Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 10:02:11 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: M-I: Evil Germans? (Post #2)


At 9:57 PM 1/30/97, Justin Schwartz wrote:

> N's point there, elucidated more
>systematically in Towards a Genealogy od Morals, is that moral notions
>evolve and have a class basis. The opposition "good" and "evil," N thinks,
>derives from a certain class structure and perspective, the morality of
>slaves in ancient society; they reversed the value signs on the morality
>of the masters (whose opposition was "good" and "bad" or "vulgar"). N.
>thinks that reversal served an inevitable use in its day, but is now
>destructive of human flourishing. We need a "transvaluation of values," a
>morality that promotes human flourishing instead of identifying the
>successful exercise of human capacity with "evil." What's sick or even
>antisocialist about that? Of course N. was antisocialist. But _that's_ not
>anti-socialist.

Sure morals are historical and class-based, but Jesus, there's some truly
repellent stuff in the Genealogy - deeply antisocialist at its core, and,
dare I say, proto-fascist.

It's also interesting to read Nietzsche's denunciation of the "subject" in
this context. Pomo subject-snuffers lift part of his argument, but his
worship of noble predators is unacknowledged.

Here's Freddie:

"'But why are you talking about noble ideals? Let us stick to the facts:
the people have won - or 'the slaves' or 'the mob' or 'the herd' or
whatever you like to call them - if this has happened through the Jews,
very well! in that case no people ever had a more world-historic mission.
'The masters' have been disposed of and the morality of the common man has
won.... [E]verything is becoming Judaized, Christianized, mob-ized.... The
progress of this poison through the entire body of mankind seems
irresistible....'"

"One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of
prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and
victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has
to get out again and go back to the wilderness...."

"A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect -
more, it is nothing other than precisely this verydriving, willing,
effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the
fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and
misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects,
by a 'subject,' can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind
separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action,
for the operation of a subject called lightning [I'd have thought the
popular mind thought the only separable part of lightning was the thunder,
and that the flash was the lightning, but no matter - ed.] so popular
morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there
were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express
strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no
'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction
added to the deed.... [O]ur entire science still lies under the misleading
influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the
'subject'.... [N]o wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of
vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact
maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is
free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb - for thus they gain the
right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey."

"The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct
for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy - where can it not be
discovered, this will to power of the weakest!
   The sick woman especially: no one can excel her in the wiles to
dominate, oppress, and tyrannize. The sick woman spares nothing, living or
dead; she will dig up the most deeply buried things (the Bogos say: 'woman
is a hyena')."

"They are all men of ressentiment, physiologically unfortunate and worm
eaten,a  whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and
insatiable in outbursts against the fortunate and happy.... Undoubtedly if
they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own
misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed
of their good fortune and perhaps said to one another: 'it is disgraceful
to be fortunate: there is too much misery.'"

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
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