Nietzche: Just Shy of Good and Evil

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/ch01.htm

"Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions..."

"They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic....whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or "suggestion," which is generally their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event."

Those with a keen eye for irony will apreciate the choice of the above quotes, which appear in Nietzche's Beyond Good and Evil spaced by only one paragraph. It is fair to Nietzche to conclude that his ascertion of the lack of distinction between most conscious deliberation and instinct is really his heart's desire, abstracted and refined. He wants logic to be replaced by animalism. Our consciousness is (according to him) nothing but a bundle of lies created to cement power. Infact his 'reading between the lines' of selcted Western philosphers does little to yeild a reliable conclusion that "a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity"--rather if taken seriously, his conclusions show only that Nietzche was a solispsistic douchebag.

His attack on the stoics as making principles out of what is natural ignores the element of stoic morality that is a battle between an individual's contradictory nature. And perhaps we can doubt the contradictory nature of people's battle with good and evil. I for one can not do so successfuly. I believe the stoics make a principle of what is natural...not the good, but the struggle. Nietzche warns us of teleological dogmatic principles (accept that life is itself a will to power), that we must distinguish between finding and inventing (save his own findings of the nature of consciousness), to recognize untruth as an essential condition of life (and blame only stoics or Jews for asserting any idea of truth or value) , to question not the truth of an opinion, but the power-giving ability of the opinion (unless that power is defined in terms unsuited to Neitzche's vision of truth), and that "morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who [the philospher is],--that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other" (unless it means concluding that Neitzche is impugning tradition under the guise of an enlightened transcendence of self-tyranny because he wants to screw his sister, guilt free).

Nietzche admitts that truth and values are there only to serve the will to power. His values and truth statements do not escape this viscious solipsism. No wonder Hitler liked him.

He is right I think. Most keenly weighed logic is imbued with value and most discription of society is actually architecture of morality. If you dont value self-tyranny (to use his term) then you value self-liberation. I would ony siggest here that it is self tyranny to write a book advocating moraly unabridged indulgence in the individual's Will to Power. You cant assert a truth after damning all truth without practicing self-tyranny. A free person, to paraphrase Rousseau, obeys his or her own laws.

So Nietzche, morality is self-serving. Truth is filtered in human consciousness. That doesn't mean people should do what they shouldn't. If untruth is such an essential condition of life, why hate the Stoics.

Nietzche does not successfuly expell the unstated but powerful motivating assumption that existence requires explanation, justification, or expiation as the Marxist.org site explains. As Nietzche's own self-decapitation shows, explaination is key to communication of experience. It can be used to assert a system of power relations, but we should turn to Chomsky and the Frankfhurt school for lessons on this phenomenon of social control. Philosphy does not denigrate experience in favour of some other, "true" world. Neitzche can be said to denegrate truth in favor of blind desire. Chomsky says "Look, they are lying to control you!" This is why he writes to lay audiences. Foucault says "Hey, you can lie and control people!" This is why he writes like such an arrogant schmuck. Nietzche is not better.

Ex-marine Claims Nuclear Weapons Stored at Newfoundland Base

Last Updated Tue, 10 May 2005 09:41:36 EDT
taken from CBC News
FT. LAUDERDALE, FLA. - An American veteran who says he guarded a secret stash of nuclear weapons in Newfoundland claims his government would rather see him dead than admit to violations of international law.
Almon Scott, who worked as a guard at the Argentia military base between 1963 and 1965, claims that years before Ottawa allowed nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, he was guarding them at a secret weapons lab in Placentia Bay.

Scott, who is dying, blames the cancer in his blood and bones on his duties four decades ago.
He claims the U.S. government is not only refusing to help him, but will not give the veteran his own service records because that would mean admitting to its ally that it had nuclear materials on Canadian soil without informing the government.
Scott, now 65, said that when he was a young marine assigned to duties at the military base in Argentia, he did what he was told.
"It was a different time. We did our duty, and we didn't ask questions," he said.
With top-secret clearance, Scott said he was assigned to guard duty at a heavily barricaded weapons laboratory.
It was there, he claims, that he was exposed to nuclear weapons.
The U.S. government says there is no proof Scott was exposed to nuclear material at Argentia.
The Department of Foreign Affairs told the CBC any questions about nuclear weapons at Argentia would have to go through the Access to Information Act.
Like other American military facilities in Newfoundland and Labrador, the U.S. naval base and air station at Argentia was built during the Second World War.
Strategically important to North Atlantic activities during the war, the base was also key during the Cold War, with many of its activities considered secret.
The base closed in 1994. Cleanup efforts are still continuing.

Motherfuckers.

Foucault for a Day

I was sitting watching television with my partner last night when I stumbled onto an emotionally rich experience of what postmodernists have been yapping about. We had just finished what is one of BC’s favorite (mind-altering) pastimes—a distraction I haven’t taken up in over a year (it’s been longer since I enjoyed it) when it occurred to me that the Foucaultian explanation of power as mingled with knowledge and the production of subjectivity is actually serious stuff. I marveled like never before at how corporate media (an innocuous cliché to some) shapes our behavior, and how like automatons, we mimic what we are supposed to be, supposed to consume, and into what that actually makes us. This false moral imperitive stands in heartbreaking contrast to actual morality. But perhaps more tormenting was the existentialist sense of responsibility that collided with this amazement: I am free. I am free to realize that I can never be what profit seeking media want me to try to be (note: to realize the corporate cultural abomination is impossible since it invariably means trying to literally be the model, which is itself and illusion). The harm that is caused in my continued delusion is not merely self-destructive. I am a pixel in a cultural mosaic, and I am helping to steer the collective spirit of humanity in a certain direction. As I harm myself I harm the dynamic moral fabric of humanity.
Maybe my moral absolutism is in bad faith with the historical materialist analysis, and my reliance on objective morality is whitewashing the implicit relativism behind Foucaultian thought. The system of power that I encountered last night is one that works to control behavior by defining identity. While postmodernists insert this into the modern category of power relations, I am not sure how that’s particular to the modern. I think that we have an essence as human individuals, which conveys a morality that remains through the manipulations of the media, of the choices of conceived identities we may mimic. We are something and power tells us what should do to actualize our nature. Where as Foucault advocates (and practices) a promiscuous relationship with language to counter the power systems that can only be nihilistic, the Frankfurt School (from my limited understanding) rightly suggests that a nature does exist and ‘the right’ subsists as both a weakness to be exploited by power through filtered knowledge/information, and a unavoidable beacon of truth and being. Goodness exists to the extent that human individuals throw aside the myth of passivity, and the fear and transitory illusions of gain that perpetuate it.


...or maybe you just need to be real high to "get" Foucault.

The Enlightenment Gasps for Air

I’m beginning to think that democratic socialism is the last gasp of the Enlightenment in the throws of its death. Domestic government tries to squeeze the bourgeoisie for the immediate benefit of the workers, without at the same time revolutionizing the class relations that allow for the former to simply pull the rug out of the economy as they scurry under the global fridge like cockroaches. Restricted trade often goes benefit specific corporations, protecting powerful unions at the expense of unorganized labour in unprotected industries. Or trade barriers actually benefit working people in the short run until the global neoliberal economy ‘disciplines’ the electorate. Where those nations with wealth once succeeded in establishing a social-welfare system on the revenues of global exploitation, the neoliberal wave of globalization is turning the page on that chapter of ‘progress.’
International capitalist jurisprudence is fixed thus far and is gaining strength. Chapter 11 of the NAFTA impacts in particularly undemocratic ways. The government is becoming a liability to the progress of property rights. Eventually private regimes will shake the sovereignty off their backs and through force compel respect for the rights of man—broadly construed. But in this battle, if consent is too be won, or dissent to be ignored, enemies must be found to unite the workers under the star-spangled flag of the bourgeoisie.
What once represented liberty from oppressive absolutist monarchies is now used to crush any real initiatives for political and economic equality. The attention of the workers is now turned to the new absolutists: fundamentalists and totalitarians. The Enlightenment is trying to crush those regimes which pose a threat to an abstraction of liberty. The abstraction does not come from the easily ignorable cries of the subjects of authoritarian power, but the vain fight in the name of those subjects. Osama bin Laden was the master of a dying revolution (the people of the Middle East were lashing out against fundamentalist terror in the late 90s), until the US turned its ire against the innocent. Now we see the Egyptian rebellion reasserting itself to be swatted at by foreign violence, leaving scores of spectators in the line of fire. The more the West swings at the rage in the Middle East, the more these regressive fires are fanned. And the wealth that is scavenged from the embers is the crystallized liberty of the audience, now martyred for one cause or another.
While Western university elites scratch their bald heads trying to assert in flaccid and insincere dissertations that the rise of evil is to be attributed to some penetrating postmodern episteme, they cradle the source of that evil in their 2-car garages in the hills, safely overlooking the bestial idiocy of those whose liberty they braze in the flames of hypocrisy. They wipe their noses on their corduroy sleeves and regretfully help themselves to the fruits of others’ labour. The Enlightenment gasps for air as inevitability wipes out alternatives to all-out global revolution.

The Need for Praxis

Kelowna RCMP plan to seize shopping carts from homeless Last Updated Sat, 19 Mar 2005 09:39:35 EST
CBC News
KELOWNA, B.C. - Street people in the B.C. Interior city of Kelowna have been told by the RCMP they have until April 1 to surrender their shopping carts – or have them seized.
The police said the carts, worth up to $350 each, are stolen property. They said they're simply enforcing the law after complaints by the city and the business community.
But homeless people, who can often be seen trundling around Kelowna's downtown core with everything they own on the carts, said they're crucial for their survival.
"These are really these people's homes. They carry their homes in their shopping carts," said Bob, who is homeless.
"Then they get it taken away. Their sleeping bag is gone. Their clothes are gone. And they call us bums, right, because they took our stuff."
Anti-poverty advocates accused the police of targeting the poor.
Candace Sutherland of the Drop-In Centre said that if the police take away people's carts, the city should build a day-storage facility where they can store their few belongings.
Michelle Rule, who is on Kelowna's committee on the homeless, said her group is working on long-term solutions, including more shelters and places for the homeless.
She said they're also looking for help from the business community to acquire some warehouse space that street people could use to store their belongings safely during the day.
But Rule warned that it could take some time to find a storage space and get it set up.

