Nietzsche’s Hammer

Discussion of articles that appear in the magazine.

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iambiguous
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Eternal Recurrence Revisited
Brandon Robshaw
The point of the thought experiment is a sort of test of one’s relationship with one’s life. Do you celebrate being alive; do you savour every moment, even the most painful or challenging ones? If so the demon’s words will be wonderful news: you will be able to savour it all over, again and again, forever and ever and ever. If, on the other hand, your response is to feel absolutely horrified, that strongly suggests that you are not making the most of your time here.
This is not unlike the argument that revolves around free will. If you have free will then you can pat yourself on the back for all of your great accomplishments. But if you don't have free will then you cannot really be blamed at all for your great failures. Live a rewarding life and it's all about you bringing it about. Live a disappointing life and it couldn't be helped.

But then the posthumous "I". Assuming free will [of course], if the ever-recurring life is a collection of your greatest hits you took the Übermensch route on this side of the grave. If, however, it's an ever-recurring collection of toilet flushes...?

Besides, to the best of our knowledge, it really is just a "thought experiment", isn't it?
Nietzsche offers only these two alternatives: horror or delight. It is clear that he recommends the delighted reaction. This ties in with his idea of amor fati, love of one’s fate.
Of course, most religions offer two alternatives as well: Heaven or Hell. But what stays the same is that either one or the other depends entirely on the behaviors you choose on this side of grave. So, one way or another, narratives are found to connect the dots between the here and the there, between the now and the then.

And, chances are, you have one yourself.
In Section 276 of The Joyous Science he puts it thus: “I want to come to regard everything necessary as beautiful – so that I will become one of those who makes everything beautiful. Amor fati: from now on, let that be my love!” But there are other possible responses. A third response which Nietzsche did not consider would be to feel neither elated nor horrified at the idea, but indifferent. After all, however many times one lives this life, each time always feels like the first and only time. No memories are carried over from one incarnation to the next, so what difference would it make, anyway?
And it's not for nothing that some choose suicide precisely in order that the result is oblivion. To obliterate once and for all consciousness itself. Back to the blank eternity before you were ever born.

That then becomes the only source of comfort for some.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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iambiguous wrote: Mon Nov 14, 2022 6:15 am This is not unlike the argument that revolves around free will. If you have free will then you can pat yourself on the back for all of your great accomplishments. But if you don't have free will then you cannot really be blamed at all for your great failures.
Why do people choose to overlook the inherent flaws with all the current conceptions of free will?

If you don't have free will you can also pat yourself on the back for all of your great accomplishments. Because it was pre-determined for you to pat yourself.

If you don't have free will then you can still be blamed for all of your great failures. Because it was pre-determined that you will be blamed for your pre-determined failures.

Free will makes absolutely no difference. The universe makes murderers; and it also makes policemen who arrest them; and judges who sentence them to life in prison; and it also makes the people who are morally outraged about the heinous act.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Scattered through Nietzsche’s writings are proclamations of his ‘untimeliness’, expressing the conviction that he will be ‘born posthumously’. He claims that few in his time have ears to hear him, that he must trust in future generations to understand him, and also that he is preparing that future audience.
Given the extent to which both God and religion still managed to play a bigger role in human interactions back when he was around, that was pretty much a certainty. This and the historical fact that, more and more, the capitalist political economy was laying a foundation for a " modern" and then a "postmodern" assessment of human interactions. The spotlight shifting from Catholicism to Protestantism...from an "other worldly" perspective to the here and now. And especially from "we" to "I".

Many more options from which to choose.

Nietzsche died in 1900. Right at the very beginning of the century that was far more amenable to the death of God, to the rise of the rich and powerful Ubermen who came to own and operate what was fast becoming the global economy. And, of course, the advent of existentialism and nihilism.
Along with these proclamations goes his prediction that one day his name will be associated with a crisis unprecedented in human history. Nietzsche appears to suggest that his work may help precipitate the most acute stages of this crisis; but he also positions himself as humanity’s guide through and beyond the coming upheaval.
Clearly a No God world is rife with endless possibilities. Once the common denominator Gods give way to mere mortals "thinking up" their own objectivist fonts how far away can calamity be? I quote the 20th Century for example. And now this one. This coupled with Nitzsche's own Uberman philosophy. After all, once the powerful get it in their head that they can justify their "my way or the highway" moral and political agendas philosophically then they can readily switch from "might makes right" to "right makes might".

