For Fixed Cross: Logic as self-value.

In Prismatic567’s Humans are Born with a Sense of Morality? thread, I posted the following quote, to the implications of which he ultimately failed to respond:

[size=95]“For philosophy, Kant’s knowledge that reason only has insight into what it itself according to its design brings forth can, if finite reason is historical, only mean that thinking, in an ever-revolving change, makes its own designing of the design the object of its knowledge. If the knowledge however is to be true nonetheless, then absolute spirit must manifest itself in every finite form of reason. For a thinking which radically carries out the change of consciousness, the self-knowledge of reason in the act of its designing becomes a ‘phenomenology of spirit’, that is to say a doctrine of the forms in which the absolute essence of spirit appears as finite. Now Nietzsche carries out a change which puts into question even the fundamental presupposition of Hegel’s: that the absolute in and for itself is already with us. Kant’s doctrine ‘that reason only has insight into what it itself according to its design brings forth’ is taken so radically that it now comes to light how reason itself has been brought forth in history by man, according to his own design. The force which brings forth and posits [or: determines] both reason and the principle of identity that constitutes it bears the name ‘the will to power’. Thinking, knowing and acting is now interpreted out of the historical carrying-out of designing, that is to say out of value-positing. Whereas in Kant the apriority of reason is condition of the possibility of designing, through the change carried out by Nietzsche the design becomes the condition of the possibility of reason.” (Georg Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 71-72.)[/size]

Now the implications of this Nietzschean revolution have led me to the experiment of interpreting logic in terms of value ontology.

  1. Logic–for example the law of non-contradiction–is “merely” a value. That law basically says: “There can be no A which is not A; every possible A is not not-A.” If that law however is no natural law, no “given”, no truth, but only a positive law, a law given by us, a value, then it reads: “Any A which is not A is worth nothing to us; only an A which is not not-A is worth something (and thereby infinitely more!) to us.”

  2. This goes for As in general, without exception. An example of a specific A is our self. As Picht says elsewhere, for Nietzsche the idea of an individual self is an illusion on which living beings insist. In my view, value ontology, starting from oneself, projects this insistence into all beings, not just living ones: “An A which is not A (that is to say, that which does not exist) is such because it is worth nothing, or not enough, to itself; any A on the other hand which is worth something, or enough, to itself is for this reason–and solely for this reason–an A (that is to say, exists).”

  3. This means that the axioms of logic represent the most fundamental value in value ontology, for the value-positing formulated in them is the source of even the “self” of “self-valuing”. It need not be the case that there are selves that value themselves; all that needs to be the case is that selves are posited, that the idea of a self (the eidos, the Gestalt) is posited. Beings exist inasmuch as they value themselves, posit the value “my self”, assert the idea “this is me” strongly enough.

I responded in the way [hit and miss fashion] I understood it. If it did not reconcile with your expectations it is your fault due to ineffective communication.

You relied on a narrow quote from Georg Picht who is not a popular philosopher with the English language philosophical community.
If Picht had successfully countered Kant, it would be BIG NEWS in the philosophical community around the world since Kant imo is the greatest Western philosopher and at least amongst the greatest for many. I can not find any article in English that confirm nor countered Picht’s critique of Kant.

Btw, do you have an overall view or understood [not necessary agree] Kant’s philosophy at all? All you had is merely faith in Picth, how do you know he is even right with his critique of Kant.

Er, what? If you do not understand someone it’s necessarily the other’s fault?

It’s not Picht’s critique, it’s Nietzsche’s. And yes, that was big news in the philosophical community around the world.

I think the critique of Kant that Picht summarises so well is right because it makes logical sense to me. In fact, its rightness is corroborated–though not proven, of course–by the fact that you, a great admirer of Kant, have, as I said, ultimately failed to respond to the challenge posed by it. In light of this new thread’s OP, that challenge can be epitomised as: "How do you know that an A which does not equal A is nothing, and not just nothing to us, worth nothing to us?

When I wrote the above, I did not have access to the passage I referred to. Here it is:

[size=95]“[Nietzsche wrote:] ‘In order that there may be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to–emerge: beings [or: entities] with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche’s answer reads: ‘beings with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the beings that populate it. But the beings are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their Being organises itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung]; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical Self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its ground [sich behaupten]. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the change of an organic being, its εἶδος [eidos], its form [Gestalt].” (Picht, op.cit., page 250.)[/size]

The only “Nietzschean revolution” is in the courage to admit that Christianity and the priestly ascetic idealism are the only source for the human decline so far.

