Re: Intelligence in a Box (was Re: Nietzsche (transhumanist philosopher))

From: ppi@amug.org
Date: Fri Sep 01 2000 - 13:14:11 MDT


At 9/1/00, Upgrade! wrote:
>At 05:55 PM 08/27/2000 +0200, "scerir" <scerir@libero.it> wrote:
>>Friedrich W. Nietzsche died in august 1900, the 25th.
><snip>
>
>To me, the essence of Nietzsche is that he was a destroyer
>of the boxes within which people are intelligent.
>
>In his attempt to destroy religious boxes, he said "God is dead!"
>and got his message onto the cover of Time magazine.
>
>Many religious people are highly intelligent... within their
>religious boxes.
>
>Max Stirner ('The Ego and its Own') was, in my opinion, a
>more penetrating box-destroyer than Nietzsche. He essentially
>said, "You need to go beyond killing God, you need to destroy
>the very notion of "god" (so-called), the very idea of "god"; the
>word "god" needs to become no more than a nonsense-noise
>to you."

If Stirner had heard the phrases, "intelligence in a box" and
"box-destroyer," he may well have liked them.

 From 'The Ego and Its Own':
"Just as the schoolmen philosophized only *inside* the belief
of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV wrote fat books *inside* the papist
superstition, without ever
throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the
State without calling in question the
fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics
because they are conjured into
the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon -- so also subjects
vegetate in subjection, virtuous
people in virtue, liberals in humanity, without ever putting to these fixed
ideas of theirs the searching knife
of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts
stand on a firm footing, and he
who doubts them -- lays hands on the sacred! Yes, the "fixed idea," that is
the truly sacred!" [Stirner's emphasis]

http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/stirner/theego3.html

BTW, I agree that Stirner was a more penetrating "box-destoyer" than Nietzsche.

Mark Lindsay



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