My rank name change. Or: the pride of a Nietzschean.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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For one thing, I started this thread. But yes, I post in others’ threads as well. I will not stick around if I find no response, though.

Or at least your understanding of it. And who says you’ve not outshrunk it? The last man is a dwarf, after all (though not the dwarf).

Of course, if one cares not what you think one cannot care what any other person thinks…

Yes, why did I not ignore you from the start? I was aware at the time that it might be a mistake. It was a way of probing you, though.

What? Where did you get that idea!

Yes, viewing and the will to power. The world as will and idea.

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Nietzsche’s concept are useful tools - to use as we find need for them. But I have noticed you failed to address my main purpose of posting here: to show you that you are idolosing Nietzsche. Or at least you are portraying him in such a manner, and neglecting the deeper significant of his ideas, which are wholly personal and psychological (spiritual?).

I offer the interpretation that Nietzsche, like all writers, is not discovering anything beyond himself and, to the extent that we are alike, of us as well - but that whatever this degree of correspondence, such creations of his are personal and psychological. What I mean is, of a nature such that they describe who we are as individuals, what we are made of, how our minds and instincts and feelings operate, what our drives and impulses and tendencies are - how the mechanisms of the brain work as it relates to the possibilities of knowledge, self-discovery, awareness, self-actualisation, personal ethics and conditionings.

When I read Nietzsche I see deeply into his mind, and deeply into my own. I feel myself growing, pushing outward, beyond what I was - away from narrow and previously limiting and enslaving perspectives! This seems always to be a key here, an indicator of progress: moving up and away from that which I had previously been an unwitting slave to. Nietzsche is wonderful for this. As are many other things. But when you interpret him dogmatically or put him onto a pedastal as an Idol, I fear you misunderstand the very basics of what he was trying to teach. But no matter - as you say, you care not for my words here. I find no complaint with that - rather, it is as it ought to be, considering the vast divide between our two internal worlds.

I have no problem leaving this conversation, as this little bit of conflict seems to have given the admins a headache. But lets do keep in mind that while Nietzsche’s ordering of rank is a limited interpreting and represents its own self-serving psychological complexes, we can remember that indeed a pathos of distance certainly does exist - a distance from ourselves to ourselves, from who we were to who we are now. . . and from who we are now to who we are becoming.

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:laughing: I just thought I would interject for a moment in here.

Oftentimes, Sauwelios, it IS the most who ARE the craziest. Have you never heard of the mob or the herd?

It is most often the AUTONOMOUS one who stands alone who is NOT the crazy one…the one who dares to be different from the rest, not for the sake of being different but for the sake of being and for the sake of discovering what this being IS all about; i.e., his being.

84

Faust, please don’t blow out this beautiful candlelight. :cry:

Though I also love groping in dark mysterious places, shades of light and dark give way to beautiful renderings.

And candlelight, in its dance, cannot help but sometimes surge upward and grow in power and might through the breath of that which surrounds it.

Shadows playing upon the walls eventually can give way to truths…

So please, Faust…please…

85

Wow, I never thought of that…

86

A strange thing is that even though this discussion now seems to be about whether or not the will is will to power, neither of the participants really gives profound arguments for or against it. We know Nietzsche has formulated this truth as based on his perspective. We can identify this perspective in his elaborate writing and understand it as far as our intellect (and heart) permits it, and then see that the thought “The World is Will to Power and Nothing Besides” flows from that perspective, naturally.
But this thought, to me, especially the weight of it, only makes sense if the line thoughts which leads up to it is traced, explained and shown to be correct. Likewise, denying it, or saying one has moved beyond this idea, only makes sense if Nietzsche’s thoughts leading up to this universal idea are deconstructed and explained as false or inadequate.

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Ay, I forgot I wasn’t supposed to enter into discussion with Sauwelios anymore.
Anyway my puzzlement has more to do with the lack of arguments against the will to power than a lack of arguments for it, because I’ve read Nietzsche, and not yet anything beyond him.

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Don’t you mean “the world”?

The two ‘proofs’ that I know of are BGE 36 and the following:

[size=95]Precisely if all views of the world are interpretations, i.e., acts of the will to power, the doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact, for, in contradistinction to all other interpretations, it is the necessary and sufficient condition of the possibility of any “categories.”
[Leo Strauss, Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, with my emphasis.][/size]

The clause I made bold implies an interpretation of interpretation as an act of the will to power.—

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BGE 36 is not a proof, but a justification of the idea. To the sense of: I believe this, because it is functional to believe it. If I believe it, everything falls into place.

90

Right.

