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

Either that, or the content-less criticism is already a result of a disentanglement of the entity from itself. It may be that the “critical caste” is a class of consciousnesses having lost their rooting. They seek objectivity to find it back, to find a sense of being-entity, but on the path to objectivity, they will only be able to erode themselves.

It seems to me that Nietzsche embodied a conflict between rootedness and uprootedness, that he was able to write from both, but as he progressed in years and declined in strength, perhaps after he had passed the peak (Zarathustra, BGE), the impetus of establishing self value was lessened and his critical faculty was unchained from his personal being.

Of course this is pure speculation. It should be seen to stand in service of the development of the idea, not to aim at a psychological profile of Nietzsche.

Exactly.

To really find out where this error is rooted seems very difficult and to require a full model of consciousness based on value-ontology, it may well have several causes. I may also simply be the hereditary superstition of The One God, the objective standard.

In very simple terms, entropy has been the scientific mans God. It is believed that the most fundamental rule of structure/matter is its necessary disintegration. The results of this belief are predictable.

I support your notion of violence, but must specify it to mean that where before there has been a raging fire, moving from a premise but without clarity of that premise so without a precise aim, we now try to fucus this violence, after having specified, explained the premise of it.

Apparently, or so goes my conclusion, intellectual honesty is a plant which grows only on a certain soil. We may call this a naturally affirmative morality, a sort of ‘follow up’ to Nietzsches forged affirmative morality.

Most thinking, and it seems like even this is an understatement, is deeply rooted in the belief that the self is unworthy of dictating truth. It lacks the self-value to relate to the predicate “true”. “The grammar of the soul” is perhaps a useful term here. The noun in the soul is not an integer, but a question, and can therefore not carry, give structural integrity to, ‘the sentence’, the operation of being.

Such people are a rambling.

Probably not. Nietzsche, as respected as he is, is most often taken for granted. I doubt that many of his admirers have understood what he was aiming at. Of course I have reason to doubt it – I am convinced that what he was aiming at is this, an ontology based on interpreting as fundamental and comprehensive the act of valuing. It seems to me that everything Nietzsche wrote/unearthed is confirmed and explained by this idea, all except his notions of finalities and ultimates.

Fixed Cross…

You fail to adhere completely to your new idea in that you demand too much objectivity. If you allow some subjectivity, you will see that yes, perhaps Cezar is unwilling to move past Nietzsche, but he has contributed something to this thread. The Jacob’s ladder reference was moving, and honestly a big compliment (if you ever had the privilege of reading Human, All Too Human Vol. 1). In Nietzschean terms, which are terms you obviously respect, he is far superior to this guy who is only playing at grammar, but to whom you give credit anyway.

Why do you give him credit? Because if the part of Nietzche’s zietgeist that was his weakness was morality, for you it is objectivity.

Remember (if I understand you correctly) that all, including objectivity/subjectivity, including the very idea of a dichotomy, is subordinate to the act of valueing/self-valueing.

Nay?

Will to power is a psychological concept. Almost a buddhist concept in that it is an answer to buddhism.

“Ah, yes”, says Nietzsche “as you say, Buddha, man is nothing and the concept of individuality is only an appearance. But it is the will to power that keeps man acting (valueing?) anyway!”.

Buddha is outraged: “What do you mean? where do you get the balls for such assertions?”

Nietzsche blushes: “Evolution…”

Health is the magic word.

“What values are for your health?”

“How much truth a spirit(health) can bear?”

I think this health is the ability or disability to experience things.

Health is the ability to resist suffering, just like courage. When my name is translated into the Aristotelian terms it means 3 things under which also courage.

If you are healthy, or very healthy, then you will have the chance to experience many things, and if you do this, then you can learn from your experiences. And what is known to us, as Nietzsche clearly says, that corresponds to health!

That is why Aristotle says that we can not learn truthfulness, we are only born with it.

When I was a child I have heard adult people saying that I am “too honest”. Today all people say to me “who cares about truth?”

The book I have written I have named “Nitimur in vetitum”. It is about values and nihilism and the Eternal return.

In my opinion my homeland is among the truest people. Nietzsche being my natural ally.

One must be able to challenge to a duel those who oppose you.

Only so one keeps his name clean and identity known. Otherwise one awakes speculations.

And then he is no more a master of himself.

Sawelios:

Put a shirt on, man.

The only self-flattering in this thread has been your intellectual acrobatics.

Yes, that is precisely what I’ve been doing in this thread. And this differs from what Nietzsche says how?

