Nietzsche
would have himself or his reader cast off the idea of any possible world save
the present; no alternative ideals that might be better or worse, no posited,
unobservable, “real world,” and no moral imperatives indemonstrable by appeal to
the observable world (that is, all of them). No valuation but one’s own: perspective is reality. Fine, then; but what action does this
imply? All the old moral principles can
be justified by replacing some divine mandate with personal valuation. I like people, so don’t kill them. I want people to be happy, and want to be
happy myself, so do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Of course, one does not and cannot develop
valuation independently of society and experience in societal milieu, so I can’t
help but wonder if this causes the ubermensch project to fall apart. How is one to know which “passions” are one’s
own, and which are imparted by others?
The distinction is meaningless.
We are products of our biology and our experience; it is entirely
possible that free will is a myth. So
are we to use whatever passions we have, and care not whence they come? Well, then, we’re back into the institutions
and norms—the “old moral monsters,” as he calls them—that teach us those
values. We’re social animals. Our state of nature is society; to separate
us from it is meaningless.
Following
our class discussion, let me elaborate on something I should never have assumed
was implicit. I roughly, poorly,
indistinctly believe in two different kinds of belief. The one is intellectual: a truth of reason, proof, demonstration. It is explicit, for I declare it; and it can
be changed if one can show, by appeal to evidence, demonstration, and reason,
that it has less basis than another. The
other kind is visceral: these are truths
of the heart, of the flesh, of long experience incarnated as identity. They are intuitive, only poorly explicable,
and mutable only with great effort; for to alter them is to remake the self. The intellectual belief and the visceral have
little conversation; they can contradict one another as freely or more freely
than they contradict themselves.
I believe a
great many contradictory things, and believe that I can successfully argue—though
I cannot bring myself to believe—a great many more, both within and across the
intellectual and visceral spheres. Still
more things do I hold within my intellectual mind as possibilities rather than
loci for belief. Meanwhile, the visceral
belief is elusive, difficult to pin down and even harder to express. This is all to say: it is no easy task for me to explain what I
believe. In what sphere? With what weight? In the intellectual sphere, according to what
presuppositions? In the visceral sphere,
in regard to what and who, and when I’m in what mood? I believe—intellectually—that the universe is
a meaningless mass of information (that might have no resemblance at all to my
ideas of it, per my last post), and that the very act of assigning meaning to
it—even meaning in the sense of “this is a chair” and nothing deeper—is
fundamentally wrong-headed, for it elides some data and emphasizes others when
no datum is inherently more important than another. This willful, inevitable wrong-headedness,
the construction of shapes of meaning out of the meaningless, is, to me, a
wonderful and beautiful thing.
Viscerally, meanwhile, I believe in chairs, and other people, and love,
and hope—in fundamental goodness, in beauty, and in the world that I perceive
with my raw flesh—and my intellectual justifications are nothing but
rationalization. I’ll sign off with Section
123 of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.”; for it helps me to articulate my
visceral dream in the face of the immense nothing that is everything.
There rolls the deep where grew the
tree.
Oh Earth! What changes hast thou seen!
There, where the long street roars,
hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they
flow
From form to form, and nothing
stands;
They melt like mist, the solid
lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves
and go.
But in my spirit will I dwell,
And dream my dream, and hold it
true;
For though my lips may breathe
adieu,
I cannot think the thing farewell.
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