You are focusing too much on denial. Denial simply refers to the individual blocking his impulses from his consciousness. It refers to the incapacity to dissipate excess energy that is produced by resisting one’s impulses. Once you learn how to dissipate energy properly, without trapping it inside your body, you can set any goal you want for yourself, anything you feel attracted to. This also includes power.
You somehow believe that striving for power is necessarily denial. It isn’t. It’s the same mistake people make when they assume that people who are aggressive are necessarily neurotic or mentally ill. It’s naive. You are assuming there is an ideal that is shared by everyone and that those who choose a different ideal are necessarily denying themselves. In certain cases, this is true, but in many others, it isn’t.
Most importantly, you are promoting the idea that being an egoist is only bad if there is some sort of sickness (e.g. ressentiment) beneath it. The same mistake people make when they assume that power-cravers are only bad if they are motivated by hatred. Power-cravers are bad no matter what motivates them. This is the truth. Everything else is naivety.
I don’t think my focus is on denial, though I mentioned it. My focus is on the partial nature of striving after one thing, in this case power.
Striving ONLY after power.
If someone is habitually agressive there is a problem. I don’t like the word neurotic so I wouldn’t use it and I certainly wouldn’t use mentally ill. A parallel problem exists if one ONLY focuses on power. Now some people are not complete. They are not well rounded. They are literally partial humans. In certain cases on can actually point to brain damage and parts of the brain are not functioning. But with others, no such organic damage is present, but to me they are partial people and yes, these partial people may not be in denial. I think in most cases they have made being a partial person an ideal and this involves suppression and often denial. I thought I made it clear that my focus was on people who only focus on gaining power, and that focus came from your interpretation of will to power. An aggressive person or a person who focus on gaining power is not a one track person, at least not necessarily. So I am not making the mistake you are talkin about.
Metanote: my experience is you are leaping away from things I say and making a bunch of assumptions.
Well, no.
'Egoist´? Stop putting words in my mouth and assuming so much. I was using your definition of the will to power and focusing on that individual and not thinking about egoism in the slightest. Egoism will generally lead one to want a role for others in one’s life, for example. Me mentioning the grass cutter not focusing on other people in any relational way was not a criticism of the grass fanatic’s egoism, but of his own self-undermining. I gave and give no shit about his altruism or how much he gives or loves or whatever someone might think are his human shortcomings for others. I am looking at a social mammal that has chopped himself down to a little partial humanness. It’s like he blocked off all his senses but smell or refused to use the muscles on the left side of his body. Whatever the side effects of the idiocy involved on other people, I am focusing on what he is doing to himself.
The same mistake people make when they assume that power-cravers are only bad if they are motivated by hatred. Power-cravers are bad no matter what motivates them. This is the truth. Everything else is naivety.
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You are still focusing on some sort of illness as an explanation for every phenomenon that does not fit your expectations.
You said it yourself: you consider striving (only) after power to be a form of denial. I say, and I repeat, that’s not necessarily the case. And narrow focus isn’t necessarily denial. Reducing some senses to increase others is not denial.
Yes, I know, and that’s precisely the problem, because you assume that what is good for you is also good for everyone else. You assume that people share the same ideal. In this instance, you assume that everyone shares the ideal of completeness (or whatever is opposed to partiality.) You speak of “what he is doing to himself” as if he is sharing the same ideal as you do.
Every phenomenon?
No. A person who only strives for power and a person who is always aggressive have problems.
Seriously examine what you are doing. Why would you put ‘only’ in parentheses? Doing that means that if the sentence is read with what is enclosed in the parentheses is out of parentheses it is ALSO TRUE. In fact that sentence without parentheses is the only thing I have asserted. I could see misinterpreting the first time I mentioned this, though even then it is a stretch, but now you do it again after I capitalized the only. It is as if I must judge striving after power AND so I judge when someone only strives after power. That is not the case. I strive after power and I see nothing unhealthy, problematic about it. I do not see striving after power as a denial. I do think only striving after power would include denial, yes. If we are looking at a lifetime, where, say, one’s life is not always threatened in some really immediate sense.
