'Circumstance' - that dirty little word
“Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual...”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
When questioned about the basis for our morality, I'm sure most of us could come up with a perfectly coherent and reasoned argument for why we believe what we believe (for we all believe in ‘something’, even if it is only ourselves...) and why we behave as we do. We all have a moral code - those things that we consider ‘right’ and those that we consider ‘wrong’ - regardless whether or not mine is not quite the same as the next person’s. Of course, I’m sure that most of us agree on things like murder, lying, adultery, violence, slander, cheating etc... So I suppose you could say that, on the fundamentals, most people are superficially more or less the same in belief.
But in justification...?
This is where that dirty little word, “Circumstance”, comes into play. You see, however attractive our argument and demonstrable our reasoning, we cannot escape from the implication that the reality of circumstance brings to bear on our morality. If I have an atheistic worldview then, however well-reasoned and thought-out my morality is, it cannot escape from the fact that a world without a God is a world dictated by circumstance. In other words, if the material world is all there is, then the only law that governs our actions ultimately is the law of survival. The rule is, basically, survive or ‘be survived’. Under this worldview, whatever cosmetic dressings are added to the argument, the only reason for a morality that espouses ‘good’ principles such as truth, justice and peace is the fact that these things enable us to live in a society that is more conducive to our individual and/or corporate survival. In our experience, we have seen that these values do indeed lead to an increased chance of survival and so having good morals is good sense for most people. We could draw a link, then, between a decent standard of education and ‘good’ moral values held within a society (decadence notwithstanding). But this does not change the fact that its only BASIS, if it is held within a worldview that rejects God, is that it is beneficial for survival.
Do you see what this means? It means that if I have good morals and believe in just principles, then the only reason for this is ultimately circumstance. The circumstances of my life have dictated that I have been brought up in privileged surroundings and have witnessed the benefits these principles bring to one’s survival or at the very least that I have had access to a good education which has informed me of this greater chance of survival.
So, these values are not good ‘in and of themselves’. Circumstance has led me to view them as ‘good things’ based on their usefulness to my survival.
Take the flip-side of this. Say that I was born into adverse circumstances and I was consequently unaware of the benefits and increased chance of survival in a society where good values are upheld. If the only thing I was witnessing was how greed and injustice were rewarded then wouldn’t I be led to believe that ‘this is the best way to live to ensure my survival’? It’s a dog-eat-dog world y’know... Whatever anyone else might say about these good values being better, I would still have never seen them helping anyone in my own context. Circumstance, therefore, dictates my morals in both contexts, whether privileged or not. All of a sudden, Nietzsche’s cynical and seemingly far-fetched words (quoted at the beginning) are beginning to sound a lot more like the way things actually are...
Where does this leave us? If that part of us that we had always considered to be the one/main thing that sets us apart from the animals is now revealed as being the result of the most basic animal instincts within us...?
Surely morality is just an illusion??
Well, if you are finding something within you reacting against this suggestion (and I do hope so), then you have just demonstrated to yourself, in some ungraspable but very real way, that morality is - or should be - derived from something greater than ourselves. It is no ‘proof’ for the existence of God, but whoever said that God’s existence needed to be proved in the first place? When we know something to be true, something for which we have seen the evidence our whole lives - such as the love of our mother - then it is not something that needs to be (or can be) proved, it just needs to be accepted, because it IS true. The discomfort that we feel when confronted with that one little word, “circumstance”, should remind us that, all our lives, we have always ‘known’ that morality is something that we humans share, NOT because we are animals and have developed a ‘herd-instinct’, but because there are values greater than ourselves, values whose source could only be a person. And a person who is not only greater than us but better than us.
While I see the usefulness of arguments that attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, I do not believe that they will convince anyone conclusively because ultimately this is not something that can be ‘proved’. It is, however, something that we have seen, something that we see everyday (and something that one event in history should have convinced us is something we can believe beyond any reasonable doubt. This event was the appearance on this planet of the God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth, who demonstrated that he was the Christ of God and Lord of Creation and every man through the things he said and did).
