Gotta' Serve Somebody

Epictetus said, "it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices" (Discourses, 1.2).

...there are economies everywhere. Every moment, the Stoics say, is a decision within one's economy, where one type of life is exchanged for another. For the Stoic, that was why you disciplined your body- by doing so, you learned which economies would sustain you best. You learned the role of hunger and want for lowering the price of satisfaction; the role of attentiveness to death in order to lower the price of actual death; the role of pain in order to lower the price of pleasure. The Stoic economy was a minimalist economy, an economy at a lower frequency...

...there are other economies. There is the Epicurean economy, where one takes pleasure in everything, because one recognizes the role of fate, and thus one is amor fati. One also learns the role of distance, and thus serenity, that allows even the most banal thing to be enjoyable...

...there is the capitalist economy, where one learns the negative role of freedom. Freedom in this economy means the restriction that comes with "unlimited" growth; the disruption of "upward mobility"; the heavy weight of the impersonal "market"; the paralysis of "infinite possibility"; Hume's fork, that-all-too important separation of what something "is" from what it "ought" to be (the "is" is merely what we make of something in it's exchange); the restriction (on some) of the unequal exchange (for which a "profit" is only possible)...

...is there a democratic economy? This is the economy I'm interested in. A democratic economy would be an exchange of equality, perhaps a radical equality, were the reasons one gives are acceptalbe in themselves; where the entry fee is merely being a person; where my exchange is the same as yours...but of course that's a utopia. Everyone sells themselves, and everyone has different prices.

The Agenbite of Inwit

Nietzsche asked what our conscience tells us...there's a sting to it, yes, but why? A sting...like a yellowjacket that we've angered, come too close to its nest, crossed over some invisible line that separates its world from ours...there is something like this in Nietzsche's assesment. There are conditions for our preservation wrapped up in the movement of our bodies, the judgments and thoughts we engage in, the things we eat, and the people we love and hate. When we cross the boarder of these conditions the sting is harsh, but we can overcome it. That is what the 'over-man' is, the over-coming of these boarders, the creation or formation of conditions for life...the problem is when we are reactive to the conditions, rather than actively forming them.

But "objectively" we really can't create our own conditions, because even our need for creation is a condition for the preservation of life. What is Nietzsche's answer? The Eternal Recurrance of the Same. The Gay Science, section 341:

The heaviest weight. -What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'this life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...the eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'

To affirm every moment as if (one can sense a little of the Saint Paul as if here) one were to live it over and over and over. This isn't about getting rid of guilt. For Nietzsche, the problem is that we are too innocent, since we do everything because of the conditions for the preservation of life. No, the problem is: how can I be responsible.

Historical Belief/Religious Belief

Wittgenstein says:
"Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through think and thin, which you can do only as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don't take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.- There is nothing paradoxical about that!" (Culture and Value, 32e)

Does belief encounter a 'historical truth' in the same way it encounters an everyday truth (like, the garbage truck comes on Tuesday)? Wittgenstein seems to be saying the encounter is very similar, insofar as it is only a result of 'a life'. But what's 'a life'? Elsewhere he says, "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? -In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? -Or is the use its life?" (PI, 432). This is a fascinating idea: a narrative is 'true' in its use- the 'way' it is used, the place where it is heard, spoken. The historian reads the inconsistent gospels, and says, 'ah, one of these accounts must be false, because they couldn't all have happened.' But St. Irenaeus of Lyon reads four gospels that indicate the four zones of the world (east/west, north/south), and thought four manifested everything about Jesus, 'breathing out immortality on every side.'
This doesn't deal with any type of "objectivism" as such, and that's probably not in Wittgenstein's concern. Really, what is the point of such "objectivism"? Most likely it is to give your reasons for action justification to others, but the only people who would care are those who already somehow hold your poistion (or life, as it were).

The question to me is this: how much is "given" to us (where we don't partake in the forming) and how much do we (consciously or not) form this life? It's this dialectic (if it is a dialectic) that's fascinating.