Psychoanalysis is not “deterministic” (“What I do is determined by unconscious processes”): the “death drive” as a self-sabotaging structure represents the minimum of freedom, of a behavior uncoupled from the utilitarian survivalist attitude.The “death drive” means that the organism is no longer fully determined by its environs, that it “explodes/implodes” into a cycle of autonomous behavior. “we should bear in mind the basic anti-Darwinian lesson of psychoanalysis repeatedly emphasized by Lacan: man’s radical and fundamental dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation, to his environs.At its most radical, “beinghuman” consists in an “uncoupling” from immersion in one’s environs, in following a certain automatism which ignores the demands of adaptation-this is what the “death drive” ultimately amounts to. Zizek elaborates Freud via Lacan in Parallax View : So this observation also belongs importantly to his explanation of how ascetic moralities get started. Schopenhauer makes a similar point in " On the Suffering of the World." But Nietzsche here also implies that if there were no other way for one to vent one's cruelty, no one else upon whom to vent it, one would attack oneself (in the manner of religious ascetics). Thus, I take this claim to be just the (fairly uncontroversial one) that, if everything were perfect, we'd cause trouble just to (i) avoid boredom, or (ii) maximize our opportunities for expressing and feeling power, or (iii) some such. This quote does suggest that not all of us might be "warlike," but it seems to me to give us no way of assessing whether being "warlike" would be a good thing or a bad thing. Rather, just the observation that human beings are feisty little critters, consistent with Nietzsche's claim in the Genealogy that human beings naturally delight in cruelty (which is also meant to be a value-neutral statement). It's important to note, though, from the standpoint of the question you seem to have received about it, that this quote isn't an evaluation - it's just a psychological observation. That, of course, makes its "context" a difficult issue, since Part IV of BGE is just the "Epigrams and Interludes" chapter, made up largely of several dozen one-liners, not obviously related or continuous in theme. In peaceful conditions, the warlike man will attack himself. The quote below is, in fact, the whole of Beyond Good & Evil §76: This struck me as probably not what Nietzsche had in mind, and I sent this to our favorite Nietzsche scholar Jessica Berry, who answered: "In times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself."Ĭan you explain the context of this reference and where it comes from, please?Ī quick web search reveals that this is an often quoted aphorism, especially in the context of martial arts, where it's meant to be inspirational for one's training. A while back we received a question via email from Joe R.:
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