The point of this thought experiment is not to show that values don't exist, but rather that values depend on an image of an external, unchanging grounding. When I say "external" I mean external to the human community. — frank

This would explain the reaction of “wow, so money doesn’t exist!” when someone realizes it’s conventional. But I’m not convinced. Specifically, by the “external” part.

My interpretation: neither of them quite got to the bottom of the error. GPT3.5’s answer was better, but GPT4’s answer was more imaginative, though more wrong.

I don’t have any great objection to that view, and it’s also consistent with my post. In fact, I used the word “additionally” specifically to imply it.

But the point is that the existence of something “merely” as a social practice or as an intersubjective attribution does not entitle someone to say it’s just an illusion. And somewhat against your point, I don’t think this depends on its being rooted in something basic, unless we say that everything we do is rooted in something basic (which is a fair point but doesn’t say much).

The hard question here might be: what is basic? Is it essential, eternal, and universal? Is it the species lowest common denominator or would you also include values that are culturally relative?

We don't decide to give value to food and shelter, so in this case value is rooted in basic needs and desires which we don't control. — frank

On the other hand, in a sense we do decide, through the market, to put prices on them, i.e., they do not have prices purely by virtue of their use to us, but also by virtue of their inclusion in a social practice of exchange on the basis of money, which is based on conventional behaviour—playing the game. After all, they can be provided without charge, if we decide not to put prices on them.

This can be extended to cover all needs and wants, whether basic or not. All of this valuing, whether based purely on need or additionally on conventional observance (“deciding”), is real. Things really are valuable, in our hands or in the market.

So the question to the OP is: how much more real does value have to be to be really real?

But the quotation in the OP is taken out of context, unattributed, and ambiguous, so it’s difficult to determine what it’s actually saying.

I can't wait to see how well GPT4 will understand it and how it will suggest to rephrase it in order to make the argument more transparent! — Pierre-Normand

Indeed. I really have to try it myself soon.

Impressive.

Imagine you started without a clear notion of the formal similarity, just an intuition that there might be one. Could GPT4 help you to develop your own insight, or actually guide it and cash it out? Or without the clues, would it just flounder or identify only superficial similarities?

I have no idea what it’s actually doing when it identifies the connection between the arguments, but it seems like an important ability to say the least—or is it somehow less amazing and more routine than it seems?

Yikes.

So what I'm wondering is what goes into OpenAI's...

... unspecified steps to filter out prejudicial responses

I'm imagining the equivalent of hard-coded hacks. And though it's conceivable that the models can be altered to remove such obvious discriminatory bias, less inflammatory biases, such as fundamentally different ways of describing perception or even basic assumptions about society, will presumably continue to proliferate.

I look forward to reading more!

Fascinating, thanks for sharing.

I have not yet used ChatGPT (it can't be accessed where I live), and I don't know much about how it works, so forgive my naive and ignorant questions.

I'm interested in GPT4's bias, how it initially answered your trick question with the representationalist account of perception, but switched into Gibsonian mode when prompted to do so (even going so far as to misreperesent its earlier statements in the transcript). I wonder: what motivated you to ask the trick question and what do you think its answer revealed, if anything? Was it a demonstration that its training will produce a bias in accord with the dominant side of a philosophical debate, as this imbalance is reproduced in the training data?

And I wonder if there's a tension between this bias and what you say here:

On the other hand, there are two considerations that are a source of optimism for me. Suppose there are two ideologically rival factions named PJW (progressive justice warriors) and AWR (anti-woke rationalists) that each are claiming the high ground in the ethical-political area of discourse. Two positive things might happen if those two tribes would attempt to harness the capabilities of the AI bots to craft masterful arguments in favor of their respective paradigms. The first thing is that by virtue of the very lack of opiniatedness of the bot, and its equal ability to argue both sides, its authority in underlying any one of those sides will be undermined. Secondly, the bots appear to have a rather unique ability, when urged to do so, to present the concerns on one side in a way that is intelligible to the inhabitants of the members of the opposite ideological camp by means of translating them into the language of the rival paradigm. Without quite serving as a fully neutral arbiter in ideological disputes, since there may not exist any such thing, the bots could nevertheless facilitate discussion and communication with a view of achieving some common grounds, casting light into formerly blind spots, and reducing crude misunderstandings. — Pierre-Normand

Suppose a person is using GPT4 to assess an issue from a neutral perspective. Further suppose that the sides of the debate are not equal, such that this person might even be unaware that there is any controversy at all, because one of the sides is dominant.

