Which is First?

Ah, ok then. I seem to read quickly through your statements and derive the wrong meaning, this has happened before. Perhaps there is a strange resonance between the ways we each write/read.

Glad it’s been of some benefit to you also, though.

Yes and what you said of weakness and the earth, precisely. Weaknesses only become justified (earthy, enduring, beautiful) when paired with strengths. Then the weakness ceases to be a weakness and becomes productive of personality. And a way for strength to grow through its opposite.

Not sure if it’s my inability to read or what, but it seems you’re threatening me with a good time as if being absent ad homs and self-aggrandizing grandstanding were considered bad. Time to open the window again.

It seems as if we’re all in different countries. I’ve wondered that before.

Sauwelios - this is why I put ethics first.
One (something) must first embody worth, to be able to amount to any logical process at all.

It must remain consistent when it goes through processes, calculations, etcetera. Consistency and worth are not identical, but certainly parallel concepts and impossible to understand without each other.

So for you (anyone) to understand VO - and the WtP - you have to be entirely consistent with yourself, which logically means to be a master, law-setter in that consistency, rather than a slave, law-follower - a follower can only be consistent with externality, not with its own integrity. It is simply too weak to value otherwise than what is put before it as value. Why trolls don’t post premises, and like being insulted.

Perhaps you see strength and law-setting as mystification – perhaps this is why you find it hard to admit to your own agency, it seems truer to not set the laws but follow them.

I have in part experienced my anger at those who hate VO as coming from outside of myself, as I understand very well how painful it is to understand it from a position of weakness - they would either have to gain integrity (no pain no gain there) or to be fully conscious of being at best a utility rather than an entity. I am only truly angry at those who I know not to be as weak as to justify belief in passive law-giving. I fucking want them to legislate like […] - I will (them) to power.

My bad, I alway realize - and yet, my tirades have influenced thousands. People now know that it is possible to be this aggressive with logic; that alone is crucial standard setting. Perhaps in fact it is this that I have willed - I understood within a year or two that not a lot of people are going to want to understand this, less even than would endure understanding Nietzsche. After that I simply went about setting this particular standard. It certainly is a standard, widely used, as something to stand against.

Ha.

:sunglasses:

Ignorance is forgiveable, but the love of ignorance is not. I try to select out and filter away those who love ignorance from those who just don’t know something (yet).

If one does not love ignorance then eventually they overcome it. But I can attest to the fact that understanding the notion of self-valuing logic requires a “leap” (I won’t say of faith, but rather perhaps of courage) as it potentially calls everything that one is into question. “Is such and such aspect of myself justified, self-justified?” Self-valuing is a law-giving in the Nietzschean/Zarathustrian sense.

Serendipper is more forthcoming with you, and your exchanges are interesting to read. He has brushed off a lot of things too easily in response to me, feigning ignorance where I could see he is far from. That is trolling - I bring it out in people, I am vulnerable. But people don’t realize what they’re getting into.

Sauwelios and you have in the past feigned ignorance to each other, out of ill liking of approaches, anticompatibility of values in a certain processing of valuing into mastery, power. That was excruciating and perfectly explicatory of VO - you refused to understand it in equal terms out of different natures. Still do. Now neither of you feigns ignorance toward the other anymore - there is a silent at least pretence of respect, which even if it is only that (I can not judge) it itself is a sign of respect - at ,east for a certain degree of consistency, worth - even though it may not pertain to ones own universe.

Why I respect proponents of all sorts of cultures, if they are consistent enough. Not if they also pretend to be all-inclusive and all-tolerant, which no one and nothing is.

Absolutely. This leap is one of strength. “Faith” is what the weak think a man who engages a big enemy is acting on. The fighter just acts on his will to overcome ever stronger enemies. The overcoming that leads to VO is perhaps then visualizable as an enemy, mythic monster. An abysmal un-creature to slay.

