File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9803, message 97


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 12:35:13 -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 babboon of
Zarathustra, babboon 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,
anger, 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)


	--- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005