Power can be defined as ability.
Ability means being able to do something.
More ability means being able to do more things.
Less ability means being able to do less.
Power = more ability
Weakness = less ability
There are people who are said to hate power.
What does this mean?
Well, nothing other than that they are unable to, because they find difficult to, do certain things.
Say think.
Thinking requires the ability we call intelligence.
When you find something difficult to do you’re gonna hate doing it so you’re gonna say bad things about it.
Like Jakoff saying bad things about intellectual rigor . . . too dry, he says.
Then they gonna do and worship whatever they can do.
Like doing drugs.
Now that they no longer have reason, i.e. long-term considerations or simply long-term goals, there is nothing to impose restrictions on such practices as taking drugs.
Drugs are now okay.
Why not . . . when you have no sense of the future, no goals bigger than sex, then that’s perfectly fine.
You don’t know what an ad hom is.
It’s a usual complaint that I see.
Ad hom is not simply saying negative things about your interlocutor.
It’s about making a mistake in the logical process of deriving your conclusions from your premises.
No such mistake has been made, honey.
My argument didn’t have the logically invalid form that is:
fixed is a stupid person
fixed says that what is good is existence
therefore, what is good is not existence
That would have been a logical mistake, at least if we interpret it literally, because the connection between Fixed’s intelligence and what The Good is is not clear.
Fixed can be stupid and still be correct.
However, the following form would have been valid:
people who are stupid make wrong claims 90% of the time
fixed is a stupid person
therefore, it is very likely that fixed is making a wrong claim
But that’s not what I said either.
I think it’s rather difficult to spot an ad hom.
In general, I am very suspicious of people levelling such accusations at others.
Very glad both of you showed up, and with proper force. Now we can have a real debate, as this question has been resolved to me only at the most basic level, which is actually the highest, the point of unity of all concepts. Obviously and excruciatingly, this deeply liberating, power-inducing point is enclosed into itself, because where all concepts are equal, they cant be compared, and thus further logic is impossible, there is no logic beyond its completion. But this is precisely the clue as to the path we should be taking here. As a third protagonist here, I will claim to refute both of your contrary premises: I say that the natural world and the human world are, in the highest philosophic analysis, one spectrum. And this includes morality: the Will to Power is in fact the morality of nature, not merely its behavior. It is, after all, a logical formula, thus: a human logical value construct that accounts for the behaviors of the natural world, in which the human is, per these very standards of consequence, embedded. And it is here that self-valuing can begin to be understood as a refinement of the morality of will to power in increasingly human terms - it is the commencement of the birth of humanity out of philosophy. Philosophy which thereby is retroactively rendered an animal affair - to which Nietzsche’s logic testifies, but more so even to which Socrates’ method testifies. Socrates is a beast, if there ever was any philosopher-beast; he brought all humanity thus far to ruin, by imposing the idea of logic on a nature that was far superior to that idea of logic. He took Greek humanity back into the animal realm, by making it subservient to universal notions. Notions which were universal only because they were hollow. Under Socratic notions, the Greeks lost grip of thought, and succumbed to mere notions, words, superstitions, neuroses, delusions, subjection, a play of ghosts and shadows, all in pursuit of the ‘inner good’ - where the good, as Sauwelios astutely observes, is simply that which is valuable. Socrates, by denouncing the outward world in denouncing the gods, the heroes, the founders, the traditions, the state and Law, turned philosophy into a purely egoistic, or narcissistic endeavor; he made self-valuing in human terms impossible: he destroyed the good as a human, cultural attainment, and threw us back in the mud, looking for the good in what our bodies naturally produce without the effort of the mind - that refined function that makes us human by allowing us to cooperate and build beyond ourselves - lust is all that Socrates advocates, and not a healthy lust - lust for young boys and political subversion. Socrates represents the loss of the human will, and the descent of humanity into the animal realm which it had for an instant, as Athens, superseded, by which it has established the Greek Standard, which is what Zeus is, and consequently, what Pallas Athena and Dionysos also are. What are such Gods at all besides the absolutely human ability to cognate joy? And what, thus, is the loss of such Gods?
Before I throw in more, I’ll allow this to sink in and produce its ripples. Ive only introduced the minutest of hints as to how to further proceed - but in an exceptional mind such a minute hint can turn to an inferno of insight.
If not, how are they determined?
Which non-subject would set them for us subjects?
Why does he have to? That seems an assumption, a subjective value. He doesn’t really need to do anything, objectively.
I agree.
If one considers ones survival “the Good”, that is.
Who can tell another what he truly needs without being terribly invasive and presumptuous?
