Morality vs Economic Well-Being
Is morality opposed to self actualization? Or does it temper the will to power, which I interpret as the will to dominate one's environment?
Or is it a tool of self actualization?
I'll argue that it's opposed to life and the will to power. Morality is about blaming, shaming, despairing, and seeking permission. It's at home in fear and loathing of oneself and others. It's about tearing others down, only to be torn down ourselves.
It's only a encumbrance to life.
Or is it a tool of self actualization?
I'll argue that it's opposed to life and the will to power. Morality is about blaming, shaming, despairing, and seeking permission. It's at home in fear and loathing of oneself and others. It's about tearing others down, only to be torn down ourselves.
It's only a encumbrance to life.
Comments (78)
Morality is essentially immoral.
True of "Christian" morality, but not e.g. virtue ethics or negative utilitarianism.
Self-actualisation is usually understood in pro-social terms. Otherwise it makes no sense.
We are the products of our environments - both biological and social. So we need to tend to the health of both those environments, using our best endeavours.
The moral opposition between self and other then arises out of that. We need to be able to act in both competitive and cooperative fashion - as a intelligent choice - to do the best for ourselves, in our environments.
It is thus moral to be competively selfish - as that creates the free variety that any evolving system requires. And also moral to be selflessly cooperative or altruistic, as that ensures the overall cohesion and harmony the world we are taking a part in co-creating.
Morality is a win-win to the degree we are self-actualising in the sense of being able to step up to this critical kind of choice.
When to mix in, when to stand apart.
It is not about grabbing all the available power as some kind of bloated reserve. It is about being the intelligent switch that directs the available flow of power to best effect, from moment to moment.
It's driven by a concern for the use of pesticides. We could say they're used because of the will to power. I'm basically arguing the side I don't like.
Morality would dictate that we have an obligation as stewards of the environment, but isn't this view doomed because it limits us? Doesn't it run afoul of the primacy of the will to power?
I guess I'll go with what you're calling "Christian" because it just is morality as I know it.
I thought of this, thanks for articulating it. When we condemn ourselves, we're acting as though we aren't earthlings like everything else.
The issue of determinism enters. What are your thoughts on that?
So let's add ethics - doing what you ought.
How does determinism come into it from your point of view?
From my point of view - the holistic systems perspective of natural philosophy - the whole that is our environment/society imposes deterministic constraints on us. But what aint forbidden is then what is freely permitted to happen and becomes the systems matching degrees of freedom.
So constraints create freedoms, in the systems view. Determinism produces the indeterminism that is necessary to keep it youthful, creative and evolving.
Morality only arises in human history as part of taking that basic system principle to its next level of hierarchical complexity.
We have to be given more agency as selves to be a part of a sociocultural level of self-organisation.
It can be a bit of a rough fit of course, as humans are primarily still biological organisms and only through language capable of becoming a collective sociocultural organism.
Well chimps too are social and smart enough to make choices about the value of competing vs cooperating. But language - as the genes for culture - put Homo sap into a whole new realm.
But we can feel the step-up, especially as the gap becomes large enough where we might have some romantic or catholic choice between acting like ethereal angels, yet being weighed down by our animal needs.
Much silliness follows when your moral philosophy is allowed to get that much out of kilter.
Another similar degree of moral stupidity arises in neoliberalism where we are all meant to be self-making entrepreneurs acting in a free market but that angelic aspect of our human nature is still anchored in the unfortunate material fact of only having the one planetary ecology to despoil. We still have to share the one commons.
So maybe your complaint is against patent moral imbalances - which are plentiful in the world right now. :razz:
Nice. Yes, I remember meeting with a climate change activist back in the days when it was called the 'greenhouse effect'. He said something like - 'People don't like to be told they need to change their approach and values for the good of the community. Sounds like communism to many and will be resisted bitterly, even if it means a collective suicide." That was around 1988.
