For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with your conclusion. Landa's interpretation, not only of Nietzsche, but also of its cultural reception and effects, seems forced. If anything one would expect it to shift opinions away from bourgeois ideology, because it's an ideology based precisely on utility.

Nietzsche devaluates utility and that somehow gets co-opted to strengthen an ideology based on utility?

Do you believe in a kind of perennialism, the idea that a lot of these religions or wisdom traditions point to a similar thing, but just use different conceptions for it? Or do you think they really are fundamentally different in some important ways.

I was struck by the similarities for instance between Heraclitus notion of the wisdom and the Doaist. This notion of the one/doa/logos that is beyond conception, desire being the thing that leads us away from the one etc etc... Both are situated arround the same time, 500 BC. It is possible that they influenced eachother, or rather had older sources in common, but more likely is probably that they independantly came to similar conclusions because of the way things are.

A certain guy with a moustache would say the Western tradition, Christianity is still a young tradition, and that this ascetic path eventually leads to a kind of Buddhism where the will get negated (for instance Schopenhauer). Maybe that's overly reductive and determinist, I don't know. But it does seem to me like a 'logical' path a tradition would follow give the nature of world (changing, impermanent) and the nature of the human mind (fixating, grasping for permanence).

How does one reconcile with the ever changing impermanent without negating the will altogether? Some of your quotes seem to point to moderation, some of them to a more total renunciation of worldly desires, some seem to point to a kind of Amor Dei and some of them seem more like the Epicurian notion that abstinence ultimately intensifies pleasures.

So yes, maybe there are different ways to deal with the question.

I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist? — Tom Storm

I can bring some wisdom skepticism to the table, not necessarily about its existence, but about its value.

In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

The basic intuition they generally start from is that world is a continuous changing and interconnected whole... the one.

Conceptualisation, dividing the one into parts with the mind, is thus not merely a neutral, but an active process, implying some force or desiring involved in the dividing.

But since the world is an interconnected whole, the conceptualisation is also an imposition and thus falsification of the one.

To be better attuned with the whole, one needs to let go of these conceptualisation that lead him astray, ... and letting go of these conceptualisation means letting go of desire.

And so you get the ascetic ideal, and taken to its ultimate conclusion, the will to nothing... nihilism.

But then the question becomes, as living beings, have we not thrown out the baby with the bathwater?

I can give you some of Nietzsches thoughts on it, he doesn't think there is simple or direct causal link from one conscious thought to another, but that they seem to cause eachother because they come from a similar unconscious wellspring so to speak.

Josh quoted the following passage from his notebooks in another thread:

“Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! - Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.” “Supposing the world had at its disposal a single quantum of force, then it seems obvious that every shift in power at any point would affect the whole system - thus, alongside causality, one after the other, there would be dependency, one alongside and with the other.” — Nietzsche

Yes, so to bring this back down to the criminal, this is part of what they do that is laudatory. They might be unsavory or even evil in some respects, but they are tearing down something that has to go.

But on the bolded part, I would simply disagree with this. It's correct in the context of the 19th century, where notions of causation, reason, etc. have already been drastically deflated. I would go as far as to say that notions of the Good, reduced from limitless fecundity, a presence is all that even appears desirable, to "universal maxims" or a "moral calculus," already amount to a conceptual castration of the Good. Reason too loses all its erotic elements and become wholly discursive and calculative, lacking all appetite, and is thus disqualified from any sort of leadership role except as a sort of "hired executive," acting in the service of the appetites.

Against this though, even if one accepts the thesis that a broader view starts with Plato (and I think this is false, you can see threads in Homer, in the Hebrew wisdom literature, etc.), it became the dominant thread in Pagan and Christian thought by late antiquity and survived over a thousand years, finding ample space to flourish in Judaism and Islam. It was the Reformation, an upswell of fideism and the efforts of figures who were decidedly critical of reason and who wanted to invert the old narrative that unseated it. Not until the Enlightenment, when all the terms of the narrative have already radically changed, does reason start to eat itself (and I'd say this is because it loses its erotic elements, but that's a bit off topic). Things like Plato's Socrates exploding into ecstatic dithyrambs on love have essentially been excluded from the deflated "logos" of the Enlightenment; it is closer in some ways to the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, although it is more a union of the two. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes just blaming it all on reason is maybe a bit vague and not all that helpfull... I'll try to clarify what I meant.

If I understand Nietzsche correctly, it's not reason exactly that he sees as the problem, but the use of language in conscious thought to get to (universal) truth.... 'rationalism' rather than 'reason' if you will.

He thinks there is reason, even prior to consciousness and language, in the instincts. And these are typically not directed at discovering universal truth, but have 'reason' to them in that they serve life, particular biological organisms... they are perspectival.

