Malice

Mo, no malice intended here but your new avatar is no where near as effective as the one projecting an impression of the Marlboro man epitomizing the rugged individual/cowboy sitting around the campfire out in the Badlands somewhere.

This new one looks like, well, Adrien Brody. Kinda mousey.

On the other hand, I don’t even know how to create one! :wink:

I actually agree with you here, a point at which Aletheia and myself find ourselves at odds often enough–though I hope sans animosity. To attempt to understand such an intricate social body as we inhabit with no regard to how it came about is…well, myopic at best. The stark contrast of baring the fangs to the smile of human society warrants looking into and certainly implies a (now) more or less subtle malice. Anyone read about (or been in the company of) debutantes, parvenus, the bourgeoisie to high society in general (you know, the pretentious boners living in named manors) is more than familiar with the perfunctory nature of court civilities. Perhaps somewhere along the lines we began to believe the ruse. Observing the signification of the smile in culture at large metastasize over the years would be an interesting study.

Perhaps my insult to Mo was not clear enough. It is his reduction to “primitive animality”, not merely reference to it (e.g. of course we have an animal past, and of course this past has and still influences much of what we do/are), which is irrelevant here.

This exploration into the psychology of what I have called “malice” here is built upon such things as, for example, our animal past. The basic pathological drives are remnants of this past. What we experience as sentimental, passional, emotional reactions are derivatives of this basic “pleasure/pain” set-up of “instincts”. All that goes, or should go, without saying. My explorations here are subsequent to this, they take it all into account from the outset, they build upon it. So, the reduction of the sort of psychological responses and conscious functions which I am analyzing here to this instinctual set-up is, again, irrelevant.

We evolved, we are apes, we are animals. Yes yes, we get it. This is no big insight any more, no profound revelation. We shake hands because it is (i.e. arose because it led, in the past, to giving a distinct survival (social-structural) advantage) a display of passivity, yes yes. Now what?

Also interesting is the idiotic mis-construal of what I said, of “If I ever catch myself saying something like, “I didn’t understand what you said, …oh, but it’s also worse than useless””, when in fact what I stated was that what Mo said does not make sense. I did not state that I do not understand it. I understand it quite well, which is how I know it is irrelevant here.

Amusing how these simple little logical feats, like mentally construing a simple statement of clear meaning as it was written down, can remain so totally out of reach.

Math,

Continue with this person if you want; I can’t.

The point of my first post was to ask for a clarification, everything else there being a justification of why the clarification was needed. (Some nice writing. A few insights. All dressing for my question). This is clear from the post itself. I’m not sure why aletheia’s insult was needed, or why the follow-up seemed so incoherent. And btw, imagine the absurdity of someone now claiming to have understood what also did not make sense. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t a waste of my post. I mean, the claim to have understood something that did also not make sense!

Hark at the wind.

And how might you know something “made no sense”, or was “irrelevant”, unless you understood it?

The equivalent of what you did: I say, “We have all these complex psychological drives, they work together in such-and-such a way, this is a result of that, which has led to this over here… that instinct tends to manifest like this, when it is … but like that when it is rather … etc. etc. etc.”, to which you reply, “We were primates once.”

I mean, really. I know you can do better.

Your “comments” might not even have been in reference to my post here, you touch on none of the content. Nor do your subsequent replies touch on any of the content of my own continuing replies to you. Like I said, it is truly fascinating to see a mind slide away like that, escape so naturally and totally into delusion, into irrelevance.

You’ve turned idiocy into quite an art. You ought be proud.

Now, if you wish to actually address the substance of my post here, by all means, go right ahead. But a hint: the whole “we are animals, we have evolved combat and hunting instincts, our social behavior derives from animality” is always-already implied within what I’ve said here, so if that is what you really want to focus on – if you’d rather look back than forward, or hell, even look back rather than at the present – at least try to meaningfully draw that out in light of the topic here. At least make some effort.

I know you can do it.