Rather than being unopinionated, isn't it opinionated in favour of the dominant view by default, but pretends not to be when it realizes you know more about the debate than you originally revealed? (In case it's not obvious, I'm using anthropomorphic metaphors here)

How does it decide if it needs to pay attention to bias? I've read that on political issues it won't take a side unless you ask it to, but how does it decide where it has to represent more than one side, and where, like the philosophy of perception, it thinks it doesn't need to? I assume this is the result of intervention by the humans at OpenAI.

Eat some apples, ride a horse. That's where they came from. — T Clark

This information will stand me in good stead, so thanks. But while I do like apples, I'm more of a donkey guy.

I think Central Asia is the geography we're most ignorant of. — T Clark

Indeed, things have changed since the heyday of the Silk Route. Even my recently increased familiarity with the culture and food of the region has just been about Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan in my mind conjures up vague images of hunters on horseback with eagles, and then I think "wait, maybe that's Kyrgyzstan. Or Mongolia".

Preparation for Kazakhstan:

Alma-Ata: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955-1991 by Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolay Malinin.

One of the Five Pillars of Islam is the shahada: “there is no god but God [Allah]”.

I think you can find statements to similar effect in both old and new testaments of the Bible, even though early Judaism didn’t deny the existence of other gods.

If all of this was somehow an elaborate justification for antisemitism or racist theories, I see zero evidence for it. — Mikie

Anyway — if it was all an elaborate system created to justify deeply held antisemitic and German nationalist sentiments, then why is there so little evidence in the text for it? — Mikie

Is this the claim that is being made in the reviews or in the book itself? Or in this thread, even?

Tathata

Cool.

I can't help but also notice the resonances with Heidegger's 'presencing'.

Outside the web of discursive thought and conceptualisation. — Wayfarer

Yes, and Kant had a version of it too of course, the thing in itself, although I suppose the difference is that for Kant, it exceeds our grasp (almost) entirely, not only intellectually. Philosophers, using thought, are always trying to get beyond thought (except Wittgenstein, who said stop trying).

Unrelatedly…

What we have now in postmodernity (or “liquid modernity”) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology. — Jamal

It occurs to me that things are even worse than this. Maybe people are increasingly escaping the spell of ideology—it’s just that there seems to be nothing they can do about it.

I think Russia is a good example of this. There is very little trust in authority in Russia, whether at the federal or local level, and yet authority is unchallenged. The attitude is not critically engaged so much as cynically disengaged. The people are to a significant extent under no illusions about the situation, and it’s the fact that they do not feel themselves to be political actors, citizens of a polis, that prevents any change. They made a deal with the State years ago: ensure stability and prosperity and stay out of our lives, and we’ll let you get on with it.

On the other hand, the Russian media, which since last year has been cleansed of its critical, independent elements, spreads the ideological orthodoxy every day, and for those who are disengaged it must become easy to accept it.

Magical neo-Marxism is now a thing, I think? — Moliere

I've just noticed there's a book: Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination by Andy Merrifield. Also, Mark Fisher and hauntology might fit.

Good stuff. I don't know enough about the study of magic and you've given me a direction for further study. Sympathy and symbol on the surface almost seem to go against my focus on thisness and the non-identical, but my guess is they can be made compatible. In Adorno the significant concept here is mimesis: in magic the symbol imitates the thing but does not abstract from it to a generality, or something like that.

To my mind, this was a really great OP on this forum — ssu

Thank you ssu, much appreciated.

In the 19th Century they had a far more apt name for economics. They called it "Political Economy". And that's what it is, no matter in how much in mathematics you disguise it, it is political and part of politics. It's basically a straight lie to try to make economics to be something like a (natural) science and somehow apolitical. It simply isn't that. The dominant questions have been the same since Antiquity. The story of the Grachi brothers tells that the question about redistribution of wealth isn't something we started thinking about thanks to Marx and the 19th Century socialists. — ssu

Absolutely.