The issue he has with the dialectics of Socrates and Plato's forms, is that it abstracts away to lived context and tries to get at some ideal universal conception, and consequently does away with perspective.

And Christianity, with the 'word of God' and its universalism, he sees as a continuation of that. He also thinks the reformation was a shame, not because it deforms Christianity in some way, but because it turns back the renaissance which was allready a first attempt to get away from Christianity.

I don't think you get the enlightenment and this turn to scientific materialism without the idea that there are universal truths to be discovered. It seems to me it happened in the West, and not in say China, for a reason.

As an aside, Plato famously wanted to do away with the influence of the poëts because they led people away from the Truth in his view. But poëtry it seems to me is precisely the way in which eros gets conveyed in language. It works not only on the rational intellect, but also 'moves' the whole body and the affects with it rhyming, meter and use of imagery. So I probably agree with you that part of the issue it the loss of Eros in the use of language, though I suspect I might have another conception of eros.

There's a lot I want to reply to in your post there, I'll see if I can tie it all together somewhat.

Right, and I can see where Joshs is coming from because I think Landa's thesis is somewhat obscured here because we are starting with Chapter 6. The earlier parts of the book are all on Nietzschean heros. This section is specifically on villain characters who are nonetheless embraced in some sense. The thesis is not that Nietzsche supports villains above heroes, but rather his relationship to a certain sort of response to a certain sort of villain that has evolved in Western culture.

I think, to your point, this insight, a sort of self-knowledge and self-respect vis-á-vis one's own (and the world's) arationality and amorality underscores the admiration for a sort of villain: the "insane" villain who is merely being honest about the greater insanity of their own context, and is thus in a sense performing an act of self-mastery and yes-saying, affirming the world-that-is and not the imagined moral world-that-ought-to-be that is ultimately mere delusion. The Joker is a sort of paradigmatic case here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The insanity or madness Nietzsche is often talking favorably about in his works is not the insanity of a nihilistic Joker or some of these unhinged villains you see in Western Culture. It is rather a kind of noble man, the man of passion. He calls it madness because passion is juxtaposed to being reasonable, to being concerned with utility (The conscious mind reasoning with language, is using concepts that are common to the group in origin, and therefor often concerned with utility for the group). The passionate man is mad or unreasonable in the sense that he isn't concerned with utility.... he spends himself in pursuit of that passion, often to the detriment of himself.

But note, this is far from nihilistic, or some kind of random disordered madness, It is directed at achieving what he is passionate about. That ruling passion serves as an ordering principle of his instincts, whereas a villain like the Joker would be more of an example of someone where anarchy in the instincts rules, a degenerate in Nietzsches view.

Something else that comes to mind when thinking about these villains in Western Culture, it seems to me, is that the grotesqueness of some of these villains in part comes out of common tropes in Christian culture. In Nietzsches view the inversion of orginal noble values of good and bad into Good and Evil is not merely an exact inversion of these values but also a distortion. Moralising is distorting. Good didn't merely became Bad, but Evil.... a kind of demonization if you will.

What I think might be happening here with this sympathizing with these villains in Western culture is on the one hand a sense that we want to fantasize about setting free some of these impulses that have been suppressed in a Christian culture. But in doing so we still end up using these exaggerated distorted Christian tropes because that is what we are familiar with... because Good and Evil is the distorting binary we are used to thinking in.

Contrast this with earlier visions of the good life and self-mastery, where logos (reason) must order the lower appetites and passions. Logos has authority here precisely because it is:

A. Capable of knowing and desiring the Good.
B. Is itself a participation in a sort of greater Logos that perfuses and goes beyond the world.

In later modern narratives, there is first suspicion and the a denial that human logos can actually perform this function. This makes the old sort of narrative a sort of delusion and slavery that the villain exposed and transcends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've read your excellent thread on "Arguments From Underdetermination and the Realist Response", and I was planning to react to it but couldn't find the time... but I think what I had in mind is relevant here.

When you talk about "pre-modern" thinkers viewing things this way, I would want to say you are really talking about pre-modern thinkers after Socrates. In Nietzsches view Socrates and Plato were a break from what came before. Pre-Platonic Greece was Sophist, and reason was seen predominantly as another tool for convincing people, not necessarily to find universal truth... rhetorics rather than dialectics was the name of the game. The idea that we can arrive at truth by conscious reasoning, by dialectics was alien to most Greeks. At the time that was the radical idea, and the start of a complete re-evaluation of values (later picked up and spread by Christianity).

