Friedrich Neitzsche considered benevolence a tyranny against nature, a slave revolt spurred on by the Church and driven by resentment and jealousy of the weak and ugly against the strong and beautiful. These paragons of humanity have been cowed by morality's weapons of guilt and blame and have unwittingly co-operated in their own oppression, blinded to their true and natural goal- the will to power!

This particular philosopher ended up in a dark corner of a mental assylum grunting on all fours until he died. However, that's just an irrelevant observation. What he did say, though, has been echoed since in some form or another across many issues.

I suppose it would be fair to say that he underscores and champions selfishness. On the flip side of human nature ( however that is interpreted and explained) we have other voices believing that mutual aid is at least just as important in nature.

How do you square with altruism and selfishness? Are we just selfish beings pretending to be altruistic at times with some selfish goal behind our machinations or can we be genuinely altruistic without regard for self? Do we have an innate nature with respect to these things  or do you think that we learn to be one way or another?

Man, people in the Northern Hemisphere (Europe/ Middle-East/ Asia/ Namerica) are really over-crowded and stuffed up !!

My take on it is, yes we are all selfish. We want reward for investment.

A suicide bomber is uncaring and selfish and would never ever sacrifice their own life if "said" Allah promised only an eternity of being strung up by the toes in the fires of hell instead of their imagined 72 virgins.

The sense of investment in self through the helping of others is innate in most people IMO, and a good common trait to have.
Just the "knowing" that it's a good investment is well good enough in most circumstances. However, self-protection will kick in hard if the vested interests don't repay the good-will when they have the opportunity to do so.
I think that the general concensus (amongst us so-called "communists") is to repay if or when you can. But if there is an "unsaid" breach of trust, then there will be hell to pay.
It's generally not a good idea to give away the upper hand these days, for here there be tigers.

freediver wrote on Sep 13^th, 2010 at 10:51pm:


It's ironic that you're appealing to the "Darwinian perspective", FD, seeing that you don't believe evolution is scientific. That aside, I'd say that there's a lot of human behaviour that evolution does not explain. I think people's beliefs are stronger than any instinct we might have. And as we know beliefs are fashioned by the culture we're in. Not all human behaviour is explicable in terms of evolution.

I would also observe that people kill their direct kin and save strangers at their own peril.

Finally, for now, given that you're an ardent believer in falsificationism, how would you falsify the notion of instinctual selfishness being behind people's behaviour including altruism?  

Ziggy wrote on Sep 13^th, 2010 at 4:06pm:



Although I agree with Nietzsche that altruism is merely a social construct for pragmatic purposes, however, by him claiming the world is will to power, he goes daringly close to falling back into the metaphysical trap he spends so much time refuting. To say nature has an inherent law called "will to power", is to make an absolutist claim about the nature of human behaviour. But, Nietzsche was cleverer than that to fall for such a mistake, that's why he posited it as an empirical hypothesis. However, it's the best damn hypothesis I've read that tries to account for all human behaviour. Human behaviour, whether it manifests itself in morality, religion, science, art, menial labour, or philosophy, is an instantiation of one's will onto something. Each one of these human endeavours - morality, science, art etc - is an act of overriding the previous interpretation of the world. The brilliance of this hypothesis is that it blows away any inherent teleogy in human life because of constant reinterpretation of the world. Life becomes a mere flux of events due to human wills imposing their view over previous views ad infinitum. Altruism, then, is the mere temporal cessation of the imposition of views over an 'other'.

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Changing philosophical, scientific, spiritual and moral perspectives come and go regardless. Altruistic and selfish motives still stay.

I think altruism is just as much a fundamental as selfishness in humanity and in the broader animal kingdom. Selfishness or altruism taken to extremes , or out of proportion are a catastrophe.

How can saying that everything that we do is a "will to" really explain anything if it explains everything? And as an empirical hypothesis what are the potential falsifiers? Alder, for example, could explain every human behaviour as dealing with an inferiority complex. This was rebuked by Popper for that very flaw. If an explanation is without potential falsification then it's metaphysics.

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I suspect you misunderstood what I meant by unscientific. I see no irony or contradiction. I don;t see science as the only path to knowledge.

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Evolution can explain the general 'tendency', though individual acts are always at the whim of a person's idiosynchasies.

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Culture too can be explained away by Darwinian processes.

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Perhaps you should start with an example.

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That doesn't make sense. Falsification is part of the definition of science, but it is not an ideology.

Ziggy wrote on Sep 14^th, 2010 at 7:24pm:



Maslow's hierarchy of needs shows the genius is independent and intelligent rather than an ordinary person and someone who is just another cog in the machine. I am speaking of real innovation here, things that have had major influence on cultures and have lasted hundreds or thousands of years. Apart from maybe Christ, many a great thinker were solitary and eccentric beings; (although even Christ liked his solitude as well).