The difference between WtP and VO is indeed that WtP never attains, and can thus never be a particular standard.
VO is the formula for differentiation-unto-reintegration in the next instance -
instead of a mere statistical infinitesimal, we have a full fledged, relatable (operational, non-hypothetical) logic operating, calculating every consecutive instance in terms of every other consecutive instance of such logic, thereby deriving the power relations in real world terms, be they mathematical, military or medical (or of any type whatsoever).

The catch to all of the differences and gradations of worth in philosophies, is degrees of ease of use. A good philosophy is handy for a scientist. A bad philosophy stands in the way and tries to re invent the wheel. VO stands on the shoulders of greatest minds, and does so lightly. Parodites is even more of a dancer. You walk with absolute grace in the terrains of mathematics and all purely abstract things. Darwin is pure delicacy. Newton doesn’t even touch. He is the greatest dancer of all, the greatest integrator of concepts. You can’t do what he did anymore. It was the one thing, the turnaround, the real death of all gods but pure massive overbearing beauty.

Our philosophy tramples the grazing grounds of the herd, but it has now nearly reached its perimeter. Its a “pretence”, a form… a limit - an aesthetic entry point, a politesse, a support line - a discharge of neutrons in a recognizable pattern… an objective thing - and yet it is entirely arbitrary qua content. Or so it would seem.

What are numbers anyway.

11511
9

I forgive Einstein for not seeing what was so easy to see logically, and yet so hard morally - I forgive him because I realize it wasn’t a moral wish that he had, but a love of the splendid Newtonean universe that prevented him from differentiating phenomenon from logic in the same way he had integrated them. It was at his hand - he could have written a few signs and he’d have formulated what Im after (formally), the equation that puts VO into physics. (which would thereby become a form of it)

Speaking of which, this pre-VO discussion that definitely went into my understanding of a self-valuing, ties into what you and Serendipper are discussing about the collapse of a photon into matter.

I haven’t read new posts in this thread after my last one, but before I do, here’s some more I want to say.

People seem to forget, or never to grasp in the first place, the psycho-logical necessity that, for us, it will always be people, not turtles, all the way down. If you’ll allow me a simplification (the notion of “subjects” and “objects”), we can never understand what an object is, as we can never understand what it’s like to be an object: in fact, an object is supposed to be an entity for which the answer to the question “what’s it like to be that entity” is: “nothing”.

A clear example is when men objectify women: it means the former don’t empathize or sympathize with the latter (depending on you definitions of “empathy” and “sympathy”).

We cannot understand affects except as homunculi (little men); or rather, the best we can understand them is when we experience ourselves as all affect (big affects): what Nietzsche describes as “what poets of strong ages called inspiration” (Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, section 3) is the state in which we can best understand the will to power at its most fundamental level. Or, to quote from that exemplar of inspired poetry:

“When you are the willers of a single will, and this acting against God is to you an act of God: there is the origin of your virtue.” (Zarathustra, “Of the Bestowing Virtue”, section 1.)

::

What exactly are you saying “no” to here? Everything I said?

But a logic has axioms. What exactly are the axioms, and only the axioms, of this logic?

I have been unable to conceive valuing otherwise than as willing, or as having the feeling of will. That is, I have done my best to ascertain precisely what “valuing” means for me, and arrived at the conclusion that it means “experiencing something in accompaniment with the feeling of will”. (In the case of disvaluing, what’s felt is a will away from the thing experienced.)

In your last post before my last in this thread, you said:

If value is the very basis of any axiom-setting, then it cannot be a logic, as logics are based on their axioms. That is to say, it cannot be a logic, one logic among others. It could be the logic, meta-logic; but if it is the logic of all logics, it’s also its own logic, which would make it circular. Which has of course always been clear about it.

