← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · NeoNietzsche
Thread ID: 5636 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-03-19
2003-03-19 15:47 | User Profile
"Steiner outlined his thesis on the meaning of the Jews in history. He said that 3 times the Jews made an ethical demand on humanity which was rejected because it was too difficult. These were the Mosaic, the Christian and the Marxist. The last 2, he said, were heresies of Judaism. The ethical demand seems to be basically altruism.
"I would have liked to have questioned him. What if one finds the demand no so much too difficult as unacceptable and impertinent? I think of Nietzsche's view in the 'Genealogy of Morals'. What does he say to that?"<
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*Consequently, only with the setting up of the law is there a "just" and "unjust" (and not, as Dühring will have it, from the time of the injurious action). To talk of just and unjust in themselves has no sense whatsoever-it's obvious that in themselves harming, oppressing, exploiting, destroying cannot be "unjust," insofar as life essentially works that way, that is, in its basic functions it harms, oppresses, exploits, and destroys-and cannot be conceived at all without these characteristics. We must acknowledge something even more alarming-the fact that from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of law must always be exceptional conditions, partial restrictions on the basic will to live, which is set on power-they are subordinate to the total purpose of this will as its individual means, that is, as means to create a larger unit of power. A legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle of power complexes, but as a means against all struggles in general, something along the lines of Dühring's communist cliché in which each will must be considered as equal to every will, that would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of human beings, an assassination attempt on the future of human beings, a sign of exhaustion, a secret path to nothingness.***
*To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organisation). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately disclose what it really is--namely, a Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;--but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organisation within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal--it takes place in every healthy aristocracy--must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organisation, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency--not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter; people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which "the exploiting character" is to be absent:-- that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. "Exploitation" does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life.--Granting that as a theory this is a novelty--as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!***
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It is, as well, a fundamental aspect of the ethical implication of the logic and history of political economy. The fool and the fanatic, the Christian and the Marxist, are altruists indeed - whose misappreciation of and resistance to this intractable reality maximize rather than minimize human suffering. The true monsters and beasts of the political world are the well-meaning and charitable, the "liberators" and democratizers, whose victims are always an order of magnitude in number beyond those of the "fascists" and "Nazis" intent upon eliminating this source of disorder.
[Note that today's Nazis are uniformly opposed to the impending, obscene massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that is to issue from the regnant Judeo-Christian regime of the Lie.]
P.S. And all Americans will want to lovingly rejoice at the sight of the pictures now posted of the girl being compassionately run over by an allied, democratist bulldozer.
[url=http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1248.shtml]http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1248.shtml[/url]
2003-03-20 01:48 | User Profile
Originally posted by wintermute@Mar 19 2003, 17:20 > Steiner outlined his thesis on the meaning of the Jews in history.**
Help me out here, NN. Are we talking about George Steiner (Bluebeard's Castle) or Rudolf Steiner (Eurythmy, Antroposophy)?
Wintermute**
[url=http://www.acpr.org.il/NATIV/1999-3/1999-3%20George%20Steiner%20xs.htm]http://www.acpr.org.il/NATIV/1999-3/1999-3...teiner%20xs.htm[/url]