The world as a series of revolutions, the dialectical self-overcoming of power, and the re-formation of the constellation of institutions around the evolution of the core institutions of power. At the macro level then, the dynamics of a will to power.
***
What is the greatest good also contains within it the greatest evil. What is the greatest joy also contains within it the greatest suffering. That is the lesson that Nietzsche learned.
Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Thursday, December 01, 2016
Note 74
For Nietzsche, the inadequacy of metaphysics lies in its inability to incorporate life. Hence his metaphysics is fundamentally aimed at the breaking down the categorical barriers that distinguish and separate the two; that is, being in its totality, and idea.
Saturday, August 08, 2015
Quote 9
"Nietzsche’s work relentlessly undermines the elevation of ‘literal’ over ‘metaphorical’ truth. He argues that we cannot privilege literal or ‘pure’ truth over metaphor because truth is itself a metaphor that has been invented to lend authority to particular forms of thought and styles of living. He argues repeatedly, for example, that the ‘truths’ of religious teaching are really dominant perspectives upon the meaning of human experience employed to establish the prestige of a community’s way of life (Spinks, 2003)." - Ruwan Jayatunge on The Nation
Monday, October 27, 2014
Fate
1) Irony
The knowledge of fate allows you to take responsibility in actualizing it.
My lack of freedom to determine my destiny gives rise to the responsibility to bring it about. The freedom to self-determine the specifics of the destiny gives rise to the responsibility.
Freedom is exercised through choice, and choice is the result of the interactions of the conditions which limit our freedom with those that allow it.
2) Persons
Persons are the unfolding of ideas in the world. People are just embodiments of ideas that are unfolding in the world of ideas.
The world is just the artifact of ideas, interacting with the progression of ideas.
The world of things are just historical artefacts of the things that are thought and brought into existence by persons, who become themselves as ideas through the chanelling process.
It is the receptacle of the potentiality of ideas, as the residual of that process of incorporation.
Becoming what one is = Embodying the idea that one is
The world supports this process of embodiment because it is itself idea; and the process of that embodiment is itself idea.
The phenomenology of idea-unfolding is just the historical world itself, that is, agency is the relation of the active idea to the systemic totality of ideas.
Problem: Defoundationalization of the systemic totality. How do we reconceptualize it, and therefore our relations to it?
Eg. I will not be an asset manager because I do not embody the idea of one. But I will be a philosopher because I am the idea of philosophy in person; I am philosophy itself.
The primary function of man is to embody the idea that they are in the world.
In so doing, they create their own religion.
In this sense, there are two types of persons: those who create their own religion, and those who follow the creations of others. Other distinctions are irrelevant.
The knowledge of fate allows you to take responsibility in actualizing it.
My lack of freedom to determine my destiny gives rise to the responsibility to bring it about. The freedom to self-determine the specifics of the destiny gives rise to the responsibility.
Freedom is exercised through choice, and choice is the result of the interactions of the conditions which limit our freedom with those that allow it.
2) Persons
Persons are the unfolding of ideas in the world. People are just embodiments of ideas that are unfolding in the world of ideas.
The world is just the artifact of ideas, interacting with the progression of ideas.
The world of things are just historical artefacts of the things that are thought and brought into existence by persons, who become themselves as ideas through the chanelling process.
It is the receptacle of the potentiality of ideas, as the residual of that process of incorporation.
Becoming what one is = Embodying the idea that one is
The world supports this process of embodiment because it is itself idea; and the process of that embodiment is itself idea.
The phenomenology of idea-unfolding is just the historical world itself, that is, agency is the relation of the active idea to the systemic totality of ideas.
Problem: Defoundationalization of the systemic totality. How do we reconceptualize it, and therefore our relations to it?
Eg. I will not be an asset manager because I do not embody the idea of one. But I will be a philosopher because I am the idea of philosophy in person; I am philosophy itself.
The primary function of man is to embody the idea that they are in the world.
In so doing, they create their own religion.
In this sense, there are two types of persons: those who create their own religion, and those who follow the creations of others. Other distinctions are irrelevant.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
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.”
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.”
Thursday, March 22, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
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
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
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Christmas Day Reflection on Kim Jong Il and Power
A Hitler, a Stalin, or a Kim Jong Il is NOT as pathological, in terms of drives, as we are usually led to think. Assuming a relative equality among persons, I'd like to think of us as repressed versions of them.
It is the relative order of significance to which we attribute certain aspects of our lives as they do to theirs which characterize the huge differences in consequences.
In fact, the inflation of the significance of the tiniest details and trivialities of our daily lives can be understood best as the same function acting out on a much smaller scale, but with no less absoluteness.
So it is the factors which affect the positing of significances to events which is the crucial difference here.
It is the capacity of the tyrant to overlook the factors that limit his desire for power that distinguishes him - and it is his interpretation of the world that crucially cannot be accomodated because of its real effects.
Ultimately, like us, he needs to sustain a view of the level of significance of the obstacles which lie in his path in order to locate his identity within the coordinates of control and power over significant things. But his approach differs: as we elevate the value of the smallest things, he consumes and destroys greater and greater amounts to sustain a level of said satisfaction.
Of course, the former approach is to be preferred to the latter, while 'successful people' are characterized by the enviable ability to cultivate and balance the two approaches.
It is the relative order of significance to which we attribute certain aspects of our lives as they do to theirs which characterize the huge differences in consequences.
In fact, the inflation of the significance of the tiniest details and trivialities of our daily lives can be understood best as the same function acting out on a much smaller scale, but with no less absoluteness.
So it is the factors which affect the positing of significances to events which is the crucial difference here.
It is the capacity of the tyrant to overlook the factors that limit his desire for power that distinguishes him - and it is his interpretation of the world that crucially cannot be accomodated because of its real effects.
Ultimately, like us, he needs to sustain a view of the level of significance of the obstacles which lie in his path in order to locate his identity within the coordinates of control and power over significant things. But his approach differs: as we elevate the value of the smallest things, he consumes and destroys greater and greater amounts to sustain a level of said satisfaction.
Of course, the former approach is to be preferred to the latter, while 'successful people' are characterized by the enviable ability to cultivate and balance the two approaches.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Emerson
The point is not to choose to see all as divine but to be able to see in all particulars the representations that make them so. For Nietzsche the overriding narrative of development and growth celebrates the present as a necessary and grand organic element of becoming. Hence the Emersonian vision is defined as the ability to see the future in the present and thereby elevate it into what it truly is. Therefore the paradox of eternal recurrence takes its place as the final barrier within the Nietzschean project of affirmation by subverting the illusion of progressive growth, in individual or societial consciousness. It is Nietzsche's thought experiment for the creation of a post-historical philosophizing that succeeds his historical and genealogical project - one that again reorients the interpretation of the present, within, or built upon, the wider system of consciousness that developed from the irreversible incorporation of historical reality.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Note to Self 4
What Nietzsche hopes to do. Whether or not science is true is besides the point; what is the psychological function that a belief in the truthfulness of science plays? A psychological inquiry into the nature of beliefs and the act of believing, as revealing the cognitive assumptions that underlie the way we think, live, and react to the conditions in the present, in our lives.
So the psychological, historical revolution hopes to overturn the conception of truth as something that belongs within the first order relation of the world to itself. Instead, from a perspective of a second-order system of truth, where all perspectives are subjectively embedded, one criticizes one's experience, and therefore all its contents, as a contingent possibility, something where practical and pure reason each have to face problems and reconcile them in possibly conflicting ways. Nietzsche builds on a system of truth to critique its presumptions and to show them to be hollow, and posits a higher order truth pertaining to the nature of perception and experience, and how it must be, to show that these are themselves functions of practical reason, qualities in actual relation to life as a problem in its broadest sense.
This itself reflects a nominal philosophical realism as against the competing propositional realism. Or does/can it?
