Nietzsche's World as Will and Imagination.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

First off, the “imagination” in the title is a translation of the word usually translated as “representation” or “idea” in Schopenhauer’s “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung” - namely, “Vorstellung”. Other possible translations include “show” and “vision”.

Nietzsche’s conception of the world as will to power is well known. What may be less well known is that this means the world is will to power to will to power to will to power etc., until the circle is round.

In an important passage, Nietzsche writes:

“Suppose nothing else were ‘given’ as 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 - for thinking is merely an interrelation [Verhalten] of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to perform an experiment and to ask the question whether this ‘given’ would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or ‘material’) world? I do not mean as a deception, as ‘appearance,’ a ‘representation’ (in the Berkeleian or Schopenhauerian sense), but as holding the same rank of reality that our affect has - as a more primitive form of the world of affects in which everything still lies contained in a powerful unity before it undergoes ramifications and developments in the organic process (and, as is only fair, pampered and weakened, too), as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions, along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, metabolism, are still synthetically linked with one another - as a pre-form of life. […] The question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do - and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself…, then we must perform the experiment of positing the causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. ‘Will’, of course, can have an effect only upon ‘will’ and not upon ‘matter’ (not upon ‘nerves’ for example…): in short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will has an effect upon will wherever ‘effects’ are recognized - and whether all mechanical occurrences are, insofar as a force is active in them, will force [Willenskraft], effects of will. 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; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment - it is one problem - then one would have gained the right to designate all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world viewed from inside, the world defined and described by its ‘intelligible character’ - it would be simply ‘will to power’ and nothing else.”
[Beyond Good and Evil, section 36.]

This is a nice, but exoteric passage. For Nietzsche did not believe in causality. The only thing he absolutely believed in, his “cogito ergo sum”, was “cogito ergo est”:

“Fundamental certainty. - “I imagine” [“Ich stelle vor”], therefore there is a Being [ein Sein - not to be confused with “a being” as in “a human being”; that would be ein Wesen]: cogito, ergo est. - That I am this imagining Being, that imagining is an activity of the ego, is no longer certain: just as little is everything that I imagine. - The only Being that we know is the imagining Being. […] Characteristic of imagination is change, not motion: passing away and coming to be, and in imagining anything persistent is lacking. On the other hand, it posits two persisting things, it believes in the persistence of 1. an ego, 2. a content; this belief in persistence, in substance, i.e. in the remaining identical thereof with itself, is a contradiction with the imagination process itself. […] Inherently clear, however, is that imagining is nothing resting, nothing identical-with-itself, unchangeable: the Being therefore, which alone is guaranteed to us, is changing, not-identical-with itself, has connections [Beziehungen] (conditions, thinking must have a content, in order to be thinking). - This is the fundamental certainty about Being. But imagining predicates precisely the opposite of Being! But that does not mean that it is true! But maybe this predication of the opposite is only a condition of the existence of this kind of Being, of the imagining kind! That is to say: thinking would be impossible, if it did not fundamentally mistake the essence of esse [das Wesen des esse]: it must predicate substance and that which is identical [das Gleiche], because a cognition [ein Erkennen] of the completely fluent is impossible, it must impute properties to Being in order to exist. There need not be a subject or an object for imagation to be possible, but imagination must believe in both.”
[Nietzsche, Nachlass.]

The predicates of imagination and the will are the same. “I imagine something” and “I desire something” are identical grammatical constructions. Both predicate an ego and a content. But “I desire something” is really “I imagine a desire of something”. So our world of desires and passions is not given as real, but only as imagined. The imagining Being is the only thing that is “given” as real. This is in complete accordance with the fact that Nietzsche called the will to power “not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos” [in The Will to Power, section 635] - an event. This event may be completely imaginary.

2

I’m trying, Saully. I know you’re on to something but I swear I can’t make it out yet.

3

An easier way to put this…hmm.

Humans take what is and see what can be.
Ok. By golly, I think Nietzsche was onto something. #-o

4

Well you spelled his name right. Still I wonder how much Nietzsche you have read, SS. No, not on your trips to the mall with your parents when you read the first page of a book written about Nietzsche by some freelance philosopher or the quotes on the bumper-stickers over by the map section of the bookstore, but the actual books he has written himself.

5

Aw, detrop. Don’t you have anything better to do than insult me? Or must you go that low as to make fun of a teenage girl in order to boost your ego?

What I’ve read of Nietzsche hasn’t to do with my understanding of this simply written paragraph. It was summed up in one sentence.

6

And what sentence is that?

7

If the topic contradicts that sentence in anyway please let me know.

8

You just have this aloof thing about you. I’m torn between admiring it and scolding you. Don’t get me wrong, a good confident attitude is swell, but you can’t sum up Saully that quick, much less Saully’s thoughts about Nietzsche.

Like in your other post in the religion thread. Suddenly you are an atheist. For four reasons I think it was. My question is this; how do you do this so quickly? Are you serious, or is this just more snootyness?

