“[A]longside and in constant tension with Nietzsche’s weighty cluster of opinions affirming that the world lacks a natural, rational, or divine order, that morality is artifice and pathology, and that the will is sovereign, exists a rival and equally weighty cluster of his opinions asserting that the cosmos has an intelligible character, that there is a suprahistorical ethical order, and that knowledge of these matters brings health, liberates, and ennobles. It is the unresolved antagonism between these sets of fundamental convictions that animates and orders Nietzsche’s thought.”
[Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, page 26.]
The resolution of this antagonism is the following. The intelligible - though not provable - character of the cosmos is that it is “to all eternity chaos” [La Gaya Scienza, section 109] - including the original meaning of “chaos”, namely “void” - it is to all eternity devoid of meaning. Nietzsche’s suprahistorical ethical order is based precisely on this insight: the measure of the rank of individual human beings as well as families, tribes, peoples, nations, and ages, is their truthfulness in this regard - how much of this deadly truth they can endure.
“It is here and nowhere else that one must make a start to comprehend what Zarathustra wants: this type of man that he conceives [the Overman], conceives reality as it is: it is strong enough for it—, it is not estranged or removed from it, it is reality itself and exemplifies all that is terrible and questionable in it, only in that way can man attain greatness…”
[Ecce Homo, Why I Am a Destiny, section 5.]
Thus the paradox is this: there is a natural order, one’s rank in which is measured by the degree to which one can concede the absence of a natural order! It is here that we must try to understand the meaning of the subtitle of Berkowitz’ book, “The Ethics of an Immoralist”: there is a natural ethical order, which is based on the realisation that there is no natural moral order. I will not go into the origins of the terms “ethical” and “moral” here; it is sufficient to explain what they mean here. The ethical good is good as opposed to bad; the moral good is good as opposed to “evil”…
I am the one regarding it as a paradox, i.e., a seeming contradiction; Berkowitz evidently regards it as an actual contradiction. As for the “natural” thing, Berkowitz elsewhere describes the “contest of extremes” in Nietzsche’s thought as follows:
“At the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought there is a pervasive tension between his fundamental assumption that morality is an artifact of the human will and his unyielding conviction that there is a binding rank order of desires, types of human beings, and forms of life.”
[ibid., page 4.]
This rank order is there, is a given; does that not make it natural?
Also, just before that passage from page 26 I quoted, Berkowitz writes:
“In The Antichrist […] the law of Manu is offered as an illustration of a political order that conforms to the dictates of nature (A 57).”
[ibid., page 26.]
And indeed, this is where I got the word “natural”:
“The order of castes, the supreme, the dominant law, is merely the sanction of a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no “modern idea” has any power. In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery. Nature, not Manu, distinguishes the pre-eminently spiritual ones, those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one respect nor in the other, the mediocre ones—the last as the great majority, the first as the elite.”
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 57.]
The phrase “suprahistorical ethical order”, which is Berkowitz’s, already implies this insight: for later on in the same chapter, when he discusses the three types of history Nietzsche distinguishes, he writes:
“The “suprahistorical man” suffers nausea as a result of his correct perception that history is nothing but a meaningless series of equally valueless moments. Contrary to the historical man, who is deluded about the “meaning of existence,” the suprahistorical man knows that existence rules out salvation, and that despite the great variety in the history of nations and individuals, existence is always the same, a perennial flux devoid of intrinsic significance.”
[ibid., page 31.]
Greatness consists in enduring this nausea, in enduring this perception:
“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.”
[Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Preface, 3.]
Ah, and is not cowardice what is bad?
“In the word kakos [Greek: bad, ugly, ill-born, mean, craven], as in deilos [Greek: cowardly, worthless, vile, wretched] (the plebeian in contradistinction to the agathos [Greek: good, well-born, gentle, brave, capable]), cowardice is emphasized: this perhaps gives an indication in which direction one should seek the etymological origin of agathos, which is susceptible of several interpretations.”
[Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I, 5.]
