----- Original Message ----- From: "ravi" <ravi at platosbeard.org>
Not at all being disrespectful my friend, but I suspect a good chunk of leftists outside the U.S would find the last paragraph any where from amusing to incomprehensible. That politics is a power struggle is obvious. But moral struggles aren't [necessarily] about politics. If leftism is (as I have claimed earlier) the attempt of the improbable ideal, in the same vein as life, etc, then morality is the non-deterministic(*) wedge, the diagonal slash if you will, that makes life, leftism and all that milk and honey possible. If we are to resist falling prey to reading Nietzsche as cliches then the same is appropriate for moral leftism as well.
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If you substitute aesthetics -perhaps more precisely, a physiognomic desire for creative effulgence in cognitive and emotive performances- for morality I'll happily agree. As long as you don't regard my claim as a mere cliche, you know, like the one asking us to imagine Nietzsche with good digestion....Moral vocabularies/idioms are fetters when it comes to political struggles, imo.
I think this connects with the issue, which iirc we last attempted discussion on via John Holloway's book, of how we render the distinction between *power-over* and *power-to*; a huge political problem for any aspiring post-liberal theories of freedom and creativity.
Ian