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Joseph Carter's avatar

The problem right now is that the left craves a moral system, but neither the Nietzschenian dissolution of all values or Marxism (the other dominant left tendency of the last 100 years) can provide that. Which is why so much of left morality is liberal bourgeois manners with radical slogans. Practically, this is open to abuses (call out culture, basically), and, intellectually, this is thin gruel compared to the before mentioned ideologies (as well as conservative Christianity and classical liberalism). But I don't what the path to a left moral system is. We struggle to build on the strange intellectual heritage that Nietzsche has provided us with.

Good writing as always though!

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Notes On Useful Beauty's avatar

I remember two sayings from my reading of Nietzsche, which sum up much of my academic experience, in fact.

1. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” I destroyed a graduate student in Philosophy critiquing this sentence, by pointing out the Nietzsche was not making a distinction between good and bad systems-he was saying that any system, externally imposed or internally selected, was a crutch that reduced one’s freedom. I thought this idea was rather exciting, in the way many 19 year olds might. It seemed that none of the other students had any idea what we were talking about, but later I realized they were just more prudent than me.

Later in the same book, I read another line which ended my fascination with Nietzsche. If you are familiar, perhaps you can guess the sentence?

2. “When going to women, carry a whip.” Perhaps this is a slight paraphrase, but you get the gist here. Having grown up on a ranch where whips were used for a variety of purposes, none of which involved men wanting to date me, it was immediately apparent that Nietzsche’s idea of what constituted “mankind” was extremely narrow, did not include me (one of those ‘women’ he felt such a need to both approach and protect himself from), and showed that that other interesting thing he said to be a miserable lie. I still got an A in the Intro Phil course thru the simple expedient of not bothering to try to discuss this with the graduate student at all. I expect the other students were grateful for my forbearance.

I had already encountered the same problem with Freud, when I realized that anytime he spoke of sexuality, he was discussing male sexuality, with “the female” being the focus is sexuality, not an active generator of sexuality for myself, and a rapid scan forward from tat point convinced me that Freud was a puzzled man too limited by the cultural milieu within which he found himself to address how women actually interacted with men at all. But Nietzsche was the last straw. I turned to neuroscience and the oversimplifications of Skinnerian behaviorism after that. Ugh.

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