Strauss's "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's _BGE_", § 35.

Dear WL,

Are you asking me whether FixedCross now ever reminds me of you then? Only of you in the very beginning of those debates, and only vaguely, and only now that you mention it. You seemed to understand Nietzsche’s “superhuman being” as some kind of transhuman being back then. But you soon stopped clashing with Bill about your and his apparently incompatible interpretations, and became a student rather than a self-appointed teacher. It seems sanctimoniousness and self-appointed teacherhood go well together.

It definitely does often seem to me that the things you said back then about the entity or non-entity behind the pseudonym Fixed Cross are still quite applicable today.

Best regards,

Sauwelios

Thank you for commenting candidly, I consider it very educational to have that on record.
Behold, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same! New Osbornes are needed. New shock&awe studies of BGE.
Truly, to study philosophy is to meddle with a magic cauldron, as what you put into it is never what you think you had put in, and what you get out is never what you thought you got out.

Label-juggling does not survive contact with the witchbrew.

-WL

boo-ya

Sau, forgive me for again intruding, but I once again reread your OP. You give an excerpt from Leo Strauss’s essay, but don’t mention a translator. This led me to looking for the essay, because I found it helpful. I never found the essay itself–either in English or in German–and never found the name of a translator of Strauss’s essays, so I assumed it had been written in English.

So the Complementary Man completes Man. Does that then mean the Complementary Man is the Ubermensch? That’s certainly a lot easier to say than “der außergewöhnlicher Mann”–the extraordinary man. lol

I don’t know if being cited on Google means that you’re becoming famous, exactly–but–you never know! You may become known as Googley Goodone, Savant Sauwelios–but probably not. :smiley:

FC, thank’s for your input. I’m okay with it up to your last sentence:

“Hence, “the ER must be affirmed” – the logical circularity implicit in the reflection on the subject has to be incorporated into some aspect of the philosophy, but this is done without logically addressing it, the circularity has to be made into a “cosmic ring”. This signifies that Nietzsche had not yet abandoned the idea of objectivity altogether, had not embraced perspectivism as a true ontological ground. Perhaps because this would have undone the work of presenting the will-to-power as God, as an omni-present entity, as a great mother-like being in which all are enclosed.

Did N. present the will-to-power as God, or was that some one’s interpretation of N.?

Ah, Bill. Were it only that he could see this little reunion… he would surely weep!
I did sense that it was going to be like this. Back then I was already the only one who suspected that Nietzsche would have to be conquered, overcome by the very means he provided, in order to do justice to these means. But what do you peasants understand of this.

What is here?

The need for a commandment to affirm the given. This is all that could be acquired from the witchbrew?

You can’t possibly be serious.

Dear FixedCross,

The trouble is that F.Nietzsche refers to something using the words you and I both see. If somebody takes the words as the only matter at hand, then the witchbrew ingredients are denatured. It becomes well-mashed and shaken and stirred water, but water nonetheless. This is how I had come to imagine (in Nietzsche) the transhuman possibilities that intoxicate me, and how you deal today with the Recurrence. However, niether of those constructs was Nietzsche’s, but only yours and mine.

I refer to your omnipresent arguments of the form: “The philosopher claims he sees red. If red is a colour, then it is part of the rainbow, and therefore what concerned Nietzsche was atmospheric precipitation. Luckily today we have much better data on this. We may overcome Nietzsche using this data and my logics.” Meanwhile, the red may have been there as a sign of danger, or simply to agitate the bullheaded.

This note is to caution you against drawing semantic conclusions from the linguistic or logical behaviour of English labels.

-WL

The quote is from Strauss’s essay “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”, which was originally written in English. So far so good!

Not just man, the rest of existence.

I think so, yes.

I think this deserves a response now, if only in the light of WL’s question.

The will to the eternal recurrence, the supreme will to power, is indeed the “will to will”. And this is indeed related to a need, though not to a need to will but to a need for will. Thus in BGE 56, the only section of BGE devoted explicitly to the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche describes the complementary philosopher as the human-superhuman being who “has need of precisely this spectacle [i.e., the spectacle of “that which was and is” (ibid.), of “the whole natural process”]—and makes need of it: because he ever again has need of himself—and makes need of himself”.

