Maha asked:

Time is composed of moments. Moments have no duration. Therefore time has no duration. This rather surprising fact is further supported by the following considerations. Time is illusory because time seems real but isn’t real. Furthermore down through the ages the best and brightest people have always thought time was illusory. What’s the fallacy? I am confusing if its composition or not? but even if its composition, I can’t explain why, because of the second part of the argument! looking forward to receiving from you!

Answer by Peter Jones

You seem to thought this through correctly. Im unable to make out what you mean by composition so cannot comment on that point, but the paradoxically of our naive or folk view of time is clearly not in agreement with our reason.

As you say, the present can have no duration, so it is not just our naive view of time but also our view of change and motion that are threatened by logical analysis. Zeno and Parmenides saw this long ago.

A solution for the logical absurdity of our ideas of time, change and motion once we have reified them you might like to examine the literature of mysticism. In particular you might like to look at Middle Way Buddhism. This would be not just because the philosopher-sage Nagarjuna, who explained the philosophical foundation of the Buddhas teachings in his Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, logically refutes the true existence of time, change and motion, but also because he puts an alternative view in its place.

Peter Jones at philosophos.org

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

I’m guessing that the question here isn’t whether or not time is real or has real duration but where are the fallacies in what you have stated as the argument for this conclusion. Actually, you give three arguments. Let’s look at these one by one:

‘Time is composed of moments. Moments have no duration. Therefore time has no duration.’

As stated, the argument contains a logical fallacy. A wall is composed of bricks but it is also composed of mortar (cement). If you drew a conclusion about the wall based on the assumption that it consists solely of bricks then your conclusion would be wrong. Is time made of something else, besides moments? I don’t know. We are not philosophizing about time but just evaluating logical validity.

Let’s add the word ‘solely’ and see if the argument fares any better. ‘Time is composed solely of moments. Moments have no duration. Therefore time has no duration.’ Well, now the problem is whether in fact we were right to make an analogy between bricks and moments. Dry stone walls are composed solely of stones and nothing else. But stones have a physical size. How could something that was composed solely out of bits that had no physical size have a physical size? Maybe if you allow empty space between the bits. But then (however you conceive of ’empty space’) aren’t you saying that the object is composed of bits with no physical size plus empty space?

Could that apply to time? Could time be composed of timeless moments plus ’empty spaces’ between the moments? Again, I don’t know.

Then consider this. Do moments exist? Is it correct to infer from the fact that you can divide and subdivide a period of time to infinity, that the time in question is composed of those of those infinitely subdivided parts? That’s a question that Zeno and Aristotle puzzled over. So far as the logical validity of the argument is concerned, you can say that the term ‘composed’ is not sufficiently well defined, so we are unable to evaluate the truth of the first premiss, as stated.

There are two more arguments we need to look at but these are easy.

‘Time is illusory because time seems real but isn’t real.’ — This isn’t an argument for the unreality of time because it simply assumes this as its premiss. If time is not real and if we believe that it is real then we are under an illusion. But who’s to say whether time is real or not?

‘Down through the ages the best and brightest people have always thought time was illusory.’ — I believe that in logic text books this is called an ‘argument from authority’. A fallacy.

http://www.philosophypathways.com/vita.html

Kai asked:

a. Would a Turing test that tested aesthetic experience be possible? Why or why not?

b. Would this kind of Turing test be a more accurate way to assess human intelligence (or human consciousness) or less accurate or as accurate as the standard Turing test? Why or why not?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Your question might have been relevant if it was based on a sound (i.e. verifiable) scientific theory of intelligence, consciousness and aesthetic experience. Regrettably all we really possess is a little well-founded philosophical speculation, which would dismiss these assumptions with a tired handwave and reference to ‘category error’.

As for any scientific merit of the Test, you must surely be aware that it measures (if that’s the word!) the degree of gullibility of easily fooled people, who are deceived day in, day out by fakes and imposters for as long as history remembers. That’s asking a lot! In science, you’ll remember, subjective impressions are not allowed, because they are not quantifiable. So that’s pretty much the end of this story, I would say.

