Recently, I detected, in Doris Lessing's book, Going Home, that the attitude underlying the whole book was something of the order of: "Let us destroy this evil in front of us, so that good may result."
I even had someone apppear on this site to confirm my diagnosis for me that this was the attitudinal principle at work: "If we focus on the evil that is in Zimbabwe, and destroy it, good will result."
Well, this conviction about how things work -- or, in fantasy "ought to" work -- has precisely the structure of ressentiment about it. As Nietzsche points out regarding the dynamic of ressentiment, some kind of manifest evil is pointed out as the feature that has to be destroyed. That is the whole point of the moralising -- to destroy what is considered evil. (It's not a creative or balanced or contemplative approach, as you might see.) So, the principle at hand is to destroy "evil" (that which one perceives as such). The erasing of something that exists -- the ostensible "evil" -- is thereby supposed to leave a space for what isn't evil (ie. that which is defined negatively in relation to "evil", as the "good") to emerge. And, belief in this principle of how things work is actually an empirically-unfounded conviction. (Things actually do not work in this way, if you look into history.) So, as Nietzsche said, according to this philosophy of ressentiment, "good" is always an afterthought. (It is supposed to appear automatically, upon the banishment of evil.)
Anyway, one might consider in terms of Nietzsche's paradigm concerning ressentiment, that those who manifest the principle of ressentiment also reserve a very small place in their hearts for eros, which is an afterthought of the pleasure they will receive after they have embarked upon their main task at hand -- a binge of destruction.
Doris Lessing and ZANU-PF youth! -- embrace!
I even had someone apppear on this site to confirm my diagnosis for me that this was the attitudinal principle at work: "If we focus on the evil that is in Zimbabwe, and destroy it, good will result."
Well, this conviction about how things work -- or, in fantasy "ought to" work -- has precisely the structure of ressentiment about it. As Nietzsche points out regarding the dynamic of ressentiment, some kind of manifest evil is pointed out as the feature that has to be destroyed. That is the whole point of the moralising -- to destroy what is considered evil. (It's not a creative or balanced or contemplative approach, as you might see.) So, the principle at hand is to destroy "evil" (that which one perceives as such). The erasing of something that exists -- the ostensible "evil" -- is thereby supposed to leave a space for what isn't evil (ie. that which is defined negatively in relation to "evil", as the "good") to emerge. And, belief in this principle of how things work is actually an empirically-unfounded conviction. (Things actually do not work in this way, if you look into history.) So, as Nietzsche said, according to this philosophy of ressentiment, "good" is always an afterthought. (It is supposed to appear automatically, upon the banishment of evil.)
Anyway, one might consider in terms of Nietzsche's paradigm concerning ressentiment, that those who manifest the principle of ressentiment also reserve a very small place in their hearts for eros, which is an afterthought of the pleasure they will receive after they have embarked upon their main task at hand -- a binge of destruction.
Doris Lessing and ZANU-PF youth! -- embrace!
No comments:
Post a Comment