An examination of ‘morality’ (through the filter of Nietzsche and circumstance) is just one of the many ‘pointers’, like the deeds of a mother that speak of her love, that reassure us that God is both real and good and that we are part of the evidence that points to this truth.
posted by Achilles @ 5:52 pm
6 Comments
6 Comments:
Nietzsche, "Will to Power"
493 (1885)
Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.
534 (1887-1888)
The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power.
488 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Psychological derivation of our belief in reason.--The concept "reality", "being", is taken from our feeling of the "subject".
"The subject": interpreted from within ourselves, so that the ego counts as a substance, as the cause of all deeds, as a doer.
The logical-metaphysical postulates, the belief in substance, accident, attribute, etc., derive their convincing force from our habit of regarding all our deeds as consequences of our will--so that the ego, as substance, does not vanish in the multiplicity of change.--But there is no such thing as will.--
We have no categories at all that permit us to distinguish a "world in itself" from a "world of appearance." All our categories of reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world. "The soul", "the ego"--the history of these concepts shows that here, too, the oldest distinction ("breath", "life")--
If there is nothing material, there is also nothing immaterial. The concept no longer contains anything.
No subject "atoms". The sphere of a subject constantly growing or decreasing, the center of the system constantly shifting; in cases where it cannot organize the appropriate mass, it breaks into two parts. On the other hand, it can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without destroying it, and to a certain degree form a new unity with it. No "substance", rather something that in itself strives after greater strength, and that wants to "preserve" itself only indirectly (it wants to surpass itself--).
1067 (1885)
And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by "nothingness" as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a sphere that might be "empty" here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my "beyond good and evil," without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself--do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?-- This world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!
858 (Nov. 1887-March 1888)
What determines your rank is the quantum of power you are: the rest is cowardice.
-anon.
(Continued)
552 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Against determinism and teleology.-- From the fact that something ensues regularly and ensues calculably, it does not follow that it ensues necessarily. That a quantum of force determines and conducts itself in every particular case in one way and manner does not make it into an "unfree will." "Mechanical necessity" is not a fact: it is we who first interpreted it into events. We have interpreted the formulatable character of events as the consequence of a necessity that rules over events. But from the fact that I do a certain thing, it by no means follows that I am compelled to do it. Compulsion in things certainly cannot be demonstrated: the rule proves only that one and the same event is not another event as well. Only because we have introduced subjects, "doers," into things does it appear that all events are the consequences of compulsion exerted upon subjects--exerted by whom? again by a "doer." Cause and effect--a dangerous concept so long as one thinks of something that causes and something upon which an effect is produced.
a. Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.
b. When one has grasped that the "subject" is not something that creates effects, but only a fiction, much follows.
It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things and projected them into the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then belief also disappears in effective things, in reciprocation, cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things.
There also disappears, of course, the world of effective atoms: the assumption of which always depended on the supposition that one needed subjects.
At last, the "thing-in-itself" also disappears, because this is fundamentally the conception of a "subject-in-itself." But we have grasped that the subject is a fiction. The antithesis "thing-in-itself" and "appearance" is untenable; with that, however, the concept "appearance" also disappears.
c. If we give up the effective subject, we also give up the object upon which effects are produced. Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes--e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event (rest--motion, firm--loose: opposites that do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites--and falsely transfer it to things).
d. If we give up the concept "subject" and "object," then also the concept "substance"--and as a consequence also the various modifications of it, e.g., "matter," "spirit," and other hypothetical entities, "the eternity and immutability of matter," etc. We have got rid of materiality.
From the standpoint of morality, the world is false. But to the extent that morality itself is a part of this world, morality is false.
Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable, an abolition of the false character of things, a reinterpretation of it into beings. "Truth" is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered--but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end--introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining--not a becoming conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the "will to power."
Life is founded upon the premise of a belief in enduring and regularly recurring things; the more powerful life is, the wider must be the knowable world to which we, as it were, attribute being. Logicizing, rationalizing, systematizing as expedients of life.
Man projects his drive to truth, his "goal" in a certain sense outside himself as a world that has being, as a metaphysical world, as a "thing-in-itself," as a world already in existence. His needs as creator invent the world upon which he works, anticipate it; this anticipation (this "belief" in truth) is his support.
