"The Hour Glass"

Blown sand, finely shaped and crafted well,
Fine sand within fragile, funneled glass
Soundless fall—weightless each pebble fell.
Swirling vortex warped time-terminus too fast.
Momentous hour glass and corpuscular sand,
The gravity of time moves all with chaos’ hand.

~Dedicated to Thomas Mann, inspired by Death in Venice~

On Misinterpreting Nietzsche's Master & Slave Morality

Loeb to Leopold:  "Nietzsche's superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men.  He is not liable for anything he may do." ...And this is why you went to prison—for misreading Nietzsche.

“Similar misunderstandings [as Leopold & Loeb's] mar many academic interpretations; but professors naturally react differently:  they feel outraged by Nietzsche and do violence, on a different level, to him.” – Walter Kaufmann

Vide infra for two germane and elucidatory aphorisms:  

Twofold prehistory of good and evil. - The concept good and evil has a two-fold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man one belongs to the 'good', a community which has a sense of belonging together because all the individuals in it are combined with one another through the capacity for requital. As a bad man one belongs to the 'bad', to a swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer the Trojan and the Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but he who is contemptible who counts as bad. In the community of the good goodness is inherited; it is impossible that a bad man could grow up out of such good soil. If, however, one of the good should do something unworthy of the good, one looks for excuses; one ascribes the guilt to a god, for example, by saying he struck the good man with madness and rendered him blind. - Then in the soul of the subjected, the powerless. Here every other man, whether he be noble or base, counts as inimical, ruthless, cruel, cunning, ready to take advantage. Evil is the characterizing expression for man, indeed for every living being one supposes to exist, for a god, for example; human, divine mean the same thing as diabolical, evil. Signs of goodness, benevolence, sympathy are received fearfully as a trick, a prelude with a dreadful termination, a means of confusing and outwitting, in short as refined wickedness. When this disposition exists in the individual a community can hardly arise, at best the most rudimentary form of community: so that wherever this conception of good and evil reigns the downfall of such individuals, of their tribes and races, is near. - Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling tribes and castes. 

(Human, All Too Human, section 45)

260.  As the result of a stroll through the many more sophisticated and cruder moral systems which up to this point have ruled or still rule on earth, I found certain characteristics routinely return with each other, bound up together, until finally two basic types revealed themselves to me and a fundamental difference sprang up. There is master morality and slave morality—to this I immediately add that in all higher and mixed cultures attempts at a mediation between both moralities make an appearance as well, even more often, a confusion and mutual misunderstanding between the two, in fact, sometimes their harsh juxtaposition—even in the same man, within a single soul. Distinctions in moral value have arisen either among a ruling group, which was happily conscious of its difference with respect to the ruled—or among the ruled, the slaves and dependent people of every degree. In the first case, when it’s the masters who establish the idea of the good, the elevated and proud conditions of the soul emotionally register as the distinguishing and defining order of rank. The noble man separates his own nature from that of people in whom the opposite of such exalted and proud states expresses itself. He despises them. We should notice at once that in this first kind of morality the opposites “good” and “bad” mean no more than “noble” and “despicable”—the opposition between “good” and “evil” has another origin. The despised one is the coward, the anxious, the small, the man who thinks about narrow utility, also the suspicious man with his inhibited look, the self-abasing man, the species of human dogs who allow themselves to be mistreated, the begging flatterer, above all, the liar:—it is a basic belief of all aristocrats that the common folk are liars. “We tellers of the truth”—that’s what the nobility called themselves in ancient Greece. It’s evident that distinctions of moral worth everywhere were first applied to men and later were established for actions; hence, it is a serious mistake when historians of morality take as a starting point questions like “Why was the compassionate action praised?” The noble kind of man experiences himself as a person who determines value and does not need to have other people’s approval. He makes the judgment “What is harmful to me is harmful in itself.” He understands himself as something which in general first confers honour on things, as someone who creates values. Whatever he recognizes in himself he honours. Such a morality is self-glorification. In the foreground stands the feeling of fullness, the power which wants to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of riches which wants to give and deliver:—the noble man also helps the unfortunate, however not, or hardly ever, from pity, but more in response to an impulse which the excess of power produces. The noble man honours the powerful man in himself and also the man who has power over himself, who understands how to speak and how to keep silent, who takes delight in dealing with himself severely and toughly and respects, above all, severity and toughness. “Wotan set a hard heart in my breast,” it says in an old Scandinavian saga: that’s how poetry emerged, with justice, from the soul of a proud Viking. A man of this sort is simply proud of the fact that he has not been made for pity. That’s why the hero of the saga adds a warning, “In a man whose heart is not hard when he is still young the heart will never become hard.” Noble and brave men who think this way are furthest removed from that morality which sees the badge of morality in pity or actions for others or désintéressement [disinterestedness]. The belief in oneself, pride in oneself, a fundamental hostility and irony against “selflessness”  belong to noble morality, just as much as an easy contempt and caution before feelings of pity and the “warm heart.” Powerful men are the ones who understand how to honour; that is their art, their realm of invention. The profound reverence for age and for ancestral tradition—all justice stands on this double reverence—the belief and the prejudice favouring forefathers and working against newcomers are typical in the morality of the powerful, and when, by contrast, the men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future” and increasingly lack any respect for age, then in that attitude the ignoble origin of these “ideas” already reveals itself well enough. However, a morality of the rulers is most alien and embarrassing to present taste because of the severity of its basic principle that man has duties only with respect to those like him, that man should act towards those beings of lower rank, towards everything strange, at his own discretion, or “as his heart dictates,” and, in any case, “beyond good and evil.” Here pity and things like that may belong. The capacity for and obligation to a long gratitude and to a long revenge—both only within the circle of one’s peers—the sophistication in paying back again, the refined idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as, so to speak, drainage ditches for the feelings of envy, quarrelsomeness, and high spirits—basically in order to be capable of being a good friend): all those are typical characteristics of a noble morality, which, as indicated, is not the morality of “modern ideas” and which is thus nowadays difficult to sympathize with, as well as difficult to dig up and expose. Things are different with the second type of moral system, slave morality. Suppose the oppressed, depressed, suffering, and unfree people, those ignorant of themselves and tired out, suppose they moralize: what will be the common feature of their moral estimates of value? Probably a pessimistic suspicion directed at the entire human situation will express itself, perhaps a condemnation of man, along with his situation. The gaze of a slave is not well disposed towards the virtues of the powerful; he possesses skepticism and mistrust; he has a subtlety of mistrust against everything “good” which is honoured in it —he would like to persuade himself that even happiness is not genuine there. By contrast, those characteristics will be pulled forward and flooded with light which serve to mitigate existence for those who suffer: here respect is given to pity, to the obliging hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness—for these are here the most useful characteristics and almost the only means to endure the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility. Here is the focus for the origin of that famous opposition of “good” and “evil”:—people sense power and danger within evil, a certain terror, subtlety, and strength, which does not permit contempt to spring up. According to slave morality, the “evil” man thus inspires fear; according to master morality, it is precisely the “good” man who inspires and desires to inspire fear, while the “bad” man will be felt as despicable. This opposition reaches its peak when, in accordance with the consequences of slave morality, finally a trace of disregard is also attached to the “good” of this morality—it may be light and benevolent—because within the way of thinking of the slave the good man must definitely be the harmless man: he is good natured, easy to deceive, perhaps a bit stupid, a bonhomme [good fellow]. Wherever slave morality gains predominance the language reveals a tendency to bring the words “good” and “stupid” into closer proximity. A final basic difference: the longing for freedom, the instinct for happiness, and the refinements of the feeling for freedom belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as art and enthusiasm in reverence and in devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic way of thinking and valuing. From this we can without further ado understand why love as passion—which is our European specialty— must clearly have a noble origin: as is well known, its invention belongs to the Provencal knightly poets, those splendidly inventive men of the “gay saber” [gay science] to whom Europe owes so much— almost its very self.