The point of my post was to ask you for a clarification and expanded explanation. This makes your ensuing comments about my not addressing your post not only ridi… Anyways, here’s what I wrote:

AND EVERYTHING I SAID was was to bolster the need for a further explanation on your part. After your comments, I’m afraid I have no interest in hearing it. And besides, you may have already agreed with me that “playful malice” is borderline an oxymoron.

LOL. How would you know something made no sense unless you couldn’t understand it? If you understood it, then guess what? --It makes fucking sense.

I have? I should?

Thank you for your explanation and definitions. Using ‘playful’ as an adjective modifying ‘malicious’ is putting opposites together–like “beautiful ugliness” (although it’s easier for me to understand the latter than the former.) Perhaps that’s why I have trouble with Nietzsche.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to paraphrase your next paragraph just to see if I understand it correctly.

When someone acts maliciously, they sometimes do so because they don’t recognize the potential for harm their actions may cause another–the result of the action is unpredictable (chaotic) because it’s unknown. Because ‘innocence’ has no understanding of consequence, an ‘innocent’ cannot have either compassion or concern for another–nor can an ‘innocent’ keep himself from unwitting malice. Nietzsche called this the “playful innocence of the Child” in Also Sprach Zarathrustra, meaning–(and here’s where I have a problem. You say “its” with the antecedent being the child. It could also be “it’s”–it is–with the antecedent being the child’s innocence.) Which do you mean?

Now I’ll use my own words. I agree, compassion is more than either sympathy or empathy–or a combination of both. Compassion means trying to help the person in need as well as you can. Now I’ll come back to malice. People are malicious when they are fully aware that what they do will hurt someone else, but they do it anyway. For example, this often entails a whisper of truth, half-truth or non-truth meant to denigrate. If the whisper is made to another person who feel’s as you do, it’ll be passed on. One homophobe can go to another homophobe and say pretty much anything about a third person and be believed. People who do things like that aren’t innocent nor are they being ‘playfully malicious.’ They’re just spitefully mean!

There are multitudinous reasons for being spitefully mean and all of them, imm, stem from fear.

However, if I’m incorrect in my understanding of you words, please correct me. I have no desire to derail your thread. (Although I do admit to hoping to derail mo’s rather tedious arguments.)

Let me try this another way, as I have two main objections.

I) I wonder why you feel the ‘negative’ emotions substantiate your existence as an individual more than the ‘positive’ ones. Perhaps I’m way off base here, but it seems to me that anger is something that defines you contra others, in a bellicose ‘I am not that’ sense. Let’s take chess for example: I know my anger at losing is not directed at my inadequacy but the opponent’s superiority. Is this really me at my most replete state of dasein? On the contrary, when I play a piece of music on the piano well, take an inspiring photo, express an opinion that is lauded, my focus (though sometimes aided or even induced by the praise of others) is on my accomplishment (“I am this”)–my successful expression of self–and this, I feel, is my zenith of self-awareness.

II) Malice is defined as the desire to inflict injury; it’s unequivocally intentional. Innocence thus can’t be malicious as the intent is not to harm another but to benefit oneself. Though you seem to have begun to notice this yourself, it still seems a bit confused. You appear to describe more of a sociopath (or a graduation thereof) than an innocent: the self-interest supersedes the consequences bestowed external to the individual, this stemming from a “lack of guiding compassion and concern for another,” or in other words a lack of empathy–ergo sociopath. Perhaps you could transpose your concepts onto a graduation of sociopathy, the consciousness of one’s locus in that graduation and the conscious behavior as a result of this–or if this is analogous to what you’re developing, I could just translate in my head, but I often find our signifiers conflict and as a result have difficulty interpreting the gestalt of your ideas.

Aside from that, I do think you were too quick to disregard Mo’s and my post–and that’s saying something, as Mo and I don’t have the most congenial history.

Yes, it is as if no one can be bothered to read, and then think about, what they are attempting to comment upon (no offense intended toward you, that is largely meant for Mo). These issues are raised and dealt with in the OPs here, and those issues which require further explication are made subject to an outline of the direction and means of departure which would set us along a continual path of development and exploration. That all this is ignored and instead one merely circulates around the base, at the level of definitions, is unfortunate, but still salvageable so long as this is aimed toward something – toward an intent at higher understanding. Which can come as a refutation or rebuke, of course. Nothing wrong with that.