Further, what is a real need - what truly is necessary? Is life necessary?
Again, is this bad?
Is it perhaps preferable to live in ones own terms for a short while than to live a century in service and die in facility for the elderly?
I don’t share that world-view, as far as Ive seen in my decades on this planet, it is the wealthiest criminals that govern and set the laws, in the present time.
The mere fact that one needs to pay for effective legal representation means perfect absence of fairness in the justice system. Only a legislature entirely devoid of costs for the State and the Defendant both could be seen as fair.
I disagree - societies where people swim with the currents turn invariably into fascist societies. A healthy society has relatively few sheep, and relatively many lions.
The worst atrocities are invariably committed by hordes of obedient persons. To be obedient means to lack spirit, strength, thus also compassion.
But it can’t.
When someone rapes a child, its best to take him to a ditch downwind, shoot him in the head and toss him in there for the worms, which have more merit in such a case than any prisonterm could have. The value under consideration here includes the victim. Retribution is vital to existential logic, to the preservation of values. In our time justice is oriented on protecting the criminal. That’s to the detriment of all.
Perhaps read my post before this one, that should provide an angle to introduce your ideas on objective values.
Magnum, I consider myself to be good, yes - but only because I manage to exist. Not because I am particularly special.
I think you are only good insofar as you exist. I leave it up to you to decide if you exist, or not.
I can tell you that mr Reasonable does exist.
In fact, if there is any ILPer that could make claim to being The Good, by any verifiable standards, I have contended for years and still do that it is mr. R. Not because of his splendorous philosophy, but because when philosophy talks about merit, it would talk rather about Mr Rs accomplishments than about most anyone elses here - Life is quite simple in its wisdom: it gives and it takes, and doesn’t really care when which is the case. Life doesnt keep count, it’s too rich.
The Good actively defies expectations because they dont satisfy him.
I am a very conservative person when it comes to verifiable values - self-determination and abundance, both of goods and experience, is pretty much a universal standard. I dont much care about morals, i care about compassion though, and loyalty and all that, master morality.
The Good is thus a subject. More than one, but it’s never an object.
You can have good apple pie, good and bad taste, good kung fu, bad karma, all that. But that’s not good or bad in themselves, thats just a relative measure of quality.
A case of existence is not relative to itself, it is absolute to itself. It is only relative to the powers surrounding it.
::
I will only practice positive Ad Homs. They are quite as uncomfortable if not more so, but they actually convey a message. Positive ad homs convey true values. I implore everyone to do the same - if you judge someone here, dare to judge affirmingly.
You are being vague when you say “you are good only insofar you exist” because I am pretty sure we will all agree that we cannot say anything about things that don’t exist for the simple reason they don’t exist. I mean, everything we can speak of exists, in one way or another, so what exactly is bad? You must have a specific definition of existence then. Does it refer to non-imaginary existence? Is imaginary existence that which is bad? Or is it something else? What is it?
If you accept that value is relative, which it appears to me you do, then what is this “existence is what is good” if not a relative value, namely, your own?
Sure, you can say Mr R is a lovely man. But because that’s relative, I don’t have to agree with it. I can say whatever I want to say e.g. that Mr R is a contemptible man.
To “be Good” implies that you have the capability to cause acts of goodness in the world, and similarly, have the power to reap the rewards of those same acts that you were responsible for.
You can’t claim other people’s goodness. That’s not how it works. Or if you tried, then that would make you evil, because you are not responsible for the goodness you’re claiming.
I suppose this does contradict my position, in that it turns it around: where I said morality is a form of the will to power, you seem to be saying the will to power is a form of morality. But then what is morality?
Are you saying here that the good is not that which is valuable? I certainly don’t think it’s simply that, as I think “value” is itself hollow, a mere notion, etc. What is the meaning of “Valuing”?–that’s the question I’ve been trying to answer lately.
Well, I disagree with you about Socrates. I don’t think he was any less great than Nietzsche (but neither greater, of course). And I’m strongly reminded by the phrase “what our bodies naturally produce without the effort of the mind” of the fourteenth episode of The Occident… And in the fifteenth and sixteenth episode, there is this “coming out” on my part, first in the direction of homophilia (though as you know I’m a radical heterosexual), but then it turns out to be my coming out as an absolute, cosmic Narcissist. Your reminder of total interconnectedness was helpful there, by the way.
