Morality

"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries - a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world."

- Nietzsche, F., "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873)

There is not much time until I have to be somewhere, but I thought I'd continue Nietzsche's morality experiment since it was all I could think of upon awakening. People misinterpret Nietzsche. If I were to be more general I would claim that people misinterpret many things, but maybe I can learn something from my very own statement. That is, that I myself have made the attempt to project upon the general what appears to me a consistent thought and a sense of normality, accuracy... acceptability. So, in turn, I become dogmatic and less flexible that I was. So maybe what I ought to say is I believe people misinterpret Nietzsche. 

Unlike most people the sense of the Second World War always looms behind me, regardless of the distance or time that has taken place. When I read Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" I remember tellling myself not to read for however long it would take to break the empathy that was attached to my learning; to, in a sense, stem my ability to self-educate so that I could grasp more knowledge. What I remember distinctly is that the text was so familiar to cruel, malformed, self-gravitational philosophies that I began to identify it not with myself but with abstract suffering. So whatever I had learned from that particular text I quickly forgot. It has taken me some time to recognise that ideas are interpreted differently and that there is possibly no good or evil afoot at all here, and that this is what Nietzsche was reaching out towards. 

Nietzsche, if anything, means to break down conventional thinking into what it really is; an assemblage of evolved ideas over time, which have been connected to feeling and sense of place. If there were anything he was most interested in, it would have been to indicate exactly what humanity wasand what it could be. His emphasis upon the singular and the exceptional individual are not entirely agreeable to me, mostly because the idea is intrinsically false even from immediate interpretation; the individual is othing without the whole. Like any philosopher living in his time Nietzsche can be criticised and overthrown yet also understood in an altogether different way... maybe even synthesised with other contemporaries, the naivete of his arguments overcome:

"But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfilment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is that withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection, the inwardizing, of that experience, has perserved it and is the inner-being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts. The realm of Spirits which is formed in this way in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor. Their goal is the revelation of the depth of Spirit, and this is the absolute Notion. This revelation is, therfore, the raising-up of its depth, or its extension, the negativity of this withdrawn 'I', a negativity which is its externalization or its substance; and this revelation is also a Notion's Time, in that this externalization is in its own self externalized, and just as it is in its extension, so it is equally in its depth, in the Seld. The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of the absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is most notable that the only thing preserved or maintained during this shifting time and this living, continous history is the sense that knowing and education are the things worth keeping. That nothing else matters, that materialism seems only an empty phrase is instructive. It is entirely akin to the Platonic ideal, that matter is temporary and is therefore not worth so much as seeking strength and understanding within the spirit. But these abstractions, and these philosophies have been used in the past to such witheringly familiar ends. Ends which these two philosophers, Nietzsche and Hegel could not have expected (well, perhaps Nietzsche could have expected it). It's not merely a matter of thinking of a solution but of dismantling and reassembling the philosophies of the past. There is so much that is overdue for criticism.