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Suffering
Their criminalization of suffering precludes us from finding meaning in and growing from
our pain. We must refuse moral condemnation of suffering in order to promote inner
peace.
Van Hooft, 1998, Stan Van Hooft, Stan is professor of philosophy at Deakin University,
Melbourne, 1998, The Meanings of Suffering,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=17&sid=9bcfda3c-98ba-4d27-a336e3eecab55613%40sessionmgr110&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=rlh&AN=1178447,
7/04/2012, [AR]
Are such ways of giving meaning to suffering available in a postmodern secular age? What meaning is available for people without religious or
even humanistic faith? A schematic answer can be found in the ancient Stoic philosophers and in Nietzsche, who in different ways
embraced a tragic sense of life. They held that there is no plan, no purpose, and no meaning to
existence arising from reality itself. The cosmos does not run in accordance with a divine plan or an
inherent goal. There is no overarching fate or justice. The world is just a vast dynamic system of
change and becoming. Everything becomes what it is and changes in systems of mutual interaction and effect. Human beings
are subject to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Whatever happens is caused by blind and purposeless
processes. It is appropriate to do what we can to protect ourselves from bad luck and evil, but if we
become victims we can only accept what has happened as inevitable. There is no transcendent
meaning to be given to it. Nonetheless, to accept suffering as the result of blind fate, or even to love
fate, as Nietzsche would put it, is to give meaning to one's suffering. To see suffering this way is still to
exercise the contemplative and meaning-giving side of our existence, since to adopt such a view is still
to insert our suffering into a larger theory of reality. It gives suffering the meaning of tragedy even
while it says that suffering is meaningless. And so the tragic view of life is a real alternative among the various ways that the
contemplative aspect of our being gives meaning to suffering. The Stoic philosophers encapsulated their view in saying
that we should live life "in agreement with nature? By this they variously meant that we should live in accordance with human virtue or
with natural law. To be moral was all. This in turn meant that we should seek good things, shun bad things,
and be indifferent to things that are indifferent. Among the indifferent things is health, since it can be used for good or for
bad and so is in itself morally neutral.[ 9] Good things make us morally good and bad things make us morally bad, but of itself, health does
neither. And so it is with the opposite of health. As Seneca put it, "That which is evil does harm; that which does harm makes a man
worse. But
pain and poverty do not make a man worse; therefore, they are not evils."[ 10] Epictetus offers
not that events should happen as you will, but let your
will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace. Sickness is a hindrance to the
body, but not to the will, unless the will consent. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to the will. Say this to yourself
similar advice in paragraphs eight and nine of his Manual: Ask
at each event that happens, for you shall find that though it hinders something else it will not hinder you.[ 11] Epictetus's thought is, first, that
those people
who accept everything that befalls them in the physical world will live with equanimity,
and second, that illness, lameness, and other forms of suffering are physical events; they affect the
body but not the will or moral being of a person. Provided this moral being is kept intact, the person
will experience inner freedom and peace. Acceptance of fate, along with a focus on one's inner
existence, are the guarantees of a peaceful mode of being. In this conception, suffering is something
toward which the victim should remain indifferent. It is neither good nor bad. It is to be given no
meaning. The contemplative dimension of our being should not trouble itself with it and should look
beyond it toward an eternal and changeless nature conceived as moral and transcendent. We can see the influence of
Plato's Socrates on this view. The tragic view of life, as articulated by the Stoics, leads to a life that secures our moral being and integrity by
withdrawing from our worldly existence. But it is not likely to be useful to us today. While we may view it with admiration, its emphasis on
withdrawal ensures that it will not have much appeal to our modern sensibilities
Morality
The 1AC's drive towards eradicating suffering is an example of becoming enslaved to a
totalizing system of morals for the sake of preserving value- this is inherently life
negating and turns case
Scott 98, Jacqueline Scott, Associate Professor Philosophy Department Loyola
University Chicago, 1998, Nietzsche and decadence: The revaluation of morality
7/04/12, [AR]
For Nietzsche then , the best type of rationale is one whose goal is self-enhancement by way of an
afrmation of ones life, and it is only the healthiest individuals who will be able create and live by
such a rationale. It is their opposites, those who are distressed and weak, who have traditionally
created rationales for preservation which they labeled systems of morality . According to Nietzsche,
the philosopher was the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience of the
over-all development of man, and he will make use of religions for his project of cultivation and
education. The philosopher, then, is responsible for creating the rationales for existence which are
necessary for the over-all development of man. Nietzsche claimed that modern morality, as opposed
to creating the conditions for both the enhancement of the species and for the production of people
of great deeds, was leading to stagnation and even the decay of the species. This diminution was the
greatest danger for everyone because it signaled the inability to carry out our most fundamental,
distinctly human task. Our moralities no longer served to provide us with rationales for existence.
Instead, modern moralities only made us feel a certain weariness for this world and for the species in
general. The worst type of decadent, though, is one, like the Christian, who teaches that one must
blame oneself this choice of being harmful to oneself is the formula for decadence. It teaches
hatred of oneself, particularly hatred of ones instincts. One is taught that in order to do penance for
the past sins of other humans, one must selessly devote ones life to serving others and to having
pity for them, because one is not worthy of ones own attention. Nietzsche referred to this as unselng or self-denial and contended that such an approach was unhealthy because the priestly
leaders who created it made self-destruction a sign of value and duty. A symptom of this type of
decadence is assigning the unegoistic an absolute value, and considering the egoistic abhorrent.
Securitization
By constructing the fantasy of a stable world to which we must aspire, the affirmative
participates in a hegemonic securitization of reality. This will to order vilifies life by
positing suffering and uncertainty as inherently defective aspects of existence that
must be eliminated.
Saurette 96 (Paul, associate professor, University of Ottawa, I Mistrust all
Systematizers and Avoid Them': Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in
International Relations Theory, Millenium Journal of International Studies 25,
http://mil.sagepub.com/contentI25/1/1.citation - oliver g)
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give
meaning to the phenomenon of human existence within a given cultural framework. As one
manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to meaning fundamentally influences the social and
political organisation of a particular community.' Anything less than a profound historical
interrogation of the most basic philosophical foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the
origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and natural. Nietzsche suggests, therefore, that to
understand the development of our modern conception of society and politics, we must reconsider
the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that preSocratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic myths which honoured tragedy
and competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful and ordered (Apollonian)
and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life were accepted and affirmed as inescapable
aspects of human existence.' However, this incarnation of the will to power as tragedy weakened,
and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the self-respect
and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. 'Everywhere the instincts were in
anarchy; everywhere people were but five e steps from excess: the monstrum in animo was a
universal danger'.' No longer willing to accept the tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic
myth, Greek thought yielded to decadence, a search for a new social foundation which would soften
the tragedy of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates' thought became
paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped
that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration
was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an endAnd Socrates
understood that the world had need of him his expedient, his cure and his personal art of selfpreservation.' Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard
paralleled the widespread yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient, his
cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that promised mastery and control, not
through acceptance of the tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent,
and the problematic. In response to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to
renounce the very experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the
Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In Nietzsche's words, 'Nationality was divined as a
saviourit was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws
itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to
perish, or be absurdly rational....' Thus, Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an
intellectual framework.The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and
order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised
Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised of both order and disorder, however, the
promise of control through Socratic reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World' of eternal and
meaningful forms, in opposition to an 'Apparent World' of transitory physical existence. Suffering
and contingency is contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and ignored in
relation to the ideal order of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the
fundamental contradiction between the experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and
the idealised order of the Real World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the
emergence of a uniquely 'modern' understanding of life which could only view suffering as the
result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook created a modern notion of
responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be understood only as a phenomenon
for which someone, or something, is to blame. Nietzsche terms this philosophically-induced
condition ressentiment, and argues that it signalled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by exposing
the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved
historically through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to
Nietzsche, ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent
World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for
suffering fell on individuals within the Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God,
the Truth, and the Real World. As Nietzsche wrote,`I suffer: someone must be to blame for it' thinks
every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: 'Quite so my sheep! someone must
be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,- you alone
are to blame for yourselfThis is brazen and false enough: but one thing is achieved by it, the
direction of ressentiment is altered." Faced with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the
prospect of meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish,
or be absurdly rational....' The genius of the ascetic ideal was that it preserved the meaning of the
Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad absurdium the Socratic division through
the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World! Through this redirection, the Real World
was transformed from a transcendental world of philosophical escape into a model towards which
the Apparent World actively aspired, always blaming its contradictory experiences on its own
imperfect knowledge and action.This subtle transformation of the relationship between the
dichotomised worlds creates the Will to Order as the defining characteristic of the modern Will to
Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World, the ascetic
ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of deepest
sleep, in short absence of suffering'.` According to the ascetic model, however, this escape is
possible only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order,
then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the precepts of the
moral Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order, therefore, generates two
interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World
in accordance with the dictates of the ideal, Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this,
however, the ascetic ideal also asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World
must be established, creating an ever-increasing Will to Truth. This self-perpetuating movement
creates an interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and ordered in
relation to the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests,[t]he ascetic ideal has a goal
this goal is so universal that all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it,
petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it
permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions solely from
the point of view of its interpretation:4 The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that
theoretical investigation must be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the
perfection of the ideal. At the same time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it
creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent World. With this
critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes the fundamental philosophical principle of
modernity.
The concept of security erects what it tries to defeat in its name, wars were waged
and WMDs developed all in this search for complete security
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx,
Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]
The rapidity of change in the international system, as well as the inability of international theory to
make sense of that change, raises this question: Of what value is security? More specifically, just how
secure is this preeminent concept of international relations? This evaluation of security invokes
interpretive strategies to ask epistemological, ontological, and political questions--questions that all
too often are ignored, subordinated, or displaced by the technically biased, narrowly framed
question of what it takes to achieve security. The goal, then, of this inquiry is to make
philosophically problematic that which has been practically axiomatic in international relations. The
first step is to ask whether the paramount value of security lies in its abnegation of the insecurity of
all values. No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor
commands the disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears,
rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves
from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its
name, weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national
interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in international
relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has
been furthered and intellectual dissent muted.
Security creates a self fulfilling prophecy in which the rest of the world is an enemy to
be destroyed turns case
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security:
Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet,
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]
We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the
existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a
widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks the entire history
of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center
for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." 1 From God to Rational Man,
from Empire to Republic, from King to the People--and on occasion in the reverse direction as well,
for history is never so linear, never so neat as we would write it--the security of the center has been
the shifting site from which the forces of authority, order, and identity philosophically defined and
physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference. Yet the center, as modern poets and
postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a bipolar system, the diffusion of power
into new political, national, and economic constellations, the decline of civil society and the rise of
the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything --transportation, capital and information flows,
change itself--have induced a new anxiety. As George Bush repeatedly said--that is, until the 1992
Presidential election went into full swing--"The enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is instability." 2
One immediate response, the unthinking reaction, is to master this anxiety and to resecure the
center by remapping the peripheral threats. In this vein, the Pentagon prepares seven military
scenarios for future conflict, ranging from latino small-fry to an IdentiKit super-enemy that goes by
the generic acronym of REGT ("Reemergent Global Threat"). In the heartlands of America, Toyota
sledge-hammering returns as a popular know-nothing distraction. And within the Washington
beltway, rogue powers such as North Korea, Iraq, and Libya take on the status of pariah-state and
potential video bomb-site for a permanently electioneering elite. There are also prodromal efforts to
shore up the center of the International Relations discipline. In a newly instituted series in the
International Studies Quarterly , the state of security studies is surveyed so as to refortify its borders.
3 After acknowledging that "the boundaries of intellectual disciplines are permeable," the author
proceeds not only to raise the drawbridge but also to caulk every chink in the moat. 4 Recent
attempts to broaden the concept of "security" to include such issues as global environmental
dangers, disease, and economic and natural disasters endanger the field by threatening "to destroy
its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise solutions to any of these important
problems." 5 The field is surveyed in the most narrow and parochial way: out of 200-plus works
cited, esteemed Third World scholars of strategic studies receive no mention, British and French
scholars receive short shrift, and Soviet writers do not make it into the Pantheon at all. The author of
the essay, Stephen Walt, has written one of the better books on alliance systems; 6 here he seems
intent on constructing a new alliance within the discipline against "foreign" others, with the
"postmodernist" as arch-alien. The tactic is familiar: like many of the neoconservatives who have
launched the recent attacks on "political correctness," the "liberals" of international relations
make it a habit to base their criticisms on secondary accounts of a category of thinking rather than
on a primary engagement with the specific (and often differing) views of the thinkers themselves. 7
In this case, Walt cites IR scholar Robert Keohane on the hazards of "reflectivism," to warn off
anyone who by inclination or error might wander into the foreign camp: "As Robert Keohane has
noted, until these writers `have delineated . . . a research program and shown . . . that it can
illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field.' " 8 By the
end of the essay, one is left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have
triggered a "security crisis" in security studies that requires extensive theoretical damage control.
