All posts filed under: morality

Pathways

Wednesday, May 13, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
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desire / existence / history / idealism / micro-politics / morality / reality / truth

Joel Isaacson, James Joyce (1998) War on Information. Idealism begins with the proposition that life is futurity, yet attempts to halt before the inevitable futility this produces, the cancerous desires which follow, not from “particular” notions, but precisely from the incorporation of Truth into life, that is, the incorporation of a point of ideality into the social diagrammatics of thought. A bad conscience, alienation, a nullity or ‘nihilism,’ is the necessary counterpart to this process […]

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: Towards an Ethics of Expression

Sunday, April 27, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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art / cruelty / difference / language / love / metaphysics / morality / nature / Nietzsche / Politics / rigor / science

Introduction: Rationality and Affect The lofty prize Of science lies Concealed today as ever! He has no thought To him it’s brought To own without endeavor! Goethe, Faust (1st part, 2567-2572) Intelligence is a moral category. The separation of feeling and understanding, that makes it possible to absolve and beatify the blockhead, hypostasizes the dismemberment of man into functions. Praise of the simpleton has an undertone of anxiety lest the severed parts reunite and put […]

Evaluating Value

Tuesday, February 12, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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aristocracy / Christianity / evaluation / evil / good / human / judgment / life / morality / nobility / origin of language / power / psychoanalysis / question / reality / subject / the future / utility / value

Under what conditions did men invent for themselves these value judgments good and evil? And what inherent value do they have? Have they hindered or fostered human well-being up to now? Are they a sign of some emergency, of impoverishment, of an atrophying life? Or is it the other way around—do they indicate fullness, power, a will for living, courage, confidence, the future? Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to the Genealogy of Morals Why is this work […]

Temporality and Power: The Politics of Absence

Wednesday, January 9, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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alterity / concept / critique / ethics / infinity / language / metaphysics / morality / ontology / Politics / power / production / theory / time

In the relation of the human being to language, a process is reflected that extends to the relation of the human being to beings in general: The scientific knowledge has become the standard knowledge! The other: thinking, spirit of language, history, culture is still there, yet dragged along into a certain indeterminateness. It is decisive that the consciousness was lost as to where this other belongs and of what kind must the reflection be in […]

Beyond Desire: Remarks on Nietzsche and Becoming

Monday, December 10, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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Anaxagoras / becoming / being / chaos / cosmos / desire / discourse / freedom / infinity / intensity / lacan / morality / morphology / Nietzsche / nous / ontology / phenomenology / psychology / Theory / Philosophy / unconscious

    Topos (biocosm)     In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order. Anaxagoras [1] What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new […]

The Will to Virtue and the Morality of Capture

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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capture / Christianity / domestication / herd morality / individual / Manu / morality / Nietzsche / power / virtue / war / Zarathustra

    “Neither Manu, nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral” (Twilight, 505). Nietzsche despises the improvers of mankind because they have typically been priests, otherwise known as […]

Nietzsche, Pity and Virtue: From the Superfluous to the Exceptional

Thursday, November 29, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Antichrist / breeding / Christianity / corruption / exception / individual / kant / morality / Nietzsche / overman / pity / power / species / Spinoza / suffering / superfluous / values / virtue

The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance (The Antichrist, 570). In the opening sections of The Antichrist, Nietzsche raises the question of what type of man shall be bred, continuing a line of thought developed in Twilight of the Idols in relation to the Laws of Manu. In former times, Nietzsche argues, the exceptional human was a fortunate accident; […]

The Genealogy of the Unconscious: Evolution, Awareness, Creativity

Thursday, October 18, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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affirmation / creativity / Dionysos / drives / evolution / human / libido / metaphor / morality / Nietzsche / reality / relation / truth / unconscious / will

“What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw […]

The Sense for Custom and the Feeling of Power: Nietzsche’s Joyous Denial of the Old Ways

Thursday, September 13, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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custom / force / morality / Nietzsche / Politics / power / society / sovereignty

We should take Nietzsche seriously when he asserts that Daybreak is the work of the subterranean man, one who constantly undermines the foundations of our belief by illuminating the mixed origins from which those beliefs emerge (Preface 1). While Nietzsche indicates briefly that it is the scientist who best represents this figure, the subterranean thinker could stand in general for anyone who conducts thought experiments that examine and dismantle our faith in morality. The active […]