Nietzsche,value of life and POE

[felix_dakat]

@Sauwelios

@felix dakat

@attano

There is no freedom implied by the fact that judgements about the value of life cannot be true.

Thank you for your fine synopsis. It seems Nietzsche was clearing the ground for a philosophy of life. [Or clearing the ground of philosophy for life.] Unfortunately, he stopped short with determinism. IMO, he should have admitted that while the matter is uncertain, freedom of will best accounts for our expereince at his time and ours still. That being the case, we may be free to choose our own value given that the value of life is indeterminate. Affirming life is a choice in itself.

He “admitted” this much:

[size=95]“[E]ither no will—the hypothesis of science—or free will. The latter assumption the dominant feeling from which we cannot get loose, even if the scientific hypothesis were proved true.” (The Will to Power, Kaufmann edition, section 667.)[/size]

No will—the replacement of the concept “will” by the concept “force”—is the hypothesis of science because free will is a logical absurdity: it would be a self-cause, like Baron von Munchausen’s pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair. The doctrine of the will to power is a form of the hypothesis of science that takes account of said “dominant feeling from which we cannot get loose”: see http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2391222#p2391222 ff.

We are not free to choose our own value. The value we attach to life—i.e., not to mere survival but to the whole phenomenon of life, including death—betrays our own actual value. “[T]he doctrine of the will to power is at the same time an interpretation and the most fundamental fact[.]” (Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)

So, for Nietzsche, will to power is the subjective experience of force and, since we experience free will when we choose, it is merely a counterintuitive fact like quantum mechanics?

[felix_dakat]

@attano

@Sauwelios

@felix dakat

If life can’t be evaluated, how does he know the negative judgments are wrong? He was psychologizing. He should have stuck with his original title for the book.

A negative judgment on life, a rejection of life as a whole, also rejects itself; a positive judgment on life, an embracing of life as a whole, also embraces itself.

Maybe I can contribute here.
I can understand this perception of a predicament here, I share it too to some extent (but I am not going to discuss that).
There is however one short analysis that may help to understand why Nietzsche qualifies these judgements as “stupid”.

There’s a fragment, quoted in Heidegger’s Nietzsche (I could not retrieve it and I am just using my memory – my apologies if I happen to recall it wrongly), where Nietzsche states that error begins with the living. Most probably Nietzsche hadn’t this in mind, but I guess that it is possible to portray the living condition with a sort of relativistic image: in the knowledge space the living is a mass bending the world around it. There’s no intention, the living is structurally determined to form its own world, to bend everything in order to form the conditions sustaining and favoring it. This may be also rendered by saying that the living is structurally determined to form knowledge according to the knowledge’s value, which is – according to Nietzsche - how much that knowledge fosters living.
So the judgements about the value of life are not wrong because they are false, but there is a logical problem in predicating the value of life, it means assessing the value of life for life itself, it means assessing if life fosters life.
Thus a man cannot judge life, rather, if one’s to engage in this kind of judgements, one should judge his value for life, how much he is valuable to life, how much he sustains and promote it.

Are you, like Bob, saying [or rather reading Nietzsche as saying] that we cannot evaluate life because we are encompassed by it?

[Bob]

@felix dakat

@Bob

I may be just showing my ignorance here, but the fact that someone tries to evaluate an experience which is ongoing seems to be ridiculous. And whether life can be given a value begs to ask, why ask the question? The answer seems to be in discriminating life of value (lebenswert) and life which is ascribed no value (lebensunwert) after which one either allows or disallows that life to continue.

At the end of life we may be able to evaluate our experiences, but to evaluate life itself with all of its potential is hardly within one human beings range of competency. So much from a non-knower.

Are you saying that we cannot evaluate life because we are encompassed by it?

I think I’m really saying, “don’t appraise the day until evening comes.” We have no complete picture until the experience ends. Really I think that our biggest problem is that we have a need to judge instead of simply experiencing.

[attano]

@felix dakat

Are you saying that we cannot evaluate life because we are encompassed by it?

In a way, yes I do.
Maybe this is just about semantics, but I guess it is worth to stress that I am not using the words “cannot” and “encompassed”.
As for “encompassed”, I sense a sort of existentialist drift, but, regardless, we are not encompassed by life, we are life – while it is dubious that we are like our impression of being conscious subjects and agents portrays us.
Then, one can posit that there is some object/concept called “life” and, pretty much like for everything else, may wonder about its value. But the question becomes meaningless if we agree that the word “value” means “life fostering”. Then the question becomes a trick of language.
(Then it should be clear that Nietzsche thinks that this concept of life used by the sages and the value against which life is assessed are molded by platonism, but here I am just focusing on why, in fact, «the value of life cannot be estimated »).

