I was hoping you would be, as your inquiries seem oriented on a kind of will to power I have much faith in; the combination of fighting and conscious dreaming, the symbolic will.
The forums are in my signature. I have only strange explanations for why they are there. Sometimes reasons aren’t causes.
Fixed, what’s clear here is that you’re obsessed with Satyr – you see Satyr in everything that opposes you. What’s more, I only heard of him thanks to your thread in the “Rant” subforum, which was a couple of days ago.
So no, this has nothing to do with Satyr. In fact, unlike you, I know almost nothing about him.
I agree.
To overcome a person I know nothing about? Impossible.
It’s a bit too technical but I think I get what you’re saying.
That is true.
What I don’t understand is your fixation on “self-valuation”. People who are obsessed with “self-valuation” – do you know how we call them? We call them slaves.
I wouldn’t say “self-valuing-proper” is what defines a masculine type. What defines a masculine type is a strong will, ability to command and obey, ability to forget/suppress. What defines a feminine type, on the other hand, is a weak will, disobedience, inability to forget/suppress (in other words, “dyspepsia”.)
They suffer from their “inability not to react to a stimulus”. What you call here “suffering the self-value of the masters” is merely a symptom.
There’s nothing wrong with civilized self. In fact, civilization is progress. If you want jungle, just take a ticket to Africa or something.
I don’t and I don’t care.
[size=85]bingo.[/size]
I had totally misplaced your name. My apologies. You are clearly a rational and experienced thinker, and I am seeing fantoms.
I agree with everything, it is refreshingly simple and absolutely un-technical.
What we claim to have with value ontology is a grammar of power. Its terms are misleading and also your comment on slaves is refreshing, beautiful even. But what you mean is trying to self-value by means other than bestowing oneself - egoism, wretchedness, lacking.
FC purified N.?
N. wasn’t pure?
That claim’s worse and even more telling of narcissism. self image > philosophy
I’d also like to point out neither of you answered my initial questions that related to your philosophy.
If you respect the guy that comes into a discussion with blanket dismissals like ‘it’s cause you’re weak’, without anything to back it up, then you’ve my sympathy.
I won’t invest my time arguing the matter, but know, FC clearly demonstrated his misunderstanding of WtP as I quoted.
Your interest appears to be in defending FC’s image, as opposed to discussing philosophy. Ask yourself why.
Best wishes
Perhaps not quite everything.
“273. The fact that there is not a single successful artwork — whether a novel, movie or videogame — depicting “utopian” conditions, proves that we, as mankind, DO NOT WANT THEM. The prevalence of so-called “dystopias” in art, on the other hand, proves what we really want — and where we’re headed…”
The closest one comes to this are the escapist art of Van Gogh’s nature paintings, and maybe Rousseau’s stuff, like his ‘Charm’. In this sense Utopia equals the original primeval.
Here’s some proper movie kung fu, though not in a dream setting.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Cb2d0ZUVs[/youtube]
I doubt that, actually.
You may call it naturalistic, but if you do, I think you may also want to point out that he did not discover it naturalistically so much as phenomenologically: see the fourth paragraph of my “Note on the First Chapter of Leo Strauss’s Final Work”.
What do you mean by this? Nietzsche did not conceive the will to power as a lack of power.
I don’t think he tried and reified the naturalistic order because he conceived the will as a lack, but because the world as “the clash of creative impulses” (WP 673) is “to all eternity chaos” (GS 109). In other words, the chaos or lack is a resultant, not something intrinsic. Intrinsically, the wills or impulses represent the contrary of a lack.
Nietzsche uncovered the insight that form and force can be traced to “power” as the impulse toward self-expansion, self-increase wherever possible. Yet he never explained why this is the case. From where does this will come? What is it, how is it, how does it manifest and where/why is it different or not among various willing entities? How do various levels of willing relate to each other, and to that which they are not? All of this represents a concern beyond Nietzsche’s.