Apart from this, nothing more is required than a minimum awareness of the mechanics of computer programming. Forget the hype, but take a cold hard look at it. The you’ll see that every such algorithm is human intelligence flowcharting procedures that can be implemented by a machine. A century ago the acme of this was the steamship. Today’s computer belongs into the same category, except that electricity replaced steam and the functional aspects became miniaturised and more diverse. But one as the other implements its procedural routines on the basis of clear-cut and well-understood causal principles.

So here as there, it is pretty absurd to ask for a machine to ‘acquire’ autonomous consciousness, intelligence and aesthetic sensibility, simply through the agglomeration of ever more bits and pieces and branches on the flowchart!

Accordingly the Turing Test, as it relies on human gullibility for its results, has no truly scientific merit. Philosophically it has none at all: being deceived is hardly a philosophical subject. Even speculatively it works only on the proviso that you first reduce all human specificity to quantifiable features, i.e. regarding life processes in an exclusively molecular context. But this is hardly the proper way of differentiating a rock from a rodent, as you’ll surely agree. There is an ineradicable internal conflict between the cause-and effect mechanisms that apply to non-living objects and the spontaneity of living creatures. Which spells out that you have the choice between thinking of yourself as a human creature or as a biological computer. But the computer does not have that choice.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Brian asked:

Kindly let me know what does Mao mean by saying, ‘It is only when there is class struggle that there can be philosophy.’ Can it be understood as an expression of unity of theory and practice that Marxists persist on it?

Answer by Martin Jenkins

I think what Mao means, is that firstly, there is material practice before we reflect or theorise about it. This is in keeping with the general thrust of Marx’s Historical Materialism as distinguished from Philosophy, which maintains ideas do not arise from nowhere nor are they primary as the only motives in human history but, can be deduced as arising from specific social contexts.

The dialectic proffered by Hegel in his Science of Logic, is a dialectic between emanations of the Concept: Abstract Understanding can only understand things immediately, prima facie. Negative or Dialectic Reason discovers oppositions or distinctions in such abstract immediacy. Speculative or Positive Reason overcomes such oppositions in a process Hegel calls Aufhebung — translated as supersession of, sublation of, superseding of the negative element but preserving it on a higher level of unity. The dialectic process begins again.

This process occurs in the movement of human consciousness overcoming the oppositions with itself in its other — famously termed the Subject-Object dialectic — until final unity of the two is reached; unity in the Absolute Idea which is the overcoming of all otherness of human consciousness. In Hegel’s Philosophy of History, human history is the dialectical process of Freedom, overcoming manifestations of itself expressed in the battle between Principles and Ideas embodied in world-historical individuals such as Socrates and Napoleon.

Following the famous ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s Idealist dialectic by Marx, Marx’s employment of the Dialectic is applied to social processes. Most generally, this is the contradiction between the Productive Forces and Social Relations which is simultaneous with class struggle. Thus in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx declares human history to be the history of class struggle.

Dialectical Materialism — a term coined by Russian Marxist Georg Plekhanov — maintains that contradiction is inherent not only to the social world but also, to the Natural world. Hence we have The Dialectics of Nature and the Anti-Düring both by Engels (and as Marx contributed a chapter to the latter, presumably it had Marx’s approval) where dialectic is allegedly found in mathematics, nature, history, chemistry — in short, it is omnipresent. Thus, dialectic, initially focusing on the social world extends beyond it to the non-social world of nature. Engels modified Hegels’Hegel’sts of the Dialectic to reveal the three Dialectical ‘Laws’:

1. The Interpenetration of Opposites.
2. Quantity into Quality and vice versa.
3. The Negation of the Negation.

This is a contentious issue in Marxist Philosophy with ‘Hegelian Marxists’ such as Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs emphasising contradictions as occurring, like Hegel before, in the phenomenology of lived experience, in consciousness, ideologies and culture upon the basic contradiction between the productive Forces and Relations. They are less disposed to extending dialectic to Nature.

