Haha, no, you forced your “Clan” on me.
Not indignant; that is your specialty. But it’s so easy to say you’re beyond Nietzsche, and I’d heard it so often before, from you and many others… But yeah, VO does add something, namely a clear and simple formula to Nietzsche’s own version of Buddhism’s “dependent origination”, which is crucial to both the Buddha’s teaching and the doctrine of the will to power. Here’s an excerpt from my final communication to the late Laurence Lampert (December 31, 2020-January 1, 2021):
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When I last wrote you, I’d barely begun to understand my friend’s ontology yet. In the meantime, I’ve formulated it as “self-Valuing through other-Valuing” (note the Krellian capitalisation). The closest formulation by Nietzsche that I can think of is this:
“[N]o things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their ‘effect’ upon the same[.]” (Workbook Spring 1888 14 [79]; cf. [80].)
This is closely related to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination. And in fact, in the Summer of last year, I basically became a secular Buddhist […]
‘Postulate of being as self-Lightening.—“[F]orce is the drive to discharge itself within a field of forces enacting the same necessity. […W]ill to power has no aim but discharge of the total quanta of its force at every moment; such discharge is always an event within a relatively unstable field of such impulses to discharge, the relation among them being simply that of greater or lesser; all beings are ultimately more or less stable collections of such impulses and themselves express the fundamental quality of impulse, will to power.” (Lampert, What a Philosopher Is, pp. 264 and 266n29.)’
What I’d always missed in my friend’s ontology was precisely the notion of “will to power”. So while I still think “self-Valuing through other-Valuing” is a step up from “will to power” in some respect, I also think it loses something essential and is therefore a step back as well. Well then, I regard “self-Lightening” as another step up because it does include the notion of “will to power”. As I wrote a few days later:
‘I now think the accumulation [of forces] is secondary, whereas the discharge is primary. I can’t even say the accumulation is the means whereas the discharge is the end, for this would ascribe an intentionality to the accumulation process which I don’t think there need be. When power is discharged, of course it doesn’t disappear into nothingness; it is discharged somewhere, which means someplace else is getting charged… At the most basic level, accumulation is simply this getting charged. And the feeling of power is not in the accumulation, but in the discharge (seine Kraft herauslassen, letting out one’s force). This is why I now call the will to power a “self-Lightening”: the feeling of power is the feeling of getting “lighter”; and the Lightening gets “lighter” by this very Lightening: it becomes less in one place but greater (“heavier”) in another. It never comes to a standstill!’
Around the same time, I put that thing about discharge leading to accumulation in terms of individuals (though it probably hardly applies to individuals; that was just the context in which I wrote it): ‘I think what came first was the impulse to give oneself up completely (“to not exist at all”), but often this inadvertently led to our getting something back in return, which in turn sustained us, so we could keep giving parts of us away, and as long as we got stuff back we remained in existence.’
For more on this, see the appendix below.
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Appendix:
In other words, ‘[f]irst and foremost, beings aren’t self-Valuings through other-Valuings, but self-Lightenings, that is to say Lightenings of those very Lightenings. The feeling of power, the feeling of—free—will, is most basically the feeling of getting lighter.’ And it’s not just that self-Lightenings charge other self-Lightenings. Most fundamentally, self-Lightenings are self-Dischargings in(to) space… Some more formulations of this idea:
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‘At the most basic—quantum—level, all “beings” are getting lighter all the time, less all the time, meaning more and more space emerges. This is the infinite universe-equivalent of the “expansion” of the universe.’ (Logically, it makes no difference whether the universe is expanding or everything in it is contracting.)
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‘Discharge of force ultimately means that force (energy, “matter”) becomes space… The Big Bang is the absolute maximum accumulation of force discharging itself into space (the heat death of the universe is when the universe almost entirely consists of space).’
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‘[M]y thesis: space is the show-freedom [schijnvrijheid] of bodies. Every body is a light source (even though most light is invisible to humans: infrared, ultraviolet, etc.), and indeed I mean “show-freedom” in a dual sense: the apparent freedom to give light. In truth we give off space all the time, whether we want to or no; ever more space emerges, all bodies become relatively smaller all the time. Space is light that has not yet given light, given off energy; as soon as it’s done this it’s gone, no longer light but part of a body. This body “in turn” (really at the same time) gives off space, “radiation”. When we see light, this means the space between us and the light source has been reduced to zero: for the space between us and the sun this takes approximately eight minutes, but in the meantime the sun also adds a (more or less) equal amount of space: it is thence that we do not scorch our eyes…’
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‘[S]elf-Lightening into light-space is not so much discharge into the void as it is discharge into void: the self-Lightening becomes light-space, never completely but more and more (approximating an asymptote). The discharge creates more void, or more precisely it is a Creating of more void (empty space, vacuum).’
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'[S]elf-Lightening in light-space is not even a particle(‘s) becoming a quantum of space, but the relative un-Kinking of a wave of space. The whole is infinite, but its “parts” can never be infinitesimal.’
[Note. ‘I now think self-lightening in light-space is a particle’s uncollapsing into one or more quanta of a wave of space as well as the relative unkinking of that wave.’]
(Also, you signed my registration, though it’s true that I persuaded you to do so.) When you’re this mendacious about matters I know, why should I believe anything you say about matters I don’t?