“Axiom-setting” means “logic-setting” (unless the axiom(s) do(es)n’t suffice to base a logic on). I’m not against VO’s being a mystification, in fact I insist on its being a mystification… Logic-setting is a law-positing. What has always been most obvious is that you’re insisting on the soundness (the sanity) of VO. But paradoxically, it seems it, and you, will seem “fundamentally unsound” to me (to quote Jeeves and Wooster on Nietzsche) until you acknowledge your insistence, nay insist on your insistence… And this is of course my insistence, my will, my irrational, stubborn ass. Anyway, let me see if you address this self-application of VO below.

I try to start from common sense–which is where all science and philosophy must start from. The “direct (self-)valuing” of gold, for instance(?), can make no sense to us. It must make sense to us on our scale.

“Purity” is quite literally an empty word. I say the world must be grasped phenomenologically (that is, psychologically, but not positivistic- or naturalistic-psychologically), “impurely”, concretely–that is, concrescently, con-creatively:

"The Chastity whose Magical Energy both protects and urges the aspirant to the Sacred Mysteries is quite contrary in its deepest nature to all vulgar ideas of it; for it is, in the first place, a positive passion; […].

It may assist us to create in our minds a clear concept of this noblest and rarest–yet most necessary–of the Virtues, if we draw the distinction between it and one of its ingredients, Purity.

Purity is a passive or at least static quality; it connotes the absence of all alien admixture from any given idea; as, pure gallium, pure mathematics, pure race. It is a secondary and derived use of the word which we find in such expressions as ‘pure milk,’ which imply freedom from contamination.

Chastity, per contra, as the etymology (castus, possibly connected with castrum, a fortified camp) suggests, may be supposed to assert the moral attitude of readiness to resist any assault upon an existing state of Purity.

[…]

The Sphinx is not to be mastered by holding aloof; and the brutish innocence of Paradise is always at the mercy of the Serpent. It is his Wisdom that should guard our Ways; we need his swiftness, subtlety, and his royal prerogative of dealing death.

The Innocence of the Adept? We are at once reminded of the strong Innocence of Harpocrates, and of His Energy of Silence. A chaste man is thus not merely one who avoids the contagion of impure thoughts and their results, but whose virility is competent to restore Perfection to the world about him. […]

‘Beware of abstinence from action!’ is it not written in Our lection? For the nature of the Universe being Creative Energy, aught else blasphemes the Goddess, and seeks to introduce the elements of a real death within the pulses of Life.

The chaste man, the true Knight-Errant of the Stars, imposes continually his essential virility upon the throbbing Womb of the King’s Daughter; with every stroke of his Spear he penetrates the heart of Holiness, and bids spring forth the Fountain of the Sacred Blood, splashing its scarlet dew throughout Space and Time. His Innocence melts with its white-hot Energy the felon fetters of that Restriction which is Sin, and his Integrity with its fury of Righteousness establishes that Justice which alone can satisfy the yearning lust of the Womanhood whose name is Opportunity. As the function of the castrum or castellum is not merely to resist a siege, but to compel to Obedience of Law and Order every pagan within range of its riders, so also it is the Way of Chastity to do more than defend its purity against assault. For he is not wholly pure who is imperfect; and perfect is no man in himself without his fulfillment in all possibility." (Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, “Chastity”.)

This does not clarify anything for me.

::

Except that consciousness is immediately intelligible to us–and only for that reason impervious to our attempst to define it–, whereas valuing is not. “Value” is almost as empty a word as “good”. Etymologically, “good” means “fitting together”. Likewise, “valuable, of value” means “strong enough” in the sense of “weighing up against”; the latter also goes for “worth” and axios. But these are objective judgments. What we need is to be able to relate to it subjectively. What does it mean when we are inclined to-ward (to-worth!) something?

“[A]ll becoming [Werden, “worthing”) seemed to me dancing of Gods, and wantoning of Gods, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:–
–As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many Gods, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many Gods[.]” (Zarathustra, “Old and New Tables”, section 2, Common trans.)

::

You would not agree, exactly! It’s your conviction that it’s not. And this conviction is a convincing yourself. Insisting, as I’ve called it.

