> The error of free will. Today we no longer have any tolerance for the
> idea of "free will": we see it only too clearly for what it really
> is —
> the foulest of all theological fictions, intended to make mankind
> "responsible" in a religious sense — that is, dependent upon priests.
> Here I simply analyze the psychological assumptions behind any attempt
> at "making responsible."
>
> Whenever responsibility is assigned, it is usually so that judgment
> and
> punishment may follow. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence
> when
> any acting-the-way-you-did is traced back to will, to motives, to
> responsible choices: the doctrine of the will has been invented
> essentially to justify punishment through the pretext of assigning
> guilt. All primitive psychology, the psychology of will, arises
> from the
> fact that its interpreters, the priests at the head of ancient
> communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish — or
> wanted to create this right for their God. Men were considered "free"
> only so that they might be considered guilty — could be judged and
> punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and
> the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the
> consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological
> deception was
> made the principle of psychology itself).
These are knowledge claims, i.e.they implicitly assume a "subject" able to be "responsible" for its claims. The claim that there is no such subject contradicts this assumption.
The psychological "analysis" self-contradictorily traces the assignment of "responsibility" "back to will, to motives, to responsible choices" and is itself "moralistic" i.e. assigns the assignment to a bad motive, namely "to justify punishment through the pretext of assigning guilt."
There is a psychology that can explain these self-contradictory claims and the related inability to imagine any motive other than a sadistic "will to power" and any ethics that isn't merely a more or less disguised expression of this. In particular, it can explain the inability to imagine Marx's ethics of "mutual recognition" having its starting point in the idea of "love" found in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
That psychology is "psychoanalysis," particularly as developed by Kleinians. It explains both the claims and the lack of imagination as expressions of a weak unintegrated ego dominated by the "paranoid- schizoid position." Such an ego is also prone to psychotic breakdown.
This also explains the immunity of the ideas to rational critique.
Nietzsche, in contrast to Marx, prefers the Greek sophists to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
“168 A model. — What is it I love in Thucydides, why do I honour him more highly than Plato? He takes the most comprehensive and impartial delight in all that is typical in men and events and believes that to each type there pertains a certain quantum of good sense: this he seeks to discover. He displays greater practical justice than Plato; he does not revile or belittle those he does not like or who have harmed him in life. On the contrary: though seeing nothing but types he introduces something great into all the things and persons he treats of; for what interest would posterity, to whom he dedicates his work, have in that which was not typical! Thus in him, the portrayer of man, that culture of the most impartial knowledge of the world finds its last glorious flower: that culture which had in Sophocles its poet, in Pericles its statesman, in Hippocrates its its physician, in Democritus its natural philosopher; which deserves to be baptized with the name of its teachers, the Sophists, and which from this moment of baptism, unfortunately begins suddenly to become pale and ungraspable to us — for now we suspect that it must have been a very immoral culture, since a Plato and all the Socratic schools fought against it! Truth is here so tangled and twisted one does not like the idea of trying to sort it out: let the ancient error (error veritate simplicior) continue to run its ancient course! —“ (Nietzsche, Daybreak, [Cambridge ed.] p. 169)
So the world to which Nietzsche looks forward in eager anticipation differs somewhat from Marx’s “true realm of freedom” characterized by relations of “mutual recognition”:
“148 Distant prospect. — If only those actions are moral which are performed for the sake of another and only for his sake, as one definition has it, then there are no moral actions! If only those actions are moral which are performed out of freedom of will, as another definition says, then there are likewise no moral actions! — What is it then which is so named and which in any event exists and wants explaining? It is the effects of certain intellectual mistakes. — And supposing one freed oneself from these errors, what would become of ‘moral actions’? — By virtue of these errors we have hitherto accorded certain actions a higher value than they possess: we have segregated them from the ‘egoistic’ and ‘unfree’ actions. If we now realign them with the latter, as we shall have to do, we shall certainly reduce their value (the value we feel they possess), and indeed shall do so to an unfair degree, because the ‘egoistic’ and ‘unfree’ actions were hitherto evaluated too low on account of their profound and intrinsic difference. — Will they from then on be performed less often because they are now valued less highly? — Inevitably! At least for a good length of time, as long as the balance of value-feelings continues to be affected by the reaction of former errors! But out counter-reckoning is that we shall restore to men their goodwill towards the actions decried as egoistic and restore to these actions their value — we shall deprive them of their bad conscience! And since they have hitherto been by far the most frequent actions, and will continue to be so for all future time, we thus remove from the entire aspect of action and life its evil appearance! This is a very significant result! When man no longer regards himself as evil he ceases to be so!” (Nietzsche, Daybreak, [Cambridge ed.] pp. 148-9)
An account of the difference between the ideas of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, on the one hand, and and those of the sophists, on the other, that illuminates the difference between Marx and Nietzsche is available in the chapter from James Daly's book, Deals and Ideals. It's at the url he recently posted. Here are some illustrative passages:
“The key to an understanding of ethics and politics (and of the relation between them) is in the conflict between Socrates and the Sophists. The division between them polarised two claims to enlightenment, with mutually exclusive concepts of nature, human nature, reason, the good, justice, right, law, virtue, happiness and freedom.