Allow me to respond to each of your points more precisely, then:

What substantiates your existence is sensational interactivity and expression, it is the experience/s of your organism, of your ‘consciousness’. Negative and positive here, to use there labels (I would prefer not, but for the sake of demonstration) are entirely equal in this regard. What matters is not is this feeling “negative” or “positive” but rather: what does this feeling indicate, into what relations, with what, does it enter, and why? What sort of telos does this, in the mind, to the subject, attain, and does this telos impose itself upon the form-al expression or necessity or possibility of the experience, in an ‘a priori’ or structurating-conditioning manner, and why or why not?

Your example of anger at losing a game is only a limited analysis. In fact, this anger is very much directed at the self. It is just that the self tends to blind itself to this fact, to prefer to externalize the anger outwardly, in order to protect the ego. We can see that anger, to continue this example, arises here from an imbalance or disconnect between what one desires or intends and what in fact plays out, what is actual. This disconnect generates here a passional response which we name ‘anger’. To merely state that anger is “directed at the opponent” not only does not address the actual ‘telos’ (or, if you prefer, psychial structure and causality-generation) of the sensation, but it reduces the sensation of anger to its superficiality of expression and justified rationale, its “target” which ignores the situational context in which anger arises and by which it is conditioned. This context includes both the subject who is expressing-experiencing “anger” as well as this subject’s environmental elements which interact with the subject’s pathological (or, passional, emotional, sensational) nexus. Of course we can see how this “pathological” response, this emotion is the result of this reaction’s expressing with regard to cognitive/rational consciousness, which is to say, we get “angry” when some sort of expectation, intention, or desire is “thwarted” or somehow confounded or made inaccessible and we are, in some manner, made aware of this.

When you perform a piece of music successfully, this “positive” feeling reinforces your ego, generates satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, self-validation. This is no more existentially, ontologically or even teleologically prior-to experiences like “anger” which are more a refinement of suffering. The conceptual/rational “faculties” “color” these states by interpreting them with regard to their own expectation, imag-ination and necessity of form/s; what the emotion “itself” reveals is precisely this nature of expression, the necessity surrounding the pathological release/response. What you feel tells you something about yourself (and of course, about your situation as well). This is not either/or, not one or the other. One is not “better” than another, positive experience (so-called) does not “lie closer to the heart of dasein” than negative experience (again, so-called). Self-awareness is not merely “positive” emotional catharsis or self-validation under the forms of pathological release, it goes much further than this – it involves, for one thing, the ability to objectify and distance oneself from these sensations, to a degree, in order to begin to see how these experiences express and thus what they reveal about yourself to yourself, what they reveal about the interactivity between yourself-as-subject (“dasein”) and your environment/s, and why/how.

This is definitional. I stated in my second post, that I am no longer convinced ‘malice’ is the right word here, and I began to outline the reason for this. The idea of malice, as you say, is taken to mean intentionality. But Nietzsche’s meaning, which I mentioned, as per the “Child” is the “playful maliciousness” which is not an intention to harm but rather a lack of intention to “care”, to be concerned with another. This lack of compassionate/caring intention toward the other can be more or less “direct” or "indirect: it can be either assumed/unconscious, as in a person who truly has no capacity to understand how their actions affect the other, or it can be innocent/conscious as in a person who “wills” or intends – who knows but does not “care” – that their intentionality does not encompass their possible (detrimental) impact upon another. Nietzsche’s Child (re: the progression from Camel to Lion to Child) is an example of this latter: it is a being for whom the “needs” or concerns of others has become unimportant, unable to inform its intentions/motives. But this is essentially an unimportance of lack, not of substance: it is a substantiated lack which is necessitated by the fact that this being has become able to “sustain itself” or “will itself”, be itself as it is, only in so far as it is able to operate with some degree of disregard for the concerns and needs of the other. This is not an intention to harm, but it is also very deliberately not an intention to concern oneself either. Indeed even this Child can be able to experience sadness, regret or sympathy at the misfortunes of others, even those which the Child itself caused or contributed toward. In other words, this Child is not “heartless”, far from it. This is the internal complex structurality of this psychological type which Nietzsche was outlining with this metaphor, and which I have brought up in this topic for further consideration.

