The Elder Gods

“I've thought of this from a from a narrative 

point of view or from a symbolic point of view — 

in Old stories in folktales and fairy tales you often have uh, 

um  — Cyclops or one-eyed Giants, and there's a 

sexual connotation to that which is which is apropos, 

that the psychoanalysts would would certainly point out, 

but The One Eye Idea is that this thing is gigantic 

and wants ONE thing, and so that's another way 

that is conceptualising the fundamental 

structure of the human psyche is that 

it's a Dwelling-Place full of one-eyed Giants 

and they're constantly at War — one of them 

wants to be the largest ONE Giant 

and dominate everything else."

The Elder Gods

"So one of the claims -- I suppose this would be an Enlightenment claim;

is that people do have a drive to knowledge and that that drive 

is in fact what underlies the production 

of such things as philosophy —

But Nietzsche questions that — because he's trying to bring us back to consideration of the fact that you can't separate the Philosopher's Mind from the philosophers being he's first and foremost a living creature and he's up to something and the question is what is it that he's up to and so you can see the earliest manifestations in a paragraph like this of what later developed into deconstructionist thought and that that was mostly French Continental philosophers who pursued that particular line of reasoning and it it is derived exactly from this kind of statement by n so for example someone like Derrida would say say it doesn't matter what the content of the text is what matters is that The Text can be used as a tool for Power and that whether the person who wrote the text knew it or not that's what they were doing and they were doing it in a way to privilege themselves above other people and that's really I would say the fundamental deconstructionist claim and it's a powerful claim it's an utterly corrupt claim but it's a really powerful claim and it's related directly to the sorts of things that n was referring to to in this paragraph what is it that the person's truly up to now the problem with the deconstructionist claim is that it's an it's an open invitation to cynicism to thoughtless cynicism I can just make the presupposition that whatever it is that you're telling me you're you you're telling me merely to dominate regardless of what it is that you claim to be doing well the problem with that approach is that it's predicated on the implicit assumption that the only value that people actually have is the value to is the desire to dominate and of course that's a purely like that could be the case and I also think that it's even reasonable to posit that to some degree that it is the case but to take that from a contributing factor and to make that the highest God because that's essentially what the deconstructionists are doing those are entirely different things and you have to be aware of people who take a single causal element and elevated to the stature of single comprehensive cause you know it's more reasonable to assume that people are complex in their motivations and that many different strands of biological and cultural motivation are in some sense primary and that what happens is that they come together to weave a kind of tapestry rather than to make the automatic assumption that you can reduce the entire set of human motivations to a single principle like that of power now you know I would say nich is also responsible to some degree for the deconstructionist claim that it's power because one of his most famous utterances was that the fundamental motivating force in life is the will to power but he wasn't so much because nich is a subtle thinker he wasn't so much attempting to reduce human motivation to power he was attempting to redefine what it was that we conceptualized as power where that is what the deconstructionists are doing at all because fundamentally they're marxists and they believe that you know they've ins sconed themselves within an economic Viewpoint where within a philosophical Viewpoint where economics is Paramount and where all that matters is power construed as socioeconomic domination fundamentally you know and that's in in turn is embedded in metaphysics that's even deeper which is a metaphysics that presumes that people are are fundamentally materialist and all of those things are qu you know all of those things are Highly Questionable so I'm going to skip ahead a little bit in the paragraph when Nature talks about the motivations of you might consider them people who are working in the middle ranks of bureaucracies whether they're scientific or otherwise so they're in some sense acting as cogs in a particular machine and so that's what he's describing here he says in the case of Scholars or in the case of really scientific men it may be there may really be such a thing as an Impulse to knowledge some kind of small independent Clockwork which when well wound up Works away industriously to that end without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein the actual interests of the scholar therefore are generally in quite another Direction it is the family or in moneymaking or in politics it is in fact almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist someone who studied the origin of words a mushroom Specialist or a chemist he's not characterized becoming this by this he's not characterized by becoming this or that nich's point there fundamentally is that even when you do analyze people who in whom the the will to knowledge might actually be operative even though he wouldn't be willing to Grant it the status of highest motivating power that even in those people people where that will to knowledge does exist the probability that that is in turn subordinated to some other principle that's higher in the value hierarchy is very very high and it's hard to tell exactly what that additional principle might be but he points out such things as well maybe they're primarily interested in serving the interests of their family or they're primarily interested in making money or maybe they're primarily interested in status and maybe they're interested in stat status becomes it because it makes them more sexually attractive and that sort of thing so but the the the question of what is it that's lurking in the background is always Paramount so another detour in this particular paragraph whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as inspiring geni or as demons will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another and that each of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate Lord over all of the other impulses that's another like Beyond Good and Evil to think of it as a book is a really foolish framework you know because this is what a book is when people think about a book you know it's like a material entity it's it's 8 in high and 6 in wide and 2 inch thick and weighs a pound and it's made out of paper and it's between two two covers you know and that's a materialist that's the a prior sort of axiomatic view of a book but n's Beyond Good and Evil isn't a book at all it's a series of bombs and each sentence is a bomb and each sentence blows things up that people don't even know exist and so one of the things with this sentence for example here's how he's conceptualizing a human being so the first thing he talks about is that the F there are fundamental impulses of human beings okay so that that BS the questions well what do you mean by impulse and what do you mean by fundamental and both of those are extraordinarily complicated problems so an Impulse you can think of an Impulse as a drive you could think about it as a biological Instinct you could think about it as an aim or a goal you could think about it as an act of will like there's there's endless questions that that hang off that question but we could start with the idea that we perhaps can't Define it but we are willing to go with the proposition that people do have impulses and I think maybe that's manifest to you more most particularly when you're attempting to do something voluntarily and something involuntarily interferes with that you know so maybe you're sitting down to to try to get some work done and the work is not of any particular intrinsic interest but you regard it as necessary you know necessary element in some higher order scheme and so you're attempting to organize yourself so you will in fact concentr on that particular relatively mundane activity but what you find when you sit down to actually engage in that is you can't do it you have to go do the dishes or you have to clean under the bed or you have to have a sexual fantasy or you or or there's some other thing that you could do that's useful but that you wouldn't normally do that you'll go do instead or that you fall asleep or that you get hungry or like there's an endless number of let's call them impulses that might arise to interfere with your conscious movement forward well exactly what are those things well 

