figure appears and tells you
what you needed to hear but knew didn't work anyway.

Those switches!
How do you work them?
I need some transistors
these veins bleed like BIOS overloads.
He poured milk over them
like a salve, cruxifying
soaring like a pebble throw at the skydomes
hitting the ceiling of a dream.

Now the hydrants open,
and the circus spotlights are switched on.
They shine on the busloads of tourists,
children, grandparents.
Someone eats a fire-stick,
pours kerosene down his throat,
a small fire breaks out, threatens the tentage as
it shakes in the breeze.
The firemen arrive - but the lungs have been burnt beyond repair.
The clown-business fails, and the magician is severely injured.
So the illusion ends.

I draw a few cards.
They slide from my cramping hands.
I do not know what they mean.
Do they know what they mean?
I take a few red pills that seem to
laugh and chatter to themselves
with secret, knowing truths
as they rub against my throat.
And the cards seem to flutter
they speak of love, life, danger, misery,
in cliffhanger tones,
that is, universally, generally,
and i am reminded of ants that swirl around
before they are crushed by a playful hand,
or killed by cigarettes.

The music begins
that is, the piano music drawn from wrinkled hands
the flowers in the flower pots begin to sing
and so the leaves droop to listen.
What do they hear?
Only music muffled from the dust in the carpets
trapped in some room on the hundredth floor.
While I hear the joyful sound of motorcycles
stuttering and stopping, speaking,
like animus mundi at the roundabout,
while the caged hens in the buses look out of the windows.

Listen, listen?
Do you hear its spirit aching, singing, sighing?
Remember, breathe it into you.
Oxygen for the dead! Oxygen for the dead!
Put it into tanks, and use it for resuscitation.

Zizek's GM video quotes and Notes

1) Zizek notes that the problem of authority as played out in the King's Speech is the problem of assuming a title that is, paradoxically, a) absurd b) one which one does not feel adequate to fulfil.

The basis of authority is absurd, yet the kinds of responsibility that come with the title need to be assumed.

How is that assumption to take place? Zizek, as against the bourgeoisie current of the movie, notes that it is based on a stupid internalization of the values of the system which support that form of authority. Man is condemned into deception as a price for responsibility.

Maturity becomes a dependent on a form of ideology even as it builds the ground on which to act for the benefit for others.

Ideology is therefore a root: from it all living forces grow.

2) Fetishes can be brutal, cynical, realistic; but fetishes allow them to acquire a distance, to prevent themselves from fully emotionally assume what they rationally know. Brutal, cynical behaviors and attitudes rest on fetishes. What is the fetish?

Distinguishing subjective beliefs, and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it.

Acts embody beliefs. The father example.

A friend visited NB in his country house in a Central European home in the highlands.
There was a horseshoe to prevent evil spirits from entering the house.

Friend: Why do you have this here? Are you stupid, are you superstitious?

Niehls Bohr: No of course I don't believe in it, I'm a scientist, I'm not stupid, but I have it there because I was told it works even though I don't believe in it.

3) Does philosophical totality lead to political totalitarianism?

Critical theorists show how society necessarily undermines its own basic premises.

The distortion of a noble idea, its falsification and misinterpretation, is grounded in the idea itself.

4) What we are witnessing (in higher education reform) is an attempt to change university as a space of freedom into a factory of experts. Post-industrial transition.

A true intellectual dosen't solve problems posed by others. It is to re-formulate and critique the formulation of problems.

The privatization of public space. The changing function of ideology.

Market power replacing education and law as a moral instrument.

Self-commodification; other-directedness the behavioral norm.

Passionate, narcissistic, solipsistic behaviors discouraged.

Spontaneity and love of self and animality as a necessary condition of freedom.

6) The innate bureaucracy (Platonic-Legalist totalitarianism) of the Asian.

Europe as true narrative flux. The arbitrariness of power, and external authority in that context.

Power as a negative notion of agency. Negative notions of agency as conditions to which maxims of inviolability adhere. Maxims as adopted, chosen, habituated, deemed useful or neccessary.

What kind of power as the pre-condition of Order is being recognized in the structural features of the phenomenological landscape of the Asian?

How are conceptual constituents of Order to be conceived, and in relation to what?

Specifically, the relations and order of the principles which underlie beliefs.

What are the parallel or differential understandings of features that condition orientative-being (of which power is one) to the organization (of which no discourse as yet exists to elucidate) of the mind of the European?

How is the societal instrumentality of individuals to be understood in relation to the underlying systems of beliefs?

7) The injunction to enjoy.

The reproach to psychoanalysis: it is only a theory of individual disturbances; applying psychoanalysis to other cultural, social phenomena is illegitimate.

But psychoanalysis asks in what way you as an individual have to relate to the social field, not just in the sense of other people, but in the sense of the anonymous social-as-such, to exist as a person. You are a "normal individual person" in being able to relate to some anonymous social field.

Everything is to be interpreted.

When Freud says, "civilisation and its discontents"; the uneasiness in culture, he does not just mean we socialize ourselves normally, and that there are some idiots didn't make it, and they have to be normalized.

