In this article I will explain how different interpretations, that deal with the concept of power, relates to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Currently, the tendency of western society is to identify power more and more with corruption and abuse. We relate power to intelligence, knowledge and control but also to hierarchy and corruption. In the 21st century these become challenging in the common mind in relation to technology, nature and society. Progressively we gained more power but less control and certainty, which stems from our undermining of the definition of truth. Is it fear that plays a big role in the foundation of our actions ?
When Nietzsche wrote “God is dead” what did he mean ?
Well, he meant that the belief in one truth, one universal system of values, would become obsolete for the West. In the century after his death this would become a main topic taking many forms : in the context of philosophy, science and culture. ‘The Truth’ was an invention of the monotheistic religions later developed by Descartes. You can also say that today’s modern people of the west who still hold a conception of a single truth are in essence monotheistic, meaning- not up to date, not progressive.
Descartes and his followers thought they have found an element of certainty in our way of thinking which could not be doubted, and on top of that solid base, achieve knowledge over the world, the same objective world for any subject. Later on this concept would be challenged.
What does that mean in a social context, to have no paradigm of single truth ?
- There is no more common sense of what ‘happened’ and what didn’t ‘happen’, it is now something common in our technology age. What does it mean that something really happened ? That we trust the report of someone with a subjective memory ? That we read it online ? There is no reliable authority. Fake news ? Were they ever ‘real’ ? In what sense ? our own memory works like a photo which had been photocopied so many times it’s hard to recognize what was initially there. This notion of truth in the context of memory is expressed in the films Memento, Blow-up.
- The taking over of nihilism, when everything can be subjective and there’s no higher / transcendental values to agree about, there is no (one) way to define what’s right and wrong. And so, our age ontological freedom began in the 20th century with traumatic events, two world wars, which was caused by the void that rapid change, uncertainty, fear, and ignorance brought. This is to state that freedom can also be expressed in negative ways, like the freedom to develop an anti-humanistic world of view.
- Our interpretation of events can change their meaning to us, even within the context of causality, since meaning is just a cognitive / symbolic reference which language and thought does. This concept is hard to grasp because we are held captive by other notions, more solid ones of reality, and they can be misleading
Truth and meaning becomes now something which we can search for, like with a flashlight. We have to point the flashlight where we want to search, raise questions before finding an answer. Our values, which we extract value from, can vary. They are always judged within the context of our own parameters and wise versa. - We have to rethink and invent our destinations and goals, we will have to find a new foundation for thought and value creation : Universal human conditions, our biology, psychology, myths etc’.
If God is dead, we are living the age of nihilism, my article would provide a critical approach towards our misunderstanding of possibilities in the age we are living in.
So, what is morality again ? Desire and freedom vs intelligence
Hume, in his book “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1739) argued that we mistakenly think of the world as containing necessities and certainties. What we call ‘Inferential‘, Hume claimed, is only based on our habits, and not related to necessity. The fact that the sun rises every day is not certain : at certain point of time it did not happen, at a certain point of time it will not happen again. What seems obvious to our common sense can be not so obvious to our intelligence, the process of making order in our lives is based upon many paradoxes.
The physical world does not contain facts in the sense of necessity, let alone something we might call evil or immoral Hume claimed. When talking about good and bad the only things we can relate to, in the end, are our own feelings, own condemnations of certain deeds. These are subjective, each person has its own feelings and own distinct judgement.
As humans, cannot act against our own will and judgement. Our actions which are conditioned on our will and based on our desires are biased by our judgement. Any moral judgement that is alien to us does not affect our actions, every person has its dos and don’ts.
Society exists, says Hume, by definition, only if and when our actions are coordinated. That coordination means the limitation of every individual’s freedom, will and desire by ways of imposing the same type of shared collective judgement. Society as an organism imposes the limitation of freedom and desires through intellectual means in contrast to more basic instinctive conditioning which is the case with children and animals.