9

We’ll see what he has to say. Thanks for the intrusion though.

10

Though I do not go into it here, there is a reason why I’ve added this last remark.

This is really an aside.

The essence of my post is really in the second quote, which I have deliberately contrasted with the first. In the first, Nietzsche describes the world as will to power (Beyond Good and Evil, by the way, is a book published by him in his lifetime). In the second, he describes the world as imagination. This is from the Nachlass, literally that which he has left behind. It may have been meant for his planned major work, the Revaluation of All Values.

If the world is the will to power, one may ask whose will this is, i.e., who wills, who is the subject that wills; but that is a grammatical, not a philosophical, problem. The essence is will: there is nobody who wills, no doer behind the deed. The doer is in the deed and is itself part of the deed.

One might also ask: what is the object of the will? Nietzsche leaves no doubt here: it is power. But power can only be the power to will. So the world, according to Nietzsche, is really the will to will. It is the will affirming itself.

11

I don’t really understand what you mean by that sentence. Allow me to take it apart and see what I can make of it.

“Humans”. This is the subject of the sentence. It presupposes multiple beings who are equally “human”. But Nietzsche does not presuppose multiple beings. At bottom, he is only certain of the existence of one being, the imagining being.

“What is”. This is the object of the sentence. The only thing whose existence can be confirmed is the imagining being, according to Nietzsche (and me). Anyway, whether we agree about what it is that is or no, we both mean the same thing by “what is”, namely, that which certainly exists.

Humans, according to you, “take” the latter. “Take” is the main verb of the sentence (I don’t know the right grammatical term in English, and am too lazy to look it up). This must mean that those humans are aloof from what is; unless they themselves are (part of) it, in which case they (also) take themselves. But this cannot be right. Nothing can ever take (or in any other way act upon) itself. At best it is a part (of those humans, in this case) which acts upon another part (maybe “the rest”, i.e., all other parts: everything about them except the active part).

But your humans don’t only “take” “what is”, they also do something else. They “see” “what can be”. “What can be” means “that which has the possibility to exist”. But if it already has [present tense] this possibility, then it must already exist. So what can be, must be. This summarizes what I think Nietzsche thought, and what I definitely do think: that whatever can happen, must happen, that what mustn’t (isn’t destined to) happen, can’t and won’t happen. What will be follows from what is; it is already latent within it.

12

Yes, exactly. I think my sentence was ok in simplifying it.

But, I see only 2 categories:

What people can imagine which is solely kept in their heads and what is tangibly there. What’s able to be sensed outside the brain to sensing inside the brain; what’s able to be sensed inside the brain to sensing outside the brain.

You see what I’m saying? Maybe, I’m wrong. =( Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. What are yours?

To me, Nietzsche is recognizing past, present, and future. So, I’m not seeing it anymore complicated than that.

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The first appearence of the term “will” and the various conceptual attempts surrounding the use of the term in text, was, as far as I know (Dunamis will surely find a greek origin and post it, I’m sure) with Schopenhauer, who directly followed, and was more or less guided by, Kant’s use of term “noumenal,” only Kant used the term to represent the domain of what he called “a priori,” which meant “absolute structures for experience” and more importantly “truth that is not dependent on experience,” which was a fundamental rule for the empiricists.

Essentially Schopenhauer makes an anthropological metaphor out of Kant’s original postulate. The lineage of Kant’s thinking, Schopenhauer’s, and Descartes, follow the Platonic rationalism of the early philosophies. Plato started all the confusion with his cave analogy, in short.

What followed as the evolution of rationalism was bourgeois dialect; any and all terms invented thereafter were metaphorical, unscientifical, unpragmatic, …poetry, basically. Dualism as it has evolved is not a necessary philosophy for a language speaking species, because, well, it doesn’t do anything…that is, the world is not determined by what is “said,” but by what is caused atomically, physically, in a material form.

(I even speculate that three quarters of the frontal lobe is an accident…just kidding)

Schopenhauer, in taking Kant’s “chinese puzzles” out of hand, creates a pessimistic philosophy which not only garantees the existence of Kant’s noumenal reality, but also claims that this reality is comparable to a “willfull persistence,” what Schopenhauer interprets in its anthropological form; the purpose of existence is suffering and that suffering is noumenal.

Finally, with Nietzsche we see a complete reversal of the theme but with the same Platonic lineage.

“Still the question remains; what would be left of the world if it had been chopped off…”

…asks Nietzsche (refering to the human head…the mind).

Everything would remain, that’s what. There is no perspective that effects anything; the empirical world is impressed upon the senses, and are the senses themselves. The burden of proof is on the rational lineage, this supposition of absolute a priori truths, this noumenal reality.