(Beyond Good & Evil, Part IX: What is Noble, section 260)

“In the Gymnasium with Martin Heidegger”

An aging man with sagged skin and tattoo--
The impermanence of Being and the constancy of Time--
Upon which both depend is Flesh and Death.

Dialectical Conversation in the Modern Era

E: What do you mean by "Crystal Ball" vis-a-vis Notes from the Underground?

A: Sorry, I meant Crystal Palace. I'll try to find the section, I believe it's in part one.

A: Found it! This is quite long, "Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. "

E: The passage is at the end of chapter VII. (Btw, there is an ebook PDF copy of Notes from the Underground on my website.)  http://evankozierachi.com/uploads/Notes_from_the_Underground.pdf

E: But I found the unnamed underground man to be surprisingly sympathetic, rather I found myself feeling a duality expressed by him and the novella. That feeling being a compassionate contempt for a society of numbers--quantification and abstraction to the point of imperceptibility and nihilism.

A: In what sense is he expressing a duality? I saw him as the epitome of nihilism, and representative of the problems of that mode of thinking. Namely, a life of feeling miserable. I believe he could have benefited from an understanding of the asceticism of the stoics or Buddhists. I also felt as if he remained too cowardly and self-loathing to take any action to improve his situation, instead resorting to feelings of helplessness. 

E: Nihilism is a duality, a self-contradiction. "A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists." -- Nietzsche

E: In other words: asceticism, that is, the "will to nothingness" is still a willing of some sort, because it is by this that the underground man clings to life.

A: I think I see what you're saying. The nihilist views existence as being nothingness, but "in willing" he is acting contrary to the notion of nothingness. He is acting as if there is meaning. Is this correct?

E: He is acting (or willing) in spite of meaning. Let me rephrase... Without enemies, such as his school-friends & women (& perhaps, society at large), the underground man would not have persisted. But his enemies held him fast, his enemies seduced him ever again to emerge from the underground and to persist in spite of them. He lives, but only in spite.

A: Hence, the contradiction

E: Yes, if life is meaningless, why live?

A: Yes, it's illogical. However, perhaps he doesn't believe life is meaningless, he only deludes himself into thinking it is meaningless. (switches to new topic)