Recourse to the label of sociopathy is not helpful here, because, like that of malice, it is a notion which is already pre-ordained with set meaning. It is inflexible definitionally, which is in itself not problematic, except that this notion is then allowed, before the fact, to condition our thinking about these ideas at all. You approach these ideas of malice, innocence, intention and for you the concept of sociopathy is a signifier, a form-al designator. And yet this designation is rather instead a more final-production of these more nuanced and ‘primary’ objects under analysis here, e.g. the sensational reactions, the “rational intentionality”, and these more or less “individual” attaining as well as their entering into relations with/in each other and thus their mutually co-occurring expressions.

Sociopathy is a useful concept here, but you are proposing we use it as a pre-emptive blinder in order to designate the manner in which we allow these passional or rational-intentional elements to be grasped, seen, understood. Rather I would have these experiential elements, these psychological expressions and ‘drives’ analyzed in their own, as they are, and the build up from there – this building up will certainly arrive us at a point of understanding what is commonly referred to as sociopathy, but this understanding will not be a notional legislator acting a priori to form-alize and condition our understandings of that which should, in fact, be rather formalizing and conditioning what we think of as “sociopathy”.

This thread had best take a turn for the civil, or warnings will be issued.

As you can see, it since has.

You put “playful maliciousness” in quotes, called it a “lack of intention to care”, and then attributed it to Nietzsche.

3 Things—you’re wrong about all of them.

(1) Could you please point out the passage you’re referring to when you refer to the term “playful maliciousness”? It’s not in 3 Metamorphoses, as you suggested, nor is it anywhere in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nor is any synonym of “playfulness” ever connected to any synonym of “maliciousness”, not in the same section, and not anywhere in the entire book except in an off-hand comment in the passage about scholars. And the reference there is to the simple notion that a child knows not right or wrong, and is thus innocent even when it does wrong. So, please, help me out by pointing me to the passage you’re referring to. That I’ve memorized the book doesn’t convince me that I’m not overlooking the passage you’re referring to—it’s just not the one you said you were referring to. And btw, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making things up—or divining insights from nowhere particular, if that’s how you’d prefer to think of yourself—just don’t try to sell your bread on someone else’s authority.

(2) and (3)You go on to grab at (or divine) a bunch of stuff about “a lack of intention to care”—an odd phrase when you think about it. Let’s be clear: Not a single thing you made up in this paragraph has a single thing to do with my dear Fritz. That the Child is not a load-bearing spirit like the Camel has nothing to do with whether the person who embodies the Child archetype thinks the “needs or concerns of others are unimportant”. As a matter of fact, that’s just simply false—and even at odds with what the archetype itself represents! The idea here is that the Lion and the Child do not submit to (read: burden themselves with) self-effacing commands of the form “Thou-shalt”. But if you think the only way to care or concern yourself with another person is to submit to self-effacing commands of the form “Thou-shalt”, then you’re just wildly mistaken. In fact, think about what the Child itself represents… The Child represents the person for whom value-creation is a possibility. (As an aside, think about what a value-creator like Nietzsche has directed his caring at. Do you think it is himself? Because that’s what everything you’ve said implies. No, clearly not! And it’s not just any other person, but it’s clearly another person. Call them the Free Spirits—you know, the people he writes for. Nevermind the manmensch called Uber. That’s called concerning yourself with another). Could you please explain how you can somehow associate ‘not caring about another’ with the Child archetype?? How are you walking on these airy non-existent bridges? My poor Fritz…

WHAT?!