Lampert translates Nietzsche’s Not (“need”) as “necessity” when he interprets this section, and says that it “is not a physical or cosmic necessity but a lover’s necessity, erotic necessity” (Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 119). And in his latest book, he defines philosophy as “the highest eros of a whole that can be [rationally] understood as eros and nothing besides” (Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, page 13). The phrase “eros and nothing besides”, being entirely reminiscent of Nietzsche’s phrase “will to power and nothing besides” (BGE 36 and WP 1067), implies that “eros” is the Socratic or Platonic name for the same phenomenon for which Nietzsche’s name is “will to power”, and this is confirmed on page 417. The Nietzschean equivalent of the phrase “highest eros of”, however, is then “highest will to power over”. Philosophy, Nietzscheanly defined, is the highest will to power over a whole that can be rationally understood as will to power and nothing besides. And this highest or supreme will to power is the most spiritual or intellectual (geistig) will to power (BGE 9; cf. WP 617): it does not seek to “change the world”, it only “interprets the world differently” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)—it wishfully or willfully interprets the world as eternally recurring will to power and nothing besides.

The idea of “the complementary man” stands to be related to the ascetic ideal. If one wanted to be charitable to the text and give credence to its many criticisms of this traditional ideal, then it could simply be renamed, becoming the “esoteric ascetic ideal”, or just the esoteric ideal.

This should rightly fascinate lizbethrose to no end, how it had happened that at the pinnacle of Nietzsche studies one would find formulas like the one shown by Sauwelios. A higher man of affirmation, who does not shirk from the “problem of suffering”, but on the contrary praises its erotic necessity, and by whom the eternal return is ASSERTED, niether logically proved nor even shown to be true, but willed, out of inherent perfection, to be true.

The eternal return means: “everything as it is, forevermore!”, and is in more than one sense equal to the spiritual purport of the familiar “thy will be done…”, as understood by those who understand, and not merely choose to recite it.— The proof-less affirmation spoken of before means: to formulate a faith out of the core of being, done in such a way that it cannot be otherwise, in all eternity. Is this not an endlessly captivating surprise for some outside observer, how a classicist comes to present the essence of faith, though not the evacuated christian faith, to be sure?

-WL

Dear WL.
Nothing has changed!

““everything as it is, forevermore!”, and is in more than one sense equal to the spiritual purport of the familiar “thy will be done…”, as understood by those who understand, and not merely choose to recite it.”

You have always been a Christian, and tried to draw Nietzsche into the Christian. This is why Bill detested you. I have been mild with you out of respect for your graceful prose.

I leave you and Sauwelios to celebrate your struggle to affirm the world.
This never was Bills concern, of course – affirmation was in his blood, and he needed no tricks to attain to it.

Neither was it ever my concern.
I rather needed to understand why even when seeing it for all its suffering, I found it impossible not to affirm the world.

With value ontology I finally have the proper logos of such a natural affirmation.

Sauwelios – I’m not sure what makes me want to tolerate your utterly disgraceful way of addressing me… pity, I suppose. But that would leave no question that pity is a disgraceful sentiment. So to hell with you.

Lizbethrose – Nietzsche did leave open the possibility of a God, of an eternity, of an all-encompassing being in which the individual may eternally take part.

True, it would be an immoral God*, but at its ground is still an appeal to the illogical and an expression of desire for eternity.

As I see it, Nietzsche is most rational and insightful in his value-studies. If you read much of him, this is the point at which he always comes back; how and what different types of people value, the type of cultures resulting from this, the types of value systems resulting from that. This is Nietzsche staying true to the Earth. The proclamation of the death of God is a call to invent new values. He did his own part in following this call, in attempting to positively valuing all existence by willing the Eternal Recurrence of it. In his notebooks however he writes that, where he attributed to Zarathustra the power to affirm the recurrence of all things, he himself could not (of all things, it seems that his family situation troubled him too deeply to affirm its recurrence). So the ER is a proper religious method of subjection - put forth as a trick, a lure promising greatness, not as an insight. This is the folly of formulating a religiously doctrinal need to affirm the world – all that speaks out of it is that such affirming is a problem. This is a common problem, but not one that warrants being exalted to a religion. A properly affirmative religion would/did simply call to celebrate life in all its aspects. This was the Greek way. A typical Greek would see the opposite of a problem in affirming the eternal recurrence of the world as it is. He would enjoy the idea of it, but realize that it is unfortunately not very likely, so proceed to find meaning within the transience. The sense and taste for the tragic was this honesty’s final consequence in the Greeks.

  • immoral in the sense of being beyond good and evil, what is sought after is an affirmation of nature by denying its transience.

If you’re referring to my response to what you said about a “will to will”: I wasn’t addressing you at all there! :mrgreen:

If you interpret my “will to will” as a “struggle to affirm the world”, you don’t understand the main insight I gained from Strauss’s paragraph 35, which insight was what inspired me to create my “Nietzschean Übermensch” website (though that’s only an attempt, an experiment). I specifically gained that insight from the last two sentences of that paragraph. Paradoxically, what led me to my insight was Lampert’s interpretation of these sentences which I consider to be probably a misinterpretation:

“In the final two sentences of his paragraph on the complementary man’s solution to the most difficult problem [i.e., paragraph 35], Strauss names two different actions with two different actors, an act by one who paves the way for the complementary man, and an act by that ‘highest nature’ itself. ‘While paving the way for the complementary man’—and just what paving the way consists of Strauss does not say—‘one must at the same time say unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples.’ This Yes is part of the unbounded Yes ‘to everything that was and is,’ the part that Zarathustra himself found most difficult. This affirmation leads to the act of the complementary man: ‘Nature, the eternity of nature, owes its being to a postulation, to an act of the will to power on the part of the highest nature.’ Nature complements nature in this most spiritual action, the highest individual nature willing the eternal return of nature.” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 108.)

As I told Lampert:

Actually, WL praised Christianity—Catholicism—for precisely the same reason as Nietzsche did:

“Let us not forget in the end what a Church is, and especially in contrast to every ‘State’: a Church is above all an authoritative organisation which secures to the more spiritual men the highest rank, and believes in the power of spirituality so far as to forbid all grosser appliances of authority. Through this alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the State.” (Nietzsche, GS 358; cf. BGE 61 and AC 57.)

The only thing Nietzsche had against Churches in this sense—Churches for which religion is a means, not an end (see BGE 62)—is that they needed so-called “noble” or “holy” lies. In Nietzsche’s time, which I think is also ours, such lies are no longer necessary. But philosophy’s ideal State is still the same as it was in Plato’s time: a hierarchy based on spirituality. Such a hierarchy very basically consists of three classes: from low to high, those who are characterised by love of well-being and ease, those who are characterised by love of honour, and those who are characterised by love of wisdom. And you, Fixed Cross, seem to belong among the second of these: after all, when you first became interested in Eastern astrology, you put special emphasis on your belonging to “the most ambitious [eerzuchtig, lit. “honour-addicted”] of all the Dragons”; and as in the meantime, you still haven’t been accorded the honours you so crave, you recently exalted yourself for your great ambition: http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=176444. According to your logic, however, such a will to honour implies a lack of honour… Add to this your wishful thinking of yourself as an “arch-father”, a hero of the people, and I’m apt to conclude that you’re a Daedalus:

“Daedalus is the ancient hero fit for the Baconian tasks of invention and engineering for the public good. But Daedalus lacked the public spiritedness essential to Bacon’s undertaking; he was treacherous and lawless, serving only himself in his apparent service of others. How can Bacon dare to entrust the rule of Bensalem to the Daedaluses?
[…] [T]hey can be ‘convicted by their proper vanity’; they can be made to bridle themselves, Bacon hints, if attention is paid to their nature, to what they are rather than what they ought to be. The ancients knew the nature of the Daedaluses: they are, of all men, those most troubled by envy. Their envy is the most bitter and most implacable kind. And their envy never lets them rest. The ancients attempted to reform or repress that ineradicable envy and to make the Daedaluses superfluous. Bacon attempts to use that envy, to direct it by nurturing it in a society that thinks the Daedaluses indispensable.
[…] Bacon brings the envious Daedaluses under Minos by allowing them to be the envy of all. More exactly, he allows the Daedaluses to usurp the powers of Minos and ascend to the positions of rule because he has found a way for their vanity to channel their powers. The vanity of the Daedaluses, the product of their envious natures, requires that they be acknowledged as the singular geniuses they think they are. Uneasy in their self-regard, they crave recognition both by the many and by the few who are like themselves. They are lovers of honor consumed by the passion to be looked upon as marvels and to outstrip those already honored, and in Bacon’s New Atlantis they are given what looks like free reign.
Bensalemite society is calculated to feed the envious natures of the Daedaluses. […] [T]o be fed in their vanity these Daedaluses must put their genius to one use only: the common good. […] Bensalemite society […] satisfies the Daedaluses only when they satisfy others, when they turn their pliable talents to the well-being of those not driven by implacable envy, the great majority driven by nothing higher than a desire for well-being and ease. The envious natures of the Daedaluses are turned to the common good when those natures are fed on all the honor and gratitude their beneficiaries can bestow. And Salomon’s House administers punishments as fitting as these rewards: behavior inappropriate to their powers brings ‘ignominy and fines’—wounded [vanity] and diminished wealth. Such rewards and punishments channel the genius of the Daedaluses by satisfying their natures; they are domesticated, made virtuous or civil by that novel, Baconian form of society that believes Daedalus’s gifts to be worthy of the highest public esteem.” (Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche, pp. 35-37.)

