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

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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.

We cannot imagine it as it is, as we are ourselves within curved space-time. Of course we can imagine it as a rubber sheet that is distorted by massive objects, but this is not helpful to explaining it, as the force by which that analogy would explain it, gravity, is precisely the force that the model seeks to explain!

Ah, so you decided to use the word “metaphysical” correctly again for a change. Yes, of course I believe that; so do you! The bond that you propose is the bond of their shared “self-valuing”.

Obviously “it’s simply there” is not all I say about it! As Heidegger himself says, “will to power” is a Nietzschean answer to the question “What is being [Seiendes]?”…

Too much empty words.

Let’s have the final word in the Spartan way!

What is a subject? - Everything that possesses a center!

Does the universe possess a center? - If yes then only temporarily. Like Dionysus who is teared apart and then comes together from those parts.

Like someone who wants to create above himself but can not because he is surrounded by nothingness and thus he destroys himself.

Only so can the universe as a whole have a will to power - temporarily and without a final sense and goal.

Most of the time universe is a chaos of different centers of energy, i.e. subjects.

You have it wrong. The distortion is the massive ‘object’, and it is not an object, but affect. Nor would such a simplistic analysis do away with the usefulness of the model.

One of its uses is that it enables us to imagine time and mass /energy as being the same fabric. It is the scientific formula uniting time and being.

No, I don’t. This nonsense is precisely what value-ontology does away with. There is no valuing-ness being posited. Self-valuings are not units of a greater, all encompassing meta-thing that gives them their character.

And that answer is not “it is simply there” at all.

I was just using xkcd’s words. And don’t you mean “effect”? Or is that your own, Nietzschean addition? For surely the science does not say that it’s affect!

That’s fine, but in that it’s no different from any other space-time model (e.g., block-time). What does the notion of curvedness add to the notion of a space-time continuum, with regard to its imaginability?

They’re all “self-valuings”… You coined the term “will-to-power-ness”. I’ve never claimed that the will to power be an all-encompassing “meta-thing” that gives beings their character!

Really?? Does Nietzsche ask, “Why is there will to power and not rather nothing?” or anything like that?? Then tell me where!