“The Sophists' epistemological- and value-relativist position was that all reasoning and all valuation is subjective because it is relative to and subservient to the immediate, particular desire or will of each individual. They also held that by nature the primary, basic and inevitable desire of every individual is to survive. Once that is guaranteed the next desire of everyone (including Socrates, who was declared by Polus in the Gorgias to be hypocritical for not admitting it) is to possess everything, and to rule and enslave all others. That would provide the greatest possible amount of value. There is no hierarchy of values; they are quantitative, not qualitative.
“The Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian reply was that the Sophistic perspective ignored the specifically human natural capacity of the intellect to transcend the immediate, particular and finite towards the universal, in the forms of the understanding of universal essences, the orientation to universality as unity and totality, and the love of infinite and absolute truth, beauty and goodness. The fulfilment of the individual is found not in the false infinity of the endless satisfaction of finite desires for quantifiable things, but in the infinitude of these values, which are qualitatively better and higher than that of survival, and may require the sacrifice of one's life, liberty or finite goods. The most fulfilling relationship between human beings is mutual justice; that includes in principle the common ownership of resources, at least as a ground for the community's requiring that, if they are to be distributed (by the community) among the citizens, they must be used for the common need and the common good.” http://www.greenex.co.uk/philosophy/deals.html
“No one sophist held all the views generally attributed to sophism, but I am following Plato in seeing Callicles in the Gorgias as typifying a possible extreme logical development of basic views shared by many of them, and widely current in Athens at the time, being given full sympathetic expression by writers such as the radical historian Thucydides and hostile expression by the conservative comic dramatist Aristophanes.
“Sophistic naturalism was relativist and individualistic, making the immediate particular arbitrary whim of any individual human mind or any social convention the measure of truth and value. The opposing spiritual dialectical enlightenment was communal, seeing a universal rationality common to the divine and the human mind as the measure of truth and value, and a potential source of total harmony. Sophistic moral relativism is the theory that all morality is, not contingently or in fact, but necessarily or in principle, an expression of will or power, by which every 'individual' secures her or his own 'interests' against those of others. The Sophists saw rules of justice as a convention imposed on others by each of us, as the means of gaining our own pleasure and avoiding harm from others. Protagoras claims in Plato's eponymous dialogue that the source of politics is Prometheus the bringer of technology, and that its instrumentalist function is a substitute for the animals' teeth and claws.
“The Sophists' radical interpretation of nature in general as raw and primitive stuff, which needs to be improved by art (that is, technology) led them in the case of human nature to an atomistic, mechanical and almost socio-biological view of human nature, and an instrumental view of reason as serving the passions by the social engineering of articles of convention. They claimed that that was being rational; that they were seeing nature as it is, and not as it allegedly ought to be or could be; they were being what Max Weber called "disenchanted". In fact, however, their view of nature was a reductionism which forced human nature into a Procrustean bed. They represented it as a manifold of finite beings competing for pleasure, possession, domination, in which the stronger individuals rule and, according to nature, should rule. Thucydides's account of the Athenians' Realpolitik attitude to the Melian delegation which came suing for mercy expressed their view succinctly: of the gods we believe, they said, and of men we know that the stronger rules and the weak submit. Men bargain about justice only when their forces are equal. We did not invent this law, we found it in nature, and we expect it to go on forever; that is why we apply it. You would do the same to us if you had the power. So they massacred the men of Melos, sold the women and children into slavery, and later colonised the deserted island.” <http://www.greenex.co.uk/philosophy/deals.html>
Ted