I'm not for the human race, generally, and this explains much of my philosophical predilection to favor Bataille, Marechera and Nietzsche over more humanistic writers. My attitude is along the lines:
"O, look, there are humans! How can one experiment on them to make them more interesting?"
Contemporary humans have disappointed me. They're good at preaching, but they're not so good at listening. It's easier to assume that all statements have a moral or political agenda than to look more deeply. My ideas are concerned with psychological attitudes and predispositions. Moral posturing doesn't interest me, because there's never anything underneath it.
Psychology, on the other hand, offers a wealth of meaning. When people express, for instance, their idea that a baby is cute, well I have other ideas. I had to bring myself up from mid-teens onward. For me, therefore, a baby isn't cute. It represents a burden I had in relation to myself that I have successfully overcome and gone beyond. A very young child represents, to me, a threat that I have not gone beyond this early stage of being preoccupied with rearing myself. Viscerally, I do not like the young child.
Sure a lot of moral mileage can be made in terms of whether the parents of the child have what it takes to raise it well. One could bring a very moral and decent human being into the world. But even were this true, there would be no moral obligation on me to like the child. One does not have to like someone just because they are moral.
I do like humanity when it is preoccupied in action, when it doesn't reveal to me its flaws in thinking, when it flows in one direction, turbulently, like a river. I don't like it when it becomes personal, when it takes on an individual quality or presumes to know what I am thinking without reading, without asking.
"O, look, there are humans! How can one experiment on them to make them more interesting?"
Contemporary humans have disappointed me. They're good at preaching, but they're not so good at listening. It's easier to assume that all statements have a moral or political agenda than to look more deeply. My ideas are concerned with psychological attitudes and predispositions. Moral posturing doesn't interest me, because there's never anything underneath it.
Psychology, on the other hand, offers a wealth of meaning. When people express, for instance, their idea that a baby is cute, well I have other ideas. I had to bring myself up from mid-teens onward. For me, therefore, a baby isn't cute. It represents a burden I had in relation to myself that I have successfully overcome and gone beyond. A very young child represents, to me, a threat that I have not gone beyond this early stage of being preoccupied with rearing myself. Viscerally, I do not like the young child.
Sure a lot of moral mileage can be made in terms of whether the parents of the child have what it takes to raise it well. One could bring a very moral and decent human being into the world. But even were this true, there would be no moral obligation on me to like the child. One does not have to like someone just because they are moral.
I do like humanity when it is preoccupied in action, when it doesn't reveal to me its flaws in thinking, when it flows in one direction, turbulently, like a river. I don't like it when it becomes personal, when it takes on an individual quality or presumes to know what I am thinking without reading, without asking.
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