Right?
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
What is the nature of this predicted crisis...[that one day his name will be associated with a crisis unprecedented in human history]? The most common reading of it represents, I believe, a misconception or underestimation of its nature and scope. This common idea is that Nietzsche is speaking of the gradual erosion among humankind of our belief in any binding, transcendental values.
This will always be tricky. What are deemed by some to be specious, spurious transcendental values are often deemed by others to be entirely reasonable. Here, for example, those who link value judgments to Gods that are thought by others to be but ridiculous "supernatural" entities. Instead, historically, the secular ideologues among us will link their own dogmas to, among other things, philosophy [Ayn Rand] or to science [Karl Marx].

And, as exchanges here often dramatically demonstrate, there has been anything but an erosion of objectivists value judgments. They are still clearly the rule. In fact, I think it might be argued that Nietzsche's own "will to power"/"Uberman" mentality is just another rendition of it for some.

Not many around like me willing to suggest that in a No God world individual value judgments are rooted existentially in individual lives out in particular worlds historically, culturally and interpersonally. Let alone that construing right and wrong from a "fractured and fragmented" perspective is actually a reasonable manner in which to construe "conflicting goods".
This process is exemplified by, but not restricted to, the decline in religious faith. Without the foundational belief in a divine sanction for human systems of morality, and without faith in a reward beyond it for our conduct in this brief life, the idea that one’s life and actions (and especially one’s efforts and sufferings) are meaningful becomes inestimably more difficult to accept.
This also gets tricky. For millions and millions of men and women [and even children] it matters not what is able to be demonstrated as in fact true. It matters only that one believes that it is true. Not only that but increasingly we live in a world where meaning and purpose themselves are becoming more and more moot. Instead, the new equivalent of God and ideology is 1] pop culture 2] mindless consumption and 3] celebrity.
The result is nihilism: a renunciation not only of religious belief but also of the sustaining convictions of antiquity that the continued flourishing of the community to which one belonged might supply a suitable end for one’s action.
Again, for millions of TikTokers and other "social media" denizens, who cares? Give them reality TV, gadgets, and all the latest "things" and those who own and operate whatever your own particular rendition of the "deep state" is, just carry on with "business as usual".

Indeed, of late, look at what we ourselves here have reconfigured into.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
The case can certainly be made that this strain of nihilism [above] has spread, and one can appreciate that this mass renunciation of inherited values was already underway in Nietzsche’s time – as he recognised.
In Nietzsche's time in particular because he was around after capitalism and the Industrial Revolution had well over 50 years to turn the human condition itself upside down and inside out. God, we and the next world gave way to "show me the money"...here and now. Nihilism was all but inevitable as one reaction to it.

As Marvin Harris, the American anthropologist, more or less in sync with those like Karl Marx suggested, the means of production -- the economy -- was the "infrastructure" that went a long, long way toward shaping and molding a society's "social structure and culture".
Indeed, Nietzsche is one of the most astute chroniclers of this malaise and its progress. But one need only read a little of Nietzsche’s diagnoses and prognoses of this to realise that what he is describing is a more or less inevitable process, and in some way therefore independent of him.
All of this intertwined in his speculations about human relationships in a No God world. Though the extent to which he construed it all as "inevitable"...how far removed was that from the manner in which Marxists construed both historical evolution and political revolution being embedded in "dialectical materialism" and the "class struggle"?

Start here: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/qu ... each-other

Reach your own conclusions.
Nietzsche could today be identified as one spur to the Western decline in religious faith; but after reading his own writing on the subject, you might well conclude that this process would have continued anyway, without his contributions. That is to say, one might concur with a famous assertion from his notebooks (The Will to Power, Preface 2) that in the rise of nihilism, Necessity itself was at work. But the decline of humanity’s belief in transcendental values is just a preliminary. The true looming crisis on which Nietzsche trains his eyes is considerably more shattering.
Indeed, just look at the world we live in today. Fractured and fragmented in countless ways. In part because nothing has come along to replace God. Sure, various political, ideological and spiritual movements have come and gone but now, as often as not for millions. it's merely sustaining a "lifestyle" rooted in pop culture and consumption that preoccupies them. Though how "shattering" that is for each of us as individuals is still largely rooted existentially in dasein.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
No Free Will: To Power or Otherwise

The nature of the projected crisis is indicated by a conviction expressed throughout Nietzsche’s writing: his absolute unbelief in the freedom of human will.
Here we go again...

