Do you younger guys agree with this article?

[vy65]

Our resident overman apparently finds non-consensual simian courtship amusing.

Since distinctions between human beings and other animals are ersatz and bad philosophy, isn't the distinction between rape and animal rutting artificial as well?

Maybe.

And come on, you didn't chuckle a little?

[CosmicCowboy]

I'm going to go with LnGrrrR's take on rape. Just because our society view rapists as these fundamentally flawed and weak individuals that has not been the case historically. Take our native american culture for instance. Rape was just a way of life when one tribe won a battle over the other tribe. The winners raped and enslaved the losers women. The strongest in the tribe were the biggest rapists.

[LnGrrrR]

The lambs and birds actually represent humans. It's like Animal Farm!

Not quite. Animal farm used animals as symbols of other people; they didn't rry to use the thinking process of an animal and transpose it to human morality.

Bull . Nearly every single CEO and world leader is a psychopath or sociopath. It's been that way for ing millenia. Our system rewards psychopaths and sociopaths unless they break the law and get caught.

Sure, a lot of them are pretty shady. And sociopaths/psychopaths do get an advantage by not having those moral inhibitions. But as long as siad sociopath/psychopath is benefitting others more than he's hurting others, than he'll probably get by.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Then there is the whole thing of the lambs not actually getting together calling anything evil so there is no true parallel. About the closest you get is a fear response.

The main problem here is this: what do you guys think Nietzsche's take on the ubermensch being defined by money? All this other elitism stuff is great but not without the backdrop of what he finds to be the truth no matter how repugnant?

Its just self serving bull as its currently guised.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

What makes you say that? The whole Pre-Socratic/Dionysian tradition the Greeks had suggests the opposite (in the terms we're using here)



I never said it was "evil." I said we can criticize rape as an act of resentment.



I think Foucault said something like the work of the philosopher is to make facile gestures seem difficult. You're right that it's obvious. But the point being made here is that people espouse the opposite belief system - rather than recognizing the mentality of the powerful, the mentality devoid of resentment, people instead invent terms like evil and systems of morality which use these terms to castigate the powerful.



You saying that it's bull doesn't make it so. I explained why the rape example doesn't really fit here. I think you're point is turning into "you can't say that because there will always be someone more powerful." So what?

Heraclitus Pythagoras were contemporaries of the Bacchans and they did not agree with your assertion that there was no evil.

[vy65]

Animal farm used animals as symbols of other people; they didn't rry to use the thinking process of an animal and transpose it to human morality.

Nietzsche was doing the same thing.

His point was to criticize taking a human way of thinking (i.e. the predation) and ascribing it to nature. Violence exists in nature just as it exists in society. To view that violence as immoral is to resent life itself.

[vy65]

Heraclitus Pythagoras were contemporaries of the Bacchans and they did not agree with your assertion that there was no evil.

Pics or it didn't happen.

[greyforest]

But the red herring is to justify them by saying "well, we're all animals". I can understand a lion thinking "I'm hungry" and going out there and eating 5 people. The lion doesn't have rational thinking. He doesn't understand that those 5 people have families, and they're not coming back home.

We're light years away from raw animals. Trying to justify our choices by some link to the animal world is patently lame.

I'm not justifying the behavior, I'm merely explaining it.

Humans are only 10% human. The rest is all animal.

Morality is really really simple and easy, and everyone obfuscates it. As long as a person has the capacity for empathy, they will treat every person as if they were themselves.

Narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths literally lack this capability from a physical defect in their brain. This gives them an advantage in society, because when they rape someone, or extort money, or do anything immoral they have no capacity to feel shame or even acknowledge what they did was wrong.

Society tries to instill codes of ethics to prevent these people from ing others over, but they always are around. These codes of ethics change over time dramatically, despite morality being very very simple.

Our society is much more racially integrated than 50 years ago, for example. Most people these days would agree that it's immoral to treat black people as sub-human, but 150 years ago? Exactly. Different code of ethics.

[LnGrrrR]

What makes you say that? The whole Pre-Socratic/Dionysian tradition the Greeks had suggests the opposite (in the terms we're using here)

Care to explain?

I never said it was "evil." I said we can criticize rape as an act of resentment.

