I wonder if the reason that so many males are attracted to Nietzsche is that he seems to solve their problem of primeval guilt. Primeval guilt is not like ordinary guilt, as Deleuze and Guattari, in their reading of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, (Psychoanalysis and Ethnology) make clear. One need to have done anything wrong to suffer from it. Rather, one has it as a result of being born, and of feeling that one owes one's parents something.
Not feeling this sense of primeval guilt is possible if one can ascend the social hierarchy and stay there in such a way that you make others feel it. This is the fundamental goal of patriarchy and of all patriarchal ideology. It is not too extreme to say that patriarchal ideas and values create a permanent underclass of women, who can be permanently blamed for various feelings of existential guilt, that might arise for one reason or another.
It is important to realise the dependent nature of one who has developed himself along these lines of coping. He needs women (to stand in for him as social martyrs), but he cannot admit this to himself. To do so would be to open the doors to an even more overwhelming sense of guilt about what he actually is and what he has done. This is no longer any theoretical or unfounded guilt lurking in the subconscious. He has built himself up on a false platform and has become habituated to making others suffer in order for him to maintain his feelings of power.
Such a person is unlikely to have the nerves of steel that would enable him to contemplate his own life in a true sense of its Eternal Recurrence.
His barely repressed awareness knows that he would need "woman" (the psychological function this symbol allows him to peform, rather than a flesh and blood sample) to come on the journey with him into every event of his life, for he cannot go there alone -- he needs projections in the worst possible way!
Not feeling this sense of primeval guilt is possible if one can ascend the social hierarchy and stay there in such a way that you make others feel it. This is the fundamental goal of patriarchy and of all patriarchal ideology. It is not too extreme to say that patriarchal ideas and values create a permanent underclass of women, who can be permanently blamed for various feelings of existential guilt, that might arise for one reason or another.
It is important to realise the dependent nature of one who has developed himself along these lines of coping. He needs women (to stand in for him as social martyrs), but he cannot admit this to himself. To do so would be to open the doors to an even more overwhelming sense of guilt about what he actually is and what he has done. This is no longer any theoretical or unfounded guilt lurking in the subconscious. He has built himself up on a false platform and has become habituated to making others suffer in order for him to maintain his feelings of power.
Such a person is unlikely to have the nerves of steel that would enable him to contemplate his own life in a true sense of its Eternal Recurrence.
His barely repressed awareness knows that he would need "woman" (the psychological function this symbol allows him to peform, rather than a flesh and blood sample) to come on the journey with him into every event of his life, for he cannot go there alone -- he needs projections in the worst possible way!
2 comments:
Does everyone suffer from primeval guilt ... is it "natural" ... ?
Nietzsche said we began to experience it through not being in the water anymore, and having to walk upright. The weight of our bodies impacted on our consciousness at the time as "unnatural" and this installed the feeling of having transgressed appropriate behaviour in us, at a primeval level. I do think there is something to that, as whenever I am feeling overly tired -- and thus as if I had strained against the boundaries of what is natural for too long -- I tend to feel inexplicable guilt. Not at other times!
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