How can we impose the mechanism of social control, and synchronize the same collective judgment between individuals in a group ? Only through mechanisms of power and authority, a doctrine, an ideology. The negative incentive is punishment, fear and uncertainty, while the positive incentive in the context of mature society is through a social contract, which is purely intellectual driven : hope, order, stability, compensation, profit and a degree of freedom. Our fear is based on the punishment : taking our incentive away and sometimes worse.
As individuals our actions are always self-justified by our will, they are our representation in the physical world that we share with other individuals. Acting against our own will, can only exist in the context of power, of influence of another will or in the context of social order. Though against our will there is also the action of our instincts and bodily mechanisms. This is to say : all our actions are basically willful.
Repression is the psychological mechanism responsible for limiting ourselves from acting unfiltered upon our desires, it is usually underlaid and conditioned with guilt and fear. So by this analysis, we can see how our human intellect is functioning in the context of social agreements (morality) as a coordinator regulated by fear and guilt. A person who does not experience fear and guilt, and act accordingly, we call a psychopath.
Our intelligence is a tool that can think in terms of cause and effect, it imposes order on the world (more on that later). But, what we call good, does not extend beyond our human brain and conception of the world, ‘goodness’ does not exist in nature and the universe which are indifferent. In the animal kingdom there is no murder and no ill intentions.
To give a contemporary example – Sustainability as a concept of preservation is rooted in the psychological fact of fear of our own death and annihilation, while entropy is an inherited trait of material and time. This entropy in the end will disintegrate even our concept of order and causality, in a world where sense does not make sense anymore.
Hume concluded that vice, virtue and morality, are all just projections of our own feelings. That was the beginning of the nihilistic / anti-theistic doctrine and the foundation of the tendency of denial of the possibility of sharing universal values between people:
But can there be any difficulty in proving, that vice and virtue are not matters of fact, whose existence we can infer by reason? Take any action allowed to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind…
David Hume. “A Treatise of Human Nature” 1739
Nihilism in Kantian philosophy, the roots of Perspectivism
Kantian philosophy teaches that the world is lacking form. We see that the world has form only as part of our ability to synthesize reality through our cognitive abilities. Our brain has the ability through our senses and intellect to give form and value, to create objects, to assimilate, to distinguish, see similarities, rationalize by means of ration. The world outside our mind is just a formless flow, the scientific parallel being energy forming all material.
In this context man becomes the only creator of his values, and therefore there are no universal or transcendent values, although Kant tried to articulate them. Kant’s categorical imperative (German: kategorischer Imperativ) is a subjective deontological moral philosophy, the idea of its universality is no longer valid for the same reasons religious beliefs are considered not valid – by those who no longer hold them. To say in other words : not fashionable or progressive. In the ‘Faustian’ west, so far, our perspective of the world was subjected to constant change due to what we call progression, an evolution of ideas in the context of history.
Practically, what we have left from Kant’s tradition, in this point of time, is prominent the fields of sciences, language and post-modernist ideology / fashion, the idea that man can create the shape of ideas, but there is no single truth or universal values, there is nothing absolute anymore. Nietzsche called it Perspectivism.
Existentialism as a resort from nihilism
What began with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s philosophies and developed with mostly Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus was an escape from nihilism and its lack of ability to deal with the confusion of a meaningless world. Existentialism tries to link the basic fact of existence to meaning. It’s characterizing the world not as composed of essence but of extensions. Instead of trying to base a solid objective view of reality (which is philosophical and classical), we should avoid anything that would categorize, formalize and therefore sterilize any aspect of the world. By taking this approach rather than searching for a meaning which is exterior to the nature of life (which is : language), we should focus on living and experiencing, accepting other people as agents of the same individuality and freedom, this would be the basis for our responsibilities, the foundation of our morality.
Nihilism and Fascist ideology
There are many thinkers who tried to figure out what did go wrong during the World War II. It was an irrational and destructive event in the history of humanity, maybe the most nihilistic one with concern to technology, power and destruction.