Mao Zedong in his 1937 essay On Contradiction, uses quotes from Lenin and Engels which advocate the omnipresence of the dialectic, as described above:

“The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics. Lenin said, “Dialectics in the proper sense is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.” Lenin often called this law the essence of dialectics; he also called it the kernel of dialectics.”

In other words, contradiction is everywhere. Every thing, each phenomena is a unity of opposites.

As usual, the distinction is made between Idealism and Materialism in Philosophy. The two world outlooks are discussed by Mao and unsurprisingly, Idealism or Metaphysics is rejected. It is rejected primarily because it cannot account for or accept the primacy of change or becoming. Materialist Dialectics can and does.

Previous Philosophy while at most, recognising the Becoming of Being, (such as Heraclitus) did not articulate this to the degree Hegel had with his use of Dialectic. Reaching fruition with Marx, philosophy in the guise of Dialectical Materialism, promulgates the position that ontology is change and not the settled metaphysical finalis of Plato’s Forms, Aristotle’s teleology, the afterworlds of the Abrahamic religions and so on.

It is with the class struggle that Marx first notes that social being is becoming. (The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The Holy Family 1845,The German Ideology 1845/6) Only later, as we’ve seen with Engels’ Anti-DuAnti-Düring and Dialectics of Nature (1883) does this extend to an analyses of Nature, chemistry and so on making the dialectic a omnipresent process, a ‘scientific socialism’. So the impetus of class struggle leads to a dialectical account of it. Later, the dialectical approach is extended to Nature etc. and the dialectic becomes the ‘philosophy’ of the Proletariat, as ‘Scientific Socialism’

Scientific Socialism, as the science of the Proletariat, would be the final word in Philosophy. For with the triumph of the Proletarian Revolution and the establishment of Communism, the truth of scientific socialism, of dialectical materialism is vindicated. Previous philosophies of metaphysics and Idealism will consequently have been demonstrated to be false, to be ‘ideologies’ in the service of of previous ‘ruling class’. Hence Materialism, Dialectical and Historical Materialism or scientific socialism is the truth. Not only has the riddle of history been solved but also, so have the riddles of philosophy. Philosophy or Theory informs practice and practice is informed by Theory: indeed, the ‘unity of theory and practice’. This echoes what Hegel had earlier concluded with his Absolute Idealism: ‘All that is Actual is Rational and all that is Rational is Actual.’

It is in this sense, in Mao’s view, that Philosophy — as Dialectical Materialism — could only exist in virtue of the existence of class struggle, being deduced from it.

Martin Jenkins received the ISFP Fellowship for his dissertation ‘Aristocratic Radicalism or Anarchy? An Examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Will to Power’. He is a Pathways Mentor and an Editors of Philosophy Pathways

Tony asked:

What is the reason for existence if life is temporary, has no true purpose, and can be erased so easily?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

The first thing to say about your question is that all three of your presumptions are mistaken.

Life is not temporary: It has been present on earth for upward of 3 billion years, and there is no sign of it disappearing in a hurry.

Nor can it be erased easily. Some life forms are so tough, they can survive inside volcanoes. It would take a lot more killing than we can do, to erase all of it, even with total nuclear warfare.

As for purpose, if you can’t think of what to do with your life, it may be that you are spoilt by too much affluence and ego gratification. As far as I can tell, all life on earth has the distinct purpose of keeping Project Life going, if only to ensure that consciousness, intelligence and intentionality have a place in the universe and give some meaning to this colossal morgue of dead matter.

I suspect however, that your question on purpose is rather more narrow and merely the common doubt born from a self-centred perspective. When you worry about life being temporary and easily erased, it is probably the shortness and vulnerability of your own life that bothers you. But you could take this on as a challenge to be creative with your little gift, rather than waiting for a meaning or purpose to be handed to you on a silver platter.

Alternatively, you could devote a little of your life to studying biology. You might find your respect for this unique condition of existence growing on you. This too is a good tonic for people whose life might not seem to be very purposeful.

