The Fundamental Telos of Existence.

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.

It is that, as you say, but also more than only that.

Will to truth is one kind of will to power, one kind among many possible kinds.

Will to power is very much an ontological idea, or more precisely an onto-epsitemic one. It is not a “moral” idea in the sense that N understood morality.

Telos does not = morality, for N or otherwise.

Yes, except that even Nietzsche via will to power and, more essentially through eternal return, caves to a semblance of telos, because he discovers it is impossible to do away with entirely. N is reacting against CHRISTIAN telos, not against the notion of telos itself. Remember, secular modernity and science are very much Christian, to N.

That is a mistaken and simplified reading of Nietzsche.

Teleological means “with/of/for purpose”. Goal-directed. It does not need to mean also “moral” or “metaphysical”.

The “goal” of will to power is to will power, to will itself. It is the “self-propelled wheel” as N writes in TSZ, the basis of consciousness and all gradations, from lower to higher forms, of consciousness (“will”).

Nyet. There is only one will to power, and N is explicit that truth is not a useful goal, by and large. There is no truth in the sense that those he was reacting to thought, hence the will to truth is a phantom. Nietzsche wasn’t writing in a vacuum, and a little consideration of the history of philosophy, of which N was keenly aware, goes a long way in understanding just what he was talking about.

I used the scare quotes for a reason. Again, you have to consider that N was in a dialog with Plato and Descartes and Kant. He was a critic and it was they who he was often criticising. He writes philosophy about philosophy. I wonder how much Plato and Kant you have read. If it’s not a lot, you will miss a lot of what N says.

No shit.

I cannot fathom how you reach this conclusion. But I have already commented upon this.

It’s simplified, yes. Evidently, I have not been able to simplify it enough.

Again, no shit.

You seem to lack the sense of irony with which N makes a similar claim. I might have guessed that you’d chose the most testosterone-laden version of his thinking, which is also among the most ironic.

No on both counts. You are simplifying.

“There is no truth” is definitely something that Nietzsche was not saying.

I could throw the same accusation at you, and it would be equally mindless and lazy.

You could also stop simplifying everything and then throwing around half-veiled insults. But then you might attain something other than a grumpy, washed up old fuck with an ax to grind.

No shit.

Not to me.

Science and secular modernity are the children of Christ. You might want to read more carefully. (How does the shitty insulting feel?)

Yep, I’m gonna stop here. We’re done. You can go fuck yourself. Good day.

True

Also true.

The will to power is in part conscious, namely for the part that a being is conscious of itself. Consciousness is nothing but will to power, and this will produces, when conscious, a goal. We can not be consciously willing to power (existing) without having a idea of a specific state of power, be this idea a rudimentary object of desire or the apex of an explicitly construed strategy.

Any goal that you may have in your mind is an instance of the the will to power as consciousness.

That’s why nihilism has the subject desire unconsciousness. It doesn’t want to have goals, because it realizes the folly of all particular goals. Nietzsche’s remedy here is to accept goals as means of the will to be conscious, and set them accordingly. The goal itself doesn’t matter, what matters is in how well it allows the will to experience itself consciously.

Nietzsche wasn’t impressed with consciousness as a means to truth. In his paradigm it is only a contingency of the will to power, and I imagine he’d interpret it as valuable only in as far as it could be honest to itself about its nature. And that simply means that it would be conscious of itself as relatively strong.

Any other form of consciousness acquires the compulsion to mislead itself, to become metaphysical - to become conscious of (itself as) another thing than the physiology that produced it. Nietzsche’s point is moral in so far as it proposes that morality is inevitably linked to consciousness, that consciousness equals morality, as the facet of the WTP that manifests as producing goals and with that the possibility of yes and no - and logic.

I am old and grumpy, to be sure, but I am not washed up. That would imply that I was once something to begin with… and a philosopher without an axe to grind is boring at best and probably not a philosopher at all.

I’m not trying to insult you, I am trying to argue with you. As for me, I feel nothing at all. It’s just an argument.

Oh this is futile!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y[/youtube]

You are so asking for it. :stuck_out_tongue:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV7u1VBhWCE[/youtube]

This world is the will to a goal.
The wills to goals.
And some goals, that thereby are created. And sometimes reached.