No; culture-as-such, in order to establish itself as normal, what appears as normal, involves a whole series of pathological card tricks, distortions, so on and so on.

There is Unbehagen, an uneasiness, we are out of joint, not at home, in culture as such, which means that there is no normal culture, culture-as-such has to be interpreted.

"It is this paradox which defines surplus enjoyment; it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some normal, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus-value, because it is constitutively an excess."

"Systems cease to exist if they stay the same, if it achieves an internal balance."

"The surplus-value is the cause which sets in motion the capitalist process of production, and surplus-enjoyment is the object-cause of desire."

The merging of Marxist surplus-value, Lacan's objet petit, and the paradox of the superego.

What are the principles underlying the evolution of a phenomenology and psychology of the systems. Hegelian dialectics?

"A thousand people cannot have the same interest in Lacan as I do."

How is culture a disease? How is God a disease?

Quotes 4

"Breaking out of an established framework of thinking or perceiving occurs in creating a theory or artistic object, yet it is not restricted to these; it is important to be able to "break frame" in our everyday lives also.

Sometimes the breaking of frame will be a direct action violating a previous framework of expectations that defined which actions were admissible or were allowed to occur, but which excluded the most functional actions or even effective ones.

The pieces of the frame - other's expectations, cultural traditions, our own habitual patterns of behavior resulting from past reinforcements, our own rules of thumb for acting - affect what range of choice we perceive, which alternatives are salient, which ones come to mind, which ones get excluded immediately, even whether we think we face a choice rather than simply a direction we must move in."

- Robert Nozick

1) Exploration begins from a framework, or "home base", of contours of significances and beliefs, and consists in the harmonic synthesis of new experiences, and therefore the reorganization of the meaningful interrelations among these frameworks, within the bounds of the affective and cognitive principles underlying the attachments to these frameworks. A three-level re-orientation takes place - phenomenology, belief, relation to principle.

2) Interestingly, while non-contradictory by necessity, these frameworks tend to be irreconcilable, and creative acts function to draw links between them that alters their place in a larger whole.

3) Rules of harmony differ according to the situational, and hence functional, context of the synthesis. Different principles reflect different approaches.

Note 34

Italy was like a dream; it sleeps fervently; the buildings like the closed face of a coloured curtain withdrawn from the world into the hills, into the dressing-gown cupboard that locked hidden things. Shadows plague the puppet architecture of the walls; grand mausoleums of society; emptying of space but filled with directionless, decaying spirit. The inescapable foreignness of the country is an exotic starting point where one plays out one's drama of the unknown: the grotesque yet charming preservation of the spirit of the dead (Italy is its coffin), strikes one as necrophilia, while the strangely useable beauty of the shaded streets seems to remind one of the crevices in our mind that remain stuck in the past.

Note 33

Narcissism is performance's favourite decoy, and it makes one sick and nauseous. Acting that tricks oneself; a lesson. The subject as your audience; not you.

Note 31

We note that culture is essentially the underlying principles of the structure by which values systems are situated in actual circumstance.

These principles underlie the network of meanings by which significance is attributed to events.

It is my contention that an objective structural description of these principles exist and can be given.

Strange Thought

What was the point of the thrifty compass?
He spun in the northern tiers
directionlessly faithful, focused
or was it distraction that bred the cause,
a failed thought that derailed at high speed
a poor driver, a poor train,
of indian construction, or difficult terrain.
One that stalled when over its speed limit.

But we were always delayed
the trains at coventry were always late
and standing in the open cold talking about life
we would speak of photographs
of making memories of forgotten things
and knowing, if we looked hard enough
we stood a chance of remembering.

There was always the big city
The signboards that changed at every quarter hour
telling of delays,
and as you walked past frustrated faces
or acquaintances in the hundreds
as you walked past the station
towards the mall, the church, the row of shops
as lamplight pooled our gaze at stunted spires
as the columns rose and crammed and slid by
you felt that this was all he had, and you were all he needed.

***

Note 30

the flower king

sandbeds and the third eye
romping through the countryside
a taken beast, a fleeting touch,
and lilting eyes, as the sun blazed golden on
the waves drowned as they pulled ashore

fishes crammed into the sides of tanks
like sharks in the fleshy deep
but you turned left
and the curtain rose to meet the sun
but you turned again
and the corridors led to dead ends

we stood in the room of mirrors
staring at the sunlight through the window
reflecting on the dusky floor
on the images of days
there shone a blueprint
it was the bounds of sense
like a child grasping at light
you reached for the image in the mirror
but all you saw was your reaching
all you touched was the light

Intuitive Knowing as a Prelude

For Nietzsche the primary lesson and the framework within which his philosophy operated was Schopenhauerian in the sense that intuitive knowing was the object and aim of his philosophy.

The subject of his philosophy was the content and constitutive aspects of this form of knowing, and its approach is premised on the value of rending the veil of abstraction between theoretical and intuitively felt and performed knowledge, knowledge that was significant insofar as it was constitutive of the orientations that produced a sense of identity and meaningfulness of acts in the highly intuitive run of daily existence.

