The thesis seems well addressed as academic work on history and philosophy. It does seem to have reached and twisted to place ideas and intentions where they didn't originally exist.
Where I found your answer perhaps wanting was towards the end, even if I was still agreeing with everything said, good points were still being made. The broader critique seems... insufficiently broad. The thesis could be said to fail as an academic work on history, and even "Vitalism" might fail as an ideology or doctrine through which to pursue politics or human excellence. But there's a more charitable way to read all of this.
It may not have been his intention all along, Dr Alamariu may have wanted to lead a kind of movement within history scholarship at one point, but even if that's so, it also seems likely that he intended for his work to have an element of performance to it even then. Intended to shock people with ideas, as much as facts. A proposition on history, even if factually "wrong", can have power.
What is being proposed, specifically, does not seem to have power. "Vitalism" treated as a doctrine or ideology in accordance with this thesis is stupid and politically impotent. But 'Vitalism' as a vague suggestion made through a series of flamboyant and attention grabbing performances has potential. As you've said, power is a large machine made up of an enormous number of people. Several of those people have now heard of Dr Alamariu. Some of them now have ideas in their head about higher men of the past who may have been "vitalists". Something about wolves. A general sense that they should be ashamed of the way they live.
Vitalism is a meme. It touches people and spreads. That seems to be Dr Alamariu's project now. This thesis may have been a historian's work at some point, and it *can* still be read as such. but it's clear that *now* it's been wheeled back out to serve the meme. Critiquing the thesis as a thesis is perfectly good and fine work, and I enjoyed reading that. But if you're expanding to a broader critique of "BAPism" I think that, unfortunately, we can't really say too much that's definitive. Which I think is deliberate. I personally HATE this about the man, but that's how memes are. This tactical advance and retreat game he plays between postures of serious work and shapeless performance is obnoxious but allows him to imbue a broad and shallow collection of ideas with enormous potential energy and reach. It's a trade off. He *does* have a limited capacity for deep impact due to all that you've described, but we are simply not a deep society anymore. What you've written here is probably the deepest serious response Dr Alamariu is ever going to receive. Maybe if he really wanted to he could put up a better fight in this field for specific ideas, but it really seems to me that the particulars don't matter to him anymore. That's not where the fight is. All of his work now serves the same function as a /pol/ infographic. He wants to shock the system with REDPILL impacts. To harness energy and inject it violently into the salvageable human elements of the first world which are in contact with power. To spiritually grab the shoulders of white nerds in silicon valley and government and say "FAGGOT. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS? IS THIS HOW MEN ARE MEANT TO BE?" The "Dissident Right" *is* done. What I see playing out here is more like a conversion program. Hearts and minds, with no real plan beyond that as far as I can see.
The government and industry are occupied by and made up of humans. Many of whom now "know" that aristocrats used to be wolves and that Plato was a eugenicist. What can you do with that? If nothing else they might pay for your podcast and boost your engagement.
I *really* appreciate the work you put into this and don't at all mean to be dismissive of the value of engaging with ideas *as* ideas. These issues *do* have to be addressed at some point. It's important for thinking people to understand that Dr Alamariu does not actually have all the answers we need. Even if he may have some useful force behind him.
Thank you for the serious work, I enjoyed reading this.
" To harness energy and inject it violently into the salvageable human elements of the first world which are in contact with power. To spiritually grab the shoulders of white nerds in silicon valley and government "
Shopping and pandering to 'white' nerds - like Spook Moldbread - and government, the irredeemable herd self-anointed of said Longhouse, will only embolden the 5th columnist idiocracy gerontocrat pinkos, thinking themselves the 'ethical prometheans' alluded to. "On The Present Age" from Kierkegaard delimits this insouciance, and Łobaczewski's "Political Ponerology" its pathological dynamo. Sharing links and physique posting isn't getting anyone out of this-- the conditions of political exit which historically have given rise to phusis remain predicated on an Open Frontier. If there is a world historic cause to bemoan Baby Boomers, it is their presiding over the miscarriage of the Space Race in favor of migrant hordes and acceding to Soviet Active measures. A Mannerbund out in wild space claiming a planet to practice 'good breeding' will return in short order like unto gods with breakaway technology and IQ gains. The last frontier must be pried open-- this is the object of the great effort and it must be articulated beyond "you go to wine bar with gf, you are GAY!"
You know, I'm actually glad that he finally produced a serious piece of work, rather than some low-IQ version of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but it just seems like breeding fetishism. A bit decadent and deranged, this is the kind of stuff women would write in their diaries a decade ago. Vitalism is a spirit, an art, a current, an inner fire... it is not "going out and impregnating the ho's." It is a core that one holds within, and a spirit of the age that transcends the material realm. Alamariu misunderstands Nietzsche, twisting his writing to wax poetic about his breeding fetish. See here:
“move beyond the strictures and absolute rule of ancestral nomos, beyond the primitive “rule of elders” that characterizes all early society, and that, again, seemingly provides no “out” from within.“
This seems to be exactly what happened in Germany, as the Reiks class of Indo-European clan patriarchs was deposed by brotherhoods of warrior-youth who became wealthy by plundering Rome. These brotherhoods proclaimed kings, the Germanic king being a form of secular and mobile ruler whose legitimacy rested on the personal loyalty of warriors rather than the sacral-familial legitimacy of the Aryan patriarch. We don’t see these bands of pirates in the sagas, because by this point they had become the established and mostly settled nobility; the notion of the berserkr as outlaw in Snorri’s time comes from their greater settlement as a ruling class. Kveldulf and Egil were both “berserkrs” in the old style, but the word had specifically come to mean the outlaw. Perhaps the Reiks used to call the warbands that took their status this nearly a thousand years earlier- a similar situation exists with the Latin “militibus sylvanus”, a medieval euphemism for bandit.
Of course, the king’s authority resting on the personal support of bloodthirsty warriors was an unstable situation and led to constant internal strife; this is where Alamariu and I diverge. Successful kings reintroduced nomos and sacral sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen their rule and strengthen elite cooperation, which made them more effective in external warfare. We can acknowledge the origins of aristocracy without considering their “nature” or original state to be an ideal state. An athlete is both born and trained- nomos represents a training regimen. History is a team sport moreover, and nomos becomes necessary to make an elite cooperative and militarily effective. The Renaissance tyrant that Alamariu loves could barely hold a single city in his hands- the individually less virtuosic but superior in cooperation German and French nobility made Italy the teleological object of history rather than the subject. Rule from the castle and the tent made rule from the city tower obsolete.
Nietzsche, in a passage cited by BAP, says that a people is nature’s roundabout way of arriving at 5 or 6 great specimens. I wonder if part of Alamariu’s confusion is the failure to recognize, as Nietzsche did, that even *if* those specimens are the meaning and justification of a people, there is a great deal of work -- centuries in fact -- to be done in preparing for them, work which involves the “ordinary” tasks of political administration, hierarchy, etc. Large swathes of Will To Power are concerned with the *virtues* of obedience, even among aristocrats. In many places, Nietzsche labels reverence and obedience as distinctly aristocratic qualities as opposed to the leveling instincts of the masses. Perhaps the “great specimen” is an anarch, but his predecessors can’t be. *They* have to build the inheritance which the great man disposes (in both senses of the term). There can be no aesthetic glory to Romantic rebellion unless there’s first a strong binding culture of taboos, prohibitions, strictures: “What is crucial is that there should be long obedience in one direction.” Hence, Nietzsche’s political ideal isn’t the mannerbund or even ancient Athens, but the Roman Empire, which he values precisely because it is durable.
