The highest nature, the individual nature at the summit of the hierarchy of the natures, is the complementary man. His supremacy is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem. This solution is the highest achievement, and it is worthwhile understanding or knowledge, and thereby a thought. The highest, the most difficult problem is that people are abolishing the prerequisites of human greatness—suffering and inequality—and there are no assignable limits to that abolition. The solution is the thought, the postulation, of the eternal return, for this assigns limits to the conquest of nature and thereby to the abolition of the prerequisites of human greatness. The thought that the eternal return be a fact is an act of the most spiritual will to power, philosophy: it is the tyrannical decree that it be a fact (cf. BGE 9). With this decree the complementary man wills the eternal return of the prerequisites of human greatness, i.e., the future existence of those prerequisites.
Just as today it is required “good taste” to accept that all are politically equal, in times and places where Master Morality had historically manifested, it was required of men of culture to accept the fact of fundamental inequality, rank ordering, and the subjugation of lower nature to higher.
The world-ordering concept of Greatness is naturally incompatible with dominant slave-values. There Greatness can only appear as “Moral Greatness”, i.e. a public association with some praiseworthy act, and thus already a spiritual perversion.
I invite you to imagine a popular symbol of Greatness - the Great Pyramid.
What I find most interesting is that inequality occurs naturally. Whereas equality needs the executive branch of government to enforce it.
Every discipline or domain will naturally formulate a rank order, be it economics, military, religion, science, philosophy, or sport. The cream will rise to the top and the lower will be subservient to the higher - always has, always will. Nietzsche was absolutely spot on in regards to the envy and aggrieved conceit that drives equality. It’s a kind of back-door philosophy the lower use to try and inflate their false sense of self-importance.
Consider that the object of promoting Slave Morality is solely to make more and better slaves. Hypocrisy, vainglory and all manner of mental uncleanliness would be completely indispensable for this task. The better the slave, the badder and meaner and more despicably tame he will seem under the scrutiny of any Master Morality mode of valuation. He must not suspect this, and better yet, should think that all Master evaluations are inherently evil (forbidden and punishable), and only he, the slave, is good.
That is how things would stand if you do decide to accept that in our world you and I face ACTUALLY, not hypothetically, two different and divergent moralities. There is danger here, note how similar it is to the Marxist class struggle, an invisible hand seemingly orchestrates the conflict between the high and the low. The lows then flood the naturally far less numerous highs, in doing so losing their head completely. With it, their previous autoimmune ability to set their own course, to resist cheap manipulations, etc. is also lost, such a people perhaps becoming a useable resource for the purposes of the invisible hand.
I particularly wanted to highlight for you that while mountains and valleys are natural, their warring with each other onto death and mutual degeneracy, appears utterly forced, contrived with ill intent. In healthy nature, there is no inherent conflict between Head and Hand; observe that there is between them a harmonious, fruitful, cosmological concord: one that we might well call the Morality of Unified Duty. This alone made the writing of my message to you possible, thus I am poised reasonably sure of it, a concord morality, united and indivisible, as different from today’s ideal of degrading “democracy” as it is from degrading tyrannies in the past.
The talent for greatness lies in the lower economic classes though( Even Nietzsche wasn’t royalty). Democracy(the push for equality) is needed, at least for the time being, to give these people the necessary comfort(freedom from excessive labor) to propel themselves into greatness.
The question that I never see being discussed is how Nietzsche( who has no desire to directly rule over anyone but himself) affects a new rank ordering in society through mere words. Is it that Nietzsche remains a topic of discussions, books, and papers until “something” starts take hold of the right person, until it reaches the right person? What is it about the language of Nietzsche that makes an affirmation of the Eternal Return even possible? Is there something about the language that is inherently subversive? Why does Nietzsche always cut himself off, leaving the reader full of questions and energy?( What’s the strategy in writing like this)… He prides himself on honesty but conceals much… or his “concealment” just a new form of honesty?? A thousand paths and no definite destination.
