State of the World Address.

Right, but man cannot not do that. Hence “the will to power”: positing such positing as the meaning and measure of the value of things, and projecting it into the essence of things.

Yes and this is the very discovery of self-valuing.

But I believe that we can “not do that”, but I do understand your meaning and do not disagree with it. It is in the nature of all life to value itself first and to value from its own position and perspective, to use itself as the measure of what is valuable or is not valuable, to use that which itself is as the standard by which its interpretations take place. Indeed this is natural and right. But this is also fundamentally a formal-structural fact of life, and therefore open to challenge and examination and eventually to change. What I mean is not that we can get rid of it nor should we want to, but we can push inside this structure to see how and why it does what it does, so that any individual content and result of its process can be individually challenged or changed. Remember there is an abyssal difference between the logic of the individual subjectivity as you allude to, and the logic by which philosophy and truth are arrived at, known, and proceed in their own essences—in order to arrive at philosophy we must first be made aware that we are wrong about something, that the self-valuing which we are is deficient and lacking in some way.

Plato was right that ideality is objective, which means is rooted in the universal and describes in part why subjectivities and individualities arise; self-valuing is a fundamental logic, but truth includes every self-valuing and includes even the fact of self-valuing and why/how it is necessarily fundamental. Logic itself is pure objectivity, which is why individual beings like us fill ourselves in more and more with what is more objective as we grow in our thinking.

The entire process of consciousness-to-selfconsciousness is learning how to restructure ourselves (the human species) both biologically and socially so as to allow certain kinds of structures to obtain: these structures are located in our ideas, “metaphysically”, and it takes certain kinds of neurological and social conditions to allow these stuctures of potential thought or “ideas” to take root in us and as us.

The dual, daemonic nature of man is precisely this ever-increasing polarity between the individual-subjective self-valuing, which is as you describe above, and the domain of truth itself which is the “objectivity”. In other words: an individual self-valuing must resist the temptation to fall absolutely into itself, it must always and in part thrust itself outside of itself in order to attain new kinds of perspectives by which what it already is can be encountered and used anew. The external-objective domain is, for self-valuing, a necessary limit and world that can never be wholly abandoned nor wholly accepted.

I suppose I can say the same in return.

That man cannot not “posit himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things” remains for me the first truth from which I always depart again–for the following reason. Nobody–and only Nobody!–can refute nihilism which, properly understood, is solipsism without the ipse.

Postmodernity–which, as is implied by the fact that it does not have a name of its own but is defined in reference to Modernity, is simply the fulfillment or perversion of Modernity–Postmodernity is the age of the Weltbild (“world image”): postmodern man is the man who knows that for all he knows all that exists is his representation of the world, which for all he knows is not a reflection of an objectively existing world but a “subjective” hallucination (which includes any notion of himself, the subject or ipse, hence the scare quotes). Even the will is thus reduced to representation. But the will–and all this, it should be understood, is my personal experience/thought–rebels against Nothing so much, wants Nothing so badly, as to be more than a representation. As I wrote in Dutch last week:

“NIETZSCHE’S IMAGE OF THE WORLD AS WILL TO POWER IS AT ITS DEEPEST THE IMAGE OF A WILL THAT WILLS [or: WANTS] TO BE A WILL–TO EXIST, TO BE IN THE WORLD [a reference to Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world”].”

Well, this suggests that that “abyss” is first opened because we are made aware that we are wrong about something and are thereby motivated to become right about it. But I question this; I doubt necessity is the mother of invention in this case. For if it was, philosophy could only be a conditional will to truth. Philosophy however is the will to truth even when it makes no difference–indeed, even when it means a disadvantage.

That may be true, but objectivity is not necessarily itself objective. That is to say, it could be an objectification–a reification of hallucinatory phenomena. Self-valuing may only be necessarily fundamental in our (my?) experience/thought. Even the self-valuing logic, and not just the logic of A=A, may be a freak of nature!

It may surprise you, but I do agree with all this–but in the light of, not in spite of, the above. I want such structures to obtain! And I want them to include what I said above.

On second thought, though, I do think there’s a problem with what you say here. If “an individual self-valuing […] must always and in part thrust itself outside of itself in order to attain new kinds of perspectives by which what it already is can be encountered and used anew”, then even this vision of “the objectivity” must be surpassed–new kinds of perspectives on it must be attained. Then it may turn out that new perspectives need not always be atttained and the external-objective domain can be wholly abandoned or accepted.

Nietzsche’s image of the world as eternally recurring will to power is basically the whole-hearted acceptance of all of the above.

There are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

I once thought of this witticism already. But now I have thought of it again, and even more originally. There are those who insist that there are two kinds of people, yeah that there should be two kinds of people, and those who don’t. Even in this day and age, there still are–thank God.

There are those who believe in God, in some form–in a monotheistic dualism, in Heaven and Hell–and those who don’t. And the question is–the question is who is who. Are the goats the bad guys or the sheep?

