Inbox: - Zarathustra narration rec by Pmarca https://youtu.be/IHnRs3g8EmE - Transfer notes from Google docs!! - The Paradox of Perspectivism - Bernard Reginster Nietzsche: I hate Socrates because I am so close to him. ## Christopher Janaway – Nietzsche and [[=Derek Parfit]] on suffering https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/385242/1/Attitudes%2520to%2520suffering.pdf N: growth-through-suffering is a thing. The (dis)value of suffering depends on context. When suffering ocurrs as part of a period of growth-through-suffering, it is not bad in itself for the suffered. {{I don't understand why this isn't just saying suffering can be instrumentally valuable.}} {{I think DP would say that world would be better if growth could happen without suffering.}} > Suffering that can be given meaning through growth is something we have reason to want. Suffering that remains brute and uninterpreted is something we have reason not to want. But **suffering as such has no invariant value across all contexts**. Basic thought: > (S) In all cases where a human being is or may be suffering, it benefits that human being to prevent, remove or diminish that suffering. Need to modify that to account for cases where suffering has instrumental value. Maybe suffering is a pro tanto reason against but not always decisive. ## John Richardson – Nietzsche's Values Nietzsche thinks he cares more about truth than other philosophers do. This is partly because he is not in thrall to a moral bias, but also because he understands better the kind of truth there really can be—the kind humans can and do have. So he rewrites philosophers’ previous idea of truth while still giving it preeminent value. [...] In announcing these truths he contributes to what he thinks is a prolonged, ineluctable process by which our modern scientific will to truth finally faces the truth about values—the last and hardest topic for it to face. As these truths are exposed, our culture, and the rest of the world through it, is confronted with a great spiritual crisis and challenge: How can and will we go on to value once we have uncovered these truths about our valuing? How can we value, now for the first time, honestly (i.e., while facing the truth about what we’re doing)? [...] it is extremely difficult to do so because this truth tends to undermine our valuing. This is so for our Christian, moral values in particular because the truth is that these values are “sick” (he will try to show) and depend on lies. But it is also true for values more widely, insofar as they involve a framing claim that these things (that are valued) are really, independently good. For the truth, Nietzsche holds, is that all values are dependent on valuings—are “perspectival.” [...] The whole book will try to show his allegiance to the first, naturalistic view of them. A value is just the object of a valuing; it’s a “valued.” I’ll call this his internalism and perspectivism. It is the central truth he strives to incorporate into his own valuing: he means to call his values “good” in a sense consistent with it. On this naturalistic view, we’ll see, a “value” is essentially a sign used by a will or aiming; a will “values” precisely in so using a sign. [...] Recognizing Nietzsche’s idea of values as signs is the key to much of his thought about them. Seeing a value as a sign, we see why he insists that it’s not only humans that value. Animals are clearly responsive to signs in their perceptual discernments. So a predator may employ a certain smell as a sign of prey. And we can see ways that plants are responsive to signs as well. Nietzsche holds that willing (or aiming) is something that all organisms do. It depends not at all on consciousness. [...] Our human values, as worded, are distinctive in being held in common, as norms. They are accepted because this is “how one values” in the community to which one belongs. They thus serve a “herding” function, which strengthens the group but at the expense of members’ individuality. Nietzsche’s own question is how, given this way all of his words have “common” meanings, he can use them to express his own quite individual thoughts. We will need to see the grounds but also the limits to his critique of our sociality. [...] The part’s four chapters present in turn the affirmative stance needed to sustain this honesty, how the honesty makes one more fully oneself, Nietzsche’s aim to embed these new values in social norms, and, finally, the new religion designed to sustain these norms. [...] I think that he aspires to absorb the truth about values, found in that study, more fully into the valuing attitude itself. We don’t need to posit values as real (or strongly external) in order to value at all; that posit isn’t essential to valuing. Although it will be very hard, we can gradually learn to value our values as perspectival, thus building the naturalistic truth won by studying values into our own valuing. We can revise our valuing’s claim to special status to make it consistent with internalism. ... his new valuative practice is distinguished, he thinks, by how much of the truth it manages to reflect. And the core truth it incorporates is about values’ dependence on valuings. ... Nietzsche needs to be able to give reasons for his values—reasons both for his own benefit and for his readers to accept his values, too, if this is what he wants us to do. In the absence of such privileging reasons that perspectivism threatens either a flattening relativism or a nihilistic loss of values. 