promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 06, 2026 5:26 pm
We could just say moral behavior is value-laden behavior... which is pretty much all behavior. Yes, man is a moral creature, but he makes the whole shit up as he goes and divides behaviors into groups called 'right' and 'wrong' and 'good' and 'bad' depending on their correspondence to the valuer's values and their use as a means to hypothetical imperatives.
I would suggest the following if only so that we could get to the real cause of the differences rehearsed here day after blessed day. It is, in truth, the Nietzschean problem, the problem that inspired and also mired M. Nietzsche: his incapacity to “believe in” the category of the metaphysical and supernatural. I do not think there is one “philosopher” writing here who can accept the proposition of the existence of metaphysical categories, and naturally any sort of transcendent divinity.
It is a curious conundrum of the modern mind really. Once the conceptual pathway that allows for *all that* has been severed and undermined, thereafter it cannot be restored, cannot function and operate. At that point a new concept supplants the former one: man is just a biological organism that developed awareness. Just that, nothing more. So then, the new concept doubles-down on the only platform of understanding that the concept-system allows. I think Promethean exemplifies it. For him, simply put, there is no Author of morality. Such is “inconceivable”. Everything that follows is therefore logically sound. And as a system it operates within Naturalism. The only model is that of Nature.
On the other side of this problem is the intellectual situation of those who have internal and intuited connections with what I describe by the relatively coherent term “the metaphysical”. But note: Our “certainties” function for us on a gradient. Some sense vaguely that there are transcendent imperatives. Others have a conviction that is unmovable. And then there is the issue of: Well okay, I accept metaphysical and supernatural categories, but which established (religious) system will I align with? One in particular? Why?
My view is that for we Occidentals we cannot help but present as “rebels” from the overarching and undergirding metaphysics that define our civilizational trajectory. We certainly can resist it but we cannot escape it. But saying this I will only stimulate our rebelliousness to “prove me wrong”. I
think this explains Novak’s position.
But once on has accepted (reasoned out; intuited; arrived at ‘belief’) that there is an Author and Authority, that is the point where one steps into “commitment”, and commitment, similar to Nietzchean counter-commitment, does indeed construct itself. I.e. builds upon what is reasoned and intuited (that which is described by the Latin term
intellectus and carries itself into the world of choices, behaviors, and all else.
Curiously, when one thus chooses the conceptual order of metaphysical imperatives, one finds oneself immediately in the position of “rebel” to the Reigning Conceptual Model. That model can be very authoritarian and demanding. Why? Because it cannot but see itself as ‘the real truth’ and, let’s face it, that real truth is indeed The Power Principle — just as Herr Nietzsche cannot but conclude.
That is to say “the world” and certainly of “modern society” and its astounding Naturalistic operating rules and imperatives. It is a sort of mechanism of inevitability, is it not? And one is choosing to oppose that mechanism, to act against its imperatives of inevitability.