Self-Valuing, as the Valuing of that very Valuing, is surely Narcissistic–unless it be that, because it’s not about a self valuing itself, it is not. But if Narcissus is understood as a Valuing, and that Valuing is a Valuing of that very Valuing, I’d certainly call that Narcissistic. Anyway, at this point I’m really only interested in the question as to the meaning of Valuing. What does it mean to value something, to experience something as valuable? I think it means to experience something as pleasurable, which means to derive a feeling of power from it, which means a sensation of freedom. Self-valuing is then: deriving a sensation of freedom from deriving a sensation of freedom.
I want to share with you a passage of Picht that I’ve translated:
“Here we again run into the concept ‘will to truth’. On first sight, the opinion must suggest itself that, by ‘truth’, at least at this point only the so-called truth of metaphysics can be understood–after all, doesn’t Nietzsche say that the will to truth is a hiding-from-view of that false character [of the world], a reinterpretation thereof into what is? The will to truth is thus determined here as the will, active in metaphysical morality, to the reinterpretation of semblance [Schein] into what is, thus to the grounding of the fundamental error of metaphysics. The true is understood in this will as the permanent. Permanent however is only the imaginary counterworld to the absolute flux, permanent is therefore only semblance. No doubt: the truth, thus understood, is semblance and, when the semblance is passed off as truth, error. But how does it stand with the will to truth? Nietzsche does not say, as would have to be said from the standpoint of metaphysics: The will to truth is the will to cognisance of the steadfast, the true, the permanent; he rather says: ‘The will to truth is a making steadfast, a making true/permanent’, a reinterpretation of semblance into Being. When one oneself first makes what shall be cognised as true, when one gains Being only thereby that one reinterprets semblance into being, then the will which accomplishes that cannot avoid eventually discovering that what it must first make steadfast is not yet steadfast by itself, and that the permanence which it must first create is not already given in advance. As Nietzsche puts the concept ‘will to truth’ in place of cognisance of the truth, he has thus carried out the great inversion. He wants to cognise the problem of science no longer on the soil of science, but sees the process of designing the schema of a permanent world from the perspective of the artist. From this perpective, too, the truth is still only so-called truth; it is the semblance in which the counterworld appears. But only when considered from the standpoint of the will to truth does it come to light what is really true about the so-called truth, namely the necessity to found an abiding order, in which life is possible. Once again it turns out that Nietzsche’ s inversion of metaphysics has a double meaning. On the one hand, the fundamental error of metaphysics is as it were unmasked; it is now no longer possible to pass off as Being what in truth is semblance. On the other hand, however, it is through the exposure of the will which is active in its ground that the proceedings of metaphysics in their inner necessity first become understandable and in this sense get justified. Only through the overcoming of the error of metaphysics does what had been true in all metaphysics come to the surface. If one understands ‘truth’ in the concept ‘will to truth’ as the truth in truthful semblance, then the will to truth is no more only a will to so-called truth; it is then rather the will to poiesis or, as Nietzsche says here, to ‘making’, that is to say to the production of a semblance which does not negate life but affirms it; which is thereby in unison with life and thanks its truth to this unison.” (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 281-82.)
I can’t even try to answer this as long as I don’t know what you mean by “to cognate”–“to cognise”?
It doesn’t really matter where Nietzsche starts, because what he is articulating with the concept of the will to power is basically an ontological principle of expansive growth. Willing to power means to secure and expand one’s existing, to not only keep existing but to keep existing in larger ways, to take account of more and to include and incorporate more within you, and to force more other existing things to conform to you. This sometimes includes that a being will will its own destruction in its search for more “power”, or as Schopenhauer noted in an attempt to avoid having to live in such a way that is a direct refutation of that being’s own being. This reflects a correct understanding that living and staying alive isn’t the ultimate value, that this value derives from something, namely as per the natural world it derives from an “expansion-growth” principle that sometimes ends up furthering the destruction of life in the aspiration for more expansion-growth. The will to power is simply this growth/expansion principle, that is it. And this is exactly how nature works: all life is genetic, and genes are simply a mechanism for competing for “power” which means the ability to survive and thrive, to expand the reach of one’s living to incorporate and control more that is around oneself. Given infinite space and resources, life would expand forever. The only reason living organisms limit themselves is because the environment limits them, because they do not have infinite space or infinite resources and are rather competing with other living organisms for finite space and finite resources.
This is a basic principle in biology, the whole wolfs and rabbits example: The number of rabbits continues to multiply exponentially until it reaches a point where there are so many rabbits that the wolves, who eat the rabbits, have a bountiful supply of easy food, at which point the wolves start to multiply exponentially, so that when there are more wolves eating more rabbits then the population of rabbits starts to decline, thus constricting the food supply for the wolves, thus causing the wolf population to also decline. All life is like this. The “will to power” is simply in the fact that the rabbits and the wolves would keep expanding if they were able to do so, and only stop expanding because they are forced to by the environment.