21But he needs a kind of reason that’s consistent with internalism. We’ve already anticipated Nietzsche’s strategy. He tries to “moderate” the internalism by loosening the relation between what a person does now value and what’s good for the person: the latter still depends on the former, but they’re not simply identical. Very roughly, P’s good is what his or her values would be if corrected with respect to power and/or truth. This opens up a difference between what a person does value and what he or she should value. And it lets Nietzsche claim to have reasons for his own values, reasons both for him to hold them and for some others to hold them as well. This moderated internalism gives him license to argue for his perspective and values. It gives him the degree of externalism he needs in order fully to value his values. As we’ve noticed, however, a much stronger externalist posit is deeply ingrained both in us and in Nietzsche himself. The assumption of real values quite independent of our valuing has ruled through most of our human history and pre-history, so it is not surprising that it is deeply deposited in us. And it is also no surprise that as Nietzsche struggles to find a way to justify his own values even he slides repeatedly back into making that stronger claim. His aspiration to privilege his values by how much he understands constantly pushes against and past the limits set by the very lessons he thinks he has learned. So he drifts, over and again, into meaning and claiming his values to be valuable in a sense that their perspectivity can’t allow. He slips back into the realist illusion in his valuing that he aspires to overcome. One reason Nietzsche is optimistic that we will be able to incorporate this perspectivist truth is that the strong realist posit in valuing is a historical phenomenon. That is, this posit is historical and not biological, which gives hope that it can also be unlearned and replaced as our history proceeds. Moreover, it is a posit that we make only in one way that we now value. We make it in our “agential” values (i.e., in those we put into words and awareness). But Nietzsche thinks there is another kind of valuing that we engage in all the time that does not involve that posit; this is the valuing we perform in our “bodily” drives and affects. The absence of value realism in this valuing gives a further reason for hope that we can learn not to make it in those worded and conscious values. ... Nietzsche insists on putting values in this biological context. Within it, what life aims at ultimately is its own preservation and growth (power), and values are employed for this aiming. BGE.3: “valuations, or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life.” [...] Changing values at all isn’t easy. They’re not mere ideas, but things built physically, lastingly into the world. Agential values are set down on tablets, but, more importantly, they are built into us as deep-rooted mental habits for feeling and judging in given ways. We don’t just “give up” a value; we need to actively weed its habituated response out of ourselves in the many different kinds of situations they’re tangled in. [...] three main ways of valuing: the body’s, the moral agent’s, and his own. We could also call these animal, human, and superhuman valuing. Each has its own “semantics” (or “intentionality”); that is, its own way of positing its values as good. So Nietzsche has what might look like three separate and inconsistent metaethical positions but that are really three elements in a unified account of valuing. ## Christopher Janaway – Beyond Selflessness (on The Genealogy of Morals) Reading Nietzsche with any degree of sympathy should incline us to regard as fairly convincing a certain picture of the nature of moral values, and to the extent that we are convinced here we may be led to question our attitude towards those values we find ourselves continuing to have. Nietzsche persuades us that morality’s various tenets and constitutive attitudes are historical constructions, to which there have been (and may still be) genuine alternatives. Placing high value upon compassion, guilt, and the suppression of our more aggressively expansive instincts, believing everyone’s well-being to be of equal kind and importance, expecting everyone to be a subject of rational free choice capable of acting similarly and blameable for failure to do so—these are not absolute, eternal, or compulsory attitudes for human beings to hold, but attitudes invented and perpetuated to fulfil a host of functions and needs. [...] The moral attitudes that we now take for granted as the values, as the ‘values in themselves’, were brought into existence and sustained through enormous cultural ingenuity by specific types of human beings, standing in specific power-relations to others, and governed by specific internal drives both innate and learned. [...] the fact that moral values are not the values ¨uberhaupt does not exclude their being the best ones for us to have. That they are a historical construct does not show that their construction was in any way a bad thing, nor does the manner of their construction, whatever its details, decide whether it is good for us to continue having them as ours. [...] The creation and elaboration of Judaeo-Christian values, centred around the promotion of selflessness, brought about the development of man as an ‘interesting’ animal with a proper history, gave rise to an inner life, expressed an unparalleled form-creating will on the part of humanity, brought forth cultural products of the highest order, and enabled us to value truthfulness, the very instrument Nietzsche uses in his project of revaluation. However, none of this negates his central charge that morality has caused us to be ill, self-conflicted, self-hating, and deluded in ways that are ugly and unnecessary for us. Morality has fostered weak and reactive tendencies in humans, elevated self-punishment to a supreme good, taught us to loathe and fear large parts of the psyche, inclined us to conform