The affs constant search for security forces us to live life in a seatbelt action is
discouraged because of fear of the unknown
Der Derian 98 (James, Prof of PoliSci at the U of Massachusetts, "The Value of Security:
Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," Cianet,
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html ]
The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in
which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection
against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and
everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained by, the
strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative
relationship in The Twilight of the Idols : The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by,
the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as
for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . . That which is
new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only
searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and
preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the
strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. 38 A safe life requires
safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil,
and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as
Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the
"necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of
mistrust and evil experiences." 39 The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained
by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely
upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong
in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of
being protected by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from
false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error : in every single case,
cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be
true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes." 41
Economic Rationality
Their reduction of humanity to utility-seeking creatures reeks of herd mentality and
renders itself unable to comprehend the noble few that commit themselves to goals
that do not economically benefit them.
Rony Guldmann, PhD from Michigan and Professor of Philosophy @ Hofstra, 2010,
Between Cynicism and Idealism: Nietzsche and the Slanderers of Human Nature
access via: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1651505
Nietzsches plain hostility to utilitarianism reveals that his sympathy for psychological egoism coexists
with a powerful aversion to the notion that human beings are rational calculators of self-interest who,
in the spirit of homo economicus, tough-mindedly employ social institutions, if not social interaction
itself, as mediums through which to maximize gains. He famously claims that *m]an does not
strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that. T33 Although Nietzsche sometimes suggests
that individual egoism indirectly benefits the species,16 he does not have anything like Adam Smiths
invisible hand in mind. Rather than being a Darwinian jungle in which the strongest, wiliest, or most
adaptable prevail, commercial society represents the triumph of asceticism and herd instinct over selfrealization and individuality. Only the contemptible bourgeois, not man as such, is a cool, cautious
calculating machine. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche suggests that this overly pessimistic moral
psychology is the hallmark of common natures:
Common natures consider all noble, magnanimous feelings inexpedient and therefore first of
all incredible. They blink when they hear of such things and seem to feel like saying: Surely,
there must be some advantage involved; one cannot see through everything. They are
suspicious of the noble person, as if he surreptitiously sought his advantage. When they are
irresistibly persuaded of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, they see the noble person
as a kind of fool; they despise him in his joy and laugh at his shining eyes. How can one enjoy
being at a disadvantage? How could one desire with ones eyes open to be disadvantaged?
Some disease of reason must be associated with the noble affection. Thus they think and sneer,
as they sneer at the pleasure that a madman derives from his fixed idea. What distinguishes the
common type is that it never loses sight of its advantage, and that this thought of purpose and
advantage is even stronger than the strongest instincts; not to allow these instincts to lead one
astray to perform inexpedient actsthat is their wisdom and pride.17
The powerful pursue the fulfillment of values, not the attainment of valuable objects.
Rony Guldmann, PhD from Michigan and Professor of Philosophy @ Hofstra, 2010,
Between Cynicism and Idealism: Nietzsche and the Slanderers of Human Nature
access via: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1651505
The slaves resented the masters not only for wounding their self-esteem but, more importantly, for
weakening their conviction in their right to self-esteem. Unlike homo economicus, Nietzschean agents
are ultimately concerned with their value, not merely with getting things of value. As Robert Solomon
put it, Nietzsche holds that human beings ultimately prefer a sense of self-importance to mere
satisfaction.24 Retaining this sense requires that one be partial to whatever worldview endows ones
particular qualities with significance, and seek to convince oneself and others of its truth, even in the
face of ones own doubts.
Deterrence
The imminent threat of nuclear annihilation has literally become a non-event, for the
explosive energy of the nuclear has been programmatically integrated into the
strategies of social and political implosion. The technologies of the nuclear, of a
deterrence without any boundaries or objectives, are a fixture of a global power that
levels out the possibility of any true conflict or event in order to incorporate the
political into the totalizing logic of security. Even the most peaceful anti-nuclear
movements are neutralized by the models of nuclear deterrence, which operate at the
level of molecular and programmatic control
Baudrillard 95 (Jean, Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of Simulacra, pp. 3437)
The apotheosis of simulation: the nuclear. However, the balance of terror is never anything but the spectacular slope of a system of
deterrence that has insinuated itself from the inside into all the cracks of daily life. Nuclear
longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks
annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the
military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes
remain. The "space race" played exactly the same role as nuclear escalation. This is why the space program was so easily able to
replace it in the 1960s (Kennedy/Khrushchev), or to develop concurrently as a form of "peaceful coexistence." Because what,
ultimately, is the function of the space program, of the conquest of the moon, of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a
model of universal gravitation, of satellization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo? Programmed microcosm, where
nothing can be left to chance. Trajectory, energy, calculation, physiology, psychology, environment - nothing can be left to
contingencies, this is the total universe of the norm - the Law no longer exists, it is the operational immanence of every detail that is
law. A universe purged of all threat of meaning, in a state of asepsis and weightlessness - it is this very perfection that is fascinating.
The exaltation of the crowds was not a response to the event of Rinding on the moon or of sending a man into space (this would be,
rather, the fulfillment of an earlier dream), rather, we are dumbfounded by the perfection of the programming and the technical
manipulation, by the immanent wonder of the programmed unfolding of events. Fascination with the maximal norm and the
mastery of probability. Vertigo of the model, which unites with the model of death, but without fear or drive. Because if the law, with
its aura of transgression, if order, with its aura of violence, still taps a perverse imaginary, the norm fixes, fascinates, stupefies, and
makes every imaginary involute. One no longer fantasizes about the minutiae of a program. Just watching it produces vertigo. The
vertigo of a world without flaws. Now, it
spatial and nuclear models do not have their own ends: neither the
truth is to be the models of simulation, the
model vectors of a system of planetary control (where even the superpowers of this scenario are not
free - the whole world is satellized).*9 Resist the evidence: in satellization, he who is satellized is not who one might think.
discovery of the moon, nor military and strategic superiority. Their
Through the orbital inscription of a spatial object, it is the planet earth that becomes a satellite, it is the terrestrial principle of reality
that becomes eccentric, hyperreal, and insignificant. Through the orbital instantiation of a system of control like peaceful
coexistence, all the terrestrial microsystems are satellized and lose their autonomy. All energy, all events are absorbed by this
eccentric gravitation, everything condenses and implodes toward the only micromodel of control (the orbital satellite), as conversely,
in the other, biological, dimension, everything converges and implodes on the molecular micromodel of the genetic code. Between
the two, in this forking of the nuclear and the genetic, in
Fear of Prolif
The belief that nuclear proliferation will result in sporadic and unprecedented
accidents masks the underlying nature of the nuclear era. The expansion of nuclear
technologies into all corners of the world is not a strategy of acceleration and
imminent catastrophe, but one of implosion and technical control.
Baudrillard 95 (Jean, Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of Simulacra, pp. 4142)
This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an accident - save
in the interval when the "young" powers could be tempted to make a nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the Americans did in
Hiroshima - but precisely only they had a right to this "use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be
deterred from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry
is a
danger in the current rash of interest in globalization, it is that anthropologists will enact their new
interest in studying global society in a way that subtly reinforces old disciplinary divisions of labor in
the academy while producing a skewed vision of global society. While the current global system is, as Arjun
Appadurai (1996) has pointed out, characterized by flows of migrants, capital, and culture that undermine the integrity of the
nation-state and produce intriguing new forms of global hybridity, there
too long,
anthropologists have conceded the study of security to political scientists, with unfortunate
consequences for both anthropology and discussions of security. This disciplinary division of labor emerged in
the academy after World War II and was reinforced by the painful fiasco of anthropology's secret involvement in Vietnama fiasco
that, once revealed, produced an allergic response to security issues in many anthropologists. But armies,
weapons, wars,
and military ideologies are also important facets of the new global system taking shape as Fordism
and the Cold War security structure collapse and are remade by scientists, military officers, national
bureaucrats, and NGOs. Until anthropologists make the evolution of post-Cold War military institutions and ideologies
integral to their narratives of globalization, they are not getting the whole story.
international
system partly organized around what Timothy Luke (1989) calls "postwarring," the use value of nuclear
weapons has been superseded by their exchange value such that Strategic nuclear forces can be seen as elements of
a code, texts enscribed with meanings. . . . Nuclear weapons have not been, and are not, called upon for use as weapons.
Instead, they are made operational to be continually exchanged . . . in "shows of force," "displays of capability,"
"proofs of credibility," or "displays of determination." [Luke 1989:219, 223] Of course, "postwarring" is a luxury not everyone can
afford. 16 Against Baudrillard's tendency to speak of the hyperreal as a blanket condition that has fallen uniformly on the world, I
would counterpose the insight of Der Derian (1994) and Kroker (1994) that virtual spaces are spaces of power not accessible to all
alike. Just as within nations, some spaces at the side of the roadto use Kathleen Stewart's (1996) evocative phraseare left behind
by the information superhighway, so within the international system, some
Marxism
Their rejection of the capitalist world as a bad one ignores that we only have one
world- their pushes toward utopia ignore that we have to enjoy our world now
Buccola 09(Nicholas, Political Science Professor at Linfield College, The Tyranny of the
Least and the Dumbest: Nietzsches Critique of Socialism, Quarterly Journal of
Ideology, Jstor]
Socialism is another in a long line of idealist systems that are, on Nietzsches view, inherently
flawed. Idealists, in short, reject this world and embrace another. The mischief of idealism began
with Socrates and Plato, who created a world of Truth, or realm of Being, and in so doing brought
about a denaturalization of moral values. As you will see below, this move is problematic for Nietzsche
for many reasons. For now, it will suffice to say he believed that overthrowing other-worldly ideals
was central to his craft. Idealism, in his view, deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its
truthfulness and, as such, Socrates represents a moment of the profoundest perversity in the history
of values (EH 2 and WP 430). The Grandfather of Socialist Thought: Christianity Although much could
be said about the relationship between Christianity and socialism, I will limit my consideration to two
major points of contribution. First, I discuss the relationship between Christian and socialist idealism.
This will include brief reflections on the striking parallels Nietzsche sees in the Christian and socialist
rejection of this world. Second, I explore the socialist adoption of the Christian idea of the equality of
souls before God. I will conclude this section with an exploration of why Nietzsche thought the socialist
ideal represents nothing but a clumsy misunderstanding of *the+ Christian moral ideal (WP 340). First,
Nietzsche identifies Christianity as an idealist philosophy that, like Platonism, rejects this world for
another. While Socrates and Plato contended that the realm of the Forms, or the World of Being, is
what really matters, Christians emphasize the importance of an eternal Kingdom of Heaven for
believers (WP 161). In both cases, it is worth noting that Bliss is not necessarily something that can be
achieved through a transformation of this world. Rather, both Plato and Jesus can be interpreted as
offering individuals a philosophy of life that they can establish within themselves. The essential point for
Nietzsche is this: the Christian, in typical idealist fashion, condemns, disparages, *and+ curses the
world (WP 373). According to Nietzsche, Christs emphasis on personal transformation was not shared
by St. Paul. Whereas primitive Christianity is, on Nietzsches reading, possible as the most private
form of existence, the Christianity of St. Paul is much more public and, thus, more like a political
doctrine (WP 211). Once we begin to view Christianity as a social doctrine instead of a personal one, we
can see how it can be read as a forerunner to socialism. Nietzsche saw the Christian slave revolt in
morality as quite similar to later political revolutions. Christianity offers the poor and lowly a gateway
to happiness and, for Nietzsche, to this extent the rise of Christianity is nothing more than the typical
socialist doctrine. The things of this world that the gospel passes judgment upon property, gain,
fatherland, rank and status, tribunals, police, state, church, education, art, the army are all typical of
the socialist doctrine (WP 209). The second foundational contribution of Christianity to the socialist
doctrine is the idea of equality of souls before God. It is important to point out that Nietzsche is not
arguing that socialists accept the tenets of Christianity as a matter of faith. Rather, like so many political
actors throughout history, he thinks socialists are adept at using Christian ideas for their own
purposes: The socialists appeal to the Christian instincts; that is their most subtle piece of
shrewdness (WP 765). In The Antichrist, Nietzsche calls the equality of souls before God the pretext
for the rancor of all base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution,
modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society (AC 162). Nietzsche traces the
warpath of this idea quite explicitly in Will to Power: mankind was first taught to stammer the
proposition of equality in a religious context, and only later was it made into morality: no wonder that
man ended by taking it seriously, taking it practically! that is to say, politically, democratically,
socialistically (WP 762). With these two foundational contributions the rejection of this world and
the equality of all souls established, we can now turn to consider why it is that Nietzsche concludes
the socialist ideal is nothing but a clumsy misunderstanding of *the+ Christian moral ideal. While it is
true that Nietzsche identified socialism and other progressive theories as cults of Christian morality
under a new name, he thought that they fundamentally misunderstood Christianity (WP 340). What
was it that he thought the socialists misunderstood about the Christian moral ideal? These doctrines
represent misunderstandings of the Christian moral ideal because they transfer the arrival of the
kingdom of God into the future, on earth, in human form (WP 339). In Nietzsches mind, the
emergence of socialism and similar theories can, in part, be contributed to the death of God.
Without the hope of glory in the next world, socialists and others seek to transform this one (WP 340).
The emergence of the socialist ideal is, in Nietzsches mind, part of our payment for having been
Christians for two thousand years (WP 30). For the complete development of the doctrine of thisworldly transformation, though, we must turn away from the Christians and to the philosopher who
Nietzsche identified as the bridge between Platonic-Christian idealism and the socialist idealism of the
nineteenth century Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
second and more serious charge Nietzsche makes against socialism is that in its deepest instincts and
tendencies it is a reactionary ideology. It is, he argues, 'the fanciful younger brother of the almost
expired despotism whose heir it wants to be' (HAH 473). The reason for this, according to Nietzsche, is that
in order to bring about the transformation of society it desires, which will require a massive extension of social
control over the private life of individuals (in order to guarantee that they are 'good socialists'), socialism must desire
the kind of abundance of state power that one would normally associate with the most fearful despotism. He writes,
socialism outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as ii expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual,
who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the
cammuniljf,.. it desires a more complete subservience of the citizen to the absolute state than has ever existed before,
(ibid.). The real danger of socialism, Nietzsche argues, lies in its extreme terrorism. Given that religion
has declined and there is no longer any ethical or divine basis to the state, socialism, considered as an
impious and irreligious creed bent on the abolition of all existing states, can only exist through the
exercise of terrorism. Nietzsche attacks socialists for cultivating an atmosphere of fear and for 'driving
the word "justice" into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their
reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play' (ibid.).
Universal Equality
Attempts to universally dismantle hierarchy are symptoms of a hostility towards life.
Only the alternative allows us to reject society without also rejecting reality.
Owen 02 (David, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of
Southampton., Fall 2002, Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on
Nietzsche's Agonal Perfectionism, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 24,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717793 - oliver g)
The different degrees of repression to which nobles and slaves are subject have two consequences to
which Nietzsche draws our attention. The first fea ture to which Nietzsche directs us is that precisely
because the slave is more deeply repressed, "[a] race of such men of ressentiment will inevitably end up
cleverer than any noble race, and will respect cleverness to a quite dif ferent degree as well: namely, as
a condition of existence of the first rank" (GM . 10). It is in this respect that Nietzsche comments: "The
history of mankind would be far too stupid a thing if it had not had the intellect [Geist] of the powerless
injected into it" (GM .7). The initial significance of this cleverness emerges with respect to the second
issue of importance, namely, the slave revolt in morality. In contrast to the noble's consciousness of
power, which emerges from the pathos of distance that attends the social order of rank, the slave is
characterised by a consciousness of lack of power, which is expressed as ressentiment. The need to
make sense of their suffering as a class, on Nietzsche's account, drives the slaves both to reject the
noble style of valuation in which the slave is figured as lacking value (GM 1:10) and to identify the nobles
as the evil agents of their suffering (GM 1:13)?a move that requires the radical separation of agent and
act, which raw bad conscience makes possible. The cleverness of the slave is given expression in the
cre ative moment of ressentiment which says "no" to the hostile, external world and fabricates the
idea of the freely choosing subject to allow the slave to engage in self-affirmation, albeit of a reactive
type (GM . 10). It is precisely through the fiction of the freely choosing subject that the impotence of
the slave can generate "that sublime self-deception" which construes "weakness itself as freedom, and
their particular mode of existence as an accomplish menf (GM 1:13) and which simultaneously allows
the construal of the noble as evil (the claim that Nietzsche mocks in the parable of the lamb and beasts
of prey). The point I want to stress here is that the "imaginary revenge" through which the slave
compensates for "being denied the proper response of action" (GM 1:10) involves a pathos of imaginary
distance, a reactive consciousness of power predicated on an imaginary inversion of the social order of
rank in which the highest virtues are those of "choosing" weakness (i.e., humility, patience, pity,
obedience, etc.)?the attributes that characterise the slave?and the lowest virtues are those of
"choosing" strength (Le, cruelty, murder, etc.)?the attributes that characterise the noble (particularly
from the slave's perspective). The importance of this point for the purposes of this essay becomes clear
with the movement from the slave revolt in morals to the construction of the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche's
account. The relevant feature of this movement is the development of a transcendental notion of the
freely choosing subject in which the slave's devaluation of the hostile external world is heightened
and secured through the construction of the distinction between real and apparent worlds. The
imaginary inversion of the social order of rank is constituted as revealed metaphysical truth?"the first
shall be last and the last shall be first." However, while this priestly move secures the reactive selfaffirmation of the slave, it makes possible a further development that resolves a problem raised by
the slave revolt in morals. The problem is that a mass characterised by ressentiment is unstable, facing
"the ever-present threat of the disintegration of the herd" (GM 111:15). This instablity is the result of
ressentiment itself in the context of the slave's experience of Ufe as suffering (GM 131:15). Hence,
ressentiment threat ens sociality as such. It is to this problem that the priest's transcendental move
provides a solution. The separation of soul and flesh, mind and body, rational will and empirical desires,
allows the priest to redirect ressentiment: suffer, someone or other must be guilty' and every sick sheep
thinks the same. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, 'Quite right, my sheep! Somebody
must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you your self alone are to blame for it, you
yourself alone are to blame for yourself . . . That is bold enough, wrong enough: but at least one thing
has been achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is, as I said?changed. (GM 111:15) Thus, the priest
exploits "the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance and selfovercoming" (GM 111:16). Why is this important? The cost is clear?a more thorough-going and radical
devalu ation of this-worldly existence. But this redirecting of ressentiment has a fundamental
implication for the possibility of a nobility (Le., standing to oneself as a sovereign individual) in which
the overhuman is not tied to the inhuman. The implication is that the redirecting of ressentiment
divorces the pathos of distance from any necessary relation to the social order of rank. Thus, while the
original creative thrust of ressentiment is expressed through an imaginary inversion of the social order
of rank, the consciousness of power that is manifest as "self-discipline, self-surveillance and selfovercoming" is articulated through a pathos of metaphysical distance in which the opposition of spirit
to flesh, mind to body, rational will to empirical desires is given hierarchical and imperative form.
What is crucial about this development is that it involves a reflexive ethical relationship of the self to
itself, which is not mediated through forms of social hierarchy. The significance of this devel opment is
twofold. On the one hand, it raises the possibility of a form of noble morality in which the
consciousness of power is similarly not predi cted on relations of social hierarchy. On the other hand,
it cultivates the capacities requisite to this possibility. Hence, the point of Nietzsche's presentation of
the figures of the overman (i.e., one who stands to himself as a sovereign individual) and the last man
(i.e., one who does not stand to him self as a sovereign individual) is to recommend an order of rank
appropriate to our post-moral situation that allows for the reflexive construction of "inner distance"
and, thus, in no way requires that the political form of society is aristocratic.
Revolutions
Their notion of revolution is ignorant to the inevitable resurfacing of violence and
conflict.
Schutte 84 (Ofelia Schutte,1984, Professor of Existentialism at University of South
Florida, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks, Published by University of
Chicago Press, 7/4/12, K.H.)
t is here that Nietzsche first begins his archaeological excavation of the historical evolution of moral concepts and
judgements. Casting off the comforts of Schopenhauerian metaphysics he now supports modern philosophy in its
attack on all unexamined authority, whether that authority be religious and metaphysical, moral or political. He
supports the Enlightenment, but condemns any attempt to develop a philosophy of revolution out of
its challenge to illegitimate authority. An opposition between 'enlightenment' and 'revolution ' is
presented in terms of a contrast between Rousseau and Voltaire. For Nietzsche a philosophy of
revolution surfers from the delusion that once a social order has been overturned then 'the proudest
temple of fair humanity will at once rise up of its own accord*. The modern theory of revolution is
derived from Rousseau's belief that beneath the layers of civilisation there lies buried a natural
human goodness; the source of corruption lies not within man, in human nature, but in the
institutions of the state and society, and in education. Against this theory Nietzsche offers the
following warning and advice: The experiences of history have taught us, unfortunately, that every
such revolution brings about the resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the longburied dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages: that a revolution can thus be a source of
energy in mankind grown feeble but never a regulator, architect, artist, perfector of human nature. It
is not Voltaire's moderate nature, inclined as it was to ordering, purifying, and reconstructing, but Rousseau's
passionate follies and half-lies that called forth the optimistic spirit of the Revolution against which I cry:' Ecrasez
Tin/ame J* It is this spirit that has for a long time banished the spirit of Enlightenment and of progressive evolution:
let us see - each of us within himself - whether it is possible to call it back! {HAH 463)
hierarchical order that manifests itself in different forms of reality. All reality is the result of these
processes of measuring and subduing, respectively, of a continuously changing hierarchical order, of
smaller and bigger coups (see KSA 13:14[81], 13:14[98]). Change can be the symptom of both the
establishment of a new hierarchical order (which I call "substantializing") and the collapse of an old
order (which I call "de-substantializing"). One should continuously keep in mind here that all these
processesmeasuring, order, (de)substantializing, and the rise and fall of different forms of reality that
accompany themhave no reality beside or outside the will to power. They are all manifestations of
it. Will to power individualizes itself in different appearances.7 Nietzsche's ontology aims to clarify
how the processes of individuation proceedthat is, how a variable and relational multiplicity arranges
itself, decays, and rearranges itself in different directions and in multifarious ways, how different
functions and phenomena form and decay, which we can see in Nietzsche's conception of organization.
foisting on nature the status of a subject in law, we are also foisting on it all the vices
of subjectivity, decking it out, in our own image, with a bad conscience, with nostalgia (for a lost object which, in this case, can only be
us), with a range of drives - in particular, an impulse for revenge.
Environmentalism Link/Impact
Feeling bad about exploiting nature and attempting to reconcile with nature causes
humans to hate themselves because we fail to stop catastrophes. We wonder why
nature hurts us with catastrophe after catastrophe. This leads to biological and
nuclear destruction because we begin to desire mass suicide.
Jean Baudrillard 94 (L'Autre par lui-mme , or professor at, Universit de Paris-X
Nanterre, The Illusion of the End: Maleficent Ecology, Stanford University Press, Dec
1, 1994, ISBN: 0804725012, p 81-84)
The 'balance' we hear so much of in ecology ('out of balance') is not so much that of planetary resources and
their exploitation as the metaphysical one between subject and object. Now, that metaphysical subject
object balance is being upset and the subject, armed as he is with all the technologies of advanced
communication (technologies on whose horizon the object has disappeared), is the beneficiary. Once that balance is
disrupted, it inevitably sparks violent reactions on the part of the object. Just as individuals counter the transparency
and virtual responsibility inflicted on them as subjects with unexplainable acts, acts of resistance, failure, delinquency and collective disorder,
so nature
counters this enforced promotion, this consensual, communicational blackmail, with various forms of behaviour
that are radically other, such as catastrophes, upheavals, earthquakes and chaos. It would seem that nature
does not really feel a sense of responsibility for itself, nor does it react to our efforts to give it one. We
are, admittedly, indulging in" a (bad) ecological conscience and attempting, by this moral violence, to stave
off possible violence on nature's part. But if, by offering it the status of subject, we are handing it the
same poisoned chalice as we gave to the decolonized nations, we ought not to be surprised if it
behaves irrationally merely so as to assert itself as such. Contrary to the underlying Rousseauist ideology, which argues
that the profound nature of the liberated subject can only be good and that nature itself, once emancipated, cannot but be
endowed with natural equilibrium and all the ecological virtues, there is nothing more ambiguous or perverse than a
subject. Now, nature is also germs, viruses, chaos, bacteria and scorpions, significantly eliminated from Biosphere 2 as though they were not
meant to exist. Where are the deadly little scorpions, so beautiful and so translucent, which one sees in the Desert Museum not far away,
scorpions whose magical sting certainly performs a higher, invisible but necessary function within our Biosphere 1: the incarnation of evil, of
the venomous evil of chance, the mortal innocence of desire (the desire for death) in the equilibrium of living beings? What
they have
forgotten is that what binds living beings together is something other than an ecological, biospherical
solidarity, something other than the homeostatic equilibrium of a system: it is the cycle of
metamorphoses. Man is also a scorpion, just as the Bororo are araras and, left to himself in an expurgated universe, he
becomes, himself, a scorpion. In short, it is not by expurgating evil that we liberate good. Worse, by liberating
good, we also liberate evil. And this is only right: it is the rule of the symbolic game. It is the inseparability of
good and evil which constitutes our true equilibrium, our true balance. We ought not to entertain the
illusion that we might separate the two, that we might cultivate good and happiness in a pure state and expel
evil and sorrow as wastes. That is the terroristic dream of the transparency of good, which very quickly ends in its opposite, the transparency
of evil. We must not reconcile ourselves with nature. It seems that the more the human race reconciles itself
with nature, the less it is reconciled with itself. Above and beyond the violence it inflicts on others, there is a violence specific
to the human race in general, a violence of the species against itself in which it treats itself as a residue, as a survivor - even in the present - of a
coming catastrophe. As if it too were ready to repent of an evolution which has brought it such privileges and carried it to such extremes. This is
the same conjuncture as the one to which Canetti refers, in which we stepped out of history, except that here we have not stepped out of
history, but have passed
a point beyond which nothing is either human or inhuman any longer and what is at
stake, which is even more immense, is the tottering of the species into the void. It is quite possible that, in this
process, the species itself is commencing its own disappearance, either by disenchantment with - or ressentiment
towards - itself, or out of a deliberate inclination which leads it here and now to manage that disappearance as its destiny. Surreptitiously,
in spite of our superiority (or perhaps because of it), we are carrying over on to our own species the
treatment we mete out to the others, all of which are virtually dying out. In an animal milieu which has reached saturation point,
species are spontaneously dissuaded from living. The effects produced by the finite nature of the earth, for the first time
contrasting violently with the infinity of our development, are such that our species is automatically switching over to
collective suicide. Whether by external (nuclear) violence or internal (biological) virulence. We are
subjecting ourselves as a human species to the same experimental pressure as the animal species in our laboratories. Man is without
prejudice: he is using himself as a guinea-pig, just as he is using the rest of the world, animate or inanimate. He is cheerfully
gambling with the destiny of his own species as he is with that of all the others. In his blind desire to know more,
he is programming his own destruction with the same ease and ferocity as the destruction of the
others. He cannot be accused of a superior egoism. He is sacrificing himself, as a species, to an unknown
experimental fate, unknown at least as yet to other species, who have experienced only natural fates. And, whereas it seemed that, linked
to that natural fate, there was something like an instinct of self-preservation - long the mainstay of a natural philosophy of individuals and
groups - this experimental
this disappearance from the field of thought signals that, beneath a frenzy for ecological conservation
which is really more to do with nostalgia and remose, a wholly different tendency has already won
out, the sacrificing of the species to boundless experimentation.
Survivalism
Our obsession with survival is unnatural death is the natural part of life. We are
forced to live a dead life to survive. In our fear of death, we attempt to stabilize the
earth, embalming ourselves in life. There must be some sort of accident, a break from
the system, which smashes our stasis.
Jean Baudrillard 7 (L'Autre par lui-mme, or professor at, Universit de Paris-X
Nanterre, IJBS, Volume 4, Number 2; July, 2007; Darwins Artificial Ancestors and the
Terroristic Dream of the Transparency of the Good; Jean Baudrillard; Paris, France)-JNWE DO NOT ENDORSE GENDERED LANGUAGE.
It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to
life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what
follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. It is only by paying the price of a
failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival. At least in
present conditions, which the Biosphere principle perpetuates. This micro-universe seeks to exorcize
catastrophe by making an artificial synthesis of all the elements of catastrophe. From the perspective
of survival, of recycling and feedback, of stabilization and metastabilization, the elements of life are
sacrificed to those of survival (elimination of germs, of evil, of sex). Real life, which surely, after all, has
the right to disappear (or might there be a paradoxical limit to human rights?), is sacrificed to artificial
survival. The real planet, presumed condemned, is sacrificed in advance to its miniaturized, airconditioned clone (have no fear, all the earth's climates are air-conditioned here) which is designed to
vanquish death by total simulation. In days gone by it was the dead who were embalmed for eternity;
today, it is the living we embalm alive in a state of survival. Must this be our hope? Having lost our
metaphysical Utopias, do we have to build this prophylactic one? What, then, is this species endowed
with the insane pretension to survive not to transcend itself by virtue of its natural intelligence, but
to survive physically, biologically, by virtue of its artificial intelligence? Is there a species destined to
escape natural selection, natural disappearance in a word, death? What cosmic cussedness might
give rise to such a turnabout? What vital reaction might produce the idea of survival at any cost? What
metaphysical anomaly might grant the right not to disappear logical counterpart of the remarkable
good fortune of having appeared? There is a kind of aberration in the attempt to eternalize the species
not to immortalize it in its actions, but to eternalize it in this face-lifted coma, in the glass coffin of
Biosphere 2. We may, nonetheless, take the view that this experiment, like any attempt to achieve
artificial survival or artificial paradise, is illusory, not from any technical shortcomings, but in its very
principle. In spite of itself, it is threatened by the same accidents as real life. Fortunately. Let us hope
that the random universe outside smashes this glass coffin. Any accident will do if it rescues us from a
scientific euphoria sustained by drip-feed.
Resisting Power/Genealogy
In the same way that God died at the exact time that we thought his omnipresence
was the greatest, power has now died; it is now no more than an effect of our desire
we want it to continue to exist, and thus we imagine that it does. A continued
discussion of power only serves to nostalgically preserve the power-zombie.
Foucaults discourse is merely a seduction of power resuscitation.
Jean Baudrillard 77 (L'Autre par lui-mme, or professor at, Universit de Paris-X
Nanterre, Forget Foucault, ISBN 1-58435-041-5, p 65-67)-JN
WHEN ONE TALKS SO MUCH about power, it's because it can no longer be found anywhere. The same
goes for God: the stage in which he was everywhere came just before the one in which he was dead.
Even the death of God no doubt came before the stage in which he was everywhere. The same goes for
power, and if one speaks about it so much and so well, that's because it is deceased, a ghost, a puppet; such is also the meaning of Kafka's
words: the Messiah of the day after is only a God resuscitated from among the dead, a zombie. The
finesse and the microscopic nature of the analysis are themselves a "nostalgia effect." And so
everywhere we see power coupled with seduction (it's almost obligatory these days) in order to give it a second
existence. Power gets its fresh blood from desire. And it's no longer anything more than a sort of "desire
effect" at the confines of the social, or a sort of "strategy effect" at the confines of history. It is here
also that "the" powers of Foucault come into play: grafted upon the privacy of bodies, the tracing of
discourses, the facilitation of gestures, in a more insinuating, more subtle, and more discursive
strategy which there too takes away power from history and brings it nearer to seduction. This universal
fascination with power in its exercise and its theory is so intense because it is a fascination with a dead power
characterized by a simultaneous "resurrection effect," in an obscene and parodic mode, of all the
forms of power already seen-exactly like sex in pornography. The imminence of the death of all the great
referents (religious, sexual, political, etc.) is expressed by exacerbating the forms of violence and
representation that characterized them. There is no doubt that fascism, for example, is the first obscene and
pornographic form of a desperate "revival" of political power. As the violent reactivation of a form of
power that despairs of its rational foundations (the form of representation that was emptied of its meaning during the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), as the violent reactivation of the social in a society that despairs of
its own rational and contractual foundation, fascism is nevertheless the only fascinating modern form of power: it is the only
one since Machiavelli to assert itself as such, as a challenge, by trifling with all forms of political "truth" and it is the only one to have taken up
the challenge to assume power unto death (whether its own or that of others). Besides, it is because it has taken up the challenge that fascism
has benefited from this strange consent, this absence of resistance to power. Why
eternal inner
simulation of power, which is never already (jamais deja) anything but the sign of what it was. We find the
same nostalgia and the same simulation characteristic of nostalgia fads when we look today at
"micro" fascisms and "micro" powers. The "micro" operator can only downshift from what fascism may have been
without resolving it and transform an extremely complex scenario of simulation and death into a
simplified "floating signifier," "whose essential function is denunciation" (Foucault). Its function is also
invocation because the memory of fascism (like the memory of power), even in the micro-form, is still the nostalgic
invocation of the political, or of a form of truth for the political; and its invocation simultaneously allows us to save the hypothesis of
desire, whose mere paranoiac accident power and fascism can always appear to be. IN ANY CASE, power lures us on and truth
lures us on. Everything is in the lightning-quick contraction in which an entire cycle of accumulation, of
power, or of truth comes to a close. There is never any inversion or any subversion: the cycle must be
accomplished. But it can happen instantaneously. It is death that is at stake in this contraction.
For Foucault, power is a polar and static entity that cannot be fluid. His analysis
ignores resistance as a form of resistance, and ignores powers endpoint selfcancellation. Foulcauldian genealogies of power only serve to further the power they
attempt to fight they dont posit reversibility.
Jean Baudrillard 77 (L'Autre par lui-mme, or professor at, Universit de Paris-X
Nanterre, Forget Foucault, ISBN 1-58435-041-5, p 47-50)-JN
This "veering away" in Foucault's writing occurs progressively since Discipline and Punish, going against
Madness and Civilization and the whole original ordering of his genealogy. Why wouldn't sex, like madness, have
gone through a confinement phase in which the terms of certain forms of reason and a dominant moral system were fomented before sex and
madness, according to the logic of exclusion, once more became discourses of reference? Sex once more becomes the catchword of a new
moral system; madness becomes the paradoxical form of reason for a society too long haunted by its absence and dedicated this time to its
(normalized) cult under the sign of its own liberation. Such is also the trajectory of sex in the curved space of discrimination and repression
where a mise-en-scene is installed as a long-term strategy to produce sex later as a new rule of the game. Repression
or the secret is
the locus of an imaginary inscription on whose basis madness or sex will subsequently become
exchangeable as value.* Everywhere, as Foucault himself has so well demonstrated, discrimination is the
violent founding act of Reason-why wouldn't the same hold true of sexual reason? This time we are in a full universe,
a space radiating with power but also cracked, like a shattered windshield still holding together. However, this "power"
remains a mystery-starting from despotic centrality, it becomes by the halfWay point a "multiplicity of
force relations" (but what is a force relation without a force resultant? It's a bit like Pere Ubu's polyhedra that set off in all directions like
crabs) and it culminates, at the extreme pole, with resistances (what a divine surprise on pp. 95-96!) so small and so
tenuous that, literally speaking, atoms of power and atoms of resistance merge at this microscopic level.
The same fragment of gesture, body, gaze, and discourse encloses both the positive electricity of
power and the negative electricity of resistance (and we wonder what the origin of that resistance
might turn out to be; nothing in the book prepares us for it except the allusion to some inextricable "force
relations." But since we may ask ourselves exactly the same question concerning power, a balance is
achieved in a discourse which in essence staunchly describes the only true spiral, that of its own
power). This is not an objection. It is a good thing that terms lose their meaning at the limits of the text (they don't do it enough).** Foucault
makes the term sex and its true principle ("the fictive point of sex") lose their meaning; the analytics of power is not pushed to
its conclusion at the point where power cancels itself out or where it has never been. As economic reference
loses its strength, either the reference of desire or that of power becomes preponderant. The reference of desire,
born in psychoanalysis, comes to maturity in Deleuzian anti-psychoanalysis under the form of a shattered molecular desire. The reference
of power, which has a long history, is discussed again today by Foucault at the level of dispersed, interstitial
power as a grid of bodies and of the ramiform pattern of controls. Foucault at least economizes desire, as
well as history (but being very prudent, he does not deny them), yet everything still comes back to some kind of
power-without having that notion reduced and expurgated-just as with Deleuze everything comes back to some kind of
are shattered notions, yet they remain miraculously intact in their current
Foucault power remains, despite being pulverized, a
structural and a polar notion with a perfect genealogy and an inexplicable presence, a notion which cannot be
surpassed in spite of a sort of latent denunciation, a notion which is whole in each of its points or microscopic dots. It
is hard to see how it could be reversed (we find the same aporia in Deleuze, where desire's reversion into its own repression is
inexplicable). Power no longer has a coup de force-there is simply nothing else either on this side of it or
beyond it (the passage from the "molar" or the "molecular" is for Deleuze still a revolution of desire, but for Foucault it is an anamorphosis
of power). Only now Foucault does not see that power is dying (even infinitesimal power), that it is not just pulverized by
acceptance. Desire and intensity remain force/notions; with
pulverulent, that it is undermined by a reversal and tormented by a reversibility and a death which cannot appear in the genealogical process
alone.
Democracy Link/Alt
They fail to acknowledge the distinction between proactive and reactive democracy.
Our links demonstrate the aff is the latter while the alternative is the former.
Owen 02 (David, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of
Southampton., Fall 2002, Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on
Nietzsche's Agonal Perfectionism, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 24,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20717793 - oliver g)
Conant's point -surely correct -is that we should not leap from the fact that Nietzsche offers pointed
criticisms of the democratic movement (e.g., BGE 202-3) to the conclusion that Nietzsche is an antidemocratic thinker. Locating Nietzsche's criticisms in the context of the perfectionist strain within the
tradition of democratic theory demonstrates that such a conclusion does not follow simply from the fact
that Nietzsche engages in such criticism. In this context, consider the following passage (also cited by
Conant) from the section "Man in Society" in Human, All Too Human: Two kinds of equality.? The thirst
for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to oneself (though
diminishing them, spying on them, tripping them up) or to raise oneself and everyone else up
(through recognizing their virtues, helping them, rejoicing in their success) . (HH 300) Against the
background of Nietzsche's views on the two types of respect and self-respect, we can say that the first
of these types of will to equality is com patible with recognition respect but not appraisive respect,
whereas the sec ond type is compatible with, and requires, both kinds of respect to be in play.
Nietzsche's endorsement of the second type of will to equality makes clear that he is not, as
commonly supposed, an anti-egalitarian thinker, but an advo cate of, what we might call, the
perfectionist view of equality in which every one is called on, and aided, to develop their capacities
for self-government. In this respect, it would be entirely consonant with Nietzsche's view to endorse
the view articulated by John Dewey (another ethical theorist who held the view that the end of ethical
action is growth itself, not an end but the end, not growth towards X but growth itself): To 'make
others happy' except through liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that enlarge the
meaning of life is to harm them and to indulge ourselves under the cover of exercising a special virtue.
Our moral measure for estimating any existing arrangement or any proposed reform is its effect upon
impulse and habits. Does it liberate or suppress, ossify or ren der flexible, divide or unify interest? Is
perception quickened or dulled? Is memory made apt and extensive or narrowed and diffusely
irrelevant? Is imag ination diverted to fantasy and compensatory dreams, or does it add fertility to
life? Is thought creative or pushed to one side into pedantic specialism? There is a sense in which to
set up social welfare as an end of action only pro motes an offensive condescension, a harsh
interference, or an oleaginous dis play when it is aimed at giving happiness to others directly, that is,
as we can hand a physical thing to another. To foster conditions that widen the horizon of others and
give them command over their own powers, so that they can find their own happiness in their own
fashion, is the way of 'social' action. Otherwise the prayer of a freeman would be to be left alone, and
to be deliv ered, above all, from 'reformers' and 'kind' people. (1922: 293-94)
within and over the terms of democratic citizenship. The importance of Tully's remarks for the concerns
of this essay begins to become clear once we note that "the terms of democratic citizenship" are the
terms of political recognition-respect. In other words, the terms of democratic citizenship are the terms
of recognition-respect accorded to members as beings capable of standing to them selves politically as
sovereign individuals. In Nietzschean terms, struggles over the terms of democratic citizenship are
struggles over what recognition respect is due to citizens as persons who can stand to themselves as
sovereign individuals. How, though, does this point concerning recognition-respect connect up to the
central concern of Nietzsche's focus on the agon as a way of cultivating nobility, i.e., those features
worthy of appraisive respect? The crucial connection is this: Subjects become citizens not only in virtue
of a set of constitutionally guar anteed rights and duties enabling them to participate in the
institutions of their association. They also take on their identity or form of self-awareness and selfformation as citizens in virtue of participating in democratic-constitutional institutions and, more
importantly, participating in the array of practices of deliberation over the existing institutions. (Tully
7) In other words, it is in and through agonistic engagements within and over the terms of democratic
citizenship that citizens exercise and develop the capacities and dispositions that compose democratic
nobility, i.e., standing to oneself politically as a sovereign individual. Consider that what is required for
democratic nobility, on the Nietzschean account, is that citizens acquire and develop a will to political
self-responsibility, which consists in cultivating one's capacity and disposition for political self-rule.
But what it is to cul tivate this capacity and disposition is just to participate in struggles within and over
the terms of democratic citizenship, to engage in the practices of exchanging reasons oriented to the
two critical and abstract norms of con stitutionalism and democracy. More particularly, it is do so with
the full acknowledgment that we are subject to political fortuna, i.e., that our struggles may fail, that
we may (and probably will) find ourselves committed qua democratic citizen to accepting laws and
policies to which we are commit ted qua private conception of the good to opposing. This is what
Wollheim called "the paradox of democracy" (Waldron, 1999b: 126-29). In this regard, it is part and
parcel of standing to oneself politically as a sovereign individual that one acknowledges both the
openness of the terms of our political association to contestation and the demand that we submit
ourselves to the rule of law even as we seek to contest democratically particular laws. In other words,
what we may call political amor fati consists in accepting (and affirming) that our political fate is to be
subject to, what Waldron has called, "the circumstances of politics": The prospect of persisting
disagreement must be regarded, I think, as one of the elementary conditions of modern politics. Nothing
we can say about politics makes much sense if we proceed without taking this condition into account. . .
. Here's an analogy. Consider John Rawls' idea of the circum stances of justice?the factual aspects of the
human condition, such as mod erate scarcity of resources and the limited altruism of individuals, which
make justice as a virtue and a practice both possible and necessary. We may say, along similar lines, that
disagreement among citizens as to what they should do, as a political body, is one of the circumstances
of politics. It is not all there is to the circumstances of politics, of course: there is also the felt need to
act together, even though we disagree about what to do. Like scarcity and lim ited altruism in the case
of justice, the circumstances of politics are a coupled pair: disagreement wouldn't matter if people
didn't prefer a common decision; and the need for common decision would not give rise to politics as
we know it if there wasn't at least the potential for disagreement about what the common decision
should be. (Waldron 1999a, 153-4, see also 1999b, 105-6) In this context, to stand to oneself politically
as a sovereign individual is to stand to oneself as a being who is engaged in the necessarily ongoing
cultivation of one's power of democratic self-rule, powers which are manifest in the degree to which
one can affirm the circumstances of politics -where it is this capacity to affirm the circumstances of
politics that stands as the ground of political appraisive respect. These reflections on the character of
the democratic agon clarify why polit ical servility is a fundamental democratic vice: to fail to recognise
oneself as a democratic citizen with all that this entails is not only to undermine the terms of political
Forgetting Link/Alt
The affirmatives fixation on identifying those who suffer enframes them as victims
who can never escape the psychological pain of their suffering. Only forgetting the
violence of the past allows us to overcome suffering and move forward with our lives.
Alenka Zupancic 2003 (Ph.D, Visiting professor @ EGS grad school, The Shortest
Shadow: Nietzsches Philosophy of the Two, MIT Press, 2003, VP)
It is true that there is also a rather dierent notion present in Christianity, a notion much closer to Nietzsches own positionnamely, the
notion of mercy
as situated beyond law( Jenseits des Rechts ). Nietzsche links to this notion nothing less than the possibility of
an escape from the vicious circle of punishment and guilt. But his notion of mercy is not simply that of an act of forgiveness; it
can spring only from a surplus of power and richness. Illustrating this with the example of actual wealth, Nietzsche
writes that the creditor be-comes more human to the extent that he has grown richer: so that, nally, how much injury he can endure without
suering from it becomes the actual measure of his wealth. 24 Such a creditor can now allow himself the noblest luxury possible: letting those
who harm him go unpunished. In this way, the justice which began with 55 everything is dischargeable, everything must be discharged ends
by winking, and letting those who are incapable of discharging their debt go free. This self-overcoming
of justice is called
mercy, and remains the privilege of the most powerful. 25 We should be careful here not to believe
that the terms rich and powerful refer simply to those who have a lot of money, and hold this or
that position of power. As Nietzsche points out, it is the capacity not to be injured, and not to suer
because of an injustice, that constitutes the measure of ones richness and powernot the capacity to
endure suffering and injury, to bear pain, but the capacity not to let this suering as suering enter
the constitution of ones subjectivity (which also means the capacity not to let oneself be
subjectivized in the gure of the subject of injury, the gure of the victim). Those who can manage
this are rich and powerful because they can manage it, not the other way around. There is also an
important dierence between forgiving and (what Nietzsche calls) forgetting. Forgiveness has a perverse
way of involving us even further in debt. To forgive somehow always implies to pay for the other, and thus to use
the very occurrence of injury and its forgiveness as a new engagement ring. Nietzsche makes this very point in
relation to Christianity: the way God has forgiven our sins has been to pay for them, to pay for them with His own esh. This is the
fundamental perversity of Christianity: while forgiving, it simultaneously brandishes at us the cross, the instrument of torture, the memory of
the one who suered and died so that we could be forgiven, the memory of the one who paid for us. Christianity forgives, but does not forget.
One could say that, with
the eyes of the sinner xed on the cross, forgiving creates a new debt in the very
process of this act. It forgives what was done, but it does not forgive the act of forgiving itself. On the
contrary, the latter establishes a new bond and a new debt. It is now innite mercy (as the capacity of
forgiving) that sustains the innite debt, the debt as innite. The debt is no longer brought about by our
actions; it is brought about by the act of forgiving us these actions. We are indebted for forgiveness. The innite
capacity to forgive might well become the infernal ame in which we temper our debt and guilt . This
is why Nietzsche counters the concept of forgiving with the concept of forgetting (a good example of this in modern times is
Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because heforgot). 26 This is
perhaps the moment to examine in more detail what Nietzschean forgetting is actually about. What is the capacity of forgetting as the basis
of great health? Nietzsche
claims that memory entertains some essential relationship with pain. This is
what he describes as the principle used in human mnemotechnics: If something is to stay in the
memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory. 27 Thus, if
memory is essentially related to pain (here it seems that Nietzsche claims the opposite of what psychoanalysis is claiming: that
traumatic events are the privileged objects of repression; yet pain is not the same thing as trauma, just as forgetting is not the same thing as
repressing), then
forgetting refers above all to the capacity not to nurture pain. This also means the
capacity not to make pain the determining ground of our actions and choices. What exactly is pain (not so much
physical pain, but, rather, the mental pain that can haunt our lives)? It is a way in which the subject internalizes and appropriates some
traumatic experience as her own bitter treasure. In other words, in relation to the traumatic event, pain is not exactly a part of this event, but
already its memory (the memory of the body). And Nietzschean oblivion is not so much an eacement of the traumatic encounter as a
preservation of its external character, of its foreignness, of its otherness. In Unfashionable Observations, Second Piece (On the Utility and
Liability of History for Life), Nietzsche links the question of forgetting (which he employs as a synonym for the ahistorical) to the question of
the act. Forgetting, oblivion, is the very condition of possibility for an act in the strong sense of the word. Memory (the 57
historical) is eternal sleeplessness and alert insomnia, a state in which no great thing can happen, and which could even be said to serve this
very purpose. Considering the common conception according to which memory is something monumental that xes certain events, and
closes us within their horizon, Nietzsche proposes a signicantly dierent notion. It
is precisely as an eternal openness, an unceasing stream, that memory can immobilize us, mortify us, make us incapable of action. Nietzsche invites
us to imagine the extreme example of a human being who does not possess the power to forget. Such a human being
would be condemned to see becoming every-where: he would no longer believe in his own being, would see
everything ow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming. He would be
like the true student of Heraclitus. A human being who wanted to experience things in a thoroughly historical manner would be like someone
forced to go without sleep. 28 Memory holds us in eternal motionit keeps opening numerous horizons, and this is precisely how it
immobilizes us, forcing us into frenetic activity. Hence, Nietzsche advances a thesis that is as out of tune with our time as it was with his own:
every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful only within a dened horizon; if it is incapable
of drawing a horizon around itself and too selsh, in turn, to enclose its own perspective within an alien
horizon, then it will feebly waste away or hasten to its timely end. 29 Of course, Nietzsches aim here is not to
preach narrow-mindedness and pettiness, nor is it simply to arm the ahistorical against history and
memory. On the contrary, he clearly states that it is only by thinking, reecting, comparing, analyzing, and
synthesizing (i.e. only by means of the power to utilize the past for life, and to reshape past events into history) that the human
being becomes properly human. Yet, in the excess of history, the human being ceases to be human once
again, no longer able to create or invent. This is why Nietzsche insists that every great historical event is born in the ahistorical
atmosphere, that is to say, in conditions of oblivion and closure: the ascetic ideal. Imagine a man seized and carried away by a vehement
passion for a woman or for a great idea; how his world changes! Looking back-ward he feels he is blind, listening around he hears what is
unfamiliar as a dull, insignicant sound; and those things that he perceives at all he never before perceived in this way; so palpable and near,
colorful, resonant, illuminated, as though he were apprehending it with all his senses at once. All his valuations
acts
loves his action innitely more than it deserves to be loved, and the best deeds occur in such an
exuberance of love that, no matter what, they must be unworthy of this love, even if their worth were
otherwise incalculably great. 30 If we read this passage carefully, we note that the point is not simply that the capacity to forget, or
the ahistorical condition, is the condition of great deeds or events. On the contrary: it is the pure surplus of passion or love (for
something) that brings about this closure of memory, this ahistorical condition. In other words, it is not that we have rst to close ourselves
within a dened horizon in order then to be able to accomplish something. The
whenever something important happens to us and incites our passion, we tend to forget and dismiss the
grudges and resentments we might have been nurturing before. Instead of forgiving those who might have injured us
in the past, we forget and dismiss these injuries. If we do not, if we work on our memory and strive to keep these
grudges alive, they will most probably aect and mortify our (new) passion. It could also be interesting to relate
Nietzsches reections from the quoted passage to the story of Hamlet, in which the imperative to remember, uttered by Hamlets fathers
Ghost, plays a very prominent role. Remember me! Remember me!, the Ghost repeats to Hamlet, thus engaging him in the singular rhythm
that characterizes the hero of this playthat of the alternation between resigned apathy and frenetic activity or precipitate actions (his killing
of Polonius, as well as that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; his engagement in the duel with Laertes ...). This movement prevents Hamlet from
carrying out the very deed his fathers Ghost charges him with. Many things have been said and written about the relationship between action
and knowledge in this play, and about how knowledge prevents Hamlet from acting. Although the two notions are not unrelated, it might be
interesting to consider this also in terms of memory (not only in terms of knowledge). It could be worthwhile to contemplate the role played by
the imperative of memory. Could we not say that one of the fundamental reasons for the diculty of Hamlets position is precisely the
structural incompatibility of memory and action that is to say, the fact that action ultimately always betrays memory? And do we not
encounter something similar in the wider phenomenon of melancholy (in the play, Hamlet is actually said to be melancholic) as a neverending grief that keeps alive, through pain, the memory of what was lost? Additionally, although we
melancholy a form of delity (for in-stanceto use Nietzsches wordsdelity to a woman or a great idea), this kind of
delity, bound to memory, should be distinguished from delity to the very event of the encounter with
this woman or idea. Contrary to the rst form, this second form of delity implies and presupposes the
power to forget. Of course, this does not mean to forget in the banal sense of no longer remembering the
person or the idea in question, but in the sense that forgetting liberates the potential of the encounter
itself, and opens up precisely through its closure the possibility of a new one. If we return to the
question of the ascetic ideal, we can easily see its link to the imperative of memory: the sleeplessness it generates is very closely related to
the state of being everlastingly awake that Nietzsche identies as one of the essential features of the ascetic ideal. The same is true of
frenetic activity as the very impossibility of actually acting and of the obsession with the fact that every-thing that happens to us, or everything
we do, has to be registered somewhere.
