Nietzsche, morality and ethics in violence

Jeremy wrote: ---------- I think it's the glibness that Ivar so admires ("almost telepathic" gushes your childhood friend) but I so dislike...that causes the frustration I allude to in conversations like this..."maybe you just want to purchase that book on 'Mastery'" - probably I will one day but it's not on the top of my list....I'M AMBITIOUS Andrew, AMBITIOUS, when are you going to get that? AMBITIOUS. I want to purchase all the books I read one day...and re-read them all good or bad one day...Robert Greene's books are important because I'm interested in ethics - which I define as a code for conduct regardless of morality. I wonder whether Freud would agree with my ideas about morality, that it's the expression of sexual frustration (or maybe violence - frustration - violence being the destructive side and sexual energy the creative side of the same basic force) - and ethics is the way we codify this... ========== I wanted to show Jeremy that Nietzsche had already considered these topics, so I responded with the quote: I'm re-reading Nietzsche's _Daybreak_, the subtitle of which is "Thoughts on the prejudices of morality", and understanding it a lot better than when I first read it. One of the first passages has the title, "Sense for morality and sense for causality in counteraction" and in it Nietzsche says: "In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality decreases for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundation of customs -- the real world is much smaller than the imaginary -- and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom: morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. He who wants, on the contrary, to augment it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control." ---------- Another quote from Daybreak: And in a section marked with the heading, "Animals and morality", Nietzsche writes: "The animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their coloring to the coloring of their surroundings, pretend to be dead or assume the color of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate 'mimicry'). Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept 'man', or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place: and all the subtle ways we have to appearing fortune, grateful, powerful, enamored have their easily discoverable parallels in the animal world. ... The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery -- in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues, are animal: a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal." ========== I also found this quote when doing an internet search using the search terms: "nietzsche" plus "daybreak" plus "violence". ========== The exhibition draws inspiration and its title from Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices. Like Nietzsche, Peterson presents a world in which contrasting schemes of morality result in eruptive hostility between social classes. In Nietzsche’s work, this dichotomy is described as master-slave morality: the tension between an overclass that values pride, wealth and strength and an underclass that values humility, piety and restraint. While Nietzsche claims that the people of the underclass choose this morality to soothe the cognitive dissonance of hegemony, Peterson’s “ DAYBREAK” insinuates that through violence they are breaking free not only from their oppressors but an oppressive morality as well. This role reversal, however, creates an interesting dilemma: when a revolt upends the power structure, which sides do virtue and vice end up on? Can either class be considered virtuous if they literally beat the other to death with morals? ========== I read something about the role of violence as a factor in shaping morality in my reading of Nietzsche's _Daybreak_ today, but I cannot locate the passage. It appears that violence is of most significance to his book _On the Genealogy of Morals_, which was written after _Daybreak_. Perhaps this article, a statement of Nietzsche's view of the role of violence in morality, is more in line with your thoughts? ============================== Quoted from The Guardian newspaper: Thus, a society built on suffering is dangerously unstable, constantly on the look out for others to hold responsible for the creation of its pain. Even when human beings are "enclosed within the walls of society and peace" the power of ressentiment gnaws away, setting people against each other in a toxic brew of accusation and counter-accusation. The revengefulness of the victim has a remarkable staying power over time, stubbornly outlasting the circumstances of its birth. ----- For politicians and the ruling class, such a society is hell to manage. And here the church comes in. For the priest has a remarkable way of protecting society from itself. His answer to the question of responsibility is that we are all responsible for our own suffering. There is no one to blame but ourselves. Thus the anger and bitterness of ressentiment is turned inwards. The priest is "the direction changer of ressentiment", refocusing the destructive hatred that was incubated in slavery back on the self. Here is Nietzsche's account of how sin and guilt enter the world. ---------- Part of the reason that this refocusing of ressentiment works is because it helps the politicians keep society quiet. Instead of blaming each other, the individual blames himself or herself, folding hatred back upon itself and generating self-hatred instead. It is as if Nietzsche has a sense that the suffering and resentment generated by oppression has to be discharged somewhere. The church manages of persuade people to discharge all that poisonous energy back upon itself. In this way the church makes itself indispensable to the powers that be at the same time as poisoning society with wells of self-destructive energy. ---------- Fascinatingly, some have argued that what is being proposed here – albeit in Nietzsche's characteristically hyperbolic style – is nothing less than an account of the origins of the inner working of the self that anticipates the ideas of Freud and his work on the unconscious. Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell-Pearson claims that Freud's "Civilisation and its Discontents is in many ways a psychological reworking of the Genealogy of Morals." Both thinkers develop a sense of some subterranean self operating out of immediate view, and both believe this hidden self to be the product of an act of repression – though with Nietzsche it is violence and suffering that lies at the heart of the 'unconscious' rather than sexual desire. ---------- The main task of Nietzsche's thought, then, is to rid human beings – and Europeans specifically – from the nihilistic power of self-destructive hatred that is the church's true gift to the world. To this extent he regards his philosophy as an exercise in liberation, an act of salvation even. ---------- Yet his prescription for dealing with ressentiment shows Nietzsche at his least convincing. His answer is effectively: better out than in. Better to express one's anger and bitterness than to keep it bottled up inside. For by expressing it, one discharges all its destructive energy. Thus he prefigures much cod psychobabble about the need we have to express ourselves and express our inner natures. But in contrast to much psychotherapy, there is little safe or suburban about Nietzschean therapy, he is not proposing a gentle "talking cure". Rather the location for his therapeutics is more the battlefield than the couch. In order to discharge one's ressentiment one must become like a marauding Viking or Homeric hero, an artist of expressive violence. This is the notorious übermensch, the atheist holy man, etc. ================================== That's not my idea of great writing but it points to the fact that Nietzsche had violence very much in mind when he constructed his thesis on the evolution of morality and I believe that you can learn a lot from him. _Daybreak_, the book I am busy reading these days, astounds on every page. Walter Kaufmann, the most preeminent Nietzsche scholar, is adamant in saying that it is very wrong to group Nietzsche with the evolutionary biologists and psychologists of the 19th century, like Herbert Spencer.