to the lowest common denominator, discouraged creativity and fullness of life, systematically deceived us about the true nature of ourselves, and subordinated the human to spurious ‘absolutes’ and ‘beyonds’ posited primarily for the gratification of blaming ourselves over our constitutional inability to live up to them. If there is such a thing as progress in values, in Nietzsche’s eyes we have not come nearly as far as we might, and only if morality withers away is there hope of our going further. [...] If Nietzsche persuades, he does so by first luring the reader into that space where conviction in moral values is suspended. Even if we subsequently ‘relapse’ into moral judgement-making, this experience of suspension allows a practice of self-scrutiny to set in. Nietzsche is hailed by wide consensus as a ‘master of suspicion’³ of equal stature with Marx and Freud: he has taught us not to trust our ingrained assumptions about value, selfhood, history, and philosophy, and given us an unparalleled exhibition of the kind of psychological probing that can unsettle them. This very art of self-suspicion is arguably among Nietzsche’s greatest gifts to philosophy, if not the greatest. [...] Nietzsche has a radical message for philosophers and ‘scientific’ investigators: your conception of your own activity is at fault because you picture yourselves falsely. There is no primary drive towards knowledge and truth. We philosophers are composed of many affects and drives, and the notion of a rational self or knowing subject engaged in a self-validating exercise of pure dialectical truth-seeking is as much an insidious illusion as the notion of a realm of timeless objects waiting to be discovered. Disinterested, detached knowing is a fiction, but a persistently tempting one that we must struggle to guard ourselves against. [...] That philosophers pursue the truth for its own sake, that they succeed in speaking with a universal voice freed from the influence of non-rational drives and prejudices, that pure impersonal dialectic will reliably reach an answer to the question how best to live—these are self-serving distortions. The metaphors of universality, impersonality, and purity with which they have liked to portray themselves also arise out of the valuations peculiar to morality, and philosophy in turn can function as a source of rationalizations with which morality defends itself. Along with the values of morality, philosophers need to put themselves in question. If they understood how enquiry is beholden to valuations, and valuations to affects and drives, if they enquired more into themselves and made their many affects ‘useful for knowledge’ instead of trying to evade them, they might be less estranged from themselves and not detach knowledge from ‘life’. [...] For him it makes a crucial difference to one’s success as a thinker whether one is personally involved in one’s subject matter, whether one is capable of occupying many differing perspectives and identifying with diverse affects, whether one’s deepest and most unflattering feelings are allowed a voice in one’s campaign to understand oneself and try to live better. ## Ken Gemes on Popperian podcast Asba matter of psychology: modernity brings a clash between will to truth and our valuing structures. We need to see the world as enchanted, having some meaning, but will to truth says that's just a delusion, propaganda. Maybe we value truth too much, if it disenchants the world. N is a pluralist. Truth valuable but not the only value. Reading N: he has therapeutic aims in mind, more concerned with that than with stating truths. Humans are not obsessed with avoiding suffering but finding meaning. N is a religious thinker. The last man just wants to be comfortable, free from suffering. You have to aim for something beyond yourself. Christian values werrent really being implemented by the Pope or whatever. It's really only the atheists in the 19 and 20 century that went all the way. Evolutionary account of meaning: it underwrites stronger group bonds, persuades people that some things are worth sacrifice, even death. N wants people to be consecrated to something beyond themselves. ## Stephen West: Nietzsche on the Ascetic Ideal https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcripts #todo - check the transcript again when it is published Simone de Beauvoir: revenge as symbolic gesture In the interest of governing future behaviour through punishment. Genealogy of morality: explaining how things that seem inherent to human nature are really inherited from cultural past. In ancient societies, individual self-expression, excellence and power was highly valued. Christianity introduced concept of evil: getting what you want by undermining the preferences or wellbeing of other people. New binary: think of conduct in terms of good or evil. In past: large population of ordinary people, then certain exceptionally virtuous people being heralded as good people that you can look up. In Judea-Christian world: practically everyone is a good person, so long as they embody that slave morality where they value self-sacrifice, humility and make sure they're not too powerful or dangerous. In this new world, to say to someone else "you are not a good person" is an insult. To say that is not taken as saying "you are just an ordinary person like me, like all the rest of us", no—being a good person is the standard. And then **goodness is defined by this cult of self-sacrifice for others, and anything power-seeking for the sake of having control, any greediness, any desire for strengths that you might use to take what you want in the world, these behaviours are typically seen as evil, or, at the very least, viewed with a heavy heavy skepticism**. [...] This can seem like such a solid