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

There was only the ideal, a wishful thinking about a “master race”, not any ground.

You may want to look into the advent of nationalism in relation to France.

Indeed. “Germans” do not share the same physiology, type. The unity is a lie, not a reality.
I believe I made all this clear.

I don’t know why you think that you are disagreeing. I meant to make it clear that such ideological bonds are an unreal surrogate for the real unity a Greeks polis formed.

I have no idea what lies you think that I agree with. Read closer. “Pleasure” is the feeling of power. It can exist in lower and higher, greater and smaller, cruder and finer forms. There is no pleasure without consciousness, and there is no healthy mind without of a healthy body.

The mind can take control over the body only by knowing the body. Why do you think that athletics were so important in Athens?

Re-valuation of values is not enough. A revaluation of valuation is required.

I thought you were talking about nationalism as reaction against the idea of the brotherly love.

But pleasure shall not be mistaken with happiness.

Someone who is able to have sex still doesn’t need to affirm life.

Someone who can differ happiness from sex can surely affirm life.

Sex is a humiliation to the degree of lower types of organisms. That is why it is made secretly.
Also work is a humiliation to the degree of an animal, because it serves only to gain food.

Who is humiliated, he can surely not affirm life.
Therefore, if we are decadents a half of a life, I would not allow someone who is over 30 (or maybe over 25) to mix up pleasure and happiness.

I dont consider nationalism to be a direct reaction against Christianity, but a reaction to the sterility that resulted from a conception of “mankind” as uniform, undifferentiated. But in so far as it was aimed at producing lasting values, it has mostly been failed attempts, as the connection between citizens of a nation was not a positive, active type of (self-)valuing, but a passive undergoing of the fate of falling under the same language and law. There are exceptions - France and pre-WWII Japan are examples of slightly more active, involved nationalism, where the nation actually stands (or stood) for certain spiritual (geistige) values that are both positive and considered to be exclusive to the nation. Characteristic to such value-bearing cultures is that they do not attempt to venture outside of their own realm. As Nietzsche notes somewhere, the French, like the Greeks, do/did not learn to speak other languages, as that would be a degeneration.

Physical pleasure is simply a very short lived and therefore insubstantial, “low” form of happiness.

Was the secrecy of the sexual act not encouraged by its vilification by the church? I am not sure that what you say here holds water, but I am not sure that it doesn’t either. I certainly disagree that work is always humiliating if it serves to bring food. Stay true to the Earth. Work is humiliating only if one is being forced to do it, if it is done as a slave(-wager) or if the work has no value corresponding with ones own valuing. Philosophy is also work, so is the life of the artist. The ideal form of work is play, which is the most serious and dedicated type of work.

No it was not. The ancient Greeks have not done it in public. Only barbarians like Scythians did. But barbarians are weak and cowardly.

In contrary to your opinion, I see the roots of nationalism in the English parliamentarism. And the brotherly love can be only a Christian reaction to that.

We have the French revolution and brotherhood as an ideal coming after the American revolution.

Frenchmen were “the soldiers of the English ideas” - N, consequently the orders came from England.

I suspect a low origin behind your nickname.

I must, to my regret, say that it has never occurred to me to wonder what is behind your mask and nickname. Still such curiosity has not taken hold of me.

To your opinions on sexuality and nationalism:

  • There are no indications that the sexual act was kept “secret” in either Greece or Rome, nor that it was considered a humiliation. That it was not done out in the open has nothing to do with secrecy. Keeping an activity private does not mean that one is ashamed of engaging in it or that one wants to keep this activity from ones fellows. Rather the opposite - it has is in general been a reason for shame (and self-loathing) to not be sexually active, for the simple reason that it suggests weakness. I do not mean that to abstain from sex deliberately means to be weak - not at all - but it is certainly untrue that to be sexually active was a source of shame in the classical world.

