From The Search For Evil
- What is your dog doing?
- I don't know. I looked it up on the internet but couldn't find anything.
- Sort of like dog-paddling. Except that's for floating in place. The fountain is only two feet deep. She's standing on the bottom on her back legs and paddling the surface with her front legs. I've never seen anything like it.
- What brings you to UCLA?
- The quiet. Sometimes I read by this fountain. I grew up living up in the hills over there. I've been coming here most of my life.
- What are you reading now?
- Nietzsche.
- Which book?
- Genealogy of Morality. I was thinking about evil, and this book provides one of the most famous definitions and examples.
- What is evil?
- Resentment. Destruction without practical intention, done for the feeling of power. The Jews, the book proclaims, were dark skinned slaves who created Christianity to poison, drain the life out of their masters, the light skinned Aryan race. Recognize the idea?
- The Nazis.
- Yes. Nietzsche said he liked to joke, say sombre things laughingly.
- Doesn't seem funny to me.
- Look at your dog. Do you know what I think she is doing? Playing with the light.
- She can feel the underwater light on the bottom with her feet.
- I don't mean the fixture, I mean the light. Watching the light change with her dog paddle splashing. Look, she's dunking her head under water to look at the source.
- She does that.
- So Nietzsche, the historian of ideas, makes this claim about the Jews. They invented compassion to undermine their masters' power, who before they'd been corrupted had been individuals, loving life, studying life, like the ancient Greeks. The trouble is, one thing the Jews are not especially is compassionate. I can tell you that as a Jew myself. There is nothing in their history, before and after the beginnings of Christianity, to bring in as evidence the Jews wanted to poison their master race the Christians. And the theology and philosophy of the Jews, both before and after, especially when you take Kabbalah into account, leans not towards the passive, un-individual, unknowing compassion they are supposed to have poisoned the Christians with, but very strongly in the opposite direction.
- Nietzsche was joking.
- Yes. But for fun, or out of resentment, as an act of evil? Was his writing an example of an individual's will to know the world out of love for the world? Or an act of hatred and destruction?
- What do you think?
- Nietzsche to me is insane. He watches himself as he throws his own poison into the world, sees that act itself as futile, and throws himself back into more destruction to avoid the sight of his own futility. In one famous passage he predicts the coming of destruction like the Nazi's soon brought citing Neitzsche himself as their authority. Hey. I've got a hypothesis now, a way to test my theory about your dog.
- What?
- She seems to be always facing the light while she kicks up her waves. Going around it, positioning herself like the hands of a clock. Do you know, going home last night, passing Holmby park, I stopped to talk with a group of men playing frisby. They called themselves a men's support group. Once a week they got together to open themselves up to each other. Take them as an example of the poison compassion Nietzsche hated. They talk about their lives, but practically speaking, did they share their lives? Do things with each other, help each other out of practical difficulties? Or only feelings. Look at your dog! She was at three o'clock, now she's at nine o'clock. Even though her body is not exactly angled to the light, her head is.
- Interesting.
- What I'm interested in with Nietzsche is definition of the problem: if we're not going to live with each other in false compassion, with resentment against our social conformity, acted upon or not, how do we live? How do we act with individuality, love, and science with each other? Look now. She's at one o'clock. Theory confirmed!
- You're probably right.
- Dogs play with sticks as toys, perhaps imagining them as prey. But this play with light seems to be abstract play, like making music, or mathematics. It's not impossible. Dogs love their masters and play with them, learn their habits and manipulate, master their masters. Your dog shows you her new art, while I've been coming here for decades and never did anything but sit and read. She could be the first of Nietzsche's prophesied master race, the individuals who'd invent scientific, loving lives with each other.