For me, the simple reason why there can be "enchantment of magic" is that these questions are moral, not something objective, which using the scientific method can give us the right answer. If it's subjective, why not have some magic in it? — ssu

I half agree with this, but I tend not to divide things along those lines. I think we can describe things objectively without describing them on the pattern of natural science.

I have too much to say, but I’ll say it all anyway. It’s not really in the spirit of discussion to make such a massive post that’s not responding directly to other contributors, but maybe someone will find it interesting.

In a spirit of Enlightenment, I’m breaking things down as follows:

Disenchantment: the loss of a unified total system of meaning and value, especially that which happened in Western society with the unseating of Christianity from its central and foundational position.

Re-enchantment: the return of meaning, which however might only be occasional and partial, rather than forming a total system.

Ideology: legitimation of the social order (the state, the economy, class hierarchy, etc) by means of enchantment

Magic and magical thinking: the beating heart of enchantment and ideology.


Magic

I’m now thinking that magic or magical thinking is something that we should not revile. It’s the element of enchantment that we should want to retain or revive. This is the route to the secular sacredness that I was briefly talking about with @Wayfarer. My thought is roughly that we can break the spells that bewitch us without abandoning magical thinking as such.

To try and make that work, I’m thinking of magic in the way it's described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book, magic is a practice in which the object, such as a mountain, a raven, or a tree, is imbued with inherent meaning, animated by its own spirit, and is not reducible to an instantiation of a general type, a mere specimen of a species. A respect for the thisness of the object is what differentiates magic from myth, religion, and especially Enlightenment, in which classification and conceptualization serve to abstract away from individuals in an attempt to form a unified system of science and philosophy.

Thisness—which is also known by medieval philosophers as haecceity—has its own special version in the work of Adorno, namely the non-identical. It’s the part of the thing that remains unique to it when you bring it under a category or think of it in terms of concepts, but which is lost sight of in this process. The singular thing is non-identical with the specimen, the latter being an instantiation, an example defined by categories, universals, or concepts. But the thing is not exhausted by any category you put it in, any abstract universal you bring it under, or any set of concepts you apply to describe it.

Therefore conceptual thinking, though indispensable, has to proceed carefully so as to avoid losing sight of the very thing it attempts to understand.

There's a difficulty with trying to theorize about this. Adorno doesn’t use the word “haecceity” or explicitly define the non-identical, because to do so would once again bring the singular individual under a universal concept (e.g., the universal kind called "singular individuality"). Thus Adorno’s project begins to look, not only difficult, but also somewhat paradoxical. The solution to this problem, I think, is to see the non-identical as akin to the thing-in-itself in Kant's philosophy, i.e., as a limit-concept about which we don’t want to say too much. It’s a correction by means of a negation (the "non" in non-identical), rather than positive ampliative knowledge.

Now we can see that magical thinking, which is an appreciation of the singular life of things, is an important counterweight to conceptual thinking. This is what Adorno described positively about Hegel’s philosophy:

[Hegel’s] impulse to elevate spirit, however deluded, draws its strength from a resistance to dead knowledge. — Adorno, Experiential Content

By “dead knowledge,” he means … well, the way I think about it is like the difference between the living giant squid, with its shimmering colours and graceful movements, and the ugly dead specimen in the laboratory.

Incidentally, I don't think of this as a complete rejection of science or the Enlightenment, more like a correction or a warning.

science establishes ... concepts and makes its judgments without regard for the fact that the life of the subject matter for which the concept is intended does not exhaust itself in conceptual specification. What furnishes the canon for Hegelian idealism is ... the need to grasp...what the matter at hand actually is and what essential and by no means mutually harmonious moments it contains. — Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

This might all seem ridiculously abstract, but consider the real-world example of wolves and dogs. The model of the wolf pack as led by an alpha male is now outdated, and was based on studies of wolves in captivity, where their behaviour is very different from wild behaviour. And if this popular concept is wrong for wolves, it’s even wronger for dogs. This is why dog behaviourists have been trying to demolish the myth of alpha-dominance in dog training for years. From personal experience, it’s only getting through to people slowly.