The logos is indeed often translated as 'reason' or 'the word', certainly in Christianity, but I think pre-socrates (and thus pre the Socratic re-evaluation of values) it had another meaning. In Heraclitus for instance is seems to me the Logos is more a kind of regularity, patternedness in nature that we can sense or intuit. Heraclitus was the opposite of a dialectician, not writing in arguments but aphoristically. He was very much advocating being more attuned to the logos, but reason was clearly not the way to do that. I think, with Heraclitus and Nietzsche, that we recognize patterns (the logos) by sensing and observing, not necessarily by conscious reasoning.

The danger for Nietzsche (and also someone like Adorno) is not necessarily that we are in the process of losing faith in reason in an absolute sense, as something that is necessary for every good functioning society, but that that happened to be a core part of the myth our particular civilization believed in, be it still under Christianity or after Christianity with the enlightenment. Because typically after the faith wanes, you get barbarism. Anyhow, Nietzsche believed all of this is more or less inevitable, because reason is a dissolvent for myth and faith, and so a civilization based on that will eventually eat its own tail. Realizing this, he felt compelled to become sort of an accelerationist, wanting to clear the old to make space for the new.

Anyhow, I am familiar of readings of all of Nietzsche's more "brutal" passages as a sort of allegory for peaceful self-development. I don't really buy it though. For instance:

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity.... — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're not mistaken that he very much means what he says.

Joy is the feeling of increase in power — Spinoza

With Spinoza Nietzsche considers this a physiological and psychological truth. Denying it leads to bad conscience, the will to power turned inward, and all the negative consequences that come with that.

He doesn't see this as a moral evaluation, but as descriptive of how we work and the consequences that come with it.

The way to address this would be to show that he is factually wrong about this.

Thus says the scarlet judge: ‘Why did this criminal murder? He wanted to steal.’ But I tell you: his soul wanted blood not booty: he thirsted for the joy of the knife! But his simple mind did not understand this madness and it persuaded him otherwise. ‘What is the good of blood?’ it said. ‘Will you not at least commit a theft too? Take a revenge?.’ And he hearkened to his simple mind: its words lay like lead upon him—then he robbed as he murdered — Count Timothy von Icarus

His instinct, his will is for blood, his reason leads him to justify what he instinctually wants to do in terms of what is commonly considered to be 'reasonable' or useful.

The point I think Nietzsche is trying to make here is simply that reason or conscious thought is often only rationalisation or justification after the fact (and thus falsification) of things we just want to do out of some instinctual or a-rational drive.

Check out for instance aphorism 354 of the gay science, 'The genius of the species' to understand how Nietzsche thinks about conscious thought, and I think this passage will make more sense.

That is the problem with our current socio-economic system : money & power have become separated from political responsibility. — Gnomon

China doesn't hesitate to put oligarchs in jail, there the political still seems to control economic interests. Not sure what that means, but one could say it is at least still possible to have money bow for some kind of political project.

The thing that is different now is the mobility of capital. Companies or not beholden anymore to some place or community, but can shop all over the world and force favourable conditions from governments who are put into competition with each other.

So yes things tend to oligarchy, the question to me seems what kind of oligarchy. The king and nobility in a feudal system usually still had some responsibility to their subjects, because they were ultimately still dependent on them for their power. The current oligarchs have no such issues, they can be parasitic to a place and community and just pick up and relocate to somewhere else when things go south.

I bet a good part of them only pretended to believe.

The twist is that in the Christian myth, Abraham and Isaac turn out to be the same entity. They're two aspects of one God. So at best, the story is horrifying, at worst, it just makes zero sense. — frank

I wouldn't expect the typical believer to be that concerned with thinking things through to this extend.

I wonder if swallowing the cognitive dissonance could be taken as a personal sacrifice. Christianity is really gruesome and then the Holy Communion is supposed to give you some of Jesus' blood and flesh to eat, just in case the whole thing wasn't weird enough up to that point. — frank

It wasn't weird at the time, Christianity took from common tropes. Maybe it is now and that's part of the reason it doesn't work as well.

So this is my question: is it more that a bizarre narrative (whether Christian or Q-anon, or whatever) is a expression of something deeper in the community? Or is it something that's warping the consciousness of the community? Or both? — frank

I don't think the narrative is so bizarre compared to other myths, it is bizarre if you expect it to be realistic in a modern way. But yes I think it is an expression of deeper needs of a community, and it has in turn an effect on the consciousness of the community too yes.

I think a community forms around or with certain ideas and narratives, otherwise it's not really a community. I've said this part before, but etymologically religion comes from the verb 'to bind together'... I think as an eu-social and language-using species we need something that fills that function.

The Christian myth wasn't that different from other mystery cults and resurrections stories of that time. Resurrection was a common trope going around in the Hellenic world at the time (see for instance the cults of Osiris, or Mithra).

