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

To me it is also meaningles, but for a different reason. And i think FC thinnks along these lines too:

It is meaningless because it presents no value, there is nothing useful in that question.

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?

edit-see next post

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Isn’t the latter what Nietzsche did?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It is indeed not at all essential.

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?

Bravo.

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.

“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.

I think, in the end, we agree.

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.