Nietzsche implies here that agathos originally meant “brave”. Thus we have the good, which is to be brave, i.e., truthful (for truth is terrible), and the bad, which is, conversely, not to be brave, i.e., untruthful. This is confirmed earlier on in this section:
“With regard to our problem, which may on good grounds be called a quiet problem [count the number of responses I’ve got!] and one which fastidiously directs itself to few ears, it is of no small interest to ascertain that through those words and roots which designate “good” there frequently still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. Granted that, in the majority of cases, they designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the commanders”) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as “the rich,” “the possessors” (this is the meaning of arya; and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). But they also do it by a typical character trait: and this is the case that concerns us here. They call themselves, for instance, “the truthful”; this is so above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis [Theognis of Megara, 6th Cent. B.C.]. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos [Greek: good, brave], signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of “noble,” as distinct from the lying common man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him—until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word is left to designate nobility of soul and becomes as it were ripe and sweet.”
[ibid.]
And is not the Overman the man who “conceives reality as it is”, - who “is reality itself and exemplifies all that is terrible and questionable in it” [Ecce Homo, Why I Am a Destiny, section 5]?
“I measure the value of people, of races, by how necessarily they are unable to conceive of the god as separate from the satyr.”
[Why I Am So Clever, 4, my translation.]
This means that, for Nietzsche, the god is in truth inseparable from the satyr.
The Nietzschean Jung may throw some light on the matter:
“As I have already emphasized, the spontaneous symbols of the self, or of wholeness, cannot in practice be distinguished from a God-image. […]
There can be no doubt that the original Christian conception of the imago Dei [image of God] embodied in Christ meant an all-embracing totality that even includes the animal side of man. Nevertheless the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things but specifically excludes it in the form of a Luciferian opponent. […] In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves”.
[Jung, Aion, Christ, a Symbol of the Self.]
Jung’s comment about light and shadow cannot fail to remind one of Nietzsche. When describing the inspiration he felt when writing Thus Spake Zarathustra, he mentions
“a depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy [düster, co-gnate to Dutch duister, “dark”] does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned, provoked, a necessary color in such a superabundance of light”.
[Ecce Homo, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 3.]
Note Nietzsche’s emphasis on the word “necessary”!
Interestingly, Jung connects the one-sidedness of the Christ-symbol with the coming of the Antichrist:
“Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. […] The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction - it is an inexorable psychological law whose existence, though unknown to the autor of the Johannine Epistles, brought him a sure knowledge of the impending enantiodromia. Consequently he wrote as if he were conscious of the inner necessity of this transformation, though we may be sure that the idea seemed to him like a divine revelation. In reality every intensified differentiation of the Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above and below.”
[Jung, ibid.]
And he links the coming of the Antichrist, first, to the Renaissance, and later, to “the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states” [ibid.]. Now for Nietzsche, the Renaissance and the rise of Napoleon were instances of “the ancient fire”, i.e., the “struggle” between “the opposing values “good and bad”, “good and evil””, whose "symbol […] is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”, flaring up:
“Like a last signpost to the other path [the path of Rome, as opposed to the path of Judea], Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has ever been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh—one might well ponder what kind of problem it is: Napoleon, this synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman.”
[Genealogy of Morals, I, 16-17.]
In a posthumously published note from the same period, Nietzsche writes:
“Man is beast and superbeast [Untier und Ãœbertier]; the higher man is inhuman and superhuman: these belong together. With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness: one ought not to desire the one without the other - or rather: the more radically one desires the one, the more radically one achieves precisely the other.”
[The Will to Power, section 1027, with added emphasis.]
[size=92]Note. We can now also understand Nietzsche’s opinion on the Old Testament as expressed in Beyond Good and Evil, section 52:
“In the Jewish “Old Testament,†the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and will have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe”.
It has always seemed to me that this passage was ironic. We can now see that the Jews presented their history as so superlative and spotless, that everything else turned pale (black) in comparison.[/size]
This reminds me now of something written by the Dutch poet Adrian Roland Holst:
“The more a democratic world is going to tame life, the stronger the chance gets, that oppressed life will strike back despotically.”
[Brief, my translation.]
This Necessity is described by Krishna as follows:
“Whenever and wherever there is a decline in religious practice, O descendant of Bharata, and a predominant rise of irreligion–at that time I descend Myself.
In order to deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as to reestablish the principles of religion, I advent Myself millennium after millennium.”
[The Bhagavad Gita As It Is, Chapter 4, Verse 7-8.]
