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A couple of days ago, a contact of mine told me:
I replied:
To which my Eastern European/Western Asian friend replied:
In response to which I wrote the following mini-essay:
i like classical music. schopen's fantasie is a hymn for overman. just observe the inhuman and overhuman tempo with which he plays. divine presto!
I replied:
Yeah, well, I have some radical opinions on classical music, as you know. I do think it's good you're--violating yourself with it, though. I think that's a necessary phase for any modern. Note that Machiavelli was the first founder of modernity...
To which my Eastern European/Western Asian friend replied:
So that classical music is the product of modern soul ? soul that was founded by Machiavelli ? why is modern soul machiavellian ? and why is machiavelli a founder of modernity ? first of all, i wonder how you define the pre-modern man and then modern. later is individualist and the former collectivist ? what are the basic traits of one and another ? what are the hierarchy of their values ? I do not think that machiavelli was the liberal modern man. quite the opposite, for me he was elitist for whom the prince and his nobility was end in itself. everything else should have been sacrificed for him. what do you think ?
In response to which I wrote the following mini-essay:
I don't think Machiavelli was a modern man, either; I think he was a Renaissance man. But he was the first founder of modernity. He was himself the new prince, just as Plato's Socrates--or Paul's Jesus--was the prince before him.
Yes, modern man is individualist whereas pre-modern man is collectivist, but it's a little more complicated than that. As Nietzsche indicates in Dawn 9, Platonism or Socratism was already individualist. Yet Platonism especially transferred the individual's gain to the afterlife ("salvation of the soul"), and basically taught people to live collectivistically, if only in order to "go to Heaven". Collectivistically: that means, sittlich.
Modernity is essentially the age in which the individual's gain is sought especially in this world instead. At first, that was just a promise over many generations, so the salvation still lay in one's biological or spiritual "afterlife" (biological or spiritual (grand)children, not to say great great great grandchildren). The only direct individual gain was that things would probably already get a little bit easier over the course of one's own lifetime. But since then, science has come a long way, and people can now somewhat realistically hope to be cured of old age or cryogenically frozen or something like that. In any case we're living in what early moderns would have regarded as a relative technological paradise.
Machiavelli was the first founder of modernity because he was the first to teach the conquest of nature, which after him was really got under way by Bacon and Descartes--the conquest of nature by means of scientific technology. So-called "classical" music, the original tonal music, is an important example of that: people investigated scientifically, namely physiologically, which combinations and alternations of tones had the strongest pleasurable effect on people (even if it was through negative emotions--for "all's well that ends well"...).
Lastly, as for the different hierarchies of values (modern, pre-modern, etc.), I've found it difficult to put it in those terms. I do think it's only a question of the hierarchy, not of the values themselves; like Nietzsche in AC 57, I think there are basic types of people, each type of which has had the same values since prehistoric times (though the means to attaining those values may vary). I haven't quite come to a satisfying determination of those values and their shifting hierarchies through history, though. Some of my most advanced thoughts on the matter can be found in the "Nietzschean typology thread" in our secret Dawn forum on my swastika site:
[Link replaced: https://pathos-of-distance.forumotion.com/t34-nietzschean-typology-thread]