moral truism that it's almost treated as thought it's some sort of moral absolute, chiselled into stone tablets, as it were. But this is where Nietzsche is going to do the most Nietzsche thing in the world. You see, if there were ever a hallmark of his work, it's that **he likes to take something that is widely accepted as true and present it from a different perspective and show how the obvious initial take on the thing is not even close to the full story**. **The point being, mostly, to take a little wind out of the sails of anyone who has full confidence in some oversimplified take on reality**. E.g. N casts envy as quite generative, part of the dynamic of aspiration towards excellence, inspiration. N thought the people of his time were extremely confident in an extremely simplified binary take on good vs evil and he wasn't going to have any of that. He was going to show them how basic their thinking was, one false absolute at a time. [Discussion of some arguments against compassion] If you're one of these people coming to the defense of compassion as some moral absolute, don't be ashamed, but that is exactly the sensibility Nietzsche is saying is the problem with how we think about morality in contemporary Western society. Where our minds have been poisoned to be in a constant pursuit towards this false ideal of objective morality or objective truth. This attitude where when we hear Nietzsche say anything critical about compassion, we assume "oh, he must be trying to refute compassion, he must be trying to argue for something else"—no, he's operating in a much more nuanced place than that. **He's not trying to offer a new dogma to replace people's old dogmas. He's not interested in piling onto this attitude that there are a million wrong answers in this world and a single correct answer that I have access to. This attitude that reality is somehow stable enough to categorise and define in a binary way. For Nietzsche, it's not. And he's not interested in offering you a counter system so that we can all pretend like it is—that's the entire problem.** (C.f. Previous episode on Being and Becoming). N is extremely sceptical of any attempt to create a system that claims to grab a hold of and quantify some stable, grounded depiction of reality. Remember the visual of the sand dune as a process, remember how snapshots can never capture that dune in its entirety, blowing in the wind and constantly changing. **The reality of the universe and of morality is that they are not stable, according to Nietzsche, they can never be understood in terms of absolutes.** The fact is there are examples of how compassion can hurt people rather than help them. And there are examples of how undermining the interests or wellbeing of other people would not be immoral or absolutely evil. If you doubt this, just think of anyone who seeks power in the world for the sake of overthrowing a corrupt system. Or anyone who takes a promotion over someone else and makes the world a better place from that position. The reality of this universe is that it is unstable, and this is the natural state of affairs. **But people for many reasons don't like the idea that truth and morality are unstable. So they've created all sorts of counter-natural attempts to transcend this natural instability of things. These are the varoious religious, philosophical, cultural rational constructions that we come up with to try to give us an illusion of stability.** But in the sense that they deny the true unstable nature of reality, they are life-denying by definition. They are counter-natural, the ideal they are striving towards is a denial of the sort of dynamic perspectives that Nietzsche is channeling here. The bottom line is: you don't like the way the world is, so you live your life in a constant state of denial about it. About the feelings and desire you have. About the level of confidence you have in your understanding of the world. And one of N's main concerns is thinking about where this constant state of denial psychologically leaves the average citizen of modernity facing a new kind of existential crisis... this lack of meaning, this fact that God is Dead. [...] When the primary social cue you face on a day-to-day basis is that you earn respect from people when you abide by the altruistic egalitarian self-sacrificial moral approach, you are applauded when you sacrifice your feelings and dreams and put them on the back burner for the sake of the greater good, or everyone else around you. Not a surprise, N would say, that this tends to leave the average person in modernity a bit disorientated. **To be a reasonable person is to be born on a crash course into nihilism and self-denial**. Religious, philosophical and scientific approaches systematise this denial of certain "evil" parts of ourselves, guilt is used as an internal mechanism to sustain this status quo, and we leave in a constant state of self-condemnation that we become the judge jury and executioner of. Guilt almost starts to look like debt, that we carry around with ourselves. **Google defines asceticism as "severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons". In other words: a systematised form of self-denial, that then becomes pathological. You see, because here's the thing: Nietzsche was concerned that there's no guarantee that these historically inherited traditions of self-denial will ever lead an end game for the modern individual that is psychologically healthy.