Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Nov 18, 2023 2:44 pmHe says that all morality is actually "the will to power," and he believes that because he believes "God is dead." He says that puts us "beyond good and evil." Those are his own terms for it. But the people here want to argue that God can be taken out of the equation without moral consequence: that "morality" can be some subjective feeling, and still stick.
If this is how you'd encapsulate Nietzsche it could be said you did a bad reading. Or a tendentious one anyway. "Will to power", as I read him, is simply a statement about the nature of the reality -- the place, this existence -- we find ourselves in. It is more that we have come to recognize, responsibly,
maturely, that this underlying and determining fact circulates everywhere and is pervasive. Since this is so then the standard assertions about *morality* can be examined with a more critical, if also cynical eye. Christian morality, when it is of that sort he called 'slave morality', often is expressed through guilt-slinging and moral blame. Power-tripping through the wielding of a sense of moral superiority. Right there one sees the *will to power* in operation.
Obviously, and without any doubt, God has died in our Modernity. And we are the ones who killed him. In the sense -- and you encounter this continually in this forum and you have now for
years -- of a clear and tangible perception that God is recognized as operating in the world and in life. If such a god exists, that god is thoroughly absent. There is no agreed on and recognizable point where God enters the world. God then is a sort of shadow-idea. Meanwhile, the
real world spins and spins and the universe explodes.
However, there are many who discover divinity, or something describable as *beyond the self* and mysterious or potent in an augmented relationship with something internal. That seems to have been one effect of the realization of the death of God in that external sense: an awakening to something internal. But for all that, you, naturally, have only contempt. (My reference here is to Jung and the encounter with the Self).
We now live in a world that is *beyond good and evil*. Not because (as I understand things) we could not grasp and be appalled by, say, a malicious and cruel torture and murder of an innocent person, and other sorts of *evils* that we can, in limited degree, locate in ourselves, but because it is very hard to say with precision what is really and truly evil when the affairs of the world are considered. What was morally clear is not longer so morally clear. The old, simplified model, the child's model really, no longer functions adequately enough for us. Additionally, we are very confused about morality and moral categories.
God
has been taken out of the equation. Have things really changed much when geo-politics is considered? No. Exactly the same struggles go on just as before. Where there is confusion is at the personal level. The example would be a person who had recently *lost their religion* and could no longer believe in an Overlording God who would send lightening bolts down upon him when he transgressed. Someone accustomed to live in such a world -- one in which a punishing figure hovered over him -- could hardly instantly
become moral when that figure disappeared or *died*. So yes, that person gets lost and struggles to find bearings and reestablish himself. But that does not mean that it cannot be done or is not done.
Morality is sometimes very much a *subjective feeling* if it is not a realization borne of genuine understanding. We can refer to the *woke* crowd who live through subjective feelings that define their moral sense. But real morality can only be arrived at through profound consideration. It is a far more demanding enterprise than receiving a command.
Nietzsche would rise up and bellow like a zombie bull at such an absurdity. With his usual rhetorical belligerence, he would insist that you must believe that is not possible, that you were like the trusting naive "townspeople," and that for you, it was still "too soon": that the "madman's speech" had gone over your head completely...or else you were simply afraid to face the truth, as he saw it, at all.
As everyone knows he prophesied many of the conditions that result from the loss of a containing horizon. And he also pointed to what for most of us seems necessary and inevitable: it all falls back onto our own selves and the choices we make, day to day, moment to moment.
The constraining system that you live within closes you off from so much that has occurred in the intellectual world. You seem aware of a great deal of it, but immune to the consideration of its import.