It asserts the primacy of practical reason as the starting point of philosophy.

The primacy of practical reason includes, as its most important end-goal, the rationalization of the intuitive features of daily life from a subjective viewpoint, one that is adequately informed by institutional instruction while able, insofar as it is the ground of independent and subjective fields of experience and correctly judges itself to be so, a independent adopter of reasoned beliefs.

It therefore hopes to train good judgement and a moral sense of responsibility and accountability for the beliefs which underlie, both intuitively and rationally, both individually and collectively our acts. It translates discpline, coercion and punishment into accountability, reason, and choice-based submission.

This ideal level of intersubjectively accomodating, individuating responsibility, coupled with a recognition and acknowledgement, and provisions for the essential animality, anti-rational, anti-truthfulness, and anti-idealistic, and destructive creative capacities of man, is the ONLY definition of Enlightenement progress, and its furtherance is the sole meaining of the half-meaningless life of the word 'civilisation'.

This is also the necessary precondition of a free society.

Note 28

The dualism between existence and essence is essentially characterized by the different modalities involved in what exists and what can be said. This dualism is the reason for the mischaracterization of the relations within the real by corresponding propositions which aim at truth, and on the other hand, the misapplication of the notion of truth of assertions into the real, which remain problematic, and which are mostly held for good reasons that when looked into, cannot be adequately unpacked, nor fully justified.

It is when these reasons lay claim to assertoric truths about the real that motivations for belief-systems merge with present utility to create the image of fact, which forms part of a mediated and coherant system of myths. This is not to deny the underlying Real: it denies in principle the conceivability of truthfulness of that Real to cognizable facts. This is also not to deny the possibility of the correspondence of the Real to those facts, that is, correspondence within the bounds of all possible evidence, since it must necessarily affirm that minimal possiblity as a condition of validity of any statement at all about what is real.

The core myth of which we are concerned is the myth of individualized objectified-subjectivity, which forms the core assumption of the core value - self-development - of the Enlightenment myth.

Note 27

Man as functional item.

All individuals are created with a unique psychological profile.

This unique profile is manifest in personal preference, personal interpretative outcomes, and personal needs.

The genetic pool of the being is evolutionarily tested by the conditions which impinge on the individual as mediated by the demands of environment, by the demands of society.

Society is a collection of individuals and their interactions with one another, reflecting both the living forces within the individuals that constantly actualize, that is, that serve as the bridge between past fact and the arbitrariness of present force, and the historical institutional agreements and unagreed coercive structures that have formed the ground on which one functions, on which one understands one's own functioning, and on which the re-interpretation of the present by living force always receives form from which to alter the present while preserving it.

Society functions as an organizational construct based on the possibility of rationalized social interactions that have been tested by the factors of power, of order, of satisfaction of mutually agreed and of granted rights.

Social constructs are innately unstable if not based on a certain set of real needs and the common interpretation of those needs. It is the commonness of the need, and the commonness of the belief system which re-interprets these needs without removing them, but securing and re-inforcing them instead, that forces the individual to define his role in terms of the functions he can play with regards to the Other. He conceives of his needs socially, and not only that, the solution is social - he has no sustainance from the environment itself.

That is, all thought is functional by working through intersubjectivities to create an interpretation of needs that functionalizes the individual, that applies his understanding and his capacities, and shapes his development, for the purpose of fulfilling common needs.

We interpret things in our ways, and the contrast in interpretations correspond to the needs that exist and want to be felt within the society that nurtures a sensitivity to those needs in the first place.

Of course, the point is that the individual is a means to a single end, the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective. The subjective need is a seperate existence for which all else is means. The outer always exists as a canvas for something to exist in terms of the inner. Insofar as the outer has been manipulated, has been made the object of attention, and the object of agency, the outer exists as an extension of the inner, and the advance of power consists in shaping, re-distorting, and increasing the variety of configurations of symbols of power to allow for the flourishing of individuals over the scarcity of bounded objectivity. Of course, the democracy of human needs provides an ample, and a sure insurance, for the satisfaction of absolute power over many human lives - but humans have thrived precisely because of the variety of powers which they have been able to pursue. In fact, it is precisely the creativeness of man that is required and has allowed for the flourishing of power over things that are mental, over conditions that are constructed and over tastes and nuances which have been trained so as to allow for the increasing complexity of the conditions which will generate outlets where none in fact is needed. Opinion leaders will continue to spur development: it is by defintion a competitive exercise. This understanding within a paradigm of power.

But what about the notion of a society with needs of its own? That is, the reverse view, where intersubjectivity is not only a fog of opinion, but is in fact, a living force which shapes the individual and gives him bearing? Here we have the picture of man as society - the tribal man - here we conduct an exercise of anthropology of oneself, at least within the limits of our understanding, on the basic premise that the living force of the meanings through which man exists in relation to his self-understanding is based on his relation to his external environment, and by definition, the living force of society.

Facebook Thoughts 1

What is Facebook for? Its for connecting with people you know on the web.