n certainly conceptualizes the human being as a place where those things live and he does mean live too because he wouldn't refer to them as de demons or or Genies without introducing the metaphorical conception of something that lives and so partly what n reveals in those sentences is that he conceptualizes a human being as the the Dwelling Place of spirits and some of them are Genie let's say that's the root word of genius that's the terribly powerful thing that exists in the terribly small compartment right that you have to call forth and some of them are demons and demons are things that have their own autonomous will and that generally aren't aiming for the good so then so those are all things n just lays out as implicit parts of the sentence so he activates all those ideas whether you know or not in your mind to the degree that you process the sentence and those things start to take on life of of their own those ideas and so then he he adds another dimension of complexity to that by saying well you you're full of demons and and and and genies and they're all doing their own thing whatever that happens to be but each of them if left to their own devices would it attempt to remake the entire world in their form and so I I 

I've thought of this from a from a narrative point of view or from a symbolic point of view in in in in Old stories in folktales and fairy tales you often have uh um Cyclops or oneeyed Giants and there's a sexual connotation to that which is which is app propo that the psychoanalysts would would certainly point out but the one eye idea is that this thing is gigantic and wants one thing and so that's another way that n is conceptualizing the fundamental structure of the human psyche it's a Dwelling Place full of oneeyed Giants and they're constantly well one thing one way of looking at it is they're constantly at War one of them wants to be the largest onee Giant and dominate everything else 

and then one of the things that so n takes that argument further and he says not only is this always happening in human beings but that if you look at philosophy what it is is it's a continual revelation of the attempt of some singular minded psychic monster psychological monster to dominate the entire psychological structure and therefore the entire cultural structure and therefore the entire world and then you can you can see in that the entire religious structure struggle of mankind to take this vast polytheistic vision of reality and to organize it into some sort of monotheistic and integrated structure which you could also consider indistinguishable from the civilizing the impulse that operates in human beings to become civilized because on the one hand it might be a terrible thing that one oneeyed monster emerges to attempt to dominate all the others but then on the other hand there's no difference between that and organizing something because to organize something is to bring it all into a hierarchical structure with some sort of singular value at the Forefront and then the question might be well what should that singular value be and then n would that ties the whole argument back into the first sentences that he wrote at the beginning of the paragraph which is is well what is it that the philosopher is up to what is the force that he's serving what is the unifying impulse that's another way of looking at it if there's a unifying impulse and he's not only Fallen prey to some internal demon if there's a unifying impulse to bring all of this together into some sort of functional structure what exactly might that look like for every impulse is imperious and as such attempts to philosophize that's part of that sort of nich's idea of Will To Power in in its nent form like all of these unconscious entities that inhabit the human psyche are all alive and they're trying to live they're trying to they're trying to climb up the dominance Archy and dominate because of course that's partly what life does because let's say from an evolutionary perspective and this is probably more true for males because they're less effective in their attempts to replicate the distinction between climbing up a dominance hierarchy whatever that might happen to be and success is there may be no distinction at all and then you might say well that just shows that there's nothing but will to power but that still doesn't answer one of the most fundamental questions is that power in relationship to what because that's the question okay so you can shut that off