Josh asks me to defend this statement:
—“he cannot escape the Christianity and moralism he works so hard to overcome”—
Refers to his method of argument, and method only.
How does one separate the western methods of argument: literary(parable), mythical(allegorical), religious(authoritarian/naturalistic), historical(allegorical), philosophical(internally consistent), scientific(empirical) and testimonial(totally objective)?
If you organize western works of intellectual history into those categories, then place Nietzsche’s it’s certainly not compatible with either machiavellie/smith/hume/pareto/weber (scientific) or Kant (internally consistent), but continues the german post-christian tradition of attempting to create inspirational scripture without reliance upon appeals to the supernatural, but the natural: shopenhauer and the other near-mystics.
I keep coming back to his statement that morality differs for different abilities and I think this is an incorrect definition of the word morality. It is that the philosophies that we rely upon for inspirational pedagogy differ between the classes while the law we rely upon to decide conflicts is invariant across the classes. And this would reflect what I have seen in all civilizations except the failures of islam and judaism: a lower, middle, and upper class philosophy.
This is as far as my criticism goes: method.
And the reason I make the criticism is that I am still struggling with the problem of the pedagogical and inspirational “positive-ying” and the decidable and critical “negative-yang”, and how to combine them, when it seems that the germans have been more successful with their ‘nonsense literature’ than we anglos have been with failed ‘attempts at science’.
I prefer however to separate them rather than conflate them. In other words, I think literature and law need not be conflated. That we can create literature and law as separate devices for separate purposes and like the riddles of lao tzu leave man to evolve in the contrast between the two.
This was my original thinking in 2006, and I have come full circle, but with a greater understanding of why my intuitions suggested we continue our ancient tradition of the ‘separatness’ of existential truth in cooperation and imaginary spirit in personal inspiration. The true, the good, the beautiful. Or as Renee Macintosh stated in the last century: have nothing that is not both functional and beautiful. This theme stays with us throughout all our excellences through our history, throughout our eras. Truth, Excellence, Beauty.
This tells me that truth is enough to restore us, but what is required to inspire us to persistent greatness regardless of our class? Especially when we NEED each class – at least each above IQ90.
I actually can’t find any other thinker that has tried to solve this problem in the same way.
So maybe instead of asian “balance” we seek excellence through the SunWheel of constant motion, between the inspirational, mythic, literary, and the decidable, legal, truth. One wheel inside the other. Turning in opposite directions.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine