Nietzsche's Natural Ethical Order.

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If there are only Ãœbermenschen, there is no one who is obviously “bad”, yes; but what one may distinguish is gradations of the good: even though Ãœbermenschen may agree that they are both good, the one may feel that the other is not as good as he himself.

I think you have confused me with your sloppy use of the language. Please clarify: how is the natural order that Nietzsche talks about “created by false moral constructs”? Which moral constructs are those?

Yes, morality is, but ethics is not. Morality is the idea that power is evil; ethics is the idea that power is good.

Who said that there is no truth? Does not the statement “there is no truth” imply that the truth is that there is no truth?

“Will To Power [WTP] is opposed to Social Darwinism [SD]; whereas SD talks of evolution’s will to survival, Nietzsche argued that Nature does not seek to so much survive, as to FLOURISH.
WTP describes that constant expansion of things even to the point of their own extinction and destruction [and hence not always to survival].”
[William Nietzsche.]

So yes, a struggle for power, not a struggle for survival.

As there is no verb in your question, I cannot answer it.

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So what? What does that have to do with moral constructs and the “natural order” of ranks?

Ranks occur because of false moral constructions, you are missing the point. Ranks of power, is that the “natural order” according to you?

Unless you think ranks occur because of the “truth” of the void?

Morality as framed by good v evil. What other morality are we talking about? Can we get beyond that already…

:laughing:

And again I ask, how is power good? How is that a “natural ethic”?

What is the ethical truth? Again, since there is no truth…

You want to elaborate on what the difference between the survival of the fittest of survival of the most powerful is?

Hint, power is fitness in your “natural ethics”.

Yes, because your ethical system has no basis, you don’t even know why you use the term “natural,” so there is no answer from you. I am hardly surprised.

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Good as opposed to bad is a moral construct, but because this construct has been transvalued - turned around and renamed, so it became “good” as opposed to “evil” -, and because the transvalued values are usually referred to as “moral” values, Berkowitz has, for clarity’s sake, opted to rename morals beyond good and evil as “ethics”:

“Nietzsche’s “antimoral propensity” […] is rooted in a counter-morality, an opposing ethic, an alternative conception of what is good, right, and fitting for a human being. Thus, his criticism of morality is in fact ultimately moral or, to avoid confusion, ethical.”
[Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, page 48.]

Repeating your assertions will not make me get your supposed point. “Ranks occur because of false moral constructions” seems to me a highly dubious construction itself. How do these “false moral constructions” “cause” ranks to “occur”? And why are these moral constructions “false”? Is it because they are construed, not found? But why then make a pleonasm of the phrase and add the word “false”?

Not so much ranks of power as well as ranks of might. For instance, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says:

“Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money - these impotent ones!”
[Of the New Idol.]

Thus “these impotents ones” use money as the lever with which to open doors to positions for which they do not have the right, i.e., the might.

It is no coincidence that Zarathustra makes this remark in a speech on the state; this echoes Nietzsche’s earlier essay on the Greek state:

“Against the deviation of the State tendency into a money-tendency, to be feared from this side, the only remedy is war and once again war”.
[The Greek State.]

And not those “shitty little wars”, to speak with Jim Morrison, which the US tend to wage time and again, nor a so-called “cold war” (which was really not a war at all, but the continuous deterrence of war), but “real big” and real hot wars! For power belongs to times of peace; might, however, to times of war.

"There is nothing to life that has value, except the degree of power [Macht] - assuming that life itself is the will to power. Morality guarded the underprivileged against nihilism by assigning to each an infinite value, a metaphysical value, and by placing each in an order that did not agree with the worldly order of rank and power: it taught resignation, meekness, etc. Supposing that the faith in this morality would perish, then the underprivileged would no longer have their comfort - and they would perish.

“[…] It is the value of such a crisis that it purifies, that it pushes together related elements to perish of each other, that it assigns common tasks to men who have opposite ways of thinking - and it also brings to light the weaker and less secure among them and thus promotes an order of rank according to strength, from the point of view of health: those who command are recognized as those who command, those who obey as those who obey. Of course, outside every existing social order.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 55.]

I have been talking about good vs bad all along - i.e., about the opposite of good vs evil…

“it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank”.
[Nietzsche, Genealogy, I, 2.]

They naturally felt themselves and their actions as good - that is the origin of the concept “good”.