Its for turning the web and internet surfing, which has taken a life of its own as a lifestyle trend, as something you must do because it fills a need in real life, into something more familiar. It humanizes the web.

The web is a confusing, repetitive, boring, place. It is an essentially boring and inhuman place. Yes, it interests you, but it interests you only within the context of your boredom and frustration in real life. You wouldn't be on the internet if you had real stuff to do, or if the world was in your control. You'd be using it like a upgraded form of email, if life was swell. The internet is another medium of art, art being a re-creation of reality in higher forms to satisfy something lacking in the real. (In fact, the internet is THE medium of art of today, websites being hyper-democratic art forms: one can on this basis alone predict the drive to aesthetic complexity of website design as architectural spaces of communication.)

Virtual is an always an inferior reality, but it is a superior form to non-reality, which is its role to substitute.

Social networking works on this essential frustration - it is promise of socialist utopia in its most inferior imaginable form.

Now, you will dismiss: this is the rambling of a sad loner; one who does not realize that Facebook is the most efficient means of concerning yourself adequately intimately with the life of a large circle of busy and interesting friends, and therefore with the life of the community as a whole - it is an information bank and an actionable tool in the social arsenal. Perhaps. I concede. But it is both.

Then: A measure of the degree of social deficit and deficits in other modes of social interaction. Lovely.

Feminism seminar: Wayward thoughts

Conventional wisdom declares that there inheres in every man a female and in every woman a male.

This leads to a strange paradox: The necessary condition of being conventionally male consists in submission to his inner female - she must direct the man - this is the secret of his flourishing "manhood". Conversely, the well-developed woman submits to the direction of her inner male.

In a man, the female finds the reasons; the man acts. In a woman, the male is directionless: it needs reasons from which to act, but the reasons in their substance cannot reflect the ones for which man has created for his female from which to act.

Man is, in teleological essence, female - the man is merely compensation for the essentially female character he is at core - at the level of fundamental beliefs and drives - at the level of the substance of ideas. Conversely, the woman is, in teleological essence, male - the female is compensation for the essentially male person she is at core.

Therefore man is the means to the female - in allocating to the man male-as-such, we have confounded means and ends, and so vice-versa.

Now a problem rears its head:

Man is unable, due to his male-as-means deficiency with feelings, to represent to himself the female form that directs him.

Woman is unable to represent to herself, due to her female-as-means deficiency with Ideas, the male that directs her.

Attempts on the man's part to masculinize, or take over reins of his inner female will lead to dissolution of character and sexual deficiency, and attempts on the woman's part to feminize her inner male (usually due, again, to social pressures) - will lead to the careless stupidity that characterizes the combination of female direction and instrumentality.

So its highly important in this respect not to misinterpret society's signals.

Now, is this the 'greatest myth of the woman', that she is directed by emotions rather than by Ideas? Is she, in essence, directed by the emotion or, as her male dictates, an Idea of it? But we cannot ask her: her female-as-means has no positive conception of the inner male, or what it thinks. Nevertheless, she is directed by the Idea and misattributes this source to the consciously represented emotional reaction to its content - for this reason, it characterizes her absolute morality, even though, to repeat, in attributing the corresponding emotionality as the cause, an error has been made.

Here, a problem arises: in what sense can we say that she acts 'according' to principle, if she is unable to represent the content of the principle by which she acts? (Very often, its projected: she wants her mate to act in service of ideals because she will not, as a suppressed man.)

I don't know, and in a certain sense, it is a mechanism that has no proper discourse to represent it, for obvious reasons.

So the male of the woman might be one of the most left-unsaid things in the world, despite its very real impact.

However, its ridiculous impotence in the conscious world means that the woman must fall back on a man-constructed image of the male. Therefore, the female-as-means consequently falls back on a male-constructed image of female. (More should be said though.)

So we arrive at the brand of feminism that advocates an independent woman-constructed image of male, which faces all the well-known problems.

In solution, women in general have chosen the indirect route to greater power by serving as the controlling feature of the female directing the male.

Do we reach a stasis, where women perform the role of channeling male desire, but men perform the role of setting the course? Given that patterns of division of labor are changing, what approach and attitude do we take to the charge of female inauthenticity, and to what end? The question for true equality turns on the ability and desire on the part of women to re-characterize Enlightenment forms in their image in a compatibilist way. (I would think that a good start would be for womenkind to respect their priestly or mannish types: cultural differences are obvious here.) Is this possible/desirable, or does its impossibility pave descents into fantasy - of the "autonomy of the sexes"?

Note 25

So there is something deeply wretched about this country, a hopeless yearning. Is this a residue of Christ without an object? Or a projection - mine?

The average Briton wraps his world in optimistic garbs and images to protect himself from the collapsing world of paternal institutions and maternal faith.

Economy, beer, and the collective spirit of reasonableness - culture as morality, the wreck bending in upon itself.

How can Europe live without Christ? A return to Rousseau's ideas, reformed and repackaged in hedonist covering, but in an inevitably perverted form? (ie, the development of neoliberalism as a possible branch of this general direction.) Note that this actively destroys, if slowly but surely, the substance of the ideal, which remains a guard against the basest submission. The danger of mouthing words without knowing their meanings may therefore threaten.

More likely outcome: The continuation of the dialectic between ?

Note 24

Selling yourself on a dime

So the fences to the world are craved to brokenness, and beds are filled with homeless houses of men, pouring forth to the cycle of dreams that are made stone, gliding with a skinless breath, taped to the sound of your name, your stage.

Note 23

Identity games:

a) Animal
b) Computer
c) Animal-computer
d) Computerized-animal

Note 22

Chase the resident gulls of Lanyard Common, or lift the chains of dog-bound men. Seek the treasury of the earth, or loop forwards in uncertain ends. Trace the steak-filled wooden coffin or the scar round your twisting back. Stave the bleeding from sanctity of life, or pervade through the empty fields of forgetting, unknown men.

The insanity of the springtime sunshine falls across the jutted walls, brick upon brick yielding to the yellow beam that drapes its endless sparkling cloth over the mold of the pondering, retreated earth.

I walk with my head axially lowered from the gravity of time, that rushes up to meet and consume us all. So the past peels like a layer of rotten fruit, revealing the kernel underneath as less is extracted from more, little by little, and the swirling deception of images, like a protective bark of a trunkless tree, falls into the nothingness that presses the material chains, which clink loudly with the sounds of society's bells, keeping time till the soul drifts upward, inward, into crypts and into the falling trellises of loved time.

Note 21

What if the constitutive powers to execute the action of the right is dependent on the individual and the social resources which establish the condition and the rules for the exercise of the rights. Think of a traffic light system where the arbitrary rules of the game allow for the constitutive configuration through which the possibility of orderly movement through the space of concepts is enabled, with the coordinates of actuality as it is reinterpreted by the concept in societal forms being the specific rules as actualized in the operation of the traffic lights.

In this case, the potentiality of individual man itself serves as an underlying factor which gives substance and meaning to the operation of the rules, but which remains dependent, causally and cognitively, on the resources of established concepts, associations and rules. If one then applies Paine’s method of establishing criteria of distinguishing between natural and civil liberties, one asks, simultaneously, a few key questions. In what way is the establishment of the toolkit and the content of the concept as a resource constitutive of the powers which are enabled and expressed through individual initiative? What is the set of criteria for determining, in this situation of reciprocally-conditioning dependence, the kind of capacities and therefore abilities that are crucial for the actual operation of the concept, or the aspects of the concept that are deemed to be productive of claims to right? This itself necessitates a series of value judgements that allow us to interpret what the action is for, and what it is, and therefore what is important in it. Therefore the competing accounts of the nature and ends of human agency come into play. (Or rather, the ends and therefore the nature of agency.)

Note 20

I think a developing understanding of the meaning of the term mental health is the starting point of selfconstruction.

What is the concept of mental health in society?

Why are some forms of mental health encouraged, promoted over others, and what are the levers of its promotion?

What opportunities do immense interpretive/cognitive wealth of society bring?

Real? There is no Real. The concepts that create arbitrary order. But also mental health.

What reflexivity? How does the belief in the true create illusions?

I believe in the Real, and the real has existence. But the existence of the Real has no extension beyond my existence.

Theres the nub - the narrative Real as transcendent, and the "I think, therefore I am" point as the precondition, the existence of the concept as the prerequisite for the thinking state of my existence.

But my existence is itself a meta-real.

Real is used in contradistinction to what is, in the use of concepts. What is, is , but isness is structured; always existing in ordered relations to other possibilities.

Kant: What is, must. But does the mustness constitute isness? Is Being constituted by a form of all possible "mustness", Being as necessity referring to itself?

Is all language the possibility of its necessity?

But that means that its necessity is redefined by their individual Being. Language contains the collective experience of the past in dealing with conditions shared among previous peoples.

(Unoriginal language is therefore the failure to fully interpret the significance of the present moment, but the nature of the associative set...)

Of course, individual psychologies use language differently to interpret different states, and the collective state of a group or crowd is the necessary condition of the applicability of language...It is the modality of translation of concept into existence that is shared yet subjective that constitutes a group.

What are the constituents of this modality of interpretation?

Well, first, it is precisely the ability of the group leader to appreciate the collective modality of interpretation and to adopt the responsibility of developing its substantive content.

"This is absurd. How could you call this responsibility?"

What is the meaning of a word?

It is its difference from its similarities, and the word...it does not need family resemblance, its the resemblance of collective experiences that form complexes of associations which are tied to the negotiative pillars of taboo, excitement, reality-function, to inform the purpose of conversation.

Feeling-toned complexes and their significations, when tied to underlying narratives and meanings - yes, there are master narratives, narratives of the order of mental health - ...

Know these narratives, subvert the tragedy inherent in them by re-expressing them in perverted form, ie. reflect how much we actually desire them, make fun of it in any way you can, preferably by conjuring circumstances that turn its aspects against itself, through the incongruity of the simultaneous application of two tragic values - this is the work of the comedian.