One common theme in religion going back as far as we know, is sacrifice to appease the Gods. It used to be more human sacrifice because the blood of humans was thought to be more powerful for that purpose. Gradually that changed to animals and such, but you had to sacrifice more and more to get the same result because the blood of animals is less potent... If you sacrifice the literal son of God, well now we are talking some real sacrificial value.

People tend to want to blame something or someone for their misgivings, and will look for stories to believe in that give them a narrative that supports that. For more recent examples look at Q 'anon and all the bizarre conspiracy theories that contributed to anti-establishment politics taking over. The Roman empire had a lot of enemies, external and internal. As it started crumbling more and more in the 3th century, Christianity with it inversion of values and apocalyptical vision, had the ideal anti-establishment narrative for end-of-days Roman empire... Christianity was essentially an anti-imperial collapse cult. That there are some holes in the story matters less than the motivational boxes it ticks.

Your first reference at the end is a link to the stanford article about meta-ethical constructivism, but you don't actually talk about it in the essay as far as I can tell.

You could categorise constructivism in the same bracket as error theory, i.e. anti-realist but cognitivist, but it does come at the whole issue from another direction.

Error theory would say moral statements are meant to be truth-apt (cognitivism), but can't be objectively true because they cannot be found in the world (anti-realism), coming to the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion that all moral claims are false.

Constructivism kindof bypasses the whole issue by allowing moral claims to be true eventhough they aren't "objectively" true... because they are conventionally true. For a constructivist "killing is wrong" means "it is true that in this community of people it is agreed upon that killing is wrong". It isn't objectively true, but it isn't just a matter of individual subjective opinion either...

As someone partial to constructivism, this whole exercise of categorising ethical theories in categories of realism/anti-realism, cognitivism/non-cognitivism and relativism/absolutism seems fundamentally misguided, and it is probably one of the reasons why the whole field seems so problematic.

Maybe Art, like so many things, is just a word only unified in naming and concept, but covering many diverging different things.

Edit: Why would it be a singular thing? Why should it have an essence accross obvious different disciplines? Because essences is what philosophy is supposed to reveal?

In my understanding of the idea of disinterested interest it has something to do with:
- letting the muse inspire the art, where heart drives the interest but mind does not judge, disinterested in itself and only interested in staying absorbed in the passion.
- like improv, where there is no time to deliberate,
- like not letting yourself get in your own way,
- an earnest openness.

Seems like a meditative, more eastern way of approaching activity. — Fire Ologist

It does seem to have a lot of similarities with the ideal of wisdom put forward in the east, but also with for instance Heraclitus.

The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own. — Heraclitus

What I think they are pointing to is yes, a letting go of fixed ideas of what you want to world to be, so that you can see it like it is and be inspired by it... becoming like a mirror of the world, or letting the world flow through you.

Nietzsche would see something problematic in this process of 'objectification' or 'disïntrestedness', I'm not entirely sure, but I guess because he just saw the perspectival (which is necessarily interested?) as essential for art and life.

Schopenhauer too... and Nietzsche wasn't to happy with it.

How do you do away with bad ideas, and how do you identify them as bad? Is it just that they don't provide a non-religious theodicy?

I'm guessing not because you go on to say "tragic/sensual/empirical" as something good whereas "spirituality, metaphysics, over/mis-use of dialects or reason" is bad -- in the aesthetic sense.

If no further answer then cool. We've reached the aesthetic terminus. — Moliere

I guess it's about the basic assumptions a philosopher makes and the way they use langauge because of those assumptions. Certain ideas and ways of thinking hang together more or less coherently and give rise to distinct worldviews depending on the basic assumptions one makes.

If for instance one doesn't view the Forms, Ideas or the Logos as the fundamental underlying reality, one would have to view reason, and the use of the dialectical method for instance, with a lot more scepsis.

I think the way one leans vis-à-vis those basic assumptions typically colours the rest of ones philosophy.

I think that's a common experience for people who read philosophy. Eventually you start to focus in on the couple of things that really interest you because there's just too much out there to be able to read it all.

But I like to wander around, still. I'm uncertain that much philosophy is truly bad, but only appealing to some other aesthetic. Not quite -- there are times where I don't think this -- but it's the idea that I'm thinking towards. — Moliere

For me it's not so much that there is too much out there, but that I have decided on some basic assumptions and want to progress in a certain direction from there. Coherence is typically also one of the goals of philosophy, and I feel like you can't progress if you leave everything open. These assumptions have consequences.... and so that means you try to do away with ideas that don't work with them.

Do you think that aesthetics in philosophy is a thing? Should it be?

Do you have a sense of your own taste?

Why are you more drawn to particular philosophers, schools, styles, or problems?

Is there such a thing as bad taste in philosophy? If so, what should one do if we encounter bad taste?