Nietzsche developed the will to power in response to Schopenhauer’s will to life, and as an answer to it. Nietzsche didn’t much like the will to life, because Nietzsche was smart enough to see that life doesnt really care if it is alive, and in most instances doesn’t even know that it is alive. There is no “instinct to live”, what there are are instincts to “power”, instincts seeking to discharge their excess somehow. These all work in concert by genetic blueprint to produce an excessively multiplying genetic organism that seeks to expand, and survival is simply a side-effect of this. Nietzsche understood that we do not eat because we are hungry, we are hungry because we eat. This is the basis for his conception of the will to power in contrast to the will to life.
So that explains the natural world, and it is governed entirely by this unconscious, blind, striving-expanding will to power principle and only because limits because of the environment around it. The will to power also works on the human level, but only because humans are still in certain ways part of the natural world despite also being beyond the natural world. The will to power describes that aspect of humanity that is still “natural”, just as frogs and birds and rabbits are natural, and Nietzsche wanted to completely naturalize human being so that everything about human being could be explained in these natural terms. Thus is proper rejection of mysticism and theological metaphysics, but also thus is improper rejection of morality. Nietzsche threw the baby out with the bathwater here.
Now, this, “The will to power is simply this growth/expansion principle, that is it”, is important because we must see how Fixed’s concept of self-valuing has rescued Nietzsche’s will to power from its over-generalization. The will to power explains the expansive-growth angle, but it does not explain the ontic coherence of an entity to itself (say, an atom, or a rock). Self-valuing improves upon the will to power by explaining not only what the will to power explains but also by explaining the basic logic of ontic coherence that keeps everything stable and seeking to remain as it is, necessarily and at least at a minimum threshold.
Yeah I know this is Nietzsche’s account, I am saying it is a bad account. It doesn’t capture what morality is. Nietzsche tries to explain what morality is, what the good is, by appealing to things like feelings of freedom, feelings of pleasure and feelings of power. That isn’t good enough, because morality is rooted in logic and cognition, in our reason, which is why humans have access to the moral realm while frogs do not. And the cognitive, rational realm is not driven by or run on feelings, it is driven by and run on rationality and abstract, cognitive thinking. On language, ultimately. And language is not based on feelings, language is properly a system that delimits feelings by providing a strong resistance to them, curbing and curtailing them. Language can access feelings or deaden feelings, it can allow for the expression of new feelings because as language delimits our mental existence we come to understand certain things that allow us to partition out raw affect into new forms, splitting and subtilizing affect into narrower flows and assigning these flows certain meanings. This is what the emotions have become.
But that isn’t morality or “the good” anymore than we could say that what is right is simply whatever feels good. We are not mere hedonists here. We are trying to do philosophy. Which is why Nietzsche’s answer that the good is feelings is simply inadequate. What is good is not always determined by how we feel, but often is determined or determinable precisely because we understand something at odds with how we feel in the moment. You suppress what you want in the moment, how you feel and desire, your pleasure, in order to act according to a higher and more abstract value, the unavoidable recognition of a moral-rational principle; and we do not do this because such a higher value is something we “feel”, we do it because it is something that we rationally, cognitively understand. Feeling does play a role in this process of moral understanding, but it isn’t so simple as to say that moral understanding itself is just a feeling. That sort of Nietzschean over-generalization is causing a lot of problems.
Then you simply do not believe that freedom exists. This is a bad view, because freedom and determinism are not antithetical or mutually exclusive, rather freedom is a particular kind of determinism. They work together. When one deterministic system becomes large and complex and subtle and self-referential enough to begin to posit itself and its deterministic, causal limits as part of its own causal structure it progressively gains the ability to resist those causes which would have been absolutely causal for it, but now by virtue of the complex deterministic-conscious structure are able to be mentally modeled and a different action taken. Freedom is build from an entity’s own determination, as resistance to causes that formerly exerted absolute necessity but no longer do so, and are instead made to participate in a larger sphere of reconciliation of many causes against each other.
We do have freedom, but we do not have the naive “free will” that most people believe in, because “free will” is supposedly an absolute freedom from causality, which is never possible. But it is the opposite from their naive approach, to arrive at the proper phenomenological understanding here: freedom means more determination. And this is also what morality means, it means more responsibility by virtue of being capable of recognizing, determining, more.