Will to power is a drive to dominate the environment. Morality is about transgression of transcendent rules. One assumes they transcend all of us.
As soon as we think of ourselves as natural elements of the environment, we're no longer limited by morality, but just by whatever constraints are in the system. Our selfishness is an evolved trait. We don't really have any choice.
Quoting apokrisis
So morality also evolved. We don't have any choice about that either?
How do constraints give rise to freedom? I probably need the dummed down version.
Ought one be driven to dominate the environment?
Good question. Humans are the only creatures you'd ask that of, correct? What's so special about us that we have to answer that?
No, I'm playing devil's advocate. I have no need to deflect. Determinism just appears to me to be my best argument.
I think what you are getting at here is that determinism is understood as being told what to do, while constraint is the obverse of being told what not to do.
So a constraints-based morality is inherently permissive. What aint forbidden is free to happen, and indeed expected to happen with exactly that freedom. But an authoritarian morality would have to tell you exactly what to do at all times, forever. And so there could be no meaningful local agency. God is watching and judging your every tiniest sin. Hellfire awaits.
Quoting Tate
No. All our choices shaped it.
Enough bad choices and you collectively go extinct. Next batter up. :grin:
Quoting Tate
Again, apophatically. Constraints tell you what not to do. And in doing so, they clearly define your freedom to do whatever.
The lines on the tennis court define the limits of the game. Within that, I can try any kind of game strategy I like. The asphalt of the highway defines the limits of where I can drive my car. Within that, I now have the freedom to drive any route I can find.
Our human world is engineered according this basic systems logic of global order that gives scope to local creative freedom. Infrastructure is how we distribute the power of personal choice.
Communism failed as it is a top-down command structure. Market places and social democracies are what work because they follow the ideal of a constraints-based evolutionary system.
You both enforce a collective order, and yet let it be the lightest form of order possible. You allow people to make moral mistakes. A degree of error is essential to the evolutionary process of learning how to do better.
So... you have no choice as to how you act?
Then there is no point in discussing your reasons, since they can make no nevermind...
True. There's no need to criticize people who use pesticides unnecessarily. They're driven by the will to power, and they have no choice.
Invincible argument, huh?
That might be how some view this, but I don't think this is inevitable or has to follow. I think of myself as a natural element in an environment. I don't think of morality as limiting, more as supporting the formation of my community. There's an ongoing conversation in community (which I participate in) about what constitutes moral behavior and these boundaries are explored and do change. Selfishness is no more an evolved trait than selflessness. Personally I see no reason to accept a 'will to power' model, it seems reductive and tendentious as a 'will to sex', 'will to be loved', 'will to whatever'...
Exporting buttloads of coal, as your country does, supports the formation of your community in far reaching ways. So I guess that's moral?
And yet here you are.
What will you do now?
If youre referring to Nietzsches notion of Will to Power, it is not a will to dominate ones environment.
Will to power is the self-differentiating creative impetus of willing. Deleuze says:
Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will; it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power.
I dont think this clarification detracts from the distinction the OP is making between morality and Will to Power, except that for Nietzsche morality is itself a debauched form of will to power.
I already switched sides. See my answer to Tom.
Nietzsche wasn't clear about what he meant. It's often taken to mean the will to dominate one's environment.
Quoting Joshs
Oh god, Deleuze. That idiot. :razz:
Our exporting buttloads of coal seems mainly to be supporting dysfunctional and monomaniacal billionaires.
It supports the whole Australian economy, but nice try dodging responsibility.
:roll:
Quoting Tate
IIRC, Freddy teaches we ought to strive repurpose (cultivate) the "will to power" drive to dominate ourselves first and foremost (e.g. via the existential-psychological challenge of "the eternal recurrence of the same"). Synonymous with a will to create oneself (i.e. "become who you are"). This way of becoming oneself transvaluates goes "beyond" rules for conforming ("good") & blaming ("evil") into habits of affirming ("Good") & not affirming ("Bad"). :fire:
Quoting Tate
Apparently, I gave you too much credit, Tate. You're just nother D-Ker banging your head on a keyboard. Good luck with all that. :sweat:
Quoting Tate
You seem to lack the capacity to stay on your own topic.
