ILP thread on value-ontology (starting with Nietzsche, WTP)

[Sauwelios]

Heidegger also called the question "What is Being [Sein, present active infinitive]?" "the fundamental question of metaphysics", and understood philosophy as metaphysics. In the past, however, FC has disagreed with me that the fundamental question of philosophy and that of metaphysics are essentially one and the same. But if I'm right, then FC can be understood as a true Heideggerian: for according to Heidegger, Nietzsche only answered "the guiding question of metaphysics", "What is being [Seiendes]?", and not the fundamental or grounding question (Grundfrage); FC however claims to have answered the latter question.

I disagree. I think he claims to have perfected the former. And the latter just follows logically. Namely: Things exist. Why? Because we see them. Well, value them.

So we value them before they exist?

[FilmSnob]

edit-see next post

[FilmSnob]

So we value them before they exist?

There is no time involved. The exist and we value them. We value them and they exist. We know they exist, because we value them. Therefore, in our valuing, they exist only in as far as we value them. Otherwise, we're in non-human territory. This is why the enfasis is in usefulness, because otherwise you are just wondering how many angels fit on the point of a needle.

[Sauwelios]

So we value them before they exist?

There is no time involved. The exist and we value them. We value them and they exist. We know they exist, because we value them. Therefore, in our valuing, they exist only in as far as we value them. Otherwise, we're in non-human territory. This is why the enfasis is in usefulness, because otherwise you are just wondering how many angels fit on the point of a needle.

Okay, I can live with that. I doubt though that that's all that FC is saying.

[FilmSnob]

So we value them before they exist?

There is no time involved. The exist and we value them. We value them and they exist. We know they exist, because we value them. Therefore, in our valuing, they exist only in as far as we value them. Otherwise, we're in non-human territory. This is why the enfasis is in usefulness, because otherwise you are just wondering how many angels fit on the point of a needle.

Okay, I can live with that. I doubt though that that's all that FC is saying.

Maybe... i usually get about 90% fidelity to what he says.

[aletheia]

Something exists; there is an is. Is is.








Now what?

[FilmSnob]

Something exists; there is an is. Is is.








Now what?

Ok, now I've come (almost) full circle to agree with the value ontology view of being and non-being.

Parmenides, oh Parmenides! I agree with you in the is and is not as much as I agree with Parmenides.

[aletheia]

Keep trying to derive this is is, or rather posit forward FROM this point? Understand it on the basis of valuing-activity? Yes -- this is the only way in which it can be brought under a purview of a "logic", the logic of valuation. This logic establishes subjects and objects, just as it grounds these and provides for an understanding of their relatings.

We know that something is. Therefore, this may serve the launching point from which we proceed. This certain truth is a ground for us. The most sufficient position which can be posited OUT OF and, retrospectively FOR this position, both in light of it as fact and without respect to it as an "uncertain possibility" or "essential questionability" (which would contradict it in its facticity) is simply: the notional architecture of valuing-activity. This has been elaborated very well by Fixed Cross here.

There is no deriving the is. This is what "is is" means. But we can derive that from which the is is, for us, derivable, as is. And this opens up wide spaces of new utility and power and perspective. Even if the internal coherency of the theory were not solid enough - which it is - the fact of its incredible utility still serves as a profound justifying.

[FilmSnob]

There is no deriving the is. This is what "is is" means. But we can derive that from which the is is, for us, derivable, as is. And this opens up wide spaces of new utility and power and perspective. Even if the internal coherency of the theory were not solid enough - which it is - the fact of its incredible utility still serves as a profound justifying.

In Parmenides, there are two spheres. The sphere of Truth, in which what is is and what is not is not. What is is akin to a perfect sphere, equal in all its parts, and can be known by the gods. What is not can never be, and is inaccesible to the gods.

The other sphere is Human Opinions, and what he wrote on that is mostly lost.

Human Opinions is what we are dealing with, what value ontology deals with, because we are human. The sphere of truth belongs to the gods, to metaphysics, and is utterly inhuman.

What I am saying is that we should not aspire outside our sphere, for it MAY be the only sphere, and it is the only one we have acces to.

[Cezar]

This guy wants the worst option: "Christian philosopher".
Can discuss everything, but wants nothing ... more than god.

If something is "an sich" (by itself) harmful, it is still not "in sich"(in itself) harmful. The "by" takes circumstances into account.