Your (original) argument seems to me to basically run thus:

Premise 1: “Nietzsche (was)(did) that and that.”
Premise 2: “I (Fixed Cross) (am)(do) this and this.”
Conclusion: “I (Fixed Cross) am greater than Nietzsche.”

(I will give you the benefit of the doubt and not suppose that the order of these three statements was really the reverse, i.e., that the conclusion was foregone.)

Now what you said Nietzsche was and/or did was this:

“He still believed in, at least worked from, the duality of truth and appearance. In this way it could not become apparent to him that the value is not what derives from the truth/appearance of the world/a thing, he was not (morally) strong enough to reverse this conception […] – to arrive at the far more useful idea that value (more precisely the act of valuing) gives rise to both appearance and truth.”

Let’s see if this is true. You essentially imply that Nietzsche thought that “the value […] derives from the truth/appearance of the world/a thing.” The only statement found in your opening quote that comes anywhere near this, however, is this:

“The worst thing is that with the old antithesis ‘apparent’ and ‘true’ the correlative value judgment ‘lacking in value’ and ‘absolutely valuable’ has developed.”

Note that it says “with”, not “from”. So this statement cannot be cited in support of your claim. Please provide other statements of his which can be so cited.

Now your opening quote is from the Kaufmann edition of The Will to Power. And on the page opposite to the first part of that passage, we find section 580, which is from Spring-Fall 1887 and begins thus:

“To what extent the basic epistemological positions (materialism, idealism) are consequences of evaluations [Wertschätzungen]: the source of the supreme feelings of pleasure (‘feelings of value’) as decisive also for the problem of reality!”

As you can see, I’ve consulted the German text. I looked up your opening quote both in the 1996 German edition of The Will to Power and in the Nachlass (it’s Frühjahr 1888 14 [103]). I checked both because sometimes the Kaufmann edition is closer to the Nachlass than the German edition, and the Nachlass is the penultimate authority, the ultimate authority being of course the manuscripts. I found an interesting thing. Kaufmann’s translation contains (at least) two flaws. The first is in this passage:

“That a world accessible to our organs is also understood to be dependent upon these organs, that we understand a world as being subjectively conditioned, is not to say that an objective world is at all possible. Who compels us to think that subjectivity is real, essential?”

Both the German edition and the Nachlass say rather, “Who compels us to not think that subjectivity is real, essential?” For the word translated as “compels” is wehrt, “prevents”. So what Nietzsche is suggesting is that subjectivity is real, essential. (Indeed, note that he writes, “Who prevents us”, not “What prevents us from thinking that subjectivity is real, essential?”…)

The second flaw is in this passage:

“We possess no categories by which we can distinguish a true from an apparent world. (There might only be an apparent world, but not our apparent world.)” (emphasis found in all editions)

Kaufmann left out the little word nur. It should read: “There might only be an apparent world, but not just our apparent world.”

These two flaws are interesting, because when corrected they point strongly to section 569 (which is also from Spring-Fall 1887), where Nietzsche says:

“[T]he antithesis of this phenomenal world is not ‘the true world,’ but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations—another kind of phenomenal world, a kind ‘unknowable’ for us;”

And:

“[Q]uestions, what things ‘in-themselves’ may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? ‘Thingness’ was first created by us. The question is whether there could not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world—and whether this creating, logicizing, adapting, falsifying is not itself the best-guaranteed reality; in short, whether that which ‘posits things’ is not the sole reality; and whether the ‘effect of the external world upon us’ is not also only the result of such active subjects [wollenden Subjekte, “subjects that will”]— The other ‘entities’ act upon us; our adapted apparent world is an adaptation and overpowering of their actions; a kind of defensive measure. The subject alone is demonstrable; hypothesis that only subjects exist—that ‘object’ is only a kind of effect produced by a subject upon a subject—a modus of the subject.” (Cf. section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil.)

I will finish with a passage from Leo Strauss:

“What he [Nietzsche] seems to aim at [with aphorism 36] is the abolition of th[e] fundamental distinction [between the world of appearance or fiction (the interpretations) and the true world (the text)]: the world as will to power is both the world of any concern to us and the world in itself. Precisely if all views of the world are interpretations, i.e. acts of the will to power, the doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact, for, in contradistinction to all other interpretations, it is the necessary and sufficient condition of the possibility of any ‘categories’.” (Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)

How about this:

What exactly is the difference between the will to power and self valuation?

Or perhaps my real question is: Is it fair to say that the will to power is the valuing of a human consciousness when it decides to take action?

Valuing means to put a hierarchy into the power(wisdom). The will can not use all the power at once. Thus the mind must set up priorities.