I have only started, so I might not know all. But I think Alamarian esoteric view of philosophy(same as theology) is basically deducing logistikon to epithymetikon, the highest, the spiritual, to the most carnal and base matter which he calls "nature". It's profundly profane and dull, dispite all his pretension of devotion to arête or excellence. The esoteric generally means hidden knowledge beneath the graspable surface , yet here in Alamariu, the nature and purpose of Seven Heavens(as in Timaeus) and the tripatite soul(Phaedrus) are the exoteric veil for the deepest arcana...biology production. What does he think are the beliefs of the historical aristocrats - do they regarded piety as tool for a regime of a superior kind like he does, or their actually BREEDING, thoughts and manners down to minitiae are encompassed by it? I will quote medievalist Bernard Guenée's study on public opinion during the reign of Charles VI, when more than one-quarter of over 100 processions in Paris sought peace between warring princes of the realm. ‘Politics does not seem to “use” religion, [politics] still seems to be completely immersed within it.’ Alamariu's allure to Delicious Taco and Med "rise the fuck-rate" Gold type is not exactly strange.
Although the criticism is better than others I've read, it still severely misses the mark, and strawmans Alamariu's work for an 18 year old boy's understanding of Nietzsche. The main issue is that the author is reading “physis good, nomos bad” morality into Alamariu (and later of master morality good, slave morality bad into Nietzsche). The central point of the thesis is under what conditions great men who advance the arts, science, philosophy are produced and that the same traits that breed such men also produce tyrants. Alamariu (and Nietzsche, so I will omit N’s name from now on) claims that first, an aristocratic high culture is required with its own strong nomos (judgements of good and bad) that perpetuate the traits they desire. Then, during a period of aristocratic decay, when this nomos is weakened, the excellent specimens are released to flourish.
Morrison states Alamariu’s equivalence of political decadence with the conditions for the proliferation of “monstrous” types who become liberated from convention and “acquire a taste for transgression, a boredom with the law,” fails to hold in many crucial cases.” Of course, entirely overlooking the preconditions necessary for such a thing. European aristocracy has been bred based on marriages of mutual alliances for a long time (Christianity’s role in this is unnecessary to mention), unlike the ancient Greeks for whom the king set his own explicitly physical eugenic Agon to determine a suitor for his daughters. The ancient customs must be slackened for such a flourishing to occur. That the Greeks were so excellent and European explosions of physis have been underwhelming ever since while Sparta because a producer of great men while not accomplishing anything artistic is a strong confirmation of Almariu’s thesis that strong nomos producing strong blood is necessary but not sufficient for greatness.
This passage on Nietzsche is very revealing in just how incapable Morrison is in understanding the vitalist argument: “But Nietzsche engages in the same Socratic conceit when he insists that slave morality and priestly morality is the renunciation of the will to power. In other words, the ascetic and the slave are not really exercising any power according to their station or capabilities, they are simply resentful and malformed individuals.” Nietzsche never says this, slave morality is explicitly the will to power of the masses and malformed i.e slaves to overcome the strong i.e masters. There are no moral judgements of good and evil associated with it, only psychological judgements. With such a terrible understanding of Nietzsche, one must wonder if this man is biologically incapable of understanding such arguments, as the vitalists might say.
Fundamentally, Morrison fails to demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the core arguments presented in Alamariu’s thesis, reflected in his lack of understanding of Nietzsche. The failure to recognize this central feature of the argument: that the disorganized, chaotic mass of humanity (Dionysian?) must be martialled by strong but arbitrary and fleeting customs (Apollonian?) in order to produce superior specimen in the human race and ONLY THEN, when the (Apollonian) nomos fails to encamp sufficiently against the masses of humanity do these superior specimen have the breathing space to create their own (Apollonian) nomos and elevate humanity yet further (according to the Alamariu). This new nomos then repeats the evolution. In other words, human evolution IS INCREDIBLY DEPENDENT on sociological factors in both Alamariu and Nietasche’s view which cannot be disposed of, even if they are ultimately somewhat arbitrary.
I used to wonder why philosophy used to be considered so dangerous to the Greeks in that it was an exhortation to violent action, while nowadays it produces anomie. The fact that Alamariu directly answered my question in his thesis is something I give him a lot of credit for.
"What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome."
ch.6:
"I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”—and it is possible that I’ll have to write it—would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names."
ch.17:
"Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence. The divinity of this décadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call themselves “the good.”"
In short: slave morality is a retardant for the will-to-power. At various points Nietzsche makes an exception for priests who, as it were, are exercising a sort of power by depriving others of it through their moral teachings -- but the theory as a whole is ambiguous as with everything Nietzschean, and to deny that slave morality is associated with the renunciation of the will-to-power is to completely trivialize the idea -- the will-to-power *is* supposed to have a normative-prescriptive dimension, not simply a descriptive one.
> There are no moral judgements of good and evil associated with it, only psychological judgements
Replacing the words "good" and "evil" with "healthy" and "sick" does not magically extinguish the fact that it's a prescriptive and normative valuation. The concept of disease is necessarily juxtaposed to an ideal of proper function.
> That the Greeks were so excellent and European explosions of physis have been underwhelming ever since
Quite the remarkable statement to make that the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, among other things, are "underwhelming explosions of physis."
> European aristocracy has been bred based on marriages of mutual alliances for a long time (Christianity’s role in this is unnecessary to mention), unlike the ancient Greeks for whom the king set his own explicitly physical eugenic Agon to determine a suitor for his daughters.
Given that the former produced what it did, the moral of the story is that good genes are good genes, for which a closed breeding pool of people with advantageous life outcomes and high differential fertility is both necessary and sufficient. The "physical agon" or whatever other gimmicks one might think of are neo-Lamarckian nonsense.
Concerning the “will to power” of slave morality. While you are right to call slave morality a retardant of the will to power in the individual, it is the subsuming of the individual and a collective will to power enabling slaves to overthrow their masters which is the important part as it provides an explanation for why slave morality is attractive in the first place. The “tarantulas” poisoned with vengeance see themselves as weak but able to inflict devastating bites on those more powerful individuals through their moral system.
>Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, here is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence.
This is in relationship to the re-evaluation of God as the “merely good”. From a God of the nation expressing outwards power to a more universalist concept of good. Alamariu (henceforth A) claims that the decline in physiology occurs if, given the freedom that comes with declining aristocracy, no better nomos (art, philosophy, etc) is created to produce mean specimens of superior specimens (shifting the “distribution of phusis” to the right, so to speak).
>Replacing the words "good" and "evil" with "healthy" and "sick" does not magically extinguish the fact that it's a prescriptive and normative valuation. The concept of disease is necessarily juxtaposed to an ideal of proper function.
From human, all too human: “Usefulness of sickliness. – He who is often sick does not only have a much greater enjoyment of health on account of the frequency with which he gets well: he also has a greatly enhanced sense of what is healthy and what sick in works and actions, his own and those of others: so that it is precisely the sickliest writers, for example – and almost all the great writers are, unfortunately, among them – who usually evidence in their writings a much steadier and more certain tone of health, because they understand the philosophy of physical health and recovery better and are better acquainted with its teachers – morning, sunshine, forests and springs – than the physically robust.”
This is a very good example of the difference between “good and evil” and “healthy and sick”. Nietzsche frequently talks about how some sickness is necessary to promote the enjoyment of good health, and in fact the entire “tragic worldview” based on the tragedy as an art form promoting a little sickness which is a tonic to life. The Christian view of good and evil is rather different. No Christian would say it is necessary to sin with regular occurrence through one’s life in order to promote good values (unless as a last-ditch attempt to bring the flock back into their church), rather that such sin is inevitable and one must atone for it. I always assumed a little bit of slave morality in one’s soul played a similar role, the problem being that Christianity, in its co-option of Plato, threatened to destroy the basis of philosophy itself, as A point out.