It is doomed to appear as strangely opaque reasoning, the reasoning after reasoning itself, but I believe I am largely in accord with your proposition, Sauwelios. It is somewhat analogous to Iona’s idea of the human self, and the concept Eidos is appropriate. What serves here as selfvaluing is indeed the idea of a self. Dionysos is the remedy to a petrified Eidos, connecting its substance to the flux at the basis of all such “selves”. Appollo serves as the ideal Eideal form , the ideal self. His constant struggle to contain the Dionysian is this very ideal - his health.

A healthy Eidos, living idea forming its own ideation intentionally - this is that creative spirit that used to live in and as me so powerfully, and which led me up a path to the conception of selfvaluing - a triumph of this Eidos of heath that now has become its own greatest challenger. The idea is dangerously strong and compelling and binding, as you describe an Eidos must be, but this is “the” Eidos, and my own Eidos is conditioned by the existence of this fixating idea of itself.

I am in great need of the Dionysian, the Apollonian has become supremely powerful and this is a threat to its own health.

I am writing this on my phone from below the Akropolis, I dont have the opportunity or desire to go into Kant who is this very drought and petrification without the Dionysian blood of truth to give it meaning or glory or life. I found out here how far I have strayed from the source that enabled me to become a philosopher. I have found how to become one, I now need to learn how to be one, to live as one.

I realize how much this is a tangent to your OP’s line of reasoning. I am simply submitted to the truth of my own partiality to myself seemingly despite having been able to formulate such an impartial truth about being as partiality. But what is the self that is left, that can survive the truth about itself? Must it be a destroyer?

Not so much delusion as establishment, creation. The self is not given by anything except its need for consistency and its success in estblishing that. It need not be absolute, it needs only be functional to be real. That is its unchanging part, its self referent principle of being and integration. (selfvaluing)

Also, what is the proof of flux as basic existence? How do we prove even the existence of flux without a fixed standard to compare it to? We can not, obviously. So flux is epistemically contingent on fixed being, and specifically on the self.

Obviously we need to take concepts as references to mind and never to things in themselves. “Flux in itself” is of course nonsensical. We only have the idea of flux to work with.

So, what is the difference between reasoning and thinking?

Indeed, for us pure flux would be the self-identical “A” once more: for we cannot conceive of a difference between its past, present, and future. Thus Picht observes:

[size=95]“The ultimate truth is [for Nietzsche] the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself. Being torn between its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, for itself and out of itself, no existence [Bestand]: it exists [ist] only as it produces appearance [or: illusion] out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only appearance. [… W]ithout appearance, the eternal flux has no existence. It must produce appearance out of itself. Appearance therefore belongs to its truth.” (Picht, op.cit., pp. 251-252.)[/size]

You say: “The self is not given by anything except its need for consistency and its success in establishing that.” But before the self “exists”, it cannot have anything, including a need for its existence or success in establishing that. If the self-identical “A” is a value, and not necessarily a fact, then the demand “But values must be posited by something (or someone)!” is undercut by the notion that it’s just our human, all-too-human logic demanding that, or at most the logic of all living beings; there may then well be an abyss at the source, whether it be pure flux, nothing, or–a circularity. Is that why you present self-valuing as circular? Because it does not matter whether the self is valued by “nothing” or by itself?

As for your first reply, I made a very literal translation of the passage your last question refers to here: http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296212#p2296212. That passage does indeed suggest that being “submitted to the truth of [one’s] own partiality to [one]self” necessarily makes one a destroyer, at least in the sense of individualism’s disintegration of the whole. But then what about the last quote I provided in our analogous discussion on Facebook?

[size=95]“For Plato says: When the philosopher contemplates such things, he cannot avoid bringing it into manifestation (μιμεῖσθαι), and adapting himself to it, through his conduct. For there is no way to prevent a person from bringing that with which he marvelingly interacts into manifestation in himself and his life.” (Picht, op.cit., page 234.)[/size]

I feel like Joker, having to go into mcDonalds for a good wifi connection. The rest of Athens provides highly unstable signals and I already lost some hours of work because of it. Hence the belated reply.
Anyway,

I am not sure that I grasp these terms. Does unreal relate to transient? Whence “negativity”? You will need to explain this in some more detail.

Flux, flow, is real, but flow of what? We can see that electricity flows, electrons between poles. Water flows, molecules between beds. I do not mean that these electrons are absolute beings, but we require their fixed being to speak of them. What would pure flux mean? Flow of flows? This would be an infinitely regressing formulation. Flux must thus be treated as a condition of solidity. I see flux as the condition of fixed things, and fixedness as the requirement of any reality we may speak of.