Why was Nietzsche becoming so wise?

Because he found the life around him “worthless of living”. He put a priority on truthfulness in order to liberate one of his passions - curiosity. This was a mini-experiment about his entire life, because curiosity gains even more power.

This didn’t liberate his life.

Most people misunderstand Nietzsche and then complain that others misunderstand him. What have you done to overcome this monkey?

All these terms need to be re-thought, re-valuated: fair, will, power, valuing, human, consciousness, decides, and action.

This is precisely what is at stake here, and it is indeed the highest: can we build something new, can we transgress the old for the sake of something new, perhaps more powerful, more useful and less deliberately self-constrained? I think we can - indeed I think this is precisely what is demanded of us. Demanded by the responsibility for philosophy, and by the responsibility for the/a future.

The difference between the will to power and self-valuation, this is a tricky issue, because this debate is implicitly framed already within the context of the will to power only. Self-value theory is new and has yet to significantly impose itself upon the common terms. We already think in terms of willings to power. Philosophy has yet to rise above Nietzsche, philosophy and all modernity and post-modernity still live in Nietzsche’s titanic shadow.

As Fixed Cross said already here, " It is believed that the most fundamental rule of structure/matter is its necessary disintegration. The results of this belief are predictable." An essential component of value-ontology is that is posits the prior existence of self-valuation, structure, whereas all deterritorializing, expansion, outreach, power shiftings, disintegration, these are always secondary - these suppose self-valuation to begin with. Rather, the self may only value the other/s to the extent that it does so with respect to its already existent self-value/s. To do so is to consolidate value, to produce meaning; to do otherwise is to decay and to lose meaning, precisely to abdicate one’s terms to another – and yet even here this is done still and only in terms of oneself, of one’s way of valuing.

The valuable may only present a such to the extent that there is a valuer which values, which means: to the extent that the potentially valuable is actually related to the valuing-self. All value contains a root of self-value. So what is the difference between the Will to Power and value-ontology? There are many differences, there are many overlaps. These are not two different terrains as much as they are two trajectories criss-crossing each other, but it appears that value-ontology, through positing the HOW (a mechanism) and the WHAT (a context) of the otherwise willings to power, gains the “upper hand” in that value-ontology is the frame for grasping will to power itself. Will to power is a very good start, a necessary beginning. But we need to keep going, because Nietzsche does not posit the subject, that which wills and why (the context of willing/s). We might start by reducing the difference to the orientation either toward or away from the subjective core within all objectivity and all willing to the objective. Will to Power theory attempts to repudiate objectivist metaphysics but it attempts to do so without positing the valuational opposite of this metaphysical objectivism and so is only a partial success. We need also to posit the opposite value to this metaphysics: the absolute existence of a subject/s. We need the other part of the equation.

Value-ontology subordinates all willings to power, all objectivity, and all expanse of power of any sort to a more fundamental self-referentiality that is the frame in which all other valuations/willing occur and must occur. Selves value - so what is a “self” that “values”? Valuing activity in its greatest sufficiency is self-reference, a circle. Why does this circle move, stray beyond only itself? Value is an over-flowing, self-reference may attain a greatest sufficiency but never a perfection, as circling involves spatial-temporal construction and at least the always potential for an entropy of energetic escape.

This idea is still very, very new. Its birth is slow, but even so far powerful implications stem from it, move just below the surface. It touches on what Nietzsche aspired to with revaluation of values, except in order to accomplish such a thing it is necessry to revalue revaluation itself, to seat value as the fundamental act and to subordinate all values to the valuer. Where this begins to take place, seemingly limitless utilities and possibilities begin to emerge.

As Fixed Cross has already said here, said of value-theory better than I:

Exactly. Value is that which establishes, grounds, predicates these terms as well as their supposed dualisms. The name value is not chosen arbitrarily to represent this idea. It is the recognition that without a “justification” qua standard no structure/being is possible and that no willing can occur without doing so based on such a prior standard of the ‘that which wills’, of the that from which a willing/s emerge as potent striving referentialities. Willing to power cannot be “pure willing” in a void, it is directionally relational and referential, it orients and is itself an orientating. So what is this orientating in terms of? Ultimately we are brought to the threshold where exteriority collapses back into an interiorizing from which most fundamentally it emerges and draws its own potency and ‘power’.

Yes. And through this we see that willing to power is secondary, it emerges from the nature of a subject which wills. The subject may will to itself, will from itself, will away from itself or toward itself, but whichever happens to be the case it always and only wills in terms of it’s own (standard of) value. It is in terms of itself that value is valuable, and where values go under and are subordinated here another valuation succeeds in reorientating and reinscribing value in terms of itself.