Someone claims to reject the freedom of human will. But how far does this go? Did Nietzsche argue that he did not believe in the freedom of human will because he was literally never able to opt to believe in it? Are all of the books he wrote merely but one more inherent, necessary manifestation of the only possible reality in the only possible world? Or is he like Big Mike here...a freewill determinist. We live in a determined universe but his arguments are still more rational than yours.

In other words...
Though the precise nature of his unbelief in human freedom is subject to debate, what is certain is that Nietzsche did not conceive of human beings as being in any traditional sense free agents, responsible for their actions.
Okay, is that vague enough for you? And how precise can we be in regard to pinning down what in "any traditional sense free agents are"? Free agents from the perspective of the Objectivists, the Libertarians, the Anarchists, the Communists?

Given, say, a particular context?
Our thoughts and consciousness are functions of deeper processes beyond our ken, and the freedom of our will is an illusion.
Okay, but, again, how deep? All the way? And how does the answer that any of us might give here not bump up against this:
All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.
The part many here will just "wiggle, wiggle, wiggle" out of addressing...merely asserting that their answer is the one everyone who is not a retard or a moron is obligated to accept.
There are different varieties of denial of free will, support for several of which can be found in Nietzsche’s writings, but none of them allows a notion of freedom substantial enough to grant us responsibility for our choices and actions.
Okay then, what are we to make of this in regard to the Uberman and the Last Man?

Neither one of them are really responsible for being what they are? The masters are masters only because they were "fated", "destined" to be masters? Same with the flocks of sheep?
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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"Or is he like Big Mike here...a freewill determinist. We live in a determined universe but his arguments are still more rational than yours."

Objection. Badgering the Mikeness.

this is a false dilemma, Biggs. nice try tho. choosing or not to believe something is quite another matter than how rational that belief might be.

and both A and B can be 'determined' to believe what they believe while one belief is still much more rational than the other.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
The first [variety of denial of free will] notes simply that we cannot possibly be responsible for who we are, because we have no say in our makeup. We aren’t responsible for our genes, biology, biochemistry, brain function, or the formative environment in which we are born and grow.
Okay, but, come on, given the actual existence of free will [and, let's face it, discussing this is always problematic...even surreal], we know that, given the either/or world as it is objectively and the fact that much of it is beyond our control, there are still any number of things that are in fact within our capacity to leave the same or to change. And to the extent that we can effectuate some measure of rule, reign and restraint over our behaviors, is the extent to which it seems reasonable to hold ourselves responsible. I only note that this "rule, reign and restraint" are often [existentially] manifestations of dasein. That, in other words, had our lives been different, we might be ruling, reigning over or restraining entirely different behaviors.
As these factors are so profound, go so deeply into making us the kind of person we are, with the desires and thought-processes that we have, we cannot realistically be said to be responsible for our choices and actions.
The same thing. What particular behaviors chosen in what particular set of circumstances? The factors can be profound but they can also be realistically accounted for as more rather than less thought out. Again, given some measure of free will.
Galen Strawson believes this to be Nietzsche’s position, and he subscribes to the same stance. He sums up the point by saying that we cannot create ourselves. Illustrating this, the world’s most famous long-term developmental study, the Dunedin Study, has shown how, controlling for variables such as social class, poor impulse control in childhood is the most reliable predictor of poor outcomes in health, wealth and crime in adulthood. The study notes that current research emphasises how genetic factors and brain function play quite significant roles in impulse control – and both are naturally outside of the control of a subject who did not create himself.
Great. Another "study". And what study has ever been propounded that did not start with one set of assumptions about the human condition rather than another in regard to such things as health, wealth and crime. The Leopold and Loeb Syndrome. Lots of Nietzsche there, right?

