Valuation & the Enlightenment, a new aristocracy

This excerpt is taken from ILP forum:

Quote :

Cezar wrote:
The Enlightenment movement was against "superstition", but it could not create new gods or create new values and a new class to stand behind those new values.

Fixed Cross wrote:

The destruction of idols, the abandonment of superstition, is also the destruction and abandonment of values. But new values were in fact created in the enlightenment, it's just that to Nietzsche they seemed "lowly" - the values belonging to the modern individual. Man had become too concerned with "brotherly love" to attain to classical values, to self-value in the ruthless and uncompromising ways of the Greeks. Man had come to believe in himself as part of a whole, an organized cosmos. Man as a function of a greater entity. The Greeks never saw themselves in this way - this utilitarian view of man, wherein each individual has and is defined by certain rights granted by the state. The state never reached that level of sophistication of control in the classical era, not until the Catholic church and its Jesuit orders took hold of Europe, when the art of spying on citizens and controlling their convictions became an issue. Athens was far too pragmatic and Earthly for this sort of thing, it was simply a band of people, a tribe in favorable conditions, with the good fortune of having a noble narrative (Homer) to serve as a binding super-value (as opposed to super-ego). All these conditions were real, and the values produced from them were therefore natural (to their creators) and solid.

Modern man has learned to define himself in abstract terms, as "a human", instead of for example "A Greek", which meant a specific type of human, with a lot of ethical and aesthetic attributes. By introducing the common denominator "human" as both the basic and the supreme meaning of any individual (indeed a result of Christianity), the space for specific human values has been reduced, sterilized. Nationalism was an attempt to break this sterility, but the modern nation state, this cold beast, does in no way guarantee the sort of ground for values that the Greek polis represented. Nazism was an extreme attempt to derive this ground from the will to have it, but as Nietzsche noted beforehand, the Germans were absolutely not ready for such a thing, they entirely lacked depth of being, health, subtlety, culture. Now, with the intermixing of all types, the ground is being laid for what Nietzsche called a new aristocracy - not defined by national borders, but by the capacity to value and produce values, to be value. The infrastructure used to build such an aristocracy is entirely natural, that is to say affect-based, humanity is currently being broken down into types by exposing it to extreme stimuli, and can be reorganized into a new pyramid by understanding these types and finding a proper use and context for them.

The lowest type will not be "Untermensch" but simply "dumb and numb". The highest type the philosopher-artist, or "artist-tyrant", who is capable of producing vision and attracting resources and builders to enact that vision. As is always the case, capital flows toward the ideal. Since the enlightenment, the ideal has been "liberty". Liberty from the church and the tyrannical God - but liberty for what? As this question remains unanswered by anything other than in general "the fulfillment of passions", capital flows towards all sources of pleasure. The "artist-tyrant" is he who conceives of higher pleasures, capable of inspiring greater forces than the attraction of sex and violence, and from such power may flow a healthy super-national capitalist state, naturally ranked, layered in terms of capacity to value and attain to higher values. Of course capacity to value is physiologically defined, so there will have to be, as part of such a meta-states establishment and maintenance, a tradition of physical, physiological and psychological discipline, a "yoga" whereby strong willed humans are enabled to ascend and educate their children.