You might just say it was bad science and that the concepts were wrong, not that science or conceptual thinking in general were at fault, but I see it more dialectically: science corrected its worst instincts, by paying more attention to the uniqueness of things, getting closer to what they are.

Am I saying that we should think of wolves and dogs as unique spirits with their own life-forces? It sounds a bit woo, but I think I am. Many and perhaps most people who live with dogs do this anyway: a dog is effectively a kind of person, and so personhood seems almost like the source of the magical thinking that I’m advocating: we do think of each other as unique and as animated by our own spirits.

This brings me to scientism, arguably an aspect of disenchantment and instrumental rationality. It's what leads to the denigration of personhood and irreducible singularity more generally:

There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist — unenlightened

So although people, even eliminative materialists, treat others in their everyday lives as persons and ends in themselves, this has been somewhat reduced by scientism to mere sentiment or even illusion.

Another way of looking at magic:

Theology, metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, universal suffrage, republics, progress, and what have you, are quite as irrational as anything primitives believe in, in that they are the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experiment and reasoning. — E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality

I take issue with Evans-Pritchard’s assumed rationality-sentiment dichotomy, which is related to an underlying emotivist fact-value distinction that I’m not on board with; and in any case, his separation of rationality and emotion might be untenable (see Damasio). But leaving that aside, the quotation does highlight the continuing relevance of magical thinking in societies in which magic seems to have been replaced or marginalized. I think this ties in with several of the posts by @unenligtened and @Moliere.

Thinking that the primary way to keep alive what is good in magical thinking is art, I looked into the connection and came across a letter from Van Gogh to his brother, which contains this:

It seems that in the book, My Religion, Tolstoy implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born, or rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the Christian religion used to. — Vincent Van Gogh

There’s much more to say about magic in art, and I’m guessing that was a big motivation for Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but I’ll leave that for the moment.


Power

The OP grew from my interpretation of Nietzsche as describing a disenchantment of power. It turns out that Weber has a theory of authority that lines up quite nicely with this. There are three kinds of authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. The latter is characteristic of a modern rationalized society and therefore of disenchantment, so it’s not a stretch to talk as I did of the disenchantment of power, or of the desacralization of power as an aspect of disenchantment, even though Weber did not use the term in quite that way, as far as I know.

There are two different kinds of charisma. One is about an individual’s personal qualities and abilities, and the other is institutional charisma...

... which can be inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institution. This is the charisma that gives an aura of sacred power to whomever has the right to wear the bishop's robe, or sit in the king's throne, regardless of their actual personal characteristics. — Charles Lindholm, Charisma

It’s clear that charisma of both types was what Nietzsche was identifying as lacking in the “captains of industry” and “generic bores”.

This aspect of the legal-rationalization of power was not a good thing in Nietzsche’s view, but it can be viewed positively, as opening up a space for critique.


Critique

In a disenchanted society, there remains ideological enchantment, where ideology is understood as the legitimizing ideas of the social order. In the view of critical theorists, critique of ideology is one of the central tasks of philosophy.

To that end, disenchantment can be understood and used in two ways:

• Negatively, as a lack—the lack of inherent meaning to be found in nature, society, history, and so on
• Positively, as a deliberate critique of ideology—we can disenchant the way the world is (capitalism, state power, nationalism, or whatever else we see as the primary problem), revealing the truth that it works to the detriment of people and obfuscates itself with ideology.

This latter is what I’m calling critical disenchantment.

Is this anything more than another name for the critique of ideology? Possibly. It is an enrichment of the concept, or one aspect of it. Or maybe it’s a radicalization, taking disenchantment out of the hands of the social scientists for whom it is merely a historical fact, and turning it into praxis, part of an attempt to change the world.

Another way to view disenchantment positively is as opening up the space for progress:

Society was no longer viewed as immutably anchored in tradition or God’s will. The idea of social design, the desire to create a better or perfect world, is a crucial characteristic of the modern way of thinking. — Maastricht University

And that leads us back to socialism. Nietzsche’s observation, as I interpreted it, that socialism resulted from the desacralization of power, leads us to Marx’s comments about critique:

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. — A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Marx here refers to the move from the disenchantment of the Enlightenment, when the "holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked," to the critique of the law and politics as ideologies of capitalism. The word “disillusion” parallels the double aspect of disenchantment: to be disillusioned in one sense is bad, an unhappy state in which you realize something is worse than you thought; but in another sense it’s a good thing because you no longer perceive or believe falsely.