Some early thinkers, even Nietzsche himself, warned that a catastrophe could happen as a result of change of values, misunderstanding of ideas. In this article I will not try to track possible explanations, but rather say that those can be found among the rest in the writing of Spengler, Borges, Koestler, Bulgakov, Arendt and others.
Too many times the discussion about this subjects tends to focus on the subject of power than the subject of exclusion of others and being self-critical. This is mostly due the late fashion of morality or anarchy in disguise to rule out power as corrupting, immoral.
Fascist ideology is supported by the collective national and/or racial narratives, those of nation, myth and blood. Those ideologies by definition do not see a place for ‘individuals’ which are not part of the collective. Suppression of the opposition is the course of action, psychologically Jung described it and called it ‘the shadow’, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else.
A main theme here is the lack of ability to be critical towards oneself. Today the western society is again unable to be critical to itself and sees everything only in its own form, its own morality, its own shadow. Guilt and shame would lead to aggression by means of suppression. Because we no longer believe in virtue, we lack ethos, instead we have pathos.
Humanism can no longer be the foundation of our nihilist ideology. The twilight, the last attempts of creating a humanist ideology through art, we see through the writings of Thomas Mann, the films of Ingmar Bergman. Even making sense from these narratives today is no longer a possibility even for ‘educated’ people.
Nietzsche and ethics of virtue, hierarchy and slave morality
Nietzsche wanted “virtue” to be understood in such a way as to be reminiscent of virtù—the virtue of the Renaissance—free from morality. Virtue can be defined by the power over one’s self and one’s environment; it depended on the harmony of the self with the natural, biological world, and one of its major components was the individual’s freedom or independence.
In the context of society Nietzsche identified a mechanism of control, morality, which leads in his opinion to inevitable nihilism in contrary to life affirming actions and ideas. Consider hierarchy as property of a system with potential power, and the possible rank among individuals in that society, we can identify two main typologies of ranking in that hierarchy, they are expressed by two types of approaches :
- The “higher man” – the man of virtue of Nietzsche which can acknowledge bigger talents than himself, and accept his relative inferiority without developing a complexion. Life affirmation could express itself in courage, insight, sympathy, solitude and seeking responsibility in the form of an “organizing ideas”, artistic, creative work. They lead to psychological health and strength, “health” is another name for psychological resilience and fortitude.
Opposition is wanted and appreciated, it is seen as a way of development and fundamental in value creation which is always contains opposites -“ein Teil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft…” According to Goethe’s Faust, a part of the same power that seeks the good and does evil, or beyond good and evil. - Slave / herd morality – In the past, religion as an institute developed what is called – resentment, the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be “blamed” for one’s own inferiority/failure. One does not see failure in oneself, but rather by an external “evil”. The virtues of the strong are considered vice by the weak and slavish individuals.
Nietzsche identifies this trait with the institution of Christianity, Judaism introduced guilt but Christianity developed it to a mechanism of control by means of narration, language and the establishment of their specific World-feeling, Good against evil.
In the context of society this is only a method of a weak group to take advantage of another, by the rule of numbers. At its roots lies the fear of change and responsibility, the long Scholastic period we can take as an example.
We come across a problematic term in today’s language- Slave morality, the reasons for being a problem is its own self-justification : the unwillingness of admitting inferiority, the willingness to erase history and to change our language in a pursuit of a nihilist slave mentality and the fear and avoidance of responsibility and power. Conservative religion is still here, the herd.
Most people are not mountain climbers, they dare not take the risk, they find the effort not worth it, what’s on top of the mountain.
“I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.
And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.”
Ideologies, Slave morality, Nihilism
Is it surprising to say that Socialism and Liberalism in modern forms can be a strong expression of slave morality and therefore nihilism ?