Each aristocrat takes the conditions, the circumstances of something into account, because he is richer in drives, similar to the philosopher, while the slave takes the thing alone "in itself" as something harmful, regardless of the circumstances. He has only one perspective to fit the one primary drive - hunger.

[Sauwelios]

Keep trying to derive this is is, or rather posit forward FROM this point?

Isn't the latter what Nietzsche did?

[Fixed Cross]

Sauwelios -- Flat time space is un-curved time space. That shouldn't be too difficult to understand.

It's as difficult to understand as curved time-space, of course. And I think that's impossible to understand, as the mathematical equations that formulate it cannot be imagined: http://xkcd.com/895/.

This may be the most ridiculous pretense to an argument I have ever heard.
Curved space time it is not at all impossible to imagine. It is in fact a very helpful and accessible model.

"There is no subject of will to power. The will to power is encroaching subjects, or force moving outward from centers. The phrase "encroaching units" is not an answer to the question "who wants power?" or "who feels pleasure?""

Of course it is. Either that or you believe in a metaphysical bond between these units, i.e. in God.

How so?

How else do you propose that they are related?
What makes these units anything other than independent monads?
"will-to-power-ness" is what you seem to be proposing, which is wholly Platonic; mystical.

""And how can anything posit itself? I've asked this question, in different forms, multiple times already, but this suggestion of absurdity has been conveniently ignored.""

How can anything exist if it does not posit itself? The notion "it is simply there" is what is absurd.

What's absurd about it?

One can not describe something in selective terms and then claim that this "simply is". One has already engaged in the act of explanation, interpretation -- that means that such claims are no longer accessible.

You can point to something before you and say "that simply is" without specifying it further than it's being-ness. Thereby you have defined being, not the thing that is being.

Thank you. I will file this statement, along with "will to power cannot be further analysed." under "Sauwelian law", and may use this file in the future to explain why a certain type of thought cannot attain to value-ontology.

Which is because it does not leap into irrationality (mysticism), as you do.

This seems, as does your interpretation of curved space-time, to be no more than an expression of the limits of your understanding, and of a wish to objectify these limits.

[Fixed Cross]

Your theory has emerged again in my mind as completely valid, and worthy of at least most of the importance you and yours give it.

Good. I must focus on the logic of the theory itself, not let myself be led to try to capsulate it in other logics.

I like the way science gets valued, it works. It remains to be seen to what detail what part of science adheres to value ontology, doesn't lose the ability to be its handmaiden.

If value ontology is correct, all of science would be interpretable as adhering to it. Otherwise the theory simply isn't correct. Science is, if anything, a testing ground for what can be perceived as real. It does not give/tell us however what is valuable. It does not take into account perspective, mind, to what a reality is real. So far, there is a superstition regarding what this real-ness is -- we (are led to) think that it is objectivity, totality. But the realness of "reality" is for a large part due to a very consistently held perspective, which is not effortlessly given or self-evident, but rather a matter of methodically selective valuing.

I still don't connect with the importance of the "yes and the no", the truth of what you say about it seems to me not to be self evident, and not to be essential to the logical cohesion of the... theory?

It is indeed not at all essential.

What trully stands out is this: "How can anything exist if it does not posit itself? The notion "it is simply there" is what is absurd. There is no "simply is". There is only acting, positing. And I have answered the question, several times: by accident, enabled by the absence of its active impossibility."

But I value it only after slicing off the "only" and "enabled by the absence of its active impossibility." Why go beyond? Outside? Wherefore comes the idea that you can know such a thing? Or even infer it? If, like you sway(edit-say) (and I agree), logic is an expansion and not a discovery, an uncovering?

This, I think, makes up for the small part of your pride in this theory that I find unwarranted.

For me to clearly understand, which part of the formulation do you like and which would you cut off? Could you phrase the statement as you would like to see it?

[Fixed Cross]

Heidegger also called the question "What is Being [Sein, present active infinitive]?" "the fundamental question of metaphysics", and understood philosophy as metaphysics. In the past, however, FC has disagreed with me that the fundamental question of philosophy and that of metaphysics are essentially one and the same. But if I'm right, then FC can be understood as a true Heideggerian: for according to Heidegger, Nietzsche only answered "the guiding question of metaphysics", "What is being [Seiendes]?", and not the fundamental or grounding question (Grundfrage); FC however claims to have answered the latter question.