One of the problems we face here is that the common terms of Nietzsche’s are less than adequate to explain or offer a platform for development and exploration of value-ontology. Value ontology was developed external to a Nietzschean system, and attempting to go from Nietzsche to value-ontology can only ever be a partial success, at best, but will certainly create as many complications as possible resolutions. (A Heideggerian system, being far subtler than Nietzschean systems, seems more able to well capture value-ontology). The only effective way is to move from value-ontology to Nietzsche since value-ontology is external to Nietzsche’s system but also is able to explain it – to explain it to the extent that Nietzsche’s terms carry an actual meaning that is able to withstand the highest degree of scrutiny.

Yes - we find the valuer behind all value. This is far more than a language game or a mere relation of terms. This speaks to the nature of things, and leads us directly into the root of consciousness. From here we can perceive how this root is no different from that of so called unconscious or non-living things. Value theory is able to unite vastly different fields within each other, in part because it has no need to subordinate these higher understandings to a crude and simplistic “striving for power” only. Unlike Will to Power theory value-ontology has the ability to reverse and redefine previous relational systems and the referents within them, to inscribe new ways of encounter and new logics of systems. The logic of power is bound within its own confines – the logic of value seats value everywhere it is found, in context and extent of actual and possible effects. Entire fields of possibility open up thus, and not just to us (the “thinking subject”).

Willing to power fails to adequately capture self-referential value, subjectivity, firstly because this willing leaves insufficiently developed the that which wills, and secondly because power encapsulates a different sense of this interaction as interpretation than does value: to will to power is to expand for the sake of expansion, consolidation, influence; to value is to relate an other to oneself in terms of oneself, to create (a) meaning. It cannot be the case that all that is going on is “willings to power for the mere sake of power itself”, something else must be going on here. The notion of power is still evoked with valuation but valuing spans much farther than mere power-theory can capture alone. Value often involves a deliberate “loss of power” within an objective/otherness context-environment NOT in the sense that this increases power elsewhere or in some other manner, but simply because such loss is an effect of a more essential fidelity to one’s own terms for the sake of this “one’s own” alone.

Now, I propose that in order to effectively move here we must give up attempts to explain value-ontology or any aspect thereof from within an appeal, total or patially so, to a Nietzschean system. Rather we move with the direct implications of value-ontology itself and reverse this valuation! Let us see which perspective emerge as the most valuable.

Aha! No I had not made the link to the passage you mean. A compliment indeed and a very interesting one, if this is what Cezar meant. It is true that, upon setting foot on a greater philosophical reality were metaphysics is no longer necessary (and this is in fact what has happened, “God”, with the traditional meaning, is not only become unnecessary but impossible), I have to move down and up again on such a ladder… although not as radically far down as Nietzsche imagined, as value-ontology is not actually that difficult to understand, does not really require, as far as I can see it now, myth-creating and holy lies… but perhaps perhaps I do not see the entire scope of the work that is ahead.

I fail to see where a will to objectivity has taken hold of my thinking, but I can not deny that it does, there is no doubt much that I do not see. If you see it in my expressed preference, know that I am fully aware that this is my own, subjective and contextual judgment.

Yea.

And I certainly am aware that Cezar is worth infinitely more than Sauwelios to Cezar. But perhaps I have indeed not done him justice. It is just that he does not seem interested in the specific content of the thread. My value-judgment was restricted to S/C’s worth to this thread, here and now, in this context.

I see that aletheia has done the work of explaining this. I would only be repeating him.
This is the origin:

“Willing to power fails to adequately capture self-referential value, subjectivity, firstly because this willing leaves insufficiently developed the that which wills.”

And by explaining the “that which wills”, also the how of the willing is further explained.

The will to power describes the activity of self-valuing entities (forms / forces) when they come into contact with each other. These entities can be either atoms or humans, or anything in between. Neither self-valuing nor willing-to-power needs to be conscious. In fact I believe that consciousness has been usefully redefined (made less spectacular, strange) by interpreting it as simply a more complex self-valuing / valuing in terms of self-value / willing to power/increase in self-value.

Let me be clear: I am not greater than Nietzsche, but I do reach higher. I stand on his shoulders. My thoughts could not exist without his. I have surpassed the limits of his thoughts, yes. By means of the very thoughts which before had these limits.

