It’s always interesting to hear first person accounts of fundamentally different world views. Some christian fundamentalist turned atheist is on youtube and shared recollections of the perspective of her former self. She shared how she experienced a world of demons and angels. Interesting stuff.
After reading Stirner and Nietzsche, I don’t find the quotes particularly remarkable at all. Seems very like Nietzsche’s “Geneology of Morals” and Stirner’s Hegelian world intellectual history from “The Ego and Its Own”.
What you quote also reminds me of Ian Hacking’s “The Emergence of Probability”, where he claims that the term probability really evolved in it’s meaning over time, and starting from something more like “probity and status” of the speaker. That was of a revelation to me at the time, and got me thinking of the function a word served, and the different ways that a function could be served.
If you can’t really predict worth squat, doing what the supposed smart guy says is the right thing isn’t a bad play. But as our conceptual and predictive machinery improves, we gained other and better means to identify the winning ideas.
I had always understood even the moral irrealists as acknowledging that there are genuine moral attitudes that are fundamentally ingrained in people.
It depends on what you mean by “moral attitudes”.
We are evolved social creatures. We have evolved all sorts of behaviors and preferences. Some of those behaviors are those in response to our social preferences. I’d call a subset of those the moral preferences, largely distinguished but not unique in being multiordinal preferences about social preferences and reward and punishment of those preferences in others.
I’d expect most all humans to have “genuine moral attitudes” of those kinds, just like they have general “yummy” preferences, but I would not expect them all to have associated with those attitudes some compelling moral reality beyond their own moral sense, any more than they would associate “yummy” with compelling cosmic yummyness.
I wouldn’t expect them all to have conceptually alienated their moral sense as some inexplicably compelling force, though I see how such conceptual moral alienation would be possible, likely, and would serve the interests of those who would manipulate the alienated, particularly when they are in a position of relative power in the first place.
Effective manipulation of the moral sense is the true steel, and alienation of that moral sense is a powerful start.
Similar to the article, I’d guess that monotheism would play a central role in enabling conceptual moral alienation, as it posits a singular overpowering compelling force for Morality, which makes dropping the context of “whose morality?” all the easier and more likely.
I would not expect them all to have associated with those attitudes some compelling moral reality beyond their own moral sense, any more than they would associate “yummy” with compelling cosmic yummyness.
This may be a bad comparison. “Yummy”, once you break it down into specific preferences over flavors, corresponds very, very well to food chemistry.
I wouldn’t expect them all to have conceptually alienated their moral sense as some inexplicably compelling force, though I see how such conceptual moral alienation would be possible, likely, and would serve the interests of those who would manipulate the alienated, particularly when they are in a position of relative power in the first place.
Effective manipulation of the moral sense is the true steel, and alienation of that moral sense is a powerful start.
Ooooh, I sense a Marxist talk coming on? Go on, go on!
“”Yummy”, once you break it down into specific preferences over flavors, corresponds very, very well to food chemistry.”
I have a genetic variant where when I was young I was more sensitive to bitter tastes than others, but getting older I’m supposed to get less and less sensitive, until I’m less sensitive to bitter tastes than most people.
Yummy isn’t even consistent just for me over time.
“Ooooh, I sense a Marxist talk coming on? Go on, go on!”
More Stirner than Marx. Nouveaux Marxists may have gotten on board with Stirner, but Marx spent 500 pages In the German Ideology mocking the idea that ideas matter. The world runs on historical materialism, dontcha know?
I have a genetic variant where when I was young I was more sensitive to bitter tastes than others, but getting older I’m supposed to get less and less sensitive, until I’m less sensitive to bitter tastes than most people.
Yummy isn’t even consistent just for me over time.
Uhhh… so what? It’s a very real relational property.
Really?
It’s always interesting to hear first person accounts of fundamentally different world views. Some christian fundamentalist turned atheist is on youtube and shared recollections of the perspective of her former self. She shared how she experienced a world of demons and angels. Interesting stuff.
After reading Stirner and Nietzsche, I don’t find the quotes particularly remarkable at all. Seems very like Nietzsche’s “Geneology of Morals” and Stirner’s Hegelian world intellectual history from “The Ego and Its Own”.
What you quote also reminds me of Ian Hacking’s “The Emergence of Probability”, where he claims that the term probability really evolved in it’s meaning over time, and starting from something more like “probity and status” of the speaker. That was of a revelation to me at the time, and got me thinking of the function a word served, and the different ways that a function could be served.
If you can’t really predict worth squat, doing what the supposed smart guy says is the right thing isn’t a bad play. But as our conceptual and predictive machinery improves, we gained other and better means to identify the winning ideas.
It depends on what you mean by “moral attitudes”.
We are evolved social creatures. We have evolved all sorts of behaviors and preferences. Some of those behaviors are those in response to our social preferences. I’d call a subset of those the moral preferences, largely distinguished but not unique in being multiordinal preferences about social preferences and reward and punishment of those preferences in others.
I’d expect most all humans to have “genuine moral attitudes” of those kinds, just like they have general “yummy” preferences, but I would not expect them all to have associated with those attitudes some compelling moral reality beyond their own moral sense, any more than they would associate “yummy” with compelling cosmic yummyness.
I wouldn’t expect them all to have conceptually alienated their moral sense as some inexplicably compelling force, though I see how such conceptual moral alienation would be possible, likely, and would serve the interests of those who would manipulate the alienated, particularly when they are in a position of relative power in the first place.
Effective manipulation of the moral sense is the true steel, and alienation of that moral sense is a powerful start.
Similar to the article, I’d guess that monotheism would play a central role in enabling conceptual moral alienation, as it posits a singular overpowering compelling force for Morality, which makes dropping the context of “whose morality?” all the easier and more likely.
This may be a bad comparison. “Yummy”, once you break it down into specific preferences over flavors, corresponds very, very well to food chemistry.
Ooooh, I sense a Marxist talk coming on? Go on, go on!
“”Yummy”, once you break it down into specific preferences over flavors, corresponds very, very well to food chemistry.”
I have a genetic variant where when I was young I was more sensitive to bitter tastes than others, but getting older I’m supposed to get less and less sensitive, until I’m less sensitive to bitter tastes than most people.
Yummy isn’t even consistent just for me over time.
“Ooooh, I sense a Marxist talk coming on? Go on, go on!”
More Stirner than Marx. Nouveaux Marxists may have gotten on board with Stirner, but Marx spent 500 pages In the German Ideology mocking the idea that ideas matter. The world runs on historical materialism, dontcha know?
Uhhh… so what? It’s a very real relational property.