>>>And I don't think he prescribed a formula for a better
>> >>society that would be incompatible with a communist society.
>> >
>> >He'd be horrified to hear you say that . . . .
>>
>>What I meant was that he nowhere seems to spend much time on the kind of
>>'society' he would admire, other than vague statements about the culture of
>>what he calls 'the tragic age' of the Greeks or that of the Italian cities
>>in the Rennaisance. Do you think he wanted to turn the clock back? I
>>don't think he gave much thought to society as such.
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>And what thougtht he gave was hostile and negative. But with all that talk
>about rank and superiority, it's unlikely that he'd find communist
>revaluation of values attractive. He'd view it as slave morality,
>last-manly, nihilist in the bad sense.
But my problem is that I can't see how a communist revaluation of values would give rise to a slave morality. On the contrary, it seems to me a communist society, freed from necessity, would enable us to do what we wanted with ourselves. If a new aristocracy of the spirit arose, it would not be an exploitative one in terms of material necessity, by virtue of the communistic re-organization of production and exchange. Today most people idolize rich men and celebrities because this is a money-worshiping society. Whom we admire and use as models, how we fashion ourselves, is a function of the society we live in.
Thomas says in his post that Nietzsche's philosophy is revolutionary, though the man is not. I agree with this. N. was proud of the fact that his father and grandfather had privately tutored aristocratic princesses, and he saw himself as descended from Polish aristocrats, Sarmatians. But he did say that his philosophy was a philosophy of the future. Maybe it can be of use to us now in terms of how we fashion our goals in a world without transcendence.
Albert
>jks
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