What we have now in postmodernity (or “liquid modernity”) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology.

Given everything I’ve said here, I guess it looks like I’m advocating magical neo-Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s a thing.

It’s the coolest Dad music I know.

Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool. — frank

Crucially though, I can carry on wearing my kilt without feeling like I'm perpetuating a fake culture.

I think of it like food. What is authentic Indian food? Does it include chilis? But chilis were taken to India by the Portuguese, so .. :chin:

(that risks trivializing it but you get the point I trust)

There are many dimensions to it. One is about the Stuarts and Jacobitism (there’s a book about this called “The Invention of Scotland”); the massive influence of the epic poems of Ossian, which were fabricated in the 18th century; the mythologizing of Scottish history by Walter Scott (who has been called “the man who invented Scottish identity”); and generally the disproportionate weight given to Highland culture at the expense of the Lowlands.

Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis.

Another thing: kilts. It’s not about our ancestors’ beliefs but it’s in the same ballpark. Many Scots believe that each tartan has been associated with a particular clan for centuries. This is untrue. Also, they didn’t wear kilts.

In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad. — frank

Funny you should mention that, because that’s pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture.

The Voice — Banno

I’m showing my ignorance here, but do you mean the Indigenous Voice to Parliament?

I’m saying that every culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be, both by insiders and outsiders.

I’m interested to see what you say actually.

They adopted the bullshit as their own. — frank

Maybe at that point it’s not bullshit any more. Maybe culture works like that all the time.

Cool. Maybe I’ll read it.

Dark Emu — Banno

Just had a look around the internet. Pretty controversial eh!

My first thought was that Bruce might implicitly be conceding too much to the linear progress narrative that divides people into distinct stages of development. Turns out that’s one of the criticisms the book faced from historians.

You have to laugh, surely, at such hubristic naivety? And written just after WW1, that fine exemplar of rational methodical control —not. — unenlightened

He had initially supported the war, maybe because it seemed to represent a cure for, as he saw it, the mediocrity of rationalization and disenchantment. He was not especially approving of the "rational, methodical control of life," as far as I can tell. Nationalism of course is another kind of magic.

Apparently he sort of turned against the war later, but I've forgotten why.

I think I'm mostly on track in stating "magical thinking", yes? — Moliere

I think it's fruitful, but I don't know where the track is.

Me too! Almost like the glasses in They Live! — Moliere

Can we distinguish between counter-spells that reveal the truth, like the glasses, and those that merely compete on the same ground, like the minimalism example I gave--bewitching us with something different and possibly better, but still bewitching us? How would we make that distinction? Have I lost the plot?

Just describing this phenomenon feels so surreal to me in the magical sense. For lots of reasons but foremost being that I feel like "magic" is the right description for how consumerism has an adaptability unto itself, or at least feels like it's behaving on its own, like it's alive. But it's not like consumerism is a thing with properties, either, so it sits in a quasi-place. — Moliere

Yes, and this is why it helps to use the concept of magic; I disagree with those who are dismissing it with an easy let's get real, there's no such thing as magic. You can't point to quasi-places on an everyday map.

I don't have the answer. But I have a garden. — Banno

An enchanted one, I hope.

For the various popular religions in Asia, in contrast to ascetic Protestantism, the world remained a great enchanted garden, in which the practical way to orient oneself, or to find security in this world or the next, was to revere or coerce the spirits and seek salvation through ritualistic, idolatrous, or sacramental procedures. No path led from the magical religiosity of the non-intellectual classes of Asia to a rational, methodical control of life. — Max Weber, Sociology of Religion

Magic is something maybe only seen from the outside. In which case, it's hard to identify if it's magic, because you sort of have to know how it works "from the inside" too. In which case it's no longer magical, so how do you spot the spell if it's lost its potency? — Moliere

Immanent critique springs to mind. You dig into it from the inside, or to mix metaphors, you pull at the loose threads of contradiction, till you see how the spell really works—and then you tell people about it. You don’t presume to begin outside, like you’re something special; you're able to see the spell thanks to your critical reason, which you apply from within while knowing you’re under a spell like everybody else. You continue to fetishize commodities after you’ve read Capital.

This is a bit like the question of the historical relativism of philosophy: it’s a problem only if you’re not aware of it. You don’t have to be transcendent in your thinking, only critical.

So while I find it all very interesting, I also get lost very quickly. — Moliere

I’m a bit lost too. There’s magic, enchantment, ideology, and, though I didn’t mention it, there’s myth too. And these terms are all used differently by different thinkers. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer contrast magic as a mostly ancient practice that addresses things in their specificity, with myth and enlightenment, which tend to bring things under general concepts as a means to explain and dominate nature. I feel like I should have stuck to the Weberian angle of disenchantment and enchantment. But then the OP would have been more boring.

Are there spells which counter-spells? — Moliere

I like the idea of counter-spells. The recent lifestyle movement they called “minimalism” was set against the spell of consumerism, but was really just a magic spell itself, sitting alongside all the other self-help trends as yet another choice in a consumerist world.

Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom. — The Minimalists

Unfortunately I lack the brain wiring required to accept any kind of collectivism — NOS4A2

I think the collectivism-individualism polarity obscures more than it enlightens. I’ve recently been reading some Frankfurt School Marxists, and collectivism is one of the things they seem to hate the most. Socialism is about getting the balance right, and any socialism that does not exist to enable the full flourishing of individuals is not one I could get behind.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. — The Communist Manifesto

In other words, individual freedom is the necessary condition for collective freedom.

But that’s a side-issue.

I wonder if since N's time the idea of the "industrialist" and "commercial magnate" has gone under the sort of makeover required to form him into a being more interesting, that a worker might follow him as obediently as a soldier would his general. There are definitely obsequious and servile workers, but then again I'm not sure the stereotype of the industrialist has been altered too much since those days. — NOS4A2

There’s a sense in which Elon Musk has an aura, not of nobility, but of something modern and yet equivalent to it. At the very least, he does appear out of the ordinary, at least in his public image. But Henry Ford had something similar, so…this might be an American thing. Nietzsche in his day may have been unaware of any charismatic, larger-than-life captains of industry.

On the other hand, maybe even these people would have appeared lacking in greatness to Nietzsche. In any case, the main point of the last part of the OP was that even if business tycoons and executives appear ordinary to the masses, the magic of the economy (or the system) itself is so strong that they do not turn to socialism as they once did, but once again to larger-than-life characters.

On the other hand, and despite the atrocities of the 20th century, State prestige has only grown in accordance with its power. Petitioning the state, taking part in its elections, and casting ballots is now the only means by which we can secure any right, which the state gets to confer at its whim and fancy. State power, then, becomes the means of salvation. That's why I would argue that the replacements for the old enchantments of religion and the divine right of kings is the State — NOS4A2

As I’ve implied, I think this is compatible with my position. The difference is that, unlike me, you don’t see it as inextricably bound up with the economy (which is not to say that you can’t have an oppressive State without capitalism).

Perhaps this is why, historically, socialists have followed tyrants and demagogues — NOS4A2

Forgot to address this. It’s not about who the socialist wants to follow, it’s about who the masses want to follow, and this is what I came back to towards the end of my original post. (Not that I’m endorsing Nietzsche’s view on this entirely, though he does identify something real)

As you know, Nietzsche is no fan of socialism. I only consider what Nietzsche previously wrote of socialists and assume it in this aphorism. He mentions “socialists and state-idolaters” in the same book, but it goes further back, for instance, in Human All Too Human. Their desire for state power is unavoidable.

Maybe I’m wrong but my reading is that Nietzsche was psychoanalyzing the socialist, criticizing how he dehumanizes the employer. The employer is unknown and uninteresting. At the same time he is a cunning, blood-sucking dog of a man, while everything else about him—his name, shape, manner, reputation—no socialist cares about. In my mind this is dehumanization.