>Quite the remarkable statement to make that the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, among other things, are "underwhelming explosions of physis."
Compared to what the ancient Greeks achieved, yes it was. Alexander conquered more than Cortez, Pizzaro and the rest of the Spaniards combined with less technology. Furthermore, the gigantic gulf between pre and post Greek culture can easily be argued as more impressive than everything from the medieval period to now. Although our science appears to have advanced a long way, the Greeks had to come up with the basis for science in the first place according to A. On the literary and philosophical front, however, Nietzsche +A would make the point that everything of importance was already noted by the Greeks.
>Given that the former produced what it did, the moral of the story is that good genes are good genes, for which a closed breeding pool of people with advantageous life outcomes and high differential fertility is both necessary and sufficient. The "physical agon" or whatever other gimmicks one might think of are neo-Lamarckian nonsense.
I know nothing about Lamarckian, but a quick reading says that “physical characteristics developed in life can be passed on”. If you are happy with this definition, then A is saying precisely the opposite: the skills learned in life pale in comparison to those inherited through breeding which cannot be developed but are innate. I am rather confused by your point here. The Agon was just a contest for revealing good physis, as A explicitly states, upon which a breeding program was established. By contrast, European nobles intermarried for the purpose of securing fortunes and alliances, a relatively dysgenic mating procedure by contrast.
Overall, the real problem is that you have read, but only semi-comprehended A+ Nietzsche’s work and end up constructing strawmans or hitting targets far removed from the central points of the thesis. The only time you directly attack a core feature of A’s work is in “2e. The erromenesteroi in Gorgias and the turannos eros” but here you state
>It seems that Dr. Alamariu is a victim of his own stark dichotomy between nature and convention, that he has to equate nature with emancipation from convention. This could only work if we blithely assume that conventions have no coterminous overlap with nature.
Which perfectly describes the strawman you have constructed. Are N’s ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian a stark dichotomy, emancipated from one another, and mutually antagonistic only? It is impossible to read Birth of Tragedy and not also understand that they are just as much mutually reinforcing. It is similarly so between nature and convention. A’s belabours this point, since it is the breakdown of nomos that allows the erromenesteroi the space to create effectively a new nomos which “shifts the phusis distribution to the right” in plain statistical terms. This continued destruction and recreation is necessary for human advancement. Plato’s project is then, according to A, a sublimation of this idea with the intent that these ideas can be grafted onto any zeitgeist and enable to the continual advancement of humanity through the production of superior men for the rest of time. The imperfections regarding Christianity and Plato’s contemporary moralizing are delt with later in A’s thesis where he states that Nietzsche is the unveiling and correction of such a project.
> While you are right to call slave morality a retardant of the will to power in the individual, it is the subsuming of the individual and a collective will to power enabling slaves to overthrow their masters which is the important part as it provides an explanation for why slave morality is attractive in the first place.
It is a trivial fact that power is concentrated and magnified by the mobilization of groups and collectives; any theory that doesn't put central emphasis on this is highly incomplete.
> From a God of the nation expressing outwards power to a more universalist concept of good.
The two have coexisted at a very early stage: take the traditional titles of Zeus as Hikesios and Xenios (protector of supplicants and strangers, respectively) attested in the Odyssey and in Archaic Greek inscriptions dating back potentially to the 7th century BC. In any case, I can hardly see how such generic ideal types can be the basis of grand historical narratives.
> the decline in physiology occurs if, given the freedom that comes with declining aristocracy, no better nomos (art, philosophy, etc) is created to produce mean specimens of superior specimens (shifting the “distribution of phusis” to the right, so to speak).
This is tautologically true for any meaningful notion of decline. At this point we have little better than word games.
> Nietzsche frequently talks about how some sickness is necessary to promote the enjoyment of good health, and in fact the entire “tragic worldview” based on the tragedy as an art form promoting a little sickness which is a tonic to life.
This means that sickness has a secondary utility in emphasizing the value of health, just as, for instance, losing your right arm accentuates the true value of what you've just lost as compared to when you simply took it for granted. In of itself, this is an utter triviality -- and more to the point, it does not change the fact that healthy/sick takes the place of good/evil, that health is better than sickness, and that health is a physiological standard of value with ethical implications for right conduct and what the ideal man ought to be.
Or are you seriously suggesting that Nietzsche is such a consistent amoralist he puts health and sickness on an equal level? Of course not. Nietzsche very self-consciously and explicitly wanted to create a new morality (or "post-morality") founded on natural-scientific and physiological judgments. Witness his criticism of Christianity in the Nachlass 15[110] (http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/notebooks/german/nache/nache15.htm):
"Damit daß das Christenthum die Lehre von der Uneigennützigkeit und Liebe in den Vordergrund gerückt hat, hat es durchaus noch nicht das Gattungs-Interesse für höherwerthig angesetzt als das Individual-Interesse. Seine eigentlich historische Wirkung, das Verhängniß von Wirkung bleibt umgekehrt gerade die Steigerung des Egoismus, des Individual-Egoismus bis ins Extrem (—bis zum Extrem der Individual-Unsterblichkeit.) Der Einzelne wurde durch das Christenthum so wichtig genommen, so absolut gesetzt daß man ihn nicht mehr opfern konnte: aber die Gattung besteht nur durch Menschenopfer"
(While Christianity has brought the doctrine of unselfishness and love to the fore, it has not yet considered the interest of the species to be of higher value than the interest of the individual. Conversely, its actual historical effect, the fate of effect, remains precisely the increase of egoism, of individual egoism to the extreme (—to the extreme of individual immortality.) The individual was taken so seriously by Christianity, made so absolute that one could no longer sacrifice him: but the species only exists through human sacrifice.)
GATTUNGS-Interesse -- interest of the SPECIES.
"Setzt man die Einzelnen gleich, so stellt man die Gattung in Frage, so begünstigt man eine Praxis, welche auf den Ruin der Gattung hinausläuft: das Christenthum ist das Gegenprincip gegen die Selektion."
(If you equate individuals, you question the species, you encourage a practice that leads to the ruin of the species: Christianity is the anti-selection principle.)
The Nietzschean project, fundamentally, was about creating a species-morality. However he lost his mental faculties before he could publish his intended final book "The Transvaluation of All Values," hence leaving only the incomplete and confused fragments of his philosophy we now have. Some like Alexander Tille realized this early on and basically "completed" what Nietzsche couldn't.
> Although our science appears to have advanced a long way, the Greeks had to come up with the basis for science in the first place according to A
No kidding the first mover will always have the special distinction. The implication of this is absolutely facile: given the cumulative nature of knowledge, we would effectively have to rank all later contributors as inferior because they build on existing foundations instead of making the initial leap from pre-philosophy to philosophy. Are we to seriously believe therefore that Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift was an inferior intellectual achievement relative to Thales' initial birthing of philosophical inquiry in general?
> The Agon was just a contest for revealing good physis, as A explicitly states, upon which a breeding program was established
Alamariu never gives any specifics about what a breeding program looked like.
> A’s belabours this point, since it is the breakdown of nomos that allows the erromenesteroi the space to create effectively a new nomos which “shifts the phusis distribution to the right” in plain statistical terms. This continued destruction and recreation is necessary for human advancement.
