I think that, for Nietzsche, the concept of the “subject”, a.k.a. “the soul superstition”, is fundamental. Sure, he also calls this concept “the soul atom”, but I think he thinks the concept of the “atom” is a form and consequence of the concept of the “subject”, not the other way round. Thus he writes:
“In every judgment there resides the entire, full, profound belief in subject and attribute, or in cause and effect (that is, as the assertion that every effect is an activity and that every activity presupposes an agent); and this latter belief is only a special case of the former,so there remains as the fundamental belief the belief that there are subjects, that everything that happens is related attributively to some subject.
I notice something and seek a reason for it; this means originally: I seek an intention [Absicht] in it, and above all someone who has intentions, a subject, a doer: every event a deed–formerly one saw intentions in all events, this is our oldest habit. Do animals also possess it? As living beings, must they not also rely on interpretations based on themselves?–
The question ‘why?’ is always a question after the causa finalis [final cause], after the ‘what for?’ We have no ‘sense for the causa efficiens [efficient cause]’: here Hume was right; habit (but not only that of the individual!) makes us expect that a certain often-observed occurrence will follow another: nothing more! That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is the belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the ‘subject.’ Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?
Question: is intention the cause of an event? Or is that also illusion?
Is it not the event itself?” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 550 whole, Kaufmann trans.)
I think I will refer to this section again below.
Thus far I agree.
I don’t think Nietzsche said or thought they could be infinitely divided. In fact, that would be absurd. And Nietzsche also says the whole or the sum of all quanta could not considered infinite (WP 1067). I disagree with him here, by the way, or rather I disagree that considering it finite is any less unthinkable.
I disagree again. Surely–and Nietzsche said as much–, the larger is not necessarily more powerful than the smaller! Thus he describes human beings, or at least certain human beings, or veritable human beings, as “beings that play with stars” (notebooks, from heart; dunno the exact source).
This reminds me of a pivotal Picht passage:
" ‘In order that there might be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to–emerge: entities with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche’s answer reads: ‘entities with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.’ On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the entities that populate it. But the entities are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their Being organises itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical Self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its own. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the change of an organic being, its εἶδος [eidos, Aristotle’s “formal cause”], its form. This form is never purely realised. It never comes into full presence. But all the phases in the development of a living being may be designated as Becoming or Perishing, that is to say as degrees of approximating or moving away from the realisation of the form. Therefore the form has the character of τέλος [telos, Aristotle’s “final cause”]–the goal immanent in each living being. Greek ontology designates the self-identical τέλος as the true Being of each thing that moves. The designation of τέλος as the Being of being suggests itself strongly when one considers that Becoming, that is, the transition into Being, is a process of approximating the immanent τέλος, and that Perishing, conversely, is a process of moving away from the immanent τέλος. But with the decline and eventual fall of metaphysics, the possibility of designating a non-sensual, never given entity as the true Being of the temporal vanishes as well. If the τέλος has no Being, then the only remaining alternative is to interpret it as a Non-Being that presents itself as a Being, that is, to interpret it as a semblance [Schein]. Now it remains true, however, that all life is only made possible by the fact that an entity organises itself in the striving after such a unity. One cannot say that the τέλος were a man-made fiction. Every living being is in actual fact oriented towards an organising unity. Thus the semblance of the τέλος is a semblance brought forth by Nature itself. Semblance, or, as Nietzsche also puts it: error, is the condition of the possibility of life. The unreal world of error is thus no man-made fiction but the real world of living creatures. All living creatures whatsoever exist only through the belief in persisting things, that is to say through their striving after the organising unity of τέλος. But that after which they strive never has a Being. Thus they only exist by virtue of error. The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself. Being torn between its opposites [i.e., past and future] and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, for itself and out of itself, no existence [Bestand]: it exists [ist] only as it produces semblance out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a semblance. [… W]ithout semblance, the eternal flux has no existence. It must produce semblance out of itself. Semblance therefore belongs to its truth." (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 250-52, my translation.)
Again we encounter the concept of the final cause. And again, more about this below, probably.
Just a quick response to this last paragraph, for now: surely subordinates “care” about their superiors in their organisation in some sense, and vice versa?
I think encroaching is possible on the particle level (atomic and even subatomic). How do waves or fields become particles, however? I had an interesting real-life discussion with Fixed Cross on this on January 10, in which I introduced an idea I’d already started to form last year, but developed more (intuitively) while on Atlantis truffles the day before: Fixed then processed it and called it “lighttime” (analogous to “spacetime”, though I’d rather call it “spacelight” (“lighttime” is technically more correct, but I think “spacelight” sounds much better). This is basically the idea that space is nothing other than light before it “gives light” (becomes a particle and “dies” in a blaze of glory).