Socialism compensates the incapable and consider them equal in terms of decision-making, even more since they have more resources such as free time. As an exemplary opposition compares to times which had distinguished classes- noble and aristocratic. Being noble and aristocratic meant being committed to certain responsibilities, which today are not part of our lives anymore. The modern nation makes the middle class take responsibility in terms of action, while the upper layer of society enforces decisions and enjoys status and wealth by promoting socialism, the middle layer is driving the economy and market, consuming, the lower layers has the most compensation compared to the part they take.
Modern Liberalism is just about being liberal towards those who are liberal, there is no real tolerance towards those who are not, they are still considered and treated like criminals. The point being : although from within it gives the illusion of freedom, in practice its just another extended form of morality, conservatism and control. Even the ‘primitive’ initial idea of Jesus Christ was more progressive in terms of tolerance. Love your enemy.
Socialism and liberalism in their modern form, in the context of consumer capitalism, promote nihilism because they don’t leave much room for meaning, free will and choice. The media, as part of a social organization tool, promotes this illusion, as Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Technology induces irrationality, nobody has the tools to notice. The truth, our lives, in this specific case, becomes something that misses the potential of our expression of our power and potential as humans. Even worse we are lacking today such vision.
In any way, there is a great degree of conservatism, illusion and misconception in what modern society calls freedom.
“Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so – the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own… I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.”
Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra And Simulation
Myth, narrative and universal values, Post-structuralism
Myths are human universal narratives, they represent the human condition, our symbols, our wishes, abilities and potential. The basic narratives we find in early cultured history, throughout history these stories repeat with adjustments to match the spirit of the era, the zeitgeist.
When talking about values and meaning these myths have a central role. Until the modernist period they were in the root of everything that had meaning, because they pointed out to transcendental universal values, which are actually cultural.
The post-structural line of thought, as a nihilist movement, (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida) claimed that since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism and language as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow. This is called deconstruction. Every statement has an opposite statement which can be equally valid in terms of syntax. In essence this is an attack on hierarchy and power and its legitimization as a product of language.
Similar to the same expression in the field of science : Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, it points out to the limitations of formal systems, it means that no system can demonstrate its own consistency. This was the practical application of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism in language and science. We realized that every system of meaning and value did not relate to anything absolute. In essence this is rhetoric, this is sophistication in the counter Socratic sense. Socrates was occupied with the search of moral virtues, in Plato’s dialogues we come across the dialectic nature of his arguments against the sophists, there he tried to establish ethics (as method of operation) upon universal values and some common sense.
The ancient religions, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity all believed in a clear distinction between good and evil, light vs darkness, heaven and hell. In the context of western society pre-Christian paganism and post-Christian culture do not believe in a clear distinction between good and evil. With post-Christian, we see a tendency in culture and literature starting from the writing of Goethe, through writers like Knut Hamsun, D.H Lawrence and overall in post-modernism.
Pit of pity : apotheosis of the victim
Nietzsche criticized Christianity for promoting nihilistic values, those who are not life affirming. Although Christianity is not present in the form of practicing religion, the mentality is still very present in Europe. Christianity sees Christ as a symbol of sacrifice, the sacrifice is done in the name of morality, in the name of our transcendental contracts with god and each other. Not in this life but the afterlife balance will be restored, the evil will be punished, suffering is justified.
Christianity is called by Nietzsche (and sometimes Sven Erik Kristiansen) religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength in which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.
Today we tend to glorify any person or group when we see them as victims, we lose any critical ability to criticize and to judge even if the victim is manipulating the situation for its own purposes. We tend to forget that cowardliness and fear, which draws empathy, could lead to devastating consequences.
Post Darwinian age and the possibility of truth
It is hard for us the grasp the principle of the Darwinian theory of evolution. That (possible) explanation of natural development is the most ad-hoc one, Occam’s razor, It explains creation and evolution in the simplest way. The theory itself is of sophistical and rhetorical nature, of Tautology, it is the purest form of meaning and explanation, so pure its empty of meaning.
