Philosophy Now Forum

The existential individual contains a paradox within himself. The individual, as individual, is not reducible to a set of rational truths."A man outside of the city is either a beast or a god".

The road to radical individualism: the keys to the self, can only be experienced or realized while one is alone. While the herd man follows 'rational' conventions which dilutes individuality, there is no harmony between "truth" and the existential individual.

The discovery of the self is an irrational and dangerous process.

In Nietzsche there is an equivalence between the existentially existing self (the development of violent energies and action in the potential promise of the human will) on the one hand, and what can be described as a metaphysical form of flux on the other hand. 'Will' is the Dionysian composition of metaphysical flux connected to the inner soul of the philosopher.

For Nietzsche the intense generation of a violent will to power on a cosmic scale is not amenable by rational argument but is a condition of human individuality,

If the universe is ultimately a changeless, eternal, universal realm of immutable reason then the individual, because he is individual, must act out the disunity of universal reason. There is no choice. He must defy the 'order of nature' in order to exist as himself.

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some orders of nature are more ordered than others

-Imp

Nice topic Enigma3. In order to better understand you, I’d like to ask a few questions. First I agree somewhat with this:

The existential individual contains a paradox within himself. The individual, as individual, is not reducible to a set of rational truths."A man outside of the city is either a beast or a god".

I prefer the idea that man is a plurality void of inner unity but connected by imagintion so cannot be reduced to a set of rational truths.

The road to radical individualism: the keys to the self, can only be experienced or realized while one is alone. While the herd man follows 'rational' conventions which dilutes individuality, there is no harmony between "truth" and the existential individual.

What you call the herd I call the Great Beast as described by Plato. In both cases they are sustained by imagination.

The discovery of the self is an irrational and dangerous process.

I agree that it is dangerous and a person can easily do great harm to their being by corrupting it with all sorts of imagination but why is the search irrational? Is it really irrational to strive to “know thyself?”

'Will' is the Dionysian composition of metaphysical flux connected to the inner soul of the philosopher.

What would you say is the difference between actions of free will and reactions to desires?

For Nietzsche the intense generation of a violent will to power on a cosmic scale is not amenable by rational argument but is a condition of human individuality,

If the universe is ultimately a changeless, eternal, universal realm of immutable reason then the individual, because he is individual, must act out the disunity of universal reason. There is no choice. He must defy the 'order of nature' in order to exist as himself.

We would agree that free will is an attribute of human individuality as a result of inner unity. What other qualities do you believe would be the norm for human individuality as opposed to the hypocrisy of the herd man?

Why do universal laws perceived as universal reason seem to lack unity for you? What is it that you wish to defy and what would you replace it with in order to exist as what you believe to be yourself?

The will to be individual is clearly a vulgar idea; it is a prime demand of normative culture. Even the most conservative of all demands. Life is never primarily an individual trait since it courses along from age to age under the scutcheon of impersonality. It is just when people start to preen, and think themselves individually distinct egos, that they abstract from life, and become dry Hellenistic statues.

The Opposition of Don Giovanni and the bourgeois mass who call him culprit, is between evil as pleasure in life as unity, and the narrowness of constricted meekness and the several and distinct order of human society which is visible only because it is not unified and so, therein, hidden. However, in this sense, individual is a name for power, the terrible and unpleasant strength, force or radical domination of being.