Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Was Nietzsche affirming the criminal?


In reading Nietzsche it is not very clear that he is not affirming the criminal. To be sure he is affirming geniuses, but he praises immorality constantly: “Have not all the great deeds in the memory of man been immoral?.” And “The moral man is not a better man he is less harmful.” To name only two of many statements like this.

I don't believe that Nietzsche is affirming criminals mainly because he is speaking of the true creators and developers of culture, which we need more of, but he does see these exceptional people as something like wild beasts who do not need social taming by that “terrible species” called the priests. Also Nietzsche praises the Pagan religions, the Renaissance, and Art, as being more creative and affirmative of life, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, which was not a criminal cultural development.

But when Nietzsche writes that from a biological standpoint the phenomenon of morality is of a highly suspicious nature, it cries out for the sociobiological knowledge of our time, which has shown that group-selection instinctively and innately develops morality to enhance success in biological survival and reproduction.

Nietzsche was one of the most brilliantly courageous minds in human history but his big error was in not seeing altruism as being as natural, instinctive and affirmative as the warrior mentality. The social task is to find a way to distinguish between the social and anti-social geniuses, not to reject group morality. The psychometric sciences can in fact do this now.

Yes, we need affirmative philosophy and religion rather than the exclusively Inward Path to the God Within which requires blocking natural material desires. The Twofold Path does not require the death of religion, or the death of group morality, or the death of God, or the dictatorship of individual supermen. The Outward Path of material and supermaterial evolution can lead us toward real Godhood, which was first only symbolically experienced in the Inward Path.

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