It’s an indication that in the post-modern age, truth has many faces, and the most minimalist explanation which is not possible to contradict is the one that shows that reasons for facts are its own reasons, and reasons are simply reasons for facts, that evolution for you. Darwinian evolution sees nature in the structure of language and not of the world, which is empty of meaning and value.
That is only rhetorical you say ? You are right ! Because we already said, that in the physical world there are no facts, we only have our symbolic world – interpretations, which are way of communication and agreement, sharing the same type of symbolic existence. The truth can hold many faces and models, dependent on its parameters, of the parameter is its own form, then the interpretation becomes a rhetorical one – evolutionary.
The nature of reality, Jean Baudrillard, morality in the age of consumer capitalism
According to Jean Baudrillard we can no longer talk about what is real and what’s not, there are no more lies. What is called simulacra, the modern way of representation, is beyond true and false, it’s hyper-real. Simulacra is not the opposite to reality but it’s the opposite of illusion. What we, modern people, have lost, is not reality but the illusion. Before, we had something that distinguished reality from its representation, and now we have lost it. Reality for us in only representations without no signified, this is the ultimate nihilist philosophy (I hope). According to Baudrillard we will no longer have value, reality, territory, love, politics, art and death.
According to Baudrillard, the discussion over minority rights is brought to absurd. According to those who promote minority rights, reality in a post modern age should be a guarantee for a safe and equal life, human rights become a sort of life insurance, emptying life of its own vitality.
We can only do so by sterilizing our public space from everything that is threatening, or what might be threatening. Then the discussion over minority rights will narrow down life, to proofs and signs that will justify themselves, everything that can be of a proof that our public space is safe : maybe armed guards, signs, BLGTQ (+), fair trade, sustainability and other political statements. They are all there as a replacement for things we will never do ourselves in terms of action.
“Not that the project has disappeared, exactly: it is just that its ‘realization’ as a sign embodied in the object is taken as satisfaction enough. The object of consumption is thus the precise form of the project’s self-renunciation.”
Jean Baudrillard. “The System of Objects”
For us nihilists its satisfactory enough that our project takes from only in a symbolic form. Morality takes only a form, of symbol instead of action, a simulation, a pattern produced and induced by consumer consumption. We buy a car because it’s the moral things to do. We try to replace power and action with nothingness.
For true nihilists there is no longer need to act, the symbols of social justice are reaffirming enough, there’s no need to panic. Baudrillard pointed out to the facts that morality and self justifications becomes something we can trade. There is an inherent contradiction in this state since its promoting what its sets to eliminate, doing bad in the name of good which is ten time worse than doing good in the name of bad.
The distinctive opposition that was once very clear (good and bad), takes new forms through language – being used, replaced, symbolized and fractalized. In this way the signs and action are free from their ‘ideas’.
This is for us what we call freedom : sexual freedom, aesthetic freedom, political freedom, they are now all goods, merchandise, fortunes, signs and information feeding them, they are all lost in the sea of the hyper-real.
What is left of politics when what is on the stake is not the common (society), but the exception (the other, the foreign) ?
The museum is a threat for art, the television is a threat for the viewer’s responsibility, the human rights discussion is a threat for ‘the ability of saying something evil’, freedom of speech and thought and being different. These are sterilizing forms of discussions, political correctness is their prominent paradigm, but there is only one political correctness, what is worse ? Political correctness demands avoiding hate, jealousy, desires, violence, are they not a ‘natural’ part of life ? Is it a realistic expectation to void these ?
These systems had the ambition to save us from xenophobia, but they actually promote it. Only by means of absorption is the problem solved. A poor man is a social problem because of the rich, and he stops being a social problem by becoming rich (or not poor), which was defined initially as part of the problem.
Baudrillard added that political correction systems are actually creating ‘the perfect crime‘, the justified termination of the other in the name of cohesion.
Our alienation towards others protected us from something bigger that alienation itself, which is the definitive loss of otherness. The deprivation of the other is made through assimilation, its destruction.