Given that you wanted to take an over-arching, broad spectrum view and take in all the factors that pertain to your question, would you not then find yourself horrified to realize that ALL language is there revealed to you in its inherently subversive aspect? It is, after all, always the uncontrollable intrusion of coded alien thoughtforms into my own. Consider with what extreme difficulty you and I may finally learn to resist in some small measure the structurizing demands of language as a signal, whether for the sake of some precariously snatched philosophical clarity or outright survival.
Pezer, I had assumed, amongst other things, that our colleague Iambiguous would be well comforted by the massive corporeality of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, moreso than by any abstract explanation involving disagreeable divisions (Masters, Slaves, etc.33.)
Dear God Pezer, I told you it’s useless to try to dodge or reason with this, it just is… I feel bad now about even telling you as your going to run around REJECTING that which is for something that isn’t. Yes, there are other and more effective shapes, but the archetype is too deeply rooted in it’s biased use to one side of the limbric system. Only way you can get them to even question it is by psychologically manipulating them out of adherence to it, but what replaces it? Not all archetypes follow patterns of shape and form- our theories of linguistics expressing grammar is another part of the mind’s attempt. Your going to end up jumoing out of your own skin if you try to beat this one. We both know your associations to that shape means Christianity, but that’s just your associations.
Rest on this nugget Pezer- there is no such thing as ‘power’, so therefor there is no such thing as will to power. Eternal return isn’t much of a issue either. It all comes down to how we use the Entorhinal Cortex.
I would hate to see your reaction had he quoted Strauss’s The City. You would of made a shock and resentful poo poo in your pants. Burn your poor cortex out searching it’s ghost (a soul within a soul) for another option than the optimal one. It exists in this annoying form, most people slap it redundantly like lab rats looking for the prize, and it’s the extent of people’s reasoning- even most philosophers, for the most part. Best just to sit back resigned and relax. I would of had to of killed myself 50 times over had I been as peeved as you are. Most people say MOOOOOO, why should ‘Nietzscheans’ be different. Just smile and enjoy the sight of the preacher preaching to the choir. They always say such lovely inane things to one another, then compliment one another for such amazing insights and not paying attention to so and so, much as monkeys pick lice off one another after a long day, relaxing in their monkey luxury.
I’m not Socrates ok?
I’m not walking around a public square trying to convince people of anything. I am bouncing ideas off of brains. If they don’t see, fine, I didn’t expect them to. If they do, great, all the better my ideas will bounce.
I like how you mention that it needn’t necessarily have a shape. Still, I know the pyramid is, I know what it is. I am not stupid enough to think that the idea is to kill God. I’m not going to play Satan for these little fools and become entangled in their finely evolved web. I am wrestling nothing, just putting my hands on the walls.
It may due you some good if you actually played satan in this case. This is how Nietzsche partially solved the pyramid issue via Lord Byron. It had a profound influence on Jung in his assumptions of diametrically opposed natures reaching out to become the other symbolically. He came up with this in his Nietzschean stage:
Old boy still got it wrong in that this is a projection of A ego in relations to the others, the others will have shadows that don’t coincide in the same way to the original ego projecting. Each one is a node of intelligence with a range of complexes behind it, with a wide range of interrelations. Byron took Satan in persona opposition but not triumph against god, Nietzsche said both and fuck both, Jung said 4 and loved them all. I yawned, and then thought some stuff when I saw something in the dark that never was, and the images I dreamt of but couldn’t draw, as well as things I can drawl but never thought of, and stuff I can see and never think about, causing me to yawn when apprehended by it’s void-anti void of knowing and not giving a damn and wishing it wasn’t there, and then contemplating the nothingness that could replace it. And well, now… whatever. I need to go get some sleep. I have a very long hike ahead of me. It’s going to rain tonight again, have a mountain therefore to climb. Long day tomorrow. Longer and harder weekend. Damn knee…
All the talk here is ignoring the OP. It seems that the popular feeling is that to hail master morality and condemn slave morality would mean that one is part of the master-camp. But what is master-morality? Only the OP makes an attempt to address this. I disagree with what it proposes.
“The highest nature, the individual nature at the summit of the hierarchy of the natures, is the complementary man. His supremacy is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem. This solution is the highest achievement, and it is worthwhile understanding or knowledge, and thereby a thought.”
This seems right, at least not wrong.