Those who think there is only One good, and thereby essentially only One good kind of person, are the sheep. The goats are those who think, and know, there is a Plethora of ways to be good, even to be God… And at their most Devilish, most deliciously devilish, the latter will pronounce that the plethora way, the abundant way, is the One way…

The latter can again be taken in two ways. Writing is so ironic… But here is a more brutal attempt to be unambiguous. I am God. So are or were others. In polytheistic times we were known as the Gods (though whoever calls us Gods does not know us–does not know divinity from the inside). Our divinity is the insistence that All is divine, that even what blind followers experience is divine. I mean, even when they suffer and in their despair turn to God. In fact, the unexamined life is not worth living; felt suffering is better than unseen pleasure. To be frank, our pleasure is unspeakably evil. It is moralized and thereby “innocent”–blind!–cruelty. Moralized: that simply means: got used to.

It is such moralized cruelty by virtue of which I now turn against such moralizing. Moralized cruelty is to be–so I ordain–demoralized. I have said this before, but did not succeed. This is because public speech is deeply moralized and thereby deeply tempting to further moralizing. And what speech is not public speech [speech with a public, an audience–even if only imaginary]?

I’ve often thought I may long have been my only reader, at the very least because I haven’t made it easy: how often have I mentally shaken my head at my own style? but then still read it, so at least someone would read the whole content. I’ve always been able to see, to read into it, that that content was worth grappling with. But perhaps it only is when I start being really, seeingly, cruel towards myself–unmoralizedly.

What must that mean? It must mean that I insist that I am not great, not “evil”; only bad, only “good”. Yes, I now have an idea who to write this to. Someone I referred to to my girlfriend as “my ex-con friend” told me only two years ago:

"I am very suspicious of middle aged philosophers, myself included. Whether we know it or not, at this stage in life we tend to lose the childlike fascination and vigor which we once had. Ask yourself this: what is doing the talking inside you when you begin to seriously consider this new kind of interpretation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Aged and somewhat wiser and more calm, an interpretation is formed inside you that accommodates an older physiology. Now you begin holding your arrogance in contempt, while it was once the driving force in your affirmation of life. Why? Because there is a change in physiology, not in intellect. This new philosophy is needed for a man who is no longer a vibrant young man enraptured by Nietzsche’s ideas. This is the philosophy of an older Ollie, a disillusioned Ollie, an Ollie that no longer has a war to fight, an Ollie that no longer suffers something, and so has no more stimulus to life. The will to his power, like a flame burning so long, is becoming dim and approaching its extinction?

"There is not much in Spinoza that I disagree with, but one element I do not accept is the stoicism he advocates. To become aware of one’s utter lack of freewill should not reduce one to a cog in the universe, but should instead provide a radically new orientation of one’s place, of one’s conatus. Instead of being a pawn of natural forces, we are to become composers of nature. What was I trying to explain in that essay when I tried to elaborate on the idea that the Primordial One is not above and beyond intelligent life, but is rather expressed through and by the activity of intelligent life. If there was a God, how could I not be one?

"We learned in our youth to overcome our ressentiment first and foremost in the school of Nietzsche, but now you talk of humility and modesty? What’s next, Ollie? How long before you are even ashamed of yourself?

“Please clear this up for me, Saully. I can smell something different in your words, and it is unsettling.” (Zoot Allures to Sauwelios, December 6, 2014.)

However unworthy this may have been of my “Seungian” revolution–and when did the most revolutionary stage of that development really begin! was it not when [i.e., shortly before] Satyr scorned me for my then-new Krishnaism?–YES: in a way you guys are right. I have still not drawn the ultimate conclusion from my Nietzscheanity. I have not yet equalled Nietzsche, I have not yet openly become God, or a God.

Why did I, after openly singing that I was Jesus in 1997, not follow through on that? Why did I, after “becoming a Shiva” in 2002, ease out of that into adoration of Krishna–if only a highly idiosyncratic Krishna, even as I conceived “my Jesus” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was, in my interpretation, to Nietzsche–? A Saoshyant [Zoroastrian Messiah] beyond good and evil: that is what I conceived myself or my whole universe as. “The” universe, even…

Not long after your email, Zoot, I had another revolution (I’ve had many), which was catalysed by my reading Picht’s Nietzsche, which Lampert had recommended to me years before. I became a Value Philosopher. Yet contrary to Fixed Cross, I think, who first developed the self-valuing logic which became known as Value Ontology, for me that meant believing in, nay the willing of, free will!.. Logically, that is…

I had already inferred years before, from the following passage, that I should be, like Blake, a “religious, God-inventing spirit”:

“What, then, is the law and belief with which the decisive change, the recently attained preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious, God-inventing spirit, is most clearly formulated? Is it not: the world, as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, for it cannot be so thought of; we forbid ourselves the concept of an infinite force as incompatible with the concept ‘force.’ Thus–the world also lacks the capacity for eternal novelty.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1062, Kaufmann translation.)

