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A quick quote on what it means to live naturally

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Godsmacker

Godsmacker

Rising Star
Friedrich Nietzsche said:
“You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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And Neitsche misses the point… again.
The Stoics were about living righteously, according to natural law; The natural law that applies to humans, which is not the same law that applies to snails or trees or rocks.
It's interesting because the idea of "natural law" is one I was brought up with, and which is ingrained in me, and is, for better or worse, one which is very much under much scrutiny in the popular left-leaning media and academia.
Neitsche's understanding of "nature" is more in keeping with the popular notion of "nature" (and our moral reaction to it) as being an anarchic clusterfuck.
A bit off topic, perhaps.
 
Nature has only one law, the law of physics (including presently undiscovered physics).

All other "laws of nature" are a bad front for someone's arbitrary morals.

Some time ago, in the Netherlands there was a "Natural Law Party". It turned out to be run by the Trancendent Meditation cult. They had all sorts of wacky ideas, like kicking out all immigrants, because "it's against the natural law to live somewhere else than where you are born." The big irony was that the TM cult's leader 'Maharishi Mahesh Yogi', a guy born in India, was at the time living in the Netherlands.

This seems to me to be a striking difference between the laws of nature (physics) and the laws of man (morality): physics abhors inconsistency, morality attracts hypocrisy.
 
Interesting scenario, but I don't believe morals are arbitrary, and don't doubt that our concepts of "good" and "bad" have their roots in the laws of physics. How could they not? Though it remains to be seen exactly how consistent the laws of physics are!
Also, "Natural Law" refers to a philosophical ideal, whereas "the laws of nature" is a more casual term for the innate tendencies expressed by various phenomena animal, vegetable or mineral, so I think the "Natural Law Party" to which you refer are, like Neitsche, barking up the wrong tree.
 
Swayambhu said:
Oh shoot! I remember that! Yogic flying…. so... wow.
Was 1994 really that long ago? Looks more like 1974.
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I think maybe the NLP dude just dressed like 1974, even in 1994?

Hmmm... NLP also = neurolinguistic programming...
 
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