Of course there can be narrow focus both in certain periods of time. Of course one need not be a generalist. Only focusing on cutting grass would be denial for someone who is not brain damaged. Only focusing on power also. Being a specialist in a field need not be.
On the other hand doing what I said, in my words, which ought to be relevent, would be literally denying yourself invaluble information. Taking my example, making it more abstract, then universalizing it may seem like a valid argument but it’s not.
That’s enough responses for me where someone does not respond to what I say, but uses it for jumping off points to refute things that have nothing to do with what I say or twist it in fallacious ways.
Maybe I’ll try some other time or some other topic.
It doesn’t even matter to you the least that you make a statement about egoism, a term you introduce. I then say I had no such judgment. So you simply start somewhere else without acknowledging that perhaps you misunderstood or ask a question. This is not useful or interesting. I am not sure it passes as a Turing test.
The idiocy lies in the fact that by reducing everything to the concept of “health” you are giving a free pass to egoists who are not sick. Do you understand what I am saying? It seems like you completely misunderstood what I said.
There is a tendency to reduce all value judgments either to health or to its symptoms in the form of positive feelings. If someone is positive and happy, it is commonly said, he is good. The one who is positive and happy, it is said, cannot commit crimes, and if he does, then they are no crimes.
This is a very popular way of “thinking” among common people.
Nope. I specifically left room for people who are not intelligent or partial. I am sure you have encounted them. They simply do not have the capability to include very much.
Nope. I never said anything about ideals. I would have gotten to our differences about how ideals fit in, but I certainly did not say this not do I think it.
No, I know they do not.
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No, I assume that he has other ideals. That is a given to me.
What makes you think that partial people simply lack capability to include very much?
You cannot speak of what is good for someone unless you assume that he shares certain ideal which you use as a criterium to determine how good that something is for him.
There is no good and bad outside of the context of one’s ideals.
Illness, sickness, problems, whatever you want to call it.
You are dancing around. The point is that you are judging people according to some random standards you have forced on them. They have “problems”. How the fuck do you know they have problems?
You have understood nothing of what I said.
Because it is irrelevant. It has no relevance. It is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. It has no relevance.
It is irrelevant. The point is that you are arguing that people have a common ideal. That’s not necessarily true.
You are an imbecile who is constantly missing the point without ever realizing that he’s missing the point.
Aphorism 617 of ‘Will to Power’, gives good light on the meaning of the will to power, best explained by Deluize.
“That everything recurs , is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of
being”. It is meant as an ontological argument against a mechanistic view, of determined , evolutionary process. Meaning ‘Being’ cannot be defined ex-post facto. This clears it up, at least for me.
Return is a probabilistic certainty, based on the conceptual infinity of the world, where all elements return , given infinite reps. It cannot return to the same, because of infinite ways of re-arrangement of its consistency.
Yes, if you believe in that sort of thing. But, again, the distinction I like to make is between that which you believe “in your head” to be true and that which you can demonstrate “out in the world” that all rational folks are obligated to be believe in turn. Unless they want to be, among other things, wrong. Or, in some circles, “retards”.
What brought me here are all of the existential variables in my life that predisposed me to explore philosophy. And, sure, if you wish to include that as an example of “will to power”, fine. But my own interest in such things as nihilism revolves far more around the extent to which philosophers can make it relevant [applicable] when delving into the relationship between identity and conflicting value judgments. They will either go there or they won’t.
In other words, what happens when the “will to power” exercised by folks on opposite sides of any particular moral or political divide come into conflict?
In your opinion, does anything resembling a “resolution” here revolve more around might makes right, right makes might or moderation, negotiation and compromise?
Or, perhaps, something else?
So, we are still stuck then with one or another rendition of “you’re right from your side, and I’m right from mine”. And even the philosophical arguments proposed from both sides are basically just reflections of that too. What I suggest then is that philosophers are not able to pin down the most rational, virtuous, noble behaviors. At least not in the manner in which scientists/logicians can pin down the objective truth pertaining to mathematics, the laws of nature and the rules of language.
Would you agree?
Well, let’s just agree to disagree about that. The manner in which I situate my own value judgments is embedded in this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion [like premarital sex] was a sin. Big time. Both in and out of church.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
That’s how I take my own values “out into the world”. I situate them in a particular context and note the manner in which dasein, conflicting goods and political economy seem relevant.
Will you do the same? Will you situate the manner in which you construe the meaning of nihilism and the “will to power” such that we might perhaps be able to grasp how they “work” for you “for all practical purposes”?
As for being a “wretch” yes, a nihilistic bent can certainly involve that: the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty. On the other hand, nihilism [as I I understand it] can also be a font for freedom. Freedom in the sense that, unlike objectivists, I am not confined to the intellectual contraption that they concoct out of words “in their heads”. In other words, in order to be deemed “one of us” you are required to think and to feel and to act in accordance with that which is construed to be the ideal, the superior judgment, the one and only way in which to define and to describe the “objective world”.
For example, over at KT, you either share Satyr’s point of view or [sooner or later] you are confined to the dungeon.
I merely suggest instead that their own certainty [philosophical or otherwise] is more a psychological reflection of this:
1] For one reason or another [rooted largely in dasein], you are taught or come into contact with [through your upbringing, a friend, a book, an experience etc.] a worldview, a philosophy of life.
2] Over time, you become convinced that this perspective expresses and encompasses the most rational and objective truth. This truth then becomes increasingly more vital, more essential to you as a foundation, a justification, a celebration of all that is moral as opposed to immoral, rational as opposed to irrational.
3] Eventually, for some, they begin to bump into others who feel the same way; they may even begin to actively seek out folks similarly inclined to view the world in a particular way.
4] Some begin to share this philosophy with family, friends, colleagues, associates, Internet denizens; increasingly it becomes more and more a part of their life. It becomes, in other words, more intertwined in their personal relationships with others…it begins to bind them emotionally and psychologically.
5] As yet more time passes, they start to feel increasingly compelled not only to share their Truth with others but, in turn, to vigorously defend it against any and all detractors as well.
6] For some, it can reach the point where they are no longer able to realistically construe an argument that disputes their own as merely a difference of opinion; they see it instead as, for all intents and purposes, an attack on their intellectual integrity…on their very Self.
7] Finally, a stage is reached [again for some] where the original philosophical quest for truth, for wisdom has become so profoundly integrated into their self-identity [professionally, socially, psychologically, emotionally] defending it has less and less to do with philosophy at all. And certainly less and less to do with “logic”.
Just out of curiosity, how do you see your own values/ideals as something able to be embodied in more than this? Can you bring it “down to earth” in the manner in which I did above?
Again, we really do approach philosophy from very different orientations. I ask you for “particulars” and you give me this. All I can keep coming back to then is this: What on earth does this mean?
I’m sorry, but, from my frame of mind, this is the equivalent of saying, “may the force be with you”. A Star Wars philosophy.
It shouldn’t, since a nihilization of the eternal return is based on a developing sense of ‘Dasein’ in line more with Heraclitus, then Parmenedies. Such a being cannot nihilizea probable definition. The critique is against the Heideggerian version as insupportable. Why not? Because the identity is only approximately correlated to the value judgements. The ground is indefinite and out of bounds with a logical necessity which could conceivable demark what Sawellos saw as a clear cut break between consciousness and brute instinct. This instinctive need to break away from the instinct to posit the will into exact, mechanistic effects from outside forces,
creates a literal effect by which the forces composing
the will seem to be casual extrincially…It is of a different kind of will N is talking about, and this
difference , the basic assumptions of ‘Dasein’ falter.
An air of indifference pervades, toward even the
difference, where even that last vestige is lost (Badrillard). In this sense, even the meaning of nihilism looses it’s categorical significance. From such indifference an active nihilism makes more sense, where the will to exist can garner the overcoming of all transvaluations, even the difference between the total pessimism of the existential condition and the
it’s pre-categorical hope.
Philosophers are attracted to exploring various possibilities, which leads to complicated lingo, but if you want your terms to be politically effective, and not only politically effective but also communicable and aesthetically pleasant, you need to simplify them.
Provide me with an example of a nihilist and contrast it with an example of a non-nihilist. That’s the best way to do it.