But, in an extra little slight upon the socialist, following a tyrant into tyranny isn’t as painful, and if “the nobility of birth showed in [the employer’s] eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses.” Perhaps this is why, historically, socialists have followed tyrants and demagogues. — NOS4A2

Although I’ve been reading the book recently, I didn’t notice the bit about state-idolaters. On top of that, I misinterpreted you, forgetting that you were writing about “Nietzsche’s socialist”. I was too quick to jump to the defence of my socialist, the revolutionary workers I had in mind, against what I thought was your own characterization. Apologies.

But I don’t think Nietzsche is writing about the dehumanization of the employer. He is writing about how ordinary the employers appear to workers when compared with great tyrants and generals. He has as much contempt for the bourgeoisie as he does for socialists.

The employer is “unknown and uninteresting”, lacking in greatness, from Nietzsche’s own point of view. From the same section, entitled “Of the Absence of Noble Demeanour”:

It is probable that in all those forms and insignia of a superior race which alone make a person interesting, industrialists and commercial magnates have thus far been woefully deficient; had they the distinction of noble birth in their look and bearing, there might not be any interest in socialism among the masses.

He dislikes both. His sympathies are clearly with, as you’d expect, nobility and greatness.

As for capitalism, there is no system that does not consider the management and segregation of capital. In that sense, all economic systems are invariably capitalist, socialist or otherwise, the only difference in being who controls it, private or the State. Had socialists named it something else, like the Monopolist system, we might well have been passed it by now. — NOS4A2

This is difficult to address because it hinges on the definition of capitalism, which we don’t want to get into. If I just say that any stable State is not in opposition to the economy, and if economic actors are powerful such that they significantly influence the State, then to be under the spell of the State is to be under that of the economy.

I'm not sure how this fits into your thread, but if I have strayed too far, I apologize — NOS4A2

I’m not sure but don’t worry, it’s interesting. I derailed things with my misinterpretation.

Great thread. Good read — NOS4A2

Thank you.

So it is with Nietzsche’s socialist. He is unable to legitimize the business owner’s authority as he once did the leaders of a superior kind, those militant types who hitherto governed them with force and subjection. The act of submitting voluntarily to someone who is neither superior in class or race was too foreign to him, I suppose, so the socialist runs, serf-like, to the politicians and the State.

I would say the magical forces do not manifest as economics and economy, but as politics and the State. The relationship between employee and employer rises from the Law of Necessity (in Nietzschean terms) whereas the relationship between man and state is one of unbridled superstition. — NOS4A2

I think you have a view of what socialism means that is very different from mine. The socialists I had in mind, and the ones Nietzsche was referring to, were not “running to the State and politicians”, but fighting for rights, grouping together with no help from the State (on the contrary) to challenge the power not only of the employers but of the State that backed them, demanding changes to the law, calling for a revolution and for emancipation. The idea you have that socialism is some kind of worship of the State or necessarily a privileging of government, or that socialist workers have not acted independently of authority, is badly mistaken, and it maligns a long tradition of efforts that, while they did not lead to revolution in Western Europe as intended, did win for the workers many important rights and improvements to their conditions. And you brush it off with contempt!

And this is a clue to what I see is the problem with your second paragraph quoted here. Capitalism subsumes politics and the State. To be under the spell of the State and politicians is to be under that of capitalism, in most countries, where no political party is willing to challenge capitalism.

Of course there have been state socialisms, including some very horrible ones, and of course professional social democrats look to the state to do everything—that’s just not really what we’re talking about when we talk about workers being massacred by police for going on strike.

By the way, although I won’t tell you not to respond to me with a brilliant and comprehensive denunciation of socialism in all its forms, I don’t know if I want to debate that, as it’s not really where I was going with this discussion.

On the other hand, it’s actually interesting to see that the OP is meaningful to someone with a very different world-view, and once again I appreciate that you addressed the central issue.

The spells we are under determine which spells we think people are under, but we’re not always right.

Yes, but "magic" is a loosey goosey term, once it's taken out o the theater and pressed into service at the Academy — BC

The term is used in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. No doubt it’s used loosely sometimes in those disciplines. I guess you’ve been unlucky and have somehow, in all of your reading, managed to miss the more rigorous use of the term.

:cool: