TO JOKER

I like some of his ideas too. But I think his philosophy is ultimately immature because he totally disregards things as they are now. If he wants to revert back to a natural state of being the way he describes it, then he is the idealist he so utterly despises, because it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It seems obvious to me that any workable practial philosophy has to take ‘things as they are’ into account, otherwise it stops being workable and practical, and thus idealistic.

I like his emphesis on instinct, intuïtion,… because this is something todays world is seriously lacking with all its confidence in reason, theory and blind faith in progress. I like it for that reason, but I wouldn’t go so far as to totally disregard reason and our ability to theorise because, well… its a part of being human, and has his place in the whole picture.

Finally, I think his denial of any social aspect to human nature is his biggest flaw. That’s why some form of morality, albeit no doubt different from what we have today, is in our best intrest.

I believe the principal behind that, realunoriginal, is applying Newton’s third law of motion to sociology. Anything that happens has an equal and opposite reaction. Any cruelty, any gift, any act of disgrace or lamenting, will be returned by natural social order- making law (hierarchy) unnecessary for social order, justifying anarchism as a reasonably fair lifestyle. Without the necessity for belief in any spiritualistic karma.

Why not rape? Why not kill? Someone will probably take revenge on you because they want to. So be our guest.

I’m not taking quite the same position, but it might clear up the reasoning.

Thanks. I was really surprised to see a whole dedicated thread to little old me.

I believe that action is more clearly understood as a means of communication rather than rhetoric since the later can be sucked into sophistry and deception.

I would call that a unrealistic religious proposal formed by moral idealism especially in regards to christianity.

In my book natural selection rules everything along with “action” and “effect” where will or might is the end decision.

If I have somehow allowed myself to be raped,murdered, and beaten then it would be my fault for not having the necessary might to defend myself.

I do not believe in “morals” , “rights” , “entitlements” or “privileges” therefore what I don’t believe in has no power over me and in comparison such things should have no “right” to overpower me either.

I can’t insert thoughts into your mind. :slight_smile:

The rodent doesn’t want to become someone elses meal either but that doesn’t stop the fact that the possibility of it randomly happening can arise about with there being no eternal salvation on the rodent’s part.

We only have the choice of how we face such situations not whether the situation is just or not as everything else inserted by the humanist is merely self delusion.

Immaturity is just a moral defamation perpetuated by the idealist. :slight_smile:

The fact remains that I the finite egoist have the choice to disregard and embrace what I see fit.

My personal ego shall always be mine and should someone outside of myself deny or obstruct my instinctual motives of selfhood I will forever question their motives.

The state of nature is merely the natural order of things that just “is”.

It is you who plays the idealist with figments of “oughts” and “shoulds” since I embrace the void of everything where the freedom to act on “anything” arrives.

Practicality is essentially a idealism of what is a “right” workable system and what is not.(wrong)

Practicality has always been so warped through conventionalism the habit of “custom”.

Why is reason so sacred to you?

From whence does its sacredness arrive from?

I don’t deny it completely. I only deny and disregard that which obstructs my will. :slight_smile:

Precisely.

Why does one need conventionalism or morality?

All that exists is causes perpetuated by actions that leaves effects in place.

All that exists is spontaneously random and relative.

So the 12 year old girl who is unable to defend herself from a brute 30 year old ‘deserves’ to die because of her inability to defend herself of the situation? I’m not sure the application of that principal justifies the effect.

At least to say, I am morally wavering against the proposal.

I cannot consider that justifiable by all means

Rape is rape. It is only within artificial social constructs that value is given to such things as rape, murder, etc.

Although Joker’s writing is riddled with value attribution, I think I’m starting to see that he is merely using this as a verbal tool to express what he means. Remove human-produced constructions founded on abstractions, and what you have is the rule of natural selection and might. I don’t think Joker is trying to say this is either “good” or “bad”, only that this is how it is, and it is only our self-delusion that makes us think we are canceling it out.

At least, that’s the impression I’m getting, correct me if I have interpreted wrong, Joker.

Although human constructions and morality are arguably an extension of this natural selective process. Any human society that didn’t forbid murder, for example, simply self-destructed itself. Natural selection in process.

I understand your aversion to the idealist and moralist, but it’s not very useful to describe everything in these terms.

Immature is my adjective of choice to describe your philosophy, because it has obviously not been tested and shaped by experience. I don’t believe in oughts and shoulds, I don’t think reason is sacred, and practical is the opposite of idealistic. It is what works for me. Please don’t redefine words or read things into my posts that aren’t there. It makes communication impossible.

It may come as a surprise to you, but your will is not the only one in existence. It may be the only one that matters to you, noonetheless if you completely disregard the will of others, others will will your will to disappear, which is probably not what your will wills.

I don’t believe for a second you have lived your ideas. I suggest you try it and see what happens.

I agree, but I don’t know why you care about having ‘the choice.’

Seizing power where one can definitely have it, as with the ineffectual choices made by an egoist, seems mundane; especially when used to deny fundamental morals which are in place to gently guide humanity, (eg. the reduced probability of your wife or child being brutally raped,) an issue that has already been noted.

What matters is that the egoist is still, and always will be a product of her environment, forever affected by morality. Her cognizance of the idea that she can make up her own schemes and even act upon them sometimes is cute, but it hardly puts her in a better place realistically against the literal backdrop of traditional morals.