Impacts
Sadism
The inability to accept suffering and conflict as arising from chaos produces a sadistic
desire to inflict suffering, because forcing others to suffer gives us a false illusion of
control
Kain 7, Phillip Kain, Professor of Philosophy (Ph.D., University of California at San
Diego, 1974, Eternal Recurrence and the Categorical Imperative,
http://content.ebscohost.com/pdf19_22/pdf/2007/2GW/01Mar07/24887421.pdf?T=
P&P=AN&K=24887421&S=R&D=a9h&EbscoContent=dGJyMNXb4kSeprI4yOvqOLCmr0
qep7RSsay4TbeWxWXS&ContentCustomer=dGJyMPGqsE60rrVKuePfgeyx44Dt6fIA,
7/04/12, [AR]
We live in an empty and meaningless cosmos, a cosmos that does not care about us, and we cannot
face this. Suffering we can handle, but meaningless suffering, suffering for no reason at all, we cannot
handle. So what do we do? Nietzsche thinks we give suffering a meaning. We invent a meaning. We
create an illusion. The Greeks constructed gods for whom wars and other forms of suffering were
festival plays and thus occasions to be celebrated by the poets. Christians imagine a God for whom
suffering is punishment for sin. Nietzsche even thinks we used to enjoy inflicting suffering on others. To
see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more.... [I]n the days when mankind was
not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.... Today, when suffering is
always brought forward as the principal argument against existence, as the worst question mark, one
does well to recall the ages in which the opposite opinion prevailed because men were unwilling to
refrain from making suffer and saw in it an enchantment of the first order, a genuine seduction to life.
Why was the infliction of suffering so enjoyable? Why was it a seduction to life? The answer is not, I do
not think, that people of past ages were just sadists, as Danto and others seem to think. Rather, since
meaningless suffering is unbearable, we give it a meaning. We make it a punishment and inflict it
ourselves. In doing so, suffering is no longer meaningless; it is made to participate in the web of
meaning we have created. That is why it is so enjoyable to inflict suffering. That is why it is a
seduction to life. We keep meaninglessness at bay. We engage in practices that invest suffering with
the meaning it must have for us. We unconsciously participate in the imposition of meaning. But we are
not content, in Nietzsche's opinion, merely to inflict suffering on others. We go further. We inflict it
upon ourselves. As society develops and we are unable to discharge our instincts outwardly, we direct
them within. We create guilt. And priests are quick to nurture this new development.^" Just as we
inflict suffering on others to keep meaningless suffering at bay, so we inflict it upon ourselves. We give
all suffering a meaning. No meaningless suffering is allowed to remain anywhere. Meaninglessness is
eradicated. And just as inflicting suffering on others was a seduction to life, so in inflicting it on
ourselves, "life again became very interesting ... one no longer protested against pain, one thirsted for
pain; 'more pain! Nietzsche finds all of this highly objectionable. And he will not accept any of it. He
rejects it completely. He wants to restore the innocence of existence. He wants to rid the world of guilt
and punishment.
Ressentiment Impacts
Their imagination of a better world is a continuation of the ascetic ideal. This
association of all that is good at not of this world expresses a hatred for the only one
weve gotturns case. Fantasizing about a world without suffering produces creative
impotence only our relationship to life can escape this paradox of resentment
Aydan Turanli, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences @ Istanbul Technical
University, 2003 *journal of nietzche studies 26 (2003) 55-63 p.muse]-AC
The craving for absolutely general specifications results in doing metaphysics. Unlike Wittgenstein, Nietzsche
provides an account of how this craving arises. The creation of the two worlds such as apparent and real world,
conditioned and unconditioned world, being and becoming is the creation of the ressentiment of
metaphysicians. Nietzsche says, "to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world
that makes one suffer: the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative" (WP III 579).
Escaping from this world because there is grief in it results in asceticism. [End Page 61] Paying respect to the
ascetic ideal is longing for the world that is pure and denaturalized. Craving for frictionless surfaces, for a
transcendental, pure, true, ideal, perfect world, is the result of the ressentiment of metaphysicans who suffer in
this world. Metaphysicians do not affirm this world as it is, and this paves the way for many explanatory theories in
philosophy. In criticizing a philosopher who pays homage to the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche says, "he wants to
escape from torture" (GM III 6). The traditional philosopher or the ascetic priest continues to repeat, "'My
kingdom is not of this world'" (GM III 10). This is a longing for another world in which one does not suffer. It is to
escape from this world; to create another illusory, fictitious, false world. This longing for "the truth" of a world
in which one does not suffer is the desire for a world of constancy. It is supposed that contradiction, change, and
deception are the causes of suffering; in other words, the senses deceive; it is from the senses that all misfortunes
come; reason corrects the errors; therefore reason is the road to the constant. In sum, this world is an error; the
world as it ought to be exists. This will to truth, this quest for another world, this desire for the world as it ought
to be, is the result of unproductive thinking. It is unproductive because it is the result of avoiding the creation of
the world as it ought to be. According to Nietzsche, the will to truth is "the impotence of the will to create" (WP
III 585). Metaphysicians end up with the creation of the "true" world in contrast to the actual, changeable,
deceptive, self-contradictory world. They try to discover the true, transcendental world that is already there rather
than creating a world for themselves. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the transcendental world is the
"denaturalized world" (WP III 586). The way out of the circle created by the ressentiment of metaphysicians is the
will to life rather than the will to truth. The will to truth can be overcome only through a Dionysian relationship
to existence. This is the way to a new philosophy, which in Wittgenstein's terms aims "to show the fly the way out
of the fly-bottle" (PI 309).
One reason why people devalue the physical world, according to Nietzsche, is their fear of life--of lifes
innumerable uncertainties, sufferings, and its inescapable finality. It is because of this deep-seated fear
that people seek refuge in an ideal and imaginary world where they seem to find everlasting peace
and relief from all the ailments that besiege them on earth. People do this either naively, by imagining
"another world" in which people somehow continue to exist in the way they do in this world, only
more perfectly, or they do it in more sophisticated ways, the ways philosophers like Plato or other
teachers of a spiritual life recommend. But in whatever way people try to escape the imperfections of
the physical world, their retreat is always a manifestation of weakness, an inability to face reality in
the way strong individuals would. Strong persons would not only take suffering and other adversities
in stride, they would in a sense even welcome them as inevitable aspects of the very nature of life. As
there is no life without death, there is also no experience of health without sickness, no enjoyment of
wealth without poverty, and no appreciation of happiness without a real knowledge of pain. Live
dangerously is one of Nietzsches well known pieces of advice.(2) It is his reminder that the most
exuberant and ecstatic experiences of life do not grow out of a well protected existence where risks
and extremes are anxiously kept at bay, but out of a courageous exposure to the forces and
conditions of life that activates the best of a persons powers. A good horseback rider will not beat a
spirited horse into submission to have an easy ride, but rather learn how to handle a difficult mount.
Similarly, a strong and healthy person will not shun the dark and often dangerous sides of the world
by retreating to some metaphysical realm of comfortable peace, but rather embrace life in its totality,
its hardships and terrors as well as its splendors and joys.
VTL Outweighs
BIOLOGY IS NOT THE EXTENT OF LIFE. ESTABLISHING VALUE TO LIFE IS A PRIOR
CONCERN TO CONCERNS ABOUT PRESERVING LIFE
POLOKOVA 2004 [Jolana, chapter 2: struggle for human dignity in extreme situations,
http://www.crvp.org/book/Series04/IVA-18/chapter_ii.htm ]-AC
An animal which finds itself in a life endangering situation tries to escape quite unambiguously and at
any cost, although sometimes in a mediated fashion as dictated by the instinctive attachment to ones
offspring, mate or herd. Under such a situation humans do not always behave so unequivocally. Their
attitude to their own life is not determined solely by instinct, but is freer and more complicated.
Humans are capable not only of saving their own life, but also of sacrificing it; they are capable of
running the risk of losing their life and even of giving it up in passive resignation. Such a free and
differentiated approach attests to the fact that humans do not identify what they intrinsically are with
their physical existence; somehow they can confirm their humanity independently of their own
survival, sometimes even against it. Evidently, they strive to exist somewhat differently than a
biological entity, trying to transcend their physical existence. To put it in positive terms: they strive for a
spiritually independent existence. Only on such a basis is it possible to compare life with other values
and freely avail oneself of it. This spiritual existence implements a purely human possibility of selftranscendence through a principal attachment to values. Humans can sacrifice or save their life because
of something that exceeds the value of biological life. That is, because of values towards which their
life aspires, on which it is based, in which humans invest, with which they identify themselves, and to
which they attach supreme meaning. Only a threat to such values "sublime" or "mundane", but
always vitally important constitutes an extreme situation characteristic of man. If the principal
values of his life have been destroyed or devalued, ones bare life retains value only if and as one is
capable of retaining at least some hope of discovering or creating new values. Then life becomes,
provisionally, a supreme value only in the name of those unknown values and in linkage with them.
From a human viewpoint, mere survival does not appear to be an end in itself. It is not something
absolute or unconditioned, but rather something to which one can assume a personal attitude; that is,
one which is not arbitrary but spiritually free and connected with values. The fact that one carries
within oneself something one protects more than ones own life and without which ones life would
lose its meaning and humanity points to the conclusion that, unlike other live beings, ones specific
extreme situation involves a threat to values which one regards as supreme. A threat to life is
perceived by humans as an extreme situation only insofar as it jeopardizes also their possibility of
living for certain values. In a situation of a total value vacuum and hopelessness life tends to become
virtually irrelevant to a human person. Thus, one may attach to a certain value, rather than to ones
bare life, that which is intrinsically ones own, ones most profound identity, namely, independence
and integrity. This reveals the ontologically unique spiritual nature of the person. What seems to be
significant in extreme human situations, therefore, is not any boundary of human potential for
biological survival, but rather a limit of this or that individuals value orientation and attachment.
Alternatives
Devaluing Values
To break down the nihilistic barriers of the affirmative, a devaluation or critical rejection
of the political methodology of the aff must be rejected because it recognizes the
foundations of that flawed methodology and helps identify how it can be broken down.
Reginster 06 (Bernard Reginster, 2006, Philosophy professor at Brown, The
Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Harvard Press, 7/5/12, K.H.)
I showed in the previous chapter that Nietzsche's strategy for overcoming despair is a revaluation
of those highest values of which it is the logical conclusion. Presumably, the revaluation of the
highest life-negating values will effectively overcome nihilism only if it actually devaluates them:
"Once we have devaluated [these highest values), the demonstration that they cannot be applied to
the universe is no longer any reason for devaluating the universe" (WP 12). The devaluation
{Entwertbung) of the highest values can assume different forms. The meta-ethical form of devaluation
consists in arguing that the life-negating values are devaluated because all values are devaluated. A
value enjoys normative authority by virtue of possessing a certain standing: it must be objective.
The meta-ethical form of devaluation denies this objective standing to all values. The substantive
form of devaluation, in contrast, finds something wrong with the particular content of the life-negating
values. In the present chapter, I consider the meta-ethical form of devaluation. To devaluate the
highest values is, here, to challenge their objective standing and expose their origin in some
contingent perspective. If this challenge is successful, nihilistic despair is avoided, since we would no
longer have a reason to despair over the unrealizability of values that have become devaluated. This
strategy of revaluation is supposed to reach the following "final conclusion": "All the values by
means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then
proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the worldall these values are, psychologically
considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human
constructs of dominationand they have been falsely projected into the essence of things" (WP 12).
Dicethrow
The affirmative tries to shape the world by escaping disorder and chaos. Thus our
alternative is to reject the affirmatives attempt at mastering the world by embracing
uncertainty with a simple roll of the dice.
Deleuze 83, Giles Deleuze, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Lyon, Paris, and Lycees, Nietzsche
and Philosophy, p. 25-27, 7/04/12, [AR]
The game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow the dice that is thrown and the dice that
falls back. Nietzsche presents the dicethrow as taking place on two distinct tables, the earth and the sky.
The earth where the dice are thrown and the sky where the dice fall back: "if ever I have played dice
with the gods at their table, the earth, so that the earth trembled and broke open and streams of fire
snorted forth; for the earth is a table of the gods, and trembling with creative new words and the dice
throws of the gods" (Z III "The Seven Seals" 3 p. 245). "0 sky above me, you pure and lofty sky! This is
now your purity to me, that there is no eternal reason-spider and spider's web in you; that you are to
me a dance floor for divine chances, that you are to me a god's table for divine dice and dicers" (Z III
"Before Sunrise" p. 186). But these two tables are not two worlds. They are the two hours of a single
world, the two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the hour when the dice are thrown,
the hour when the dice fall back. Nietzsche insists on the two tables of life which are also the two
moments of the player or the artist; "We temporarily abandon life, in order to then temporarily fix our
gaze upon it." The dicethrow affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming. It is not a matter
of several dicethrows which, because of their number, finally reproduce the same combination. On
the contrary, it is a matter of a single dicethrow which, due to the number of the combination
produced, comes to reproduce itself as such. It is not that a large number of throws produce the
repetition of a combination but rather the number of the combination which produces the repetition of
the dicethrow. The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which
they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense
that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity. It will be replied, in vain, that
thrown to chance, the dice do not necessarily produce the winning combination, the double six which
brings back the dicethrow. This is true, but only insofar as the player did not know how to affirm
chance from the outset. For, just as unity does not suppress or deny multiplicity, necessity does not
suppress or abolish chance. Nietzsche identifies chance with multiplicity, with fragments, with parts,
with chaos: the chaos of the dice that are shaken and then thrown. Nietzsche turns chance into an
affirmation. The sky itself is called "chance-sky", "innocence-sky" (Z III "Before Sunrise"); the reign of
Zarathustra is called "great chance" (Z IV "The Honey Offering" and III "Of Old and New Law Tables";
Zarathustra calls himself the "redeemer of chance"). "By chance, he is the world's oldest nobility, which I
have given back to all things; I have released them from their servitude under purpose . . . I have found
this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer to dance on the feet of chance" (Z III "Before Sunrise"
p. 186); "My doctrine is `Let chance come to me: it is as innocent as a little child!' " (Z III "On the Mount
of Olives" p. 194). What Nietzsche calls necessity (destiny) is thus never the abolition but rather the
combination of chance itself. Necessity is affirmed of chance in as much as chance itself affirmed. For
there is only a single combination of chance as such, a single way of combining all the parts of chance,
a way which is like the unity of multiplicity, that is to say number or necessity. There are many
numbers with increasing or decreasing probabilities, but only one number of chance as such, one fatal
number which reunites all the fragments of chance, like midday gathers together the scattered parts of
midnight. This is why it is sufficient for the player to affirm chance once in order to produce the
number which brings back the dice- throw. To know how to affirm chance is to know how to play. But
we do not know how to play, "Timid, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed. But what
of that you dicethrowers! You have not learned to play and mock as a man ought to play and mock!"