  • There is no reason to connect nationalism to the proletarian movements. The sense of an shared identity of a people has in many cases taken on the form of identification with the state. In other cases, propaganda to identify with the state has been a way to artificially forge an identification where there was no physiological ground for this - no developed taste. I can not make any statements about the English as being or not being ‘a people’ - I doubt that Nietzsche should be blindly taken as an authority on such matters - but I know that the French certainly have characteristics of a type in the sense of taste, as do the Japanese. The Germans do not, although they can perhaps be described as lacking in taste. Going by the food they produce, perhaps the same can indeed be said of the English.

I wonder if you know a single thing about the Greek position of shame and what is bad. Except that from Nietzsche.

As long as you don’t think that you are considered an authority on such matters, wonder away.

Coz you need to bow down in front of the authoritey, no fixey?

I am afraid I have no one to bow down to, Cezar - by authority I do not mean the same as you – I do not mean Allah or Nietzsche, or any sort of superior being – what I mean by an authority on the subject of Greek history is simply someone who has read and studied diligently and is able to produce some knowledge. Your epileptic bouts of spurting some random trivia do not amount not such an authority. Besides that you can never attain to a single clear thought, is has become clear to me from your notions of shame and secrecy that you’ve never actually read Homer, hence know precisely nothing about the Greeks.

Whatever. You are a new guy to me in the world of thought. Can’t say I have read anything original from you so far.

I can’t say that you seem to have understood anything I have written.

As for the focus on “originality”, seeing your obsession with Nietzsche, I assume you knows what he says about this. It is in any case the opposite to classical taste.

What I have done is, I made Nietzsches philosophy more powerful, into an instrument. You may instinctively rebel against such a move, or simply not be smart enough to understand it. You are in the camp of the anarchists, so richly represented on ILP these days, and try desperately to corrode the massive structure I have arisen amidst the tides of your uncontrolled chemistry.

Read very carefully, slowly, the arguments I have written on value ontology in this thread, reread them, and read them again – the thought seems mainly difficult to understand for those who seek to use Nietzsches philosophy to make themselves feel superior. It makes the notion of will to power into something more than a new God, which it has been to you – it makes it truly understandable, but only as a consequence of complete self-honesty.

Your “will to power” Cezar may very well be the will to deceive yourself about yourself. The only self-deceiving I have done the past decade has been to consider myself equal to others. Others have never been able to attain to my honesty, because others were never as powerful, as free as I am. It is lonesome at the top, but this is a wellspring of happiness. What hurt me was the yearning of others for the type of power that I have, the jealousy – this made me try to convince them that they could also attain to such power – I lied, and I drove men insane by this lying.

“What determines your rank is the quantum of power you are: the rest is cowardice.”

You sound now like someone who was a teenager before a short period of time and now you are finally able to regret some things.

There is a difference between considering others equal to yourself and giving others equal rights. Nobody is able today to possess unequal rights… not unpunished.

No idea what you mean. Originality is always spirituality in the classical sense. That is what you called “producing knowledge”. Creating new solutions and discovering new regularities. You appear as somebody to me who possesses that “gefährliches Halbwissen”. Like a Christian who wants to revalue Nietzsche as a symptom of decadence.

If you accuse someone of being obsessed with someone, then it is your trademark. In truth I was always obsessed only with truth. And truth is in reality overhumanly. Didn’t you know that? How poor would I be without this man then? How hungry and thirsty was I all my life until the age of 24. How poor the world has seemed to me! The man has enriched an entire world, so, why not give him the honor of a god? If Alexander could take that honor, then he certainly can have it.

I am obsessed with everything overhumanly and that is what I call “living life to the fullest”, in contrary to the modern “living life to the foolest”.

And of course I dislike it when a Christian engages in philosophy, it is most harmful.

Obsessed with truth. In truth, no less.
Sounds serious.

I was also partly psychotic. But I was also partly sane.

Come on! Sanity of a nihilist? Of a nihilist era? And you are serious…

The people at the asylum are nice to let you use the internet. But do they have a library as well? If they do, I recommend that you leave the forum alone for a while, and make it your task to read the Homeric epics. I believe that even the insane might benefit from becoming acquainted with the greatest poetic mind of all time.

