Transcript Review: Nietzsche: The Will to Power

Review: The Will to Power
• Ontological argument invalid
– Informal argument analogy test
– Grammatical trick—like I thinkI exist.
• Critical of desperate attempts at meaning
– Need reality to declare us important
• Grasping at grammatical straws
• Reality/original a myth—really willing power
• Gradual dismantling of rationalism
– Hume skeptical about science (cause)
– Abandon proofs of God (Hume/Kant)
Real world History
• Kant rationalist attempt
– Mind filters noumenal realityphenomenal
– Noumenal for rational obligation only
• Positivism= no value, pure science
• Nietzsche resting point joyful self-creation
– No real/apparent distinction (Greek Idols)
– No deeper reality but sheer will to power
• Create your own value and live by it
Questions
Explain the Buddhist paradox of
desire. What is the Mahayana
solution?
Christianity and Buddhism
• A paradigm of slave morality
– Not refuted, but sick! Self-hating negative
resentment
• All don'ts, evil, sin, sinners (invented by Jews!)
• This world, natural man as contrast with God
– A form of self-hate—hate the natural self/sinner
– Stems from Socrates’ mind/body values
Lying
• Heaven a contradiction
– No – a form of hatred of life
• Desire for "the other life" = desire for death
– Create a myth in our own image
• Attribute all power to him—powerlessness to ourselves
• Sin a deceptive form of self-hate
– Doctrine of original sin a double bind
– Protestant "grace" and predestination
• Hate yourself & ideology of powerlessness
• Moralizes enslavement – we deserve our suffering
– So do nothing about it
Christ and Christianity
• Culprit is St. Paul
– Actually a Roman—inheritors of the idols of Socrates
– Mind more valuable than body
• Hatred of body and instincts
• Celibacy of priests, sex as evil
• Christ himself a divine mystic
– Declared himself God
– Re-evaluated values
– Spontaneous self-assertion—we should all be like
that
• Christ was the last Christian
Buddhism a Kindred
Religion
• Same mind/body structure
– Skepticism of existence
– ‘Truth’ ‘reason’, ‘ideas’, & transcendent reality
• Nihilistic, decadent power denying
– Renunciation religion: Nirvana and life (samsara)
– Samsara is suffering. Get rid of desire
• But I don't want to malign it with Christianity…
– Honest – I seek to die and stay dead
• Reincarnation framework
– Positivist – no value judgment
• “Life is suffering” v “We are all sinners”
Not Powerless
• We can achieve the religious goal by
our own efforts
– We can die and stay dead
• No promises and keeps them!
– No supernatural intervention—no
supernatural role at all
• Buddha just a model who found the path
• Hygiene, diet, cheerfulness
– Attributed to climate and age of culture
Philosophical self-deception
• First "tricks of grammar" analysis
– Invent reality out of language
• Grammar and logic
– Subject term must refer (exist)
• Hence soul and God—agent and object
– Hegel and reason discovering itself—Reason=world
– All truth in SubjectPredicate form
» Summarize in a single truth Godworld
• Cogito and ontological argument
• "Can't get rid of God because we still
believe in grammar!"
India and Indo-European
• Return to first idea "invasion" of China
• Indian Upanishads and Hindu orthodoxy.
Brahman and Greeks
– Striking parallels
• Mind-body, reason, logic, truth permanence belief
• Phenomenalism-idealism: sensible world an
illusion
Buddhism
• Heresy within Hinduism
– Rejects the soul/ego
– Nirvana as extinction
Four noble truths:
• Life is suffering
– Nietzsche likes the directness, honesty
• Suffering is caused by desire
– The shared "nihilistic" theme
• Desire elimination is the way to eliminate
suffering
– Can do something (??)
• Eightfold path is the way to eliminate
desire
– Hygiene diet attitude
Nirvana
• No more rebirths = no more suffering
– Escape from samsara—cycle of lives