“The highest, the most difficult problem is that people are abolishing the prerequisites of human greatness—suffering and inequality—and there are no assignable limits to that abolition.”
I think that the highest problem is the fact that suffering and inequality are prerequisite to human greatness. What needs to be solved is the problem that consists of addressing human greatness as suffering and inequality. Because propagating or causing suffering and inequality does not mean human greatness. It is not really clear to say that inequality and suffering are prerequisites of human greatness, rather, human greatness is a prerequisite (cause to) to inequality, and this causes suffering.
The problem is that the focus has been on suffering and inequality, which are negative judgments. Greatness should be the focus. This can not be attained by focussing on its supposed prerequisites. There is nothing great about these two things by themselves. It is in fact the lingering logic of slave morality that has these negative judgments as its basis.
“The solution is the thought, the postulation, of the eternal return, for this assigns limits to the conquest of nature and thereby to the abolition of the prerequisites of human greatness. The thought that the eternal return be a fact is an act of the most spiritual will to power, philosophy: it is the tyrannical decree that it be a fact (cf. BGE 9). With this decree the complementary man wills the eternal return of the prerequisites of human greatness, i.e., the future existence of those prerequisites.”"
This would only be a containment policy, not addressing the root of the problem. The true solution is the understanding of the essence of greatness, which, in Nietzschean terms, is the morality / mindset of the Child.
Disregard “prerequisite” here - of course inequality and suffering can exist without greatness. What I mean to do is to reverse the causality. All value judgments are instances of inequality, of difference. “Great” is a strong value judgment, implies strong inequality.
First off: Hey WL, good to know that you’re still out there!
Second: Fixed Cross, I’m quite wary of responding to your posts, seeing as you tend to—wittingly or unwittingly—evade my challenges to you, for example this one: http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2283759#p2283759. Still, I will say this much: The highest problem is not the fact that suffering and inequality are prerequisite to human greatness; that’s just what makes applying the solution so difficult. To be sure, this is the most difficult part of solving the problem:
“This Yes [i.e., the ‘unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples’] is part of the unbounded Yes ‘to everything that was and is,’ the part Zarathustra himself found most difficult.” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 108.)
There’s still a riddle here, by the way. How can a spiritual will to power bring about “material” power? In other words, how can one bring about real suffering and inequality by only imagining them? How does “the tyrannical decree that it be a fact” make “the future existence of those prerequisites” a fact?
“The philosopher in the finest sense is a ‘complementary man,’ who, in contrast to the objective scholar, is a goal, a conclusion, and a sunrise. Indeed, inasmuch as he justifies existence, is a first cause and thereby [sic] a self-cause, and a self-reliant and supreme master, the complementary man or new philosopher is a kind of self-made god (BGE 207).” (Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, page 247. Cf. Zarathustra’s description of the Child as “a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea”, in TSZ, “The Three Metamorphoses”.)
By spiritually willing the eternal recurrence, the complementary man manifests the supreme and thereby essential greatness, the supreme morality/mindset:
“The highest state a philosopher [and thereby an individual nature] can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence—my formula for this is amor fati.” (WP 1041.)
“[B]y putting the emphasis on suffering and inequality, Strauss puts the emphasis precisely where Zarathustra himself puts it in ‘On Redemption,’ the crucial chapter in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2.20) from which the argument is drawn: what is hardest to bear in willing the whole natural order, the whole natural process, is to will suffering and inequality, to will the fragmentary character of humanity, to will the absence of redemption from the natural human condition with its order of rank of the natures.” (ibid., page 106.)
Actually, containment suffices. For by willing the future existence of the prerequisites of human greatness, one indirectly wills the future existence of human greatness, including the supreme human greatness, the will “to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection—[…] the eternal circulation” (again WP 1041).
By willing the eternal return of all things, the complementary man wills future suffering and inequality, which will naturally lead to human greatness, whose peak is the greatness of the complementary man, which consists in willing the eternal return of all things; D.C.
But how does “the tyrannical decree that it be a fact” make “the future existence of those prerequisites” a fact? Perhaps as follows?
