Sunday, June 23, 2013

Morality and Principle of Individuation

According to #9 of Daybreak, Christianity is an "evil" from the perspective of Roman society, because it promotes the individual's "own salvation", i. e. because it constitutes a diverge of a Morality of Individual Self-Cultivation from the given Morality of Custom.  In contrast, in I, 16 of Genealogy of Morals, the Judaeo-Christian divergence from Roman society is classified by Nietzsche as "ressentiment" towards the "noble and strong", which it characterizes as "evil".  Now, any of the following might be offered to account for the apparent inconsistency between the two passages--'Indifference to formal logic'; 'Increasing hostility to Judaoe-Christianity'; 'Greater insight in the later passage'; and 'Deterioration of the mental faculties of an increasingly ill man'.  However, these, and others, miss the underlying issue common to the two passages--the problem of the relation between the few strong and the numerous weak--in which, in terms of calculation according to the Will to Power, the Individual, no matter how strong, has no privileged status.  Accordingly, Nietzsche's floundering in the two passages, as well as elsewhere, is an expression of the lack in his system of a substantive Principle of Individuation which might confer in-itself value on the Individual, e. g. the thesis that the self-overcoming of a species always begins with the self-overcoming of some individual member.  Without such a Principle, Nietzsche's various histories and genealogies remain arbitrary, inconclusive fictions.

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