The Philosophers

James once said that evolution can only work if it’s resisted. I thought that was profoundly insightful.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe there was no first place.

Not-being is the opposite state of being and therefore one implies the other. Not-being is not nothing, but is similar to “off” on a light switch. “Off” implies the potential to be “on”, so it’s not simply a state of nothingness, but a state of potential. There never could have been a state of nothing because there is nothing in nothing to make something.

The conundrum is this: there must be an All because clearly we can categorize all things as All, but there cannot be an All because there is nothing outside of the All to be what the All is not since the All contains all things; therefore the All is a container that has an inside, but no outside, which seems very much impossible.

Exactly, absolutely. yes.

Wonderful.

The world gently opens herself now.

Mitra-Sauwelios

Actually, it was not complicated for me to follow except in one area. I did, for the most part understand what you were saying. Perhaps I did speak too soon when I said “it seems as though nothing concrete has been said with the above.” Logic dictates that since I did understand most of it it had to be concrete enough.

The below is where the waters kind of became muddy for me. The words were, at least for me, convoluted and not clear. :chores-chopwood:

“even if valuing D is itself in turn the valuing (D) of other men’s valuing (C) of valuing D. But I took it to mean man’s valuing (E) of valuing E directly. This is what I call a direct self-valuing.”

You have your perception and I have mine. That is why I said “I may be wrong”. I like to remind myself that I am not infallible. That does not necessarily mean that one or the other of us is wrong.

I might suggest and of course you do not need to listen but sometimes listing things as a nice cascade…
A
B
C
D
E

works better than the way in which you did it but it is just my perception. It is more conducive to structure and clarity of thought especially when particular words (like “valuing” 13 times) are not over-emphasized and redundant.

The thought occurred to me that you might have been being facetious when you wrote the above.

It reminded me of this and please forgive me for saying it. I just imagined something like this as I read on and on… Of course, I realize that there is value within your words but…
the dribbling…
[tab][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIV8uL0pI_M[/youtube][/tab]

Would you actually say that there were also precisely as many words needed with the above as were needed in your original quote?

UrGod

Yeah sure he is invaluable. But I disappointed him. I wasn’t even able to take over Venezuela. To my defence, I figured I had more time.

Some writing from BTL on Europe and the Netherlands.

Thanks-giving is a very direct and effective consecration of valuing

The Philosophers must quite simply adopt Thanksgiving as a festival of philosophy. We’ll do like the Romans, make use of what ha already been built and become part of life.

Perhaps it is mere pride, but I take it for aesthetics and the will to resolve; whatever the case I come back here for a moment to say that my friend told me he had been satisfied that the answer here is positive. And I think that this honouring of my 7 years of teaching value ontology finally allows me to weave my work here on ILP into an ending. As I lean back to be stroked by the leaves of a plant of the ayahuasca compound in the shadow of an enormous dragonfly, and as the sun is beginning to cast deeper shadows and a chillness comes into the air amid the incessant but mild sounds of the rainforest, I know I have succeeded.

And the beauty of philosophy for so many here [on this thread] revolves precisely around the fact that if they know they have succeeded in accomplishing their task then the task is accomplished.

Not only that, but the demonstration of this lies in the knowledge of it itself.

Go ahead, see if you can take this knowledge they impart and make it applicable to the lives that you live from day to day.

Come back here and tell us how that is working out for you.

And, for folks like me, especially when the knowledge that you claim to know comes into conflict with the knowledge that others claim to know. And then this becomes all entangled in value judgments that are equally out of whack.

How was this resolved?

How do you know they are equally out of whack?

Well, for starters, if you don’t share their own values, the objectivists will tell you.

But it’s really more about a particular set of values generating a particular set of behaviors said to be either more or less in sync with an optimal set of values/behaviors. The optimal values/behaviors then said to be in sync with that which all rational men and women are obligated to embody.

Then it’s just a matter [from my frame of mind] of bringing this “general description” of human interactions down out of the scholastic clouds and situating it in a particular context in which values are clearly in conflict.

How “in fact” is it demonstrated that one set of values/behaviors is out of sync with the optimal set?

In other words, is all of this situated historically, culturally and experientially [in a world teeming with contingency, chance and change], or are “serious philosophers” able to reconfigure all of this into a deontological analysis/assessment able to ascribe some measure of objectively to human interactions that come into conflict over value judgments?

Or take a discussion here regarding Nietzsche’s “will to power”. There are folks who argue endlessly about what he actually meant by this. What, as a matter of fact, the “will to power” is.

On the other hand, I’m far more intrigued regarding the manner in which those who claim they do know what he meant by it, attempt to situate this meaning out in the world of actual moral/political conflagrations.

How are their arguments able to effectively challenge the components of my own moral narrative: dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

The same with such intellectual contraptions as VO or RM/AO or the Generic Problem Solving Technique or Framework and System of Morality and Ethics or Satyr’s Genes/Memes dogma.

What on earth do they mean substantively when folks “out in a particular world” come to value opposite means and ends?

How do the objectivists come to illustrate their texts existentially?

Optimal for what? A pro-lifer may say: “For Life.” A pro-choicer may say: “For Liberty.” You will see that these are themselves values. The question is then: what, if any, is the ultimate value?

Taken as ultimate, Life is a slave value. A foetus is alive but not at liberty. The pro-life movement is prepared to sacrifice the liberty of the mother for the life of the foetus, whereas the pro-choice movement is prepared to sacrifice the life of the foetus for the liberty of the mother. We see the same thing if we look at euthanasia instead.