Shifting goalposts here. What makes it an "act of resentment" instead of "might makes right"? Other than, of course, the fact that making it sound morally proper pretty much shoots a hole in your own foot.

I think Foucault said something like the work of the philosopher is to make facile gestures seem difficult. You're right that it's obvious. But the point being made here is that people espouse the opposite belief system - rather than recognizing the mentality of the powerful, the mentality devoid of resentment, people instead invent terms like evil and systems of morality which use these terms to castigate the powerful.

Disagree. I think people invent systems of morality in order to live together, and as society grows, the laws which govern morality grow as well.

What good would it do to "recognize the mentality of the powerful" if you're still getting eaten by them?

And I'm pretty sure that evil/morality wasn't invented in order to castigate the powerful. In fact, I'm pretty sure we castigated the powerful the first time one caveman realized another caveman had more meat than he did.

You saying that it's bull doesn't make it so. I explained why the rape example doesn't really fit here. I think you're point is turning into "you can't say that because there will always be someone more powerful." So what?

You made up some bull about the rape claim in order to justify it, you mean. "Oh, that rape thing doesn't count because it's not REALLY strength, it's weakness!" If you want to hairsplit, define what strength is and isn't then.

You were the one espousing "might makes right". If you're going to change that to "justified might makes right", then that's a different argument.

[Borat Sagyidev]

Why is it that these older types look at the younger generation and say things like

All this "lowered expectation" certainly gives me pause since part of my retirement plan has always been that when I got ready to downsize that my current house would sell for a load of money. If the generation behind us doesn't give a and care about "stuff" then who is going to buy it?

What a bunch of "poor me" bags. I guess the entrepreneurial spirit is dead. When an entire generation is waiting for someone else to hand them something, it doesn't bode well for the future of our republic.

Like this generation really needs to get involved in the BS investment scheme known as the housing market. Or Entrepreneurial spirit? You mean owning a business competeing with the 3rd world making plastic dog crap?

Yeah, that moves society forward, Owning a business. DR posted a good story, but why should be everyone's case? If we all owned businesses like that, this country would suck

[vy65]

Then there is the whole thing of the lambs not actually getting together calling anything evil so there is no true parallel. About the closest you get is a fear response.

The main problem here is this: what do you guys think Nietzsche's take on the ubermensch being defined by money? All this other elitism stuff is great but not without the backdrop of what he finds to be the truth no matter how repugnant?

Its just self serving bull as its currently guised.

They're plenty of other reasons why I'm better than you. Money is just one.

[Winehole23]

Maybe.

You're a lawyer, right? Even if the distinction is "wrong," it remains legally enforceable.

And come on, you didn't chuckle a little?

Nope. Perhaps you can point out the funny part.

[CosmicCowboy]

Why is it that these older types look at the younger generation and say things like






Like this generation really needs to get involved in the BS investment scheme known as the housing market. Or Entrepreneurial spirit? You mean owning a business competeing with the 3rd world making plastic dog crap?

Yeah, that moves society forward, Owning a business. DR posted a good story, but why should be everyone's case? If we all owned businesses like that, this country would suck

BaaaaaaaaaaD Raptors!!!

[ElNono]

I'm not justifying the behavior, I'm merely explaining it.

Humans are only 10% human. The rest is all animal.

Morality is really really simple and easy, and everyone obfuscates it. As long as a person has the capacity for empathy, they will treat every person as if they were themselves.

Narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths literally lack this capability from a physical defect in their brain. This gives them an advantage in society, because when they rape someone, or extort money, or do anything immoral they have no capacity to feel shame or even acknowledge what they did was wrong.

Society tries to instill codes of ethics to prevent these people from ing others over, but they always are around. These codes of ethics change over time dramatically, despite morality being very very simple.

Our society is much more racially integrated than 50 years ago, for example. Most people these days would agree that it's immoral to treat black people as sub-human, but 150 years ago? Exactly. Different code of ethics.

But there's a huge difference. You're comparing humans to humans, not humans to non-humans.

A lion 50, 150, 300 years ago and today still does what it does without thinking rationally. It will very likely never think rationally, no matter how much time passes.

That humans evolved their rational thinking over years/decades/centuries is simply further proof how we're disconnected more and more from non-humans, and the animal 'instinct' or whatever you want to call it.

[vy65]

I didn't think we were talking about the legal system here.

