Because it seems like you’re talking to me, yet none of that applies or makes any sense based on our interactions thus-far.
It doesn’t make any sense to you, perhaps… But that, too, makes perfect sense to me. I’m showing you yourself in my mirror, but because your soul is so warped, it seems to you that my mirror is warped.
You may be a natural philosopher, you may honestly pursue the truth that’s out there, but you’re no political philosopher, you haven’t pursued the truth that’s in here.²
“[…] the primacy of political philosophy, or the concentration on that part of philosophy in which the whole of philosophy is in question, in which its political defense and its rational foundation are of concern, in which the self-knowledge of the philosophers has its place.” (Heinrich Meier, “The History of Philosophy and the Intention of the Philosopher”, emphasis mine.)
Your soul is warped by your spiritedness, your spirit of revenge. You’re still an angry young man or, as Faust put it, a TPN—a testosterone-poisoned Nietzschean. Yes, even and especially in your impatience with Nietzsche, not to use any stronger words.
And yes, I too used to be like that! Though not quite as bad, like I said.
The charge of “cuckoldry” is so 2016, by the way! Ah, 2016, when all manner of petty tyrants felt they were on top of the world…
This, again, suggests something that’s wrong: namely, that I agree with Blake that the wrath of the lion be the wisdom of God (or “God”). But Blake says the same thing in different words when he uses the authority of the prophet Isaiah to argue “that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” (op.cit., plate 12). And nothing could be further from the truth:
“Nobody lies as much as the indignant man.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 26 end.)
One can honestly experience indignation, but this tells us nothing about whether the object of that experience is actually unjust, unworthy, etc.; in fact, in such a state one is most likely to be dishonest!
Only when your conscience is turned against itself can you separate the science from the con! “A conscience behind your ‘conscience’,” as Nietzsche puts it in The Gay Science, aph. 335…
¹ “Acceptance”:
² Chris Christie, “I Have An Admission To Make”.
“Of Spinoza’s[!] philosophy, which had failed in its attempt to refute the possibility of revelation by means of a comprehensive system that would leave no room for an unfathomable God, Strauss had said that it rests ‘on an unevident decision, an act of the will, just as faith,’ yet regarding that philosophy, he had also expressly spoken of ‘unbelief.’ By contrast, of the philosophy following[!] Nietzsche, which no longer makes any serious effort to refute the possibility of revelation but instead rests satisfied with its cruelty toward itself and, out of probity, forbids itself belief, he says that ‘its basis is an act of the will, of belief.’ Whence the difference originates between the former philosophy, which rests on an ‘act of the will,’ and the latter philosophy, which is based on an ‘act of belief,’ Strauss makes quite clear in the final paragraph of the ‘summary’: ‘A new kind of fortitude which forbids itself every flight from the horror of life into comforting delusion, which accepts the eloquent descriptions of “the misery of man without God” as an additional proof of the goodness of its cause, reveals itself eventually as the ultimate and purest ground for the rebellion against revelation. … This final atheism with a good conscience, or with a bad conscience, is distinguished from the atheism at which the past shuddered by its conscientiousness. Compared not only with Epicureanism but with the unbelief of the age of[!] Spinoza, it reveals itself as a descendant of biblical morality.’ What distinguishes the philosophy of the age of[!] Heidegger from the philosophy of earlier ages is its morality. What allows it to be based on belief are its unquestioned moral presuppositions. What constitutes its weakness in the face of faith in revelation is the insufficient confrontation with moral and political opinions not only that are determinative for its opponent but also by which it allows itself to be determined.” (Meier, “The Theologico-Political Problem”.)
Three different philosophies are distinguished here: 1) the early modern philosophy of (the age of) Spinoza; 2) the late modern philosophy following Nietzsche, the “postmodern” philosophy of (the age of) Heidegger; and 3) the premodern philosophy of Epicureanism… These are characterized respectively by 1) unbelief, or the will to security; 2) belief, or the moral will to intellectual probity; and 3) the “natural desire for truth”, or the philosophical eros. (Cf. ibid. ff.)
Now in a private message I sent on March 10, 2023, I wrote:
‘[H]ere’s the thing. I don’t know how well you’re aware of this, but I’m actually an extremely proud man. But I should now say ‘vain boy’ instead: for if there is no free will, there can be nothing to be proud of! Not only is nothing my merit, but I can’t even be proud of anyone else—not even a God… And it’s not just pride that goes out of the window, but anything that requires me to identify as, or with, a free agent: cruelty, for example. In fact, I think that, insofar as one is aware of this, there can be no pleasure, joy, etc. whatsoever!’