In the first and last place, the “obviousness” of the SVOL is owing to your (plural) positing it “in the way” (ob viam), as the way even (Tao, the Logos, Ereignis). But I can only join you, be joined with you, in (re)minding us of this time and again. I demand that our valuing be conscious…

I had (again?) started to read that thread of yours, by the way, but haven’t finished it (yet), not even close.

::

Sorry, what? I find it hard to admit my own agency? I’m the one who’s been insisting on his own agency!

::

Philosophy is about overcoming one’s ignorance about one’s ignorance–about loving one’s knowledge of one’s own ignorance.

If a philosopher overcame his ignorance, he would no longer be a philosopher, but a sage–or a lunatic…

You may have the neck of a bull, but you don’t have the eyes of an angel–which is why you cover the angel-eyed Nietzsche with sunglasses, and make him look like a douchebag.

Humility is the virtue that balances the evil of Selbstsucht. It changes it from a necessary evil into an unnecessary good–lead into gold. The Philosopher’s Stone, lapis exilis et vilis.

Sounds good. I basically did that when I read The Will to Power roughly around 2000, though (and I haven’t stopped, either).

I look forward to where your recent embrace of the will to power metaphysics will lead you!

::

“Bite off the serpent’s head!” It seems you and I demand of each other the same thing?

No, when we objectify a woman we directly empathize/sympathize with that aspect/s of her which are “objectified”. She is valued for being that which she is, and wishes to be. It just depends on what you objectify, and how accurate that is. And this works just as equally for men when it comes to women valuing us, too.

You think women do not want to be “objectified”? Lol. Empathy and sympathy mean understanding, and respect. Creating room for; protecting, valuing. Feminism has done so much to destroy the feminine psyche that now even men seem to think that it is somehow “bad” to objectify a woman, and there are even women who also think that they think this (but they never really do think it, in so far as they are women.

Anyone who doesn’t want to be “objectified” merely does not believe that there is anything about themselves which is worthy of being “object-ed”, turned into coherent and valued reality in the eyes of another.

Indeed.

Gods do not make leaps of faith. They make leaps of value.

urGod

I have to agree with Sauwelios here. It also means that men see women as more objects hence objectify and less equal and less human ~~ in other words, perhaps things or toys.

That makes absolutely no sense to me. Can you explain it. Maybe you are using language other than how I would use it.
What you seem to be saying is that you join the herd.
How does someone become capable in the moment of putting their self in another’s shoes and experience what they are experiencing (empathizing) or having a harmonious understanding of another ~ it’s like a chemical reaction of sorts (sympathy or simpatico) by objectifying them?
When a person is objectified, they become less human to the other. What ought to be an I and Thou relationship becomes an I and It relationship.

Perhaps you are using different language when it comes objectifying because I do not get it.
Objectifying a woman or a man is not the same as affirming them or accepting them as they are.

I know that I do not. What am I - a toy to be played with for someone’s pleasure?
Anyway, you need to see the INDIVIDUAL not the whole. We are not the borg.

.
Yes. So then how can you speak of objectifying a woman?
Hmmm… perhaps you are speaking of seeing a woman as she really is? But I don’t think that a man or a woman is capable of doing that since being human, there are far too many variables to us. We are too complicated.
But some can see more than others.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is feminism and then there is feminism. We have come a long way from where we were and into having our own sense of identity and worth. We are not so much chattel anymore.
Some men are more staunch feminists than are many women. Many men real men are happy that we have come into our own or are in the process of continuing to do just that. Kudos to them.

Maybe objectify needs to be re-defined here. Say what it is to you and what it isn’t to you.
Again, if you are using the term to mean to see someone (in this case) as they actually are, then it is your perspective and bias which can still objectify the woman and make her less than she is.

