> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>> Yeah, he's anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and misogynist. I
>> understand the gagging. However, he is still a brilliant philosopher.
>> He introduced many provocative ideas that still influence
>> social theory and research (e.g., the fiction of the unified,
>> individuated self; the "genealogical" method). In short:
>> he's important to understand, just skip the goofy stuff
>> ("when you go to woman, bring your whip--").
>
> Great prose stylist too. Exhilarating to read.
Nietzche is very insightful about the hidden source of mistaken psychopathological conceptions of the "good" in an instinctive desire for violent sadistic destructiveness as an end-in-itself. It doesn't follow, though, that a truly good society requires a return to "wilderness" where we can once more become "jubilant monsters" directly acting out this instinct and realizing "awful joy and intense delight in all destruction, in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty," where we can:
"revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student's prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an ample theme to sing and celebrate. It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blonde beast, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness—the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea 'Barbarian' on all the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in their highest civilisation (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated funeral oration, 'Our audacity has forced a way over every land and sea, rearing everywhere imperishable memorials of itself for good and for evil'). This audacity of aristocratic races, mad, absurd, and spasmodic as may be its expression; the incalculable and fantastic nature of their enterprises,—Pericles sets in special relief and glory the rathumia of the Athenians, their nonchalance and contempt for safety, body, life, and comfort, their awful joy and intense delight in all destruction, in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty,—all these features become crystallised, for those who suffered thereby in the picture of the 'barbarian,' of the 'evil enemy,' perhaps of the 'Goth' and of the 'Vandal.'" (Genealogy of Morals, #11)
An alternative to this is what I've ascribed to Marx, the conception of an ideal community as one in which reason rather than instinct governs willing and the resulting object of desire is "love" understood as relations of "mutual recognition." This is a wholly positive notion of "good" free of the psychopathological ressentiment Nietzche identifies with "slave morality." Though it has logical space for the idea of "bad" willing, i.e. for willing based on a mistaken idea of the "good," it has no such space for the idea of "evil" willing and hence for the idea of capitalists as "evil enemies." Nietzche makes the same distinction between "bad" and "evil" and links the idea of "evil" to slave morality.
Ted