Though it’s a higher value than Life, Liberty cannot be the ultimate value. Logically, the ultimate value is Happiness in some sense or another. Yet isn’t happiness ultimately the feeling of freedom, and isn’t this what we mean by “feeling truly alive”?

Okay, you are outside an abortion clinic where there is a gathering folks engaged in a heated debate regarding what is the “ultimate value” at stake here.

Bingo: fiercely entangled conflicting goods.

Indeed, try to imagine their reaction to this “philosophical” contraption of yours.

My point then is this:

To what extent are individual narratives here rooted in dasein or, instead, rooted in one or another “philosophy of life” said to reflect the optimal obligation of all rational human beings.

And once you introduce “happiness”, you are broaching a first person subjunctive frame of mind. That’s the part where reason intertwines with emotion intertwines with instinct intertwines with subconscious/unconscious awareness embedded existentially in any number of combinations of genes and memes.

Out in any particular world understood from any particular point of view.

Are “serious philosophers” then able to pin down the definition/meaning of such things as Values or Liberty or Justice or Happiness here?

All I can do is to invite those who claim to have accomplished this to integrate their technical/theoretical/conceptual assumptions into a context that most here are likely to be familiar with.

Can they impart an epistemologically sound argument true for all of us or, instead, as you do above, impart a “general description” of human interactions encompassed in Capital Letter Words defining and defending other words to impart what I would construe to be a particual political prejudice.

In other words, if you were charged with reconfiguring your “analysis/assessment” above into an actual set of laws in which certain behaviors are prescribed and certain behaviors are proscribed what would that consist of?

Go ahead, try it.

We can then take that to the fiercely entangled folks outside the abortion clinic.

You don’t sound like you relate to Nietzsche.
Freedom from anything is a slave value. The mere wish of a bitch in chains.
Freedom to accomplish certain noble feats can be a master-value.

To be free from ones own progeny is the ugliest slavish value I can think of.

Happiness taken as a value is another slave-value.
Happiness is to be taken as a mere residual side product – of the exertion of strength, which is a masters-value regardless of any results.

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And now for something completely different.
This made me laugh so hard it hurt my ribs.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8_fRO3uGU0[/youtube]

Ah fucking olden days. I love Montreal.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBhI67NUzZI[/youtube]

Toxic masculinity.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUq5MrU2A4s[/youtube]

Not bad, not bad. So much Id forgotten.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFYXAY4NQGc[/youtube]

“The first time I felt all sorts of things. Things I didn’t want to feel again. Ill admit that. I didn’t vomit. But its sort of the same thing. Feel, something inside you you wanna get out of there. In this case it wasn’t poison but a kind of a blackness, and emptiness I wanted to puke out. But I didn’t, because I knew I couldn’t, so I just swallowed it. And well surprisingly enough, when I had a good steak dinner afterwards, I remember very clear, the taste of it was almost the best steak I ever had except one time in Argentina.”

“You should be in prison if you’re if you’re a homosexual”

“Worst are pedophiles. You have a lot of people in prison who have fantasy about things you wouldn’t think a man has fantasies about. And they tell you. They insist on telling you. Can you understand that? Can you explain to me why people try to confess their perversion in prison…”
"Yes, its about a sense of normalcy. A man cannot feel he is normal if - "
“He is - he isn’t normal. He shouldn’t be normal. What is it - I don’t feel normal. Im fine with that.”
“No but a man does not need to feel normal but at least he wants to be perceived as abnormal. It is not I a mans ability to feel himself simply separate”

“When I walk into a room, I can smell their opinions. I learned to not care for those things, because you know what, opinions don’t cause what people do.”

“What you should worry about is whether people feel fear about you. Thats not an opinion. If they do, thats important to take note of. And then there is some other stuff that they won’t discuss among themselves, that you can see in peoples movements or in their eyes, if you look at them that are important - things like fear but that I won’t mention.”

It’s paradoxical. What most fundamentally distinguishes a master from a slave is that the former prefers death as a freeman over life as a slave.

To relate to Nietzsche: the terms “freedom from” and “freedom to/for” are not from Nietzsche; they are abstractions from something Zarathustra says:

“Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.
[…]
Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free for what?” (“The Way of the Creating One”, Common trans.)

The thing is, it’s the same freedom to and fro. One is free from certain things so one is free for other things. Strauss speaks of “freedom from” and “freedom for” in the context of Rousseau: if I remember correctly, he speaks of a freedom that is not a freedom for anything but only a freedom from (in Natural Right and History, “The Crisis of Modern Natural right”), meaning Rousseau advocated freedom without determining in advance what that freedom was to be used for. Strauss then adds that Rousseau was aware of this but considered it so much the better, because it meant complete freedom, without being already confined to certain uses. Still, Strauss suggests that Rousseau was also aware of the rightness of Nietzsche’s and Strauss’s criticism of this, longing back as he did for Plutarch’s heroes.

As for happiness, I was careful to add “in some sense or another”. Happiness in the sense I understand it is the feeling of freedom, and this feeling is indeed only a negative feeling–the feeling of an absence–without a “for”. Freedom is power, the feeling of freedom is the will¹, and both are indeed nothing without a “to”: the will to power (or might: Macht), and the strength to its own exertion or effusion:

“Willing: A pressing feeling, very agreeable! It is the accompaniment of every effusion of force [or strength: Kraft].” (Nietzsche, Nachlass Frühjahr-Sommer 1883 7 [225], my translation.)

I think our disagreement here again comes down to the consciousness question. I can see how VO can work without consciousness, but I can’t see how there can be value without it. I mean, might a VO-system without consciousness not just as well not exist?

[size=95]¹ Or at least the essence of will, the affect of command.[/size]

Ahahahahaa

Omfgggggggz