(Z IV "Of the Higher Man" 14 p. 303). The bad player counts on several throws of the dice, on a great
number of throws. In this way he makes e of causality and probability to produce a combination that
he sees as desirable. He posits this combination itself as an end to be obtained, hidden behind
causality. This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks of the eternal spider, of the spider's web of
reason, "A kind of spider of imperative and finality hidden behind the great web, the great net of
causality we could say, with Charles the Bold when he opposed Louis XI, "I fight the universal spider"
(GM III 9). To abolish chance by holding it in the grip of causality and finality, to count on the
repetition of throws rather than affirming chance, to anticipate a result instead of affirming necessity
these are all the operations of a bad player. They have their root in reason, but what is the root of
reason? The spirit of revenge, nothing but the spirit of revenge, the spider (Z II "Of the Tarantulas").
Ressentiment in the repetition of throws, bad conscience in the belief in a purpose. But, in this way,
all that will ever be obtained are more or less probable relative numbers. That the universe has no
purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known this is the certainty
necessary to play well (VP III 465). The dicethrow fails because chance has not been affirmed enough in
one throw. It has not been affirmed enough in order to produce the fatal number which necessarily
reunites all the fragments and brings back the dicethrow. We must therefore attach the greatest
importance to the following conclusion: for the couple causality-finality, probability-finality, for the
opposition and the synthesis of these terms, for the web of these terms, Nietzsche substitutes the
Dionysian correlation of chance- necessity, the Dionysian couple chance-destiny. Not a probability
distributed over several throws but all chance at once; not a final, desired, willed combination, but
the fatal combination, fatal and loved, amor fati; not the return of a combination by the number of
throws, but the repetition of a dicethrow by the nature of the fatally obtained number.
Embrace Suffering
Our alternative is to reject the affirmative for their rationale of suffering. Instead of
understanding suffering as being caused by an external force, we embrace suffering as
an integral part of lifeonly through this mindset can we truly affirm life and give
ourselves value because by fearing suffering we only serve to construct an aversion to
life itself
Scott 98, Jacqueline Scott, Associate Professor Philosophy Department Loyola
University Chicago, 1998, Nietzsche and decadence: The revaluation of morality
7/04/12, [AR]
The decay of the species is the reason why Nietzsche thought that the problem of decadence was so
important and why it preoccupied *him+ more profoundly than any other problem. The species
preserves and enhances its will by creating rationales for existence. Without this periodic trust in
life, the race cannot ourish, and so the assignment of value to life is a necessary condition for life.
The creation of rationales is of the utmost importance because there is no inherent meaning in life to
be discovered, and so we must create it . Nietzsche contended that our main problem is not suffering
itself, but instead, the inexplicability of suffering. This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that
something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void he did not know how to justify,
to account for, to afrm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered
otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there
was no answer to the crying question why do I suffer? If we could create rationales for suffering, then
we might be able to afrm our individual lives, and view suffering as a necessary, or even desirable,
part of life. For Nietzsche, the noblest rationale for existence was one which was rooted in a
triumphant Yes said to oneself it is self-afrmation, selfglorication of life. This sort of rationale is
noble not only because its goal is life afrmation, but more importantly because it seeks afrmation
of a particular life. Afrmation is the declaration that life is worth living despite its inherent
meaninglessness. This judgment on life must be understood as a judgment on an individual life, and not
on all lives (i.e. on life itself). At the same time, while self-afrmation was for Nietzsche the noblest
goal, he claimed that most people have sought the less noble and easier goal of self-preservation.
These values of self-preservation represent an aversion to life and are a rebellion against the most
fundamental presuppositions of life. Nevertheless, as rationales although they essentially will
nothingness, they are a will and thereby preserve the species. Man would rather will nothingness than
not will. The problem with self- or species-preservation as a goal is that the true and proper goal of
life is expansion, not preservation: The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of
distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims as the expansion of power
and, wishing for that, frequently risks even sacrices self-preservation.
Ontological Disarmament
The Alternative is to render ourselves vulnerable to international danger and conflict.
Attempting to moralize our approach to conflict guarantees depoliticized annihilation
of those we deem immoral barbarians ontological disarmament is critical to peace of
mind.
Nietzsche 1879 (Friedrich, Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel,
Human, All Too Human, The Nietzsche Channel, The Wanderer and His Shadow,
http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/was.htm, ]-AC
The means to real peace. No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the
desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that
approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the
neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense.
Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for
conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of
self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a
harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they
presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however,
is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because,
as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must
abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.
And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest
development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these
things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We break the sword," and will smash its entire military
establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the bestarmed, out of a height of feelingthat is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind;
whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One
trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather
perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and fearedthis must
someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well
known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they
work for a "gradual decrease of the military burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest
will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at
once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloudand from up high.
2NCs
Suffering Good
We are more indebted to our suffering than our pleasure.
Schutte 84 (Ofelia Schutte,1984, Professor of Existentialism at University of South
Florida, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks, Published by University of
Chicago Press, 7/4/12, K.H.)
In the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science {1887) Nietzsche speaks of philosophy in terms of an
'art of transfiguration*. In this preface Nietzsche speaks as a convalescent. The goal of life, he
suggests, is to transform sickness into good health. The only way in which we can ultimately
overcome sickness is by affirming the necessity of pain and suffering as essential ingredients of life.
For Nietzsche, philosophy is 'maternal1 in that it rests on a unity of body and soul. The work of every
philosopher, he holds, represents an unconscious, involuntary memoir of their existence, of who they are (D
Preface). The true philosopher, for Nietzsche, is one who recognises that his or her thoughts are born
out of the pain of experience which, like the experience of giving birth, should be endowed with
'blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe'. 'Life' is about
transforming everything that we are, including that which wounds and hurts us, ' into light and flame
\ 11 is only the experience of great pain that affords us the deepest insights into the human lot.
Nietzsche points out that this experience does not necessarily make us 'better* human beings, but only 'more
profound' ones. From our 'abysses' and 'sicknesses' we are to 'return* to life 'newborn* (GS Preface).
sense of blindness that results from thoroughgoing skepticism to be a source of distress, which is
motivated by a belief in the possible existence of objective evaluative facts.
is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millenia as of an eternal man towards whom all
things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. (HAH a) Nietzsche's
attempt to carry out a critique of metaphysics and philosophical authority reflects what he sees as
significant political changes taking place in modern European societies. For him the growing
liberalisation and democratisation of society generates the need for a new 'historical' mode of
philosophising which is to be both enlightened and critical. He becomes an advocate of both
programmes of change and development, the philosophical and the political.
Worse, what if the "failure of imagination" identified In the 9/1 1 Commission is built into our national
and home- land security systems? What it the reliance on planning for the catastrophe that never
came reduced our capability to flexibly respond and improvise for the "ultra-catastrophe" that did?
What if worse-case scenarios, simulation training, and disaster exercisesas well as border guards,
concrete barriers and earthen leveesnot only prove inadequate but might well act as forcemultiplierswhat organizational theorists identify as "negative synergy" and "cascading effects"
that produce the automated bungling (think Federal Emergency Management Agency) that transform
isolated events and singular attacks into global disasters? Just as "normal accidents" are built into new
technologiesfrom the Titanic sinking to the Chernobyl meltdown to the Challenger explosionwe
must ask whether "ultra-catastrophes" are no longer the exception but now part and parcel of
densely networked systems that defy national management; in other words, "planned disasters."
Arguments that we cause the holocaust are intellectually dishonest the holocaust
was a result of the slave morality we criticize
Gupta 1 (Akaash, holland and knight charitable foundation, "2001 Holocaust
Remembrance Project," http://holocaust.hklaw.com/essays/2001/2001-11.htm]
As the Nazi regime of Germany followed Nietzsches favored "noble morality" or nihilism, it seems
as though the German citizens themselves followed the "slave morality" which Nietzsche
denounced. Slave morality is based upon values taught to people as they grow up. According to
Nietzsche, these values are unfounded and "To admit a belief merely because it is a custom. but
that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy!" The anti-Semitic beliefs that had been rooted in
Germany took custom in Germany because of popular opinion. The propaganda of Adolf Hitler
captivated the masses and created a population of uniform beliefs where people consented to Nazi
actions. The German public became a slave to Hitlers regime as Nazi actions went unquestioned.
This slavery was only possible because of the populations belief that they did not own moral
responsibility for the actions of Nazi Germany.
The holocaust was a result of ressentiment and the Nazi States hatred of a chaotic
world beyond control
Peachy 03 (Paul, Senior Lecturer U Cardiff U, POST-SOVIET SOCIETIES: CHAUVINISM
OR CATHARSIS?, March 30, http://www.crvp.org/book/Series04/IVA7/chapter_ix.htm]
Resentments against Marxist-Leninist rule have long smoldered in the Soviet lands. Grievances are
complex, profound, and varied and have hastened the breakup of the old Union. To refer to those
grievances, I shall use the original, more robust, French term, ressentiment, originally proposed as a
technical term in another context by Friedrich Nietzsche, and later refined by Max Scheler. The latter
used the term early in the present century to refer to deeply repressed "emotions and affects . . .
(of) revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to distract, and spite."6 Both the concept and the
condition to which it refers deserve greater specification than is possible here. In any case,
ressentiment consists of deep-seated and persistent rancor and thirst for revenge. The Soviet
regime originally seized control of, and extended, the multi-national, czarist empire. The non-Russian
peoples in the Union were thus doubly-yoked by both an ideologically alien and an imperial rule. In
his paper (chapter I above), Ghia Nodia notes one specific dimension of the resulting trauma, namely
the loss incurred in seventy-year interruption in the historical development of peoples of the former
Union. But beyond the seventy-year loss, "Communist rule does not provide anything useful to be
kept in the period of transition to modernity and leaves after itself a kind of social desert. There is
nothing real on which an attempt to build a modern (`democratic,' `free market,' etc.,) society may
be based." This contrasts, in his view, with modernization elsewhere that "occurred on the basis of
elements which emerged in traditional societies." Instead, formerly Soviet societies "can only be
founded on ideas: recollection of national past and imitating pre-given models" (presumably, other
already-modern societies). Questions may be raised regarding so sweeping a verdict, though Nodia
presumably refers specifically to the salient features of the communist system, rather than to the
whole life of the era. In any case, the democratic energies now exploding in the former Soviet sphere
had been growing for decades beneath the Soviet burden. Mikhail Gorbachev did not simply fall
unannounced from the sky, a fact that he recognized from the outset. In that sense, modernization in
the Soviet sphere, as modernization in the West earlier, "occurred on the basis of elements that
emerged" in the existing society. In the end, though acknowledgement of positive achievements
during the Soviet era is part of the healing process, unspeakable trauma remains, and in some
respects recurs. Nico Chavchavadze, head of the Institute of Philosophy in the Georgian Academy of
Sciences, on his first visit to the United States in 1989, stated publicly that a moral renewal must
precede any political rebirth in what then was still the Soviet Union. Subsequent Georgian turmoil
appears to confirm his assessment. Nor is it merely or primarily a Georgian problem. Reports out of
Czechoslovakia, for example, indicate new and persisting forms of distrust, recrimination, and
revenge, despite the nobility of spirit articulated by Vaclav Havel, the dissident turned president.7
CATHARIS OR CHAUVINISM? Can the monstrous wounds of the Soviet era, indeed of this century
generally the wars, the gulags, the genocide, the recriminations, the ressentiment, be absolved? In
this regard, the Jewish holocaust has often been treated, as it were, prototypically. Elie Wiesel,
himself a survivor, has emphasized, that the victims of that obscenity are in some sense doomed to
silence. When we speak, Wiesel observes, we describe by means of comparison. An event, hitherto
unknown, is explained in terms of another of which we have some knowledge. But the Holocaust is
sui generis, beyond anything comparable. Wiesel writes: "By its uniqueness the Holocaust defies
literature.8 If obscenities, such as the Jewish holocaust or the traumas of the Soviet era, defy our
communicable grasp, absolution of the resulting ressentiment may be similarly handicapped.
