“Choice is not concerned
with the end, but only with the means leading to the end.”
“Anything toward which
we stride naturally is not subject to free will.”
“Man necessarily desires
everything on account of the last end.”
“One wills the end, the
reason determines on the means leading to the end.”
(from Pieper's “The
Wisdom of St. Thomas”)
My response: What is the
direction of life? Does anything direct life? Life is activated from
within by the material Will-To-Godhood, or Tirips, working
with outside natural selection and evolution. Defining Godhood needs
to be revitalized outwardly from its exclusive ascetic inwardness: we
evolve to Godhood by way of material and supermaterial evolution. God
was at first seen only inwardly as the symbolic ascetic bliss
experience of the God or Father Within. Nietzsche's death of God is
denied when religion and culture are brought back to biology, back to
real morality, which develops by way of survival and reproductive
concerns, with conscious evolution now added to unconscious
evolution. This suggests the ordered evolution of conservatism, a
better term than “ordered liberty.”
With biology and evolution
in the picture, altruism and morality are not the evil Nietzsche
thought they were. It is true, as Cattell said, that other than a
little borrowing from other cultures, it is innovative individuals
who are mainly the creators of culture, and the general population
tends to genetically and culturally lag behind. But even supermen do
not survive long without group values and group altruism---which
applies to all ethnic groups. Evolutionary values are activated by
the largely un-free inward direction of life, while being shaped by
outside natural selection and evolution, always moving toward
ascending levels of Godhood, with starts and stops along the way.
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