These “principles of religion” are the principles of the varnasrama-dharma:
“You may call the Vedas Hindu, but “Hindu” is a foreign name. We are not Hindus. Our real identification is varnasrama. Varnasrama denotes the followers of the Vedas, those who accept the human society in eight divisions of varna and asrama. There are four divisions of society and four divisions of spiritual life. This is called varnasrama. It is stated in the Bhagavad-gita (4.13), “These divisions are everywhere because they are created by God.” The divisions of society are brahmana, ksatriya, vaisya, sudra. Brahmana refers to the very intelligent class of men, those who know what is Brahman. Similarly, the ksatriyas, the administrator group, are the next intelligent class of men. Then the vaisyas, the mercantile group. These natural classifications are found everywhere.”
[Sri Isopanisad, Introduction.]
This is the same division of society as described by Nietzsche:
“Let us consider the other case of so-called morality, the case of breeding [as opposed to taming], a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of “the law of Manu.” Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at once: one priestly [the Brahmanas], one warlike [the Kshatriyas], one for trade and agriculture [the Vaisyas], and finally a race of servants, the Sudras.”
[Twilight of the Idols, The “Improvers” of Mankind, section 3.]
“In all this, to repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing contrived; whatever is different is contrived—contrived for the ruin of nature… The order of castes, the order of rank, merely formulates the highest law of life; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, to make possible the higher and the highest types—the inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all.”
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 57.]
Well, your framing of the use of the term “natural” seems to be a failed attempt to frame N within the context of social darwinism.
The point is, or the question remains, what is “natural” to the overman? This a a point where N failed due ot his short demise, as I feel the will to power is not well defined.
Also, much of what N writes is about a reaction to religious dogmatism, as clearly people need to be taught to not be slaves to unteach the prophecies as it were.
Now then, how can any debate about N procede into the natural ethics when he never really nailed down man’s much about the intrinsic nature of “pre” overman?
Chaos may be natural, but it is not healthy to ethics.
Nietzsche was clearly insane when he wrote Ecce Homo. The question is, what is “our true” nature. Nietzsche wished to aid evolution by creating ubermenschen, who were one with the “natural order”, with man on top. Darwin never wished to catalyze or alter evolution, IF THIS IS POSSIBLE. Morality is indubituably a human creation,a superstion, and as Spinoza would say a vanity. We interject our view of reality onto nature. It is a view of reality that has enabled us to subdue nature,but we will Never control her chaos utterly,especially as we are at one with it.
Man is already on top (due to his cunning), so what is there to “wish” there?
What Nietzsche wanted to do is not to halt the development of the herdman, but to create a ruling caste which alone might justify the existence of the herd.
I don’t know whether or not Darwin wanted that, but that is not the issue: the issue is what Nietzsche wanted.
Yes, morality is. However, according to Berkowitz - and this use of the word is his -, Nietzsche did not think so of ethics. According to Nietzsche, according to Berkowitz, there is “a binding rank order of desires, types of human beings, and forms of life.” This rank order is discovered, not made.
Berkowitz is a professor of political science, not philosophy. He is wrong on many issues.One thing about him that has bothered me since I read his book many years ago is his inability to understand why Zarathustra chose the market place to deliver his maxim,"God is dead",instead of,for instance,A university. N. remained true to his roots of growing up fatherless,in a christian household.Through it all his heart remained as a man of the people,just like Napoleon and Caesar.
As long as there are men who will not accept that the herd has won, i.e., as long as there are men, the struggle has not yet been lost.
That is a very funny description - thanks.
Evolution is “the way things go”. Nietzsche did not want to alter that; amor fati. But his fate, and mine, is to be an aristocratic radicalist. And our aristocracy is based on truthfulness.
A professor of philosophy is not yet a philosopher. As for Berkowitz, I regard him as a “philosophical labourer and man of science” [Nietzsche, BGE 211]. He has been of use to me in my task; but I would agree that he is wrong, if not about many, then at least about fundamental issues - as I have tried to show in this thread.
I think it is clear from Zarathustra’s insight at the end of his prologue for whom Nietzsche wrote:
“A light hath dawned upon me: I need companions—living ones; not dead companions and corpses, which I carry with me where I will.
But I need living companions, who will follow me because they want to follow themselves—and to the place where I will.
