File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9803, message 95


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 11:52:28 -0500
Subject: Catholics- Inveterate murderers of life!


Rhodesian "pilput"-

>if the Catholic Church as
>an institution was so hellbent to kill Jews, why did many Jews throughout
>history seek Papal protection?  Were they just stupid?

You, closet anti-Semite, need us to answer such an insultingly stupid
question for you?  
Is that the best you can muster in guise of an excuse?

>Okay, now, but that's beside the point.  The point I have tried to make is
>simply this:  that if we resolve to put good and evil behind us, then,
>well, neither the Holocaut nor the Spanish Inquiisition are evil.  They are
>just things to be embraced and affirmed like everything else.

Let YOU affirm and embrace the crimes of your own boot-licking church,
since you're so good at shirking them off, hypocrite.  But baboon of
Zarathustra, baboon always so ready to forget all about selection,
carefully hear our words again-

>Was ist gut? --Alles, was das Gefuehl der Macht, den Willen zur
>Macht, die Macht selbst im Menschen erhoeht.
>Was ist schlecht?--Alles, was aus der Schwaeche stammt.
>                                       --Antichrist, §2

>This, I suggest, just begs the question of what power and weakness are.  I
>know that sweet Lambda C will argue vociferously that this question has
>been answered by Nietzsche's discussion of active and re-active forces.  I
>don't think this distinction as N. makes it valid, but let us for the sake
>of argument say that it is.  Since N. assigns different values to active
>and re-active forces, his use of these terms, I would suggest, amounts to a
>re-naming of good and bad and good and evil.  Re-naming is hardling an
>overcoming of metaphysics, it is just a silly game of semantics.

>Paul S. Rhodes


The following is in response to Mr. Rhodes' latest intervention.

The question arises as to whether active and reactive are synonymous or
not with good 
and bad, which Mr. Rhodes promptly identifies with Good and Evil.

An affirmative response, such as Mr. Rhodes suggests, would reduce the
question to a 
problem, not of semantics - as he pretends, but of mere transposition of
terms or 
substitution.  Semantics in fact concerns the meaning of terms, and if
there were no 
semantic problems with the notions of good and bad, or Good and Evil,
then one man's 
good would surely not be another man's evil, would it?  If this much can
be agreed 
(can it?), then there are indeed many problems with Mr. Rhodes
reductionistic 
approach to the matter of active versus reactive (forces, affects,
etc).  To begin 
with there is the very connotation of force - does it mean that a force
is bad when 
it is reactive?  If reactive denotes a subjected force, what would
become of active 
forces without object-forces that they could subject?  One can certainly
treat the 
quality of a digestive force as reactive, but can one seriously hold
that digestive 
forces are 'bad' or 'Evil'?  It is apparent the kind of nonsense one
falls into when 
one reduces good and bad (adjectives) to Good and Evil (nouns), and then
moves on to 
reduce active and reactive (as qualities of forces) to Good and Evil.  

The problem is that when one performs such a reduction and then
dismisses Nietzsche's 
distinction between forces with the papal slight of hand that it is mere
moralistic 
transposition one has brought Nietzsche back to the old problem of the
judgement of 
God, exactly what he spent his life combating.  Active and reactive are
a matter of 
evaluation of forces, a matter of genealogy, not parameters of a moral
judgement 
against life, as Good and Evil are.  Certainly the German type is
digestive, just as 
the entire Christian dualism of Good and Evil is reactive, is a tool of
reactive 
life.  But thereby organismic forces of digestion have not become
German, anymore 
than reactive life is Christian per se!

Mr. Rhodes' reductionistic suggestion also glosses over the evolution of
morality.  
Already the distinction between good and bad is characteristic of
originary culture, 
a savage invention: "it is the exalted, proud states of soul which are
considered 
distinguishing and determine the order of rank" (BGE, §260).  The first
type of 
morality concerns the determination of values and good and bad designate
noble and 
ignoble as qualifiers of human beings, not actions.  An act is neither
good nor bad, 
let alone Good or Evil.  To remind you of Spinoza's position on this
matter, as it is 
precisely confluent with Nietzsche's, an action in itself cannot be said
to be either 
good or bad; an act can be said to be good only if it compounds the
relation of a 
body with other bodies, and bad only if it decomposes it.  It is bad
that which 
weakens my desire, the force of my will.

At the limit, when savage culture yields to nomadism (our unbarbered
berbers...), one 
can discern the full extent of the active forces moving this first moral 
determination from within: the fundamental statement of the Achean
nobility of 
ancient Greece is - "I am good, therefore you are bad!" (Theognis
poem).  Hence, for 
a master morality, "the cowardly, the timid, the petty, and those who
think of narrow 
utility are despised" (ibidem).  In the age of Asiatic and City-States,
the problem 
was not one of judging life, decrying life in order to promote values
superior to 
life.  It was already the problem of combating reactive life.