@felix dakat

So, for Nietzsche, will to power is the subjective experience of force and, since we experience free will when we choose, it is merely a counterintuitive fact like quantum mechanics?

No, I guess Nietzsche does not say that. One has just to look at BGE36

Supposing that nothing else is “given” as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other “reality” but just that of our impulses–for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another:–are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is “given” does not suffice, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or “material”) world?

The “subjective experience” is the experience of reality as «our world of desires and passions». Then, by applying method, Nietzsche extrapolates from experience the hypothesis of will-to-power. This is no longer a possible description of experience, this is scientifically-oriented knowledge at work.

In the end, it is not only permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of logical method. Not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed to say so): that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays - it follows “from its definition,” as mathematicians say. The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as operating, whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do so - and fundamentally our belief in this is just our belief in causality itself - we must make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality.

The “experience” of free will is not experience, rather it is self-deception (BGE19):

Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only in name— and it is precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks, which has got the mastery over the inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages.
[…]
Therefore just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, in the second place, thinking is also to be recognized; in every act of the will there is a ruling thought; — and let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the “willing,” as if the will would then remain over! In the third place, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is termed “freedom of the will” is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who must obey: “I am free, ‘he’ must obey” — this consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally so the straining of the attention, the straight look which fixes itself exclusively on one thing, the unconditional judgment that “this and nothing else is necessary now,” the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered—and whatever else pertains to the position of the commander. A man who wills commands something within himself which renders obedience, or which he believes renders obedience.
[…] we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term “I”: a whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing — to such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing suffices for action. Since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise of will when the effect of the command — consequently obedience, and therefore action — was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the sentiment, as if there were a necessity of effect; in a word, he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success.

I would not say that free will is counter-intuitive, actually it’s even too much intuitive.
The problem is that acknowledging free will means stating a case of causa sui, which is even more absurd than “estimating the value of life”.

[felix_dakat]

@attano

The “experience” of free will is not experience, rather it is self-deception (BGE19):

In my statement that you quoted I intended to acknowledge that. For Nietzsche choice is an illusion. I got that. Thanks.

I would not say that free will is counter-intuitive, actually it’s even too much intuitive.
The problem is that acknowledging free will means stating a case of causa sui, which is even more absurd than “estimating the value of life”.

Neither would I. I was saying that the will to power was counterintuitive. Choice is intuited albeit to Nietzsche it’s an error.

But, Nietzsche can’t transcend morality any more than the rest of us can. Life becomes his new moral standard by he attempts to German culture later in the same book.

[V-OutOfTheWilderness]

@felix dakat

Neither would I. I was saying that the will to power was counterintuitive. Choice is intuited albeit to Nietzsche it’s an error.

But, Nietzsche can’t transcend morality any more than the rest of us can. Life becomes his new moral standard by he attempts to German culture later in the same book.

I’m no expert on Nietzsche like y’all. I’m lucky I can even spell his name correctly.

But seems to me Nietzsche is pushing back against all that limits life and living. He pushes back against moralists, improvers, and Christianity, that he perceives attack life’s natural instincts. He calls them – these moralists & improvers – “anti-nature.” And claims that “us immoralist’s” will save the day.

[omar]

@Sauwelios

A living being is part of the phenomenon called “life”. As such, it cannot make a true value judgment of that phenomenon, for that would be like an eye’s beholding itself. An eye can never behold itself, but at most an image of itself. A philosopher’s seeing a problem in the value of life means his making a judgment of value against life: if life has a negative value, it is a problem. But his attaching a negative value to life says nothing about life as such but only something about himself: namely, that he is a decadent.

I had discussed this privately with attano but from a different angle. What would be the consequences of the passage, as highlighted by felix, to Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts of Will to Power/Eternal Return? To me it puts his own body of work under a new light of interpretation.

[V-OutOfTheWilderness]

@felix dakat

Neither would I. I was saying that the will to power was counterintuitive. Choice is intuited albeit to Nietzsche it’s an error.

But, Nietzsche can’t transcend morality any more than the rest of us can. Life becomes his new moral standard by he attempts to German culture later in the same book.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche