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Just kidding… Anyways, yeah, I got that ES = PR, but who is PR?
PR is an N at KTS who came here as ES.
Something that explains everything explains nothing.
To Gib ( The professional illogician ),
Nietzsche was a sort of pan-experientialist. To him, all systems have a subjective element which strives to accumulate more energy. Check out this well-done video on the topic:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVoCKLyt2uw[/youtube]
Ah, no wondering I don’t know him.
ES,
Excellent video.
Got any response to this, Moreno?
Which is a compatiblist version of free will.
I didn’t miss it but I could have been clearer. These aims, needs etc, that ‘live above the derivations of power’ are utterly determined. We do not have forks in the road, though we will experience them as such. (And note, I am not saying we do not choose, just that that is utterly determined- even in compatiblist free will conceptions. There is a possibilities quale. We are riding our own wave.
But in case we are or are about to be talking past each other, could you rephrase ‘living above the derivations of power’.
In a sense I am saying that will to Power is being argued as an emergent property of matter, since you do not Think the rest of existence has it. I don’t know on what grounds we can justify that. We’ve still got Chemicals bouncing off each other and interacting. We can certainly label some of the complicated processes that humans, for example, are as will to Power, but these are simply parts of the same kinds of causal chains going on in the rest of existence. It’s a fancy label for an equally determined process that is not even separate from existence. We are not isolated from the rest we are part of its multitude of causal chains. We are simply ‘falling forward’ in time, like Everything else, pressed forward by the previous nanoseconds state of existence, the whole of it.
No. I’m not saying free will and determinism are compatible with each other. I am saying they are the same thing. Separating the issue with labels like “free will” and “determinism” is unnecessary, and causes confusion.
We don’t need some made-up idea of “freedom from determination”, that has never been anything but a falsehood anyway. OF COURSE things are “utterly determined”, it would make literally zero sense to say otherwise.
There ARE forks in the road, however. Just as “randomness” still exists even in this causal universe. That which emerges as “new” (fork in the road) or “random” (beyond ability to predict/understand within one’s own sphere of meaning-causality) does so at the behest of VERY subtle and self-responsive iterations of causalities moving through highly complex structures that may be understood through Chaos Theory. If you have never looked up Chaos Theory I suggest you do so, it has much value to understanding consciousness.
“Living above the derivations of power” just means: there are tiers of material structures, the continuum being constituted by complexity and ability to self-respond toward increasingly subtle, unpredictable and “chaotic” outcomes.
All correct except for the ‘tone’ of it, which is easily indicated by the “equally determined” you use. Two determinations need not be equal in HOW they are determined, in what and why they are what they are. As I said, there is a continuum. Also the “like everything else” you say… that is also not the case. Not all things that “fall forward in time” (nicely said, by the way, I like that expression) do so in the same way.
In addition to Chaos Theory I recommend you read Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus, if you have not.
I Believe that is compatibilism, but if your idea is different from compatibilisms let me know.
Fine, I assumed this, but wanted to make sure.
I am not sure how random factors helps make these forks in any way under our Control.
No more unpredictable than the quantum foam in any given portion of space.
Thanks, it seemed to capture my polemics well.
How is will to Power different?
It seems like a bunch of forces (which manifest as one force) that lead to an effect. It may have all kinds of details that billiard ball effects do not, but not more than how a wave forms and breaks against a shore.
I suppose I could put my position like this. We are, yes, very complicated phenomena, but the Word ‘will’ and other telos-laden Words, seem to imply that we are on a different order from the rest of nature. I Think, given current scientific models, our consciousness follows the process of inevitably going in this direction or that one - if randomness is tossed in via QM, fine, but this would not be our doing - and experiences a quale of willing this rather than that. LIke a surfboard rider thinking he is choosing to head towards the shore when he rides a wave. In this case the wave is him, of course.
It is possible we are talking past eachother, and the truth is I am trying to see if you have a break from current scientific thought, and a nice take on this break would be great. In a sense I am playing devil’s advocate.
I have read works in the former and the latter, though I have to say I started to glaze in the latter - I Went directly from anti-oedipus, perhaps I should have bumped it up a year or two. All I can remember is rhizomes. What is it I need to know about these works, in summary, as applicable here.
Oh boy. You just can’t. You just cannot use WTP as a “purpose of existence”.
How shall I begin? Firstly, “existence” is a mushy-wushy word that no one, not even Hiedegger, has ever defined. And “purpose” implies that something or someone “has” the purpose.
Nietzsche would never say such a thing.
The WTP is a description - of the universe, in Nietzsche’s more hyperbolic moments, but really of living things in a literal sense and the rest in a metaphorical sense. It’s meant as a foil to “will to truth” or “God’s will”. It’s not the purpose of anything. It is just a more accurate (read: less bullshit metaphysical") description of motive, which is not the same as volition. Nor is it subject to volition, so it’s really not a candidate for “purpose”.
I’ll leave it there, for now.
Ah, good.
Rollo May comes close to an answer of why, despite seemingly insurmountable odds in even a chaos situation, , he attaches a caveat -responsibility- to our freedom to act despite having the means and the will. It takes just a little jump to go from there to see why we can't
act upon our instinctive survival modes. We are in a situation, where there may not be a right exit.
Any solution then seems allusive and anti social.
The will’s genesis as far as it’s modern evolution is concerned, starts not from what it means, but how it can be attained and utilized with the available power in hand. I guess maybe looking to Scopenhauer for the divergence may offer some answers…
In Scopenhauer’s treatment of Shelling’s primal unity, which he calls Janus, there is a supposed attempt to connect the effects of chaos.(Above the will) Scopenhauer takes up this theme, and because he sees suffering as the effect of existence, as causing suffering, he denies the will to power, in order to achieve his aim of quietism… Nietzche is the yea sayer, and contradicts this by liberating the will! y giving it an unbridled power.
The power of chaos contained in the denial of the will which has been tied to axiomatic interpretations,. According to Shelling, derive from t Sanskrit origin.
It may be really impossible to re trace all the cause-effect changes in semantic value, hence Nietzche takes the leap into these roots by instinct.
His aphorisms reflect as much, and his reaction toward Scopenhauer is strictly based on the charge that the Janus figure of tying up chaos is not mandated by proper sequence of cause and effect relationships… Hence he liberates the chain by pointing out there are too many missing links, hence they are formally, but not yet substantially broken. His superman, either was not his own invention, it had deeper roots going back to Goethe, who coined the phrase.
Moreno: you are to the point when you find fault with compatability as a criteria between determination and free will, since it shifts focus to seeing llikeness and resemblance in terms of topical meaning. Deleuze solves this totally reduced logical problem to differentiate meaning, not intigrate it, as it was originally done.
I don't believe meaning can be dissected under a magnifying glass of that kind, it has to be reduced, reduced by phenomena as if separating onion skin layer by layer. That's where the ground is sought, but it can only be done in a good faith existential jump.
At this level the janus cannot differentiate between sartre's good faith irreducibility between actor and role, and after this, all causaility seems to disappear, probably due to the effect of the dark ages.
Some of the above is not relevant but had to write it, so as to be able to see referentiality in all this as the disconnect between Being and Nothingness.
For that I apologise.
Nietzsche didn’t view living things and non-living things as wholly separated/distinct. He saw the organic as a gradation of the inorganic - as interconnected. Nietzsche, indeed, was a teleologist. In his earlier years, he wasn’t nor did he view the WTP as ontological. But later on, his position changed. The WTP is a striving, a pressing forward. When I use the words " purpose" or " telos", I’m not using them in some otherwordly sense; like a God giving purpose to the universe, etc. The telos, WTP, is inherent to the substratum of existence, so to speak.
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms striving toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Sure, Nietzsche saw everything in terms of spectra. But this should not be mistaken for teleology. There is no discernible beginning or end to the spectrum - it’s just the conceptual apparatus that perspectivism uses.
This is not teleology.
The WTP is not a thing, it’s a description of a thing.
This world is will to power - but that doesn’t mean that this world is a thing that is the same thing as the thing he calls will to power. WTP describes that world. Note that he is referring to his world (“this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self- creating”) - his conceptual world. This is not ontology, it’s part of the lexicon of the paradigm he creates.
I never said the will to power was a thing like some static, indivisible entity. The WTP is identical to what we call " existence". All is in flux, a becoming - not a being.
You seem to be responding to a criticism that I did not make.
N wrote: ‘my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself’.
How is that teleological? Can you elucidate your point by reacting to this claim specifically?
Yes. The feeling of the will to power is always the telos beneath willings to power. In Nietzsche’s meaning, actions are guided by “self-purpose”, by the fact that they ARE expressions of will to power which is enough for them to count as “purposeful”, according to his will to power ontology.
It isn’t as if actions are purposeful with respect to some higher dimension of meaning or morality beyond the actor. The “joy of the circle itself”, the “ring feels good will toward itself” is the kind of telos Nietzsche is referring to. Self-justifying will.
That’s backwards at best. We are not conscious of the WTP. We can extrapolate a certain amount, and N does. But this is a foreground estimate.
The only sense in which “will to power” (In N’s sense of the term) has any telos (purpose) is because it produces its own self-justification, the FEELING of power, feeling of pleasure/joy in expansion, growth, risk, strength and movement.
According to N, most of will is unconscious, not directly experienced by people, in their control. It doesn’t matter if you feel it or not - it’s there. Ideas like “justification” are not relevant. It’s a description. It’s just what is, according to Nietzsche. I just don’t see where the concept of justification enters into it. It’s worth noting that the will to power is defined partly by what it is not - it’s not the will to truth, most importantly. It’s not an ontological idea. It’s a “moral” one.
Nietzsche was reacting to rationalist and enlightenment notions that there is any telos at all. That’s his entire point - that there is no telos. We are not driven to truth, reason is not directed at truth, reason, science - they do not bring us close to God or truth or objective reality or anything else. There is no goal, no end, no purpose.
To try to inject a teleological element here would be similar to saying that atheism is a belief (because everything is) - it’s more of an accusation than an exposition. “Hey, yeah, we perspectivists are teleological, too!”
If so, then everything, every idea, every philosophy is “teleological”. The word loses its meaning.