Well, in your immortal words, bugger off if you don't like it.
Quoting Tate
Its not just Deleuze who reads will to power this way. Most postmodern interpretations of it emphasize that power is not under the control of the will , because the will does not have any control over itself. It is splintered into competing drives.
The self-actualization of the will , which is tied to Hegelian dialectics, is a form of moralism that Nietzsche critiques.Creativity for Nietzsche is more about celebrating what thwarts our will than about willing what we want.
I think the will he's referring to is Schopenhauerian. It's not a personal will. It's the animating force of the universe.
We might perceive it as instinct to survive and thrive.
Does this accord with postmodern interpretations?
You could argue that the left shows its instinct for autocracy in a crisis. And so mutates into an autocratic regime engineering permanent crisis (as Orwell diagnosed). Then the right understands that crisis is the opportunity for wealth transfers. So it is always sniffing around waiting for a crisis to milk.
Climate change is a little too big for either cynical ploy. But here in NZ, we did have bitter experience of a textbook neoliberal response to carbon reduction.
Rather than an honest carbon tax, we created a tradeable carbon market - open to the world. We said let folk buy carbon credits so that those who could easily decarbonise could profit, and those who would struggle to decarbonise could pay an appropriate tax that would eventually force the required change.
It sounded textbook market logic. A model of equality where each would contribute according to their needs for the benefits of all.
But of course, secretly, it was a local rort that became swept up into a global rort. Disaster capitalism at its finest.
The NZ government effectively socialised the nations forestry. It just so happened that the mid-1990s saw high log prices and there was a gold rush to plant pines. This created a wall of wood that would have to be harvested in 25 years time. But right at that moment when the Emissions Trading Scheme was being set up, the government could bank all the plantation as a carbon credit profit.
This meant NZ could get away doing nothing substantive - and in fact increase its carbon production through a period of fast growth - while also being about the greenest nation in the world according to the shonky accounting of thr Kyoto Protocol emission trading deal that it helped sell to the world.
The people involved the best of intentions. Ive met most of them. Decent chaps committed to green politics.
But they hoped for the best with the wall of wood dodge. That was only meant to be an up front sweetener to get it past the voters. Eventually the screws were meant to be tightened.
But then along comes the rest of the world, pulling off the even bigger rort of fake carbon forest with their fake carbon credits that could extract big Euros from the EU version of the ETS. Their bad credits then washed into the NZ system and NZ polluters could arbitrage those to generate a domestic profit. They could bank the NZ credits, which were at least real forest, and pay their debts with the fake Polish and Russian ones.
Our worst polluting industries - the ones the whole scheme was meant to be pressuring - were actually having to report embarrassing annual profit figures. They were being paid a free dividend on their climate offences.
This would have been a huge political scandal - if the public could have understood what was going on.
So a bit of a diversion from the OP. But it illustrates that we do know how to design moral systems.
NZ is in fact world class - another Singapore or Finland - when it comes to effective public policy to deal with health, education, pandemics, trade, whatever. But climate change is another order of magnitude entirely when it comes to the scope of the problem in question.
Dig into the morality of the current responses - left or right - and it is all a mess ripe for cynical exploitation.
Dont get me started on blue hydrogen or the other new rorts becoming the latest policy responses.
[Oh yeah, I meant to add the NZ greens have morphed into our hard left political party now. More focused on social justice and intent on removing its leader - our climate change minister - as he lacks wokeness and is too much a technocrat trying to fix things as we shift to some actual carbon tax, and force our farmers finally to take their hit on methane and even find some way to stop foreign carbon farmers from turning all our productive land into a fresh round of international carbon credit rorting - the next step where NZ doesnt even get to claim the profits!]
Its more like a tension or difference between drives than any single drive. Not what puts us on a specific trajectory but an impetus which alway derails and resituates
our direction. Drives aim to exhaust themselves. Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength life itself is will to power.(BGE)
The way youre putting it turns it into a form of self-consistency or self-continuity. For Nietzsche it is about self-transformation , not survival. If it is a thriving , it is not cumulative addition to a valuative theme, but a continual change of direction of value and meaning.
Time for the wombat shuffle. Turn back to the dark and block the tunnel with your arse. :lol:
Power was always the wrong term for the universal thermodynamic imperative. The Cosmos is about the will to entropify.
The dialectic is then that it must have negentropic structure to achieve that. So power becomes the ability to do that work - construct the engines of dissipation.
Or at least that is how ecology and systems science now understands the general situation.
I really disagree with this. For Nietzsche, value and meaning are always mythological, no matter where you are in terms of actualization.
Quoting Joshs
I don't even know what that means. My concern is about pesticide use in my neighborhood which has wiped out the local frogs. I like the sound of the frogs, so it distresses me.
I think my neighbors were simply driven by something like the will to power: a blind will live. In the same way a tree turns dirt and water into wood, we spray chemicals to eliminate annoying bugs: to transform the environment unto our own needs.
Is this not correctly called the will to power?
And that's actually a great example in support of my argument. As I said, the community is engaged in a conversation about what is right or moral. And some of us, as part of that community, protest and take direct action against industry and government - American military bases on Australian soil, the coal industry, environmental destruction by corporations. None of these issues can be solved by one guy's will to power as per your OP. Only communities can change the behavior of communities.
Yep. We need a whole new way of conceptualizing our world, it's not just tinkering with existing systems, or adjusting our priorities. That kind of change takes time we don't have.
Now, where do the commas go?
:fire:
Quoting apokrisis
:100:
(i.e local order accelerates global disorder).
Quoting Tom Storm
:yikes:
That's nice. The exports continue, though. Economic well-being overrides morality. Do you have an argument to the contrary?
The word Schopenhauer used for it is "will.". As phenomenology, it works, though it may seem strange if you're not familiar with S.
Nietzsche's concern with will was driven by Schopenhauer's pessimism.
Quoting apokrisis
Do we need to do a deep dive on entropy? Because it's not the universal entity you seem to be suggesting it is.
Quoting Tate
I think this is one aspect of the will to power, the drive to assimilate , dominate and achieve mastery over oneself and ones surroundings. But will to power also implies a constant re-directing of the drive to dominate.
Nietzsche says the essence of life , as will to power , is its spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces.
What does he mean by re-interpeting and re-directing?
That overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former meaning' [Sinn] and purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.
No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged the whole history of a thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.
The development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts
So will to power is a dominating impetus that exhausts itself in assimilating the world to a valuative meaning, thus jumping from one meaning to another without there being a logical connection between the two. It is not about mere preservation or survival but expansion. And the dominant valuative interpretation will to power imposes becomes obscured or obliterated as it expands its dominance.
So if will to power is transforming the world in accord with our needs , it is at the same time having the valuative basis of our needs constantly be obliterated , re-directed, and redefined in ways that dont allow us to claim some sort of thematic continuity in what we want. This is self-actualization as continual self-obliteration and re-invention.
All of life is a will to power. It does not make sense to interpret this as the will to dominate. The will to power can be seen in the majesty of the mighty oak and the persistence of the weed emerging in the hostile environment of sunbaked concrete.
Quoting Tate
In the Genealogy the development of Christian morality is the development of the will to power through man's self-overcoming. It is only later that it becomes life denying.
I agree. That's just one fundamental aspect of it. Are you saying morality springs from the same source?
Quoting Fooloso4
What is self-overcoming exactly?
Yes.
Quoting Tate
I will let Zarathustra tell us.
Let me add to that Nietzsches linking of traditional morality with intentionality , the willing what one chooses to will, and his critique of this morality. Self-overcoming involves deconstructing the presumed internal unity of willing, intending and valuing.
Today, when we immoralists, at least, suspect that the decisive value is conferred by what is specifically unintentional about an action, and that all its intentionality, everything about it that can be seen, known, or raised to conscious awareness, only belongs to its surface and skin which, like every skin, reveals something but conceals even more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign and symptom that first needs to be interpreted, and that, moreover, it is a sign that means too many things and consequently means almost nothing by itself. We believe that morality in the sense it has had up to now (the morality of intentions) was a prejudice, a precipitousness, perhaps a preliminary, a thing on about the same level as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality even the self-overcoming of morality, in a certain sense: let this be the name for that long and secret labor which is reserved for the most subtle, genuinely honest, and also the most malicious consciences of the day, who are living touchstones of the soul.(BGE)
From Being to becoming.
Going back at least to Plato traditional morality has sought a fixed, unmoving point by which to guide us. Movement or change was, and by many still is, regarded as a defect. Fixed truths were beneficial or even necessary. But life is not fixed and unchanging.
When there appears to be a conflict between the will to power and morality, say when economic well-being trumps morality, what does this mean? If they have the same source?
Is it that overcoming is needed?
Cite an exception of a phenomenon that is notvsubject to either informational or thermodynamic or cosmological entropy. :yawn:
He was right that nature has a universal striving - the thermodynamic imperative. Existence is a dissipative structure, a Big Bang tumbling into a heat sink Heat Death of,its own making.
But he then projected the notion that this was suffering, a pessimistic burden, on to what is a neutral fact.
I prefer the optimistic reading of Peirce who characterises the same striving as the Comos evolving through the growth of universal reasonableness. Which is sort of Hegelian also, but Peirce had a proper model of natural structure and so really nailed the best version of the story.
Not exactly. He noted that consciousness is an arc always headed toward satisfaction, which is the death of the will. Consciousness requires unanswered questions, unresolved drama, in short, evil in order to stay awake.
This was possibly something Nietzsche reacted strongly against, not that he didn't recognize the truth of it, he just believed we have to learn to celebrate ourselves in both our good and evil. Or something like that.
Did you see the thread I started on entropy? Your thoughts would be appreciated should you find the time.
But that is just more bad psychology. The view from a world being swept up in the industrial revolution. Folk wondering why coal seemed to have the power to drive humans into a crazy new life of factories and slums, mechanised war, forced education, the slavery of capitalism, etc.
The Enlightenment had its Romantic reaction.
From natures point of view, consciousness is really suppose to be about unconscious flow. The flow state of skilled habitual action. The life of the happy villager in tune with the rhythms of the harvest, or the savage on the tropical island - in the romantic telling.
So with fossil fuels as a limitless entropy source becoming coupled to engineering and machinery, suddenly the world to which society had become habituated was being shaken up in ways no one seemed to be able to control or predict. Coal was demanding what it was demanding. Electricity and oil, then even nuclear, all followed.
Psychology aims for flow states. Neither boring nor exciting. Just accomplished and valued. Yet now here was this fossil fuel erupted out of the ground demanding we find ways to fulfil the thermodynamic imperative and burn it in some system of machine-based consumption. We had to have exponential population growth and a mechanically structured civilisation to scale ourselves up to the task nature had apparently just dumped in our lap.
So of course, we get this line of pessimistic and bewildered philosophy that continues through PoMo even today. We get the Romantic reaction that sets itself up against the Enlightenment rational view - because the Enlightenment was the enabler in terms of being the intellectual key that disturbed the black beast that had laid dormant in the Earth crust for half a billion years, slowly cooking into forms ever more explosively energy dense.
It is all very familiar and deeply confused. I give guys like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the big go round because there is not a lot of point trying to straighten them out. They sort of both get it and really dont.
