You know about “following one’s gut”? Nietzsche takes this literally. He calls your morality the morality of indigestion—the morality of making one’s gut feel good. To avoid unpleasant feeling, nausea, nervousness—this is the real end of your morality. But is it even yours? That would be giving you too much credit. It is an inherited will, given to you by your ancestors, shaped by their survival mechanisms, reinforced by the conditioning of your youth.
So what do we make of trusting one’s gut? Is avoiding unpleasantries, wanting to feel good about oneself—is this the highest aim of virtue? Should each trust his own gut? Is this what Nietzsche means when he speaks of man creating his own values?
Of course not.
One’s virtue—his honing instinct (vir-tue; read: will to)—can aim far beyond his own indigestion. But where does it aim? Is this, too, merely conditioned, inherited, just as fake as the gut itself? Perhaps it is equally inherited. Perhaps it is physically real, innate to the body. And if not—if the will comes by way of the soul, and the soul is tethered transparently to the body—even then, we know that the machinations of the ātman are as karmically predetermined as the material conditions of existence.
So the self—that wandering karmic thread through time, woven together for a moment before death disperses it again—can it be both predetermined and possessed of will? Must we believe that the thread tied to the will is of a higher type, of a nobler variety, than the thread of the body? Must we deny the body to affirm the will? Or can we embed will in the material and, with this, affirm both?
This is a troubling divide to me. I do not wish to speculate on the metaphysics…