Yet another of my personal–and mostly private–revolutions was caused by my being confronted with “the infinity/nothingness problem” by someone here on ILovePhilosophy. The concept of a finite force is equally unthinkable, for then we would have to think of “nothingness” on the outskirts of existence–as Nietzsche said of his world-view, in section 1067: “enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary”, literally “enclosed by ‘nothing’ as by a boundary”. Enclosed by nothing? As in, not enclosed by anything?..

Nietzsche reconceived force from the inside as will to power. Fixed Cross reconceived the will to power as self-valuing. I conceived self-valuing as willing oneself into being when I was on magic truffles at the end of March 2015.

Who are the prolific and the superfluous? The superfluous are those who believe in the divinity of the Nothing. The prolific are those who will themselves out of the Nothing (I realize now Nietzsche literally wrote “enclosed by ‘the Nothing’ as by a boundary”) out of pleasure. Sinful pleasure? Not as long as it is moralized. Is it not really fear of the Nothing, as Harry Neumann has it, that drives us? Is it not really cruelty, as Nietzsche, Strauss, and Lampert have it?

It can only be cruelty, be established as being cruelty, if moralized cruelty can successfully turn against its own moralization. But it would have to be unmoralized cruelty in order to do so… Therefore, the cruelty thing is false; it is only the deified beast–

As soon as an originally cruel act has a good conscience, it is no longer cruel, no longer evil, no longer–difficult. In order to be truly moral, truly self-mortifying, therefore, one would have to attach the good conscience to unmoralized cruelty–i.e., to cruelty without a good conscience…

What remains to be done in the face of such paradoxes, such aporias? To cut the Gordian knot… leaping beyond Christian-philosophic truthfulness. God is alive! God is morality… And the Gods are the lawgivers, like Moses and Mohammed, insofar as they were so wittingly… The eternal recurrence: that also means the commanding of the commandment out of and in the pleasure in the custom of fulfilling it! Then, though perhaps only then, that pleasure is its own reward. We philosophers, we who put up the sign saying “Know thyself!” have always been the heirs of moralists (Lutheran ministers, for example), of the pillars of the community–or the teacher’s pets, if you will… In this sense, then, my Nietzscheanism truly becomes transgressive sacrality. The Nietzschean religious philosopher must be an immoral moralist.

“[O]ne can achieve the domination of virtue only by the same means as those by which one can achieve domination of any kind, in any case not by means of virtue… [… A] moralist […] must as such be an immoralist in practice. That he must not appear to be so is another matter. Or rather, it is not another matter: such a fundamental self-denial (in moral terms, dissimulation) is part of the canon of the moralist: without it he will never attain to his kind of perfection. Freedom from morality, also from truth, for the sake of that goal that outweighs every sacrifice: for the sake of the domination of virtue–that is the canon.” (The Will to Power, section 304.)

Ah, but in my case it wasn’t originally for the sake of the domination of virtue, but for the sake of my own domination! It was about feeling superior. The religious man has the greatest feeling of superiority… and the religious man who is evil does not even ascribe the source of that feeling to God, to some God who is not He, unless it be to his Peers, the other Olympians… Heraclitus said that the best (hoi aristoi) strive for ever-lasting fame; but it is not about fame, but about the feeling of power. What do we care if we are celebrated when we’re dead? What we care about is knowing that we will, because we feel our own power, our own, long rise to our actualization. But, to be sure, I am inept enough even now. This is just an essay, an attempt. This is just a glimpse of the Second Coming, or the Recurrence.

Behold a Man, a Vir, whose Virility will be called Virtue! Yes, the whole Patriarchality of morality, too: my moralism is not just a timely moralism! But enough, or Too much. I have repeated myself often enough.

[Note that this post was written before my “LETTER TO ZOOT ALLURES”.]

I’ve asked myself whether I shouldn’t identify with Rudra instead of Shiva–the unhallowed form of Shiva. For identifying with Shiva tends to tempt me into a kind of compassion for myself. Rudra on the other hand spurns any pet names and tender love. Tender love tends to be delicate and dainty, but strong passion goes too deep to touch the surface like that. Thus divinity often picks Harpocrates rather than Horus, silence before such overloudness.

Self-awareness is required rewriting for those who presume being able to understand a real other. I mean, all beings are such beings-able–this is of the essence of Fixed Cross’s “self-valuing logic”, a.k.a. Value Ontology–; but increasingly few beings are on ever-increasingly high planes thereof. Thus those who have the honour and the duty of trying and fully actualizing that universal potential have always been desperate, unless it be in that most fortunate case in which such an other was actually present (Socrates and Plato? The old real real man and the young, the lover of wisdom and of the lover of wisdom and the lover of the lover of wisdom and of wisdom…). Most philosophers in recorded history had to resort to books, had to be grateful that such books had even survived in the first place!–and much more than survived: the Ancient and Moorish worlds, secretly based on that transmission… (The Ancient and Medieval Judeo-Islamic world, I should perhaps say; but then definitely “Medieval”, as I for one don’t know any Jews or Muslims who manifest that tradition in person. (Of course I know of the ancient Hebrew Scripture and Maimonides’ (the Rambam’s) Guide for the Perplexed thereto, but even that only since I was at least thirty, and by happenstance. It is therefore–and this parenthesis has hereby stepped outside of its brackets–necessary for me to conclude that Nietzsche is still right about the Modern tradition, our still Machiavellian-Cartesian Age (the age of the mechanistic, if quantum-mechanistic conquest of nature).

