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.