So the psychological, historical revolution hopes to overturn the conception of truth as something that belongs within the first order relation of the world to itself. Instead, from a perspective of a second-order system of truth, where all perspectives are subjectively embedded, one criticizes one's experience, and therefore all its contents, as a contingent possibility, something where practical and pure reason each have to face problems and reconcile them in possibly conflicting ways. Nietzsche builds on a system of truth to critique its presumptions and to show them to be hollow, and posits a higher order truth pertaining to the nature of perception and experience, and how it must be, to show that these are themselves functions of practical reason, qualities in actual relation to life as a problem in its broadest sense.
This itself reflects a nominal philosophical realism as against the competing propositional realism. Or does/can it?
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Note on Nietzsche Aphorism
I suppose that some readers may find my recent assignment on Nietzsche vaguely interesting, so here it is:
Exegesis on Aphorism 335 in “The Gay Science”
The aphorism can be split into four sections.
1) The attack on conscience and the moral affects
2) The attack on duty and the categorical imperative and the unknowability and uniqueness of human action and drives
3) The irrelevance of established morality to self-creators
4) The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'
Within this aphorism, several trajectories of Nietzschean thought converge, firstly, the refutation of the metaphysical account and justification of the grounds of morality and its replacement by a genealogical and psychological critique that emphasizes its conditioned and contingent nature, second, a project to democratize morality as a set of values that must be determined largely by the individual in accordance with the specific conditions of his personal psychology and physiology, and third, the role of the sciences, self-observation, and the sceptical mode of enquiry in this process of cultivation of the drives.
This note will address the main arguments and issues Nietzsche raises for and against each of the four points. In doing so, it will address the threads raised above and hopefully cohere them into a possible interpretation of the aphorism as a whole.
Attack on Conscience and the Moral Affects
Nietzsche begins the attack on the psychology of moral motivations with two questions: first, is the act of making a moral judgement itself moral, and secondly, why is the moral affect of conscience taken as a justification for moral acts uncritically? To this, he claims that understanding the origins and psychological nature of these affects will “spoil these grand words for you!”i
Here the critique of conscience exists on two levels: first, while the conscience exists as an affect based upon, and activated in correspondence to our abstract moral principles to compel us to act in accordance with them, the reasons for which the moral affect is taken up as the overriding guide to action as opposed to our other drives are based on egoism, self-preservation, hedonism or plain ignorance and blind faith. Here Nietzsche asks: “For this faith- is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience?”ii. In other words, he questions if we adhere to our conscience with morally justified reasons, and suggests we do not. Whether it is possible or not to have these reasons may be examined later.
Secondly, the abstract moral principles by which the conscience is conditioned are themselves products of tradition and social conditioning, which must be justified with reference to values different in nature from those which overtly motivate the conscience. As Nietzsche states in GS21:
“The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificial, the virtuous...this praise certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness. The neighbour praises selflessness because it brings him advantages. If the neighbour himself were “selfless” in his thinking, he would repudiate this diminution of strength, this mutilation for his benefit, he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would manifest his selflessness by not calling it good! This indicates a fundamental contradiction in morality nowadays: the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle.”iii
However, we may raise an objection. Given that moral affects favour a certain moral value, and given that the justification for the moral affects and the reasons for following them are themselves either instrumental upon other values based on self-interest of the individual or group, does this therefore make the outcome of the moral affects immoral, or does this make the adoption of the moral affect inconsistent in some way, morally speaking? This would be the case only if the satisfaction of the underlying value is incompatible in principle with values involved in the satisfaction of the moral outcome. However, it is seen that the (decision) situations involved in choosing to privilege the moral affect of conscience over other drives (or in adopting a moral principle for egotistical ends), where one by definition chooses between different self serving ends, is contextually different from the point where one chooses between egotistical ends and ends that consider others when one acts, before the moral act. That the latter decision situation is psychologically motivated by the former, does not entail that the principles that inform the latter are incompatible with those of the former. That second-order self-interest motivates first-order altruism does not necessarily entail that the principle of altruism has been violated, or that the agent in acting morally, is inconsistent in his virtues. This would only be the case if the self-deception on the part of the agent were complete, which is an oversimplification of agents.