I am speechless....

Socialism is for Suckers

Kunickistan said... I would only like to add that although I agree change is needed, I would classify it as a need for evolution rather than revolution. Revolutions are exactly what have discredited the notion of socialism in the likened minds of the western world. An instance of this came up in a discussion seminar I recently attended, where a number of well-read, articulate, and seemingly compassionate students butchered the idea of Marxism as the term came up for discussion in an article relating to colonialism. They referred to the human rights abuses in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China as examples what happens when Marxism is "practically applied." My point is to assert that an imposed revolution leading to state socialism is not a lasting means of promoting equality. As suggested by Corpoleon, economic altruism is completely inefficient and contradictory to the economic rules laid as a blueprint by Adam Smith. In other words socialism is for suckers who want to succeed in our current system, and socialist government and even policy will always be scapegoated for the failures of our society in the liberal context in which we live. There is no "practical application" of socialism, and no hope for group rights to be entrenched under our regime. A Vanguard Party of elites cannot defeat capitalism, capitalism must defeat itself.

I think that all this talk of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and netwar (of which I know very little about but will rap on for a bit to feel cool about myself) and the massive decentralizations of power seen in capitalist privatization bids for the 'new constitutionalism', actually do a great job of allowing the technological and ideological means for a free-associative economy (anarcho-syndicalism) to emerge from the capitalist stage of social progress. And I don't think the obviously teleological aspect of this (not my) analysis is not as damning as a deconstructionist, postmodern annalist might argue. I really think that there are laws of human progress of which we can either become conscious (thus actualize) or ignore (to out own detriment). Human consciousness can harness movement within the ample bandwidth these laws allow, thus making the process more or less painful. But the point is that capitalism is digging its own grave as Kunickistan says. If "revolution" connotes violence, I'd say that it is inevitable to a small degree. But if it means a fundamental shift in the mode of production and class conflict, then it is certain. But evolution, as it is commonly conceived, is often little more than attempts at capitalism trying to save itself from an inevitable fate. The German Green Party sees its "Fischers" change from anti-NATO mouthpieces to anti-Slobodan war-mongers. The vanguard is simply not a solution as Kunickistan says. But any attempt at socialist thus far has either failed, been violently evolutionary and nationalistic, or all of the above. The state must reform itself into a decentralized (privatized and dispersed) network in order to combat the insurgents who do the same. But this will kill the state since its essence is bureaucratic hierarchy. So, you combine competition with the failing globalization kulturträger and you get neoliberal destruction of the state (making Stalinist reactionary governments impossible), immense technological networks (making decentralized, egalitarian resistance effective), and the fundamentalist wild card. The cutural backlash against capitalism is for the 3rd world to work out, and I won't preach about that.

The Praxis Element

Isn’t this an enormous waste of time? As we speak an ineffectual tumor is boring through global civil society in an attempt to squeeze markets into shattered regimes for short-term personal profits. Earlier, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, which is so heartwarming, failed to stop the Great Depression. But there was an attempt for the bourgeoisie to build enlightened society! I mean it surpassed the contemporary stab at it: "The Apprentice." And while kulturs fail to be trägered into a brave new short-term-gain world, the masses of exploited peoples have a choice between reactionary governments or progressive institutions. Now, the latter are hard to come by and seem to represent more of a mythological postulation than a viable alternative. So what’s my point? I think it's just that we are going to have a revolution on our hands. It happened already and was destroyed. WW2 was a fascist reaction to capitalism. Marx was wrong about human nature. We're in huge trouble unless the capitalist class can stop acting like Randian babies and start acting like community leaders. But the laws of capitalist competition forbid this, I fear. So, the historical materialist analysis seems right about capitalism creating civil unrest. The praxis element is to shape the revolution towards progress, away from counter-enlightenment war and medieval theocracy. Shit—I can't even hook-up my DVD player.
are we having fun yet?

Build for Posterity

Postmodernists are destroying the foundations of morality with some implied, though non-existent moral alternative. Morality is natural. While the ideologies that constituted various epochs are filtered by the economic production of political truth that truth exists in all people in all ages is some essential form. Society is a corruptor. Basic values are perverted by the ruling classes to divide society; they bastardize the true unity of humanity while driving a wedge through society. Freedom is constituted in wealth but packaged in a lie of equal rights. Morality is at the heart of the progressive struggle. It is constructed in society based on subjective, though absolute truth of humanity. It is particular to a given person, and the ultimate basis of all thought and being. Pointing to ideology without reference to economics is as honest as pointing to criminal without reference to her crime. Destroying ethical categories without honestly reconstructing alternatives is to deprive all defiance of rapacious destruction of all that has goodness and value to humanity. And while our lives will surely be swept away into dust, we may accept the innocuous vacuum offered by the mist of nihilism, or build for posterity.