Will to Goodness

I would like to make a brief comment on what I view as the principle purpose of life.

Many have heard of Friedrich Nietzche’s “Will to Power”. Structurally, what this notion did for him is create the possibility of motion outside of the morass of materialistically inspired nihilism he saw around him. If God didn’t exist, so the argument went, then everything was meaningless.

Meaning is a qualitative structure. It is a sense within a person or group of purpose grounded in a sacred belief. It is meaningful to give your life to Jesus, or to your country, or to your family.

The motion of materialism is to equate all apparent sentience, activity, and what would have formerly been viewed as moral decision based on free will, with biology. Within this ideology, we are effectively animals with instincts that don’t differ, qualitatively, with those of ants. None of us have souls, and our apparent freedom is an illusion.

On this reading, the only way to be honest, is to admit the ethical imperative given in your biology, which is the preservation of your genes, through being the fittest, most powerful person on your block. An uebermensch (lit: “Above-man”).

Self evidently, morality in this regard is a mistake, and mercy something for lesser mortals. Only the truly great man will be able to rise above the pedestrian, bourgeois distinction of Good/Evil. Since it promotes weakness, and womanish–read non-Darwinian–virtues like compassion, Christianity is held in contempt.

The Will to Power was in effect a heuristic by which those who wanted to be free, who wanted to follow Nietzche’s reasoning into places he never went himself (spending much of his time crying on his sister’s couch), could judge their actions. Power was to act according to one’s own wishes, without regard to tradition, normal understandings of morality, or petty sentiments like mercy and compassion.

Logically, the end of the aspiring “Superman” was to rule the world. This is the summit. Once you are there, you never need to apologize to, kowtow to, or even acknowledge in any way ever again anyone who does not advance your immediate aims.

Yet let us zoom in on this World Emperor, sitting on his thrown. He is sad. Why? Because he is alone. Why is he alone? Because he subordinated the desires of everyone else to his own, and because he disabled his ability to interact with his fellow humans on an honest level, which would have enabled him to find other souls that could touch his own. To be superior, is to be alone. You can find people to surround you, but their ability to touch you are directly proportional to your capacity for vulnerability, and to giving in to the purportedly womanish virtues like tenderness. Once you do that, you have effectively renounced the Will to Power.

Hitler never loved Eva Braun.

The limit case of this is described by the Marquis de Sade, whose work should be burned in its entirety–but which hasn’t– and whose remaining value is to give us an inside look at the mind of evil.

Sade, who spent most of his life in jail both for real and imaginary crimes, dedicated himself to the destruction of traditional notions of morality. He shared with Richard Dawkins not just an atheistic stance, but an open, flagrant, and aggressive hatred of God, and every human institution and relic that flowed from conceptions of God. He described God as the most horrific invention ever to flow from the mind of man.

Like Nietzche, he found in power his salvation. Since he was precluded by lack of money and freedom from committing the crimes he imagined–and its not clear he would have had the stomach to do so anyway–he focussed his drive to power not on actual physical crimes, but on writing books intended to corrupt people. Napoleon understood this, and jailed him for that reason. He also banned his books, some of the most famous of which were not published until well after his death.

If we return to our sad Emperor–who in his solititude is not altogether emotionally different than Sade in his cell–he can do two things. He can renounce power, and again value connection, harmony, love, compassion, kindness, mercy, tenderness, and all the other virtues which seemingly oppose the doctrine of Power. Or, he can take his actual power to its limits, and begin to use it to destroy others.

He can find solace in the visceral sensations occasioned by sexual activity, and even more so by gratuitous cruelty. He can live his life, in effect, getting high. Since there is nothing he cannot do, everything is permitted. In effect, this is the life lived by Uday and Qusay Hussein, who had rape rooms, who murdered people and tortured them with impunity, and who took whatever they wanted.

What, though, we might ask is the point of this? Is this the best possible life? By what criterion do we decide that power alone is worth pursuing? What is wrong with the tender virtues?

