'I am speaking beyond good and evil...'

Call it serendipity or fortuity, amazing providence or a delightful coincidence, when Prof. Rasheeda shared with me a few lovely quotes from her current read on Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate! So much for the power of a single, simple, sample share that really has the immense potential and the power to motivate us much-o-much, and as Prof. Premjith often says, ‘to read and to grow together’ as fellow academics in the vineyard of literature!

And yesss! quotes from authors have been italicized, as always!

Well, Nietzsche’s Aphorisms on Love and Hate from which Prof. Rasheeda happened to share a few delightful thoughts with me, have something so striking about them, in that, Nietzsche takes - albeit by their ears - some of the core dogmas and doctrines, principles and precepts, creeds and credos that are supposedly, and arbitrarily, the basic givens of our existence - effectively masked behind a veneer or a facade of objectivity - and then proceeds to destabilize them or, rather, tends to bring out the inherent weaknesses in those moral principles, nay prejudices of the great philosophers of the past!

These Aphorisms per se, are culled from an impactful read of Nietzsche, titled, Human, All Too Human, most aptly subtitled, A Book for Free Spirits!!!, a book that’s been much discussed in our classes on Poststructuralism!

Indeed, the ‘Free Spirits’ alluded to here, are the souls, who have the potential so innate within them, to look beyond and beneath the ‘moral’ worldview imposed on them by society, as these moral views or standardized normative ways of seeing, are in fact, expressions of our will to power, where we automatically tend to declare our particular, or rather ‘prejudiced’ perspectives on reality to be the most objective claims to truth-hood!

Free spirits, therefore, are souls, who see ‘reality’ as something that lies beyond these competing wills, which in consequence, helps free themselves from the bigoted minds and prejudiced, opinionated minds and thereby helps them to think beyond these constraints and constrictions!

Giving you a couple of excerpted passages from the book, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits that’s a sampled exemplification of his arguments!

Here we go!

The lie. Why do men usually tell the truth in daily life? Certainly not because a god has forbidden lying. Rather it is because, first, it is more convenient: for lies demand imagination, dissembling, and memory (which is why Swift says that the man who tells a lie seldom perceives the heavy burden he is assuming: namely, he must invent twenty other lies to make good the first).

And then follows the lovely quote shared by Prof. Rasheeda –

Intellect and morality. One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.

Well, to understand the import of this delightful maxim by FN, it’s necessary to flip back the pages to the impactful preface of this book, a book that gives expression to his notion of the will to power, and postulates a transcendence that’s beyond the bounds of conventional, morality.

Over to the Preface –

Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception-but wouldn't you know it? Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and birdcatcher, I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, ‘beyond good and evil.’!

Thus I invented, when I needed them, the “free spirits” too, to whom this heavyhearted-stouthearted book with the title “Human, All Too Human” is dedicated. There are no such “free spirits, were none-but, as I said, I needed their company at the time, to be of good cheer in the midst of bad things (illness, isolation, foreignness, sloth, inactivity); as brave fellows and specters to chat and laugh with, when one feels like chatting and laughing…

And the expression ‘extra-moral’ that he has alluded to, is the characteristic of the ‘free spirit’, who have the capacity to look beyond the traditional notions of the ‘slave morality’, an offshoot of Christian morality, that ‘condemns’ human beings to live ‘tame, peaceful lives!’

Now, moving on to his aphoristic say on the Intellect!

In order to well understand the concept of the intellect to FN, it’s better to begin with his views on truth!

And for this, I would like to charter our course, down to his invaluable 1873 essay titled, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense!”

FN says, and I quote –

Insofar as the individual wants to preserve himself against other individuals, in a natural state of affairs he employs the intellect mostly for simulation alone. But because man, out of need and boredom, wants to exist socially, herd-fashion, he requires a peace pact and he endeavors to banish at least the very crudest bellum omni contra omnes [war of all against all] from his world. This peace pact brings with it something that looks like the first step toward the attainment of this enigmatic urge for truth.

So yuppp! To FN, the prescription of “truth” is pretty much a tactful and artful “peace pact” that’s made and marketed for co-existence between individuals, as human beings are basically, social beings!

Well, the way he conceives of ‘truth’ is the exact way in which he also conceives of the ‘intellect’!

To Nietzsche, the impulse for intellect, like the impulse for truth, is the emphasis on certainty and reason! Or in other words, the intellect results from our impulse for truth.

In other words, the long and short of it is that, the world as perceived by the intellect is the world of representation, and this representation is conditioned by the will, and this will, is the intellect, and this intellect is the tool, a ‘tool’ historically necessitated for the sustenance and social conditioning of the human species.

In the ninth paragraph to this wonderful essay, he gives vent to his views on ‘truth’, that have by now, become as immortal a phrasing as the man himself! Here goes –

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

So well, then, what is truth? To FN, truth is just a social contract in language!

And so is morality!

And so is morality, that is 'bound' to the quality of the intellect.

[Bound meaning fettered, tied, constrained, restricted, not free]!

Well, thanks again to Prof. Rasheeda, our vibrant admin @ Readers’ Rendezvous, this post would act a perfect launchpad for a delightful series on Poststructuralism, I bet!

I also strongly recommend a few reads that would serve authentications/validations to this Nietzschean take!

Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard

A Phenomenology Of Love And Hate by Peter Hadreas

Beyond Good And Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

To be contd…

PS: I was so awestruck by the timing of this share, by Prof. Rasheeda Madani, quite in particular, because, I was right then into reading, one fourths of my way through The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer! So thrilled, I promptly promised her that, her share would make way for my next post! And here it is! And here I am, busy typing it all out, on my Toshiba lappytappy, even as I’m ‘busy’ vacationing, with folks, reclining regally on a settee, in the upper chamber off a lovely relative’s house, and the clocks are gearing up to strike 3 AM! :-)

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