Likewise, is there such a thing as good taste in philosophy such that it differs from "the opposite of bad"?

How do you feel about your own personal aesthetic choices? Do you think about how to choose which philosopher to read? How do you think about others choosing different philosophers from you? Is that the sort of thing one you might be "more right about"? — Moliere

Yes I think as a atheïst I'm looking for a sort of non-religious theodicee, like the first philosophers, that is an 'arche' or way to envision the world as one continuous whole.

I find that I side mostly on the side of the tragic/sensual/empircal and dislike most spirituality, metaphysics or over/mis-use of dialectics or reason.

Philosophy at this point for me is mostly about doing away with bad ideas, which is most of philosophy.

And I feel pretty good about it actually, maybe wish I had come to this conclusion sooner. I certainly wouldn't want to waste any more time on bad philosophy.

I think other people have to go through the process they have to go through, and maybe that involves trying out bad ideas, but mostly I think they are just misguided.

I think praxis is part of wisdom, but so is theoria. That is, the sage knows why he acts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you're denying these as standards then we're back to: "my epistemology is not "anything goes,' but I can give no explanation of why some narratives 'don't go.'" Or "my reasons for denying some narratives are sui generis in each instance." How does this keep arbitrariness out? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe the sage doesn't consciously know why he acts. There are many things we 'know', but can't really explain why we act in a certain way, like say riding a bike or playing an instrument. If living wisely is a praxis too why should we expect an explanation for it not to be arbitrary, or anything goes?

This is the assumption that isn't justified, that everything first must be understood consciously, in terms of universals, before we can be said to know anything.

There was a very long running debate over whether terms signify concepts in the mind (Aristotle) or whether they signify things (through a triadic semiotic relationship, Augustine). I've always been partial to Augustine here, but I can see the impetus in the other direction as well, and language plays a crucial role in either case. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Augustine views seems close to Peirces theory on semiotics. I could get on board with that I think.

I think in either case you're right, it's about the world in at least some way. It's mediated, so "indirect." I'm not sure if anything is ever truly unmediated; that's another question. Logic and language only ceases to be "about the world," if the terms/concepts cease to be determinantly related to the world in any way. So, even on the view that signification is of concepts (usually universals), this isn't overly problematic because universals come to us from things via the senses. It becomes a difficulty only when that linkage is somehow severed.

Here, I don't really mind the Kantian interjection that what we say about things is always "things as we know them." That's fair. Surely we are not speaking about things as we don't know them. Where it gets dicey is in the idea that there is no determinant linkage between things and what is known, in which case, it doesn't even seem like the knowledge can be "of" the things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

They are related to the world, but in an abstracted way.

I think particulars come to us via our senses, which I would consider unmediated (stricly speaking maybe not as sense-organs, nerves etc are involved, still I think we have a sense of the world).

As in Heraclitean 'metaphysics' only particulars/only becoming exists in space and time, that is the world of our senses anyway... panta rhei.

When we name a particular thing and abstract it into a universal concept we are equating and lumping together things that are similar but not identical, and take them out of their spacio-temporal context (the spirit/the eternal).

That is fine and can be usefull as long as we don't forget that universals are not really real like Plato (contra Cratylus).

Wel words do usually signify something in the world, though not allways. Those words are abstractions from the world, and it's to some extend arbitrary where lines are drawn.

Logic then applies to statements we make with those abstractions, not directly to the world itself. Insofar those statements are about the world, maybe you could say it's also about the world indirectly. But only if those statements are about the world, which they don't have to be. Logic isn't concerned with epistemics per se.

Only 'about language' was maybe a bit loose and fast.

To everyone who thinks logic and causality were the same. They are not.

The trigger before the explosion is not a logical reason; it's a physical cause. This cause is not based upon a logical law nor is it linked with it. It's not logical that the trigger causes an explosion. This is just an empirical observation and it's not guaranteed that this effect will be the same at all times. If this were logical and the effect would change, it would be like saying: "2+2=4 has been correct until now, but in the future it may be 2+2=3." -- This is not logic. Logic is independent of space and time. — Quk

Bingo! Logic is about language, not about the world itself.

The problem is a lack of telos, and a lack of hope that man can ever fulfill his innate, infinite desires. The cosmos is no longer an ordered whole animated by love. You lose the great Eastern thinkers (e.g. Saint Maximus the Confessor, Saint Gregory Palamas) vision of a cosmos moved by love to union in love, the process of exitus et reditus whereby everything in the cosmos is , a revelation of God, and history a path towards theosis.

David Bentley Hart uses Dostoevsky as his main source for his book on theodicy, "The Gates of the Sea," and this is at least his reading too. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Christian theology is a bit of a blind spot for me unfortunately, so I'm not sure I have something sensible to say about it.

