2.77
Stones have worlds.
A stone resists; it holds open a space for itself. This stone is a maintaining of itself, even if it’s losing parts of itself or it’s nested in various ways (§2.43–2.44). It withstands, which doesn’t mean there is something beyond or behind the stone that withstands;[1] it means that the stone is this withstanding. Eventually, it succumbs. — Any opening to world can and will be destroyed.
‘But you want me to think that a stone has a world…!’
“Look at things like this.”
‘But…the racist says, Look at things like this! Or the one who’s full of hatred. The mean, the depressed, the anxious! Why should we look at things like that!’
— Ok, first, I’ll deal with the attunements in the second ‘half’ of your objection. Many of these aren’t by choice: one is drawn into them (anxiety, depression). We can, perhaps we should, “Look at things like this” — without getting drawn in. When we see things ‘like this,’ we do so with one foot firmly planted in our world/self. Different attunements, even within the same world, if extreme or intense enough, can begin to show how things would be, how things could hang together, just so: they reveal coloured tatters of worlds. We can – perhaps should – look, but we also say ‘no’ to the draw. Why say ‘no’? Because what we see, what we sense, isn’t how we want to be in the world. (We could cast this in terms of conatus or power;[2] i.e., it might not be a question of error.)
Ethics is what we do when faced with such situations—our preliminary response—as well as (if we look) what we do when we see how things could be that way—our subsequent response. We respond as ethical, imaginative beings.
Conatus isn’t always improved by fleeing from so-called ‘negativities’ and sticking to so-called ‘positivities’ (e.g., happiness, cheerfulness). We heed and attend to our situation, which isn’t always pleasant. — To take pleasure as something sacrosanct is to deny swaths of phenomena. You can respect phenomena like anger. To struggle with it and fight against it exacerbates the situation. Anger needs to be heard: not to get rid of it (we don’t heed ‘negativities’ to reach ‘positivities’), but to understand, respect, see how it appears, respond sensitively to it, and feel how it’s grounded in the core of our and others’ being.
Let’s return to the first ‘half’ of the objection: the racist, the one full of hatred, the mean. Going beyond the second ‘half,’ these dispositions don’t only narrow down phenomena, they also deny them. I can heed the phenomena of racism, hatred, meanness, but I cannot accept how they colour the world through their denials and pettiness. Maybe, in some cases, I can understand rivalry, the identification of an enemy, struggle, and combat, but not hatred as petty, blatantly reductive, or consuming and raging, rooted in a desire to rid the world of its enemy. Hatred is wrapped in irresponsibility.
When we “Look at things like this,” we do so without necessarily getting carried away.
[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 26.
[2] Spinoza, Ethics, Prop. VI–VIII, Part III, p. 91; Prop. XII, Part III, p. 94.