No. Alamariu explicitly distinguishes it from nomos, calling it a politeia -- supposedly an artistic project by a nomothetic tyrant-lawgiver, to be distinguished from nomos, which always has derogatory connotations of tribal custom. Alamariu actually never explicitly theorizes the crucial distinction between "aristocratic convention" (as a nomos) and post-conventional aristocratic radicalism; he merely mentions it obliquely but it's never discussed in any specifics. Otherwise by nomos Alamariu understands something completely antithetical to nature on a fundamental level. That is not a "strawman" I have constructed; that is Alamariu's theory. What you're doing is engaging in a rear guard action to rescue it. Even if you do, we just have a boring, uninteresting and uninsightful theory.
>It is a trivial fact that power is concentrated and magnified by the mobilization of groups and collectives; any theory that doesn't put central emphasis on this is highly incomplete.
Your point above is indeed trivially obvious, but not relevant to the distinction between master and slave morality. A clear distinction between the two is the feelings of emboldening of individual power or individual weakness, both of which can increase collective power. The tarantula is absolutely exercising power yet feels weak. When the values of oppressor/oppressed and equality are these are telltale signs you are living under a slave morality. So let me grant you your initial opinion on this matter and move on.
> The two have coexisted at a very early stage: take the traditional titles of Zeus as Hikesios and Xenios (protector of supplicants and strangers, respectively) attested in the Odyssey and in Archaic Greek inscriptions dating back potentially to the 7th century BC. In any case, I can hardly see how such generic ideal types can be the basis of grand historical narratives.
I am explaining the context for your quote from ch17 of Antichrist. But this is all tangential to A’s thesis and explained in N’s Genealogy of Morals, so let’s not pursue it further.
>This is tautologically true for any meaningful notion of decline. At this point we have little better than word games.
Not at all. The Christian view would be that a slackening of Christian morals is exactly what causes decline while the enforcement of Christian morals leads to prosperity and advancement. Here, the point is made that evolution and progress requires a declining enforcement of nomos, for better or for worse.
> This means that sickness has a secondary utility in emphasizing the value of health, just as, for instance, losing your right arm accentuates the true value of what you've just lost as compared to when you simply took it for granted. In of itself, this is an utter triviality -- and more to the point, it does not change the fact that healthy/sick takes the place of good/evil, that health is better than sickness, and that health is a physiological standard of value with ethical implications for right conduct and what the ideal man ought to be.
I am of the personal (and controversial) opinion that Birth of Tragedy is absolutely the most essential Nietzsche-core and no-one can really get him until they read and understand it as pertaining to the art of tragedy (and music). Until you really grasp the tragic worldview and what Nietzsche meant by Apollonian and Dionysian, you will continue to lack understanding of N’s thought. Apollonian and Dionysian are not opposites or even on the same level. The mutual antagonism of the two, but also mutual necessity, is Nietzsche’s way of explaining the high culture of Greece. Apollo speaks with the voice of Dionysos, and maybe we can say that the Platonic project is an attempt to have nomos speak with the voice of the erromenesteroi. Although this is not explicitly stated by A I think it is a good reading of his thesis through N’s philosophy. Do you really think cutting your arm off could lead to a greater feeling of power and vitality compared to earlier, like recovering from an illness might?
> No kidding the first mover will always have the special distinction. The implication of this is absolutely facile: given the cumulative nature of knowledge, we would effectively have to rank all later contributors as inferior because they build on existing foundations instead of making the initial leap from pre-philosophy to philosophy.
Compare to your previous statement
> Quite the remarkable statement to make that the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, among other things, are "underwhelming explosions of physis."
The key is underwhelming compared to the Greeks, for which I believe there is an argument, nothing more. Compared to modern man, they were a veritable supernova of physis, sure. Again, this is opinion for the most part.
>No. Alamariu explicitly distinguishes it from nomos, calling it a politeia -- supposedly an artistic project by a nomothetic tyrant-lawgiver, to be distinguished from nomos, which always has derogatory connotations of tribal custom. Alamariu actually never explicitly theorizes the crucial distinction between "aristocratic convention" (as a nomos) and post-conventional aristocratic radicalism; he merely mentions it obliquely but it's never discussed in any specifics. Otherwise by nomos Alamariu understands something completely antithetical to nature on a fundamental level. That is not a "strawman" I have constructed; that is Alamariu's theory. What you're doing is engaging in a rear guard action to rescue it. Even if you do, we just have a boring, uninteresting and uninsightful theory.
I concede the first part of this point, A does distinguish the two: politeia is “nomos made concrete through physical force”. However, this makes the argument stronger. The advancement made by Plato’s philosophy is one of tactics: not the direct opposition of physis to nomos, but to the centres of power, the politea, the elites of the city, the erromenesteroi of the past. Opposing nomos directly leads to philosophers being persecuted and runs the risk of philosophy dying out. Indeed, A says that “on the hand to advise potential philosophers on the necessity of liberation from convention. And on the other hand it would be to do so only in the context of assuring the cities that this liberation would not encourage tyranny or injustice, or, indeed, not even make it look like a liberation.” Thus according to A, Plato encourages the erromenesteroi to speak with the voice of nomos.
This entire discussion has really underscored how important Birth of Tragedy is to an understanding of Nietzsche and being able to perceive the world through his eyes. I am convinced that most ridiculous opinions concerning his philosophy stem from ignorance of this text. The main source of all strawmans present in this response is the idea that, while nomos and nature are antithetical and often a source of hostility towards one another, there is a kind of dependence of one on the other in a very similar way to Apollonian/Dionysian. Sparta required strong nomos of breeding and training to propagate itself but could never advance beyond into a flourishing of culture like Athens because the nomos was too strong and didn’t decay. Likewise, in our modern period we are far less bound by nomos, but the human capital isn’t there due to the absence of this strict breeding program encoded in the nomos of yesteryear. You require certain combinations of both in temporal succession for culture to flourish. This, I believe, is the heart of the argument.
It is certainly not trivial, as even today we see excellent people get caught up in culture wars (nomos) when they should be adapting to the speech conventions and taking positions of power with it, in order that they might impose cultural norms for their own advantage while not believing in any of it, according to A’s view of Plato. Then, once in power, a breeding program based on PHYSICALITY and PHYSICAL competition (A is very specific: they aren’t competing for mates by playing video games or taking exams) should be established to perpetuate the ruling cast. It is exactly this focus on the physical which prevents the re-establishment of a priestly cast of conservative Christian pastors, “woke moralists” (defined as the maladjusted conglomerate of weak men and racial and sexual minorities that despise the handsome and well turned out white men that got us to the moon), climate scientists (and basically everything that passes for “science” these days), and general despisers of the body in the form of fat acceptance and trans rights activists we see today. The specific values (nomos) can be established later. There is great power and (contemporary) novelty to the political implications of such a thesis.
As you see, such a program is not boring, insightful and uninteresting. It is, according to A, a continuation of the breeding program concealed by Plato and later uncovered by Nietzsche as a racial breeding program and formula for the future advancement of man across the abyss. As much as I would love to continue discussing this topic, I feel there isn’t much more to say since I believe Birth of Tragedy ultimately gives one the right tragic perspective to really internalize what is being said (an understandable oversight, since you obviously are very well read and the text is not well emphasized).
I was about to write an entire piece against this review at the request of "Becoming Noble" before I saw this. Excellent deconstruction, thank you for saving me an evening of work.
The thesis seems well addressed as academic work on history and philosophy. It does seem to have reached and twisted to place ideas and intentions where they didn't originally exist.
Where I found your answer perhaps wanting was towards the end, even if I was still agreeing with everything said, good points were still being made. The broader critique seems... insufficiently broad. The thesis could be said to fail as an academic work on history, and even "Vitalism" might fail as an ideology or doctrine through which to pursue politics or human excellence. But there's a more charitable way to read all of this.