** Many Westerners, still to this day, live their lives in this pathology that Nietzsche refers to as "the ascetic ideal". **Characterised by this binary thinking and this desire to transcend the natural instability of the world through categories such as good vs evil, true vs false. The type of thinking that can lead otherwise reasonable people into a hatred of themselves for feeling the wrong way, or a hatred of their neighbour for believing the wrong thing. ** [...] What is Nietzsche saying about the creation of meaning here? Is he saying that we shouldn't be disciplined and renounce certain behaviours and desire that hurt us or other people? No. Is he saying that truth is entirely relative, that its all a matter of perspective and there's no way to determine which perspectives are better than others? Definitely not what he's saying. Once again, if your tendency was to think that Nietzsche was arguing for the opposite, notice that binary, polarised way of thinking that's easy to fall into that requires there to be a million wrong answers and one correct answer, and lives in constant denial of the true instability and nuance that we have to contend with. In a post-"God is Dead" world, we're told a couple things. When it comes to truth: don't worry, we're working on it, we have science. When it comes to morality: don't worry, we're working on it, we have philosophy. But are these two fields the grand liberators from the religious counter-natural chains of the past, or are these just the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal? This will to truth or objectivity as being the final goal? N sometimes talks about how it's this will to truth, or this imperative towards objectivity, that's leading to all these problems. And that if anybody is gonna try to offer an alternative system, which again he is not trying to do, but if someone did try to subvert the domainant narrative of the ascetic ideal, they would have **call into question one of the most fundamental things that people just blindly accept: the value of truth as an end goal in our social systems.** Seems kind of difficult to imagine? But N invites us to consider the fact that we already have things that do this in other realms, e.g. art. When Kanye West comes out with a new album, that album is not released as a refutation of someone else's work. When a new TV show comes out, you don't sit there and say "ok yeah, that show is true. I was wrong before about last season." N says **art is forum where meaningful human expression is currently being made, depicting reality from a particular perspective, to be appreciated on grounds that have nothing to do with staking a claim to The Truth**. You don't hate yourself for liking the music you listen to, and you don't hate other people around you for thinking other music is better. [...] **So what are we actually trying to accomplish in our social systems? Is this old ideal of a stable truth and a dissatisfaction with the natural world—where people seem themselves, as N says, "in the world but not of the world", we feel almost too good for this world, we have to transcend it in some way—is this false ideal just continuing to make people self-hating, disoriented, stagnant and miserable where they actually are.** And what he's asking us is: **could there be a counter-ideal out there, can we imagine a system built on a foundation of accepting the fact that reality is unstable, and rather than living in denial of that fact, could ask the question that fascinated N all throughout his work: what kind of natural philosophy might we be able to create that is an affirmation of life, and not a renunciation of it?** --- ## Random highlights from somewhere " I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment... Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue. The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.' " Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under... "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth... One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink... One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. 'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink." from Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, p.3,4,5, Walter Kaufmann transl. --- ## On time Z: On Redemption ‘It was’: thus is called the will’s gnashing of teeth and loneliest misery. Impotent against that which has been – it is an angry spectator of everything past. The will cannot will backward; that it cannot break time and time’s greed – that is the will’s loneliest misery. Willing liberates; what does willing plan in order to rid itself of its misery and mock its dungeon? Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool! Foolishly as well the imprisoned will redeems itself. That time does not run backward, that is its wrath. ‘That which was’ – thus the stone is called, which it cannot roll aside. And so it rolls stones around out of wrath and annoyance, and wreaks revenge on that which does not feel wrath and annoyance as it does. Thus the will, the liberator, became a doer of harm; and on everything that is capable of suffering it avenges itself for not being able to go back. This, yes this alone is revenge itself: the will’s unwillingness toward time and time’s ‘it was.’ Indeed, a great folly lives in our will; and it became the curse of all humankind that this folly acquired spirit! The spirit of revenge: my friends, that so far has been what mankind contemplate best; and wherever there was suffering, punishment was always supposed to be there as well. For‘punishment’ is what revenge calls itself; with a lying word it hypocritically asserts its good conscience. And because in willing itself there is suffering, based on its inability to will backward – thus all willing itself and all living is supposed to be – punishment! And now cloud upon cloud rolled in over the spirit, until at last madness preached: ‘Everything passes away, therefore everything deserves to pass away! And this itself is justice, this law of time that it must devour its own children’ – thus preached madness.