"...two brilliant teenagers intent on demonstrating their Nietzschean superiority over the masses."

Only, again, how far to take it? In a wholly determined universe as some understand it, all they were doing was only what they could never have not done in the first place. They may have been brilliant but they had absolutely no capacity to not be anything other than what the laws of matter compelled them to be.

Then back to this:
All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.
Given "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" of course.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
The second related but subtly different conception of our lack of freedom rests on the Nietzschean assertion that the body is the self. In other words, physiological processes (dimly understood though they are) contain or define the whole of the human person.
Spot the key point here? Of course: "dimly understood though they are". And that's always my point, isn't it? We grapple to understand our own measure of autonomy given the staggering gap between what we profess to know about anything at all and how that fits into what we know very, very, very, very little about regarding the existence of existence itself.

Thus: the whole of the human person?!!
On this view, consciousness is merely a function of biological processes beyond our control. This contention could also find support in some recent research. For instance, experimental evidence lends support to the idea that the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii may inhibit risk-aversion in its host. In other words, playing host to this parasite makes people significantly more disposed to taking risks.
And, yes, how utterly fascinating yet entirely perplexing this sort of thing can be. It's akin to all the other maladies our brains can be afflicted with: dementia, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, autism. All the bizarre conditions explored by those like Oliver Sacks.

In other words, all that we still do not understand about the brain chemically and neurologically. For me, in particular, the part that revolves around dreams. The way the brain itself creates "realities" "in our head" that we experience as though in the waking world but utterly beyond our control.
Much more banal is the increasing evidence that gut bacteria play a role in the regulation of mood, and determine our cravings for food. This research into our physiology seems to erode the possibility of free will. The bacteria or parasites to which we play host determine our moods and behaviour, and so our beliefs and lives, even while we cherish the idea that we ourselves determine our fates. Recent research has even suggested that the great marker of our humanity, consciousness, might be the result of the long-ago binding of the genetic code of the Arc virus into the human genome.
Over and again: what to make of this? The moods that we flit from and the behaviors that we choose [over time] regulated and/or determined by "gut bacteria"?!

By the Arc virus? https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... the-brain/

All of these [still mysterious] chemical and neurological interactions unfolding in our brain...and yet here most of us just shrugging that aside and insisting "I make all of my own decision!"
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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personal responsibility is one thing...

altered mental states quite another...

the devil made me do it, or the prescription the doctor gave me, or that little drink...

-Imp
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Impenitent wrote: Sat Jan 07, 2023 6:59 pm personal responsibility is one thing...

altered mental states quite another...

the devil made me do it, or the prescription the doctor gave me, or that little drink...

-Imp
Right, like given the behaviors that you choose, your own understanding of Arc viruses and gut bacteria and chemical/neurological interactions in your brain are considerably less "dimly understood" by you.

And then the part I come around to here in regard to Nietzsche's "No God" world. That one may well be fully autonomous in taking responsibility for choosing an abortion, but that even if "somehow" free will is embodied in the human brain, there does not appear to be a way to determine if abortion itself is objectively moral or immoral.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
The final and strongest position undermining human freedom could be termed ‘cosmic determinism’. The argument starts with the premises that every physical effect must have a physical cause, and that we humans, being physical, are subject to this rule. We cannot be exempted from the chains of cause and effect in the material world. Therefore, everything we do or think is the result of prior physical causes, themselves the effects of still earlier causes back to the beginning of time.
Two words:

1] human
2] brain

Then "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule".

How to even begin to explain the grand canyon that clearly exists between matter in a rock and matter in the human brain. And we are all stuck here, of course. It's just that some will admit it and others won't. Some will actually go on and on and on pontificating about free will, determinism and compatibilism as though what they believe about them in their own brain really is as indisputable as 1 + 1 = 2.
This is a deeply materialistic form of determinism, and it is perhaps the form which has traditionally most troubled philosophy. I happen to believe that Nietzsche subscribes to this last and strongest form. Despite his distaste for the vulgar ‘mechanistic’ vision of the cosmos that it entails and his criticisms of the very notions of cause and effect, he is ultimately a cosmic determinist.
Okay, imagine you're Nietzsche. Imagine you do believe in this "deeply materialistic form of determinism". There you are penning your aphorisms about God and the Uberman. And all the while you're thinking, "I could never have not written what I am now writing. Absolutely everything that I think, feel, say and do, I think, feel, say and do in the only possible reality in the only possible world."

