If a third party [society or other individuals] forced my will it would be changed, hence willing what we will. Some people have mixed values e.g. Bisexuals, and so can choose either value inherent in that.
More importantly, the will-to-power confers no power to the subjective observer [individual] if they have no say over it. Where you are saying that the will is causal, then you are stating that the observer/consciousness makes no difference to it et al.
Virtually as opposed to actually i.e. Not real but just ideas ~ is what i meant. Again you chose to pick up on the least important point and didn’t answer the main issue. Secondly stating that values spring from our nature means they must be derivative and not fundamental ~ which is what i was saying!
Perception is a function of the instrument similar to e.g. functions in a camcorder. What is power? You are either saying that the perception is driven or that it drives, it cant be doing both.
Yes. As described ~ the flow of information through the perception, where if you are attached to that you are being driven. if you are detached i.e. Subjectively observing the myriad of informations passing through the minds eye and experience, then you are not being driven. A driven will would be assuming an abstinence of subjectivity in the observer.
No, one just has to believe oneself disinterested to feel it (which is often enough accomplished by a willful ignorance).
A feeling.
It depends on what you mean by “will”. On a certain level, the will can be analysed into feelings, among other things. On a deeper level, however, the will, or the essence of the will, is fundamental to all feelings. At this level the will is itself a feeling–a pathos, an affect–, and not just one feeling among others, but the quintessential feeling.
Bisexuals can choose to whom they are attracted? I think not.
Yes, but that is due to your making a metaphysical distinction between the two. The observer/consciousness is really nothing but will. When Nietzsche speaks of “subjects that will”, he does not mean that there are subjects separate from the willing; that’s just a Platonism inherent in our grammar.
That’s what I thought you meant at first, but then you should have written “virtual”, not “virtually”.
Again?
I don’t think we mean the same thing. If a jigsaw puzzle is missing a piece, are the form and print of the missing piece not fundamental to it?
Not sure what you’re saying here. Camcorders are built and set up by human beings, so their perception is determined by wills. I suppose I’m saying perception is driven.
I suppose you’re saying that what you perceive either arouses a will in you or it does not. That is unproblematic and does not preclude perception from being determined by wills. After all, why are you perceiving?
If you’re truly saying that the will is a representation–i.e., that there is no will beyond your representation of it–, then you’re basically some kind of a solipsist, or perhaps a Berkeleyan idealist.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Where did I speak of a driven will? Is the will not supposed to be what does the driving?
What you ‘do’ [thinking isn’t doing?] is a product of the will [after calibration etc]. If not then you are saying that something other than the will is driving our actions ~ what we do.
It is possible to choose who you are attracted to yes, e.g. I used to like voluptuous women, then i met a petite woman and because i liked her personality and fell in love, then my attractions leant towards that. Virtually a complete flip on the feminine theme.
This belongs to the more fundamental; ‘can we make choices or are they made for us’ argument. The latter to me disallows will-to-power.
I see. You make a good point, but i have been trying to make the distinction so as to place the position of power. If we are fundamentally placing it in the subjective observer, it seems by renaming that as the will, then my previous points hold. I had taken it as so, that you were placing the position of power elsewhere, and somewhere beneath or behind the subjective observers experience, or by any explanation primary to the then secondary subjective individual.
I would place the entire personhood in the first person and not the third.
Yes in that metaphor. Yet i maintain that ‘values spring from our nature thus they must be derivative and not fundamental’~ this is more akin to a fountain perhaps, all of its form does not describe the water, all its other natures and essential stillness.
No i meant that the perception is an organic instrument akin to a camcorder. If perception is driven and not driving, and you have placed the will in it [as above], then again you are saying that the will is driven. Whereas i am giving the will its own will-to-power! The perception to me is literally the awareness being focused, and it is the driving force and that force is the will.
That the will is representational is like the fountain, because there are causal informations flooding into the perception ~ IF we go along with them that is, then the will is being driven. If we as subjective beings pull back and observe that, then we are placing the position of power in the driving seat, and the individual is being the driver. The awareness Is essentially like still waters, it has to be distinct from it’s drives for subjectivity to specifically exist! This is fundamental to free choice. - viva la anarchy!
Sure, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. However, by leading it to water, you give it the choice to drink or not to drink from it. It might rather have wanted lemonade, but you’ve circumscribed its possibilities and thereby its “will”, yes. Is this what you mean?
Where is the choice in that?
You mean, the free-will discussion? Again, we may be able to do what we will, but we can never will what we will. For the latter would make the will a self-cause, which is absurd.
Well, in a way the subject is secondary, of course: secondary to what came before him, what gave rise to him.
This metaphor is not very clear to me, so I can’t really comment.
I don’t see how that follows.
That makes no sense. The will is the will to power.
This is sort of going on a tangent, but I think it is still pertinent to value, if not to vo.
Is will-to-power an explanation of self-deception then, particularly since there are no truths, only perspectives?
Ugh, too many quotes…
Then pleasure is also a feeling.
It seems that a lot of disagreement comes from what one means by will.
You’ve defined:
There mustn’t be emotion where there’s will.
There must be will where there is emotion.
There must be feeling where there’s will.
Will is a feeling of which the essence is fundamental to all other feelings.
So when schoppie speaks of aesthetic contemplation as will-less but also yielding an aesthetic pleasure(peacefulness), how could he have been speaking of “immaculate contemplation”? Certainly he mustn’t have thought of will-less as thought-less or feeling-less.
Perhaps what he meant with will-less was that it is a feeling, an affect, without a will… the pleasure of peacefulness.
[size=95]“‘Life ought to inspire confidence’: the task thus imposed is tremendous. To solve it, man must be a liar by nature, he must above all be an artist. And he is one: metaphysics, religion, morality, science–all of them only products of his will to art, to lie [noun], to flight from ‘truth,’ to negation of ‘truth.’ This ability itself, thanks to which he violates reality by means of lies, this artistic ability of man par excellence–he has it in common with everything that is. He himself is after all a piece of reality, truth, nature: how should he not also be a piece of genius in lying!” (The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 853.)[/size]
Here the will to art is generalised from man into all of reality, and from all of reality particularised into man. And this will is called an ability: likewise, Heidegger and others point out that the will-to-power is itself power, is not a lack but an ability. For more on the will to power as the will to art, see my “Will to Might” thread.
Yes: the feeling of (a gain in) power.
Well, there needn’t be emotion where there’s will.
[size=95]“Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus are, up to a point, simply Representation and Will in Greek costume. […] Up to a point, then, Nietzsche presents himself as an uncritical acolyte of Schopenhauer.
But a fundamental difference also makes itself felt from very near the beginning. [… Nietzsche’s] fundamental opposition to Schopenhauer was already present in [The Birth of Tragedy], though not in either a polemical or an especially obvious form.
That opposition emerges almost immediately, as Nietzsche presents both the Dionysian and the Apollonian as both ‘tendencies’ and ‘drives’ (Tendenzen; Triebe] in human nature; also as ‘impulses,’ as ‘energies that are satisfied.’ In other words–a point Nietzsche was to make and remake throughout his career–cognitive activity is itself thoroughly practical, and can only be explained as answering to a practical need. Apollonian activity is not detached and coolly contemplative, but a response to an urgent human need, namely, the need to demarcate an intrinsically unordered world, making it intelligible for ourselves. What Nietzsche was to argue in detail against traditional epistemology in works from ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ (1873) to Beyond Good and Evil and the fragments of his last years, is here already in essence: all our cognitive ability, including logical reasoning, including the abstracting and generalizing tendencies, are profoundly practical–ways in which we try to master the world and to make ourselves secure in it.” (Martha Nussbaum, “The Transfigurations of Intoxication”.)[/size]
Let me note that “truth” here is meant as the exoteric truth common to man; that which is described and explicated to ‘simply be given’, object-ivity, thing-ness - not the truth of the will to power, not that truth immanent to transience itself.
We may call the artist an the general lifeform truthful if we hold truth to be existence itself (the light, the way, etc) but if if it comes in the form of a statement of fact, then there is only ‘dead matter’ to deal with; then all mortals are by implication already dead, etc.
Truthfulness can be a remedy from a poisonous take on truth.
Not sure I agree with you. I don’t think the “truth” that Nietzsche here puts between quotation marks is the “truth” of traditional metaphysics. Rather, it is the “truth” that metaphysics negates. After quoting another passage from the Nachlass, Picht writes:
[size=95]“Here we again run into the concept ‘will to truth’. On first sight, the opinion must suggest itself that, by ‘truth’, at least at this point only the so-called truth of metaphysics can be understood–after all, doesn’t Nietzsche say that the will to truth is a hiding-from-view [Aus-dem-Auge-Schaffen] of that false character [of the world], a reinterpretation [Umdeutung] thereof into what is [das Seiende]? The will to truth is thus determined here as the will, working in metaphysical morality, to the reinterpretation of appearance into what is, thus to the grounding of the fundamental error of metaphysics. The true is understood in this will as the permanent. Permanent however is only the imaginary counterworld to the absolute flux, permanent is therefore only appearance. No doubt: the truth, thus understood, is appearance and, when appearance is passed off as truth, error. But how does it stand with the will to truth? Nietzsche does not say, as would have to be said from the standpoint of metaphysics: The will to truth is the will to cognition of the steadfast, the true, the permanent; he rather says: ‘The will to truth is a making steadfast, a making true/permanent’, a reinterpretation of appearance into being. When one oneself first makes what shall be cognized as true, when one gains being only thereby that one reinterprets appearance into being, then the will which accomplishes that cannot avoid eventually discovering that what it must first make steadfast is not yet steadfast by itself, and that the permanence which it must first create is not already given in advance. As Nietzsche puts the concept ‘will to truth’ in place of the cognition of the truth, he has thus carried out the great inversion. He wants to cognize the problem of science no longer on the soil of science, but sees the process of designing the schema of a permanent world from the perspective of the artist. From this perpective, too, the truth is still only so-called truth; it is the appearance in which the counterworld appears. But only when considered from the standpoint of the will to truth does it come to light what is really true about the so-called truth, namely the necessity to found an abiding order, in which life is possible. Once again it turns out that Nietzsche’s inversion of metaphysics has a double meaning. On the one hand, the fundamental error of metaphysics is as it were unmasked; it is now no longer possible to pass off as being what in truth is appearance. On the other hand, however, it is through the exposure of the will which works in its ground that the proceedings of metaphysics in their inner necessity first become understandable and in this sense get justified. Only through the overcoming of the error of metaphysics does what had been true in all metaphysics come to the surface. If one understands ‘truth’ in the concept ‘will to truth’ as the truth in truthful appearance, then the will to truth is no more only a will to so-called truth; it is then rather the will to poiesis or, as Nietzsche says here, to ‘making’, that is to say to the production of an appearance which does not negate life but affirms it; which is thereby in unison with life and thanks its truth to this unison.” (Picht, Nietzsche, “The will to truth is the will to the production of ‘truthful appearance’”.)[/size]
So the ‘truth’ from which the will to power flies is the absolute flux. It should be placed within quotation marks, however, because the absolute flux is not the whole truth, but only half of it:
[size=95]“The ultimate truth is [for Nietzsche] the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself. Being torn between its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, for itself and out of itself, no existence [Bestand]: it exists [ist] only as it produces appearance out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only appearance. [… W]ithout appearance, the eternal flux has no existence. It must produce appearance out of itself. Appearance therefore belongs to its truth.” (Picht, op.cit., “The imaginary counterworld of life”.)[/size]
The truth (reality, nature) of which Nietzsche, without quotation marks, says man is a piece is this double truth.
Well, even if the subjective observer experiences it as internal to himself, the fact that he experiences it means that it’s really external to him, of course. But the fact that all that we know is experiences, and not objects of experience, means that we do not know of any subject of experience, either. Part of every experience is the notion of objects and a subject… This is why I said that the belief that the will is a representation makes one a kind of solipsist. If you believe that only the subject exists, that everything that is experienced is merely the subject’s representation, then you’re a solipsist (“all there is is a self”); if you believe that even the subject is a representation, you’re a solosomniist (“all there is is a dream”). The latter is the most consistent. But the dream apparently needs the images of objects and a subject. The need to pose such images is what Nietzsche called “the (primordial) will”. As Picht puts it:
[size=95]“[W]ithout appearance, the eternal flux has no existence. It must produce appearance out of itself.” (Picht, Nietzsche, “The imaginary counterworld of life”.)[/size]
I may now understand what you meant. Perhaps you were thinking of this:
[size=95]“One could, with some liberality of expression, call Jesus a ‘free spirit’–he makes nothing of everything steadfast: the word kills, what is steadfast kills. The concept, the experience ‘life’, as he alone knows it, with him goes against any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. He only speaks of the inmost: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ is his word for the inmost,–all the rest, all of reality, all of nature, language itself, for him has only the value of a sign, a simile.–” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 32.)[/size]
I think that, in section 853 of The Will to Power, neither “‘truth’” nor “truth”–that is, neither “truth” within nor “truth” without quotation marks–refers to the steadfast. I think that, within quotation marks, it refers to Jesus’ “truth” (“life”, “light”), whereas without quotation marks, it refers to that plus the fact that that must pose steadfast things.
The inmost being the love of love, the highest eros - in the still infantile phase of man that Jesus represents.
Let us never compare Jesus to the Greeks in any way - the Christian tale was of a post-Socratic, no longer Homeric but cosmopolite Greece the expression, not in any way comparable in spiritual health and wealth to the people of Athens and the related city states that formed the nexus of our history; that was a case where the collective was greater than the individual, that precious state, possible precisely because there were so many great individuals.
I do strongly identify truth with the ‘innermost’ of the sage of eros - the existence in happy knowledge of itself - but I value this happy self knowledge higher as the superhuman value of Vesta in Rome, the innermost heart of the empire, a flame containing the innermost heart of ‘good Romans’; those who valued themselves whole as Roman. (This excludes the ‘likes’ (broadly speaking) of Caesar, whose innermost is realistically not a possible discussion for moderns).
If you are wondering what the hell I am blathering about, let me just say that I find truth to be a subject that can almost not be expressed directly, at least not truthfully. It is almost an error that the word exists, denoting an object or entity of sorts, whereas it is always first an evaluation based on a perspective, this includes the case of Jesus innermost merriment.
I think Jesus’ life is an example of escaping the indiscriminating flux of the will to power as such, represented by Roman magistrate, and Hebrew priests and lenders, by becoming the embodiment of that flux; the truth is probably that Jesus was trying to save himself, trying to become ‘something’ in what he perceived as nothingness (in terms of value). In any case, I would agree that the truth without quotation marks has to mean the combination you propose; basically ‘everything’, including all the contradictions and struggles enclosed in that term. The monster-hood of the will to power, at the same time as the constantly attained existential victories of beings; the spirit-consuming storm and the prevailing spirits causing the storm; who is the final cause of the storm? The storm will wreak havoc regardless of who stands at its center; in this light we can read all apocalyptic visions in the New Testament; all too well did the early subconscious of the Christian cult realize the implication of its absolute selfishness; of taking “truth” to mean the perfection of their moral self-valuing; this is a recipe for a spiritual war without end; or rather, with only the end of exhaustion. This end is asked by Nietzsche, who cut off the head from the spent body. What had been reached, the Enlightenment, also Newton, many things, may be called ‘the Christ-consciousness’ - we must now cut up his body and feast, because tomorrow is another day. I hope you catch my drift; I have definitely drifted very deep into metaphor rely greatly on you reading between the lines - it is true that the most powerful truths easily betray the one who speaks them.
I don’t see how an experience can be external to that which is experiencing it? I can understand that information is external, that’s a simple fact. What i see are multifarious external informations entering the sphere of the subjective experiencer where it is experienced. This ‘sphere’ has an experiential range where it’s influence degrades in tune with it’s ‘intimacy with the conceptual object’. The brain however has a fundamental survival mechanism, which in extreme events overrides the subjects will.
I can then make the informed assumption, that the ‘subconscious will’ - let us call it, equally degrades and has a range relative and respective to that of the subjects experiential range.
[also = not a solipsist or solosomniist]
= Where the conscious subjective will takes precedence over the subconscious will.
That is where free will occurs, but it is not total, and un-free will is equally as powerful, though both can be tuned and calibrated, due to the variations of range. Being master of this = will to power, even if that’s not what Nietzsche thought it was imho.
The OP is merely asking what benefits or dangers are involved in the prospect of everyone being an egotist. Nature has spent millions of years proving that the greater mass of life is not egotistic, even quite slavish.
The relatively few who aspire to be gods among men do so for a very specific reason, an error in judgement. They become famous merely because they stand out as being unusual and more than a little dangerous. Value Ontology seems to infer that all people should aspire to be gods, all people should attempt to be dangerous.
What happens when literally all people are capitalistic, egocentric, scheming serpents?
The Nietzschian idea was that an Ubermensch, superman would eventually rise from the competitive filth due the aberrant annihilation of the others. The “Will to Power” mindset flows from the notion that if you kill off all of the weak, the only thing left will be the strong. That makes sense … to simple minds.
So what are you left with after a relatively greatest murderer of men has arisen to the top of the dog-pile, besides a whole lot of dead dogs?
From there the notion is that he, being “stronger” (more capable of killing more others), will mate with more females and produce more of himself, more competition for himself (Caesar and his offspring). An then from their competition with each other, another dog-pile, a even greater killer of men will arise.
And the pattern continues so as to eventually evolve the greatest of men, a god of death, capable and willing to kill ALL life at a moments notice upon any hint of being offended - an emotional, extremely dangerous, child - the result of life long insecurity fighting back by any means that seems to work.
And that is the inherent pattern being portrayed even by those who just barely begin such a journey. Just as the species evolves, every single mind does as well. The growth and pathology of the race is that of a blind race through the struggles of life, from birth to death. So as to merely produce the greatest of murderers? Emmm … why? Space alien attacks?
Where and when in such blind egocentric malignancy is the effort to stop the murdering and terrorism?
What was the real purpose of life that was being ignored?