So wherefore the specific horror of a failed joke, which sounds like a bad lie, all-too-earnestly told? Are all jokes clownish masquerade of the truth-complex? The belief in the joke is the essential condition of its success. So a joke obviously has a shadow in a tragic truth.

"Laughter is freedom from order - it shows us how much we secretly want to be mad."

Note 19

Institutions as systems of reproduction of process: material process factorized - ?

The analogy to self-interest, with need as base but in a purely functional immanent sense.

Post-material process. Institutionalized symbolic order as the facilitating process, the shortcut of agreements in matters pertaining to societal-individual scope.

We are actors in society's endless cinema that's the definition of our existing but existence is empty without reference.

What about the fundamentalization of functionalism?

Access breeds utility precisely because increasing areas and aspects of our experience can be categorized in relation to the externalized function-form - a form that commodotizes experience and consciousness-time by increasing its productivity and profit per minute.

The individual as the crucial myth, Real, and necessity that holds up the form.

Realities

Its these kinds of realities that make me sick.
Nausea nausea.

Jan 10. 2012.

Meaning: Random Points

When we need meaning what we want is a perspective that objectifies our relation to the world. (Is it a self-referring perspective? In being said, it is NOT you that's saying it; but in your saying it, we infer that you are saying it.)

Necessity of being in all its forms cannot constitute truth.

Truth like all concepts are innately self-referring in their content and cannot be shown to reflect being.

Meaning is the object of the sign but meaning is itself indefinite without a picture of meaning, a relation to a web of meanings.

Truth is a certain set of accepted forms of webs of meaning regulated in part by necessity in being.

Understanding proceeds on the ability to perceive possibilities of meanings.

Note 18

Jung 98: The individual as a resource-based ordering concept. It redirects the problem of subjectivity into a duality that can be reconfigured and understood reflectively in terms that are continuous with the recognition of other individualities existing in the world. It deproblematicizes and justifies interpretation of morality and existence. The subject as myth based on the standpoint of the Real: subjectivised affectivity.

Note 17

Individual as a set of enabled conventionalized intersubjective experiences, given arbitrariness.

Order becomes an important resource: individual as an ordering resource-concept.

What is the economy of concepts?
As opposed to their theoretical reason?
That is almost THE question.

Amor Fati (Nietzsche)

The person in the modern world is thrown back into a mode of existence corresponding to a rung of collective culture - in having to abandon the systematic misinterpretation of experience that is the condition of self-contained philosophizing, he lives within a socio-culturally embedded interpretation of existence which he is fundamental conflict with precisely because it functions as a complement, as a facilitation, and a support to the fundamentally life-affirming, life-sanctifying orientations and capacities of individuals who have been able to act upon the world to create effective mechanisms which reflect their preferences in the conditions of their flourishing. (This sanctification is a precondition of all postconscious acting.)

That is, collective cultures reflect the conflict of interpretations - they are its products, and the process and product of interpretation are themselves based upon the makeup of individual psychologies.

That is the role of social and genealogical critique in Nietzsche: to reveal, by example, the underlying mechanisms through which culture is disseminated and reinforced: he envisages a larger, unified social science which can reveal how conditions of need (psychology, biology) create conditions of interaction (ideologies, philosophy, beliefs), through facilitating mechanisms and factors (politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, social psychology) to condition and guide the existing actualities within lived experience, bearing in mind that the reflexively conditioned historian at bottom always contradicts.

***

Love of fate is a transition back to a starting point of an approach to the world that embraces lived experience as the object of our investments of emotional and intellectual attention.

The individual has transcended lived experience, he is situating himself behind a skeptical veil of abstraction, of concepts and ideas, from which to organize and explain away the inherent unpleasantness of lived experience.

He structures lived experience according to these ideas, ordering his thoughts, creating moral systems, and approaching life from the lens of these ideas, acting in accordance to the totality of the thought out ideal as applied to the substantive content of the lived experience.

That is the equilibrium of the philosophical type - one who throws the net over the motley whirl of the senses, and seeking to distance himself from the nature of existing as the fundamental condition, the primary mode of living which the mob instinctively pursues and excels in.

However it is the failure of these ascetic ideals which throws the philosopher back into the world in which living as others do is a requirement which he is in some way maladapted to. It is the tension of the failure of the ascetic ideal which is instinctively, and intuitively felt, and the essential hatred of existence which is the chief motivating force of one who constructs philosophical systems, which drives the post-Romantic philosopher into explicitly pessimistic hatred and denial of the will-to-live, which, when deprived of the metaphysical narrative of the truthfulness of salvation, and therefore its accordant prescriptive mode of life, collapses into a denial of the validity of the conditions of existence, and its contents, with the absolute skeptical hypothesis as its epistemic creed.

The love of fate is explicitly addressed to the types who are unable to live without justification, whether metaphorically-speaking, of God's guilt, or of one's own, for the suffering one has inflicted upon the world.

***

Why love fate?