But then it dawns on you: "Now, how do I actually demonstrate this?"

And how is it any different for us?

Which brings me to what I call the "free will determinists" here. They argue that we have no free will. Yet still insist that those who don't agree with their own understanding of it are wrong. As wrong as those who do embrace free will would put it.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.

Freedom is Dead and We Have Killed It

Let us assume that one of the following two situations obtains at some not-too-distant point in the future: either that definitive scientific proof is provided of the unreality of human choice or that although conclusive proof of this unreality is not yet attained, the balance of evidence suggests it.
What this points to for some however is just how surreal all of this is. Suppose the opposite occurs. One day it is announced that the scientific community is all in agreement that this...

All of this going back to how the matter we call the human brain was "somehow" able to acquire autonomy when non-living matter "somehow" became living matter "somehow" became conscious matter "somehow" became self-conscious matter.

...has been cracked. The human species has acquired some measure of autonomy. On the other hand, that, in and of itself, might just be but another inherent manifestation of a wholly determined universe...the only possible reality.

But how to wrap our heads around human brains discovering that which human brains could never have not discovered: that we really are just nature's dominoes toppling over onto each other on cue.
In either scenario, the ideas of human freedom and moral responsibility must be renounced by any honest and thoughtful individual who weighs the evidence.
Again: weighs the evidence only as it ever could have been weighed because human honesty and thoughtfulness themselves are no less psychological illusions.

Same with this...
Imagine next that this becomes the conventional wisdom, spreading irresistibly until the idea has taken hold of humanity, compelling a new and unprecedented reckoning with our nature.
Again, what am I missing? It's as though the author here is suggesting a wholly determined "human condition" but is still asking us to imagine things just as a libertarian might? The whole point is that the "reckoning" is compelled.

So, sure, I'm thinking, "it must be me...I'm just not getting his point". When his point [to me] seems to be that I was never able to freely opt to get it.

Then just more of the same...
Only in imagining this has one begun to contemplate the crisis which Nietzsche predicts, and with which he envisages his name being associated. A world in which deterministic ideas have become moral principles, really believed in and lived by the vast majority of humankind, defines the dimensions of the Nietzschean crisis.
A "crisis" that could never have been otherwise? How to encompass human brains discussing a crisis when the brains themselves could never have not discussed it other than as they are compelled to by the immutable laws of matter. Then me necessarily typing these words and you necessarily reading them.
Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal responsibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would ultimately destroy itself.
Same thing. A conviction that could have not been a conviction. Concepts that could never have been otherwise. Responsibility that is no less a psychological illusion "somehow" built into the human brain when matter acquired life here on planet Earth. Reasons that are neither good nor bad when all reasons are only as they must be.

Ultimate destruction only because there was never the possibility of no destruction. Just as ultimately Mary aborts Jane because there could never be a reality where she didn't.
What then is to be done if humankind is to survive passing into this Nietzschean era where belief in the freedom of the will has been renounced?
What then is to be done?!!! Exactly as the libertarian would put it, right?
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
The Future of Philosophy

There is no doubt that the renunciation of the idea of freedom would represent an irreversible debasement of humanity as traditionally understood, inducing a kind of vertigo in our species. That such a renunciation might be inevitable, and belief in freedom irrecoverable, is however not at all difficult to imagine. How might a person orient themselves in this vertiginous climate?
Again, however, how far is he going with Nietzsche and determinism?

To wit...

"Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal responsibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would ultimately destroy itself."

Think this through as I do...

If we cannot be held accountable for our actions, and our actions are a result of what we think and feel, then how is the task confronting humanity not the same thing? We carry out the task but we are not accountable -- responsible -- for doing that either. And did the author and Nietzsche bring determinism all the way back to themselves? The author wrote this article and Nietzsche wrote those aphorisms only because they were never able not to? And we are reading them because we were never able not to?