Bravo.

[Fixed Cross]

In Parmenides, there are two spheres. The sphere of Truth, in which what is is and what is not is not. What is is akin to a perfect sphere, equal in all its parts, and can be known by the gods. What is not can never be, and is inaccesible to the gods.

The other sphere is Human Opinions, and what he wrote on that is mostly lost.

Human Opinions is what we are dealing with, what value ontology deals with, because we are human. The sphere of truth belongs to the gods, to metaphysics, and is utterly inhuman.

What I am saying is that we should not aspire outside our sphere, for it MAY be the only sphere, and it is the only one we have acces to.

Rather, I am dismissing the notion that there is an "is" separate from perspective. But Nietzsche has already done this. What I have done is to make the definition of the perspectival more logically evident, by placing it in properly perspectival terms.

I have essentially done nothing beyond what Nietzsche has thought, I have only ignored the structural limits he imposed on the world (I refuse to posit a "the world") and brought to the foreground something where I see the core. I have refused to take Nietzsches laws as equal to his thoughts.

The will to power, useful as it is, is not to me his clearest or deepest insight. It is relatively obvious even, and its imposition rather brutal (as in 'brute', ugly) compared to his finely making-apparent of different valuing beings, types.

It is hard to find any passage in Nietzsche that is not an address of value/valuing.

[FilmSnob]

"How can anything exist if it does not posit itself? The notion "it is simply there" is what is absurd. There is no "simply is". There is only acting, positing. And I have answered the question, several times: by accident, enabled by the absence of its active impossibility."

About the "enabled by the abscence of its active impossibility", I think I can come around. Having thought about it more carefully, I actually even like the statement.

This issue comes back (to me) to the fact that the isn'tness and isness is not essencial. I think there may be infinite different otherness that we do not value, and there may be none. There may be 678 and 56/6. Only what is valued is for us.

In Parmenides, there are two spheres. The sphere of Truth, in which what is is and what is not is not. What is is akin to a perfect sphere, equal in all its parts, and can be known by the gods. What is not can never be, and is inaccesible to the gods.

The other sphere is Human Opinions, and what he wrote on that is mostly lost.

Human Opinions is what we are dealing with, what value ontology deals with, because we are human. The sphere of truth belongs to the gods, to metaphysics, and is utterly inhuman.

What I am saying is that we should not aspire outside our sphere, for it MAY be the only sphere, and it is the only one we have acces to.

Rather, I am dismissing the notion that there is an "is" separate from perspective. But Nietzsche has already done this. What I have done is to make the definition of the perspectival more logically evident, by placing it in properly perspectival terms.

I have essentially done nothing beyond what Nietzsche has thought, I have only ignored the structural limits he imposed on the world (I refuse to posit a "the world") and brought to the foreground something where I see the core. I have refused to take Nietzsches laws as equal to his thoughts.

The will to power, useful as it is, is not to me his clearest or deepest insight. It is relatively obvious even, and its imposition rather brutal (as in 'brute', ugly) compared to his finely making-apparent of different valuing beings, types.

It is hard to find any passage in Nietzsche that is not an address of value/valuing.

I think, in the end, we agree.

[Fixed Cross]

Keep trying to derive this is is, or rather posit forward FROM this point?

Isn't the latter what Nietzsche did?

I believe that Nietzsche, as seem to do many great men, succumbed to the mythical side of his philosophical narrative.

I read Zarathustra as the thickest blood and the only requirement to understand the heart of what Nietzsche knew. Experience as knowledge, quantum of experience as depth of knowledge - the life that cuts into life out of its lust of eternity.

Nietzsche lusted after eternity, when he posited that the world is nothing besides will to power. His will to recur infinitely gave cause to a pain that he needed to overcome -- he willed to power, and to fortify this will he posited it as the penultimate and quintessential reality of meaning. He valued the will to power as the one and only necessity.

We may thank him and shed tears for this but we must not bleed for it again. To bleed once for a thing is noble, sacrifice strengthens, to bleed twice is bad, sacrifice weakens.

[Sauwelios]

Sauwelios -- Flat time space is un-curved time space. That shouldn't be too difficult to understand.

It's as difficult to understand as curved time-space, of course. And I think that's impossible to understand, as the mathematical equations that formulate it cannot be imagined: http://xkcd.com/895/.

This may be the most ridiculous pretense to an argument I have ever heard.
Curved space time it is not at all impossible to imagine. It is in fact a very helpful and accessible model.

We cannot imagine it as it is, as we are ourselves within curved space-time. Of course we can imagine it as a rubber sheet that is distorted by massive objects, but this is not helpful to explaining it, as the force by which that analogy would explain it, gravity, is precisely the force that the model seeks to explain!

"There is no subject of will to power. The will to power is encroaching subjects, or force moving outward from centers. The phrase "encroaching units" is not an answer to the question "who wants power?" or "who feels pleasure?""

Of course it is. Either that or you believe in a metaphysical bond between these units, i.e. in God.

How so?

How else do you propose that they are related?

Ah, so you decided to use the word "metaphysical" correctly again for a change. Yes, of course I believe that; so do you! The bond that you propose is the bond of their shared "self-valuing".

""And how can anything posit itself? I've asked this question, in different forms, multiple times already, but this suggestion of absurdity has been conveniently ignored.""

How can anything exist if it does not posit itself? The notion "it is simply there" is what is absurd.

What's absurd about it?

One can not describe something in selective terms and then claim that this "simply is". One has already engaged in the act of explanation, interpretation -- that means that such claims are no longer accessible.

You can point to something before you and say "that simply is" without specifying it further than it's being-ness. Thereby you have defined being, not the thing that is being.

Obviously "it's simply there" is not all I say about it! As Heidegger himself says, "will to power" is a Nietzschean answer to the question "What is being [Seiendes]?"...

[Cezar]

Too much empty words.

Let's have the final word in the Spartan way!

What is a subject? - Everything that possesses a center!

Does the universe possess a center? - If yes then only temporarily. Like Dionysus who is teared apart and then comes together from those parts.

Like someone who wants to create above himself but can not because he is surrounded by nothingness and thus he destroys himself.

Only so can the universe as a whole have a will to power - temporarily and without a final sense and goal.

Most of the time universe is a chaos of different centers of energy, i.e. subjects.

[Fixed Cross]

We cannot imagine it as it is, as we are ourselves within curved space-time. Of course we can imagine it as a rubber sheet that is distorted by massive objects, but this is not helpful to explaining it, as the force by which that analogy would explain it, gravity, is precisely the force that the model seeks to explain!

You have it wrong. The distortion is the massive 'object', and it is not an object, but affect. Nor would such a simplistic analysis do away with the usefulness of the model.

One of its uses is that it enables us to imagine time and mass /energy as being the same fabric. It is the scientific formula uniting time and being.

How else do you propose that they are related?

Ah, so you decided to use the word "metaphysical" correctly again for a change. Yes, of course I believe that; so do you! The bond that you propose is the bond of their shared "self-valuing".

No, I don't. This nonsense is precisely what value-ontology does away with. There is no valuing-ness being posited. Self-valuings are not units of a greater, all encompassing meta-thing that gives them their character.

Obviously "it's simply there" is not all I say about it! As Heidegger himself says, "will to power" is a Nietzschean answer to the question "What is being [Seiendes]?"...

And that answer is not "it is simply there" at all.

[Sauwelios]

We cannot imagine it as it is, as we are ourselves within curved space-time. Of course we can imagine it as a rubber sheet that is distorted by massive objects, but this is not helpful to explaining it, as the force by which that analogy would explain it, gravity, is precisely the force that the model seeks to explain!

You have it wrong. The distortion is the massive 'object', and it is not an object, but affect.

I was just using xkcd's words. And don't you mean "effect"? Or is that your own, Nietzschean addition? For surely the science does not say that it's affect!

Nor would such a simplistic analysis do away with the usefulness of the model.

One of its uses is that it enables us to imagine time and mass /energy as being the same fabric.

That's fine, but in that it's no different from any other space-time model (e.g., block-time). What does the notion of curvedness add to the notion of a space-time continuum, with regard to its imaginability?

How else do you propose that they are related?

Ah, so you decided to use the word "metaphysical" correctly again for a change. Yes, of course I believe that; so do you! The bond that you propose is the bond of their shared "self-valuing".

No, I don't. This nonsense is precisely what value-ontology does away with. There is no valuing-ness being posited. Self-valuings are not units of a greater, all encompassing meta-thing that gives them their character.

They're all "self-valuings"... You coined the term "will-to-power-ness". I've never claimed that the will to power be an all-encompassing "meta-thing" that gives beings their character!

Obviously "it's simply there" is not all I say about it! As Heidegger himself says, "will to power" is a Nietzschean answer to the question "What is being [Seiendes]?"...

And that answer is not "it is simply there" at all.

Really?? Does Nietzsche ask, "Why is there will to power and not rather nothing?" or anything like that?? Then tell me where!

[Fixed Cross]

All-too-unambitious. But I thank you, we have together sharpened the theory. Last words here: Kill the Father!

I also thank you Cezar. Pretending that you oppose value-ontology, you have enthusiastically described its ground and necessity. The question is: What is "possessing a center" ?

Pezer - That you may reap from this thought and (so) sow its seeds. It is a tree and its fruit is life.

[Jakob]

The difference between valuing-into-being/being as value and will to power (as value) is that power is translated to value. Thereby the mechanism becomes evident: exchange. Between what? Not an absurd question. Between entities that evidently aim to conserve their own structure, which permits them to posit themselves unto each other -- mind you though, the issue is that they do so in a certain way. The particular comes closer to view. A new acting is assumed, not an omnipresent storm of willing, but a coincidentally arisen, minimally possible somethingness, very spefically the thing that would survive in such an unlikely case of something against nothing - - a thing that 'holds' 'itself' 'as good'. These three are one, amount to - noble, for instance, or kingdom. Cell. Metaphors are required.

"Subject" is an anthropomorphism. "Value" stands to reason as the earth to the sun.

[Fixed Cross]

Always. Let us keep this in mind:

Language as an alleged science. The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that, in language, man juxtaposed to the one world another world of his own, a place which he thought so sturdy that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foundations and make himself lord over it. To the extent that he believed over long periods of time in the concepts and names of things as if they were aeternae veritates, man has acquired that pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really did believe that in language he had knowledge of the world. The shaper of language was not so modest as to think that he was only giving things labels; rather, he imagined that he was expressing the highest knowledge of things with words; and in fact, language is the first stage of scientific effort. Here, too, it is the belief in found truth from which the mightiest sources of strength have flowed. Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Fortunately, it is too late to be able to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief.

Logic, too, rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). So it is with mathematics, which would certainly not have originated if it had been known from the beginning that there is no exactly straight line in nature, no real circle, no absolute measure.

Human, All Too Human 1.11

[Fixed Cross]

Leaving behind us (behind me at least) now the de debate overe whether or not value ontology holds water / is "superior" to the will to power, on to an indication of its uses. For this I introduce this topic:

"Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong." (Thomas Carlyle)

If this is so, and this is no rock solid fact, but at the least a tempting thought, scientific thought would be the result of a valuing the world negatively in terms of self-value. To realize this is of course useful. It gives us the suggestion that science, if we do not radically deviate from our approach to it, and question the nature of its analyses, will keep on trying to negate, which means level.

Science does not permit inequality. Its logics are based on standardizing al value. What remains is value that van be standardized against the ground-value of science, which is not mans self-valuing per se. Science after all arose out of the minds who had to arm against nature, not in those who were "fit to it".

Philosophy, this is at least the tast that I see now as possible, would have to bestow a new, affirmative morality onto science. Science may, as further understanding into in the future be employed to invest in the world as it is (grows, becomes, emerges, stands forth), instead of trying to subdue this becoming.

A further study of the theme Nietzsche opens with, in the Birth of Tragedy, would be useful. Because the Greeks, in creating Apollo / the Apollonian did the same thing as what the scientist / inventor does - arming against the terribleness of nature -- but they did so by positing their own aesthetics against it, rather than to simply submit their judgment of nature to what was possible as a functionality of dominion. In other words, they created something that they could value higher in terms of self value, than they could value nature herself.

This is the genius of the Greeks, their noble genius, set against what must have arisen as the all-too-human genius which Carlyle describes. We must look at this dichotomy, science versus the Apollonian, to recognize in our own culture these two different types of valuing, for they both exist next to / intertwined into each other. In order to 'heal' our culture, to truly improve it, we have to make it possible first to distinguish what is Greek, and what is, in short, "nature-hating-ape".