Post Category → Philosophy

What did Nietzsche mean when he wrote: “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”?

Nietzsche makes his remark about the abyss (in Beyond Good and Evil §146) just after cautioning the reader that someone who fights monsters risks becoming a monster himself.

That can happen to the man of ressentiment. He’s convinced that his various disabilities are caused by someone or something out to get him, and that if only the scourge were eliminated from the world all would be well.

If this is your attitude, Nietzsche is saying, you’re going to get really good at ferreting out the nasty parts of life, wherever they might be hiding, and you’ll uncover one hitherto unrecognized injustice after another: first racism, then structural racism, then elitism, then heteronormativism, ableism, lookism, microagression…. You may get to the point where you can see nothing but monsters.

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Do you agree or disagree with Hume’s claim that there is no self?

Hume argued, not that there’s no self, exactly, but that there’s no substantial self.

I’m not entirely persuaded. Consider the following imaginary case:

You’re on a base on the Moon. The oxygen delivery system has malfunctioned and you’re suffocating to death. You step into a machine that scans everything about you down to the last detail, including all your neural pathways and hence all your memories, and transmits this information to Earth. On Earth, the information is used to produce an exact duplicate of you. The “you” on the Moon dies of oxygen deprivation, but the “you” on Earth goes on living. So who are you: the one who died on the Moon, or the one living on Earth?

It seems to me that there’s a duplicate of me on Earth, and that what’s left of the original me is on the Moon. Why? Because although the duplicate has all my memories and experiences and is just like me, I am not the subject of those experiences. My experiences are mine because they happened to me, not merely because they happened.

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Why can’t everything be free?

I assume the question is whether there’s a better way to allocate resources than the market.

Relatedly, the question is whether scarcity can be eliminated, and whether its elimination will make it unnecessary to allocate resources by a principle according to which some receive more than others. If so, then the only principle we’d need is Marx’s: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Can scarcity be eliminated? Some say that capitalism has artificially multiplied our needs. The idea is that in order to prevent crises stemming from weak demand, capitalist societies create desires for unnecessary things. Without capitalism there would be no need to create these “false needs,” and we would be able to determine what we truly need. If our true needs turn out to be simple and straightforward, we can achieve the elimination of scarcity.

Since we don’t know in advance what our true needs will turn out to be, we can’t know that we’ll be able to eliminate scarcity with respect to them. But for speculative purposes let’s distinguish between things the unavailability of which causes death, and things whose unavailability does not cause death. The first kind are needs, and the second kind are wants.

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