However what successfully Nietzsche sought to topple was the notion that morality was universally binding in all circumstances and occasions, and that we can make clear demarcations between good virtues and evil vices; in showing that they are reciprocally conditioningiv, with the good having dark roots and depending upon the amoral drives, Nietzsche does not claim that we cannot be good, but that we do not have to be.
Attack on Duty and the Categorical Imperative
Nietzsche states in parenthesis: “The voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.”v However, one may consider a recourse from the moral affects to an ethics based on reasons.
Nietzsche attacks this dependence on the rational ethics:
“An original sin of philosophers. - Philosophers have at all times appropriated the propositions of examiners of humanity (moralists) and ruined them by taking the propositions unconditionally and wanting to demonstrate this as necessary...” [AOM 5]vi
Robert Guay, in an excellent article, interprets Nietzsche's attack on on morality as an attack on a “complex whose center is the search for a kind of normative stability” whose role is to generate “sound practical commitments”.vii The soundness of a code rests on its purity, where “morality is conceived as detached from any contingent concerns or features of the world”viii and its unconditionality; where “humanity must have something that it can obey unconditionally [D 207]ix, thereby preserving the stability and independence of its authority.x The comprehensiveness and universality of the claims of morality is explained in terms of its purity: independence of contingency ensured that no morally relevant differences between persons or suitably similar occasions obtained.xi
Nietzsche's attack on the purity, unconditionality and universality of morality takes several forms in GS335. Firstly, he cites the origins of morality, namely, its situatedness in cultural and political authorityxii and the conditional and revisable nature of the mores and traditions which they perpetuate which determine moralities [D9], secondly, the inability to specify “a universally recognized goal [which is a necessary condition before one could] propound such and such should be done” [D108], making any “unconditional feeling that here everyone must judge as I do” a “blind, petty and frugal selfishness” [GS335], third, the lack of independent and objective moral authority, given the conditionality and selfishness of the first order ethical principle of equality that underlies the “categorical imperative”, therefore opening up the danger of infinite regress when one questions the higher-order morality of morals, fourth, the uniqueness and unknowability of the psychological profile of the moral agent and his environment and therefore his act that debars any simplistic or universally meaningful application of second-order moral laws, or even any form of ethically-tinged judgement, upon acting agents, and fifth, the indemonstrability of the law of the mechanism by which our moral judgements cause our actions, thereby undermining the autonomy of the Kantian will.
The Irrelevance of Established Morality to Self-creators
Nietzsche dismisses the task of constructing a morality that lays claim to an objective ethical truth, for the reasons stated above. He proposes a more modest task: “Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the moral value of our actions!”xiii
There are two main thrusts in his argument. Firstly, for Nietzsche, morality “trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function”, for “valuations and orders of rank [of impulses] are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most- that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals.”[GS116] It turns men to creatures whose ideals do not necessarily correspond to the conditions of their individual flourishing[GS120]. In taking the individual to be an end-in-itself, “human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves”, he advocates the pursuit, or at least the equal legitimacy of the pursuit, of individually determined ends that require a freedom from the limits of morality as a contingent social construct.
Secondly, Nietzsche perceives the pervasiveness and insidiousness of moral valuations in ascribing significance and value-judgements, and therefore creating cohesive interpreted meanings, psychologically speaking, out of the contents of our experience. The pervasiveness and habituation of moral thinking, acting and evaluating [Dawn 9] is itself conditioned by existential and therefore superstitious fears - “fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the personal- there is superstition in this fear.” That is, the human fear of the essentially unknowable and therefore unconquerable aspects of becoming-as-such condition a flight to meaning based on established traditions, and propels the desire to turn oneself into a function, and creates the ascetic ideal, all of which becomes habitualized in thought and therefore renders life manageable and ordinary. However, these moral valuations “crowd out the significance of the smallest, everyday, matters [GS299]”xiv; things pertaining to lifestyle, diet and so on; in addition, adopted meanings organize life in a way over which the agent has little conscious control. Hence, for Nietzsche, self-critical observation and science plays a key role in allowing the free spirit to shape the terms by which he lives a purposive life.
