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An Interpretion of the Ideals of Sovereignty, Wholeness and Becoming What One Is by Gabriel Zamosc-Regueros..
Later,Finally, my interpretation of Wholeness runs against the grain of the prevalent
readings that characterize this as an ideal of psychic unity aimed at restructuring the various parts of the agent’s mind into a harmonious whole. I argue, on the contrary, that wholeness fundamentally concerns social – not psychic – integration: the person becomes whole by placing himself within the circle of genuine culture in which he works together with others in the perfection of nature and freedom. In this way, the person finds redemption from the meaninglessness of existence by ensuring that his energies survive into the future within a suprapersonal community in which life and creativity are perpetually renewed and guaranteed.
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The goal, then, that will make the individual whole is a cultural struggle on behalf of the genius. It is crucial not to misunderstand this as a sacrifice of the individual person for the betterment of a few great individuals or as the command that he devote all his efforts to the production of greatness in others.98 The production of the genius that Nietzsche claims is the goal of wholeness is always first and foremost the realization of that genius
in each and every one of us.99 Nietzsche makes this clear throughout many passages in the third meditation. Take for instance the following section where Nietzsche speaks of one of Schopenhauer’s great lessons for us:
he teaches us to distinguish between those things that really promote human
happiness and those that only appear to do so: how neither riches nor honours nor erudition can lift the individual out of the profound depression he feels at the valuelessness of his existence, and how the striving after these valued things acquires meaning only through an exalted and transfiguring overall goal: to acquire power so as to aid the evolution of the physis and to be for a while the corrector of its follies and ineptitudes. At first only for yourself, to be sure; but through yourself in the end for everyone (UM III, 3; emphasis added).
Or, then again, in section 5, where he refers to the circle of duties that the person who has been educated by the example of great men will adopt as his own:
these new duties are not the duties of a solitary; on the contrary, they set one in the midst of a mighty community held together, not by external forms and regulations, but by a fundamental idea. It is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of nature (UM III, 5).
The fundamental goal of each individual is to manifest his own personal freedom, to give true form to his inner being and uniqueness. Nietzsche seems to think that he can do so only by placing himself in the circle of genuine culture, in which he works together with other individuals in the promotion of the perfection of freedom and individual expression
in himself and in all. In doing so, he contributes to the communal goal of forming cultural institutions in which he and others will be protected from the forces that threaten to destroy or misappropriate each person’s drive to freedom. As Nietzsche puts it, “these individuals have to complete their work – that is the sense of their staying together; and all who participate in the institution have, through continual purification and mutual support, to help to prepare within themselves and around them for the birth of the genius
and the ripening of his work” (UM III, 6; emphasis added). In that sense, the birth of the genius in one’s own self or in others coincides with the birth of true freedom, with the manifestation of a genuine as opposed to a false, borrowed or weak personality.
-Lyfing
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