Vulnerability and Nietzsche

Essentially, the recognition of one’s own vulnerability in the face of a hostile, natural world allows the individual to access themselves deeply and internally where the expression of power is an act which allows the individual to valuate themselves with the external result. Even though Nietzsche claims that the autonomous, aristocratic and supremely powerful individual values themselves in relation to nothing outside their own action, it is necessary that they are still looking only into the external world to see the result of their action for their appraisal of value in themselves. There is an inward, vulnerable nature of the human which loving only the external products of physical action grossly and dangerously ignores. The path to understanding one’s own inward vulnerabilities, and the value of this knowledge, precipitates into a community of individuals who know what is best for each other because they deeply and personally know each other and themselves. Typically, we see our own manifestations of strength played out in our own lives and communities where the human being has the choice to take on, or not, the education of being informed by the objects of their own external valuation which can lead into an awareness of the value of another’s, and their own, vulnerability.

In primitive mental youth, we love the physical as its own end and chase it with all the strength we have. There is much joy and happiness in this the success of this, as Nietzsche indicates, but once you have loved enough physical things for their physical ends, the saturation of physical love begins to feel mundane. This mundane feeling does not satisfy our perennial longing to love and so we are shaken free, by lack of satisfaction in the diminishing marginal utility of entertainment with manifestations of the physical. Our longing causes us to search within the numerous objects of our physical love to discover what it is that we are still missing. We still long because it is in our internal nature that we feel our vulnerability crying out to reach that of another’s. We discover that all the varieties of objects and bodies and the strength we exerted to obtain them had the ability to be accessed and loved simply because they possessed a common vulnerability; All things can be understood and accessed by the natural condition of their existence with a vulnerable nature. The revelation of this fundamental commonality gives birth to a desire to see all things with existence reach their maximized expression of existence. At this point our intellect seeks to believe in, and experiment with, ideas that we think will better all things that exist. To bringing these thoughts in meaningful contact with things that exist necessarily requires a preoccupation with the function of corresponding action and “ought” claims, or laws. A preoccupation with the proper role of action and law to better all things in existence eventually makes the individual want to allow for themselves an education with an unlimited scope. Different approaches and styles and values concerning knowledge and human understanding are explored, desired and loved. A society where only force is respected because of its external results cannot sustain a society at all because it only incorporates half of human nature. The potential society of individuals, which go through the process I describe above, is not characterized by an individual’s selfish state of bliss for the satisfaction of themselves. It is the experiential truth that somehow the individual’s personal, selfish interest is transformed—and forever marked—by being encompassing of the whole of existence for the sake of a better, specific and more transparent experience with the individual. This is the process that cannot help but to emerge to shape our society once Nietzsche’s credible critique of modern morality is blended with the proper and more full understanding of our nature as also containing vulnerability.