Nietzsche was correct that the feeling of free will is an illusion, and one that worked its way into our deterministic consciousness. But he was incorrect to simply stop here and call it a day, as if this feeling of free will is the same as existential freedom as such. They are not the same thing. Nietzsche confuses the feeling of free will with actual freedom, thereby negating the latter. Just as he confuses the will to power principle (instinct, feelings, genetic expansion [and ontic coherence, if we throw in VO’s contribution to improving upon the will to power]) with the good (rationality, logic, abstraction, higher understanding as the ability to cognitively/mentally posit and determine values against each another according to a higher, more universal and rationally consistent standard), thereby negating the latter.
So it isn’t that Nietzsche wasn’t correct. It’s that he wasn’t correct enough.
Sorry but you’'ll have to put this fluffy poetic stuff into proper philosophical language for me to know what you’re talking about.
Yeah okay, that’s what I thought at first (“whereas”). Anyway, the rest of my response to that section assumed you did mean that the good is that which is valuable.
Okay. Yes, though I’d say “pleasure”, not “joy”: joy is something even a moral slave may approve of (though the “pleasure” of the immoral slave is even worse). Lust.
I think Socrates, too, consciously experienced the highest healthy lust. But he had to mostly hide it, like Spinoza and, indeed, all philosophers until late modern times:
“Nietzsche judges that the genuine philosophers share the fundamental Platonism, erotic attachment to the whole of which they are the rational investigators. Nietzsche too could have said with Lessing, ‘there is no other philosophy than that of Spinoza’ ([Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing] 182). But as a judge who stands at an unprecedented turning point in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche was forced to add about Spinoza’s form of Platonism, his amor intellectualis dei: ‘What is amor, what is dei, if there is not a drop of blood in them?’ [Note by the way that the genitive dei can mean “of God, God’s” both in the possessive and the non-possessive sense…] ([Nietzsche, Gay Science] 372). Nietzsche’s history of philosophy is a measurement of Platonic kin from a standpoint beyond the historic necessity to compromise with popular stupidity and feign affinity with priestly asceticism.” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche 122.)
But doesn’t feigning such affinity itself make one sick, as Nietzsche says in Twilight, “Skirmishes” 45? (“Whoever must do secretly what he is best at, would best like to do, with protracted tension, prudence, slyness, becomes anemic[.]”) To be sure, the genuine philosophers have not been unlike women:
"“In Strauss’s account, Eve was the first lover of knowledge; the first seeker after wisdom; the first philo-sophoi. If man is distinguished from other animals by reason, the desire to know or the love of knowledge, then Eve was the first truly human being. In view of the close alliance between philosophy and eros, Eve is a particularly appropriate symbol of the love of wisdom. But Eve is also the representative of evil, of wickedness, and of the disobedience of God. However, God’s prohibition was given to Adam; He had not spoken to Eve directly. She knew of it only through Adam. Strauss curiously comments that she knew of the prohibition only from ‘tradition’. This is an important clue. The philosopher, the lover of knowledge must necessarily set herself against tradition, convention or the ancestral.
[…]
The fate of philosophy in the world is the same as the fate God inflicts on Eve. She is to be subject to the authority of Adam, the ancestral, the one who came first (at least in one out of the two accounts of man’s creation provided in Genesis). If Eve is to have any freedom in the world, she must retire to the private domain and shun the glory of the public realm. Likewise, philosophy must live eternally in the shadow of the ancestral and avoid offending it for fear of its very life. If it is to enjoy a modest freedom, it must keep itself hidden and shun the glory of power and politics. This is not to say (contrary to the way in which Strauss is generally understood or misunderstood) that philosophy has nothing to do with politics or nothing to offer it. On the contrary, it has a great deal to offer, so much so that any happiness man can attain depends on philosophy’s success in secretly influencing the powers that be and ruling vicariously or behind the scenes, as women have always ruled over men.” (Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss 44-45.)
Compare:
“Why the weak conquer. […] Finally: woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant–woman needs strength in order to cleave to it; she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak–she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong. Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the ‘powerful,’ ‘the strong,’ the men–. Woman brings the children to the cult of piety, pity, love:–the mother represents altruism convincingly.” (Nietzsche, Will to Power 864, Kaufmann trans.)
However:
“Health and sickliness: one should be careful! The standard remains of course the efflorescence of the body, the agility, courage, and cheerfulness of the spirit–but also, of course, how much of the sickly it can take and overcome–how much it can make healthy. That of which more delicate men [Menschen] would perish belongs to the stimulants of great health.” (op.cit., 1013.)