All events, all motion, all becoming, as a determination, degrees and relations of force, as a struggle--
As soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for our being thus and thus, etc. (God, nature), and therefore attribute to him the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming. We then have someone who wants to achieve something through us and with us.
The "'welfare of the individual" is just as imaginary as the "welfare of the species": the former is not sacrificed to the latter, species viewed from a distance is just as transient as the individual. "Preservation of the species" is only a consequence of the growth of the species, i.e., the. overcoming of the species on the road to a stronger type.
[Theses.] That the apparent "purposiveness" ("that purposiveness which endlessly surpasses all the arts of man") is merely the consequence of the will to power manifest in all events; that becoming stronger involves an ordering process which looks like a sketchy purposiveness; that apparent ends are not intentional but, as soon as dominion is established over a lesser power and the latter operates as a function of the greater power, an order of rank, of organization is bound to produce the appearance of an order of means and ends.
Against apparent "necessity": --this is only an expression for the fact that a force is not also something else.
Against apparent "purposiveness": --the latter only an expression for an order of spheres of power and their interplay.
-anon.
Hmm... if it is indeed true that all we have to go by in our analysis of this world is our own senses and observations then Mr Nietzsche is most certainly correct. Human "truth" is a mere construct that can never be objective. However, he has overlooked one thing. There is a way that we can (potentially) know objective truth: if someone who is over and above our universe and world and has infinite and perfect knowledge of it, indeed the very creator of it, if he were to come into our world and tell us about it. Then... if such a person really existed and did speak, we could be sure that we were in possession of objective truths about this world. REVELATION is the undoing of all the carefully constructed arguments above...
And of course, Nietzsche may have said:
"God is dead"
but it is Nietzsche who is dead....
And I don't hear our friend, Nietzsche, coming up with a retort to this. The wisdom of men is foolishness to God. That may hurt to hear but... Nietzsche "is" dead. The fool dies without God - it is his desire and God grants him his wish.
But the wonderful truth that gives us hope is that God "did" come and give us the truth. And Jesus is alive today, guaranteeing that we also can live again after we have tasted death. We needn't remain like Nietzsche forever. I only wish he had read the below words from C.S.Lewis before he had died...
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." (C.S. Lewis)
There could be objective truth, provided all of mankind worked towards and believed it. But the possibility of that happening, can only apply to smaller "groups" of men, to which the truth merely "appears" objective.
Nietzsche was the son of a pastor. He was NOT happy that G_d was dead. For the belief that G_d was dead would soon lead to nihilism, a belief in nothing (including no morality). His object was to move his readers "beyond" nihilism, but without a "present" and "intervening" G_d. He did so by postulating a theory of "eternal recurrence", in which the chance events of the universe would eventually, given "eternity", unfold themselves in the same manner countless times, and that each person woud be back to re-live the same life over and over again. And given those circumstances, even an atheist should attempt to create and live the "best" possible existance.
Nietzsche:Plato
as
Zeno:Parmenides
He took the "opposite" tack to arrive at the same conclusions.
And since the existance of G_d cannot be proven, the need for moral behavior given the non-existance of G_d (for the more "scientific/ empirically inclined) still serves every man's best interest. Nietzsche "proved" it.
Niezsche wrote "polemics". It's hard for a Christian to get "beyond" the anti-Christian message of his writing. But then again, he wrote for those that had lost faith and to convince them that in the natural struggle for power, there will be only a few "dogs" at the top... so it would be best for men to cooperate when necessary and for each man to try his hardest to create the best possible existance for himself, for if there was "eternal recurrance", the do-overs of eternally living unfullfilled lives would not be a pleasant thought. So it became a "burr" under every horses saddle to spur it on.
-anon.
His purpose ws similar to Kant's, (categorical imperative) every man a end unto himself, and not merely a means to an end. Every man the master of his fate, and captain of his soul.
-anon.
btw - I failed to mention it, but I love your sonnets. Wonderful stuff!
-anon.
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