In my earlier entry Survival
Of The Sheepest I was asking the jocular question, whether there could be
any justification for such ignoble human activities as dissimulation, lying,
cheating, hurting other people, and even killing them, all in the good cause of
survival? Wouldn’t it be “nobler,” I asked, to do all of the
above as an affirmation of one’s will to power or, in pursuit of some
other objective more consistent with our idea of ‘Heldenleben’? This
weighty subject was pertinently raised in connection with the following passage
in Nietzsche’s Jenseits (13):
“Physiologists should think before putting down
the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being.
A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength --- life itself is
will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent
results… In short, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles, one of
which is the self-preservation instinct.”
The teleological question here
raised by Nietzsche, as well as his undisguised, and well-deserved contempt for
the instinct of “self-preservation,” can be properly reduced to the
question of attitude, the good attitude being a healthy affirmation of
life, whereas self-preservation for its own sake must be relegated to the darkest closet
of our consciousness, being some shameful skeleton-relative of the proud owner
of the good attitude distinguished in his infamy by the whining of the “survivor,”
obnoxiously rejoicing in his victim status.
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