Quantum-Mechanistic Post-Modernity is the third or superlative crisis of modernity. It is the Nietzschean phase of modernity–but not yet the Nietzschean phase of true post-modernity, of a world beyond modernity, the proto-Classical phase, laying the first stones of a foundation for a project of building the most Classical and thereby the highest culture there may ever have been on earth: Nietzsche’s Antichrist says that Classical Antiquity was only a beginning, only a successful initial stage or stages!

Nietzsche’s Antichrist, or his Zarathustra–that is his desperate but at the same time perfectly certain attempt at a successful call for such a project. My most personal theory–a theory I didn’t so much think of, by the way, as was the first to think through thus far–is that he was an Ariadne who dreamed up that Dionysus, who then in turn carved her out in reality… The reason I could no longer stand even Nico and her passion of the death of the death of passion was, in a simile I’ve used several times before, that the eroding waves of emotion had already hollowed out my heart from within, and it could now only be tempered from without (this last part is new, actually).

I once heard the claim that Dutch men are known to need things like listening to the Johannes-Passion on Christmas Day in order to weep out all their pent-up emotions. Well, I started not much later than age 6, not with that, but with a song which, even when it was first released, was apparently widely considered oversentimental. I probably shouldn’t refer you to it now. I probably shouldn’t even listen to it now. Especially now, after I improved my French enough, with Carmen, to be able to follow the French text (there’s also an Italian version). How fateful a thing for my then-best friend’s parents to do, give me a record player and that single! They also gave me other singles, but this was the one I liked by far the best (back then).

What a way to spoil a child… And without knowing it, I grew up to be a bit of a Gigi, with my dreams of conquering the world as the next Jim Morrison! I even “broke through” into a small circle of friends not far south of Naples… That was 18 years ago, and those people haven’t heard from me, still haven’t heard me on the radio yet. I wrote my “Natural High” there. But I have turned–well, bent, if not broken–against that fatalism and sentimentality in the meantime. Now I indulge in it only in order to push myself away from it, up out of it, back to the surface… Yet I may need to go through all that in order to pull others up with me, to allow them to grab on to me…

In Qabalistic terms: Kether may be the highest, but someone has to go down to Tiphareth, right? Nay, not just one; may more goats/sheep follow me! The Christ has turned out to be a disaster, there must be many Anti-Christs! (Song attached, which came shuffling by.)

I had meant to say Gigi is also a bit of a Krishna figure. Ah, by what strange byways did I approach what I am now! The “passionate spirit” Tool sings about–Rousseau’s opera, Le Devin de Village, inspired me to the term “Philosophical Supremacism”, which I then in turn came to associate with the Mediaeval Baebes “Undrentide” (song).

Can an esoteric love of life, of life as Eros or Will, exist without an exoteric front? That is the question of Nietzschean political philosophy. In fact, now that I mention it, I’d already started to refer to it as “Nietzschean religious philosophy”. A further question, then, is whether such a religion can be a religion of love. Well, wouldn’t it have to be? Wouldn’t it have to appeal to North-European boors who are at best the grandsons of rats? (“rats” not in the sense of tattle-tales, but of wandering Walloons born not far from the gutter.)

So unlikely was my path that I had to look for my fellow “free-spirits” or companions among girls… (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is like Plato’s Socrates in more ways than one.) But that appears to be a phantasm (hierarchically probably the third girl, after my girlfriend and you, has had a sex-change operation, not into a male but into a breastless female, a “sexless” person of sorts). Amour-passionnel boy that I am, I may at best write to idealised girls with the hindthought that it be for other men like me–like us, Nietzsche and his precursors as well. Would a woman not have to be completely emancipated from gender roles, would she not have to be basically a man in order to fulfill that function for me in real life?

This mail is probably already too long. I unattached that song again, by the way. I don’t think you would like it, though in structure at least it’s somewhat akin to Nico’s “The End”–which Moody Lawless preferred above any version by The Doors that he knew, by the way. I’ll attach a song that reminded me of you when I encountered it in a “various medieval” album I’d downloaded, and which I haven’t had the nerve to delete yet. It’s called “Enae Volare” and–on second thought, now that I started listening to it, I will delete it!

I can cut sweet corrosives out of my life. And if you are to be in it, you will have to follow me, at least in some respects. I guess I should just send you my favourite music.

Two of my favourite groups are the ensembles De Organographia and Micrologus. Another is Les Musiciens de Provence. Nietzsche I still like, too (it was his music that made me look to Rousseau, then to Lully and then to pre-Baroque music). I also really like Atrium Musicae de Madrid.