Fate refers to a series of circumstances which are predetermined in some way and in which essential characteristics one observes and lives through but cannot change. There are several possible candidates for this series of circumstances which can be construed as ‘fate’. First, the claim of ‘Character is Fate’, which significantly structures and limits the ways one lives or can choose to live, second, the aspects of the external environment which one is unable to control, and third, the kinds of experiences and situations generated when these given irreversible conditions come into contact with each other.

At the outset, we can pose an essential problem of definition: how does love of fate differ from pure resignation, or fatalism? The love of fate and fatalism share in the acknowledgement of the significance of our failure to control the conditions in our lives that do cause displeasure or suffering. This obstruction of the will toward attaining a desired state has swelled to such a point of concern that an ostensive approach has to be taken towards dealing with it, in the form of therapy, as it were. However, the love of fate preserves an active form of directedness towards the world, re-channelling the desires for the unobtainable state toward the conditions of that unobtainability. It reinterprets the failure or inability to achieve a certain object as a cause not for regret, misery or guilt, but as a condition of one’s life that is to be embraced and affirmed. Conversely, fatalism creates and breeds a passive form of hopelessness towards the task of attaining the desired object without specifying the attitudes which are directed towards the object of desire, or the situation of hopelessness. Insofar as the agent is unable to relieve himself of the desire, the situation descends to a state of pessimism or despair, and one that drains individual health.

But of course, in order to love fate, one has to believe in fate and in the lack of ability, despite our best efforts, to improve the given situation to our satisfaction, in the first place. Given that Nietzsche views the truth of this claim to be inconclusive, why affirm the lack of free will in this regard – don’t we want to affirm or assert the presence of free will instead? We may reply that Nietzsche tires of the intellectual dishonesty of metaphysicians of free will, who attempt to establish the dogmatic belief in the fact through arguments, when it remains essentially unknown. But this fails to account for the converse danger of believing in fate where it does not exist. The practical effects of misdirected belief in either may be equally damaging. While a belief in absolute free will breeds a sense of responsibility and guilt for all our acts, which becomes a cause for unjustified unhappiness and unhealthy inhibitions, a belief in fate may lead to indolence, or pessimistic fatalism, or lowered ambition, and wasted opportunities for individual, or world-development. And if we acknowledge the possibility of a reflexively conditioning power of this belief, it might seem that the price of believing in unavoidable fate is too high.

An answer may be suggested: if we take Nietzsche's aim in the denial of free will to be primarily one of the eradication of guilt, then amor fati might be interpreted as a solution to the problem of guilt: the agent adopts a sense of responsibility for the present and future, but is absolved of the past. The past belongs to the circumstances classed under ‘Fate’- its only relation to the living present existing as a cause - and we are to accept it without guilt or regret; as a given. We do not allow the past to colour the present moment in which we act. This requires a “form of robust health”, an ability defined as “forgetfulness”, or a good “digestive system”, as its precondition. But this solution does not eliminate the problem of the need for a degree of responsibility in the present as an intuitively forceful guide to action. The inhibitive power of a sense of responsibility in the present implies the ability to make and keep promises by definition – ie, to create fixed identities over time through which to structure our approach to the world – and this ability of the “protracted will” to extend projects over long periods of time is crucial to the development advocated by Nietzsche. So Nietzsche attempts to remove the phenomena of guilt as a stain on mankind while retaining the notion of responsibility. This is possible insofar as a sense of responsibility is not to be defined as a fear of guilt, but either as a love of honour, or genuine generosity of spirit, or a commitment to an ideal of virtue.

But the question remains: Is the admission of fate not in contradiction to the possibility of Nietzsche’s normative calls to develop mental discipline and to pursue an individualistic programme of self-cultivation? And wouldn’t the belief in the ability to control or reshape our circumstances in this respect be an important contributory factor, and not mere epiphenomena, for this process of development? Cultivating a belief in the lack of free will sets an unhealthy precedent, and encouraging emotional attachment to their conditions could easily overwhelm the drives to self-cultivation. An obvious possible reply is that Nietzsche interprets the individual's belief in his ability to impose his will on a given set of circumstances as a symptom of strength or weakness of will rather than as effective cause, but to assert this as a blanket justification for the opening of the floodgates of fate seems to me to overestimate the sovereign power of individuals against the influence of ideas that are taken to be true. And Nietzsche clearly does not take the crude epiphenomenalist view that our conscious commitments have no effect on the development of our character or our acts, even as he develops a physiologically-grounded character typology in terms of ideal binaries such as “weak” versus “strong”, which do point to certain unchangeable aspects in a person's character: “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, a desire to overcome, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd of weakness to demand that it should express itself as strength.”. Is Nietzsche therefore suggesting that the acknowledgement of selective fatalism is a test to tempt the strong to overcome it, while it serves as justification for the weak among themselves to feel contented and unresentful at their lot? I think an answer to this question lies in understanding the larger context of amor fati, or “Dionysian pessimism”, and in exactly what it defines as fate.

