There is something about Nietzsche, which I now interpret as an actual flaw in his thinking -- his view of the general human character is of one who is normatively immature. Apparently, Shopenhauer has the more mature image of the human being, whether or not you agree with his perspectives.
I think it is dangerous to pretty much assume that humans are as immature as Nietzsche makes them. Ultimately (and paradoxically?) this diminishes empathy as a rational-calculating device [as per the computational paradigm given as an example in the article]. Such an assumption is more likely to cause one to regress psychologically, due to the isolating nature of one's attitudes.
See: Sarah Richmond, "Being in Others: Empathy From a Psychoanalytical Perspective"
3 comments:
That is a problem I have encountered when contemplating my perspectives on individuals vs Culture.
When I make that mistake, it sucks all hope right out of me, that people {me or anyone} can overcome these issues at all, whatever they might be.
So while my observations might be mostly correct when dealing with individuals, its odd when they can successfully corrolate to a larger population without invoking this hopeless imagry.
Good points, although I haven't read the piece.
I have this idea that to assume that level of immaturity tends to produce it -- because it is what you call forth, and what you see.
It is worth realizing that level of immaturity may actually exist (I tend to err by not understanding this), but to expect it limits everyone.
This is without reading the article, of course.
It's one of the psychological errors that leads to the downfall of Nietzsche's "higher man" -- that you tend to attribute higher motives to people whose characters are never really all that developed.
However, I think that the obvious alternative to this -- of reading lower motives into people, from the offset -- is not necessarily the corrective it might at first be deemed to be. What happens then is that instead of projecting your good into them, you end up projecting your evil into them instead. Actually this proactively defensive position puts you in much more psychological jeopardy than you would be in simply by being on your guard about being wrong about a person. You have decided that most other people are almost certainly definitively evil. And projecting your evil capacities into people, through the mediation of your imagination, will tend to put you into a paranoid-schizoid position. Far better just to be alert to the diversity within human nature.
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