Of course that was not what I referred to.
You and WL as two hands on one belly… how horridly misplaced. As if there ever was an inkling of understanding between you…
or between either of you and Bill…

It is interesting to read your conclusions about my character. I suppose it is this better than the other way around. I see that you do consider my philosophy as a gift, but that you have to attach to my character a negative label in order to accept its worth. You have to conceptualize yourself as morally superior in order to accept my thinking as valid/valuable. Such has always been the dynamism between us – I value your thinking when it makes you appear noble, exalted. I reject your thinking when it reveals a quest to drag down the world into a lowness I did not suspect. You value my thinking when it supports your own, and falsify it when it doesn’t, so that it either fits your constructions, or warrants rejection.

As for my supposed quest for honor, I was already well under way of attaining this through using my talents, when I decided to renounce honor and take the longer road to wisdom and understanding. Now that I cannot conclude otherwise than that I have arrived at a profound understanding that can only mean the beginning of wisdom, I will admit some honor into my life, as it derives quite naturally from the fruits of my labor.

Lastly, what else is your construction than a “noble” lie?

Dear FixedCross,

There is no need to leave, be disparaged. For me, your talents and input are valuable even in ways that you may not value all that highly yourself. Earlier I read your message about there being no sign that F.Nietzsche had voiced any special philosophical objection to jewish world domination, if jews happened to become the master race of his political vision. No one was able to respond,and you highlighted a theme very often ignored. That was well done!

And who knows, one day you may feel inclined to go further and present to the antisemites the idea that they have it all backwards; for it’s not somehow the bumbling, politically active jews, who lately got radicalized by reading Nietzsche, but rather vice versa, and this is everywhere palpable in his political polemic. Baby Nietzsche encountering ancient, thoroughly spiritual jewish doctrine under whatever contemporary veil that was appropriate - and being forever changed.

-WL

This is even more depressing than my high school reunion.

Maybe scathing sarcasm has become so ingrained that someone could read that into my message as well. On the contrary, the message was meant literally, its author striving very much to become more literal and rural.

The fact of the matter is that you and classmates, most of us, are good people and deserve unpoisoned praise for the things we had done especially well. (plus, as always, a good caning for obvious mistakes).

-WL

Part of what depressed me was not being certain whether you were serious or not in your last message. Your second paragraph, especially what you wrote about “bumbling, politically active Jews” and “baby Nietzsche” suggested to me strongly that you were sarcastic. But mainly, I could not myself have drawn the conclusion you suggest I present as an idea to the anti-semites. I am not that confident on this issue. My reply to ravens thread consisted mainly of quotes, and I did not deviate significantly from what I quoted in my conclusions.

Lately, after a journey through Israel where I got to observe the behavior and the faces of orthodox Jews, I have grown for the first time an honest, “superficial” admiration for them. It is visible in their composure that they have been cultivating psychological discipline for thousands of years. An unflinching and unambiguous will to power is also visible in their contemporary architecture. But even if we can agree that Nietzsche also admired (much about) the Jews (as opposed to the beneficiaries of their influence in Europe) this is a long way from enabling me to interpret Nietzschean thinking on politics and power as being a result of an encounter with Jewish doctrine.

If you were indeed serious, I’d certainly like to know how you arrived at this thought.

The problem is the tyrannical decree itself. While life-affirming it constitutes a falsification of what is. A quixotic life affirms the highest type. But if by tyrannical decree then greatness may only be a misinterpretation of windmills as giants.