…

William Nietzsche continues:

“Nietzsche noticed that it was NOT the best human specimens who survive and flourish, but the mediocre, the average - even the down-right botched.
The great tragedy of life is that the rare and highest types are the most threatened and vulnerable.”
[ibid.]

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Again, that is the reaction to dogmatic moral constructs. The overman is above morality and dogmatism.

I already knew that, it was you who asked “which moral constructs?”

Ahh, so power is good because it feels good, naturally!

At which point are you going to more honestly embrace that this is virtue ethics and little more that the dogmatic worship of power in the manner in which you [Berkowitz] are framing it?

The virtue of power…

That in no way justifies the ethic of power as good.

Pretending that evil [power] is good and thus ethical merely because it resists a controlling morality, AGAIN, says nothing of what happens once THAT MORAL STRUCTURE HAS BEEN BROUGHT DOWN.

The “new values” ethical system that N proposes would not become the new morality, that is the interpretation of that nimrod you keep quoting.

The “Overman ethics” do not become the new moral constructs, because there is no dogmatic system of ethics.

I suggest you find some different authors or read Nietzche more critically yourself instead of someone who has cherry-picked him to construct this absurdist relativist power struggle.

You don’t know Nietzsche, you know Berkowitz. HAIL BERKOWITZ!?

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Note first that you might want to reread my last post: I added something.

You are turning things around (now how - ironic is that?). The original valuation was good vs bad. This was then turned around:

“It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!”… One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation [namely, the Christians]…”
[Nietzsche, Genealogy I, 7.]

So it was the dogmatic moral constructs you so rightly condemn that were reactive. What Nietzsche wants is to restore the original noble valuation - hence his revaluation of values.

Good vs bad is not a false moral construct, but a natural difference in power.

Indeed. But this feeling of power may be justified or no. Might must be tested, and will test itself. It is only the excess of power that is the proof of power.

I don’t know what “virtue ethics” is. However, I suspect that this word “virtue” is in need of a revaluation, like the word “morals” and the word “power” (which we have given different names in order to distinguish the revalued (original) versions from the transvalued (reactive) versions: “ethics” and “might”, respectively). I suggest the word “prowess”:

“Not contentedness but more power [Macht]; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness (Renaissance-style virtue, virtù, moraline-free virtue).”
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 2.]

George Bull, in his translation of Machiavelli’s Principe, usually renders virtù as “prowess”. We may also just use “virtù”.

“Only as aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified to all eternity”.
[Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 5.]

“These bearers of the oppressive instincts that thirst for reprisal, the descendants of every kind of European and non-European slavery, and especially of the entire pre-Aryan populace—they represent the regression of mankind! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against “culture” in general! One may be quite justified in continuing to fear the blond beast at the core of all noble races and in being on one’s guard against it: but who would not a hundred times sooner fear where one can also admire than not fear but be permanently condemned to the repellent sight of the ill-constituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned?”
[Genealogy I, 11.]

So, in the end, it is a matter of taste.

“And ye tell me, friends, that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher!”
[Zarathustra, Of the Sublime Ones.]

Taste is a function of might. Thus there is a natural rank order in the sphere of taste, too!

Is this a circular argument? That might is good is an aesthetic judgment; but this judgment of might as good is an expression of might, of joy in might - an affirmation (and all affirmation is self-affirmation) of might, of the possession of might.

And yet those lacking in might only call their lack of might “good” in contradistinction to the mighty, whom they call “evil”. Thus their “good” is a negation (and all negation is self-negation).

It is not a case of pretending that power is good; it is a case of repudiating the pretention that power is evil. That power is good is the original valuation, made by those who possess that power; that power be “evil” is the transvaluation made by those who do not possess that power.

Power is not good because it resists a controlling morality!

It shall become the new morality - that is the interpretation of that Nimrod I keep quoting. The Overman shall be the meaning of the earth.

The New World Order will be an order of rank based on might, veracity, and prowess. And it will be natural, for these are the qualities that determine value.

“What determines your rank is the quantum of power [Macht] you are: the rest is cowardice.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 858.]

Hail Nietzsche!

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I’ll let you re-read yourself so hopefully you will realize that you have just argued that the “NWO” will merely become another moral system that must be overturned…

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My own judgment runs along those lines.