At the very least, however, you should read Camus’ little book called The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s all about this issue, and he begins by asking why you should not suicide immediately, if life appears as senseless as you imply. You might find it curious that Camus is of the opinion that each of us bears an individual as well as collective responsibility for the meaning of life.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Tyler asked

How does Hume’s extreme skepticism influence the thinking of Immanuel Kant? How does Kant resolve the perceived dilemma introduced by Hume’s scepticism?

Answer by Graham Hackett

One year ago I would have answered this question in a quite different way to how I am going to (try to) answer it here Last year, I would have been rather more dogmatic about both Kant and Hume than I am now. I am less sure. I ask you to bear in mind this, when you read my response to your question. It is not that I am trying to show Socratic humility; it is just that the degree of subtlety in both of these writers is immense, and I don’t think it is possible ever to be definitive.

Kant was very impressed by Hume, and remarked that he had been ‘woken up from a long slumber’ after reading him. Hume was doubtful about how much we could know through reason, and regarded empirical matters of fact, ideas and impressions as being all important. Added to this was the stunning success of the scientific model of knowledge; just a few laws developed by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton enabled the development of large and impressive bodies of knowledge. It is no wonder that Hume took a very dim view indeed of metaphysics, and dismissively opined about it in the following words;

“If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

I do not think that Hume was an extreme sceptic in the normal sense of the term; viz, that we can never know anything. This reputation partly comes from his view on the respective roles of empirical knowledge and reason. For Hume reason was involved in considering the relations between ideas, and was either a priori reasoning or based on matters of empirical fact. For some 18th century philosophers, like Clarke, reason was a much weightier matter, with metaphysical implications. For instance, Clarke, as a moral realist, thought that reason extended to matters of ethics as well as matter, for our actions would be fit or unfit even if no one could have any intuition that they were so. Physical matter and the fitnesses or unfitnesses of actions exist independently of us and are there for reason to discover. Hume, however, did not believe we have access to anything but ideas and impressions, so he thought that Clarke’s view must be incorrect; we cannot grasp anything outside the bounds of experience.

Hume also has critical views concerning causality and determination. He sees no causal laws in operation; only the constant conjunction of events A and B, from which we infer that A causes B.

Kant was enormously disturbed by the success of the scientific revolution and by Hume’s scepticism about such matters as the role of reason, causality, the timeless underpinning for our ethical beliefs and the usefulness of metaphysics in general. He wished to rescue metaphysics from the demise that Hume predicted for it because of the success of science. It is no coincidence that he referred to his book Critique of Practical Reason as beginning a ‘Copernican revolution’ for metaphysics, putting it on the same firm foundation as science.

It is possible to read into Kant’s division of existence into two worlds — noumena and phenomena — as a response to the attacks of the empiricists on metaphysics. The world of phenomena is the world which can be known empirically, by scientific discovery. It is the world governed by the natural law, and everything in it is structured by time, space and causality. Because we are part of this world, we are also governed by the natural law and our behaviour is determined. For Hume this is all there is.

But for Kant, there is also the noumenal world, which is outside space and time and causality via the laws of nature. We can know nothing certain about what is in the noumenal sphere, but because of Kant’s adoption of the ‘two standpoints’ we are part of both worlds. From the standpoint of theoretical reason, human actions are phenomenal events occurring in the natural world and are therefore completely determined by natural physical laws. However, from the standpoint of practical reason, actions are noumenal events that result from a free will that deliberates between alternatives, evaluates them, selects one, and thus acts freely by self determination. So humans are determined when viewed (theoretically) from a third-person perspective as an object, but free when viewed (practically) by the ‘self’ from a first-person perspective as a subject. This is a rather clever way of allowing us to have free will and yet still recognise the necessity of the laws of nature. It is also a good way of showing that despite the successes of science and empirical method, we can still find a powerful role for reason. According to Kant we can even formulate synthetic a priori knowledge, where reason is used, independently of experience to know things which are not self evident.

Hume would probably not have been convinced by Kant’s defense of reason and freedom against empiricism and the natural laws, but he would certainly have been impressed.

Graham Hackett is currently studying for the BA (Hons) in Philosophy with the University of London International Programme. He is a former student of Dr Geoffrey Klempner.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Hume’s views greatly influenced Kant.

Early in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic (1785; trans. Bennett J: online at http://www.earlymoderntexts.com, page 2) Kant says:

“David Hume’s attack on metaphysics was more decisive for its fate than any other event… since the earliest recorded beginnings of metaphysics’, and ‘It was my recollection of David Hume that broke into my dogmatic slumber.”

Kant felt he had cracked the Hume problem. Later in this text (page 36) he says:

“So the Humean problem is completely solved, though in a way that would have surprised its inventor… the complete reverse of anything that Hume envisaged — instead of the concepts (of the understanding) being derived from experience, that experience is derived from them.”

What then was the problem posed by Hume, what is Kant’s solution. and is it a good one?

Hume problem. Hume held that all knowledge falls into one or other of 2 categories (a view later termed ‘Hume’s Fork’ or ‘Hume’s Dichotomy’, and I take it this what your ‘dilemma’ refers to):

* matters of fact
* relations of ideas

Matters of fact are known from experience (known a posteriori), tell us something about the world, and are contingent truths (could have been otherwise) e.g. Paris is the capital of France. Relations of ideas are known simply by grasping the meaning of the ideas (known a priori), are necessary truths (couldn’t have been otherwise), but tell us nothing about the world e.g. truths of logic. Any statement which is neither a matter of fact nor a matter of logic can’t be knowledge. Talk of God’s essence and actions, immortality of the soul and other metaphysical ideas, are hot air. Hume’s famous last paragraph in his ‘Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding’ (1748) reads:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

So, for Hume, metaphysics is bunk.

Furthermore, he felt that the role of human reason was overblown. Reason is only the servant of our feelings, helping us to plan the means to the ends set by our feelings, was his view. We think reason tells us there is an external world, an enduring self, and a necessary cause-and-effect relation, whereas we don’t really know there is an external world, we don’t actually see any necessary causal connection (only constant conjunction), and introspection reveals only a bundle of sensations and thoughts, no enduring ‘I’.

This extreme scepticism was too much for Kant. He wanted to show that metaphysics is possible (and indeed to write some actual metaphysics), and that talk of external world, causation and self was not empty. And that reason had a bigger role.

Kant’s solution. Kant agreed that if Hume’s Fork truly were an exhaustive account of kinds of knowledge, then metaphysics would indeed be impossible, for experience can’t justify a world, causation and a self; and purely analytic a priori reasoning does just yield what is already implicit in the concept we start with. So Kant cleverly suggested that Hume had overlooked a third type of knowledge, a third prong on the fork, as it were, one on which metaphysics could hang. He suggested that in addition to matters of fact (synthetic a posteriori knowledge) and matters of logic (analytic a priori and necessary knowledge) there was synthetic a priori knowledge i.e. necessary truths, known a priori, but which, unlike analytic truths, did tell us something about the world. In short, synthetic a priori knowledge makes metaphysics possible. But is there such a thing as synthetic a priori knowledge? Kant gives examples.

First, mathematics. Kant maintains that ‘7+5=12’ is not an analytic truth, known just by understanding the meaning of the numbers. The concept ‘7+5’ contains the uniting of 7 and 5 into a single number but doesn’t contain 12. We obtain 12 by amplifying the concept, using (at first) say our fingers to count on. This is easier to grasp with bigger numbers, say the concept ‘38976+45204’ which clearly doesn’t contain ‘84180’ So, whilst 7+5=12 is known a priori, it is not analytic, it clearly tells us something about the world and so is synthetic. Next, physics. Kant maintains Newton’s laws are known a priori yet apply to the world, and do so necessarily. Another example of synthetic a priori knowledge. Coming to metaphysics, Kant says the concepts of space, time, enduring objects moving in space/time and interacting causally, are all known a priori because these concepts are necessary for any rational mind to experience any kind of coherent world. In short they are the preconditions for any experience at all. Space and time are the forms of our sensibility (perception) and things with properties (substances and accidents to use the old terms) and causality are categories of our understanding, to use Kant’s technical terms. We don’t get these concepts by experiencing the world (as Hume thought), we are only able to experience any world at all by organizing our sensory input and thoughts according to these concepts. And so, the world, the self and causation are all restored. But the price of this, says Kant, is that we can only ever know what we experience, how things appear, never how things are in themselves, about which we can know nothing.

A good solution? We get back a world, a self, and causality, but we know these only of the world as experienced, not the world in itself. It’s a brilliant and novel tour-de-force of fancy philosophical footwork. But does it take us any further? One could imagine Hume saying, fine, you’ve explained why the world (as experienced) shows causation, but only because you put it in as a category (of our understanding), whereas I say we take it from the world by experiencing constant conjunctions; you derive it a priori and say it’s necessary, I derive it a posteriori but say no necessity can be seen, although of course we can’t do without the notion of causality both in science and in everyday life. But at least I consider that my constant conjunctions apply to the real world, whereas your necessary concepts and forms only apply to appearances. Scholars still argue the matter.

And this assumes that synthetic a priori knowledge exists. Most philosophers think mathematical truths are analytic, although attempts to reduce maths entirely to logic (Frege, Russell, Whitehead) have not succeeded. However Newton’s laws of gravity, far from being necessarily true, are not even true. But I forgive that. Pretty well all 17th and 18th century philosophers, and other thinkers, including Kant and Hume, revered Newton, thinking his laws to be the last word, and Hume models his intended science of the mind on Newton’s science of matter.

I wish I could get Kant and Hume into a room, give each of them a copy of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ (‘aha, of course’, I might overhear) to read and digest, and internet access to neuroscientific findings, And then to offer the following paragraph for their comment:

Our cognitive capacities are part of our evolved nature. They are likely to be adapted to important features of the way the world is, thereby favouring our survival. Those among ancestral human populations who had less well-fitting capacities left fewer descendants. We would expect that enduring aspects of the world might be hard-wired into our brains so that each generation doesn’t have to start from scratch. Features like space, time, objects and causal interaction. And indeed, experiments with very young babies indicate that they have the notions of space and of causation. Being hard-wired, this knowledge is a priori, and is necessary because all creatures necessarily evolved in such a world. And so Kant is right here. On the other hand, this account suggests that these are features of the real world, the world-in-itself, not just of the world of appearances. So Kant is not so right there. Furthermore, the hard-wiring is the end result of the cumulative experience of our ancestors (improved survival/reproduction in those who had favourable prototypes of our present cognitive capacities). So, ultimately, all knowledge is from experience, either our own or that of generations of our forebears, and so a posteriori. There is no a priori knowledge at all (empiricists rejoice), so it’s fruitless to worry about whether some of it is analytic and some synthetic.

Would they come to an agreement? From what I know of great philosophers, they might agree partially or on details but not completely on such a major issue.

Forgive my broad-brush, non-expert, punter’s account of (some of) Kant’s views. Kant is very difficult, systematic, subtle, wordy, sometimes obscure, even inconsistent. A lifetime could be spent trying to fully grasp him. And has been by some, but not by me. Incidentally, the short ‘Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic’ is the best introduction to Kant’s writing on metaphysics, so clear, snappy and vivid, it’s difficult to believe it’s written by the same man who, four years earlier, wrote the long, dense, detailed, sometimes obscure and tedious ‘Critique of Pure Reason’

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Martin asked:

What do you think the horse episode before Nietzsche’s mental breakdown means if we consider it within the context of his philosophy as a whole? His reaction of pity towards an innocent suffering is indeed very surprising after reading his work and it really contradicts the kind of ideal man he wished to be?

Answer by Martin Jenkins

I think we have to define what Nietzsche means by Pity. I understand that people will use the incident where Nietzsche displays pity to attack his philosophy which is apparently dismissive of Pity. I think his philosophy can be undermined by other false premises — such as the non-Darwinian theories of evolution — it is based upon.

Nietzsche is condemnatory of pity in his wholesale rejection of modern ideas. He believed that Modern ideas ‘of equality and sympathy for all that suffers’ (Beyond Good and Evil 44) are the latest manifestations of Christian values, Christian values originate in a slave rebellion in morality. The slaves rebellion and underpinning values and perspectives were symptoms and semiotics of a declining and sick physiology.

