ILP thread on value-ontology (starting with Nietzsche, WTP)

Yes, one wills because one values.

Therefore, one values before one wills.

Will is direct proof, Evidence, of Value.

People do the things they do, if any reason at all, because they have underlying, and often indescribable, values.

Value or rather a standard of valuation being the condition/s of willing, yes.

I see Fixed Cross has explained this idea beautifully and concisely, more so than I have been able to do thus far. To will is to will in terms of something. Willing to power requires the principle offered by value-ontology.

So one does all this by maintaining one’s structural nature? That’s what you’re saying here, in any case.

Then what “values itself” before it is a self?..

Which originally meant “void”, and as a synonym for which you’ve used the word “no-thingness”. So what you’re saying is that self-valuing emerges out of a “void” in which no things, no selves, exist. This means it cannot be self-valuing in the reflexive sense, but is a valuing of something by nothing…

But in order to circumvene such irrationality, one usually says “nothingness” or something like that. And indeed, you said “no-thingness”. Pure flux amounts to nothing.

Unless “chaos” is used simply as an antonym of “order”. In Nietzsche’s “chaos of sensations”, there are already “things”, though not objects but subjects; there is no more primordial condition than the chaos of subjects, and it is not prior, but only deeper—more real—than all apparent orders of objects.

Indeed. And it’s impossible to not do so and still make logical sense. We cannot get rid of “grammar”, and Nietzsche accepted that:

We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation.
Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off.” (WP 522.)

Uuuuu… Interesting to posit this as definitive answer to Plato’s error of perfect ideas, or souls.

This whole theory reminds me of systems thinking, as described in the movie Mindwalk.

No; “encroaching units” is not an answer to the question “who wants power?”, but to the question “what is the will to power?”. Said encroaching units are quanta of power-will.

(Reminds me on the team FC Lumpen-proletarian Nietzschean)

Good, concise criticism.

Indeed. Its particular structural nature, its structural integrity.

Nothing. There is no “before”. There is no causality at the root of this, but the self-valuing, which is the structural integrity, the consistency of form in time – I understand all this to be a random accident.

Strange, indeed, to imagine an accident erupting from no-thingness. As I said, the only ground for this is the lack of its impossibility.

No, of nothingness by something, thereby making out of the nothingness more somethingness. I see no causality, no temporality at the ground of the first (self-)valuing, only as a result of it.

Here we differ in our definitions of “flux”. I use it as “stream”. A stream necessitates content, mass or energy.
Chaos is not energy, as it can not account for any relating, movement, tension, difference.

Chaos → being → flux.
And of coure flux can amount in greater being. So the cycle continues: Chaos → being → flux → being → flux → being → flux →

Yes. I depart from the view that this is the primordial condition.

And so do I! My theory is the result of being economic with language, of using grammar in an effective way.
Its function lies in the specific and exceptional usefulness of the term value.

This word, the seamless dynamic between its noun- and verb-form, is remarkable. Its meaning is crucial to seemingly everything that we can describe and define. So fundamental is it that from its meaning I found I can construct an explanation of the term ‘subject’, where before I had to see this word as an irreducible.

I hope that I have made another small step to clarification. I realize very well where the difficulty of this theory lies – in the positing of the arising of a self-valuing, a structural integrity, out of no-thingness. It is only using the term valuing and in using it specifically in the way that I do, that I can conceive of the answer to “why something, and not rather nothing?” in a rational manner.

I want to make this understandable even to the most unyielding sceptic.

Cezar - please define in logically sufficient terms “a determiner of values”.

I thought you were leaving.

I have no interest for an exchange with the deifiers of nothingness.

I am satisfied to know you two are ready to sell Nietzsche for Nothing and maybe even die for it.

Everything else is superfluous.

I will never completely abandon ILP, as it is the cradle of my philosophy. I use this thread as a bridge from here to a more specifically dedicated location. On this site I will restrict my writing to this thread, as I am not interested in departing from the study of value-ontology. I see a lifetime of work before me, and even that can only be a beginning. I am certain that I am in fact the (type of) philosopher of the future, for whom Nietzsche wrote his prelude.