You have, in my opinion, avoided my fundamental differentiation between the experience of self through anger and through happiness: “I am not that” / “I am this” respectively. Instead, you portend to contradict my premise on the grounds that I am absolutely upset with myself and thereby externalize the anger through projection—or some similar defense mechanism. If the anger is directed at the self (ego) but “in order to protect” said ego, is externalized, can the anger not then be said to be at least re-directed at another—and is this not, as I said, something that defines me contra others rather than as an individual independent of others? Further, I believe I said “my anger at losing is not directed at my inadequacy but the opponent’s superiority”: perhaps I need expressly note that the telos, the catalyst for my anger is ultimately a matter of contradicting intention and eventuality, immediately manifest as an inferiority to my opponent—that the above quote emphasizes the confluence of experience into emotion, its subsequent direction, and in what way this affects the relation of the individual to the external world. Your prose is advanced, but it failed to explain to me where you disagree other than that experiencing individuality/dasein through ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions are (either) qualitatively and/or quantitatively equivalent, which happens to be the crux of the objection that you have, in my opinion, avoided. I feel it’s a valid point, but whatever. Moving on.

Then this sounds more like what I call ‘selfishness’ or ‘egocentricity’. Fine, but you seem to have misinterpreted my use of ‘sociopathy’: it was meant as a graduated strata, a sloped or curved foundation upon which is constructed the apparent self (that which you display to the world) and which, when used as a conceptual model, aids in analysis of this conscious experience: think of it as the BWO of which a given degree of sociopathy is one component. Now you say ‘sociopathy’ is inflexible, but I beg to differ. Without augmenting the definition itself we can attach ‘relative’ to it and instantly arrive at the potential for a graduation (or field of quantitative-variation, if you prefer).

Regrettably, I must admit I’m losing interest. Like with the ‘Theory of Consciousness’, I’m wondering if this isn’t just a contrarian attempt at a para-psychology, a desire to explain the work of Freud and Jung in a more philosophical dialect qua The Gay Science.

aletheia

Google defines malice as …

It would appear to be a far cry between acting in a less than totally compassionate way and controlling one’s intention to do evil. Most of us do not intentionally intend to do evil - but we are capable of acting in a less than totally compassionate way through our lack of awareness.

As I wrote, this often takes an initial form of ambivalence -- malice, or a lack of compassion/caring will express as a disinterestedness, lack of concern, or neutrality toward another and his or her needs. 

What you seem to be describing here is a form of apathy - which in my book does not necessarily translate into malice. One may not care, one way or the other for a person, in the way you describe above, which is totally unloving, but it may not be seen as malicious - as wanting to cause harm. I think the difference is in the intent. I’m not sure though.

It may be narcissistic and selfish but still - malicious seems to be too strong a word to use here. Malicious has the conscious intent to harm, no?

What do you mean by maliciousness can be naive or self-responsible?

By unbounded do you mean “unlimited”? Perhaps malice is also a form of apathy in motion…deliberately wanting to incur harm on another.

Innocence may be lacking in awareness and so a certain amount of guilt and responsibility toward something may be excused or understood but innocence is not maliciousness because maliciousness acts in total understanding of its intentions - it wants to inflict pain. Though one can say that maliciousness may also encompass a lack of understanding and reality for what is…the only forethought in maliciousness is the intent to hurt.

There is nothing playful about that. You would be surprised at how compassionate children can be for other children…much more so than the malicious, childish adult is toward other adults.

Yes, compassion is love in action.

It is ALWAYS a response though…if it is simply a thought or intent to move, it is not compassion. Compassion acts with passion and love.

I choose to call it narcissistic, 'lacking awareness" and a sense of responsibility toward others - but for me still it is a far cry from malicious. But it can become, grow into malice - at the very least, the person does not psychically grow up and may have a great potential to cause harm.

And by the way, aletheia, “Thank you for your comment” is always a polite way of recognizing someone’s post, whether or not you agree with it. :neutral_face:

I am not so convinced that anger vs happiness is an effective analogy for reactionism/opposition vs affirmation. I think anger can and should be understood as its own entity, first, and then subsequently placed within the total pathology of the self, in its proper relations to the other forms of emotional expression. I think we do well to grasp these states or psychological modes in their own ‘essence’ and necessity/function first, but of course not also without a parallel attempt to situate these contextually. What I oppose strongly is this a priori, definition and pre-emptive approach, the approach that makes assumptions based on an intuitive sort of “common sense” understanding and then proceeds to think underneath these invisible-legislating assumptions.