Do not sugarcoat your existence to me, do not constantly tell me how wonderful everything is or how happy you are; show me what you’ve endured, what you have survived.
Tell me about your spirit and your strength.

Reveal to me the process of your becoming what you are and what you will be, becoming.
Let me admire your resistance and tolerance.

Show me the darkness you’ve traversed or still pass through.
Show me what you’re made of.

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My darkness is my nihilism - my insight into “the nothing (the “meaningless”)”, as Nietzsche calls it. But, as Weary Locomotive said, “Nietzsche solved the fundamental philosophical problem of the meaning of human life.” If I am a modern Theseus, than this is the crown of light that has been given to me to find the exit out of the labyrinth. Nietzsche does not say that, with his Zarathustra, he has “made mankind the greatest present that has been made to it so far” for nothing.

“Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…”
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 1.]

This Yes is “the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that justifies the feeling of strength”; this No is “the No to all that makes weak - that exhausts”; this straight line is the path to our goal, and our goal - our goal is the Overman.

Hail Nietzsche!

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Seems to me your nihilism is your darkness.

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I just discovered this passage:

“My purpose: to demonstrate the absolute homogeneity of all events and the application of moral distinctions as conditioned by perspective; to demonstrate how everything praised as moral is identical in essence with everything immoral and was made possible, as in every development of morality, with immoral means and for immoral ends–; how, on the other hand, everything decried as immoral is, economically considered, higher and more essential, and how a development toward a greater fullness of life necessarily also demands the advance of immorality. “Truth” the extent to which we permit ourselves to understand this fact.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 272, entire (1887).]

This, in combination with the following, is my thesis in a nutshell:

“My new path to a “Yes”.– Philosophy as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence. […] “How much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth does a spirit dare?”–this became for me the real standard of value. Error is cowardice–every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward oneself-- Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. It wants rather to cross over to the opposite of this–to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection–it wants the eternal circulation:–the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence–my formula for this is amor fati.
It is part of this state to perceive not merely the necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability; and not their desirability merely in relation to the sides hitherto affirmed (perhaps as their complement or precondition), but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence, in which its will finds clearer expression.”
[ibid., section 1041.]

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Had a late brain fart did you?

Here’s the deal, can you tie in this statement earlier

and now

and tell me what that has to do with a “natural, ethical order”?

Or is this just an elaboration for an Overman ethic based upon null values?

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You take the ‘b’ out of “banal”.

Easy:

“It is part of this state to perceive not merely the necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability; and not their desirability merely in relation to the sides hitherto affirmed (perhaps as their complement or precondition), but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence, in which its will finds clearer expression.”

Note the emphasis on the word “truer”. There is a natural, but immoral order of rank, according to Nietzsche, based on how “true” something or someone is.

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I would kindly refer you back to my initial post. At least you are consistently contradicting.

Your “mistake,” imho, is in confusing the perception of natural order… to their being an order.

THERE IS NOT A NATURAL ORDER.

There is chaos, that is the truth, why you deny that is most bizarre. An imposed truth is not a natural order. It would be completely unnatural, which is the whole point as I see it.

You are projecting Overman revalued truth, and calling it “natural order.” A meaningless meta-irony it would seem, at best.

It’s quite a mad assertion, imho.

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fwiw, I always seem to find your take on his take to be spot on. I’d just would like to understand him more, or for that matter, at all.

All I see in Sau’s take in N is social darwinism, justifying tyranny on others, which would seem to be exactly what N feared would happen with the unchecked “Master class”… He denies that is his take on N, however.

I have always seen N as trying to wake the sleeping from their chains, not trying to shackle them anew…

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THERE IS, ACCORDING TO NIETZSCHE, a natural ethical order (but no natural moral order).

I do not deny that, to the contrary (I affirm it); but I have been consistently pointing out that, for Nietzsche, there was a natural ethical order based on truthfulness in this regard. Thus the more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence rank above the sides hitherto affirmed, according to him; also the more powerful, more fruitful, truer men, above the men hitherto affirmed - the “good” men…

This thread is titled NIETZSCHE’S Natural Ethical Order. I have been saying all along that NIETZSCHE presents this order as natural. How can you still fail to grasp this?

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So-called “Cezar” is just feeling resentful for the fact that the Commander called him “a complete ignorant moron” while calling me “a great spirit”.

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