Zosima, and Alyosha, which presumably are mouthpieces for Doestoevsky's views, are advocating love of everything as the way to go, in spite of all the bad in the world. That is contra the rational Ivan who is stuck on the problem of evil, i.e. what God would create a world where innocent babies are being killed.

I could be way off here, but Exitus et reditus seems to have a lot of similarities with some of Nietzsches ideas like amor fati (love of everything, because everything is one, and thus wanting to change one thing is the same as wanting to change everything), eternal return (the cyclical nature of things) and the Dionesian (dissolution of boundaries to return to primordial one).

The difference maybe is that Nietzsche doesn't see the Good as the source of everything. Time is a child playing dice (Heraclitus), meaning it's an arbirary, amoral universe. And presumably in an amoral universe love means something else than in a moral one.... a more aesthetic appreciation of surfaces, of the temporal and immanent, instead of a contemplative appreciation of the eternal and transcendent.

Or perhaps religion and theism don't have as much to do with morality as some think, and are primarily a justification for particular codes of conduct, some of which we might consider immoral today.

It’s not as if religions or theism doesn't commit egregious crimes against people, right?

Zizek (borrowing from Lacan) flips Dostoevsky’s quote to account for the poor moral behaviour of theists: “If God exists, everything is permitted." Presumably the idea is that there's not a crime going that hasn't been justified by theists as part of God's plan. — Tom Storm

I'm guessing he means that one needs something to believe in, some passion for some end or another, to have people commit attrocities they normally wouldn't. I think that's true to some extend. He says something similar about poets if I remember correctly. One could do away with poetry or religion that inflame the passions, the question then is if a society doesn't lose something vital also in that process?

Well, if you talk to some theists, they don’t think secular culture is moral. They see it as empty hedonism that promotes what they consider outrages, like gay marriage or expanded rights for women. What’s clear is that different moral systems or codes of conduct are at play simultaneously in the West, and they are unlikely to disappear. Humans are a social species, and living together requires shared norms. The idea that without belief in God humans will revert to killing and rape is clearly false. It's also evident that prisons are full of rapists and murderers who are theists. I can attest to this, having worked with prisoners and gang members, most of whom are believers. — Tom Storm

Maybe you can only see the effects of it over longer periods of time as religion slowly wanes from generation to generation. And I would say it is not only about more extreme things like killing and rape, but also about basic virtues, the general state people are in. And if you look at our secular societies today, maybe they have a point that it tends to hedonism. I'm not talking about gay marriage or something like that either, but generally there's a lot of drugs, gambling, lack of discipline, etc, etc, etc.

And if we indeed need shared norms, isn't that essentially what religion does? Etymologically, religion comes from re-ligare, which means to bind, to unite. What does the uniting absent religion?

Yes, they had a very similar diagnosis of society, i.e. that it was build on religious foundations, and that it would fall apart if you take that away. And they probably had a similar insight about the role guilt played psychological and in contemporary morality.

Their proposed solution was different though. Nietzsche wanted to go beyond Good and Evil, beyond guilt-based morality, at least for some. I think he saw a 'morality' based on shame rather than guilt with the pre-platonic Greeks. Socrates and Plato were a break from what came before, a re-evaluation in Greek valuations... from values based on the sensual, on aesthetics, to 'moral' values, ultimately ending in Christianity. He saw that as a mistake. The question for him was how to go beyond that, whereas Dostoevsky wanted a return to true Christianity.

What I want to propose is that there are two different ways of doing philosophy. There are those who do philosophy through discourse. These folk set the scene, offer a perspective, frame a world, and explain how things are. Their tools are exposition and eulogistics. Their aim is completeness and coherence, and the broader the topics they encompass the better. Then there are those who dissect. These folk take things apart, worry at the joints, asks what grounds the system. Their tool is nitpicking and detail. Their aim is truth and clarity, they delight in the minutia. — Banno

Yeah, people seem confused about language and the process of abstraction.

Knowledge is only possible through abstraction. That is trying to go beyond the world of particulars we sense to more encompassing general concepts. Without that there is no knowledge, only particulars. The flipside is that in this proces of generalisation and abstraction we lose information about particulars... and so it tends to become less useful the further we push it.

Since the beginning of philosophy there have been those misvaluating the highest concepts to the point that they were considered more real than the world of the senses, when in reality they were merely the most general, the 'highest' abstractions of that world, and consequently also the most empty.

Those that don't really understands this proces, or the implications thereof, tend to overvaluate what can be done with it.

Ramifications... Reifications and rationalisations.

As an atheist I didn't understand why the absence of divinity would necessarily lead to a world without righteousness.