You forget that kitsch is inescapable. Black sheep–despite their cooler, more bad ass color–are still sheep nonetheless.

Once we accept that we can’t not defeat the lies that we tell ourselves, we can then at least twist these lies to our own advantages.

I’ll agree with you that the will–particularly the will to power–is the focal point for all egos and consciousnesses. That isn’t to say that the egos and consciousnesses themselves ought to be abandoned. Morality–as it is today, and as it always has been–is but the expression of the will to power through complicated, more social-oriented faculties and layers of the psyche.

What separates us from insatiable, sexually driven beasts, is not that we don’t carry these insatiable drives–but rather that we merely sublimate them through other means, resulting in art and culture.

Where things go wrong is when nihilists or other religious-idealists–who, might I add, are merely nihilists in disguise–attempt to either oppress or, as you allege, affirm the individual’s will without any consideration for the surrounding kitsch.

Nihilists are hopelessly vain creatures; they think that they can escape the inevitable constructs of the mind. Even this so-called ‘natural order of things’ is but an illusion. Hell, the world itself is probably but an illusion.

Yet nihilists and Christians continue to deny the legitimacy of the subjective world; kitsch isn’t a poison to the will, but rather an ammunition for its affirmation.

You should read Machiavelli, Mr. Joker, he understood the exploitation of morality for personal gain. To deny kitsch, morality, and the subjective world–all of which are manifested facets of the will–is to, in effect, deny the will itself.

The mentally ill and hyper-aggressive–of whom are more prone to such rape and murder–are people who, for whatever reason, are incapable of channeling their will to power into more advantageous fields of dominance. They are usually short-sighted animals who inevitably land themselves in prison.

You say it is my fault for allowing myself to be murdered. Well, accordingly, it is the murderer’s fault for allowing himself to be sentenced to death because of my murder. Ultimately, my demise equates to your demise. Thus, anybody with a relatively adequate IQ number can assert that the compliance with said social structures, contracts and moral principles offer more power in the long run.

Joker, you are a denier, you accept all of the so-called futility of everything, yet you stubbornly cling on to the one notion that reason and its resulting morality is merely a mistake, a hiccup in the evolutionary process. But you’re wrong.

Evolution seeks power, and morality benefits the eventual acquisition of such power under the condition that one is capable of seeing beyond the imaginary boundaries of these ethics.

I agree. To use Nietzsche’s metaphor of the three phases. Why would you ever want to be a camel if you can be a lion from the start? Because without having been a camel the lion is clawing in thin air and can only bare a stillborn child.

That’s Zarathustra, right? It’s been a while since I’ve read that. In fact I forget the implications of that particular metaphor–especially considering that there are so many that he has used.

The lion represents a life-affirming Ubermensch while the camel represents the life-denying Christian/nihilist, of which also serves as the lion’s dinner, correct? I forget, how does the baby come into play.

The way I see it the lion is not life-affirmining, he’s the one reclaiming his freedom by destroying all absolute thruths and values the camel believed in. He is actually more a nay-sayer, the typical nihilist. But he doesn’t really know what to do with this freedom while being a lion and doesn’t move past the fact that there are no absolutes. The child is the yay-sayer. Saying yes to life, he sees the use in values and creates values and thruths as a life-affirming strategy. The lion gave the child the freedom to create, but without the camel these creations would be without substance.

Ah, that makes more sense. The lion was Dionysus or Vishnu, the destroying wrecking ball that knows no other way. But his eradicative ways gives the creating baby spirit–i.e. Apollo, Brahma, etc.–the necessary space to rebuild new values and boundaries of which the lion could never conceive of. This, of course, will eventually lead to a new camel and a new lion. An ongoing, never-ending process.

So does that mean we should all aspire to become a baby? Or a lion?

Why natural selection (which wouldn’t even be true natural selection, since we would be intending it to be so, thus it would have a degree of simulation)? I think you are still lost in a metaphysics of will, pretty much like Nietzsche was. There is no why people should respect a singular stronger being and offer their lifes for it. If you think it is because of ‘progress’, then peharps you are being the ‘progress idealist’, since biological evolution through natural selection isn’t a need.

Why do you still live? For the biological progress of humanity?

You can’t deny that a group of people is stronger than one. That’s one of the few things Plato got right. No matter how strong you are, a gang could always bang you.

Yes.

“Thou shalt” is the great dragon called. I don’t think we should anything :smiley:.

When I look at the vast majority of the people I have met, it’s hard to phantom it would do them any good to become a lion or a child. Mostly they choose security above anything and work to keep what they allready have. But if you’re naturally inclined to look for thruth and values, you become a prime candidate to accumulate responsabilities and bear the burden of many. Then the lion is not a bad bet if you don’t want to grow to resent life. But if you don’t have anything left to destroy, the destroying force of the lion becomes obsolete. The child has overcome the resentment that was driving the lion, and can freely dance within the realm of thruths and values, creating as it pleases, which is the more agreeable way of life I think.

So the short answer, it depends on where you are at.

Great Thread!
(I think) It’s all a question of balance - the optimistic joy of the baby, the violent, aggressive, primal survival instinct of the lion, the spiritualism of the camel. Denying the validity of any one of the three seems unrealistic.