Moreover, this idea [no god, no purpose] is a poisonous one. It robs us of the will to take action. It leads us on a path to despair and apathy. It’s destructive and cheapens our life. It’s a dud. ("Andrew" @ OD)
I have a sense that this is a bourgeois difficulty.
Lower-class males have no problem forming gangs, arming themselves, and pursuing various aggressive activities that replicate the pre-historic behavior of mankind in small kinship groups.
Whatever superstitions arose/arise in these prehistoric minds were/are epiphenomenal, in that the motivation to exploit one’s environment was/is not dependent upon philosophical notions.
As it was then, so it is today - kill something to eat and fuck something so you can go to sleep. No need to worry about “the will to take action”.
Nietzsche had something constructive to say on the point:
[BGE] 257. EVERY elevation of the type “man,” has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be–a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance–that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-surmounting of man,” to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type “man”): the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power–they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the same as “more complete beasts”).
[And Kasimir Petrenko seconds the notion:]
“I have a sense that this is a bourgeois problem.” - NN
It is. The ‘man of conscience’ has replaced the ‘man of instinct’ and our vitality is now far below what it once was. With that we find ourselves in the present predicament. Forced to search for some ‘moral justification’ for our own survival, where our distant ancestors knew what to do without asking any question.
But even as early as the first American Settlers, we find Whites who came up with the ex post facto explanation that they needed to take over America to save the Heathen Indians from the devil, or else to punish them for their Devil Worship.
ReplyDeleteSo you can have moral qualms and yet still inflict an effective racial cleansing.
"It is. The ‘man of conscience’ has replaced the ‘man of instinct’ and our vitality is now far below what it once was."
Our instincts aren't strong enough, that's for sure, and a lot of it does have to do with a stupidly obsessive concern with morality, or at least a perverted Liberal version thereof.
If the early Christians cared about Christian Morality with the inflexable extremism that today's Liberals care about Liberal Morality, the sect never would've accomplished anything useful.