It may not have been his intention all along, Dr Alamariu may have wanted to lead a kind of movement within history scholarship at one point, but even if that's so, it also seems likely that he intended for his work to have an element of performance to it even then. Intended to shock people with ideas, as much as facts. A proposition on history, even if factually "wrong", can have power.
What is being proposed, specifically, does not seem to have power. "Vitalism" treated as a doctrine or ideology in accordance with this thesis is stupid and politically impotent. But 'Vitalism' as a vague suggestion made through a series of flamboyant and attention grabbing performances has potential. As you've said, power is a large machine made up of an enormous number of people. Several of those people have now heard of Dr Alamariu. Some of them now have ideas in their head about higher men of the past who may have been "vitalists". Something about wolves. A general sense that they should be ashamed of the way they live.
Vitalism is a meme. It touches people and spreads. That seems to be Dr Alamariu's project now. This thesis may have been a historian's work at some point, and it *can* still be read as such. but it's clear that *now* it's been wheeled back out to serve the meme. Critiquing the thesis as a thesis is perfectly good and fine work, and I enjoyed reading that. But if you're expanding to a broader critique of "BAPism" I think that, unfortunately, we can't really say too much that's definitive. Which I think is deliberate. I personally HATE this about the man, but that's how memes are. This tactical advance and retreat game he plays between postures of serious work and shapeless performance is obnoxious but allows him to imbue a broad and shallow collection of ideas with enormous potential energy and reach. It's a trade off. He *does* have a limited capacity for deep impact due to all that you've described, but we are simply not a deep society anymore. What you've written here is probably the deepest serious response Dr Alamariu is ever going to receive. Maybe if he really wanted to he could put up a better fight in this field for specific ideas, but it really seems to me that the particulars don't matter to him anymore. That's not where the fight is. All of his work now serves the same function as a /pol/ infographic. He wants to shock the system with REDPILL impacts. To harness energy and inject it violently into the salvageable human elements of the first world which are in contact with power. To spiritually grab the shoulders of white nerds in silicon valley and government and say "FAGGOT. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS? IS THIS HOW MEN ARE MEANT TO BE?" The "Dissident Right" *is* done. What I see playing out here is more like a conversion program. Hearts and minds, with no real plan beyond that as far as I can see.
The government and industry are occupied by and made up of humans. Many of whom now "know" that aristocrats used to be wolves and that Plato was a eugenicist. What can you do with that? If nothing else they might pay for your podcast and boost your engagement.
I *really* appreciate the work you put into this and don't at all mean to be dismissive of the value of engaging with ideas *as* ideas. These issues *do* have to be addressed at some point. It's important for thinking people to understand that Dr Alamariu does not actually have all the answers we need. Even if he may have some useful force behind him.
Thank you for the serious work, I enjoyed reading this.
" To harness energy and inject it violently into the salvageable human elements of the first world which are in contact with power. To spiritually grab the shoulders of white nerds in silicon valley and government "
Shopping and pandering to 'white' nerds - like Spook Moldbread - and government, the irredeemable herd self-anointed of said Longhouse, will only embolden the 5th columnist idiocracy gerontocrat pinkos, thinking themselves the 'ethical prometheans' alluded to. "On The Present Age" from Kierkegaard delimits this insouciance, and Łobaczewski's "Political Ponerology" its pathological dynamo. Sharing links and physique posting isn't getting anyone out of this-- the conditions of political exit which historically have given rise to phusis remain predicated on an Open Frontier. If there is a world historic cause to bemoan Baby Boomers, it is their presiding over the miscarriage of the Space Race in favor of migrant hordes and acceding to Soviet Active measures. A Mannerbund out in wild space claiming a planet to practice 'good breeding' will return in short order like unto gods with breakaway technology and IQ gains. The last frontier must be pried open-- this is the object of the great effort and it must be articulated beyond "you go to wine bar with gf, you are GAY!"
If we want space we're going to need motivated nerds.
Is that you Nigel?
You know, I'm actually glad that he finally produced a serious piece of work, rather than some low-IQ version of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but it just seems like breeding fetishism. A bit decadent and deranged, this is the kind of stuff women would write in their diaries a decade ago. Vitalism is a spirit, an art, a current, an inner fire... it is not "going out and impregnating the ho's." It is a core that one holds within, and a spirit of the age that transcends the material realm. Alamariu misunderstands Nietzsche, twisting his writing to wax poetic about his breeding fetish. See here:
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/nietzsches-last-dance
Nevertheless, it's still impressive he pulled these sales off as a self-published author. That is not something to ignore.
So should I invest in Urbit, yes or no?
27k to be able to chat with Yarvin on the internet seems like a good deal.
Only spiteful helots who engage in manual labor would disagree.
“move beyond the strictures and absolute rule of ancestral nomos, beyond the primitive “rule of elders” that characterizes all early society, and that, again, seemingly provides no “out” from within.“
This seems to be exactly what happened in Germany, as the Reiks class of Indo-European clan patriarchs was deposed by brotherhoods of warrior-youth who became wealthy by plundering Rome. These brotherhoods proclaimed kings, the Germanic king being a form of secular and mobile ruler whose legitimacy rested on the personal loyalty of warriors rather than the sacral-familial legitimacy of the Aryan patriarch. We don’t see these bands of pirates in the sagas, because by this point they had become the established and mostly settled nobility; the notion of the berserkr as outlaw in Snorri’s time comes from their greater settlement as a ruling class. Kveldulf and Egil were both “berserkrs” in the old style, but the word had specifically come to mean the outlaw. Perhaps the Reiks used to call the warbands that took their status this nearly a thousand years earlier- a similar situation exists with the Latin “militibus sylvanus”, a medieval euphemism for bandit.
Of course, the king’s authority resting on the personal support of bloodthirsty warriors was an unstable situation and led to constant internal strife; this is where Alamariu and I diverge. Successful kings reintroduced nomos and sacral sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen their rule and strengthen elite cooperation, which made them more effective in external warfare. We can acknowledge the origins of aristocracy without considering their “nature” or original state to be an ideal state. An athlete is both born and trained- nomos represents a training regimen. History is a team sport moreover, and nomos becomes necessary to make an elite cooperative and militarily effective. The Renaissance tyrant that Alamariu loves could barely hold a single city in his hands- the individually less virtuosic but superior in cooperation German and French nobility made Italy the teleological object of history rather than the subject. Rule from the castle and the tent made rule from the city tower obsolete.
Nietzsche, in a passage cited by BAP, says that a people is nature’s roundabout way of arriving at 5 or 6 great specimens. I wonder if part of Alamariu’s confusion is the failure to recognize, as Nietzsche did, that even *if* those specimens are the meaning and justification of a people, there is a great deal of work -- centuries in fact -- to be done in preparing for them, work which involves the “ordinary” tasks of political administration, hierarchy, etc. Large swathes of Will To Power are concerned with the *virtues* of obedience, even among aristocrats. In many places, Nietzsche labels reverence and obedience as distinctly aristocratic qualities as opposed to the leveling instincts of the masses. Perhaps the “great specimen” is an anarch, but his predecessors can’t be. *They* have to build the inheritance which the great man disposes (in both senses of the term). There can be no aesthetic glory to Romantic rebellion unless there’s first a strong binding culture of taboos, prohibitions, strictures: “What is crucial is that there should be long obedience in one direction.” Hence, Nietzsche’s political ideal isn’t the mannerbund or even ancient Athens, but the Roman Empire, which he values precisely because it is durable.
Are you Carlsbad?
I have only started, so I might not know all. But I think Alamarian esoteric view of philosophy(same as theology) is basically deducing logistikon to epithymetikon, the highest, the spiritual, to the most carnal and base matter which he calls "nature". It's profundly profane and dull, dispite all his pretension of devotion to arête or excellence. The esoteric generally means hidden knowledge beneath the graspable surface , yet here in Alamariu, the nature and purpose of Seven Heavens(as in Timaeus) and the tripatite soul(Phaedrus) are the exoteric veil for the deepest arcana...biology production. What does he think are the beliefs of the historical aristocrats - do they regarded piety as tool for a regime of a superior kind like he does, or their actually BREEDING, thoughts and manners down to minitiae are encompassed by it? I will quote medievalist Bernard Guenée's study on public opinion during the reign of Charles VI, when more than one-quarter of over 100 processions in Paris sought peace between warring princes of the realm. ‘Politics does not seem to “use” religion, [politics] still seems to be completely immersed within it.’ Alamariu's allure to Delicious Taco and Med "rise the fuck-rate" Gold type is not exactly strange.
No one have connected Krypteia to Männerbund yet: SAD!
As the gentleman BAP himself pointed out on Aristophanes gravestone he had engraved that he fought at Marathon, not that he was a comedian.
Perhaps the Superior Man needs to find himself a Marathon, or Plataea. An Ivy League shingle and best selling book doesn’t cut it for Aristocracy.
Although the criticism is better than others I've read, it still severely misses the mark, and strawmans Alamariu's work for an 18 year old boy's understanding of Nietzsche. The main issue is that the author is reading “physis good, nomos bad” morality into Alamariu (and later of master morality good, slave morality bad into Nietzsche). The central point of the thesis is under what conditions great men who advance the arts, science, philosophy are produced and that the same traits that breed such men also produce tyrants. Alamariu (and Nietzsche, so I will omit N’s name from now on) claims that first, an aristocratic high culture is required with its own strong nomos (judgements of good and bad) that perpetuate the traits they desire. Then, during a period of aristocratic decay, when this nomos is weakened, the excellent specimens are released to flourish.
Morrison states Alamariu’s equivalence of political decadence with the conditions for the proliferation of “monstrous” types who become liberated from convention and “acquire a taste for transgression, a boredom with the law,” fails to hold in many crucial cases.” Of course, entirely overlooking the preconditions necessary for such a thing. European aristocracy has been bred based on marriages of mutual alliances for a long time (Christianity’s role in this is unnecessary to mention), unlike the ancient Greeks for whom the king set his own explicitly physical eugenic Agon to determine a suitor for his daughters. The ancient customs must be slackened for such a flourishing to occur. That the Greeks were so excellent and European explosions of physis have been underwhelming ever since while Sparta because a producer of great men while not accomplishing anything artistic is a strong confirmation of Almariu’s thesis that strong nomos producing strong blood is necessary but not sufficient for greatness.
This passage on Nietzsche is very revealing in just how incapable Morrison is in understanding the vitalist argument: “But Nietzsche engages in the same Socratic conceit when he insists that slave morality and priestly morality is the renunciation of the will to power. In other words, the ascetic and the slave are not really exercising any power according to their station or capabilities, they are simply resentful and malformed individuals.” Nietzsche never says this, slave morality is explicitly the will to power of the masses and malformed i.e slaves to overcome the strong i.e masters. There are no moral judgements of good and evil associated with it, only psychological judgements. With such a terrible understanding of Nietzsche, one must wonder if this man is biologically incapable of understanding such arguments, as the vitalists might say.
Fundamentally, Morrison fails to demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the core arguments presented in Alamariu’s thesis, reflected in his lack of understanding of Nietzsche. The failure to recognize this central feature of the argument: that the disorganized, chaotic mass of humanity (Dionysian?) must be martialled by strong but arbitrary and fleeting customs (Apollonian?) in order to produce superior specimen in the human race and ONLY THEN, when the (Apollonian) nomos fails to encamp sufficiently against the masses of humanity do these superior specimen have the breathing space to create their own (Apollonian) nomos and elevate humanity yet further (according to the Alamariu). This new nomos then repeats the evolution. In other words, human evolution IS INCREDIBLY DEPENDENT on sociological factors in both Alamariu and Nietasche’s view which cannot be disposed of, even if they are ultimately somewhat arbitrary.
I used to wonder why philosophy used to be considered so dangerous to the Greeks in that it was an exhortation to violent action, while nowadays it produces anomie. The fact that Alamariu directly answered my question in his thesis is something I give him a lot of credit for.
> Nietzsche never says this
He absolutely does. The Antichrist ch.2:
"What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome."
ch.6:
"I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”—and it is possible that I’ll have to write it—would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names."
ch.17:
"Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence. The divinity of this décadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call themselves “the good.”"
In short: slave morality is a retardant for the will-to-power. At various points Nietzsche makes an exception for priests who, as it were, are exercising a sort of power by depriving others of it through their moral teachings -- but the theory as a whole is ambiguous as with everything Nietzschean, and to deny that slave morality is associated with the renunciation of the will-to-power is to completely trivialize the idea -- the will-to-power *is* supposed to have a normative-prescriptive dimension, not simply a descriptive one.
> There are no moral judgements of good and evil associated with it, only psychological judgements
Replacing the words "good" and "evil" with "healthy" and "sick" does not magically extinguish the fact that it's a prescriptive and normative valuation. The concept of disease is necessarily juxtaposed to an ideal of proper function.
> That the Greeks were so excellent and European explosions of physis have been underwhelming ever since
Quite the remarkable statement to make that the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, among other things, are "underwhelming explosions of physis."
> European aristocracy has been bred based on marriages of mutual alliances for a long time (Christianity’s role in this is unnecessary to mention), unlike the ancient Greeks for whom the king set his own explicitly physical eugenic Agon to determine a suitor for his daughters.
Given that the former produced what it did, the moral of the story is that good genes are good genes, for which a closed breeding pool of people with advantageous life outcomes and high differential fertility is both necessary and sufficient. The "physical agon" or whatever other gimmicks one might think of are neo-Lamarckian nonsense.
Concerning the “will to power” of slave morality. While you are right to call slave morality a retardant of the will to power in the individual, it is the subsuming of the individual and a collective will to power enabling slaves to overthrow their masters which is the important part as it provides an explanation for why slave morality is attractive in the first place. The “tarantulas” poisoned with vengeance see themselves as weak but able to inflict devastating bites on those more powerful individuals through their moral system.
>Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, here is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence.
This is in relationship to the re-evaluation of God as the “merely good”. From a God of the nation expressing outwards power to a more universalist concept of good. Alamariu (henceforth A) claims that the decline in physiology occurs if, given the freedom that comes with declining aristocracy, no better nomos (art, philosophy, etc) is created to produce mean specimens of superior specimens (shifting the “distribution of phusis” to the right, so to speak).
>Replacing the words "good" and "evil" with "healthy" and "sick" does not magically extinguish the fact that it's a prescriptive and normative valuation. The concept of disease is necessarily juxtaposed to an ideal of proper function.
From human, all too human: “Usefulness of sickliness. – He who is often sick does not only have a much greater enjoyment of health on account of the frequency with which he gets well: he also has a greatly enhanced sense of what is healthy and what sick in works and actions, his own and those of others: so that it is precisely the sickliest writers, for example – and almost all the great writers are, unfortunately, among them – who usually evidence in their writings a much steadier and more certain tone of health, because they understand the philosophy of physical health and recovery better and are better acquainted with its teachers – morning, sunshine, forests and springs – than the physically robust.”
This is a very good example of the difference between “good and evil” and “healthy and sick”. Nietzsche frequently talks about how some sickness is necessary to promote the enjoyment of good health, and in fact the entire “tragic worldview” based on the tragedy as an art form promoting a little sickness which is a tonic to life. The Christian view of good and evil is rather different. No Christian would say it is necessary to sin with regular occurrence through one’s life in order to promote good values (unless as a last-ditch attempt to bring the flock back into their church), rather that such sin is inevitable and one must atone for it. I always assumed a little bit of slave morality in one’s soul played a similar role, the problem being that Christianity, in its co-option of Plato, threatened to destroy the basis of philosophy itself, as A point out.
>Quite the remarkable statement to make that the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, among other things, are "underwhelming explosions of physis."
Compared to what the ancient Greeks achieved, yes it was. Alexander conquered more than Cortez, Pizzaro and the rest of the Spaniards combined with less technology. Furthermore, the gigantic gulf between pre and post Greek culture can easily be argued as more impressive than everything from the medieval period to now. Although our science appears to have advanced a long way, the Greeks had to come up with the basis for science in the first place according to A. On the literary and philosophical front, however, Nietzsche +A would make the point that everything of importance was already noted by the Greeks.
>Given that the former produced what it did, the moral of the story is that good genes are good genes, for which a closed breeding pool of people with advantageous life outcomes and high differential fertility is both necessary and sufficient. The "physical agon" or whatever other gimmicks one might think of are neo-Lamarckian nonsense.
I know nothing about Lamarckian, but a quick reading says that “physical characteristics developed in life can be passed on”. If you are happy with this definition, then A is saying precisely the opposite: the skills learned in life pale in comparison to those inherited through breeding which cannot be developed but are innate. I am rather confused by your point here. The Agon was just a contest for revealing good physis, as A explicitly states, upon which a breeding program was established. By contrast, European nobles intermarried for the purpose of securing fortunes and alliances, a relatively dysgenic mating procedure by contrast.
Overall, the real problem is that you have read, but only semi-comprehended A+ Nietzsche’s work and end up constructing strawmans or hitting targets far removed from the central points of the thesis. The only time you directly attack a core feature of A’s work is in “2e. The erromenesteroi in Gorgias and the turannos eros” but here you state
>It seems that Dr. Alamariu is a victim of his own stark dichotomy between nature and convention, that he has to equate nature with emancipation from convention. This could only work if we blithely assume that conventions have no coterminous overlap with nature.
Which perfectly describes the strawman you have constructed. Are N’s ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian a stark dichotomy, emancipated from one another, and mutually antagonistic only? It is impossible to read Birth of Tragedy and not also understand that they are just as much mutually reinforcing. It is similarly so between nature and convention. A’s belabours this point, since it is the breakdown of nomos that allows the erromenesteroi the space to create effectively a new nomos which “shifts the phusis distribution to the right” in plain statistical terms. This continued destruction and recreation is necessary for human advancement. Plato’s project is then, according to A, a sublimation of this idea with the intent that these ideas can be grafted onto any zeitgeist and enable to the continual advancement of humanity through the production of superior men for the rest of time. The imperfections regarding Christianity and Plato’s contemporary moralizing are delt with later in A’s thesis where he states that Nietzsche is the unveiling and correction of such a project.
> While you are right to call slave morality a retardant of the will to power in the individual, it is the subsuming of the individual and a collective will to power enabling slaves to overthrow their masters which is the important part as it provides an explanation for why slave morality is attractive in the first place.
It is a trivial fact that power is concentrated and magnified by the mobilization of groups and collectives; any theory that doesn't put central emphasis on this is highly incomplete.
> From a God of the nation expressing outwards power to a more universalist concept of good.
The two have coexisted at a very early stage: take the traditional titles of Zeus as Hikesios and Xenios (protector of supplicants and strangers, respectively) attested in the Odyssey and in Archaic Greek inscriptions dating back potentially to the 7th century BC. In any case, I can hardly see how such generic ideal types can be the basis of grand historical narratives.
> the decline in physiology occurs if, given the freedom that comes with declining aristocracy, no better nomos (art, philosophy, etc) is created to produce mean specimens of superior specimens (shifting the “distribution of phusis” to the right, so to speak).
This is tautologically true for any meaningful notion of decline. At this point we have little better than word games.
> Nietzsche frequently talks about how some sickness is necessary to promote the enjoyment of good health, and in fact the entire “tragic worldview” based on the tragedy as an art form promoting a little sickness which is a tonic to life.
This means that sickness has a secondary utility in emphasizing the value of health, just as, for instance, losing your right arm accentuates the true value of what you've just lost as compared to when you simply took it for granted. In of itself, this is an utter triviality -- and more to the point, it does not change the fact that healthy/sick takes the place of good/evil, that health is better than sickness, and that health is a physiological standard of value with ethical implications for right conduct and what the ideal man ought to be.
Or are you seriously suggesting that Nietzsche is such a consistent amoralist he puts health and sickness on an equal level? Of course not. Nietzsche very self-consciously and explicitly wanted to create a new morality (or "post-morality") founded on natural-scientific and physiological judgments. Witness his criticism of Christianity in the Nachlass 15[110] (http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/notebooks/german/nache/nache15.htm):
"Damit daß das Christenthum die Lehre von der Uneigennützigkeit und Liebe in den Vordergrund gerückt hat, hat es durchaus noch nicht das Gattungs-Interesse für höherwerthig angesetzt als das Individual-Interesse. Seine eigentlich historische Wirkung, das Verhängniß von Wirkung bleibt umgekehrt gerade die Steigerung des Egoismus, des Individual-Egoismus bis ins Extrem (—bis zum Extrem der Individual-Unsterblichkeit.) Der Einzelne wurde durch das Christenthum so wichtig genommen, so absolut gesetzt daß man ihn nicht mehr opfern konnte: aber die Gattung besteht nur durch Menschenopfer"
(While Christianity has brought the doctrine of unselfishness and love to the fore, it has not yet considered the interest of the species to be of higher value than the interest of the individual. Conversely, its actual historical effect, the fate of effect, remains precisely the increase of egoism, of individual egoism to the extreme (—to the extreme of individual immortality.) The individual was taken so seriously by Christianity, made so absolute that one could no longer sacrifice him: but the species only exists through human sacrifice.)
GATTUNGS-Interesse -- interest of the SPECIES.
"Setzt man die Einzelnen gleich, so stellt man die Gattung in Frage, so begünstigt man eine Praxis, welche auf den Ruin der Gattung hinausläuft: das Christenthum ist das Gegenprincip gegen die Selektion."
(If you equate individuals, you question the species, you encourage a practice that leads to the ruin of the species: Christianity is the anti-selection principle.)
The Nietzschean project, fundamentally, was about creating a species-morality. However he lost his mental faculties before he could publish his intended final book "The Transvaluation of All Values," hence leaving only the incomplete and confused fragments of his philosophy we now have. Some like Alexander Tille realized this early on and basically "completed" what Nietzsche couldn't.
> Although our science appears to have advanced a long way, the Greeks had to come up with the basis for science in the first place according to A
No kidding the first mover will always have the special distinction. The implication of this is absolutely facile: given the cumulative nature of knowledge, we would effectively have to rank all later contributors as inferior because they build on existing foundations instead of making the initial leap from pre-philosophy to philosophy. Are we to seriously believe therefore that Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift was an inferior intellectual achievement relative to Thales' initial birthing of philosophical inquiry in general?
> The Agon was just a contest for revealing good physis, as A explicitly states, upon which a breeding program was established
Alamariu never gives any specifics about what a breeding program looked like.