Altogether different is the second type of morality, slave-morality, the
morality of 
reactive life.  Here the great inversion of values is brought about:
what is good 
becomes the image of Evil, and what is bad becomes the source of Good. 
The arts of 
the Priest and the Despot.  Such is the caricature of will to power, its
becoming 
lust for power, will for power, will to debase the other: "You are evil,
therefore I 
am good!"  How not to find in this triumph of reactive forces, the herd
morality that 
weakens desire?  For that is precisely the seat of all illusions, the
roots of the 
dominion of Church, State and Capital!  Good and Evil are both
thoroughly reactive 
notions, the implements of an entropic morality, the implements of a
weak life.  

Spinoza would argue that there is no Evil as such, as there is no
adequate idea 
possible of bodies that disagree; the only existence Evil could take
would be with 
respect to the affections of sadness (hatred, rage, resentment) that
result from 
inadequate ideas and the repression of desire.  Much as we have argued
about the 
cosmological and ontological meaning of the Eternal Recurrence,
(following Deleuze's 
thread, undoubtedly!) to know that what returns is not reactive life,
nor reactive 
forces, but active affections, Spinoza held that "from the standpoint of
nature or 
God" and "their eternal laws" only relations that compound exist.  Your
depressing 
problem in reading Nietzsche stems precisely from your inability to
realize that Evil 
exists neither in the order of essences nor in the order of relations. 
Evil is 
nothing.

But then, eh bien, parlons-nous en du Mal!  One cannot but wonder what
attracts you 
to Nietzsche, who you so vehemently abhor and denounce!  Clearly,
Nietzsche does not 
compound with you, he rather decomposes your body, threatens your faith
in 
Christianity, saddens you.  Can you not find in him that Great Outdoors,
a breadth of 
fresh air sweeping through the stale chambers of academic scholarship
and the 
judgement of God, a hurricane rendering utterly meaningless the
regurgitated 
neo-modern snippets of this List and its cloacal extension?  Do you hate
idiosyncrasy 
(Deleuze's, Nietzsche's, etc) so much that you not only ignore it but
must destroy 
it, reduce it, crumple it, caricaturize it? 

Is that why you speak of Evil then, to make this world yet more
sinister?  Aren't 
there enough of us basing our power upon the sadness we can inflict upon
others, upon 
the diminution of the power of others?  Hasn't Nietzsche been demeaned
enough by 
students of Philosophy, unable to befriend knowledge?  What makes this
list so 
uninviting?  What is so tempting about its idiocy?  Is it not the
impotence to 
communicate, the incapacity to take Nietzsche seriously, the need to
recuperate and 
reduce all disputes and rob them of their essence, that rules its
threads?  The 
legacy of the Priest and the Despot: to convince us, to program us to
act as if 
sadness was the promise of happiness, as if the cult of death, the cult
of weakness, 
the cult of sadness were already a joy in and of themselves!  

Yes, Mr. Rhodes, it is bad all that proceeds from weakness, all that
weakens one's 
desire even further.  After all, the cure of reactive life lies not in
throwing it 
back to more unbridled reaction.  What is bad is not reactive forces,
but their 
triumph when they cease being enacted by active forces, when resistances
cease being 
overcome.  What is bad is negative, passive, reactive life, not reactive
forces, but 
reactive forces that have subtracted themselves from the mastery of
active forces.  
Fortunately, human beings have not yet succeeded in assassinating the
last redoubt of 
active forces, their own unconscious activity; for the triumph of Good,
as pure 
entropy of spirit, would surely preclude any possibility of freedom. 
But they have 
come darn close.

Bad is-
"The ones who don't enjoy themselves even when they laugh..."  The ones
who say- you 
know what I mean but cannot say what they mean...  "The ones who believe
in 
everything, even in God.  The ones who keep going, keep going , just to
see where it 
all ends.  Oh Yeaah!"

When is the last time that our moralists adopted Nietzsche's concept of
ethics?  We 
don't recall...et pour cause.

Good night ladies, ladies good night-


Lambda C


PS1 - "In this sense, existence is a test.  But it is a physical or
chemical test, an 
experimentation, the contrary of a Judgement.  (...)  This is the
ultimate difference 
between the good man and the bad man: the good or strong individual is
the one who 
exists so fully or so intensely that he has gained eternity in his
lifetime, so that 
death, always extensive, always external, is of little significance to
him." 
(Deleuze)

PS2 - "Combat is not the judgement of god, but the way to finish with
both god and 
every judgement.  No one develops one's power by judgement, but by
combat - which 
implies no judgement whatsoever.   Five characteristics seem to us to
oppose 
existence to judgement: cruelty against infinite suffering, vigil or
drunkenness 
against dreams, vitality against organization, will to power against a
want to 
dominate, combat against war." (Deleuze)


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