At the extremities of what reason may address, it appears necessary to replace the phrase “x is y” with “x must be treated as y in order to not lead to error”.

This extremity ( the smallest object, the first cause, etc) requires that the identification that the philosopher attemts or accomplishes exists within the model he chooses to represent that identification. This is where Kant smashed his head releatedly ahainst walls and made loud noises that became famous books.

Yes, but as much as my formulation does suggest that there is, there is no “before”. That is an imaginary state. Given that the self, or the object exists, it needs to be successful in existing.

Indeed.

And abyss is an appropriate term here as by this insight, this most basic honesty or integrity before existence, the traditionally taken approach to causality that holds that all effects must have causes outside of themselves goes down the drain. In order to hold to this new perspective, causality becomes a property of “self-causality” for lack of a less terrible term. This approach yields that cause can not ultimately be prior to that which ascribes cause. Man, specifically the one of philosophical integrity, is the cause before all causes, when it comes to his philosophical model, including all its contents, i.e. “reality”. Kant was totally oblivious to this. Nietzsche’s idea that you quoted about individuality standing against coincidence is the basic form of the idea that I shaped further: it is analogous to being standing against nothing, or logic standing against keeping silent. (Wittgenstein did in the end have some good intuitions, developed a relatively sound intellectual conscience)

So indeed, logic and conceptuality itself behaves as selfvaluing. There is no logic prior to logic, there is no cause that must logically precede logic. Once logic is given (or assumed) there is a beginning. There is nothing becore the beginning.

So this is why in the first year after my value ontological “awakening” I was constanty saying that ontology and epistemology have to be treated as one and the same- and that the term value, and a specific approach to that term, gives opportunity to this.

This is also interesting in light of my denial that there is or can be said to be a “the whole”, a denial that was promped by the realization of selfvaluing as the foundation, selfvaluing of course being analogous to individuality.

Indeed the philosopher is born anew , as a new entity, by his conception of his idea. He becomes the idea, or rather the idea becomes him. Thus the idea proves a stronger selfvaluing than the man as he was when he did not yet have that idea. The man becomes enclosed somehow, a function of he idea. And this is precisely what my post from under the Akropolis was about. I felt overcome by my own idea.

My attitude the year after the conception can be seen now as symptomatic of this conquest of my soul by my minds discovery. I first only experienced that exhilirating power of the idea along with the thoughts of how it (the new “I”) would come to rule a world.

As some bloated sick parody of a human of which I had remained blissfilly unaware in my concentration gets up next to me to adjust its pants and reveal in full glory what it means to be in mcdonalds, I will end my work of editing this post in which my phone had beyond my will pasted parts of the same message randomly within that same message and accept that the thing may be a mess. Heres hoping the connection holds out…

Edit - of course a double post. The resistance thrown at my posting on ilp from Greece is extraordinary. I recommend against writing on smartphones in general as well. The monster has left my side. I am free to leave this trashhole as well. A dove flies across the window as I think that.

Fixed have You been to the Agora? The place of Socrates’s trial.

Ps. Kant could not help running his head into models, since he was restricted by the status quo. his weakness lay in application ex cathedral, not through careful analysis of how the synthetic a priori ‘evolved’ as a process. Had he established a primordial identification between idea and praxis, he could have foreshadowed a recurrence, rather then newly formed synchronistically revealed ultimate ideals. His failure was not grounding this presupposition. Nietzche saw to that.

Orb , it had not even occurred to me to visit the Agora, strangely. My passion goes out to the gods and their priest-architects, in whom I recognize the greatest reverence man has ever been capable of, out of which philosophy was born.

I must admit I look down on Socrates, who is the first thinker who considered man an end in himself, a formula whereby man loses his drive to become God like, and by this I mean not Christ- but Zeus-like, an irrational and forbidden but supremely sanctifying and creative drive out of which all that makes humanity worthy to me were born. All qualities that help man be not less than animal. Without this reverence man is merely a pest.

Indeed, Kant was a conventionalist, a follower of Sokrates, blind in his completely banal and ugly assumption that man should without any special quality or effort on his part be granted the status of a standard to all ends.

As the saying παντα ρει already implies, only things can flow. Pure flow is therefore flow of nothing: there is flowing, but nothing that flows. Molecules flow, but molecules themselves consist of–among other things–flowing electrons, and these electrons in turn of etc. etc. There cannot be fundamental particles, for these would then have to flow through nothing–would have nothing to flow through; they would be kept from flowing by each other, as there would be nothing in between them. So this positing of smaller and smaller things must go on into infinity, or–what amounts to the same thing–must stop at some singularity, a circularity or “nothing” or a contradiction: infinity is itself such a singularity. “There is only flux” is just another way of saying “there are no fixed things, there are no things, there is nothing”–hence Picht calls it “pure negativity”.

