Good is good and bad is bad (yes morality is really that easy)

[Zeroeth_Nature (Self-Lightening, ΑΘΕΛΗΜΑ,)]

@Jakob

If you hadn’t noticed, striving for distinction is striving to be valued,

Nope! Already wrong on the first thing you say (and “noticed” is a weasel word there). In the first place, the word “valued” is misleading, as it suggests a considerable positive judgment; but as I told your friend the beginner recently, ‘It doesn’t have to be a big positive distinction, it may very well be a being-disvalued.’ And in the second place, and more importantly, the whole point is that being (dis)valued is not the purpose of the striving after distinction: it’s a form of cruelty, after all… The purpose is the feeling or even just the dream of “ruling” (walten, “holding sway”) at one’s own sweet will… It’s about the feeling of power, the feeling of freedom, the (feeling of) will…

@Jakob

eros is valuing.

No. Eros as “the nature of nature is universal process, a becoming that is an internal drive to fulfill itself whose product is an internal drive to fulfill itself.” (Lampert, How Socrates Became Socrates.) As such, it’s the same as the self-lightening will to power:

“[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, Becoming Nietzsche.)’

@Jakob

WtP comes close but isn’t as accurate. Power is really a means to being valued and attaining values.

If you hadn’t noticed it, it’s precisely the other way round:

“Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values.
The measure of unbelief, of permitted ‘freedom of the spirit’ as an expression of an increase in power.
‘Nihilism’ an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of spirit, the over-richest life—partly destructive, partly ironic.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 14 whole.)

@Jakob

Self-lightening by contrast doesn’t correspond to reality (from quark to stars and life, self-heavying), and doesn’t work as an interpretative logic (which I consider to be the most accomplished, most powerful kind of philosophy).

Of course self-lightenings may become heavier temporarily and locally; I’ve pointed that out from the beginning. This is because self-lightenings may well lighten themselves on each other… And as for interpretive logic, why exactly were you absent from ILP for three weeks straight immediately following these posts?:

@Zeroeth_Nature

@Jakob

Huh? You think ideas don’t work on each other as ideas?

So much for abstraction.

Let me try to explain.
Obviously a notion involves the brain. But you or I don’t actually grasp “1” in terms of the brain. You’re not actually tracing it back to the brain when you add it to another “1”. So you’re being intellectually dishonest if you don’t take “1” as a notion, but only as a brain process. In fact the notion is known/seen, the brain process is not (by you or me). We believe in it, but that is not the business of epistemic philosophy.

Yes, in the meantime I’d realized you probably meant something along these lines. It’s like Husserl telling the young Strauss he should not begin with the roof (physical nature) but with the foundation (phenomena, objects of consciousness). But ironically, this means beginning, not with the scientific understanding of the world, but with our natural, pre-scientific, common-sense understanding… So you and I are back at our disagreement about common-sense. I think your scientific understanding, too, still depends on common sense—common-sense understanding being understanding in terms of “things possessing qualities”. Your “1” would actually be a thing dispossessed of all its qualities. The word for such dispossession is, indeed, “abstraction”.

Now abstraction is actually a form of lightening. When we move from “apple” to “fruit”, for example, the thing must be lightened of its quality of roundishness, for a fruit may also be pear-shaped, for instance. And roundishness is itself also a self-lightening. In fact, every quality is a thing possessing the quality of being a quality. And likewise, a thing can never be dispossessed of the quality of thinghood. Thinghood, however, is nothing else than self-lightening. A self-lightening can never be lightened of the quality of self-lightening, even though everything of which it is lightened has itself the quality of self-lightening.

…

@Jakob

And really, your philosophy of nothing matters isn’t absolved by the fact that you are basically forced by nature to care, that being necessarily matters to you. On the contrary. It shows that ‘mattering’ is necessary to being. Yes, whatever doesn’t exist/matter/care doesn’t exist/matter/care.

No, you’re still not getting it. It’s not being that necessarily matters to me; it might as well be non-being. It’s just that being and non-being are completely equal to me (note: I’m saying ‘equal’ here, not ‘the same’; that’s another discussion)… So yes, caring is necessary to being, and I happen to be. (By the way, that thing about a death drive was an afterthought. It would have to be something that really brought about a lust for death in me, so to say. But such a thing would probably not have survival value, but at most be a fitness indicator for sexual selection. And in any case, I’ve already been nonexistent for an eternity, and will soon be nonexistent for the other eternity, anyway, so why race towards death?)