To call existence a “Will,” and to make it nostalgic with metaphors of “power” is none other than a “theological negativity,” if I might borrow a term from #2. It is metaphysics without the metaphysics, and you see this in his very empirical incomplete doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

Its that Feuerbachian objectification of man in an image of something immortal and necessary, something a prior (in Nietzsche’s case, the WTP), yet it only confuses men who confront hundreds of years of philosophical terminologies in an attempt to find “meaning.” The WTP is a replacement doctrine for Platonic psychology in the working class. That’s right. Fritz was a fucking godsend. The hammer unto religion…but a great spritual hammer, a great dionysian hammer with as much mystique as the bible itself.

Meanwhile, after all this poetry is said and done…the working man goes home to his wife, eats a tv dinner, and drinks a six pack.

That’s existence, and it ain’t no WTP either. Its a communist’s nightmare.

So what is a “Will” and what is a “Power”?

14

Dictionary reference to go along with that poetry much!!? :slight_smile:

You’re a typing novel… :confused:

Well said from what I got.

15

Ah, I understand your sentence now.

When you imagine something, it is not really there at that time and place, whereas when you perceive something, it is there then and there, right? I believe that’s what your saying.

Now, may I ask how you know that what you percieve is really there? Could it not be a sensory hallucination, and not a perception? Do you know for sure that the supposed thing or being you are perceiving is actually there? That it actually exists? If so, how?

Nietzsche is actually only recognizing the imagining being. Characteristic of this imagining is change. You might say that if there is change, there must be a past. But the supposed memories of the past may themselves be only hallucinations. Imagining always occurs in the present. The image of the past is part of the present hallucination. And the present is not a point in time. The hallucination is changing, but the hallucinating being predicates [I couldn’t find a better word] two “unchanging” things: a subject and a content. The subject, which is supposedly having the hallucination, is supposed to possess continuity; likewise, the content of the hallucination. For instance, when you are sitting behind your computer, you must suppose that the hands which are doing the typing are the same hands there were a moment ago, and that the keyboard is the same keyboard there was a moment ago. Physics has already shown that this isn’t the case. But it supposes the continuity of the particles, waves, or quanta of which those things are supposed to consist.

Consciousness is impossible without supposed continuity. There is supposed to be someone who’s conscious and something of which he or she is conscious. Both are supposed to possess continuity.

16

What I see is a cycle of people. I see people passing their thoughts and genes. These are eternal. People themselves aren’t. Their consciousness isn’t. Their anscestor’s and descendent’s consciousness have or will. Their atmosphere has or will. Being of the same species and planet they share this continuity.

If this is an example of your idea then I gotcha 100% out and over.

17

How do you know? Have you tried chopping it off?

A “perspective” presupposes an objective reality which a “subject” experiences. Both may be purely imaginary.

I think this is a reference to the following passage:

“To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not phenomena in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative hypothesis, if not as a heuristic principle. What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be - the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum [reduction to an absurdity (contradiction)]: assuming that the concept of a causa sui [cause of itself] is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, is the external world not the work of our organs”?
[Nietzsche, BGE 15.]

But the organs are a part of the external world, and the external world is the work of the imagining being.

The will to power - and this is my whole point - already presupposes the external world, in the same way that your working man and everything about him does (remember that I used the word “exoteric”). I, or rather the imagining being, can just imagine your man going to the supermarket (or asking his wife to) in order to get a six pack. That is to say, it might be that your man is imagined to get a six pack. No need to ascribe a will to it. But if we suppose that your working man really exists (of which there is no possible proof whatsoever), then we need to ascribe a will to his going to the supermarket (let us for simplicity’s sake suppose that he himself goes) in order to get a six pack. There must be a driving force moving him from his easy chair and out to the supermarket. In short, we need the concept of the will in order to accurately describe the external world (already supposing, therefore, that it really exists). And not just of the will, but of the will to something: will in itself means nothing. Your working man gets a six pack in order that he can [French pouvoir] sit down before the telly with a beer in his hand.

18

It is not, but I do want to give you some credit. Thoughts and genes are both information. Only information can be passed down. One can pass one’s knowledge, but not one’s wisdom. In this respect at least, you have a pretty good understanding of the external world.

So the only thing I can give you is some praise.

“But let me go away quickly, lest I take something from you!”
[Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 2.]

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  • Nietzsche

Sure, if you exploit the argument from ignorance. Nietzsche is demanding a proof for something he has imposed upon reality, a negation-- “does the metaphysical exist? Its quite possible”-- he says at one point.

But what is it he is saying might exist, if not something he is not sure of?

Its nonsense, man.

The WTP is a romantic way of saying “events happen.” A “Will” denotes a teleology…a purpose, which must be reduced to an initial cause. To call something an “act of will” is to say that one thing exists before events happen, such as a noumenal “will.” This is what I mean by noumenalism. The “Will” is an event…an event is not a “Will.” There is no “act of Will” because then there are two things…action and Will.

What is the difference? There isn’t one, they are synonomous.

Okay, what is not an act of Will? Give me an example.

20

If reality required a thought or will how would it be possible for anything outside of humanity to be real? There is reality without thought or will so how can it be so? I think, therefore, I am? False.