Your mind is not fitted to rational thought. But there is an en-thusia-sm that just may be developed into a poetic spirit, if you would align the course of your reflections along the properly archaic aesthetics.

Thread locked for 24 hours, any further quibbling will lead to warnings.

How might we begin to frame the Good in this way?

What this seems to be requiring is that we start forging transcendental ethical ideas. The notions of ethical prescriptions or positive designations must be, if not entirely abandoned, at the very least supplanted by a new ethical order of thinking.

What is Good? A significant challenge here is finding a way to frame these ideas (“erotic-daemonics”) in our normal use of langauge and meaning. So far, it seems to me, this realm of meaning-creating exists largely super-linguistically, unable to be translated into a clear meaningful statement, word or sentence or thesis. Through successful use of abstract and aesthetic language Parodites makes known in the above quotation a space wherein a possibility for this sort of new ethical idea becomes visible. But we need more than subtle and quick glances inward toward this idea’s possibility, what you are calling for is precisely that we begin creating, demonstrating, actualizing. If it is the case that we now know these ideas are possible, and we being to see how they differ from traditional ethics and ideas of the good, now it is our responsibility to be creators and visionaries. These ideas must be forged and concretized in ways that allow them (and their more authentic implications of radical potency) to become meaningfully transmissible to the populace at large. So-called “average people” need to be able to relate to these ideas, to the expression of them.

I would say that traditionally this sort of new ethical possibility has been expressed largely in art and poetry. Which is to say, more indirect plays upon the emotions and more passional subjective qualia. They succeed in stimulating effects on this level, but these effects tend to remain here, largely pre-conceptual, non-linguistic, non-“Real” but rather only just “subjective”, informing largely automatic-unconscious manifestations and manipulations of the heart and of those more cognitive possibilities that are most (intangibly) drawn with/in/to the spheres of the heart’s influence/s. To bridge this gap seems unthinkable, literally something that is all but impossible to formulate conceptually, in terms of language-meaning, direct ideas, reason and willful intention. So I would probably say that before we begin addressing the question, “How might we begin to frame the Good in this way?” we must first at least become sufficiently aware of another question/problem which is necessary to the very questionableness of it: How to construct new bridges/passes between the heart and the mind, uniting passional emotionism and rational cognition, a will to sentiment-affect and a will to language-truth? New signifiers, assisted in their transmission by the creation of new (and perhaps even new types of) memes would potentially be capable of heralding in this more direct possibility for new syntheses of consciousness/subjectivity. And, just maybe, while we are confronting and leaving ourselves open and exposed before this monstrously difficult task (so difficult also because remaining open before it also requires of us that we draw entirely within ourselves the world itself in all its manifold contingency and exegesis, hope and horror in order that our new-born syntheses may find a sufficiently fertile ground in which to secure and grow themselves rather than become, without such a ground(-ing possibility) almost immediately effaced by the behemoths of nature (inertia/time) and world (gravity)), new forms of truly transcendental ethical ideas might begin to emerge and appear naturally before us.

A tested way is to create a mythos under which much that was until now unacceptable can be aligned. But this myth must be reminiscent in nothing of a god. It can not be a greater entity, it must be the retrieval of something far greater than all that has been experienced before, from a never disclosed case locked within the emergent being until this had grown to maturity, proper birth-giving form. This is what immaculate conception may mean to us - the seed retroactively implanted in the logical ground of being by identifying its logic - a seed that could not have come to fruition except by its retroactive implanting, but which outline was there all along to be materialized. A treasure never hidden, only implicit in the full growth from self-valuing atom to self-knowing self-valuing. This is my ring - the pact between knowledge and progression, ‘fate’.

On a more practical note: required of all initiates is that they understand value as implicit valuation and not vice versa. There is a depth of which value reflects something to make it known to us. This is why newer and higher values are being created - the approaching of the depth is being expanded. This is not to say that the depth is approached.

A new ethics must rely on what is already there, what is real. The philosopher is not the Messiah, who takes the hordes of slaves under his wings against the world, but the teacher who illuminates to Alexander his power to conquer it.