I do feel guilt and feel compelled to act on moral principles eventhough I don't believe in God. So I do think it is perfectly possible for an individual to act morally without God.

Is it maybe that the world or society as a whole tends to deteriorate over time without some divine command, so eventually this also gets to individuals who are formed by the world they spring from?

Or maybe to put the question another way, why are there still people acting morally in societies that are largely secular, like say in parts of Europe today? Is it that we are still living in a world where the divine lingers on after the dead of God? Or maybe we have replaced the strictly divine with belief in something that serves a similar function, for instance the idea of 'never again' after the holocaust?

His anti-essentialist views follow from his Heraclitean 'metaphysics' (Panta rhei) and his views on language and 'truth'... from his perspectivism.

Perspectivism implies that things are viewed from a certain point of view, which is necessarily only partial and within a historical context.

Its hard to point to a particular passage to illustrate this because it runs through his entire work.

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense maybe is good place to start:

Let us still give special consideration to the formation
of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept,
inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the
unique and wholly individualized original experience to
which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit
innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means,
strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of
unequal cases. Every concept originates through our
equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals
another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an
arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences,
through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to
the idea that in nature there might be something besides the
leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form
after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied,
colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that
no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful
image of the original form. — Nietzsche

1 - Competition. — Martijn

Competition and coöperation are no opposites, and can and do go together, if we compete in groups for example, as we usually do.

I feel like what you describing as the problem, the lack of coöperation between people, is not the result of competition as a value, but rather the result of dissolution of community.

How did it come to be like this? Why are we so disconnected as a collective? I believe it's because we are brainwashed into thinking that human life is supposed to be competitive, a faulty assumption from the very start. — Martijn

In Asia there's still more of a sense for the collective. I think it's a specifically Western evolution that let to dissolution of community. First you had Christianities universalism unrooting people for more their more local pagan traditions. And then renaissance and merchand/burgher class ideas lead to reformation of part of christianity into a more individualist striving religion. The scientific revolution ultimately put into question the whole moral fabric of the religion leaving little of substance left to reign in baser parts of our nature like greed.

2 - Desire. Also known as 'hunger', this is also something that has been drilled into us from a young age. We are taught to constantly work so that we can 'achieve' a lot of things. This applies mostly to wealth, status, appearance, reputation, job experience, sexual partners, and fitness. As the ancient philosophers knew: desire is the root of suffering. Any Stoic or Buddhist philosopher (or perhaps all philosophers) realize sooner or later that genuine happiness and stillness can only come from within. It does not matter if you are living in poverty or if you are a literal king or billionaire: happiness can never be external. As Marcus Aurelius famously stated: "Your happiness depends on the quality of your thoughts." — Martijn

This only follows if we assume happiness should be the goal.

What if we instead taught young individuals to be more autonomous and embrace their individuality? What if we stopped constantly shaming each other out of insecurity, and we encouraged each other to be different? — Martijn

This seems to be in tension with the earlier point you made about the lack of community and disconnected collective.

Isn't shaming part of how humans make people fall in line?

Or how do you think we could have a connected collective if we teach people to be autonomous individuals that encourage oneother to be different?

Norms are illusions. — Martijn

Norms are illusions, or rather conventions we make up... but so is money, or language. That doesn't mean they can't be usefull or we don't need them.

You can breathe again, and begin to write your own story. Understanding this gave me an immense amount of stillness, mental clarity, and equanimity. I don't know if it was Stoic philosophy that gave me this insight, or if there was some other way I discovered this truth, but regardless: I am free. — Martijn

If humans are these fragile creatures that need to coöperate with others to survive, as you described at the start, realising the illusory nature of the stories people tell eachother doesn't really free you from their effects.

Yes it is very confusing. It occured to me after I posted the reply to Banno that we were talking about something different probably.

I was talking mostly about how 'liberalism' has been used as an ideology historically by different political actors to further their poltical and economic aims.

And Banno was talking more about how 'liberal-democracy' (not only liberalism as an ideology, but as a political system we have ended up with in the West) has served or should serve as an ethic and system of poltical organisation to keep diverse societies functioning without coercion.

I suppose there's truth to both perspectives, and I'm not sure how to disentangle these from eachother.

I've never used an AI.

All life, from the perspective of the system, works towards the same goal - to preserve and propagate. This includes the fortification against negative signals (e.g. parasitic susceptibility, pain response, etc.). Even parasitism serves the broader life cycle. — James Dean Conroy

Ok I'm not entirely sure we can ascribe agency or a telos to life in general like that, but I maybe could get on board with it as a general description of what life does.