A light hath dawned upon me. Not to the people is Zarathustra to speak, but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be the herd’s herdsman and hound!
To allure many from the herd—for that purpose have I come. The people and the herd must be angry with me: a robber shall Zarathustra be called by the herdsmen.
Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the good and just. Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the believers in the orthodox belief.
Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker:—he, however, is the creator.
Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker:—he, however, is the creator.
Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses—and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh—those who grave new values on new tables.
Companions, the creator seeketh, and fellow-reapers: for everything is ripe for the harvest with him. But he lacketh the hundred sickles: so he plucketh the ears of corn and is vexed.
Companions, the creator seeketh, and such as know how to whet their sickles. Destroyers, will they be called, and despisers of good and evil. But they are the reapers and rejoicers.
Fellow-creators, Zarathustra seeketh; fellow-reapers and fellow-rejoicers, Zarathustra seeketh: what hath he to do with herds and herdsmen and corpses!
[…]
I am not to be a herdsman, I am not to be a grave-digger. Not any more will I discourse unto the people; for the last time have I spoken unto the dead.
With the creators, the reapers, and the rejoicers will I associate: the rainbow will I show them, and all the stairs to the Superman.
To the lone-dwellers will I sing my song, and to the twain-dwellers; and unto him who hath still ears for the unheard, will I make the heart heavy with my happiness.
I make for my goal, I follow my course; over the loitering and tardy will I leap. Thus let my on-going be their down-going!”
[Thus Spake Zarathustra, Of Herdsmen and Other Corpses.]
Since when did the ubermensch become a “we”? Without a “them” there is no ubermensch.
Why would one accept what was never true?
Again, what is the natural order for the individual following his own course? The natural order for the ubermensch means merely not dogmatically being part of the herd anymore…
to wit
“They” will never endure it, there will always be a herd and there will always be only a few who know it. Those few are the ubermenschen, they are the guardians of the republic. The chaos is eternal, because the truth is the chaos, or the notion of the void, is only relative to those who seek order. The manipulation of the chaos for the “good” is ethical, but calling it the “natural ethical order” is poor conceptual framing.
It is order that is unnatural, and chaos that is natural. That is the truth.
There is no natural ethical order to the void, only a notion of the will to power in the service of the ethical good relative to what the herd believes is the moral good. If a leader is despised and demonized by the masses and yet is still in power in the service of creating his ethical order, he likely is an ubermensch.
If the masses hate you, as they are taught to hate those who seek power, then you are undoubtedly being true to your will to power. It would seem that power is the determinant in this “ethical order.”
Read. First “F.W.Nietzsche” mentioned a natural order “with man on top” - man, not the Ãœbermensch (indeed, as I read it, man is only the top of the Ãœbermensch, according to “F.W.Nietzsche”: the Ãœbermensch being “one with the natural order”, according to him).
Then, I said man was already on top. In response, “F.W.Nietzsche” denied this, saying that “we” aren’t on top. So he identifies “us” with “man”. In response to him, in turn, I made a laconic statement about “us”. So the Ãœbermensch did never become a “we”: man became a “we”, and that was “F.W.Nietzsche”'s doing, not mine.
The Ãœbermensch is a certain type of man. So, for the Ãœbermensch, the Ãœbermensch is an “I”; and there is only a “they” if there are people (concerned) who are not Ãœbermenschen.
Again, it was not I, but “F.W.Nietzsche” (you know, the one for whom you believed you could speak) who claimed that. This claim reminded me of an actual passage written by Nietzsche (why is it that neither you nor “F.W.Nietzsche” ever substantiate anything they claim about Nietzsche with evidence?):
“Let us stick to the facts: the people have won—or ‘the slaves’ or ‘the mob’ or ‘the herd’ or whatever you like to call them […]. ‘The masters’ have been disposed of; the morality of the common man has won. One may conceive of this victory as at the same time a blood-poisoning (it has mixed the races together)—I shan’t contradict; but this intoxication has undoubtedly been successful. The ‘redemption’ of the human race (from ‘the masters,’ that is) is going forward; everything is visibly becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized (what do the words matter!). The progress of this poison through the entire body of mankind seems irresistible, its pace and tempo may from now on even grow slower, subtler, less audible, more cautious—there is plenty of time.”
[Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I, 9.]
To be sure, Nietzsche puts this monologue in the mouth of “a “free spirit””, “an honest animal”, “and a democrat”, and says that he himself has “much to be silent about” at this point [ibid.]; but does that mean that he disagrees with him about the mob being on top? From section 16, it is clear that he does not:
“The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided.”
[ibid., section 16.]
This is exactly what I meant when I said: “As long as there are men who will not accept that the herd has won, i.e., as long as there are men, the struggle has not yet been lost.” The triumph is in the acceptance. When “we” resign to mob rule, when we give up our struggle against it, only then will the mob have won. The herd has won the last battle; but if we can help it this has not yet been the final battle.
“Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More: must one not desire it with all one’s might? even will it? even promote it?”
[Nietzsche, ibid., section 17.]
Precisely that one is of a higher rank to the degree that one follows one’s own course.
Again, it is not a question of yes or no, but of degrees… Between the poles of enduring the whole deadly truth and enduring none of it, there are degrees to which one endures it; Nietzsche’s order of rank is based on how much truth a spirit endures, how much truth it dares - in how far it needs to see life falsified, in how far it can permit to have an accurate picture of reality.
Only insofar as order is made, and chaos discovered.
"The problem I thus pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings (- man is an end -): but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value, worthier of life, more certain of a future.
“Even in the past this higher type has appeared often: but as a fortunate accident, as an exception, never as something willed. In fact, it has been the type most dreaded, almost the dreadful; - and from dread the opposite type was willed, bred, and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal - the Christian…”
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 3, with added emphasis.]
"Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher, in the sense accepted today. “Progress” is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea. The European of today is vastly inferior in value to the European of the Renaissance; further development is altogether not according to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength.
“In another sense, success in individual cases is constantly encountered in the most widely different places and cultures; here we really do find a higher type: which is, in relation to mankind as a whole, a kind of overman [Ãœbermensch]. Such fortunate accidents of great success have always been possible and will perhaps always be possible. And even whole families, tribes, or peoples may occasionally represent such a bull’s-eye.”
[ibid., section 4, again with added emphasis.]
“Zarathustra […] does not conceal the fact that his type of man, a relatively superhuman [übermenschlich] type, is superhuman precisely in its relation to the good - that the good and the just would call his overman devil…”
[Ecce Homo, Why I Am a Destiny, section 5, also with added emphasis.]
The Ãœbermensch is called “Ãœbermensch” because the standard is mankind as a whole (or its “pinnacle”, the good and just); if the Ãœbermensch should be the standard, then we should call him “man” [Mensch], and call the others, if they were encountered, what? Untermenschen, perhaps?
There is no natural moral order, no moral world order. However, there is (for Nietzsche) a natural order in which the Ãœbermensch occupies a higher rank than those Untermenschen I just mentioned. This is Nietzsche’s natural ethical order, or ethical world order.
I am going to try this ONE MORE TIME. If everyone is an ubermensch, there are no ranks of men. Quit repeating yourself, I already understand N rather well.
The “natural order” that N is talking of is the one created by false moral constructs that creates masters and slaves. This says nothing of what happens [i]AFTER[/i] the revaluing of all values, or when we move from moral dogmatism to ethical realism.
And I am not sure if his big point is that the ubermensch should simpy be the master of the slaves. I don’t see how he would sympathize with those incapable of “saving themselves” as it were.
And why I ask you again what natural ethics do you think is arisen from the will to power? And how can one appreciate the nature of the void, the “truth,” and then feel a “natural” system can arise from it? So, what is the “natural” ethical basline of the void, in other words? Is it whatever the overmen agree that it is?
My point is that the Superman “conceives the basic concept “good” in advance and spontaneously out of himself and only then creates for himself an idea of “bad”!” So first there is the Superman - “I”, or “we” -, and only then there is a “they”: the latter is only derivative.
Where does Nietzsche say that this is a false moral construct? In my reading, the false moral construct consists precisely in the slave transvaluation [Umwertung] of this natural order; what “we” have to do is turn the tables around again, so that “good” becomes bad and “evil” good again. This is the revaluing [Umwertung] of all values.
It is a matter of truthfulness. Even the appreciation of the differences in truthfulness is a matter of truthfulness, if that’s what you mean.