I think and write with the purpose furthering philosophy, not to appear greater than someone else to someone else. Having stressed that the above is an argument by your hand, not mine, I compliment you on your following ‘defense of Nietzsche’ if I may call it that. I will use your work here for my real purpose, which is not to prove myself greater than Nietzsche, but to build onward with what he made possible.

Rather, it is in the statement(s) he did not make, conclusions he did not explicitly draw from his thoughts, which are in my eyes all correct and necessary.

Nietzsche leaves this unaddressed: what is doing the valuing? How can valuing occur at all? What is subjectivity?
Let me translate from his notebooks a passage that illustrates how Nietzsche reaches for, points to, a value-ontology without yet being able to make it explicit.

“The powerful organic principle impresses me so, precisely due to the ease with which it assimilates inorganic substances in itself. I do not know how this purposefulness is explainable simply by increase. I would sooner believe that there always have been organic entities. -” ( 1883 12 [39] )

As you may see, value-ontology explains away the need for organic entities at the basis of all willing to power, and explains (makes understandable) also this “impressive” assimilating behavior as it exists in the in-organic.

Yes, I noticed that. I had assumed it was an error.

Both are quite dramatic errors, this one possibly worse than the last. I had already automatically corrected this in my mind while reading it.

Interesting indeed. For how can one combine the concepts chaos and sensation? A sensation implies a subject, there would have to be a chaos of subjects – but a subject already implies an order, a mechanism, a form-in-time – a self-referential circuit.

This is precisely where my proposed mechanism of self-valuing provides further insight.

It is indeed, but thereby this positing is not yet explained. How can something posit something, if it has not posited itself first – as a positing ? And how can something posit anything, except by a standard-value? How can a standard-value arise, in the most fundamental case, chaos ?

It is to make this answerable that I posit the mechanism [self-valuing / valuing in terms of self-value], as emerging spontaneously out of chaos / no-thingness – possible simply by the lack of its impossibility.

Very good. Two comments:

  • The will to power is not the most fundamental activity, as it is based on the existence of subjectivity, which still had to be explained.

  • Nietzsche did indeed aim to abolish the distinction between true and apparent. I have continued this work, and succeeded – e.g. by showing that whatever is apparent to a subject must be true to its terms, where it was already clear that whatever is true to a subject does so by virtue of its appearance to it.

aletheia, I’m still waiting for you to respond to this challenge—unless you are for all practical purposes, at least, interchangeable with Fixed Cross, in which case I refer you to my last post from November 6.

I contend that valuation is interpretation: interpretation of something (and be it oneself) as valuable to something (someone!) else. (To say that something is valuable to itself is nonsense, by the way.) In fact, valuation is probably identical with interpretation: inasmuch as interpretation is always valuation, is always interpretation in terms of value (e.g., an interpreter who translates a word from a foreign language into a word his employer may understand: in which context understanding is considered valuable). As such, valuation is will to power, an act of the will to power—as I already argued 1.5 years ago here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100412100113AAQSots.

First of all ontology is a “branch of metaphysics”. What has that to do with Nietzsche?

Are you not talking in this thread about value as a thing in itself?

I haven’t seen a single personal experience from your self anyway!

The source of your “self-value” is most probably in religion!

I am waiting for almost a decade to see Sauwelios and Jakob taking responsibility for their acts and words, but until now without success.

It seems always someone else to be responsible…

But as you may see, this note is from 1883. The “subjects” he mentions in that second quote from 1887, for example, need not be organic.

But on page 1 of this thread, you said:

There are only two alternatives: either something was always there, or it came from nothing (which is technically saying the same thing, by the way). You simply replace a God That has always existed with a God That “created Himself from nothing”…

Well, first off, I don’t think it can be explained (to say that it emerged out of nothing is no more an explanation than to say that it always existed—see above), and second, the notion of “subjects that will” is subject to Nietzsche’s critique of the concept “subject”:

“If the innermost essence of being is will to power, if pleasure is every increase of power, displeasure every feeling of not being able to resist and dominate; may we not then posit pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts? Is will possible without these two oscillations of Yes and No? But who feels pleasure?.. But who wants power?.. Absurd question, if the essence is itself power-will and consequently feelings of pleasure and displeasure! Nonetheless: opposites, obstacles are needed; therefore, relatively, encroaching units…” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 693, entire.)

This may be a good occasion to start reading a book I recently acquired. It’s titled The Quantum Nietzsche.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2084622#p2084622

This has something to do with a stupid ILP topic where underage (irresponsible) people bash about NOTHING.

Or maybe you just don’t understand it—like this one: http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2130810#p2130810.