The “will” to power is using the old metaphysical language employed by Schopenhauer, who Nietzsche admired in the youth of his thought, in order to express something supposedly essential, universal, ubiquitous; something from which other things flow as consequence. Yet the basic insight, which I call the pure naturalizing thought (removal of all that is mystical, metaphysical, non-sensory, “unjustified” as merely pathological overflow/excuse) is just this, the basic. This idea required an immense history of error in order to eventually be discovered, to overcome that mountain of illusions and insanities. Nietzsche did that, and he notes the links between this and valuations, holding as his next, and uncompleted, project the same thing as what he calls the project of an eventual philosophy of the future: the revaluation of all values. To place all valuation on a scale, to value values and even valuing itself. That is as far as he got, conceptualizing the possibility of this project, as idea.
Phenomenology collapses to more subtle and comprehensive, philosophical naturalism. There is nothing “metaphysical” or “supernatural” about phenomena at all.
No, I mean that Nietzsche himself felt the “religious need”, the need for a god, for something divine and beyond the sensate experience of his self. The lack is the fact that, to a supreme intellect such as Nietzsche’s, there is no such “divine object” in which to allow that religious need to rest. Thus that need becomes a tyranny over the self, antagonizing reason further along its course. This is good for philosophy, but bad for the personality and “emotional health”. Eventually that competing anthesis spurs reason to reconstitute and purify the emotions, too. I see some of this beginning attempt in Nietzsche, but the sheer immensity of that task, for reason to assume the heart, is probably something he couldn’t accomplish given how close he was to the “beginning of history”, philosophically speaking. That beginning, that absolute rupture-point, started with him. He knew that, of course.
The use of the term will is unfortunate, but can be overlooked. Yet what is more unfortunate is that Nietzsche despite his genius as a naturalizing, anti-irrationality thinker was unable to excoriate his heart of that religious need. It drove him to take the entire order of nature and make of it an “empty god”, something that is not a god and yet is a god at the same time; something worthy of being “worshipped”, which means set above the self and toward which heightened feeling is directed, with pleasure as reprieve from the pain of the religious need as the result.
Except that “the will” is a psychological, ontic being and not essentially an epistemic one. It wills from out of itself, that structure, that self-valuing which is its being and thus is directed as vector, both in quantity and direction of force, as a consequence of whatever impelling pathways latent to its structure allow discharge of power-motive most easily. Water always flows downhill, and the will always does likewise, except where it has been made to do otherwise as the consequence of a more powerful, vital and yet still wholly “natural” process of reason, of philosophy, which means of direct subjective self-encounter and self-conquest; the self as a unitary being is the fundamental principle behind the will, even as willing itself flows back into the self and acts as meter and reflexive cause for it.
So the real question becomes: what is the structure/nature of this “self”? It cannot be simply the “will”, to power or otherwise, because will is, as noted, an ontic, psychological entity. “Willing” is an eminently pathological act, instinctual release of tension (force) as motive-energy to create change, and will do so naturally based on no different logic than why water always carves its route through the same stone set lowest in the earth; gravity.
The “hell” of the will to power, as Nietzsche knew, is the “spirit of gravity”. He might mock and oppose this spirit, yet it is still the law to which the will is subject. One might teach that will to dance, to sing and to fly lightly, in which case new laws are introduced into the subject, new laws by which the will is able to act differently, to have more “freedom”, yet this does not replace the old law, it merely compliments it. Thus a new, more potent struggle ensues.
That struggle is the demonism of the self elevated to a new height and scope over the old daemon, and is the only project proper to a philosophical entity. Nietzsche didn’t understand that yet; he still thought in terms of ‘essentializing universals’, probably because that is all philosophy had ever thought in terms of up until that point.
It never occurred to him that the basic, fundamental substance would be self-opposing, self-irreconcilable, and self-causing; dual as well as unitary, dual in its unity and unitary in its duality; “the self”. From this “self”, this “self-valuing”, comes everything, including all “wills”. And if we want to talk specifically about lack, it is usually a particular lack-qua-structure in this self which is the primary cause of any individual willing.
As an afterthought to that, I can only add that it is hard to say exactly what Nietzsche realized from what he wrote down – I think he did realize that man would have to descend into the concept, explore it from the inside, that is internalize it, explore oneself in its terms.