At least with Hegel and Peirce, perhaps Schelling, even Kant, you have an attempt to see it in a general systems perspective - a neutral view which is not about good vs evil and stuff like that, but about a dialectic or unity of opposites.
Like thermodynamics and dissipative structure theory. The science of flow states. The unity of entropy and negentropy. Or as Peirce eventually crystallised it, semiotics. What evolutionary theorists would now call infodynamics.
Yeah, the industrial revolution was in England. Schopenhauer was German. I'd say if you reject his pessimism, you just don't know what it is, because it's pretty obvious.
Sounds like what I said, no?
Schopenhauer was one of the first of the irrationalist philosophers. This is a separate issue from his pessimism.
If you say so. You are free to elaborate of course.
The two seem connected to me. Reality is the inescapability of dissipative structure the dialectical combo of entropy production and the negentropic structure needed to actually produce it. From the Big Bang down, the Cosmos is a tumble into a self-making heat sink. And life and mind humanity - is "enslaved" into this same unhappy project. The only escape is death. And yet even then, there is just a recycling, a rebirth, as the job of dissipating is not quite complete. The Cosmos is still a couple of degrees from its destination of absolute zero.
So some folk like that bastard Hegel, and later Peirce celebrate rationality as the triumph over entropy. But Schop knows better. Rationality is the slave to entropy, not its master. We are being sucked along in ways we have no control over. A pretty pessimistic conclusion where the only alternative is to be ... a poet and philosopher. Roll on the PoMo revolution.
Satisfaction is death. Get that, you get Schopenhauer.
He falls into the silliness of treating the mind as something substantively fundamental rather than a semiotic modelling relation.
Peirce fixes this ... by making even the substantive being of the cosmos a "pansemiotic" modelling relation. A dissipative structure in other words.
Don't waste your life on second raters. Go straight to the head honcho of modern metaphysics.
No, he really doesn't. I get it. You poo poo Schopenhauer. I think Deleuze was mentally retarded. We probably neither understand our scapegoats. I know you don't. :love:
Or not give a shit - this is always an option, surely? The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step (Casals), We are free to forge our own (perhaps limited) values and narratives in as much as this is possible (notwithstanding some inherited frameworks & untheorized howlers).
Quoting apokrisis
Can you, in simple dot points, articulate why such a revolution (do you mean transformation?) will help?
But you still haven't done anything but assert you are right. You have failed to show me that you are right.
I agree I just by-pass Schopenhauer on the whole. Life is too short not to focus on the best ideas.
But your gloating is premature. You have done nothing to rebut my analysis.
I agree that is hard to decide what to do with one's life given a clear-eyed view of its reality.
But personally, I reasoned that I just happen to have been born at what must be the very hinge of human history. We have the science to have a pretty damn comprehensive understanding of why anything even exists. And if you hang around to 2050, one can also see how the whole human adventure does, or doesn't, end.
It is the biggest show on earth, and maybe the cosmos. So there's a rather obvious project. Organise your life so as not to miss any part of this ultimate story.
Quoting Tom Storm
I meant the opposite. It is the compounding of the confusion dressed up as continental cleverness.
Between AP and PoMo, I choose pragmatism. :wink:
The question is what are you afraid of?
Nothing
That's a genuinely interesting response. 'Ultimate story' sounds suspiciously like a grand narrative. But I have to say none of that matters to me. I am much more interested in making a cup of tea and sitting in the winter sun, listening to music.
Quoting apokrisis
Fair point. Sorry, don't know why but I thought you were a PoMo spear carrier.
:lol:
:clap: :100:
What is a man profited should he gain the whole world and lose his soul?
What about random violence against random people? Do you think we should feel free to be randomly violent and brutal with random people? And if you think we should avoid it, isn't it a moral principle you are advocating?
No
Quoting Babbeus
Yes
Why do you advocate moral principles if you think that morality is "only a encumbrance to life"?
Some aspects of life need squashing.