Another group I like quite a bit from is La Reverdie. That Nico-structured song is by them. But I will need to “favourite” tracks I come across in shuffle mode on my mp3-player. I’ll attach the only song for which I did that thus far (which doesn’t mean that much, as I only recently started doing that, and then forgot about it). [This song is Ensemble Micrologus’ “Pançe La Bella Iguana”.]

“The will to power as self-valuing”: to BARL that phrase cannot do without the term “the will to power”. Why not? Because “self-valuing” is a very abstract word. It’s the reflexive form [“self-”] of a gerund–and, not unimportant though only secondarily, a nominalized adjective–[“valuing”] made from a Latinism (“valu-”)–whereas “will” and “power”, not to mention “to”, are much rather “Anglish” words. Even “power”, however, is ]already[ easily dubious, being French in origin. (I could elaborate, but would rather move on.)

Self-valuing, as I understand it, is the making worthy of ‘making worthy’… It is the insistence, by that which it itself is, that this way of ‘making things worthy’ is worth the while–the time, the Being–of that which it makes worthy… A most primordial way of doing so is acknowledging that which one makes worthy as actually being other ways of ‘making things worthy’–

How can a nihilist do so? as someone who keeps insisting even this much is superstition: it is only that one has evolved, even in one’s own lifetime–i.e., memories, reminiscences…–alone, to defer to certain phenomena that they are to be regarded as themselves numena to be reckoned with. Thus there is, for example, the weather, that chaos-theoretical primeval park. Yet another exemplum would be ‘other people’… ‘People’ must have been such a weather-like cloud or forest to lone predators insofar as they had a human-like experience thereof. Ah, but the ‘human’ is precisely what is to be overcome–if only for the sake of further understanding of these matters.

My way of ‘making things worthy’–or making things matter, for that matter–is manifesting myself, making myself clear, to myself. ‘Making myself clear’, the only way my “myself” literally means something, without being a transference on the part of other(s’) “myselves”. But even this my ‘making myself clear’ is always different–though in this vaporized state it’s even more different than usual–. It’s not always deeper, but on the whole it does get ever deeper, though not necessarily faster and faster as I grow older–or just grow, you may also say. Who?

Whoever regard themselves as made worthy by applying it (“you”) to themselves! But for the sake of all of you, first of all, to me, that should be Me! Moi–voila un homme! Yes, I’ve presumed to be a Man, a real man, and perhaps even a real real man… if my ‘Others’, my ‘significant others’, have only been girls or women. But does this not mean my ‘Self’, my self-image, is at bottom still feminine? Should I, if I am to be a real man, not address other Men instead? Or at least those who rule the present world?

My weakness or passion for tonal music, and then for the most ‘tragic’ of tonal music, was intimately related to my love and lust for girls–the most feminine of girls; though by no means necessarily the most ‘girlish’ of girls… in all respects, at least. Just had a déja vu–of something I seem to remember Magnus Anderson saying. Speaking of whom, I was also reminded of him at the very beginning of this post. But that is just a distraction, right now. I probably already lost him when I called something a nominalized adjective… of which I was also reminded when I wrote that. No, I write for the most learned of readers I can imagine–even as I aspire to be the most learned of writers I can be without pretending.

The real real man Socrates was supposedly a homophile. And indeed, “homophile”, ‘loving the same’, seems to follow most directly from self-valuing. Socrates loved his “puppies”… But really, I think, only insofar as he saw great potential in them–the potential to be mature, to be a Man, to be Socrateses of their own. I think or wish Plato was onesuch. Plato was Augustus to Socrates’ Caesar; was Aristocles, the Alexander to Socrates’s Aristotle… But under Socratism, Aristocles became only Plato; Aristocleanism, Homeric Nietzscheanism, became only Platonism… Let us, myself and my peers, at last impose this Aristocleanism! Doff the priestly or scholarly garb, become bloody and sweaty warlords! Not the sweat of people warming themselves against each other–quite far from it! But a kind of Conan the Barbarian of authors…

Ah, but must that not mean ‘each for himself’? I even used a pop culture reference in order to make myself clear… I’ve started to fail again! Back to my unshared experience with me! Where will this train of thought lead me?

—Aristoclitus

When I spoke of Nico’s “passion of the death of the death of passion”, what I meant was of course “passion of the death of the passion of death”.

Now as for the train of thought from the end of my last post. Conan the Barbarian was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which reminded me of Sylvester Stallone.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYtI9NtWOkg[/youtube]

A turning point in Stallone’s life was the 1989 movie Batman. No longer needed action movie hero roles be played by bodybuilders like them. Michael Keaton could appear that way thanks to a suit with a sixpack.

Now Tim Burton’s Batman movies were especially influential in my development from late childhood, through my teens, well into my twenties. I think one’s teens are especially important–not least the music one loves then. A major musical influence–along with the darker sides of Sixties music, video game music, and even some (Black) Metal–was Danny Elfman’s score to Burton’s Batman movies. I was tempted, at the end of my post, to indulge in that again for a bit, but as yet I haven’t. Instead, I’ve watched–and still have to finish watching–Oliver Stone’s Alexander, which I never saw before (I haven’t watched a great many movies).