“Will” is the only ontological concept that could withstand his hammer, but not until it had acquired the crystallized form will-to-power, as power is ultimately what all will is reduced to, and from which all will emerges. Will-to-power is best understood as the unity of will and power. Within this unity we find the self-valuing, the requirement of power and the consequence of will. Ah - I meant to say: that which power requires, and of which the consequence is will. I implied the reverse, which is also true - herein the circuitry. Self-valuing [and valuing all in terms of this valuing] is an all inclusive circular definition, its entire nature is circular and shows all natures to be circular.
“Willing” is a circular process, it is a yes, a no and a goal, but not a straight line; and thus, in that particular maxim about happiness, the truth of MM’s words about the limits of N’s capacities, and his religion, can be suspected - and if we look at the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, then we see this linearity, this one-dimensionality which characterizes the Godhead.
The certainty of absolutely identical recurrence might be the most significant scientific difference between Nietzsche’s cosmology and that which would follow from value ontology. But since VO synthetically-universally derives from WtP, the concepts of the ER and the WtP carry a contradiction between them. This is easily enough resolved, as it is evident that the meaning of the ER is its value to Nietzsche and to his/our project, not its truthfulness or scientific basis. The entire truth of the ER is in its use - its use as an object of absolute self-willing - even though it is in a sense a monstrosity of logic - the ends justify the means! A means to absolutize affirmation, valuing, self-valuing. Instinctively N had realized what was necessary.
And his true blood, Zarathustra, is infused with the will, tragedy and sublime folly that carries man across the abyss of self-referent reason to self-referent manhood, and from there on, to man-referent reason, which will work on man as upon marble.
If truth is both woman and circle, and Nietzsche gave us her virgin form unspoiled, unknown. The word; Lord, the arrow, the lightning, is made flesh; man and woman (the circuitry of lusting and tasting in terms of self-nature, and self-reproduction in terms of that valuing), man of earth, the sphere.
The creation of the masters of the Earth is not fulfilled here; the sphere is only an egg from which the future is born. We must make those after us understand what they are in terms of us – they must surpass us and yet think we were superior to them, much like culture has always evolved. A culture begins to decline when it starts to think of its ancestors as primitives.
Ascension begins with raising children in a myth of ascension. We do not ascend to deathly heaven but to a nature that has been captured in a teaching, and this teaching must be hallowed and revered. I’ll be damned if I can look the whole challenge in the eye - time unfolds accumulatively, and very steeply so in the beginning of a paradigm. We can not see the future, we can only build it, stone by stone. Stones need not only be turned, they need to be given a place where they are most splendorous. The architecture of mankind – these beginning stages require much discipline and breeding, the idea must be bred into various types of humans. Our ‘faith’ - a certainty we have won - is that when we set the precedent, nature will follow.
To ‘become with the circle’ - to ‘flesh out eternity’ - this means that man will should begin giving birth to demigods from now on. By coupling with the ring of recurrence, by affirming his nature into infinity, he is centered, and he can begin to perceive that the ring is not time but himself, and that he is the standard of time, and thus is beyond time, as mortal and finite as this being-an-eternity is. Time is built of the eternal. The eternal is death and life is its child, which is ‘of death’ - eternal in all its elements - but a playful death, something that also lives. We thought that it was all serious and determined, but that is the very last thing it is. Life is only an extra ingredient to possibility.
We can make life severe and determined to a fantastic degree, but in doing so we will produce the most bizarre forms to represent this order. Rome, or any Empire - nature mocks all these attempts at structure – imagine the pathos of difference between an atomic force and the will of an empire to stay together. And compare the will of that empire with the real effect of that will. Empire crumbles, but self-value perpetuates, and become greater and greater, and the notion of Empire becomes more and more mythical, and eventually the notion of empire and its speech have conquered much more than its originators ever imagined even existed. In this way we must seek to conquer – conquer out of Name, Nobility, out of abundance of self.
Nature gives to use at first but must receive from us later on. We must add to nature, add to science, add to power, or nature will expel us and our self-valuing has failed its quest, lost the game, and becomes death again. Add by play - this has always been the only meaning. Heaviness is a refuge, pride is the beginning.
But neither does value ontology. “Self-valuing” is a circular concept, so ultimately self-valuings are “just there”. VO does not answer the question why there is being and not rather nothing.
If you mean the difference between, say, molecules and animals, I can indeed not think of any passage where Nietzsche did more than recognize it. He does, however, say something about what the will is (e.g., “a pressing feeling”). But the will to power is what being is; it cannot be analyzed any further, it does not consist of more basic elements (WP 635).
But the will is not originally a metaphysical concept (let alone a “metaphysical”, supernatural one). It is and has always been in the first place a psychological or phemonenological notion, an experience, a feeling. Nietzsche traced it back to that, or, more precisely, to the affect of the command (BGE 19; cf. 36), which is what the will to power most basically is (thus molecules do not have muscles, as I once pointed out to Mo).
I don’t think so. The revaluation of all values is basically simply the valuation of the will to power (cf. WP 1059-1060 with 55). Everything follows from that. So Nietzsche already started the project, valuing the will to power–and thereby valuing itself–as the supreme value, willing its eternal recurrence. The value attached to a thing follows from the will to power, not the other way round.
In that sense, then, it’s naturalistic, yes.
I disagree. I think you have not probed the full significance of Dionysus and Ariadne. A god is never set above the self, only above the ego. As Jung said, there is no essential difference between a symbol of the self and a god-image. So it is always the self that is worshipped. The difference between Dionysus and Ariadne is that Dionysus is the individual body of the philosopher, whereas Ariadne is the matrix of that body’s power, the rest of nature and–cosmic–history. Nietzsche’s philosophy is the philosophy of circulus virtuosus deus, the virtuous circle god (cf. BGE 56 with 37).
I really don’t understand what this means. “Except that ‘the will’ is a being of or relating to (the study of) the soul, to being, and not essentially one of or relating to understanding.”
Isn’t that existentialist, though? Existence precedes being?
As the consequence of a more powerful will.
The self does not consist of anything but will.
Yes, it is nothing else than force–which however we can only understand as will-force. This was Nietzsche’s point. His point was not that it be something teleological. The will to power is not a teleogical “willing”.
The spirit of gravity is not the hell of the will to power, it is nothing else than the will to power. Zarathustra thus becomes free of it when he realizes the dwarf is his self.
A daemon is not a demon. Which do you mean?
Where does he say that?
Sure it did. Kaufmann already discussed that at length in his Nietzsche.
A structure, which consists of wills, through a hole in which wills “escape”, so to say?
Dp
A note: selfvaluing is to be seen as logically prior, as deducable from wtp, but not as prior in time or literally underneath or inside the will. Phenomenologically, naturalistically, the wtp and selfvaluing are equal, their behavior is equal. Only their grammatical and syntactic nature is different.
This is what that notion of sv as epistemological standard pertains to.
SV “precedes” WTP as episteme: from the circular sf follows the straight line of wtp, and wtp and the line can thus be seen as ultimately circular and when this is seen as such can be directly understood as selfvaluing - see the ER, and my earlier posts.
Thanks for your comments, you bring some good points. Ultimately I see things a bit differently, though.
Self-valuing is a term that means to grasp this “why” as the most essential logic possible, but does not specifically explicate any “how” yet. For this “how” we look deeper into particular beings- in this case, life on earth beginning from single cell organisms to insects to animals and then finally to humans. As FC notes self-valuing is circular, what this means is that “being”, if we take a look at its fundament, is self-irreducible. It cannot exhaust itself, its structure is basically reflexive and auto-generative but tied into the periphery values of other likewise beings. There is a deep contradiction, self-irreconcilability and “insatiable frenzy” at the heart of every “being”.
My problem with WtP is that it makes being appear as if it were singular, self-consistent or “essentially universal”, meaning that it partakes of one common ubiquitous “thing” from which all more particular things/beings are derived; that one thing, according to N, is the will to power as force. (That is a quite Deleuzian interpretation [see Nietzsche & Philosophy], but I believe an accurate one, perhaps Lampert is saying the same thing).
The problem with this is seen when we ask the question, “Why is all force reduced to/derived from this willing to power? Why is will to power will to power?” Why does this fundamental will to power exist? You seem to answer, “the will to power is irreducible”, but I disagree. My answer is, “because this willing to power emerges only because that from which it emerges is a structure in a state of tension”. This tension is just the inclusion of opposing, which at most basic means separated in space and time, elements that together create the circularity which is “the self”. If we look at subatomic particles we see this duality in how potential is localize in space to create a “bump” in the surface of that flatness, in “reality”. That bump is the difference which Deleuze notes constitutes the most basic ontological category, along with the repetition of that difference (what we call “forces” that travel on vectors from those difference-points). Physics used to be the study of existence, used to be ontology but has now become a mere empirical concern. Regardless of that physics is still what the ancient Greeks thought it to be: the study of ousia, of the nature of being itself.
So from these fundamental “physical” instances of pure, minimal difference come localized variations in the topography of reality, and from those minimal differences and given those variations emanating from them are gathered together groups of differences that attract each other to an extent but also resist each other absolutely- what we call particles. A proton is such an entity. Of course from these come larger derived groupings that form from the same logic of localized force-displacements that both attract but also resist each other, namely atoms. An atom is a much more complex entity with forces extending outward beyond itself, new local displacements in the topography that mutually interact logically to eventually form molecules, etc. In this scheme the WtP is understood as the fact that those gatherings of localized difference-displacements, for any given region, give rise to internal states of tension because those sub-entities composing the overall structures within that region cannot be further collapsed to a state of unity and merger. They “create” those displacements around themselves because inwardly they are “trying” to collapse that difference but cannot. Why are they “trying” to do that? For the same reason that high pressure flows naturally into low pressure, or that objects fall toward a center of gravity.
This is why “difference itself” is the basic category of existence. This difference itself is not “will to power”, it is not (yet) a force or a “striving for anything”; it is simply a physical-natural perturbation in the underlying topography of that region, it does not yet “will” anything.
I disagree, because we can and must analyze the WtP to see what composes it and why it is what it is. As philosophers we can never simply arrest our speculative reason and investigation. The idea that “willing to power” either as force or as the “feeling” of force-as-(self)-power" is irreducible and unable to be analyzed any further is intellectually dishonest.
Right, which is why as psychological, ontic entity WtP cannot be fundamental. It arises as a consequence of certain situations and structures of situations, relations between more basic conditions (which conditions are as I noted above, at the most basic, merely topological variances in local regions). What you and other likewise interpreters of N see as non- or pre-“psychological” willing (to power) I just see as basic “natural laws” which are the result of those aggregate local topography-displacements, “particles”.
But it is more interesting I think to look at WtP as psychological being underlying consciousness. Each instance of willing to anything can be analyzed in terms of that situation of conditions and inner states of tension out of which it arose, namely as an expression of a particular lack in that being, in the self. This is because, quite simply, if that particular lack had not existed then force as "willing to power (or to whatever) would have expressed differently in some other way, following the path of least resistance out of that being/ self.
That is not true in the sense that any specific value emerges as a consequence of that state of lack (see above) which it expresses; this isn’t “willing for more power or force-as-feeling-of-power”, it is specific to that given situation and value. To reduce all valuation to merely valuing the will to power is a gross simplification and just another species of the empiricist error of over-reduction; that would be a gross denial and reducing-away of the actual reality of the subject, something Nietzsche would have known not to do. The self opens up to an inner expansiveness and “mystery” which cannot be reduced to anything other than that expanse and mystery which it is, certainly not to any “valuing the feeling of power” alone, although of course that valuing the WtP is certainly a vital component of the self. So I cannot agree that Nietzsche conceptualized the revaluation of all values as simply the valuing of the WtP. From my reading of Nietzsche he held the task of such an immense revaluation as something waiting in the distant future, when philosophy had become capable of that great project. I think N knew that this project is much deeper and more involved than just “valuing all values in terms of the WtP”.
That is interesting. I would refer to above where I outline the basically psychological and “inner lack” state of the self, which is the “daemon” of all being, but otherwise i would need to understand your point more, can you elaborate on this difference between the individual body and the cosmic/historical body? This sounds interesting.
In terms of ego, I would default to what Parodites says about the real and ideal egos; the real ego is the enduring self through time as just the sense and momentary character of this endurance, as that capacity to hold the present moment of consciousness those just-past moments of consciousness this giving rise to the experience of having an identity that endures through time, whereas the ideal ego is “what actually endures”, the whole wider memory of accumulated sense and all of the Platonic scales of being as the Ideas themselves, “the eternal”, which means the sense in which the real ego or “I” of the self endures across time as an unchanging being. The relationship between these two “egos” is what has been called “the daemonic”.
I mean that the epistemic self as the structures of knowledge as the possibilities and actualities latent to that particular self, is “deeper” (more essential) in terms of that self, its consciousness and “life”, which means also in terms of its engagement with reality and its ascent up the scales of being, than is the ontic self which I equate to that psychological component which is the specific pathways of instinct-drives and acquired social patterns-habits.
Existence does precede being- this being, you or I or any organic life-form. “Existence” just means more, other beings on other subtler levels and scopes all the way down to the most indivisible layer or however we want to conceptualize the most basic physical substratum of “pure difference” (although I am partial to the notion that reality is infinitely regressive to always-smaller orders of being; logically speaking size is relative and it is irrational to suppose any absolute, final limit to existence rather in outward or inward extension).
So other beings precede our existence, and each being is itself preceded by other existent beings; existence “itself” is just the abstraction for “all beings” (it is the sum of all self-valuings and shared values), and which might have a hard lower limit or, as I suspect instead, is actually infinite.
Yes except that the reality of this ‘more powerful will’ is always a specific and created freedom (strength) that emerges from the self’s self-activity. Simply calling it “will” misses the point.
Each “overcoming” and increase of a subject’s freedom is always an eminently individual, particular act. It is traced back to the self, to all of the “inner dynamism” of the consciousness of that subject as identity enduring through its experiences.
I disagree, for reasons I’ve already stated in this post. I think this view, “the self does not consist of anything but will (or of anything but X)” is a gross error and in fact represents the abandonment of philosophy in favor of a non-rational religious view, albeit one veiled in philosophical-rational terminology.
Yes I agree, I’m not saying that N believed in any hidden or inner telos.
That is a simplification, it is not so easy to remove oneself from gravity merely because one becomes conscious of it and “wills” it to be otherwise.
In reality Zarathustra never overcame the spirit of gravity- he just found a new structure of thought and affect in which his self could reorient its relationship with that spirit in order to give to the self new powers, new freedoms which means new strengths and possible actions, with respect to the spirit of gravity. That spirit never went away, Z just found a new way of coalescing a possible experience of self and that self’s freedom given the undeniable reality.
This is really the difference between yours and my interpretations of N. I hold the self is always active, partial, “daemonic” and composed of competing spheres of experience from which freedoms emerge (or do not emerge), that all “overcoming” is building from within and with respect to reality, while to me at least it seems like you believe in some sort of miracle of absolute overcoming given the equally absolute, irreducible and “gestalt” like nature of the WtP. I suppose it isn’t easy to well articulate the differences in our approaches without concretizing this more basic difference.
Sorry I meant to spell those the same.
The entire idea of WtP as irreducible, final being is an example of thinking in terms of “absolutizing universals”. I don’t consider that proper for a philosopher.
I’m interested in this, how does N (or Kaufmann) talk about how the fundamental substance itself is “self-opposing and self-irreconcilable”?
That would be an interpretation of what I mean given a reduction of everything in the structure of the self to “wills”, yeah.
Anyone here ever read " Might is Right" by Ragnar Redbeard?
If so, what are your thoughts on his ontology of might? Do you see it paralleling the WTP?
Although I haven’t read it, I can tell you that it is irrational (sub-enlightenment era). 