Perhaps you are right, but does this include an earthly existence? While it
is true that N thought it presumptuous that one should, or could, live
through all eternity in some otherworldly, didn't he also think that we
could make our existence worthwhile here on earth. There may not ever be a
final justification (a final painting) but the process of living is itself
a justification. The art of living is the art of loving life. Life
justifies itself and needs no metaphysical help.
>it's precisely Nietzsche attempt to break from
>such a hangman's metaphysics that wants to pass judgment on existence. It
>doesn't justify life because it's an empty, profitless repetition.
"it" meaning the ER? and "it's" meaning life?
>This
>is also its harshness that tears us away from the basic assumptions about
>what ethics is all about, of all the exchanges that take place, of coming
>to be and passing away and how that is conceived in the larger scheme of
>things. It doesn't salvage anything for the next cycle but its own
>escessiveness, its lack of profit or return. It doesn't open any "other"
>possibility, any difference whatsoever which makes it strangely
>inconceivable, as what defies the finite repetitions required by language
>by projecting an infinity or eternity that doesn't enclose any identity
>but its vast and empty being. Nietzsche's operation at this point is to
>always hesitate, to dramatize, to introduce distancing fictions, dwarves
>and animals, that speak for him and Zarathustra. His difficulty is
>focused on the elliptical in the ER. It differs mostly in how we respond
>to the insight that life is in vain,
True, and doesn't an overman type of response include overcoming even this
"in vain" and creating past it, beyond it?
that in the eyes of eternity it is
>not justified or consummated but is always an excessive passion for living
>and expending, an overflow and not an accumulation upon which we can
>reflect.
Doesn't the convalescent by definition need an accumulation upon which he
can reflect? Is this not the source of the overflow? Isn't the convalescent
one who has gathered much honey? Doesn't the overman seek experience so
that he may almost perish of it? And isn't the overman at times a
convalescent? (What does not destroy me makes me stronger)
>The will does not will backwards but can only say to the future
>"thus I willed it" and streak down into its comic conclusions.
Does the will say this to the future, or to the present? True, the future
may look less "in vain" now with this tragic worldview, and once the will
can say this, isn't it true that the will no longer blames the past or any
evil or any good, for they all deserve credit? Isn't all affirmed? At this
point, is there a need any longer for moral judgement? Once the chaos in
ourselves has given birth to a dancing star, what need have we of mere
morality?
>There is a
>radical impotence involved with ER that shakes our grasp upon the
>"honest, old ego", that makes such a thought unbearable and useless for a
>moralizing metaphysics, that makes it unreal, unsatisfying but for all
>that selective.
>
>Leonardo Raggo///////\\\
>ac857@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca
A question here: All that was not Greek was barbarian to the Greeks. Could
the rabble be the same for the overman? One who has experienced the ER, and
it is an experience at not some intellectual exercise, must look down upon
the rabble now because the latter must still cling to their petty politics
and morality and dogma and religion. It this N's elitism?
George
We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good
will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are
altogether incapable of intoxication ~ Nietzsche.
--- from list nietzsche@jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---