Monday 23 January 2012

Nietzsche

In the Preface of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche outlines the project that was also to be mapped out and re-formulated in more detail by Bataille. In more well-known Freudian terms, to get control over one's Superego and to master it, rather than to have it controlling one from above.

More to come later, but the three stages of becoming healthier he describes are:

1. Starting from being the unquestioning servant of one's Superego.
2. Losing a sense of ego in the sense of no longer taking anything personally, but transcending "for and against" (thinking about right and wrong).
3. Adopting a perspective based on these earlier stages of experience, whereby one understands that "injustice" is written into the framework of all things.  This insight accompanies a state of being whereby one comes to master Superego and thereby to gain mastery of one's "for and against".  One might put this in a different way by saying one's "for and against" become relativised on the basis of having seen oneself transcendentally -- from a distance.  They are now no longer absolute and rigid and one is no longer unquestioningly subservient to them.  Thus, one is healthier than previously.

It may never gets so far that someone has a desperate need to be an identity that isn't the consumer unit -- most people have a desperate desire to be one that IS the consumer unit. That's because Superego (the device that makes us conform from within) is going to make us conform to the prevailing paradigm/s. This is why intellectual shamanism counsels that one should depart from everything one thinks one "knows" or feels to be true about oneself and one's world.
By sacrificing one's "self"as one mistakenly understands it to be, one has a much greater chance of finding one's true nature.  (This principle is in some ways more Bataille's than Nietzsche's.)

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Cultural barriers to objectivity