Well, “believe” goes too far, I think. Nietzsche begins the section with the word “suppose”.

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Don’t debate about what ‘proof’ is, especially when referring to chapter 1 of BG&E.

Will to ‘truth’ via proof? “Why not rather untruth?” etc. This whole approach is made worse when referring truth to ‘will to power’ when N. himself criticises the ‘truth’ in his own creation in the very same chapter, by deconstructing the concept ‘will’.

Nothing here needs verification, explanation or deconstruction by the very rejection of ‘will to truth’ as final and eternally necessary, unless your ‘will to power’ values these methods. In which case I’d repeat that ‘will’ is akin to the commanding formulation of a goal and ‘power’ is the degree of ability to simultaneously obey your will towards matching this formulation with reality - in which case will to power is evident in every intention and consequence understood in terms of cause and effect. Causality of course being a given within such terms as verification, explanation or deconstruction. But will to power was only ever meant as one uneternal explanation of potentially many.

Considering the above, there is little point in attempting to ‘correct Nietzsche’, except to exercise what can be explained as your will to power by willing to conquer the values contained within his works, to vent your power. But to agree with it is equally explainable in terms of will to power. Its concern is value, not truth.

To be a Nietzschean knight, or warrior, is to sublimate your will to power most fully. To be a philosophical worker or saint of knowledge falls far short of this. A mental labourer’s body gathers dust, his thoughts crave stasis in the same way and his inner beast fights against itself towards discipline and focus towards mere objective utility. A saint of knowledge merely serves as a memory cask who guards his ‘sacred’ contents like a martyr whose main concern is the backworld where ‘sanctity’ lies, rather than dropping all that in favour of the free spirited affirmation of life. They reduce and shrink themselves and could never cope with the commandment of grand politics and the creation of law giving.

I choose NOT to join this philosophical workers party. Just sounds like a forum for petty squabbles amongst those who see themselves as superior. Hmm…

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Does the will to power bear any relation to the plastic power of man? Nietzsche speak to this in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (translated by Hollingdale).

It would seem to me that The Last Man goes astray by solipsizing all his experiences, whatever they be of. He cannot conceive of an outside to incorporate into himself what is past and foreign. Nietzsche is just another aspect of his sensory field for him generated by his own brain, giving him the illusion of an expansion of his own field and an overcoming and surpassing of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s thought cannot be transformed and incorporated into oneself if one does not first approach him as a radical alterity to oneself.

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Quite true, one must experience the difference of Nietzschean thought to appreciate its significance. However, to give this difference overdue credit simply because it is different, or to arrest one’s own development on this level merely because one lacks the courage to venture out to new spaces and perspectives, is harmful and false - a sign of one’s own personal psychological frustrations, complexes and denials.

Nietzsche is first seen as beyond one’s scope and habitual paradigms and ideas, but then, after sufficient time and exploration, Nietzschean ideas become a part of one’s internal conceptual landscapes. And as we understand more and more of an idea or set of ideas, and allow them to change our other concepts and perspectives, we do indeed incorporate them within us as they become a part of our own spaces. I am sure you are not suggesting that Nietzsche ought to remain always outside, always foreign? In this way, one would never reach deeper understanding, never grow intellectually.

It is not Nietzsche that I reject or criticise, it is the worship of Nietzsche - it is the falsely dogmatic attitude, the “inside group” of derrogatory exclusion, ignorant misunderstanding and inflated self-important hubris of his worshippers. To worship Nietzsche is to misunderstand Nietzsche. Likewise, to never surpass Nietzsche or reach beyond him, is also to misunderstand him.

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BGE 36 contains three suppositions. The second is this:

[size=95]Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it[.][/size]

This supposition has been made feasible to me by something R.J. Hollingdale wrote:

[size=95]From a very large number of experiments, two primitive drives emerged as dominant: the desire for power and the emotion of fear. And when Nietzsche came to understand fear as the feeling of the absence of power, he was left with a single motivating principle for all human actions: the will to power.
[Hollingdale, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction, 4.][/size]

I don’t know where he got this, but yeah, I believe it, he being a Nietzsche scholar and all.—

That takes care of one supposition. Now for the third:

[size=95][S]uppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power[.][/size]

The reason I present the last two suppositions separately is that the second need only apply to human beings, whereas the third applies to all organic life. However, the whole reason for performing the experiments mentioned by Hollingdale was to account for what is distinctly human without referring to something supernatural; by referring only to the natural, animal, organic.

[size=95]In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source.
[WP 619.][/size]

Methinks discussions on the last two suppositions would have to be conducted in the field of (socio)biology (and by “socio” I also mean “psycho”).—

Now as for the first supposition.

[size=95]Suppose nothing else were “given” as real [real] except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other “reality” besides the reality of our drives[.][/size]

Nietzsche’s argument for this supposition goes thus:

Premise 1: “[T]hinking is merely a relation of [our] drives to each other[.]” (ibid.)
Premise 2: ‘Nothing else is ‘given’ as real to us except our thinking.’
Conclusion: “[N]othing else [is] “given” as real except our world of [drives.]” (ibid.)

Premise 2 can be distilled from BGE 34:

[size=95][W]hoever holds our thinking itself, “the spirit,” in other words, responsible for the falseness of the world […]: whoever takes this world, along with space, time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred: anyone like that would at least have ample reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking. Wouldn’t thinking have put over on us the biggest hoax yet? and what warrant would there be that it would not continue to do what it has always done? In all seriousness: the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers; for example, whether it is “real” [real], and why it so resolutely keeps the external world at a distance, and other questions of that kind.[/size]

It is thus no question of getting up out of our drives to the ‘reality’ of thinking, but of getting down out of our thinking to the reality of our drives. Thinking is a form of feeling, feeling is essentially a responding, and responding is essentially a being-driven.—

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By the way, I think it’s best to just put Nay-sayers like Silhouette and The Last Man on ignore: it keeps the thread readable.

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True! - we cant have blasphemers with different opinions and ideas in the Holy Temple of Nietzsche, now can we? No, there might be a revolt against its dogma and holy gospels!

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I wish to use the occasion to draw attention to a link I’ve posted to an excellent post of mine that deals with all this nonsense:

http://www.nietzscheforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=335#p335

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I agree, it is quite a bunch of nonsense, isnt it?

Calling people “nay-sayers” (lol?) without explaining where they are wrong, trusting “experts” opinions on Nietzsche without caring to understand if they are right or how and why they are right, drawing conclusions from passages of Nietzsche which are totally unjustified and are not explained or even deeply explored at all, but taken by you as givens - you treat Nietzsche as dogma, and yourself as his holy interpreter.

Your link back to that other forum shows how you misinterpret. You set up a false dualism by first establishing that many people misunderstand Nietzsche as commanding them to not follow him (this is not a contradiction, as you seem to think), and then you use this new conceptual category of yours to oppose yourself to and thus generate your own feeling of being right - so long as you place anyone who disagrees with you into that first caregory, which by the way you do not ever explain how or why they belong in it - you never seek to understand their intentions, which is precisely what would place them within such a category in the first place. In otherwords you are dishonest with yourself, about those who “oppose” you, and you hide behind rationalisations and resentiment.

I cannot remember a single time you have actually critiqued any content I have written here about your interpretations of Nietzsche - I wrote you a lengthy response earlier on explaining why I felt your interpretations were inaccurate, and you made no attempt to respond in kind, but got onboard the ad-hom train and the denial express immediately. You falsely and superficially place those who do not agree with you into some vague and ill-defined category, and then are free to oppose yourself to that category in your own mind, thus giving yourself an inverted and false sense of being right, and of refuting them, when in reality you have not refuted anything at all. It is your method here which reeks of resentiment, of denial, of bombast and hubris. If you intended to carry on a conversation of ideas, that would be one thing - but you are demonstrating over and over that you are incapable of doing so.

99

My, how childish you are.

Blah, blah, blah, more of your ungrounded assertions. What a waste of time you are.

(It is, as I explain there.) There is no false dualism; many people do.

False.

Like most of what you write, this is too abstract. Kindly be clear about what you’re referring to.

More blah, blah, blah.

That may well be because you have never written any content…

In kind: that would be to become vague and evasive myself. I have explained that this is precisely what kept me from addressing your ‘points’. You yourself have your own take on this, of course:

Poor you.

100

Reading back, I’m struck by what a complete time-waster this Last Man is. If anything, he is a seducer (see my recent thread on Nietzsche’s eight principle questions, question 8), but a much too feminine one. No, I will not follow you, Eve, into your ever-expanding voids… Perhaps I should from now on make clear, at the beginning of every new thread I start, in which framework I wish to have discussions. I reckon myself to the Lampertian school of Nietzsche-interpretation (though I do not agree with Lampert on every particular),—not to the Deleuzian, for instance. My projects:

-to come to decisions regarding the particulars on which I (seem to) disagree with Lampert, e.g., the idea that the only impetus to seek truth is now cruelty,—not the edifying (to some) nature of truth;

-to reconcile the Sauwelian/Lampertian interpretation of Nietzsche with Darwinist evolutionary theory.