Cruelty. The pleasure of cruelty consists in identifying with, or as, a free agent—the one who inflicts the suffering in question. (“Suffering” also in the sense of suffering enjoyment, undergoing enjoyment… In other words, the pleasure of cruelty consists in identifying with, or as, the activity or action that’s logically behind some perceived passivity or passion.)
(Quote source: https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2907265#p2907265)
Now the thing is that even if your conscience is turned against itself, you still identify with a God…
“The beautiful is suddenly disclosed and visible, the whole that was perceived only piecemeal and disparately lights up in a flash, insights converge and gain an undreamt of, unforeseeable, overwhelming radiance in whose light things are no longer as they seemed, and life can no longer remain as it was. The prophet will be absorbed in the devotion to the beautiful. He is remolded, transformed, and newly minted in his individuality. He knows himself to be a vessel of God and nothing more. He will trace the happiness of transcending his own limitedness, the subsumption of the particular in the universal, his losing himself in the whole […] in awe and reverence back to the author of the whole. In his felicity he will become aware of his mission. He will place himself completely in the service of the sovereign authority and, with all the resources available to him, defend the order that it guarantees and that he craves. The philosopher turns his gaze in the opposite direction. He relates the beautiful back to the good. In his felicity he becomes aware of his own activity. In his erotic nature he recognizes the strength that carries him beyond himself and the power that enables him to find himself again in the whole. The experience of the beatitudo […] encourages him to live the dialectical tension between […] the necessarily anonymous truth and its individual understanding, between the devotion to the beautiful and the knowledge of our needy nature, which allows this devotion to be good for us.” (Meier, “On the Genealogy of Faith in Revelation”.)
If devotion to a God is good for us, there’s still a good to pursue and a self to pursue it. But what’s really the case is that there’s a need, a desire, an eros, and what’s “good” for this eros is devotion to the beautiful illusion of a good to pursue and a self to pursue it! For it’s only in the felicity this illusion provides that eros can become aware of itself, of its own “activity”:
“‘In order that there might be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to—emerge: beings¹ with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche’s answer reads: ‘beings¹ with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the beings¹ that populate it. But the beings¹ are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their being² organizes itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its own. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the changes of an organic being¹ its εἶδος, its form. This form is never purely realized. It never comes into full presence. But all the phases in the development of a living being¹ may be designated as becoming or perishing, that is to say as degrees of approximating or moving away from the realization of the form. Therefore the form has the character of the τέλος—the goal immanent in each living being.¹ Greek ontology designates the self-identical τέλος as the true being² of each thing that moves. The designation of the τέλος as the being² of entities³ suggests itself strongly when one considers that becoming, that is, the transition into being,² is a process of approximating the immanent τέλος, and that perishing, conversely, is a process of moving away from the immanent τέλος. But with the decline and eventual fall of metaphysics, the possibility of designating a non-sensual, never given being¹ as the true being² of the temporal vanishes as well. If the τέλος has no being,² then the only remaining alternative is to interpret it as a non-being² that presents itself as a being,² that is, to interpret it as show [Schein]. Now it remains true, however, that all life is only made possible by the fact that a being¹ organizes itself in the striving after such a unity. One cannot say that the τέλος were a man-made fiction. Every living being¹ is in actual fact oriented towards an organizing unity. Thus the show of the τέλος is a show brought forth by nature itself. Show, or, as Nietzsche also puts it: error, is the condition of the possibility of life. The unreal world of error is thus no man-made fiction but the real world of living creatures.¹ All living creatures¹ whatsoever exist only through the belief in persisting things, that is to say through their striving after the organizing unity of the τέλος. But that after which they strive never has a being.² Thus they exist only by virtue of error. The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself [i.e., the contradiction between past and future]. Torn into its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, by itself and out of itself, no subsistence [Bestand]: it is only as it produces show out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a show. […W]ithout show, the eternal flux has no subsistence. It must produce show out of itself. Show therefore belongs to its truth.” (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 250-52, my translation.)
¹ Wesen.
² Sein.
³ Seiende.
Hegel.
Nuf said.