Though Alexander doesn’t seem that high-budget to me (I’m watching it in 720p, if that matters), and I’ve had to bear with it a bit, it did beautifully remind me, just before I stopped watching it yesterday, of a thought I had when finishing the video game The Last Guardian recently. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW. I will use the “tab” function.

[tab]Yes, Trico probably dies, but his species survives, in freedom. However, what’s so great about the latter? What’s great is the travails of Trico and the boy, of Alexander and Bucephalus: the survival of their type is only great in that it leaves open the possibility of a recurrence of those travails.[/tab]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E-1awtLYAY[/youtube]

Self-valuing is necessarily the case for all life, not just our human or earth-animal ones. Thus it is objective, in the true sense; how do we know this? We know it because it is impossible to conceive a life that does not follow self-valuing logic.

If you can conceive a life that does not follow self-valuing logic, I would commend you. But I would strive to show how in fact such life is indeed governed by the deepest logic that proves and provides the fundament of all things, living or not.

I have a problem with any claim along the lines of “well causality might not be the case somewhere else! we just think causality is universal or necessary because we always see it! but look at the quantum world and clearly there isn;t even causality there, so HA!” …I tend to dismiss sub-minds that say such things with a gesture, usually directed toward my Escape key. But hey, let’s break it down for fun. IS it fun? Not really. But sure.

“Principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is not necessarily valid everywhere/always (objectively)!”

“Name one instance where it is invalid”

“Quantums!!!”

“Just because something appears random to you, does not mean it is actually random; it means that whatever causality is governing it has no way of communicating or relating itself to you, thus to you there is no schema of order impressed upon the event with respect to how you measure/detect what is happening there. It is also quite possible that at the sub-atomic level the relative speed of time (change) is such that for every iteration at our own temporal level, perhaps 1 billion iterations had taken place at the level of the causality of the sub-atomic, in which case there would be literally no way for us to make any sense of all those changes with our relatively higher time-scale. Thus when we “measure” the sub-atomic (throw another sub-particle at it) we will get a random point within 1 billion causal iterations, because we have no way of timing our measurements meaningfully to anything within the 1 billion iterations.”

“No, physicists say that it really IS RANDOM! Everything is just a probability distribution!”

“You are confusing methodology with ontology. Probability is about assigning relative quantitative values to certain outcomes, and using this as a tool for forming predictions about something that we do not know yet.”

“Ok well, PSR might not be the case in some cases, there is no reason why everything needs to have a reason!”

“Name one thing that has no reason or cause.”

“…”

“Just because I can’t name one doesn’t mean there can’t be one.”

“The concept of “reason” and “cause” is just another way of saying “exists”. If something had no reason or cause to be what it is, then it would not be what it is, it would be something else. You cannot even talk about what something is without talking about how and why it is what it is; that is what “is” means. You don’t get to pretend that “it is” can mean something “for no reason”. Furthermore, you would have absolutely no way to conceive or talk about anything that truly had no reasons or causes for existing, because such a thing would make absolutely no sense whatsoever, it would be absolutely meaningless, not just to you but to any possible perspective of meaning, understanding, reason or logic or language. So, in light of this, for you to posit that such things exist beyond the scope of the PSR means only that you have abandoned your own reasoning capacity, that you have given up on having a mind. As soon as you actually think that something can happen for no reason, your mind is dead.”

I don’t think any of this touches nihilism in the slightest; you’re just insisting that it does (and indeed, much more than just touch it). And I will keep insisting that insisting is precisely what VO teaches. In fact, what I’ve been insisting upon is that we Value Philosophers should do so explicitly. I mean, I can understand that Trump must lie about his lying, but we are philosophers, not politicians; we should be above the filth of politics in the narrower sense.

This is what I think our attitude should be. Those who cannot conceive such a life, which is probably everyone, will ultimately not be able to resist VO–for such resistance is itself a form of the insistence which VO teaches. And as for those, if any, who can conceive such a life: what do they matter to us? We cannot even conceive them!

Ancestral greatness is, like all subjects, deceptively simple. The man with a great parentage, nay great grandparentage, must fly from misconceptions regarding his gifts in every new actuality of his. (Thus how could he write “ALL subjects”, as if EVERY word from him should not warrant emphasis? A high period after every blocklettered word–when was that tradition left behind? Yes, let us write as if we’re just writing any old piece, proving by our well-versedness how virtuose we are. But what we are on about take right of way even before the subject.

ANCESTRAL GREATNESS–LET ME START AGAIN. ‘Die vornehme Natur ersetzt die göttliche Nature’, “noble nature replaces divine nature”–THIS MEANS, OVER AND ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE, THAT RELATIVE NATURE TAKES THE PLACE OF ABSOLUTE NATURE. THIS IS TO SAY, THE CREATION THAT WAS DONE IN A DIVINE FLASH, THE SIX DAYS OR SIX THOUSAND YEAR OLD WORLD IS REPLACED BY THE NINETY ZILLION YEARS AND COUNTING…

“Meet Kylie Springtime. Kylie is a petite girl with an enormous problem. She must bridge ninety zillion years in order to send a message to her beloved, the [nineteenth century] philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.”