The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'
The above section opens up several ways in which Nietzsche might have thought that the “intellectual conscience” and the development of scientific methods of inquiry, as well as scientific understanding of the self and the world contribute to the project of creation of ideals and self-creation.
First, the products of scientific development, broadly understood, allows us to better manage the natural and social conditions which affect our lives, through technology, social science, policy and management practices and so on.
Second, in exhorting us to become “the best learners and discovers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world”, that is, of ourselves, he advises us to know ourselves in order to create personal virtues. This can be neatly, if crudely, explained in the chart below:
The 'Herd'
Control (Experience of free will)
↓
Meaning (Metaphysics)
↓
Function (Morality)
The 'Free-Spirit'
Control (Amor Fati, Individual virtues)
↑
Meaning (Self-knowledge from psychology, sciences)
↑
Function (Honesty, will to truth, self-experimentation scientific method)
Hence Nietzsche interprets the freedom from the possibility of a metaphysical solution to the problem of becoming-as-such as an opportunity to overcome the pessimist view of life as suffering, or as a question mark, thereby paving the way for a physics that allows us to embrace and affirm life, and to “live in the present”.
i Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
ii Ibid, p.265
iii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 21, p.94
iv Thanks to my lecturer
v Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
vi Nietzsche, Friedrich (1880), trans. Hollingdale. Human, All Too Human: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Cambridge University Press, 5, p.215
vii Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 59
viii Ibid, p.59
ix Ibid, p.59
x Ibid, p.59
xi Ibid, p.60
xii Ibid, p.61
xiii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
xiv Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 78
Exegesis on Aphorism 335 in “The Gay Science”
The aphorism can be split into four sections.
1) The attack on conscience and the moral affects
2) The attack on duty and the categorical imperative and the unknowability and uniqueness of human action and drives
3) The irrelevance of established morality to self-creators
4) The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'
Within this aphorism, several trajectories of Nietzschean thought converge, firstly, the refutation of the metaphysical account and justification of the grounds of morality and its replacement by a genealogical and psychological critique that emphasizes its conditioned and contingent nature, second, a project to democratize morality as a set of values that must be determined largely by the individual in accordance with the specific conditions of his personal psychology and physiology, and third, the role of the sciences, self-observation, and the sceptical mode of enquiry in this process of cultivation of the drives.
This note will address the main arguments and issues Nietzsche raises for and against each of the four points. In doing so, it will address the threads raised above and hopefully cohere them into a possible interpretation of the aphorism as a whole.
Attack on Conscience and the Moral Affects
Nietzsche begins the attack on the psychology of moral motivations with two questions: first, is the act of making a moral judgement itself moral, and secondly, why is the moral affect of conscience taken as a justification for moral acts uncritically? To this, he claims that understanding the origins and psychological nature of these affects will “spoil these grand words for you!”i
Here the critique of conscience exists on two levels: first, while the conscience exists as an affect based upon, and activated in correspondence to our abstract moral principles to compel us to act in accordance with them, the reasons for which the moral affect is taken up as the overriding guide to action as opposed to our other drives are based on egoism, self-preservation, hedonism or plain ignorance and blind faith. Here Nietzsche asks: “For this faith- is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience?”ii. In other words, he questions if we adhere to our conscience with morally justified reasons, and suggests we do not. Whether it is possible or not to have these reasons may be examined later.