As you probably know Martin, the slave rebellion in morality triumphed, usurping the master, noble morality of the aristocratic rulers. Consequently, the history of Western Europe is the history of slave/Christian inspired values.

The physiological sickness is attributed by Nietzsche to the disaggregation of the drives. The old slaves has sought to escape this sickness in the expression of ressentiment against the Aristocratic rulers. It was a temporary escape, a ‘narcotic’. Modern people — equally sick according to Nietzsche — vent their ressentiment against the existing state of affairs and those who uphold it. Hence in his time, Nietzsche attacked the political and social movements campaigning for the extension of the franchise for working people, attacked socialists, anarchists the ‘levellers’ in general; attacked all those who like the slaves before them, trace their suffering to the structure and nature of society and not, to their own inability to give order to their chaotic drives. Resentment seeks revenge against society in the establishment of another world, of a new tomorrow. The millenarianism of religious Christian and atheist Anarchist are in this respect, alike.

One of the values valued by the modern ideas of the suffering majority is Pity. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes of this majority that:

“… they are likewise united in their religion of pity, of sympathy for whatever feels, lives, suffers (down to the animal, up to God — the excessive notion of ‘pity for God’ belongs in a democratic Age), they are all united in the cries and impatience of pity, in deadly hatred against all suffering In general, in the almost feminine inability to sit watching, to let suffering happen… they are United in their faith of the morality of communal pity, as if it were morality itself, the height, the Achieved height of humanity, the sole hope for the future, the solace of the present, the great Redemption of all guilt from the past: — they are all united in their faith in the community as Redeemer, which is to say, in the herd, in themselves…” (BGE #202)

United, collective Pity against suffering, against pain, against struggle, a unity for social revolution. The consequences a successful revolution with the institutionalisation of its modern values will be to prevent humanity from becoming what it could (#203 ibid). For according to Nietzsche’s understanding of evolution, its highest types (those who give coherence and direction to the struggle of strong drives of will to power) will be prevented by external law and internalised morality from taking risk, for being creative, from being who they are.

Life is suffering, in various degrees and modalities, for healthy life is expansive, vital: agonistic.

“… life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating and at least, at the very least, exploiting…” (BGE #259}

Institutionalised Pity would negate life itself, life understood by Nietzsche as the will to power.

This does not entail Nietzsche opposing all pity, only Christian pity — which as written, is expressive of a weak, degenerate life and is perhaps described as pathological pity. Pity can be expressed by strong, affirmative life along the lines of what might be called ‘tough love’. It is not about trying to avoid suffering, pain and the like-the ‘negative experiences’ of life — it is rather to recognise it is part of the economy of life, to learn from it, to embrace it, to incorporate such experiences and emotions in life so as to further grow. Witness Nietzsche’s distinction between ‘Pity for the Creature’ and ‘Pity for the Creator’ in BGE #225 of which I only quote little:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -don’t you know that this discipline has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far?… In human beings creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans, there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator divinity and seventh day: — do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is aimed at the ‘creature in humans’ in at what needs to be moulded, broken, forged, torn, burnt, seared and purified — at what necessarily needs to suffer and should suffer? And our Pity — don’t you realise who our inverted pity is aimed at when it fights against your pity, as the worst of all pampering and weaknesses? — Pity against Pity then!…”

I don’t think Nietzsche’s reaction of Pity regarding the horse negates his philosophy, I think if he had had more time and clarity then in accordance with his philosophy, Nietzsche would have perhaps encouraged the horse to trample his tormentor and to stop allowing itself as being treated as a mere slave.

See my Nietzsche and the Politics of Physiologyin Philosophy Pathways Issue 176.

Hope this was useful Martin, it’s a big subject.

Martin Jenkins received the ISFP Fellowship for his dissertation ‘Aristocratic Radicalism or Anarchy? An Examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Will to Power’. He is a Pathways Mentor and an Editors of Philosophy Pathways