> A’s belabours this point, since it is the breakdown of nomos that allows the erromenesteroi the space to create effectively a new nomos which “shifts the phusis distribution to the right” in plain statistical terms. This continued destruction and recreation is necessary for human advancement.
No. Alamariu explicitly distinguishes it from nomos, calling it a politeia -- supposedly an artistic project by a nomothetic tyrant-lawgiver, to be distinguished from nomos, which always has derogatory connotations of tribal custom. Alamariu actually never explicitly theorizes the crucial distinction between "aristocratic convention" (as a nomos) and post-conventional aristocratic radicalism; he merely mentions it obliquely but it's never discussed in any specifics. Otherwise by nomos Alamariu understands something completely antithetical to nature on a fundamental level. That is not a "strawman" I have constructed; that is Alamariu's theory. What you're doing is engaging in a rear guard action to rescue it. Even if you do, we just have a boring, uninteresting and uninsightful theory.
>It is a trivial fact that power is concentrated and magnified by the mobilization of groups and collectives; any theory that doesn't put central emphasis on this is highly incomplete.
Your point above is indeed trivially obvious, but not relevant to the distinction between master and slave morality. A clear distinction between the two is the feelings of emboldening of individual power or individual weakness, both of which can increase collective power. The tarantula is absolutely exercising power yet feels weak. When the values of oppressor/oppressed and equality are these are telltale signs you are living under a slave morality. So let me grant you your initial opinion on this matter and move on.
> The two have coexisted at a very early stage: take the traditional titles of Zeus as Hikesios and Xenios (protector of supplicants and strangers, respectively) attested in the Odyssey and in Archaic Greek inscriptions dating back potentially to the 7th century BC. In any case, I can hardly see how such generic ideal types can be the basis of grand historical narratives.
I am explaining the context for your quote from ch17 of Antichrist. But this is all tangential to A’s thesis and explained in N’s Genealogy of Morals, so let’s not pursue it further.
>This is tautologically true for any meaningful notion of decline. At this point we have little better than word games.
Not at all. The Christian view would be that a slackening of Christian morals is exactly what causes decline while the enforcement of Christian morals leads to prosperity and advancement. Here, the point is made that evolution and progress requires a declining enforcement of nomos, for better or for worse.
> This means that sickness has a secondary utility in emphasizing the value of health, just as, for instance, losing your right arm accentuates the true value of what you've just lost as compared to when you simply took it for granted. In of itself, this is an utter triviality -- and more to the point, it does not change the fact that healthy/sick takes the place of good/evil, that health is better than sickness, and that health is a physiological standard of value with ethical implications for right conduct and what the ideal man ought to be.
I am of the personal (and controversial) opinion that Birth of Tragedy is absolutely the most essential Nietzsche-core and no-one can really get him until they read and understand it as pertaining to the art of tragedy (and music). Until you really grasp the tragic worldview and what Nietzsche meant by Apollonian and Dionysian, you will continue to lack understanding of N’s thought. Apollonian and Dionysian are not opposites or even on the same level. The mutual antagonism of the two, but also mutual necessity, is Nietzsche’s way of explaining the high culture of Greece. Apollo speaks with the voice of Dionysos, and maybe we can say that the Platonic project is an attempt to have nomos speak with the voice of the erromenesteroi. Although this is not explicitly stated by A I think it is a good reading of his thesis through N’s philosophy. Do you really think cutting your arm off could lead to a greater feeling of power and vitality compared to earlier, like recovering from an illness might?
> No kidding the first mover will always have the special distinction. The implication of this is absolutely facile: given the cumulative nature of knowledge, we would effectively have to rank all later contributors as inferior because they build on existing foundations instead of making the initial leap from pre-philosophy to philosophy.
Compare to your previous statement
> Quite the remarkable statement to make that the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, among other things, are "underwhelming explosions of physis."
The key is underwhelming compared to the Greeks, for which I believe there is an argument, nothing more. Compared to modern man, they were a veritable supernova of physis, sure. Again, this is opinion for the most part.
>No. Alamariu explicitly distinguishes it from nomos, calling it a politeia -- supposedly an artistic project by a nomothetic tyrant-lawgiver, to be distinguished from nomos, which always has derogatory connotations of tribal custom. Alamariu actually never explicitly theorizes the crucial distinction between "aristocratic convention" (as a nomos) and post-conventional aristocratic radicalism; he merely mentions it obliquely but it's never discussed in any specifics. Otherwise by nomos Alamariu understands something completely antithetical to nature on a fundamental level. That is not a "strawman" I have constructed; that is Alamariu's theory. What you're doing is engaging in a rear guard action to rescue it. Even if you do, we just have a boring, uninteresting and uninsightful theory.
I concede the first part of this point, A does distinguish the two: politeia is “nomos made concrete through physical force”. However, this makes the argument stronger. The advancement made by Plato’s philosophy is one of tactics: not the direct opposition of physis to nomos, but to the centres of power, the politea, the elites of the city, the erromenesteroi of the past. Opposing nomos directly leads to philosophers being persecuted and runs the risk of philosophy dying out. Indeed, A says that “on the hand to advise potential philosophers on the necessity of liberation from convention. And on the other hand it would be to do so only in the context of assuring the cities that this liberation would not encourage tyranny or injustice, or, indeed, not even make it look like a liberation.” Thus according to A, Plato encourages the erromenesteroi to speak with the voice of nomos.
This entire discussion has really underscored how important Birth of Tragedy is to an understanding of Nietzsche and being able to perceive the world through his eyes. I am convinced that most ridiculous opinions concerning his philosophy stem from ignorance of this text. The main source of all strawmans present in this response is the idea that, while nomos and nature are antithetical and often a source of hostility towards one another, there is a kind of dependence of one on the other in a very similar way to Apollonian/Dionysian. Sparta required strong nomos of breeding and training to propagate itself but could never advance beyond into a flourishing of culture like Athens because the nomos was too strong and didn’t decay. Likewise, in our modern period we are far less bound by nomos, but the human capital isn’t there due to the absence of this strict breeding program encoded in the nomos of yesteryear. You require certain combinations of both in temporal succession for culture to flourish. This, I believe, is the heart of the argument.
It is certainly not trivial, as even today we see excellent people get caught up in culture wars (nomos) when they should be adapting to the speech conventions and taking positions of power with it, in order that they might impose cultural norms for their own advantage while not believing in any of it, according to A’s view of Plato. Then, once in power, a breeding program based on PHYSICALITY and PHYSICAL competition (A is very specific: they aren’t competing for mates by playing video games or taking exams) should be established to perpetuate the ruling cast. It is exactly this focus on the physical which prevents the re-establishment of a priestly cast of conservative Christian pastors, “woke moralists” (defined as the maladjusted conglomerate of weak men and racial and sexual minorities that despise the handsome and well turned out white men that got us to the moon), climate scientists (and basically everything that passes for “science” these days), and general despisers of the body in the form of fat acceptance and trans rights activists we see today. The specific values (nomos) can be established later. There is great power and (contemporary) novelty to the political implications of such a thesis.
As you see, such a program is not boring, insightful and uninteresting. It is, according to A, a continuation of the breeding program concealed by Plato and later uncovered by Nietzsche as a racial breeding program and formula for the future advancement of man across the abyss. As much as I would love to continue discussing this topic, I feel there isn’t much more to say since I believe Birth of Tragedy ultimately gives one the right tragic perspective to really internalize what is being said (an understandable oversight, since you obviously are very well read and the text is not well emphasized).
I was about to write an entire piece against this review at the request of "Becoming Noble" before I saw this. Excellent deconstruction, thank you for saving me an evening of work.