Secondly, the abstract moral principles by which the conscience is conditioned are themselves products of tradition and social conditioning, which must be justified with reference to values different in nature from those which overtly motivate the conscience. As Nietzsche states in GS21:
“The praise of the selfless, the self-sacrificial, the virtuous...this praise certainly was not born from the spirit of selflessness. The neighbour praises selflessness because it brings him advantages. If the neighbour himself were “selfless” in his thinking, he would repudiate this diminution of strength, this mutilation for his benefit, he would work against the development of such inclinations, and above all he would manifest his selflessness by not calling it good! This indicates a fundamental contradiction in morality nowadays: the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle.”iii
However, we may raise an objection. Given that moral affects favour a certain moral value, and given that the justification for the moral affects and the reasons for following them are themselves either instrumental upon other values based on self-interest of the individual or group, does this therefore make the outcome of the moral affects immoral, or does this make the adoption of the moral affect inconsistent in some way, morally speaking? This would be the case only if the satisfaction of the underlying value is incompatible in principle with values involved in the satisfaction of the moral outcome. However, it is seen that the (decision) situations involved in choosing to privilege the moral affect of conscience over other drives (or in adopting a moral principle for egotistical ends), where one by definition chooses between different self serving ends, is contextually different from the point where one chooses between egotistical ends and ends that consider others when one acts, before the moral act. That the latter decision situation is psychologically motivated by the former, does not entail that the principles that inform the latter are incompatible with those of the former. That second-order self-interest motivates first-order altruism does not necessarily entail that the principle of altruism has been violated, or that the agent in acting morally, is inconsistent in his virtues. This would only be the case if the self-deception on the part of the agent were complete, which is an oversimplification of agents.
However what successfully Nietzsche sought to topple was the notion that morality was universally binding in all circumstances and occasions, and that we can make clear demarcations between good virtues and evil vices; in showing that they are reciprocally conditioningiv, with the good having dark roots and depending upon the amoral drives, Nietzsche does not claim that we cannot be good, but that we do not have to be.
Attack on Duty and the Categorical Imperative
Nietzsche states in parenthesis: “The voice of conscience is never immoral, for it alone determines what is to be moral.”v However, one may consider a recourse from the moral affects to an ethics based on reasons.
Nietzsche attacks this dependence on the rational ethics:
“An original sin of philosophers. - Philosophers have at all times appropriated the propositions of examiners of humanity (moralists) and ruined them by taking the propositions unconditionally and wanting to demonstrate this as necessary...” [AOM 5]vi
Robert Guay, in an excellent article, interprets Nietzsche's attack on on morality as an attack on a “complex whose center is the search for a kind of normative stability” whose role is to generate “sound practical commitments”.vii The soundness of a code rests on its purity, where “morality is conceived as detached from any contingent concerns or features of the world”viii and its unconditionality; where “humanity must have something that it can obey unconditionally [D 207]ix, thereby preserving the stability and independence of its authority.x The comprehensiveness and universality of the claims of morality is explained in terms of its purity: independence of contingency ensured that no morally relevant differences between persons or suitably similar occasions obtained.xi
Nietzsche's attack on the purity, unconditionality and universality of morality takes several forms in GS335. Firstly, he cites the origins of morality, namely, its situatedness in cultural and political authorityxii and the conditional and revisable nature of the mores and traditions which they perpetuate which determine moralities [D9], secondly, the inability to specify “a universally recognized goal [which is a necessary condition before one could] propound such and such should be done” [D108], making any “unconditional feeling that here everyone must judge as I do” a “blind, petty and frugal selfishness” [GS335], third, the lack of independent and objective moral authority, given the conditionality and selfishness of the first order ethical principle of equality that underlies the “categorical imperative”, therefore opening up the danger of infinite regress when one questions the higher-order morality of morals, fourth, the uniqueness and unknowability of the psychological profile of the moral agent and his environment and therefore his act that debars any simplistic or universally meaningful application of second-order moral laws, or even any form of ethically-tinged judgement, upon acting agents, and fifth, the indemonstrability of the law of the mechanism by which our moral judgements cause our actions, thereby undermining the autonomy of the Kantian will.