There's no need to be crogedy all the time WH ...

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Pics or it didn't happen.

You are the one that said that the notion of evil did not exist in the presocratic world. It did as made very cear by all the bull rules that pythagoreans had.

They had a notion of the beautiful in shapes and considered distortions to be abhorrent.

Your premise was wrong and quite frankly we do not know very much about the Bacchans as they were the plebs and did not write very much however you could claim that there depiction of the ans as destroyers could be viewed as an evil en y.

[greyforest]

They're plenty of other reasons why I'm better than you. Money is just one.

Here's a great example of an idiotic principle strongly rooted in our society - more money = better than.

I could understand, maybe, if money actually represented how much you did for society, but it's not. Do you think Paris Hilton is better than you? She most certainly has more money than virtually everyone in this thread, so by your logic she is better than all of us.

[MannyIsGod]

I didn't think we were talking about the legal system here.

There's no need to be crogedy all the time WH ...

There is if life is a compe ion!

[FuzzyLumpkins]

They're plenty of other reasons why I'm better than you. Money is just one.

You're butthurt. That is so cute. Ad hominem. If you are a lawyer then you know what it makes a knowledgeable judge think of your position.

The problem with Nietzsche is that he set out a order in which there were elites but at no point described how that power was to manifest itself. that was the whole point of will to power as that was how it was to manifest.

He went mad forwhatever reasons o quit flushing out his philosophy. However without that justification for being in said spot of power its hard to justify having it. He clearly wanted to within his framework and never could.

As such using him to justify being an asshole is pretty weak.

[Winehole23]

There's no need to be crogedy all the time WH ...

Crotchety.

Just because you dislike the attention doesn't make me ill-natured or peevish. On the contrary, I'm in a great mood.

[greyforest]

But there's a huge difference. You're comparing humans to humans, not humans to non-humans.

A lion 50, 150, 300 years ago and today still does what it does without thinking rationally. It will very likely never think rationally, no matter how much time passes.

That humans evolved their rational thinking over years/decades/centuries is simply further proof how we're disconnected more and more from non-humans, and the animal 'instinct' or whatever you want to call it.

Absolutely. I'm merely pointing out that the animalistic, predatory instincts are still with us (some more than others), despite the centuries-old striving to be "civilized". Obviously comparing humans and animals isn't apples-to-apples, but no one should ever discount just how much behavior we have in common.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Here's a great example of an idiotic principle strongly rooted in our society - more money = better than.

I could understand, maybe, if money actually represented how much you did for society, but it's not. Do you think Paris Hilton is better than you? She most certainly has more money than virtually everyone in this thread, so by your logic she is better than all of us.

What he needs to do is start listing his assests and I will tell him if he has more moeny than me. He is just lashing out like an angry little boy now.

[greyforest]

No, you missed my point. Neither of you have assets worth as much as Paris Hilton, so you both should feel ashamed you aren't as good as her.

[vy65]

Care to explain?

This is much more succinct than I could ever do:

The preface to Richard Wagner already proposed that art—and not morality—was the essential metaphysical human activity; in the book itself there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, the entire book recognizes only an artist’s sense and—a deeper meaning under everything that happens—a “God,” if you will, but certainly only a totally unthinking and amoral artist-God, who in creation as in destruction, in good things as in bad, desires to become aware of his own pleasures and autocratic power equally, a God who, as he creates worlds, rids himself of the distress of fullness and superfluity, of the suffering of pressing internal contradictions. The world is at every moment the attained redemption of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the one who suffers most, who is the most rent with contradictions, the most inconsistent, who knows how to save himself only in appearances. People may call this entire artistic metaphysics arbitrary, pointless, and fantastic—the essential point about it is that it already betrays a spirit which will at some point risk everything to stand against the moralistic interpretation and meaningfulness of existence. Here is announced, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism “beyond good and evil”; here is expressed in word and formula that “perversity in belief” against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling his angriest curses and thunderbolts in advance—a philosophy which dares to place morality itself in the world of phenomena, to subsume it, not merely under the “visions” (in the sense of some idealistic terminus technicus [technical end point]) but under “illusions,” as an appearance, delusion, fallacy, interpretation, something made up, a work of art.* Perhaps we can best gauge the depth of this tendency hostile to morality from the careful and antagonistic silence with which Christianity is treated in the entire book— Christianity as the most excessively thorough elaboration of a moralistic theme which humanity up to this point has had available to listen to. To tell the truth, there is nothing which stands in greater opposition to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world, as it is taught in this book, than Christian doctrine, which is and wishes to be merely moralistic and which, with its absolute standards, beginning, for example, with its truthfulness of God, relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies—in other words, which denies art, condemns it, and passes sentence on it. Behind such a way of thinking and evaluating, which must be hostile to art, so long as it is in any way genuine, I always perceived also something hostile to life, the wrathful, vengeful aversion to life itself; for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error. Christianity was from the start essentially and thoroughly life’s disgust and weariness with life, which only dressed itself up with, only hid itself in, only decorated itself with the belief in an “other” or “better” life. The hatred of the “world,” the curse against the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a world beyond created so that the world on this side might be more easily slandered, at bottom a longing for nothingness, for extinction, for rest, until the “Sabbath of all Sabbaths”—all that, as well as the absolute desire of Christianity to allow only moral values to count, has always seemed to me the most dangerous and the weirdest form of all possible manifestations of a “Will to Destruction,” at least a sign of the deepest illness, weariness, bad temper, exhaustion, and impoverishment in living—for in the eyes of morality (and particularly Christian morality, that is, absolute morality) life must be seen as constantly and inevitably wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—hence, pressed down under the weight of contempt and eternal No’s, life must finally be experienced as something not worth desiring, as something inherently worthless. And what about morality itself? Might not morality be a “desire for the denial of life,” a secret instinct for destruction, a principle of decay, diminution, slander, a beginning of the end? And thus, the danger of dangers? . . . And so, my instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this questionable book, as an instinct affirming life, and invented for itself a fundamentally different doctrine and a totally opposite way of evaluating life, something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words, I baptized it, taking some liberties— for who knew the correct name of the Antichrist?—after the name of a Greek god: I called it the Dionysian.—

http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/niet...ragedy_all.htm

Shifting goalposts here. What makes it an "act of resentment" instead of "might makes right"? Other than, of course, the fact that making it sound morally proper pretty much shoots a hole in your own foot.

No goal posts were ever shifted. I'm engaging in a little amateur psychology here. A man rapes a woman principally to exert power over her. The act is animated by the man's own powerlessness - he rapes in order to exert something he doesn't have - power over the woman. It's a desperate act designed to hide the man's own impotence. Basically, rape occurs because a man resents a woman and also resents his own impotence. That's pretty bad in the Nietzschean world-view.

Disagree. I think people invent systems of morality in order to live together, and as society grows, the laws which govern morality grow as well.

What good would it do to "recognize the mentality of the powerful" if you're still getting eaten by them?

And I'm pretty sure that evil/morality wasn't invented in order to castigate the powerful. In fact, I'm pretty sure we castigated the powerful the first time one caveman realized another caveman had more meat than he did.

Part of this is dealt with in that huge block quote.

You might be right as to why morality arises in the first place. But that's not really what we're talking about.

The point to recognizing that mentality is to emulate it on your own terms - to become powerful yourself. If you're getting eaten, then you should do something about it.

As for the last bit, if you don't agree, you don't agree. But I think the caveman's reaction was to beat the out of the guy with more food and steal it - not sit around and call him evil.

You made up some bull about the rape claim in order to justify it, you mean. "Oh, that rape thing doesn't count because it's not REALLY strength, it's weakness!" If you want to hairsplit, define what strength is and isn't then.

You were the one espousing "might makes right". If you're going to change that to "justified might makes right", then that's a different argument.

This is answered above.

[ElNono]

Absolutely. I'm merely pointing out that the animalistic, predatory instincts are still with us (some more than others), despite the centuries-old striving to be "civilized". Obviously comparing humans and animals isn't apples-to-apples, but no one should ever discount just how much behavior we have in common.

I can understand being exceptions to the rule (or the exception being created by being intellectually lazy).

But the rule, by and large, is that we rationally choose to do what we do or don't do. Whereas it has everything to do with rational thinking, and little with instincts.

That rational thinking has evolved over time, has gotten sprinkled with different moral and idealistic angles, etc. is certainly not in dispute here.