But I think I still would hold that the general system perspective isn't all that relevant for us as a particular lifeform. We value what makes sense from our particular perspective, and by doing that maybe inadvertently also serve some larger systemic purpose... but it's not by taking that larger systemic perspective that we would serve the whole, but precisely by valuing from our perspective as a part of the whole.

So I'm maybe fine with it as a description, not so much as an axiom that can be used as a basis for our morality.

Do you mean ontological necessity from the point of view of the organism, or from a more general point of view of all life?

The latter seems hard to justify since life is often parasitic on other life, and the death of one life is often a condition for other life to persist.

So my main critique would be that in generalising all the way to life in general, you seem to have reduced away the multiplicity of life, and the different perspectives and valuations that come with that.

You're welcome.

And 'Life = Good' isn’t a moral claim - it’s the foundational logic that undergirds any value-based claim, including Nietzsche’s own. — James Dean Conroy

He wouldn't see it as a logic exactly I don't think, but as a description maybe, because he doesn't see valuing as derived from or based on a logical foundation at base, but rather coming from physiological needs... because of the type of lifeform we are.

We value from a certain point of view, not from the totality of life, and not from life as the good as an abstract principle.

Perspectivism.

Sea water is at once very pure and very foul: it is drinkable and healthful for fishes, but undrinkable and deadly for men. — Heraclitus

You seem to be one step removed from the will to power as a basic principle.

Life doesn't seek to perserve itself, but to overcome itself into something more adaptive, something greater.

Preservation makes sense only in a static world, not in a world that changes constantly... life creates order and destroys order to create another order ad infinitum.

Nietzsche wrote a couple of books on what he thought the implications were for philosophy and morality.

Outside the USA socialist policy has a greater standing and liberalism can be considered a counterpoint to capitalism, a way of constraining capitalist excess. — Banno

Outside the USA liberalism has serves against capitalism, curbing its excesses, defend individual dignity, and secure public goods. — Banno

I think you have it exactly backwards here. In Europe liberalism is more about less government intervention, more market freedom, less welfare state etc etc... a bit like the libertarians in the US but less extreme. Typically they find themselves in opposition to and to the right of Christian- and Social-democrats who do favour a larger role for the state.

US 'liberals' on the other hand are typically the party that favours more government intervention, as opposed to the Republicans and Libertarians. They have more in common with Social-democrats in Europe, but less social or less to the left.

Historically liberalism was the ideology of the capitalists class, of the bourgeoisie who wanted to take power from the aristocracy and the clergy... and it seems they have largely succeeded as the aristocracy and the clergy have very little power left in the West.

Liberalism has been mainly about "freedom from", whereas a more sensible way to look at freedom is as "freedom to" as Timothy Snyder argues is his book 'On freedom'.

I probably have a slightly different view of morality if you think it is only about figuring out cause and effect.

I think we create morals, as a society, over time. Cause and effect plays a role in that these morals get refined and adjusted by a process of trial and error when we interact with the world. But it's not like science that we just go observing the world and find out what the causes and effects are. There's also a 'subjective' valuing part to it and so there's not only one correct true answer that follows from facts about the world.

So separate societies develop different moralities because of historical contingencies, and these then get passed on to the next generations. To some extend there's an arbitrary element to them that cannot be fully justified rationally or empirically, but has to be taken on faith. Since we live in groups it is also important that there is some coherence to the morals being pursued in the same group. Myths function to justify and anchor those moralities in coherent and comprehensive stories, because that is the way we pass them on and remember them best.

If we come to question those mythical foundations, like say via the scientific method, you eventually also end up losing the justification and anchor for that particular morality. And then people start questioning them and develop their own particular diverging views on it... and you eventually end up with the anarchy or chaos I was referring to (nihilism or Durkheim would call it anomie).

That is when people instinctively start asking for some kind of unifying power to remedy the situation, which can be abused by fascists and the like.

What do you think fascism is? — Athena

It's an attempt at overcoming a culture that has become nihilistic by creating a new shared nationalistic myth.

Western culture has become nihilistic because it is based on Christianity that has within it the seeds of nihilism because of its life-denying values and emphasis on Truth as a value.

Over time a culture that has Truth as one of its core values eats its own foundational myths, and thus eventually also devaluates Truth as a value that was justified by that myth... the highest values devaluate themselves.

First the metaphysical/mythological basis of morality dissolves over time.

Then the morality based on that foundation erodes away.

Then the belief in the societal and legal structures based on that shared understanding of morality wanes.

Then you get dis-unity, splintering, corruption, power-struggles... chaos.

Then you get fascism trying to rectify that by imposing a new kind of order onto a choatic society.

It's not enough by itself. The top institutions, like the UN, aren't working or aren't adjusted to the times. Stopping the current path of militarization is at least as important if we don't want to totally lose track.