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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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?”…)
Yes, I noticed that. I had assumed it was an error.
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.”
Both are quite dramatic errors, this one possibly worse than the last. I had already automatically corrected this in my mind while reading it.
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;”
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.
"[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;
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.
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”.)
Very good. Two comments:
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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.
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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.