Men tend to be more delicate than women: consider the fact that women clearly have a longer average lifespan. This may be another respect in which woman’s nature is more “natural” than man’s, in which man’s nature has been more weakened by civilisation. Consider the fact that Nietzsche could claim to have “the great health”.
“The will to semblance, to illusion, to delusion [Täuschung], to Becoming and Changing (to objective delusion) here The Birth of Tragedy] counts as deeper, more original, more metaphysical than the will to truth, to reality, to Being:–the latter is itself only a form of the will to illusion.” (Will to Power 853, my translation.)
“Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his fail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis.” (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation I, quoted in Birth of Tragedy 1, Kaufmann trans.)
Compare also Rousseau lying in a rowboat in the middle of a lake in his Reveries. My sixteenth episode was like that for me. Sweet sixteen!
That’s only a popular conception of Nietzsche. Strauss repeatedly emphasised the importance of BGE 188.
Heidegger already drew attention to the fact that the will to power contains a will to Being (i.e., is not just a will to Becoming). Compare Freud’s eros and death instinct. Also, consider that:
“Will to power is mentioned first in Beyond Good and Evil with respect to its geistigste, its most spiritual/intellectual form.” (Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 37.)
That’s in aphorism 9. Only in aphorism 13 is it asserted to be the way of “living things generally”, and of “all so-called material things” only in aphorism 22. Then, in aphorism 23, of “the human soul itself” (op.cit., page 36), and this brings it back full circle to aphorism 9 through aphorism 36, where Nietzsche’s most mental will to power shows itself reasoning the will to power from the human soul through living things generally into even all so-called material things.
My dear Void, what morality is is not the same as what the good is…
How–Socratic of you…
They’re still emotions, affects, feelings.
Philosophy is not mere hedonism only in that philosophy reckons with indirect, even with the most indirect, pleasures. Whatever feels good is good, but a greater and the greatest good can be attained by not indulging in whatever feels good. This is what morality is, but there is also a pleasure at morality itself: the pleasure of habit or custom. But mere hedonism could only be surpassed by yet another direct pleasure, the pleasure of cruelty. The good conscience is basically the pleasure of moralised–i.e., habitualised–cruelty.
Well, I maintain that that’s just a popular Nietzscheanism. And all higher or more abstract values must eventually be experienced as concrete pleasures in order to be values, to be valuable to one.
The “freedom” you describe here is completely deterministic. And who says “an absolute freedom from causality […] is never possible”? To be sure, though, it absolutely seems to our evolved, human reason that God or Nature is not absolutely free. And this does give us philosophers, to speak with Mahdi, “a fresh appreciation of convention.” (Mahdi 2001, page 25.)
The philosopher’s feeling of freedom is the justification of civil society. I think Blake meant those two sentences to be at odds with each other, but I think the Logos is precisely what enables man to see the Infinite, his own infinite Self, in all things. He who sees the infinite Logos in all things, sees himself as God. Anyway, I doubt this will enlighten you. They are, after all, only words…
So, I didn’t read all of this; soon after, i wonder to myself why Nietszche ?
You can only get truth from observation and senses.
Opposition of basic truths is not done due to the flaws of basic truths,
it is because of the poor and common force wants to remove an obstruction,
because it cannot use or get passed a certain truth, so it finds a way
to throw away the truth which threatens its self existence.
In other words : Dummies and cruel persons hate truth.
Power has almost nothing to do with life.
Life isn’t powerful, when you look at it all.
Then again, is there even a pleasure that is not cruelty? If all pleasure is the feeling of freedom, i.e., the feeling that one is a free cause… (The pleasure of cruelty being the pleasure of identifying with the cause, the power of the cause, of something.)
Ok then. Glad to assume my arguments here are irrefutable, since your choosing not to even try to refute them.
I’m not here for Bible class. Don’t fucking quote your scripture to me, make a fucking argument. Otherwise my points stand.
You’re proselytizing again. All you do is say, “this person says this”, that’s it. No deep analysis, no rational articulation and complexity, no desire to explain anything. All you seem to do is state what you believe, without actually explaining any ideas.
Nothing you’ve said so far actually refutes what I’m saying, or even challenges it. So I’ll just take it that you’re here to state what you believe, and not here to do argument or philosophy.
Would be great if you could spend less energy wanting to seem pretentious and more energy wanting to actually say something. You know, make a fucking argument once in a while?
Why don’t we start with this: what do see as the difference between what we call morality and what we call the good?
And?
I’m seriously beginning to think you’re trolling.