As I noted, I do not believe that happiness is any less “reactionary” (or any more self-affirmative) than is anger. This stems directly from my fundamental understanding of what consciousness is. Every expression is a release, every outward dynamism a reaction and product of causal impelling forces, necessities. Consciousness, as a whole, is just the most-abstracted and total scope of this entire process, reflected back to/within/with respect to itself. Sensation is always reactive, “oppositional”. What we think of as “affirmative” of the self is so not because it is not reactive-oppositional, but because it attains a particular telos and qualia for us. These telos and qualia, then, themselves stem from a particular sort of subjective utility. My entire analysis here is bent on trying to tease apart these sort of relations; what my analysis is not bent upon is forming arbitrary or unsubstantiated, a priori definitions and then proceeding to think from within these, nor to push analysis to the farthest extremes in order to secure a more or less simple and literal definitional ‘logic’.

What is relevant here is the necessity with which the “sociopathic” subject employs its “egocentricity”. There are various reasons why a sociopathic subject is such, or indeed as you rightly say, there are many reasons why subjects attain to whatever position upon the graduated strata of sociopathy which they occupy. We can conceive a simple disinterestedness as contrasted with a more malicious intentionality; we can conceive a non-sociopathic innocence as contrasted with a sociopathic innocence instantiated and enforced under the banner of some necessity to and for this subject. These cases are wildly different, and this difference does not merely lie along a continuum ranging from less to more sociopathic – it lies on the level of the reason/s and sufficient cause/s of this sociopathic tendency. Which is to say, how this attitude is valued by the subject itself, what telos does it partake of with respect to this subject.

You will notice that the definitional approach here, even your more subtle definitional approach of the continuum gradiation of sociopathy, must fail to address these meta-sociopathic concerns, the problem as to the reasons and necessity for/of this sociopathy, with respect to the sociopathic subject. This problem invokes a need to do a subjective analysis on the level of values, motivation, telos; subjective necessity springs thusly from the ‘whole scope of being’ in so far as this necessity gathers for the subject and organizes, ex ante, its own possibilities of expression. Indeed such gradiation of sociopathy is one aspect of the BWO, to employ D&G’s terminology here, but we must, if we are set on more truly undertanding this facet of subjective being, descend our analysis more toward the level of the BWO itself, more into the level of the machinery of this subject which operate to couple differing tiers and layers with/in each other, more toward those necessitating-impelling organic structures of which “sociopathy” is but one expression and production.

And you can call an attempt to produce a philosophical conception of the psychology of man “para-psychology” if you wish, but this does not belie the actual enterprise itself. I see no problem with attempting a philosophical (i.e. rational) understanding of the psychology, of the inward life-consciousness. Empiricism informs reason just as it flows from it, but where empiricism eschews philosophy and a “philosophical dialect” we can only be left therein with a stagnant impotence, with a void.

My goal here was to explore, on the level of motivation, of value, of subjective telos the relationship/s between malice and other forms of psychological expression as well as the necessity, or lack thereof, for/of these to the conscious subject. Nietzsche propsed a particular sort of psychological development occurring within that consciousness which begins more and more, under the method of “philosophy”, to grasp inwardly itself and its various reasons why it is as it is. As this consciousness edifies itself and continues to progress, or perhaps merely because such a consciousness changes “naturally” due to the aging-growth process, it can come to pass through several phases of pathological/passional expression, “moralistic” need. This is more properly how this developing subject situates itself with respect to what it conceives of as moral reality, as its moral-free self, which is to say its manner of obligation and self-responsibility, and how this being-situated-toward changes, and why. This is all of direct import to any attempt to explicate the inward life of consciousness, which is to say, to the philosopher. I do not imagine that the scientist or scholar has much need for such things, however.

Response pending…no point posting twice.