Continental
Nietzsche further proposes a value-scale in regards to its ability to purely express the will to power, without negating it.
Every action that is a positive expression of the will to power is a good action.
Slave morality: that kind of morality that goes against the will to power. ”Slave morality says no on principle to everything that is outside, other, non-self_ and this no is its creative deed.”
The first slave-moraler was Socrates in Nietzsche’s pseudo history.
This is a perversion of the will to power in that Socrates urges the people to step back from the immediate will to power to think in a negative judgement about the social life and warriors in order to be slaves. Socrates thinks we should have a negative opinion on those who simply are without thinking about why or how.
This in turn will lead to christian tradition. Christianity’s essence then is the negating of those who take what they want. The christian’s first action is negation, ”it is wrong what one does, because one is brutish, so one shouldn’t be so.”
All the moral values then, comes out of the negation of the master by the slave. He simply accuses the other of being wrong, and then in that negative function can later find himself as that which is good, as being against the master.
The master instead takes whatever they want, they are not angry towards the others, at the slaves.
Nietzsche highlights this through the simile of the lambs and the bird of prey. The bird of prey itself is the eating of the lambs, and so cannot be otherwise, it is not good or bad that it eats the lambs. And so because the lambs cannot act against the birds of prey, they can only be reactive, and so react by saying that they do not want to be like it, and so begin hating those things that the bird of prey is.
For masters however, bad is only what diminishes its power and strength.
For Nietzsche, the Greeks were initially masters, but after socrates were turned into slaves.
Then Nietzsche invents the ubermensch, someone who is able to reaffirm the will to power.
The eternal return then is a test-case scenario to see whether we are ready to be masters: Nietzsche urges us to ask ourselves if we are ready to affirm every moment of our life to go on eternally. If we are ready to embrace our lives as it is entirely, and we lack regrets at all, and that we are able to wish that what is right now should go on for all eternity, then we are in line with our will to power.
For people who have not reached this state, it would be horrifying for people to experience this.
The eternal return: is what we are doing really worth it? We need to purify ourselves to the point that any moment feels entirely perfect to experience.
Nietzsche doesn’t provide the elements for a proper society.
The Jews are not better than the christians for Nietzsche, all monotheistic religions are bad, and since christianity arose through judaism, it has the same geneaological line.
Ressentiment, those who have regrets and live their life passively, will enter into a kind of mind-setting, a feeling of inferiority and jealousy in which one only looks at one’s own situation in the light of the other, the master, the one who has achieved something. It is a sophisticated psychological state, and for Nietzsche it is the result of a life lived in passivity and negation of the will to power.
”All noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ’yes’ to itself.”
The genius artist is the master, the one who creates their own codes and rules; the master’s morality invents their own moral values in order to fit themselves, so that their own individual power can be maximised.
To be an artist is the ideal of man, and this in its essence is the ubermensch.
Nietzsche here is fundamentally post-modern, he is an entry-gate to post-modernity. To think substance infinitely multiple and so on is a post-modern paradigm, rather than as the One in Schopenhauer.
New Nietzsche Ellison, good to read.
Perspectivism, the plurality of truth.
The Will to Power is a being that is One, but which is always multiple and different.
It is not identitcal in all different living beings, everyone has contrary wills to power.
It claims the multiplicity of being and the multiplicity of truth.
”Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept ”leaf” is formed through an arbitrary forgetting the distinctions.” On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense.
Every concept is a general concept that overrides the singularity of you.
Language then, is illusory and creates a veil over the singularity. The singularity is made up from the intertwinement of all other things, but which are hidden by language.
Language homogenizes reality; makes us believe that reality is one.
”Popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substratum behind. But there is no such substratum; there is no ’being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; the doer is invented an after-thought, the doing is everything.”
There is no being behind the deed, there is no one who does, it is pure force, it is simply done.
The agents, the centers of action, are invented after the fact of something happening. There is no purely such.
The slave implies an ontology of substances, but that’s wrong, the master is pure force.
Only an ontology of substances, when we distinguish the actions from the agent, can we blame the agent from the action. But if the action and the agent are the same thing, who will one accuse?
Here he critiques both the history of metaphysics and morality in the same.
Nietzsche is not a determinist however, it is up to us to accept the eternal return and create the conditions for its acceptance, we are actively involved in our destiny.
Nietzsche is also a thinker of history, because history shows the conditions of plurality, as when language changes, the system of truth also changes. One system of language, one ontology has been imposed on us, the one of the jews, christians and so on.