The quandary at the heart of it all?
It must first be said that, despair-inducing though this future scenario might seem, it is likely also, after some period of adjustment, to be a spur to liberation – from responsibility, from hierarchy, and from fear.
Yeah, it can always work both ways. Despair because we must. But because we must despair it comes back to the illusion of despair. The matter that is my brain compels me to despair. But it's all embedded in the mystery of my mind itself. I despair in my dreams. It's all a chemical and a neurological despair. I'm sound asleep, not really feeling despair at all as I might in the waking world. But what of that despair in the waking world? Is that too all just the brain doing its thing in a wholly, totally inevitable world?

That's the part I can never untangle in my head. That's the part I can never be absolutely certain is a bona fide option for me.
Unafraid, more willing to wager the self on an action, in this future many human beings will come by default into possession of those Nietzschean virtues of daring and honesty that mark them as ascending types. That no attitude or action will be accounted their own choice, or worthy of praise or merit, will only sharpen the sense of fearlessness and commitment.
Again, the part where the author imagines this somehow in sync with a world "where human beings cannot realistically be held accountable for their actions"...a world where "no longer would blame or merit be possible."

Okay, an individual becomes one of the Übermensch...or an individual becomes one of the Last Men. So what? He can no longer embrace the merit of one or accept the blame for the other because merit and blame themselves are but inherent manifestations of the only possible world.
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Re: Nietzsche’s Hammer

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Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
Under these conditions [above], the appropriate conception of life would be that of a game: a grand, ongoing, purposeless and all-encompassing piece of play, each person with no more agency than a cast die or caroming billiard ball. The cosmos as a game was a metaphor of which Nietzsche himself was fond. Seeing the cosmos as a game is precisely the kind of god’s-eye view appropriate to the philosopher, who looks down on creation from a standpoint beyond good and evil.
Yeah, that is basically the frame of mind that any number the sociopaths embody in their own day to day interactions with others. The "what's in it for me?" game in which others are just a means to that end. And it's beyond good and evil precisely because "in the absence of God all things are permitted." Providing, of course, you don't get caught. But that's human justice. You might get tossed in jail. God and religion are then embraced in order to raise the stakes. Only even the sociopaths are as well wholly in sync with the only possible reality?

On the other hand, Nietzsche is often connected [philosophically or otherwise] to the Overman mentality. And here one chooses one's behaviors with considerably more deliberation...sophistication. You are on the top and not the bottom because you deserve to be. You triumph because you are among the "masters of the universe". It may be a game, but you are entitled to make up [and then enforce] the rules.

But then back to the part where Nietzsche is said to be...a determinist?
The idea, along with the thought that not truth but illusion sustains life, is prominent in Nietzsche’s early, unpublished writings from the 1870s (for example in the essay ‘Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks’ and the abandoned Philosophenbuch). Both sentiments also recur prominently in Nietzsche’s mature work, Beyond Good and Evil, which he calls ‘A prelude to a philosophy of the future’.
Or is this just one more attempt to make Nietzsche a compatibilist? The illusion of free will sustains life. But somehow Nietzsche's own philosophy -- his own thinking -- is still more insightful than those who refuse to share it. How then is that explained?
It is less of a surprise than one might think that in ruminating on the philosopher’s possible role in the future freedom-free world, Nietzsche, the great anti-Christian, holds in high regard the most genuinely religious nature – the committed mythmaking instinct of the religious leader or founder. It is even less surprising that, against the traditional picture, the future philosopher is no slave to or even servant of truth, and is instead closer to the artist.
The philosopher. The artist. The atheist. The myth-making religionist. And all while interacting with others in a "freedom-free world".

Or is this all really about word games? Making words mean what you want them to mean [in your head] so that they all fit snuggly into your own "thought up" "objective" assessment of both Nietzsche and the human condition itself? Past, present and future?

Then for all practical purposes whatever this means:
The future philosopher must move in a world where the deadliest knowledge has been disseminated and accepted; he is no longer the repository of dangerous or unendurable wisdom he traditionally was. He will be, says Nietzsche, a tempter and experimenter among humankind – and how indeed could he be otherwise, when the game is all?
The "no free will" game. He'll move in the world...he'll be a tempter and experimenter. He'll do all of this while wholly in sync with the laws of matter...but not really. Only some of us are still rather confused regarding how exactly this "not really" works.
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