Because you are reading this, it means that you are alive. Surely this is a good thing.
And because you are alive, someday you will die. And surely this will not be a good thing.
Life is good, and death is not good. What kind of a monster would disagree?
Human desires, desires for sex, desires for wealth, desires for acceptance, all result from the basic premise that life is good and death is not.
But the belief is wrong, and this why virtue and ethics exist. To act “ethically” and “virtously” is to act in accordance with the truth that life is not to be distinguished from death in terms of good and bad. Life and death are the same thing. They are ying and yang. You cannot have one without the other. To disguish between them by assigning different values to each is to make a very, very deep logical error. It is no wonder that we suffer so when a loved one dies: we believe it is a terrible thing, and yet something very deep in side of us, something that most people are too afraid to touch, is telling us that we are wrong. And we hate to be wrong.
Thus, a world beyond good and evil, one without morals and virtues, would be a world in accordance with love, which is really nothing more than truth.
what you say is mostly correct, but you fail to take into account human nature.
we grieve the death of a loved one because we miss that loved one. they are gone from us, and this is the loss of a great emotional and personal value. when you lose a value, you grieve. nothing wrong with this.
but you are correct that death should not be something to call “bad”, not unless we are to call life bad as well. life and death are both mutually dependent on one another, creation and destruction, one then the other. to imagine one alone is meaningless, just as to imagine light without darkness is meaningless. the contrast is what gives either one meaning, the differentiation is what IS the extreme itself, what defines it and gives it expression.
for the overman you are right, that he should live beyond good and bad, and certainly beyond good and evil. that this seems impractical to us, as flawed humans, doesnt mean that the ideal isnt something to aspire to. i aspire to it all the time. but its good to remember that living and seeing beyond good and evil/bad doesnt mean that we cannot value certain things over other things, and we cannot differentiate. life is differentiating, selection. to live, is to select, separate, value.
and certainly, the overman himself would even feel some form of loss at the loss of a value such as a close friend or lover. its just that this loss of value does not define us, we move through and beyond it; we can both see that its irrelevant in the long run, and also understand that to grasp a value in the immediate moment is not an undesirable thing.
I am not sure I agree with you that a “loss of value” can actually occur, if “loss” is suppose to be understood as “net loss”. The more I pay attention to the best teacher I know, my own experience, the more I find that every loss of value is accompanied by an equal gain in value.
Perhaps an important compromise can be reached between our two views:
Could it be the case that value is an important part of human functioning, as you point out, but that net value is always constant? And that the additional suffering that people seem to experience may in fact be due to an incorrect understanding of this basic truth?
I actually think death is a good thing, a wonderful thing. Think about the establishment that oppressed Gallileo, Darwin, heck, Jesus if that is your bag. They were all stuck in the ‘now’, as we all are ultimately, limited by the knowledge that we’ve inherited. That is wonderful, of course, it is much better to inherit thousands of years of knowledge than it is to try and rebuild it de novo and dial the clock back to 1000 BCE. But at the end of the day, we are all sorta fuddy-duddies who think we know what is going on. And, to be sure, for our time we do (provided we’ve put enough effort in to be up-to-date). But time passes us on, history’s march is progressive, and we do it a great service by dying. When we are young, we contribute. When we are middle-aged we maintain. When we are old, we serve as a stator so as to avoid radicalism. And then we die. And what we sought to maintain becomes the old order which is torn down by a new crop. Their order eventually becomes de regueur. Then a symbol of the old order. Which is replaced by a new order. And so on and so on. Without death, this wouldn’t be possible.
Death is good, even if we don’t much care for it on an individual level. But because of that, we may as well strive to be forces for good.