Without presuming to resolve the conceptual problem, I here employ two "shorthand" terms:
chauvinism, for the venting of ressentiment in pre-political ethnic nationalism; catharis for
absolution and healing.
that reality is will to power is an expression of will to power. Also making a statement about the cause
or (pre-given) goal of a thing is nothing else than the formulation of a will to power, which always can
be questioned by other wills to power. Every account is understood as a power seizure or as the effect
of it. Although the necessary striving for more power can be called teleological, it is not teleological in
the traditional Aristotelian sense. What we have here is, in a certain sense, a teleology without telos.
The crucial point is that the "teleological" character of the will to power not only has no pre-given,
fixed end but also precisely precludes such an end. Such a pre-given end that is precluded, and that
Nietzsche frequently attacks, is self-preservation. Nietzsche characterizes the notion of selfpreservation as one of those "redundant teleological principles" (BGE 13). At the same time, this
conception is exposed as an attempt to negate the reality of becoming. The statement that all life
strives for self-preservation presupposes that there is a substantial self that wants to preserve itself.
Nietzsche repudiates that there is such a self.
Aff Answers
N:26[25], N:31[51], N:32[8(34)]). My answer -- introduced in the chapter devoted to Zarathustra, and developed in those that come thereafter - is that everything
is indeed permitted, but that universal permissibility does not make ethical reflection
impossible or trivial; on the contrary, it makes such reflection the more pressing. Simply put: to say that
everything is permitted is to say, at least, that there is no one -- better, no One -- around to forbid or prohibit anything. It is not to
say that we cannot make distinctions, that all acts are equally admirable, or honorable, or desirable. If we
take our ethical bearings by what is permitted and what is forbidden, we may pay little attention to what is noble. Likewise, even if
everything is permitted, that does not mean that all answers to the question, "What should I do," are
equally good. Instead, it makes the question more pressing, more difficult, and more interesting. As I attempt to decide
what I am to do, how I am to live my life, it makes little difference whether "everything is permitted" or not. If some ways of living
were prohibited, I would still have to decide which of the remaining ways to adopt as my own; if no
ways are prohibited, the question becomes the more pressing -- even if all ways are somehow open, I
must still decide which I am to follow. Differently stated: just as acceptance of a universal moral code -- denial
that "everything is permitted" -- does not entail decent or admirable behavior, neither does the denial
of such codes entail indecent of despicable behavior. We have all, I suspect, encountered moral absolutists who, while
adhering strictly to their accepted laws, allow themselves extraordinary latitude with respect to acts not specifically covered by the codes.
Appropriately, Nietzsche
insists explicitly that just as the identification of prohibitions does not guarantee
moral behavior, the denial of prohibitions does not preclude it: I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their
premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them. -- I also deny
immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but that there is any true reason so to feel. It
psychology
of domination calls for the war of all against all. Out of distrust for the people, out of distrust for women, out
of distrust for ones own body, the authoritarian conscience establishes the need for obedience regardless
of the absurdity of the rule. Under the psychology of domination, the contribution to personal wellbeing that grows out of a healthy and life-affirming morality is replaced by the commanding voice of a
despot who would very much like to rule the world. This reversion to repression undermines all the
liberating aspects of Nietzsches philosophy. The Dionysian affirmation of self-transcendence is
contradicted by the implementation of rigid boundaries in human life (leader and herd). The joy and pride
in ones own values (it is our worklet us be proud of it) is undermined by the defense of breeding and slavery.
Above all, the union of truth and life which was the aim of the Dionysian transvaluation of values is completely
shattered when the doctrine of the overcoming of morality is used to sever truth from life.
should one make an ontological model of this condition and project these conflicts
unto the structure of the entire universe? Would it not be better to suggest that where domination occurs new
conflicts are brought into existence which would otherwise have no reason for being? Is not domination a
nihilistic attempt to rewrite history and to deny the reality of what is? If the notion of order were reevaluated, one would notice that the
world does not need to be ordered through domination for stability to be maintained. In fact, where
order is maintained through domination and exploitation, the stability of life tends to be severely
impaired. For example, the selected exploitation of natural resources has been shown to lead to severe cases of disbalance in the
ecosystem. When Nietzsche uses the paradigm of domination as a natural or an ontological category, his perspective needs to be questioned.
The commanding-obeying notion of reality is not a given, although it is an important facet of social reality. Human
knowledge can help to lend perspective to the uses and abuses of the concepts of mastery, domination, and
command. For this to happen, knowledge must itself be free from being defined in terms of a structure of
domination. Knowledge must be freed from having to fit the pattern of mastery over the unknown or
over chaos (control and/or exploitation of the other) as is demanded by a domination of a theory of power. The analysis of knowledge as
the assimilation of chaos (which Heidegger attributes to Nietzsche) reminds one of the terrifying myth of Saturn devouring his children. One
need not accept the charge that Nietzsches theory of knowledge conforms to this paradigm. A Nietzschean interpretation would show
precisely the opposite. Knowledge is childbirth and self-overcoming; it is the result of the closeness between ourselves and the world. In
knowledge the closeness and continuity between ourselves and the world can be experienced critically, imaginatively, and creatively. One sees
this life-affirming view of knowledge, for example, in Zarathustras dialogues with life, just as it is more analytically manifested in Nietzsches
critique of logic. A
direction toward which we bring forth children. a direction from which they .re coming. Like Zarathustras children, who shall be "taciturn even
when [they] speak, and yielding so that in giving [they] receive," these children shall be capable of friendship (161). These children are still
coming to be on the final page: near, but not yet here.
Even if their K is right and we should ignore value-based judgment, extinction still comes
first.
Wapner, '3 (Director -- Global Environmental Policy Program @ American, Winter, Dissent)
All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions-except one. Even
accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This
acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear.
manifest no character . Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of
us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple
preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse
be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of
environmental preservation. Postmodernists reject the idea of a universal good. They rightly acknowledge the difficulty of identifying
a common value given the multiple contexts of our value-producing activity. In fact, if there is one thing they vehemently scorn, it is
the idea that there can be a value that stands above the individual contexts of human experience.
Such a value would present itself as a metanarrative and, as Jean-Franois Lyotard has explained, postmodernism is
characterized fundamentally by its "incredulity toward meta-narratives." Nonetheless, I can't see how postmodern critics can
do otherwise than accept the value of preserving the nonhuman world. The nonhuman is the extreme "other"; it
idea that a prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that
embodiments- must
stands in contradistinction to humans as a species. In understanding the constructed quality of human experience and the dangers of
ensuring that the "other" actually continues to exist . In our day and age, this requires us to take responsibility for protecting
the actuality of the nonhuman. Instead, however, we are running roughshod over the earth's diversity of plants, animals, and ecosystems.
Postmodern critics should find this particularly disturbing. If they don't, they deny their own intellectual insights and compromise their
fundamental moral commitment.
such sentiments: Decadence is only a means for the type of man who demands power in Judaism and Christianity, the priestly type: this type of
man has a life interest in making mankind sick and in so twisting the concepts of good and evil, true and false, as to imperil life and slander the
world.) And, as George Lichtheim would have it, only
Finally, those who read Nietzsche as an anti-institutional transgressor and creator should heed TI ("Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," 39), where
Nietzsche clearly diagnoses a repudiation of institutions as a form of decadence. Because of our modern faith in a foundational individual
freedom, we no longer have the instincts for forming and sustaining the traditions and modes of authority that healthy institutions require.
Nietzsche calls the abyss of the great suspicion and the ultimate
depths of the philosopher is nihilism. In this rebirth from the depts. with a higher health and with a second and more dangerous
innocence ones innermost nature bursts forth like a natural spring from which the covering debris has
been removed. At this point the spring proclaims as its liberator the sharp pick-axe of necessity that has
pierced down through the debris and brought it pain And ultimately the spring will come to affirm even the debris it burst
through and which now floats in it (SN 51) The image of the pick-axe a graphic analogue of Nietzsches hammer is very much in the spirit of
Zen. When
ones inner creativity is able to burst through the overlay of conventional values and
conceptualizations, the resultant condition is not one of pristine purity but rather one in which the pool of the
psyche is still polluted by debris from the barriers that have been breached. The point is that such debris
need not be rejected, but may rather be used in the reconstruction of the new self. Though Nishitani does not
himself suggest this, the selfs affirmation of the debris from an earlier obstruction would point up the idea
that, for Nietzsche, certain features of a tradition previously regarded as repressive may in fact be
reappropriated after the appropriate transformation of the self has taken place.
the will-to-power
personification of nature, natural forces may even acquire priority over the value of human purposiveness
from which they take their name of will. In the Genealogy of Morals, for example, Nietzsche argues that just as in
animal life the strong predators must overcome their prey and fully enjoy their spoils, so must the strong and
noble among human beings derive satisfaction from overtaking the weaker. In the end, the glorification of
the untamed will becomes an implicit assumption in an argument of much larger scope wherein
irrationality and violence, especially if uncorrupted by a so-called decadent reason, are celebrated both in the natural
world and that of human relations. What starts out as a personification (and thereby humanization) of
extrahuman forces tends to turn around and effect a dehumanization of human beings or, at the very least, a
devaluation of rationality. Nietzsches elevation of nature through attributes such as nobility and strength should therefore be read
quite critically. In subsequent chapters we will have the opportunity to see in more detail how Nietzsches erasure of the
distinction between human and natural forces may further the dehumanized notion of humanity. But even
though we note the danger in Nietzsches view, we also observe that other, less guarded, interpretations of Nietzsches theory can be offered.
For example, a justifiable line of argument is to maintain that, if Nietzsche sought an overcoming of humanity, his goal was not to dehumanize
humanity but to lift human beings from the illness or incapacitating character of nihilism. It cannot be denied that there is some truth to this
view. The problem in Nietzsche, as I see it, is that he does not always sustain this perspective. Therefore, to keep us from being
swept away by an idealistic interpretation of Nietzsche, we must emphasize that Nietzsches affirmation of life and nature cannot be viewed
uncritically. Affirmation
of life, in the full sense of the term, is only attained when there is a state of integration
and creative balance between human consciousness and life. For this to be achieved there must be freedom from a
nihilistic consciousness, as exemplified in the overcoming of otherworldly values. But there must also be freedom from a view of life that dwells
on irrationality and violence or that legitimizes these as natural goods. Indeed, Nietzsche criticized human nature for the resentment bred
within its consciousness and argued that human beings cannot be healed from alienation and nihilism unless they accept their finite place in
nature with the full affirmation of life implicit in his teaching of amor fati. What this argument requires for its completion, in spite of what
Nietzsche may sometimes say to the contrary, is the stipulation that nihilism
What is also necessary and ultimately indispensable, is to cancel the ideology of conquest that is
responsible for having alienated and continuing to alienate human beings from nature, from each other,
from temporal existencein short, from the meaning of the earth.
Religion Good
Religion is tight and can help people cope with inevitable suffering.
Schutte 84 (Ofelia Schutte,1984, Professor of Existentialism at University of South
Florida, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks, Published by University of
Chicago Press, 7/4/12, K.H.)
With the decline in religious belief, modern societies lack the traditional means for legitimating
authority. He argues, for example, that 'where law is no longer tradition, as is the case with us, it can
only be commanded, imposed by constraint, so we have to put up with arbitrary law, which is the
expression of the necessity of the fact that there has to be law' (ibid. 459). The decisive occurrence of the
modern period for Nietzsche is the decline of a religious basis to the state. One of the major passages in Human, All
Too Human, absolutely central for understanding Nietzsche's political thought during this period, is devoted to this
topic. It reveals sentiments that make it possible to connect Nietzsche to a certain extent with the political thinking
of the early liberal tradition of Hobbes and Locke. The passage, entitled 'Religion and Government', begins
by noting that the significance of religion in the life of a culture lies in the fact that it consoles the
hearts of individuals in times of loss, deprivation, and fear; that is, in times when a government is
powerless to alleviate the psychical sufferings of its people in the face of inevitable and unavoidable
events such as famines and wars (or at least what appeared in earlier times as unavoidable). Religion is useful
in that, through the cultivation of popular sentiment and a common identity, it secures internal civil peace and
fosters the continuous development of a culture. Nietzsche claims that 'absolute tutelary government and the careful
preservation of religion necessarily go together', because it is impossible - as Napoleon recognised - for political
power to gain legitimacy without the assistance of the priestly class. However, this close association between
religion and politics only holds good in a situation where the governing classes know the advantages they can accrue
from religion and feel superior to it. Religion simply serves them as a useful instrument of popular control
and political discipline. But in a democratic state the situation is quite different, for here it is more than likely that
religion will be regarded as an instrument of the popular will, not as an 'above' in relation to a 'below', but merely as
a function of the sole sovereign power, 'the people'. In this political framework, control of society through religious
teaching will not be so easy, because teaching will be open to rational and enlightened debate and scrutiny.
Nietzsche declares that life is worth living only if there are inspiring goals, or goals that inspire to live:
accordingly, nihilism may be deemed as goalessness: "What does nihilism mean? | . . . | The goal is lacking; 'why?'
finds no answer" (WP 2; cf. 55). Strictly speaking, we must distinguish a goal from its value: the goal
designates the state of affairs that an action or a process is intended to bring about, whereas the
value provides the reason why such a state of affairs is worth bringing about. However, in ordinary
usage, the terms goal and value tend to designate both the state of affairs intended by an action and
the reason for the action. We will, for example, describe democracy as a value, although it also clearly
designates a state of affairs. And we will talk of moral goodness as a goal, although it refers also (and
perhaps properly only) to the reason why we pursue certain goals.