My contention is that neither Nietzche or Sade (or their many fellow travellers; I am using what amount to Ideal Types in my argument, since I can cover more ground) thought through what they were doing. They were superficial, and cowardly.

The reality is that all of us crave innocence in some form or fashion. Those who live normal childhoods think back with fondness and nostalgia at the joy and pleasure of simple things like playing tag, or snowball fights, or playing house, or just walking outside on a beautiful Fall or Spring day. In our daydreams, all of us want to be innocent.

But we aren’t. None of us are perfect. There is likely not a Christian on the planet who can be found who is perfect in their love, compassion, faith, and mercy. Some people see this and reject Christianity as a whole for this reason.

Morever, once you adopt Science as your ethical system, you slowly lose all ability to use traditional standards of morality–particularly those anchored specifically in religion–and justifying doing the right thing becomes harder and harder. Your criterion for the purpose of life is Truth, but you ignore the fact that within the Philosophy of Science Truth is unknowable except provisionally. You can speak functionally about what is true experimentally, but this does not permit blanket ontological statements of Truth with a T.

For this reason, I view the doctrine of Scientism–that all answers about everything come from Science and only from Science–to be a form of power mongering. It is a cultural landgrab that is allied to that of Sade, and I think it no coincidence that the language of prominent Scientistic apostles like Richard Dawkins so often approaches that of Sade in venom.

The net fact is that our experience preceded our understandings. To invert this, I can say that the doctrine of Darwinism (my understanding) dictates what emotions I can feel (my subjective experience). For example, I can choose to believe that compassion is a relic of the need for group cohesion to survive. This means that compassion is in some respects “unnatural”, in that its expression is a function of biology, and not individual will. For all intents and purposes, this is the take that the Nazis had on biology, and used it to justify their actions to coerce evolution to the next stage through the mass slaughter of inferior peoples.

Darwinism for this reason, as an ethical system, leads immediately down the Nietzchean pipeline into the Will to Power.

Here is the crux of the matter: I believe there is equally a Will to Joy, or Goodness. This is the Will to Innocence, beauty, love and all the emotions that have, deep, lasting effects, and which actually do work to mitigate our solitude. It is a sense that can and has been expressed differently in various peoples, times, and places.

When we fail to do what is good, this is a form of repression. It is Qualitative Repression. Failing to meet our own duties with respect to what we consider to be the Sacred causes us pain. Some people don’t want to meet that pain–neither Sade nor Nietzche or any other evil human being does–so they fly away from it, and justify their cowardice by making cowardice a virtue. This is Qualitative Repression. They push back the noble feelings they cannot keep from their minds by constantly contemplating or committing crimes.

If we add to this Freudian notions of repression, we see how the argument comes to be made that NOT indulging yourself is the crime, since self restraint is somehow artificial, and licentiousness of various forms what constitutes “virtue.”

Qualitative Repression, then, is to be opposed to Quantatitive Repression. We understand readily the sex instinct, and believe we understand the effects of that. However, since there is no place holder for the notion of Quality in a universally leveling materialistic Scientism, the notion of Qualitative Repression–or of the need to express noble ideals in action, has not caught hold yet.

But I do share with Abigail and John Adams the basic idea that we are meant to be Good, to do Good, and to rejoice in everything. When I use the word Meant, I am not claiming to have unlocked the secrets of the universe. Neither can any scientist. Not one of them can find any piece of matter which is ONLY matter anywhere in the universe, or any linear explanation for the undisputed facts measured by Quantum physicists.

No one can claim that what the human race has always done need be what it always will do.

No one can measure free will, since to do so one would have to be external to the system, and no humans are. Morever, if we are limited in our decision making capacity, there is no reason to limit it further by recourse to scientific theories of unproven merit. There is EVERY reason to use our logical faculties to develop ideas which work to foster our happiness, and joy.

“Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

John Adams.