Cezar – It was perfectly clear when I asked my simple and necessary question, that you would not be capable of giving an answer. Even if your intellect would be able to exist coherently for a sustained period, you would not be able to answer without confirming that the substance of my theory is necessary even for your little ‘Nietzschean’ prancings, and it would destroy your pride to admit this.

I have done the work of making this ground conscious, rational.

Perhaps Sauwelios can give the answer to the question I asked of you, and bring all of the ones who resist, persist in resistance to the new and improved, all conservatives, closer to comprehension of why ground-value is necessary for valuing, and why this must necessarily be an activity.

Sauwelios – Obviously language can not exist without relying on grammar. The question is how we approach grammar. Obviously grammar can not exist without vocabulary. I have begun establishing an order of rank within the domain of vocabulary. The term value, in all its permutations, represents the top.

There is no term which does not rely on this ‘faraoan term’ (language is a cosmos, an order of rank a pyramid, a farao a ‘cosmic architect’) for its meaning.

Then the question is how one maintains that.

And what about the possibility of its never having erupted, but always having existed?

So then somethingness is at least as fundamental as nothingness.

And is not a first cause necessarily a self-cause?

The answer is a ‘thing in itself’, which means it comes from nothing, it always was in nothing and it can’t enter the energy, because the law of the conservation of energy does not allow it. - Nothing can come from nothing! So, there is your part of nothing…

Your thievish attempt to “provoke thought” while you self are disabled to think must fail for that reason.

No. Nothingness becomes irrelevant.

I think, and I hope, that FC here is obeying Parmenides (with whose philosophy value-ontology shares much), or at least concurring with him, that nothingness is inaccesible “even to the gods.”

I-rrelevant.

And what is energy?

How?

By it being selected - in first instance, by itself, by its particular activity, namely, selecting.
The tendency to maintain structural integrity is selected (as traits are in evolution).
Selecting means no active ‘picking’ of course - but that all that does not have/fit this tendency dies off.

That is essentially only another way of putting it, as in chaos / no-thingness there is no time.
This mechanism describes a bit more of "the origin of (being and) time " – it makes this into a less nonsensical phrase.

It is at least as fundamental to its own foundation, certainly. I do not make the claim that nothingness must exist – that would be illogical, what would exist? I only aim to describe how somethingness can be understood exist in the context of the the notion of nothingness.

“why being, and not rather nothing?”
because of its possibility through the existence of a standard.
What enables this standard, logically ? This is what I am answering to.

I have rejected the idea that such a fundamental thing can be explained in terms of physics, or in terms of any mere subject of understanding – rather in terms of understanding itself.

In all other cases, were are merely interpreting an interpretation. By positing valuing (which we understrand because we do it, not because we have defined it) as fundamental, we can interpret the interpreting.

Yes. But it is not ‘God’, something alien, prior or superior to what we are as humans. What enables the smallest entity to self-cause (the particular way of its self-causation), can be understood as the same activity that we continue as complex organisms.

The problem is that in all its irrelevance to what exists, as it obviously does not exist itself, the notion of it still needs to be explained (away). We can only do this by approaching the limit of existence, and this must be done by approaching existence, equally, as a notion.

The usefulness of the formulation I’ve found lies in its way of identifying the notion of existence in similar terms as the notions we have of thought, consciousness; – the notions of the means by which we understand being are made equal to the notions of being following from these means.

The metaphysics / physics dichotomy can no longer exist under this terminology, equally the difference between ontology and epistemology is eliminated - so may the immunity of science to philosophy be broken.

A couple of questions, arising from my desperate attempts to make sense of this passage.

  1. Does the word “by” in the first sentence mean the same thing in all cases? Or does it mean “by means of” in the last case?
  2. Does the word “selecting” in the last sentence refer only to the being-selected from the first two sentences, or also to the selecting from the first sentence?

But we’re talking about what, according to you, erupted from chaos/no-thingness…

Actually, it must mean “by means of” in the first case, because of the word “it[s]”.