The world so on has the character of becoming, not being; flux rather than structure.
Being is not unitary, not identical, but always different in different beings and actions.
Truth so on depends on the perspective of orientation. Ie. There are as many truths as there are wills to power.
”the world has once again become infinite to us: insofar as we cannot rejet the possibility that it include infinite interpretations”. The gay science.
Infinity no longer goes in one direction, it becomes chaotic and plural, it becomes ateleological.
”Granted, this is only an interpretation too – and you will be eager enough to make this objection. – well then, so much the better.”
Nietzsche’s theory has superiority over others because it can theorise the plurality of all other theories. It is in a sense a kind of meta-theory. Only this theory can justify the existances of these other view points.
Nietzsche himself was torn apart by a lot of ressentiment. His writing seems to have been a sort of self-therapy. This is why he construes this kind of negative emotions which he felt.
The clue to be happy for Nietzsche is to forget. The master forgets all, whilst the slave is sundered by ressentiment.
We can only have amor fati if we accept the eternal return. One the one hand we have to embrace our destiny and love it, but we can only do this if we strive to the kind of life that fully expresses the will to power. It would be unlivable to embrace our own destiny if we deliberately choose it and conduct it.
Freud
Freud was a medical doctor.
The young Freud had huge aspirations, he wants to get famous. He conducts research on the testicles of the male eel. Then experiments with cocaine, which he has a few breakthroughs with. He sends a lot of cocaine to his wife. He discovers the narcotic effect of cocaine, if you apply it to the skin, you can conduct operations on the eye, but didn’t get the patent. He was one of the forerunners of the medical experimentation with cocaine.
Freud’s friend died from cocaine, which is when he understood that coke was bad, at which point he became psychoanalyst.
He went to Paris, where he became a neurologist. He went to Paris in order to works with Charcout(?) who was a superstar, taking care of hysterical women. Hysteria at the time was one of the main civilisational diseases. It had to do with the strong sexual repression in the bourgois society at the time. Charcot was the first to say that it was not biological, rather he said it was a purely psychological or neurological problem. Hysteria often lead to somatic symptoms, where people would go into trance, split consciousness, or in extreme cases paralysis. Charcout took photos of all the hysterical women. In what sense did Charcot not induce the kind of hysteria he was treating?? Mf took sneak pictures of his patients.
Developed a method of hypnosis with Breuer and Charcot. Studien zur Hysterie 1895. This was not good enough though, because when hypnotising someone, we tell them what they think their problem is, so in the end this cannot be scientific, and Freud wanted to be famous due to science.
Releases a case study of a woman called Anna, in which she has access to other languages when she goes into states of hysteria. So Freud discovers that there are a lot of things ”in the dark” of a person. After this he leaves hypnosis and goes to psychoanalysis.
If you open the interpretation of dreams, Freud goes through prior theories of the unconscious in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Leibniz. Furthermore, in this work he also analyses only his own dreams, and thus discovers the complexes and so on through his self-analysis. Psychoanalysts have to be psychoanalysed however, before being able to become psychoanalysts.
When hypnotising someone, repression is working less, but we get closer to the unconscious, and for Freud dreams become even more important than, as they can be analysed in order to read what the unconscious says.
”There is a clear relationship between the hypnotic state and sleep, which is the essential condition of dreams. Hypnotism is known as artificial sleep; we say to the person whm we hypnotise, ”sleep,” and the suggestions which we throw out are comprable to the dreams of natural sleep. The psychical condition are in both cases really analogous. In natural sleep we withdraw our attention from the entire outside world; in the hypnotic, on the other hand, from the whole world with the exception of the one person who has hypnotised us, with whom we remain in touch.
So in sleeping, we withdraw from reality, and so our principles of pleasure and so can be expressed more fully. In hypnosis instead, it is only the Other to whom we are subjected.
But what they mean is that there is a psychic system, one part is entirely conscious and the other is the unconscious.
For Freud however, the unconscious becomes the dominant part of the psyche. They have an immediate power that influences the conscious. It becomes the key to understand what happens in the conscious system.
Freud claims that the unconscious is not a poorer or diminished version of the conscious, rather it is able to perform everything that the conscious can, the unconscious thereby thinks. It produces linguistic statements. It is constantly producing thoughts, that we are usually not aware of. It fears, it wishes, it hates. It is a full-blown psychological agent. The unconscious agent has its own.
One and the same ”Psychism”; two ”agents”.