No shit, that’s what I said. But you clearly missed the wider point which is that without language you can’t have emotions. Without language you’re stuck with raw undifferentiated affect as bulk instinctive release of either pleasure or pain, the most basic states. Emotions involve enduing meaning to a subtler more rarified affective feeling, which we do only because we have language (reason as vocabulary and grammar) to impose upon the raw affect and force it to differentiate itself into different forms, forms that over time come to represent that meaning by which and at the behest of language that particular shape and form came into being at all.
Oh wow, you actually made a point. Wonderful.
Please explain exactly how “cruelty” and taking pleasure in it is what “good conscience” means. When I care about someone and want the best for them, when I am attempting to ameliorate their harms and increase their goods and values I am not engaging in anything remotely like “pleasure of cruelty”, so I have no idea what you even mean. I can only guess you’ve imbibed too much of your own religion and are just enjoying making iconoclastic statements that your god (Nietzsche) would be proud of. But I’m happy to be proven wrong.
To the first part of what you wrote, denying a pleasure gratification can lead to other pleasures, yes certainly. Simple hedonists merely indulge without limitation, while more refined hedonists limit the more banal and short-term pleasures for the sake of more “refined” and longer-term pleasures. But its hedonism either way, which means it’s loving feelings rather than truth. Philosophers love truth. Nietzschean love feelings. That’s about as simply as I can express it.
“Whatever feels good is good”, no that is not at all true unless you mean that “good” is simply “good feeling; pleasure”, which is what you mean, in which case here is what you’re saying: Whatever feels good feels good. Yeah, no shit. How fucking profound.
Perhaps you can see why I consider your Nietzschean position a boring and useless circularity of logic, which barely even describes anything and doesn’t even get close to beginning to actually explain anything. It’s self-flagellating religious ideology masquerading as philosophy. Which is why the only point you’ve actually made so far in your entire reply to me has been to state one obvious thing (that there is a difference between simple and refined, so called, hedonists) and one circularity of logic that begs its own question (that “whatever feels good feels good”).
No, what has value to us does not need to be experienced as pleasurable. Things have value to us if they assist us, help us, benefit us, allow an increase in knowledge or understanding or happiness (yes pleasure is part, but only one part, of it). You’re putting the cart before the horse here. Things feel good because they’re (at least in our genetic past) beneficial, meaningful and/or healthful to us, namely are of value, not the other way around. The causality here is that something is valuable, and therefore we feel pleasure as a consequence of it. Value comes first. And not all values are experienced as pleasurable. When I write it is often painful for me, very strenuous and difficult and not at all enjoyable, yet when I finish a passage and have distilled a truth therein then that is a value. Sometimes relationships require acknowledgment of value beyond immediate pleasure. We go to a job that gives very little or no pleasure because we value the income. We put up with our kids being obnoxious and irritating and stressful because we recognize the value in doing that. Those are just a few examples of where value doesn’t ride on the heels of pleasure.
When you say that all higher values must eventually be experienced as pleasurable to become valuable to us, I half agree with you, but it isn’t pleasure so much as simply associating these higher values to the self as such, which is done by enduing the consequent action and effect of those values, at the personal level of the self, with meaning. The self is a gigantic web of meaning and facts, superimposed upon a neurological structure, and all that is then superimposed upon an instinctual structure of raw reflexive affect; in order for a value to become ingrained within the self, to be really valuable to us, as you say, it needs to find expression as a representative image or idea within the larger mental universe, which includes meaning, facts, reasoning, and instincts. Pleasure (and pain) is an instinct, whereas happiness and suffering are higher more mental-rational emotions that require language to come into being, but once they come into being take on a life of their own and begin to fill out the subjective space and establish anchors within it. So a value will enter human consciousness once that value has anchored itself like that, as either a rarified emotion or as an idea.
Yes it is. Thanks for repeating what I just said.
I do. It isn’t possible to be free from causality. What would that even look like? It’s impossible to even imagine. For anything to exist or to happen it must have reasons for that, period. You can reference the principle of sufficient reason if you like, and unless you’ve come up with a refutation of it (go ahead and try) then you’re forced to acknowledge that nothing exists or happens without having reasons (causes) that necessitated it. This is what “cause” means.
What would an uncaused event look like? It is literally the antithesis of reason and logic to even try and imagine such a thing, because it would have absolutely no reason or logic to it whatsoever. Go ahead and explain the structure of even one “uncaused event”. You can’t do it.
? Yeah it more than seems like absolute freedom from causality is impossible, it is blatantly obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 10 seconds or more that it is absolutely impossible.
The justification of civil society is in the increase in everyone’s freedom, not just for the philosophers.