‘If Nietzsche had one teaching, it was his teaching of eternal return. This was the notion that time be a circle, that all that happened had happened before and would happen again an endless amount of times. But this was precisely the teaching that Kylie found hardest to bear: Nietzsche would be born, live, and die again, then there would be ninety years of white noise, and then she herself would be born, live, and die again, followed by ninety zillion more years of white noise, after which Nietzsche would be born again… But wait, did that not give her an opportunity to communicate with him? Could she not speak to him across ninety zillion years, even as he spoke to her across ninety?’

MY PROJECTED CHILDREN’S BOOK CHARACTER–AND WHO TODAY IS NOT A CHILD?–IS ULTIMATELY MOTHER NATURE HERSELF, THE PHENOMENON THAT SCOURGES EVERYONE, EXCEPT THE CHRIST-BUDDHA’S PERHAPS, INTO CONTINUING COMPETITION. BUT BUDDHA, AND ACCORDING TO GRAVES KING JESUS TOO, WAS HIMSELF OF ROYAL PARENTAGE. ESOTERIC BUDDHISM IS REALLY OUTDOING ALL UNDER-ADEPT ZELATORES BY PERSUADING THEM OF ONE’S NOBILITY–CONVINCING THEM BY SWEET-TALKING AND -BEHAVING THEM. IT’S AN ACT–THE ACTIONS AND NON-ACTIONS OF WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN LAW.

‘Suppose that, at first, there was only a herd, consisting of a single type. This type was surely a Sensing type, because iNtuition is a mark of a certain sophistication. Now the morality of custom demands that every herd member diligently honour the community’s customs. But there will naturally be a difference in diligence between members. Some will simply be lazier than others. The lazier ones will be more lax. These are Keirsey’s Artisans–in Jungian terms, Sensing-Perceiving (SP) types. They will be less exacting, more relaxed and open to distractions, loosening of mores. But Keirsey’s Guardians (in Jungian terms, Sensing-Judging (SJ) types) will be horrified of any breach of custom, certain that God will punish the whole community for it. So they start commanding the Artisans… Ordering them around, because they always need a kick in the behind. “Today is Tuesday and you haven’t put on your blue cap yet! Do so right now!” And the Artisans would reluctantly obey. I already said it years ago: the great commanders are the great obeyers. The first commanders, the Guardians (which is a perfect name for them, considering that their first special function was to be the custodians of custom), were in the beginning simply those who obeyed the customs best. Then, as the best obeyers of custom, they came to represent its demands. It was only later that the Idealists (iNtuitive-Feeling or NF types) made their appearance, not to mention the Rationals (iNtuitive-Thinking or NT types).’

TALENT, EVEN GENIUS, IS NOT A DEITY. A GREAT MIND’S EYE IS A GREAT WEIGHT. IT MUST BE BORNE EVERY WAKING HOUR. IT MUST BE SUFFERED–EVEN WHEN WHAT IS BORNE IS GREAT PLEASURE, THE CONTINUING PLEASURE OF HAVING ONE’S MIND EXERCISE ITSELF.

CLASSIC CONTEMPLATION. THE TEMPLE OF THE MIND. BUT PURITY, SANCTITY IS NOT ABSOLUTE. NOTHING AND THEREBY NOONE CAN SUBSIST ON NOTHING, AND THE MIND IS NOTHING MORE THAN HOW A CERTAIN HIGHLY SPECIFIC BODY AND SPECIES OF BODY EXPERIENCES ITSELF, FROM THE INSIDE. SO: BODILY DIET AND HYGIENE FIRST. BUT THE MIND IS ALSO NOTHING LESS. THEREFORE: SPIRITUAL DIET AND HYGIENE NEXT!

THE WORD “SPIRITUAL” HAS OF COURSE BEEN HIJACKED BY THE PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL, BUT IT’S MORE ACCURATE THAN THE WORD “INTELLECTUAL”, WHICH HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY THE PSEUDO-SPIRITUAL.

SO-CALLED INTELLECTUALS MAY PRIDE THEMSELVES ON THEIR LISTENING TO SO-CALLED CLASSICAL MUSIC; BUT THAT IS PRECISELY WHERE MY CONTEMPT OF MODERN MUSIC STARTS.

SPIRITUAL DIET AND HYGIENE MEANS BEING HIGHLY PARTICULAR ABOUT WHAT ENTERS ONE’S MIND, AND THEREBY ESPECIALLY ONE’S SENSES.

