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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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., page34.)[/size]
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…