Say what? lol
It takes a lifetime to rid ourselves of particular kinds of conditioning and and self-patterns and beliefs and attitudes which have been pushed on us…and we are never quite done with that.
So how could what you say be otherwise unless these women met other women or even other men who could teach them differently? Some never lose the effect the parents perhaps especially that the father had on them and sometimes it is even more the mother – it’s an ad continuum. It takes time to become a Phoenix in one’s own right and over and over and over again.

We shall be consumed in the flames and rise up again ad continuum.

Utter nonsense. You cannot empathize/sympathize with tits or an ass…

Sure, I didn’t mean to suggest women never objectify men. I just used the most widely known example. And I was talking about understanding, not valuing.

I never said that.

Like battery caged animals? Those are surely valued and protected–as a resource–, created just enough room for; but understood and respected? empathized or sympathized with? I think not.

I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying it will keep you from understanding her. You may understand her wanting to be objectified, but that’s not the part that’s objectified…

::

Again, beside the point. You’re still on the plane of Gestell, not of Ereignis.

::

Of will?..

The conundrum may be this:

“Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him–and behind him… A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view… That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic’s existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them–it knows itself to be sovereign.–On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man–such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement… When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and ‘faith.’ To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly–these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man–of the truth… The believer is not free to answer the question, ‘true’ or ‘not true,’ according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic–Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon–these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses–fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons…” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 54 whole, Mencken trans.)

I know this is ironic coming from me. It is, however, only ironic. I hope some of you may see that sometime.

FC: I post this, of course, not just in the expectation that you may see that, but moreover that it applies to you positively.

The conundrum may be this:

“Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him–and behind him… A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view… That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic’s existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them–it knows itself to be sovereign.–On the contrary, the need of faith, of some thing unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man–such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement… When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and ‘faith.’ To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly–these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man–of the truth… The believer is not free to answer the question, ‘true’ or ‘not true,’ according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic–Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon–these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses–fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons…” (Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 54 whole, Mencken trans.)

That was beautiful. I don’t recall if I read The Antichrist.
Thank you for that.

That seems fairly remedial.

That which enters the mind through reason can be corrected. That which is admitted through faith, hardly ever. - Santiago Ramon y Cajal

A reasonable person will always be open to correction as he constantly refines what he suspects may be true. A cocky person has admitted by faith that what he knows is true, therefore he is unable to be self-correcting, evolving, capable of adaptation and inevitably will be wrong, given enough time.

So, therefore, we could say wisdom is a philosophy where one element is staying open to the fact that we may not know everything quite yet regardless how sure we feel.

You seem to have a very narrow idea of what is being objectified. And why.

Since when can we talk about understanding without taking about valuing?

But you don’t answer the question either.

You act as if there is only one kind of objectifying… the lowliest kind.

Does Sauwelios mean “always looks down”?

Desire and understanding are forms of valuing. By objectifying something you turn it into something that you are able to desire and understand. Tell me how something could be desired and understood without first being “object-ed”?

You have this typical leftist sort of very naive, linear view that so much can fail under the label of “objectifying” and that this is somehow bad, as it destroyed empathy/sympathy. This view could not be further from the truth.

The differentiation is not between objectifying and not objectifying, it is between low and high objectifying. What is objectified and why? More importantly from where does the impulse come to do that? Yes you can have lowly objectifying of women, but unlike you I am not restricting the issue to what the scum of the earth do.

Please feel free to try to be coherent. I’ll wait.

Yes quite ironic coming from someone who says that objectifying someone destroys ability for empathy/sympathy.

“Will” is not a fundamental concept for me. Leaps of will mean nothing except the courage to act on values.

Doubt is a wonderful tool.

I know nothing but far from being restrictive I find it very liberating for there is so much knowledge to acquire
To know everything would be so intellectual debilitating for I would have no need to learn anything ever again

Yep, you may learn yourself out of existence as if yang consumed yin because the known only exists relative to the unknown and if there were no unknown, there would be no known.

Once the first bite of the fruit of the tree of knowledge has been taken, one must eat all the fruit to escape the game.