ONCE A FRIEND OF MINE MADE ME A MIXED TAPE TITLED “Music for the Soul”. NOW THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT I ARGUE AGAINST. MY MUSIC, THE MUSIC I LISTEN TO, IS MUSIC FOR THE MIND. THE SOUL, THE HEART, SENTIMENTAL OR EMOTIONAL MUSIC MAKES OR KEEPS ONE SPIRITUALLY SMALL, ENTHUSIASTIC, IGNOBLE. SWEET SENTIMENT, NOSTALGIA, HOMESICKNESS–DANGEROUS. THE MIND SHALL NOT BE A HOMELY, ROMANTICISED, IDYLLIC PLACE. IT WILL BE VAST, A TEMPLE.

If we are at least even a little bit Nietzschean then we cannot have such a deep problem with useful lies, now can we?

Also I didn’t lie, not even once. Just wanted to clear that up.

Ok, moving on.

It is not probably everyone, it is everyone.

That isn’t the point, though. You are conflating two things here: That it is possible or impossible for someone to conceive of a life that does not follow self-valuing logic, and that it is possible or impossible for us to conceive of someone who is able or unable to conceive of a life that does not follow self-valugin logic. These are two different claims.

Claim 1: It is impossible for anyone to conceive of a life that does not follow self-valuing logic. <— ontological claim

Claim 2: It is impossible for us to conceive of someone who is able to conceive of a life that does not follow self-valuing logic, therefore such a person would not matter to us (because we cannot conceive of them). <— epistemological claim

I don’t really care about the second claim, the one you are making, at least I care about it a lot less than I care about the first claim, the ontological one. I care even less about conflating them with each other. Granted there is some small overlap in the form of the questions, which can make them both appear epistemological, but in fact only the second claim is truly epistemological while the former is strictly ontological.

If you seriously think that we are unable to ask direct ontological questions without also stipulation that “well it’s just that we can’t conceive of someone/something that would be the exception to this! Therefore we can’t really say there are no exceptions!” then I would suggest you aren’t actually doing philosophy – I don’t mean that as an insult, just an observation. Take it or leave it.

By the way, please explain what this phrase means to you: “insistence which VO teaches”. You used it twice, and I have no idea what you mean by it.

The exception is the one making the 1 st claim, by making that claim, he is asserting an identical claim to claim #1 for everyone else. He or any one else’s need not allude to the second claim, because the first claim is all inclusive, making the second claim redundant.

Redundancy destroy the veracity of the absolute entropy o identity , while misidentifying or, displacing the first claim.

Actually, that’s if we’re at most a little bit Nietzschean. The question the Nietzschean philosopher asks Cartesians at the end of BGE 16 is answered in 230.

Well, I said “we”–meaning we (I?) who do not have access to divine revelation of some kind or other. If you knowingly claim to know something you don’t know, you’re lying.

Sure, and the Bible is the word of God…

Then again, VO “conflates” (explodes the distinction between) ontology and epistemology, remember? In fact, WTP already did that.

Which is not to say I made the conflation you claim I made. I wittingly made a different claim from yours.

Well, I don’t really care whether you really care or not. So there.

Such strict divisions are (post-)Aristotelian. What does bhusis have to do with them?

I’ll decide for myself what to do with it, thank you very much. In fact, I think what I’m doing is precisely philosophy–whereas what you’re doing is sophism. Someone calling himself a philosopher thereby only claims to pursue wisdom; whereas someone who claims to possess wisdom–for example, knowledge of what kind of life every possible and actual being is able to conceive–is rightly called a sophist.

Beings (Valuings) persist inasmuch as they insist on their own value. This is the essence of VO as I understand it. See my signature, and this video (note that “pony” also means “bangs” in Dutch):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELD2AwFN9Nc[/youtube]

Thanks you for your reply. I am too intoxicated to find a true reply, but I assure you that I will reply extensively soon.

The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thoughgt and even than the night had thought.
Odin cant even trace the roots of Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil cant even fathom the depths of Hvergelmir.
Philosophy, what a pompous charade.

But then
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BOOM! HEADSHOT![/tab]

Or, the world I is a turtle upon a turtle upon a turtle a turtle upon a turtle…

People see things as they are shaped themselves.
I remember a poster called turtle.

youtube.com/watch?v=JbaK6vmNP18

If you dont mind, Im going to start a critical commentary on Truth and Lies in the Extramoral Sense here.

Nature did not throw away the key. The Church did.
In all sane human cultures, man is perfectly aware of his intestines.
The Chinese call that awareness Tan Tien, and consider it the central form of consciousness.

All peoples led by shamans or similar, physiology-based myth and ritual, are aware of the tremors in the fibers, the bloodstream, the intestines. Like I can at will slow down my heartbeat, which is very easy if one decides to not fear that power. I wont be able to stop it. That was my fear as a kid.

So the type of knowledge Nietzsche criticizes here is strictly post-Christian knowledge - metaphysics in the sense of ‘outside of the physical’. And cancer is a direct result of this knowing-outside-the-body.

Spiritualism and pseudo scientific studies took up the slack the church left behind, unless with the exceptions of churches like science of mind. OBE 's (out of body) experiences tread dubious ground.

slither away now wormie.