We can gather certain hints about the nature of the Dionysian pessimist and his relation to fate. In GS370, he is “richest in the fullness of life...[and] cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition and negation...owing to an excess of fertilizing, procreating energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland.” So he is one who does not turn away from the sight of the ugly or the nausea-inducing, because of his ability to transfigure it into something beautiful. He wants to “learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then [he] shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” So it is firstly the change in perspective created by cultivating an eye for beauty in all things, and secondly in making things beautiful by weaving its existence as necessity into a narrative thread through actual outcomes, giving it meaning by turning it into a cause for a desirable result. Now let us pursue this further. If one adopts the view of oneself in the larger scheme of things, that is, as the living causal product of an immense and complex historical process of human ideas, events, and exchanges, great and small, stretching from the present into pre-history, then the aim of making things beautiful extends into a project of world-affirmation, incumbent upon each agent at every moment, at least insofar as the world is an idealist construct of a mind that has to be justified anew within each subject, and is intuitively felt, in isolated Being, to be so. Therefore the Dionysian adopts a growing sense of responsibility for the “universe”, and the heightened state of desire to justify all the conditions of the present, insofar as he is the world, but the pessimist must acknowledge an eventual point where one is unable to justify all existence-as-such - one of which, for example, is the failure in philosophy to provide absolute grounds for knowledge claims about existence – and therefore one must relent in one's need to justify, and to love the necessity of the meaninglessness and ugliness of existence, for its own sake. For the Dionysian pessimist who engages in these activities, dangers loom, and love of fate may be construed as an instrument, a method of mental discipline one develops to overcome the effects of one's pessimism, or as a guiding principle and an indicator of one's progress towards an affirmation of life.

A danger which amor fati seeks to prevent are the effects of Pity and Nausea. Pity refers to both self-pity and pity of others. One begins by pitying oneself, in the dissatisfaction caused by our essentially-desiring and insatiable will, which Schopenhauer sums up in a quote: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing, or which he sees near him, and sets out to run over the path.” (WWRI/380) This pity at oneself can be extended to others in a recognition of universal suffering, notwithstanding the more visible forms of mental and material suffering in the world. Nausea in turn refers to nausea at oneself, nausea at others, and nausea at existence in general. Nausea at others for the Dionysian refers to the sickness induced by the perversions of man revealed by honest intellectual inquiry, expressed forcefully by verbal gasps of “More air! More air!” that pervades Nietzsche's later texts; also the presence of others, and the “art of associating with people”, especially at table, consists in “swallowing one's nausea”, also nausea at people defined as the “weak and the hopelessly sick” – those who are full of ressentiment. Nausea at oneself consists in being “sick of [oneself]” due to envy towards others, or in disgusted loathing at one's identity and character. Nausea at existence refers to disgust at life itself, revealed in Schopenhauer's highly-charged pessimism and ideal of the elimination of the will-to-life. Nietzsche views these two tendencies as conducive to nihilism and the will to nothingness, the antithesis of his philosophy. Therefore love of fate becomes a programme of mental hygiene, a means to overcome the negative affects towards things which are necessary.

The love of fate serves another function: that of balancing the possibly ascetic tendencies of the doctrine of life-affirmation with an embrace of life-in-itself. In this sense, the tension between the normative thrust of Nietzsche’s ethics of self-development and the fatalism implied in amor fati can be directly addressed. While Nietzsche’s philosophy may be seen to advocate a form of virtue ethics that celebrates the cultivation of the drives, and the development of one’s capacities of creation, and self and world-overcoming, he takes the view that this ideal must be subordinate to the higher goal of “Life” itself, the flourishing of one’s individual and unique psychologically-conditioned Being. However, it is precisely this normative thrust of the texts, the singularity of the goal of self-overcoming, mastery of the affects, and cultivation of the drives, that threatens to become a form of morality, or an ascetic ideal, or a form of living as if it were an experiment or a craft, that “has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked.” Therefore the love of fate might be read as a counter-approach to life which the free-spirit requires to complement his vigorous self-overcoming, just as, for example, art is required to temper the immoderate effects of a fervent intellectual honesty. In GS 276, Nietzsche “permits” himself, as a form of self-indulgence justifiable during a new year, “the expression of his wish and his dearest thought”, the love of fate – as “the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth.” It is clearly espoused as a balance to the arduous tasks of his philosophical inquiry, or any creative endeavour. And it must surely serve as a great balm for one who suffers greatly from life.

i See BGE19 (1973): “Willing seems to me above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a
word. See BGE 21: “Unfree will is a mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills...one
ought to employ cause and effect only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of
designation, mutual understanding, not explanation...In the in-itself there is nothing of causal connection, of
necessity, of psychological unfreedom, there the effect does not follow the cause, there no law rules.”
ii Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 19 p.48
iii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Second Essay, Section 1, p.58
iv ibid, p.58
v ibid, p.57
vi ibid, p.59
vii ibid, p.45
viii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 370, p.328
ix ibid, p.223
x Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 56 p.82
xi Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 360, p.324
xii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.124
xiii ibid, p.122
xiv Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation”, (Dover Publications, 1969), pg. 397
xv Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.122
xvi Sebastian Gardner , “Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious” in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.401
xvii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 366, p.322
xviii ibid, 276, p. 223