The second agent is the repressed agent, but it is the repressed one that provides the ’truth’ about our conscious self.
We are structurally divided in two, and so any self-knowledge is fundamentally illusory. It is a misunderstanding. We are not capable to understand what we really are, what we really want, etc.
We need a new accesspoint to this unconscious part, and only in this part can we find our truth.
The discovery of the unconscious created a surge in different fields of psychology:
Metapsychology (drives and topics)
Neuroeses (hysteria, obsession, perversion)
Psychoses (Schizophrenia (discovered by Bleuler and Jung), depression, paranoia)
The study of dreams
In a lot of sectors of life can we discover the unconscious in order to deconstruct what has been initially thought.
”At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life”. (Via regia means royal road).
”A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish”. He discovers this through studying his children’s dreams.
For Freud, every dream is the illusory satisfaction of a desire.
Drives (Triebe) are not instincts, they are not something animals have. They are always subended by language, because desire exists in language. Drives are psychical and bodily energy, which are properly rational. They provide the energy and flows for everything that we do consciously. This is where psychoanalysis tries to hang out, where it focuses. It operates with a framework beyond dualism.
Tensions are always bad for the machine that we are. That’s why we need sexuality, because it rises and rises yet has the potential to easily lower that tension to zero. What the psychic system needs is a return to zero. If we didn’t dream, we wouldn’t be able to sleep actually. The tensions of our desires would wake us up immediately if we kept desiring something while we were sleeping.
Dreams are not straightforwardly satisfying only but are disguised fulfilments.
”the dream as a whole is a distorted substitute for something else, something unconscious.”
They necessarily distort the desire and the satisfaction of it.
”nah nah I don’t want my grandmother nono.” – professor Grohmann.
So psychoanalysis is required, because it is a technique of interpretation which looks beyond the distortion.
The desire-drives is actually shaped in such a way as it is, due to the way in which we are thrown into a family structure. But these are based on symbols, rather than facts. It is about the sense that we give to certain positions, but this does not eg. mean that there is always a father-figure in any family relationship. This is why one can be a disturbed individual whilst still growing up in a good background, it is because the sense that we give the people in the household and so on, the reality doesn’t matter.
In the dream there is a manifest content, and a latent content. The manifest is that which we see and the things we think and feel. The latent content, then is what Freud calls the ”dream-thought”, which is the manifestations of the latent dream thought, it is an unconscious element being translated into sequences of images or ideas. As such, there is an unconscious process of thought.
Thinking is possible without consciousness, but not without language.
The Freudian slip basically happens because the unconscious train of thought collapses into the conscious train of thought.
When you free out the mental energy that is caught in the unconscious trains of thought, tension is released in such a manner that one feels rewarded, and so on is able to once again create, and do what one wills.
”The latent dream thoughts and the manifest dream content are presented oto us like two versions of the same subjetmatter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the manifest dream content seems like a transcript of the dream thoughts into another of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation”.
It is almost like translation in cells. The semantical course seems to be the same, we just need to find the missing pieces, the syncategorematic terms. The logical relationship between propositions that make the sentence complete.”
Thinking becomes a completely mechanical process, as it doesn’t require consciousness to operate.
Dream-work, the kind of work that translates manifest to the latent.
Dream work is fundamentally based on condensation, displacement and repression.
Condensation (Verdichtung).
Symbolic overdetermination.
Bringing together and compressing into a single unit dissimilar fragments beloning to different associative trains of thought.
The same dream-fragment ”represents” different strains of unconscious thought.
Two interpretations of one thing can be condensed into one picture. So an axe can both be a memory of cutting food with my father, but also the desire to murder him.
”There are nodal points upon which a great number of the dreaam thoughts converged, and because they had several meaings in connection with the interpretation of the dream. The explanation of this fundamental fact can also be put in another way: each of the elements of the dream’s content turns out to have been overdetermined – to have been represented in thedream thoughts many times over.”
Displacement (Verschiebung).
Replaces the most significant thought by incidental and harmless thoughts.
- a decentering of the harmful thought by an entirely harmless thought.
You dream of a ship, but what you are really thinking about is the wind at sea.
In the end it is actually the dreamer who knows what is at stake. The psychoanalyst simply has to ask questions about things that the dreamer already knows. It is an elaboration of the dream content, something conducted by the dreamer themselves, who reaches the understanding of the dream-content.
Speaking and talking about the dreams is a means of making fluid the dreams.