The Irrelevance of Established Morality to Self-creators
Nietzsche dismisses the task of constructing a morality that lays claim to an objective ethical truth, for the reasons stated above. He proposes a more modest task: “Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of opinions and valuations and to the creation of our own new tables of what is good, and let us stop brooding about the moral value of our actions!”xiii
There are two main thrusts in his argument. Firstly, for Nietzsche, morality “trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function”, for “valuations and orders of rank [of impulses] are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most- that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals.”[GS116] It turns men to creatures whose ideals do not necessarily correspond to the conditions of their individual flourishing[GS120]. In taking the individual to be an end-in-itself, “human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves”, he advocates the pursuit, or at least the equal legitimacy of the pursuit, of individually determined ends that require a freedom from the limits of morality as a contingent social construct.
Secondly, Nietzsche perceives the pervasiveness and insidiousness of moral valuations in ascribing significance and value-judgements, and therefore creating cohesive interpreted meanings, psychologically speaking, out of the contents of our experience. The pervasiveness and habituation of moral thinking, acting and evaluating [Dawn 9] is itself conditioned by existential and therefore superstitious fears - “fear of a higher intellect that commands through tradition, fear in the face of an inexplicable, indeterminate power, of something beyond the personal- there is superstition in this fear.” That is, the human fear of the essentially unknowable and therefore unconquerable aspects of becoming-as-such condition a flight to meaning based on established traditions, and propels the desire to turn oneself into a function, and creates the ascetic ideal, all of which becomes habitualized in thought and therefore renders life manageable and ordinary. However, these moral valuations “crowd out the significance of the smallest, everyday, matters [GS299]”xiv; things pertaining to lifestyle, diet and so on; in addition, adopted meanings organize life in a way over which the agent has little conscious control. Hence, for Nietzsche, self-critical observation and science plays a key role in allowing the free spirit to shape the terms by which he lives a purposive life.
The triumph of the will to truth and 'physics'
The above section opens up several ways in which Nietzsche might have thought that the “intellectual conscience” and the development of scientific methods of inquiry, as well as scientific understanding of the self and the world contribute to the project of creation of ideals and self-creation.
First, the products of scientific development, broadly understood, allows us to better manage the natural and social conditions which affect our lives, through technology, social science, policy and management practices and so on.
Second, in exhorting us to become “the best learners and discovers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world”, that is, of ourselves, he advises us to know ourselves in order to create personal virtues. This can be neatly, if crudely, explained in the chart below:
The 'Herd'
Control (Experience of free will)
↓
Meaning (Metaphysics)
↓
Function (Morality)
The 'Free-Spirit'
Control (Amor Fati, Individual virtues)
↑
Meaning (Self-knowledge from psychology, sciences)
↑
Function (Honesty, will to truth, self-experimentation scientific method)
Hence Nietzsche interprets the freedom from the possibility of a metaphysical solution to the problem of becoming-as-such as an opportunity to overcome the pessimist view of life as suffering, or as a question mark, thereby paving the way for a physics that allows us to embrace and affirm life, and to “live in the present”.
i Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
ii Ibid, p.265
iii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 21, p.94
iv Thanks to my lecturer
v Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
vi Nietzsche, Friedrich (1880), trans. Hollingdale. Human, All Too Human: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Cambridge University Press, 5, p.215
vii Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 59
viii Ibid, p.59
ix Ibid, p.59
x Ibid, p.59
xi Ibid, p.60
xii Ibid, p.61
xiii Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887), trans. Kaufmann. The Gay Science, Random House, 335, p.265
xiv Guay, Robert (2005): How to be an Immoralist, in Nietzsche and Ethics, Peter Lang, p. 78
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Reflections On Nietzsche Seminar
Self-satisfaction is the fear that has been smothered over by identity.
How does one overcome fear?
By organization; by re-representing oneself.
By creating a set of associations by which one can observe oneself.
How does one overcome fear?
By organization; by re-representing oneself.
By creating a set of associations by which one can observe oneself.
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