According to the official definition, in order to be envious, you must desire those qualities that you scorn.
The quality that I scorn is pleasure, but since I desire no pleasure, it is wrong to conclude that I am envious of people who have tons of pleasure.
You need to be a greedy person – and that means a person with no hierarchy in his actions – in order to be envious. Since I am a man of hierarchy, who relies on his will and not on his instinct to direct his actions, the concept of envy is completely inapplicable to me. I am beyond all of that business.
I am sorry, but it is you who are seeking consolation. You are trying to console yourself and you are doing so as we speak and you are doing so by trying to reject what I am saying by trying to (mis)interpret me as being envious myself. But it is you who are being greedy, not me. It is you who cannot settle on a clear hierarchy of values, not me.
I despise hedonists not because it bothers me that I cannot have what they have, but because they are developing in a different direction (actually, they have no direction of development.)
To be a slave means to be detached from your own ideal and attached to a different direction of development. I am no slave for being loyal to my own ideal.
Hedonists have no ideals. Hedonism posits no ideal because what it posits is a goal that is avoidance-based. Only advance-based goals can be considered idealistic, and hence, non-slavish.
Let me try to explain the difference between avoidance-based (what Nieztsche calls “reactive”) and advance-based (what Nietzsche calls “active”) goals.
Avoidance-based goals are negative goals in the sense that they posit an undesirable state that must be avoided. Desirable states are not defined – you see – they are left undefined. What is defined is an undesirable state. This is any state that is associated with fear, which can be death, pain, negative social judgement and many other things. The crucial bit is that negative states are primary (which is why they are well known in advance) whereas positive states are secondary (which is why they are unknown in advance.) Positivity is derived from negativity, not the other way around. We can also say that avoidance-driven people “say no to few, but yes to many”.
Advance-based goals are positive goals in the sense that they posit a desirable state that one must realize as soon as possible. Undesirable states are not defined – you see – they are left undefined. What is defined is a desirable state. This is any state that is deemed as aesthetically ideal. The crucial bit is that positive states are primary (which is why they are well known in advance) whereas negative states are secondary (which is why they are unknown in advance.) Negativity is derived from positivity, not the other way around. We can also say that advance-driven people “say yes to few, but no to many”.
The former call themselves realists while everyone else calls them hedonists. The latter call themselves idealists while everyone else calls them nihilists.
Nietzsche was a mongrel, so he was neither here nor there. In many ways, Nietzsche was a hedonist. His attempts to justify slavery, his idea that there is nothing beside WTP, his ER, his amor fati, his scorn for idols and idealism in general, his reliance on the concept of nihilism (the concept of nihilism was invented by hedonists to demonize idealists/gnostics) . . . all these point to the fact that he was a hedonist to a great degree. It is only in subtle ways that Nietzsche betrays his idealism.
There have been attempts to present the problem as being that of extremes. Both hedonism and idealism have been presented as negative extremes that must be resisted in order to reach the state that lies somewhere in between the two. These were merely attempts to escape the accusation of hedonism while preserving hedonism itself. I call this movement neo-hedonism. It’s populated by mongrels who carry within themselves both hedonistic and idealistic sets of impulses but who nonetheless remain dominated by hedonism. They have coined the term “realistic idealism” in order to tell us what mongrels they are.
Idealism is born out of the capacity to overcome one’s instinct, which is the same as that of biological ability to relax (regulated by parasympathetic nervous system, or simply PSNS.) It is those organisms that have developed the great power to relax and transcend their instints that have become idealists. All other organisms, with their limited capacity to relax, have remained stuck within the narrow confines of the material realm of instinct. No matter how many instincts they overcame, at the end of the day, they still remained dominated by them.
It is therefore very ironic to consider idealists as being uptight or too strict, as you do, as some do, as many people do. For it is those who are below instinct, and not above it, that are too tense, not the other way around. That hedonists confuse being relaxed with feeling relaxed, and feeling tense with being tense, is no argument against it, but against those who are incapable of relaxation and whose own lack of capacity leads to a self-referentiality that is only reinforced by the fact that their kind is the numerically dominant kind. A hedonist has thus convinced himself that there is nothing beyond hedonism and that those who claim otherwise are merely liars who remain to be what can only be and that is hedonists.
A hedonist cannot take an advice for a hedonist, due to his inability to relax, is stuck in a perpetual state of over-activity, and any advice he takes, even if with the good will to learn how to relax, will only lead to further over-activity which above certain point manifests as unbearable pain. The only thing he can manage is his symptoms which manifest as feelings of pleasure and pain. If he tries to change, he feels bad; if he does not try to change, he feels good. Therefore, his solution, which is no solution but he cannot hope for anything better, is to simply refuse to change, or at least, to control how he changes. The great reality of the biological ability to relax thus becomes buried beneath all this over-intellectualization.
It is very common for a hedonist to accuse anyone who suggests a change of being too strict, even if one’s aim was to make him more relaxed, for a hedonist cannot relax and cannot imagine any biology other than his own degenerate one.
We despise him for this reason, not merely because he is wrong about himself, but because he takes his own advice and makes it popular thus suffocating not only his own biological potential but also of those who are biologically superior to him.
Don’t you like him going around the town calling everyone he considers as being too strict a “Nazi”? “Nazis” were too strict indeed, but that’s only becuase “Nazis” are a caricature of authentic National Socialists propagated by the Jews.
Do you understand that without prior relaxation a man cannot be an idealist? This must be a huge revelation to all those poor souls who still think that idealism means being too strict. But there is no strictness in idealism. To be an idealist, you must completely overcome your instinct, and that is another way of saying completely relax. Those who fail to do so become hyper-active, making them less efficient in their idealistic efforts. It is a very sad reality that such people have been described by hedonists as “self-loathing”. An idealist who struggles to remain one because he is over-stimulated is described as “self-loathing” because the amount of fear and pain hedonists would feel in his shoes would be too much for their pitiful biologies.
Whatever way you look at it, it’s pretty clear that idealism trumps hedonism, not because I envy hedonists, but because idealism is infinitely superior to hedonism.