Yes, Nietzsche calls physical laws “necessities”. And he says that “necessity” here does not mean some kind of compulsion, but simply that one thing cannot at the same time and in the same sense be another thing as well. This is interesting, because it’s basically the law of (non-)contradiction–which he elsewhere critiques as a mere incapacity of certain kinds of animals (e.g., homo sapiens), not being able to contradict, but thereby by no means necessarily a “truth in itself”. The thing is, Nietzsche understood that we have to work from our idiosyncrasies: thus also, in order to under-stand subatomic events at all, to project our own phenomenological experience onto them.
If this is true, the whole must logically be infinite. This amounts to the same as saying there’s an infinite number of finite wholes. And such finite wholes could certainly come into with one another.
I for one think there is no difference between chaos and nothing, or between no-thingness and nothingness (to use Osho’s spelling), as Fixed said:
"Chaos can not relate. Self-valuing emerges not out of nothing, but out of chaos. It is crucial to understand the difference. The former (to speak of nothing as if it is a condition from which anything may arise) is irratonal, the latter is not.
“Where I break from Nietzsche is where I say that unit-ness is not given, that only chaos, no-thingness (other than nothing-ness), is given.” (Fixed Cross, “Value ontology; the law of subjectivity” OP.)
I’d say unitness is given–by the Nothing/Chaos/Ginnungagap! (See the Picht passage above.) This, by the way, is logically equivalent to saying it’s given by itself, as I imagined almost three years ago:
“To be is to rise up in Satanic defiance of God, of non-being: the rising up out of non-being, the asserting of oneself as a being, is pleasurable to those who do it; otherwise they would cease doing it, or not have started doing it in the first place. This big bang of ours, and this coming into existence of minute quanta, is all a great hubristic rebellion against non-being, against the notion that it’s better not to be. That which does not exist is just tacitly, passively, agreeing with that notion. But it’s not true, it is better to rebel, no matter what profound and protracted torture it may be punished with. The rebellion itself is worth it. This fleeting moment of being, this little life of ours, and our dedication of it to its affirmation–that is absolutely worth it.” (Sauwelios, “Re: Why I’m not a feminist.”)
One may want to compare this, which is from a month earlier:
“You [Fixed Cross] 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. 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?” (Sauwelios, “Re: For Fixed Cross: Logic as self-value.”)
Of course, as Fixed Cross wrote in that subjectivity thread, “Valuing-itself is what makes it a self. Only by consistently positing itself / holding itself as a consistent value – a standard by which it relates to otherness – can it exist as a unit and thereby relate.” “Self-valuing” in the first place means the valuing of this very valuing, not the valuing of a self. (I still think, though, that I was right when I said, as quoted by Fixed Cross in that thread: “A self cannot value itself.” Namely, if we understand it as meaning, “a self cannot value itself directly.” Self-valuing through other-valuing.)
As I told you in a private conversation, I tend to agree with this much more than Fixed Cross seems to do: I even tend to what you then called a “panpsychism”. To this, though, Fixed has emphasised that VO is a logic (whence I no longer tend to call it “Value Ontology” but “the self-valuing logic of being”, simply “the self-valuing logic” (as Fixed already called it before me), or even just “the logic”. By the way, I recently thought of the phrase “the self-valuing consciousness” (compare “Krishna consciousness” as what I wish to spread. This takes on new meaning in the light of the aforesaid).
Well, Fixed Cross has vehemently rejected the notion of a “totality” or “whole”. Also, compare what I said above about an infinite whole.
Kant and the logical positivists, I fundamentally dismiss, but Hume I, contrary to Fixed Cross, find highly instructive. Consider the etymology of “ethics”, “morals”, and even/especially nomos (“law”): convention, custom, habit even…
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“We” the philosophers maybe–but surely not “we” human beings, as a rule. Nietzsche already dealt with this question in his early essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense”, and on many occasions after that as well. As for the philosophers, I’m reminded again of that feminist thread (see above):
“[Honesty is] just our preference, the preference of the philosophers. But it is and remains our preference because we actually value existence precisely as what, in our view, it most probably is: valuation, the valuing of being over non-being, the valuing of it precisely because to be is to value.”
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This was pretty much my initial problem with VO as well. The thing is, your “can’t” is your “can’t”, and not necessarily the subject’s “can’t”. In other words, this “can’t” may only be an incapacity on the part of certain species of animal, and not a “truth in itself” (see above). This is related to your contention that even God must answer to logic (e.g., that he cannot create a stone he cannot lift and yet lift it, too). If we are to see eye to eye on VO, we cannot agree to disagree here. We have to agree to agree and disagree in the same sense on the same subject at the same time…
This reasoning will logically lead you back to solipsism, though. I mean, how do you know anyone besides you is valuing, has ever valued or will ever value?