Integral to the will to the eternal return of all things is the will to the eternal return of the highest, the most difficult problem! For it is that problem and nothing else which makes affirming the eternal return historically necessary.
Funny how perception works. In my eyes, you have been avoiding my challenges to your understanding of Nietzsche systematically for more than a year. Now that for once (I challenge you to come up with any other instances) I do not respond to one single objection you make (because I saw it as irrational), I “tend to evade”… frustrating. But I will address the objection.
The question of material causality (the discussed chain of events) is not in the same category of causality as the question “why being?”. The latter is strictly a concern of placing the human perspective toward an evident fact. I have done this by grounding logic in the term value (made it a grammatical concern), so that: “The question why (as in “Why is there being and not rather nothing?”) is the question for the cause, reason, or purpose, though.” is seen as false, at least if you mean the Heideggerian question. This why is a question of “how are we, as rational entities, to grasp the fact of being?” In other words, what is the root of our logic, where does our conception begin? But all this aside.
Exactly. My answer is that one can not. Willing and imagining suffering and inequality does not amount to spiritual will to power, it has no consequences, except perhaps that you could go out and kill someone to feel superior (relatively “great”).
Of course I agree with this.
But amor fati is not a formula, rather a physiological state, a health, an outlook. It can not be forced. I see this as Nietzsches error/transgression – he saw what the Child was from a distance, from the outside, and tried to attain it – but in doing so he forced himself beyond himself, and I think that this is why he went mad (Madness is also my interpretation of The Seven Seals).
Again, my view: Nietzsche saw the necessity of affirmation but could not attain it, as he kept seeing the world as a monster, which he felt forced to affirm, betraying a part of himself, the weaker, more sensitive part, which was nevertheless crucial.
There is nothing of the innocent cruelty of the Child in Zarathustra. He is a prelude. The future is not contained in him.
Then it does seem that I was right in locating the problem there.
I have come up with an even more simple formula for this: Greatness is a value judgment, which means that it is an instance of inequality. Greatness IS inequality. The smaller variable in the un-equation suffers from being the smaller variable.
Even if these would be prerequisites, an idea you still have to defend, that would still be a false inference. “Prerequisites” does not equal “sufficient cause”.
Then the complementary man would will nothing beyond himself. He would thus not be driven to overcoming. Such a conception is antithetical to the will to power.
The willing of the return of all things is at best a prerequisite. It is not sufficient ground for greatness, and it does not amount to greatness directly. It is simply the attainment of a positive valuation of the world. The very first humble beginning in the grand scheme of master morality ascending.
As you know, suffering and inequality exist all over the world. Many thousands perish every day under these conditions, and many thousands share in bloodthirsty laughter. I think that the “lover of wisdom” will be largely ignored until he attains to actual, living greatness, instead of “willing its prerequisites”.
Again, “prerequisite” does not equal “sufficient cause”. There are things missing from the formula. For instance, the creation of values, the power to create them. Valuation in general. The Apollonian, which is a prerequisite to the Greek Dionysos. Lyricism, art, the spirit of music – all that which makes suffering into tragedy. All that which elevates, which makes unequal.
Your value-ontology thread is full of such instances.
The phrase “to place toward” already makes me regret bringing this up again.
That would not be a spiritual will to power, though…
You’re thinking of the wrong sense of “formula”.
Ugh, always with the “Nietzsche’s error”, which “is why he went mad”… Compare that thread you linked to above.
No. The solution is “willing the whole natural order, the whole natural process”. A part of that willing, of that solution, logically cannot be the problem.
Surely you mean an expression of inequality. And greatness is a value judgment in the sense that “that is great” is a value judgment (at least if supplemented by the judgment “greatness is good”).
It’s not “prerequisites”, however, but “the prerequisites”…
I don’t have to defend that suffering and equality “would be” prerequisites of human greatness!
In a way, yes. Did you read what I said on Facebook when I posted those two links to lectures on Heidegger on your wall? Here’s a rendition into English:
“Like every will to power, the will to the eternal recurrence does want to have existence differently, but only by willing an eternity for it that is not the end of its transience, but the eternalisation thereof. I conceive this as an [i]Aufhebung /i of the will to power.”