Yes, you are still used to Analytic schools of thought, where “A” = “A” is a meaningful truth-statement. I have no time to correct you on that but I refer you to people who are searching for a scientific way out of it. As far as Im concerned, “A”><“A”, but that’s as far as it goes. Because in the real world, the “=” sign always represents transaction, not equality. And Im only interested in the real world.
But what is this relative value if not reality itself?
It’s not peanut butter, it’s a logically induced sovereign experience involving value and power as non-analytic, phenomenological concepts that build a new equation for philosophers to work with, rather than regurgiating endlessly A = B and “A” = “A” therefore B = A and the endless extensions.
Im not saying he’s lovely. I dont know him that well. He comes across very consistently as someone who knows what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, and that what he is doing is working for him and the people he cares about. That’s life. Thats existence beyond merely subsisting. I also exist. I struggle to exist, I struggle to maintain a world where I and only I set my values - this is existence for a man. For a beast it is different, no doubt. I am not a beast, I am a man, but a god and a beast at once as a philosopher, so i relate to being as such. that doesnt mean that I am exempt from being a man, and upholding that standard as the good. And that is what mr R is doing, and if you deny it you are clearly a postmodernist – or a feminist, which you are not.
You’re being childish. I could go along with you until the point where I interrupted you. And saying humans are (in certain ways) beyond the natural world is not an argument, just a claim.
Such a hot-headed young man.
BGE 188 may be supposed to be known to you, seeing as you claim to understand Nietzsche. Then again, you may not know the number. You should easily be able to look it up, though. Googling “beyond good evil 188” suffices. But maybe you did, or didn’t even need to. Still, it makes me weary to have to spell it out again: it feels like I’m doing your homework.
Nietzsche did not reject morality. Again, that was merely a claim on your part. My counterclaim neutralises it.
I’m suggesting stuff here, as in "you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’. Why do you think the first mention of the will to power in the first book to mention it after Zarathustra mentions it in respect to its most spiritual form?
The truly human being–living things generally–“non-living” things–human things (beings)…
I’ve been explaining myself here for years. If this doesn’t suffice, you can watch my videos, or go fuck yourself.
Morality is (a doctrine or system of) moral conduct, which is conduct that is said to be good by the doctrine or system of that particular moral conduct. The good is what is actually good.
I was just expressing my progressive surprise at this point.
And? “The cognitive, rational realm” is still “driven by or run on feelings”.
KTS would be proud of you.
Why deny it, though? At the most fundamental level, I mean.
Ever heard of the philosophical eros? Philosophers love feelings, indeed more than any other being. “Truth” is just another empty word, without feelings. Why, isn’t love, as in “the love of wisdom”, itself a feeling? Philosophers love philosophising.
Try determining what you mean by “good” if not what feels good to you. I have arrived at a rational value (though that’s still only rational in the sense of human reason at most, as far as I know), namely the value of valuing, but that, too, is an empty term without feeling.
Knowledge and understanding only have value insofar as they increase our happiness or pleasure. And I was talking about things that are valuable in themselves, not for the sake of something else. That in itself is ultimately pleasure (though that can be analysed further, as I’ve done here).
Which means nothing by itself.
No, when you take pleasure in the idea that you’ve finished a passage and have distilled a truth therein, that is a value.
Not necessarily reason and logic, but human reason and logic. But I’ve tried, and failed, to get this across to you before. Why the self-valuing logic need not be true.
“Is blatantly obvious” is just the superlative form of “seems”. A less superlative form is the “are held to be self-evident by us” of the so-called truths of your Declaration.
But only the philosophers, if anyone, achieve true freedom. By the way, I said “feeling of freedom”, not “freedom”.
After posting my previous post, I was suddenly stuck by a kind of regret(!?) at doing so. No Socratic philosopher would ever have done that. He would just have understood that Void is a Wasp, in the Aristophanic sense: someone who truly believes in virtue, in morality–or rather who squeezes his eyes shut tight to his own hedonism. Then again, the question is whether such a middle-caste temperament can become a first-class nature; was I myself like that, too?
The Socratics were careful not to arouse the wrath of the Wasps. But am I not a Nietzschean? That is to say, one for whom courage comes before wisdom, which in turn is rebaptised “insight”? It seems many “obvious” insights come late to me: recently that about women, and now this about men–real men, but not real real men. Aphrodite and Ares, or Hermes? In any case, Dionysus or Adonis is in between them. The Roman name for Rhamnusia, who is said to be Nemesis as an aspect of Aphrodite, is Invidia. I prostrate myself before Adrasteia! I’m going to bed.