“Any reality we may speak of” is not what Picht here means by “the real”; it is rather what he means here by “world”. Compare:

[size=95]“[T]he philosophers tried to get hold of the ‘text’ as distinguished from ‘interpretations’; they tried to ‘discover’ and not to ‘invent.’ What Nietzsche claims to have realized is that the text in its pure, unfalsified form is inaccessible (like the Kantian Thing-in-itself); everything thought by anyone–philosopher or man of the people–is in the last analysis interpretation. But for this reason the text, the world in itself, the true world cannot be of any concern to us; the world of concern to us is necessarily a fiction, for it is necessarily anthropocentric; man is necessarily in a manner the measure of all things[.]” (Strauss, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.)[/size]

What Picht means by “the real” is what Strauss calls “the text, the world in itself, the true world”; what Picht means by “world” is what Strauss calls “the world of concern to us”. The latter is obviously analogous to “any reality we may speak of”. The true world, according to Nietzsche, is the primordial One, Which–mind you–is characterised by contradiction. This means that, among other things, It is both one and not one at the same “time”. It is marked by a dual contradiction: It is both the having not yet existed (the futurity) and the having already existed (the past) of things, and the absence of things (pure flux) and the presence of things (the illusion of self-same “As”). As pure flux it is one and as illusionary self-same “As” it is many (of course these things are not all “As”, but I am a self-same “A”, you are a self-same “B”, etc.).

What do you mean by “error”?

What about “before the light”? What “gives” that the self or the object exists? The self or the object itself, or “nothing”, or God–some abyssal singularity. Note that Hegel’s famous question, at least as formulated by Heidegger, literally reads: “Why does it give beings, and not rather nothing?” I’m sure Heidegger attached some importance to this. In any case, value ontology, in my view, does answer the question after all: “Because it is the beings themselves doing the giving.”

Yes. For years I have maintained that there be a distinction between a self-cause and a first cause: a first cause need not be a self-cause, as it need not be caused; it might always have been there. But logically, there is no distinction, as both are absurd. I also understand now why you said you believed (be-lieved?) that the quantity of existing stuff was not constant, that more stuff was coming into existence. “What, out of nothing?”, I would ask. “Why not?”, I would say now. It is only the God of the philosophers that has been overcome.

Indeed, why not? Very good! As it is only the oughts that man has imposed on nature that demand of it that it remains constant and behaves in such and such a way. In reality, as Strauss explains well by the hand of Hobbes in the book you gave me, the control that human knowledge can give man over nature is based on the wholly artificial nature of knowledge, on its being grounded in man, and not in nature, which is as far as we can know, never wholly known. This brings me to the matter of that “error”. I meant to point out that we can only be exact if we speak of knowledge, i.e. the human construct of which we know the origin, and never about a world that might be said to exist independently of our knowledge. In the last/first instance, epistemology meets with ontology because the smallest bit of (known) being equals the most basic element of knowledge. The two are in fact the very same thing. Value ontology establishes this most basic element as selfvaluing - that which has no standard of existence besides the logically indisputable possibility of its existence - given (knowledge of) existence at all.

Note: Pure flow might be said to be valuing, i.e. the nature of the activity of selfvaluing, but not the logically comprehensible structure of it, not ‘positive’ being then. Much indeed like light. the smallest manifest being we can measure, can not
be measured (seen, known) and exist. As soon as it is apprehended, it is gone.

When the disciple is ready, the Master approaches.

Ready Fixed?

Nietzsche was wrong. It’s not about will to power but Will to Love.
I call it Emotional Ontology.
A love hate relationship.

Titanic Ἐπιμηθεύς how you are forgotten by the forward looking Προμηθεύς, or have modern men forsaken you?

Without hindsight how can you avoid punishment and romantic idealism?

What is foresight with no hindsight?
Delusion?
Romantic idealism?
Jesus on the cross?

Art with no reason, no science, no experience or knowledge.
The obsession with progress, minus a past, finding its just reward in eternal punishment.

Was Προμηθεύς less of a fool?

The most elemental is beyond contradiction, hence self valuing becomes anathema. It is difference of degree,
As the philosophers stone is turned only so many degrees more, before a basic change in apprehension
takes place.

The ‘modern’ concept could be only the suggestion that its origins are more the negation of what no longer holds, instead of the new is akin to death. Is modernity a malady. To view it as such, an angst, a theme of death in life is no different to the man who craves for the past only, the man who is ready for the grave himself.