The Philosophers

We see here that Zoot’s still a metaphysician. He sincerely be-lieves that logic, which evolved so contingently in man’s head, necessarily applies to all reality; whereas there is no good reason to suppose so, except that we humans are incapable of contradicting in the sense of the law of non-contradiction.

I don’t think the line of our delightful conversation went like this, by the way: “VO’s self-valuing logic as an expression of WTP > WTP as an expression of the survival instinct (in humans)> survival instinct as a substantiation of logic > substantiation of logic through application of law of identity and excluded middle in human reasoning.” That is, we definitely went beyond the survival instinct, with Zoot spontaneously granting that Spinoza’s conatus is not just concerned with survival but also with expansion, and me introducing the idea of altruism and the like as a fitness indicator. Zoot was then reminded of the concept of the “selfish gene”, and I pointed out to him that the carrier of such a gene does not have to be selfish (all the time). Also, I pointed out that such genes are only selfish so-called, because conceiving them as “selfish” is an anthropomorphism, in analogy with a selfish person. This then allowed me to make the same suggestion for “self-valuing”.

Also, I think the self-valuing logic is rather at the bottom of WTP than the other way round; that the survival instinct in humans is an expression of WTP, not the other way round (if only in humans, and probably animals in general); and that logic is a substantiation or expression of survival instinct (possibly not (so much) of the gene-carrier, so this also means reproductive instinct).

I think Zoot’s just missing a link in the chain of reasoning here. That missing link is the concept of the subject. Thus Nietzsche writes:

“The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse!” (WP 485, opening sentence.)

The substance “tiger” is the subject “tiger”; and the subject is the original form of logic’s self-identical “A”: the latter is an abstraction from the former.

This is certainly much more true or plausible than the notion that the law of identity applies to a “general” tiger-type. Now Nietzsche writes:

“The ‘thing-in-itself’ [is] nonsensical. If I remove all the relationships, all the ‘properties’, all the ‘activities’ of a thing, the thing does not remain over; because thingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic, thus with the aim of defining, communication (to bind together the multiplicity of relationships, properties, activities.” (WP 558 whole. Cf. ff., in George Morgan’s sense.)

No matter how plausible this may be, it’s an abstraction (literally: it ab-tracts properties from things until nothing remains) from our common-sense understanding. Please bear with me while I quote Michael Zuckert at length:

“Although more than a few critics have challenged Strauss’s notion of ‘common sense’ as hopelessly obscure, he quite precisely tells us that ‘common‐sense understanding is understanding in terms of “things possessing qualities”.’ […]
Empiricism is a theory based on recognition of the ‘naiveté’ or inadequacy of common sense or pre‐scientific awareness. Empiricism is the effort to look more carefully at what is actually given in experience than ‘our primary awareness of things as things and people as people’ does. ‘What is perceived or “given” is only sense data [compare Hume’s “impressions”!]; the “thing” emerges by virtue of unconscious or conscious construction. The “things” which to common sense present themselves as “givens” are in truth constructs’. ‘Scientific understanding’ comes into being when the naiveté of the prescientific is fully recognized, and understanding by means of ‘unconscious construction’ is replaced by ‘understanding by means of conscious construction’.
This science, the new political science included, intends to reject the prescientific understanding, but Strauss, following Husserl, maintains that this effort necessarily fails. One cannot, Strauss insists, ‘establish empiricism empirically: it is not known through sense data that the only possible objects of perception are sense data’ rather than ‘things’ or ‘patterns’. One can only establish or attempt to establish empiricism ‘through the same kind of perception through which we perceive things as things rather than sense data or constructs’. Empiricism, then, must begin with the naive prescientific awareness, and by a process of abstraction from that ‘sense data become known as sense data’. This act of abstraction both depends on and denies the legitimacy of such dependence on common sense. Strauss’s very Husserlian conclusion is that ‘there is no possible human thought which is not in the last analysis dependent on the legitimacy of that naiveté and the awareness or the knowledge going with it’.” (Zuckert, “Why Leo Strauss is Not an Aristotelian”, quoting from Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern 212-13. Cf. the “Conversations with Zoot Allures thread”, starting from this post: http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2692334#p2692334)

You may want to reread my earlier post in this thread in this light: http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2692205#p2692205–especially the two long quotes (Nietzsche and Picht). In the light of the Picht quote, I will now point out, following Picht, that a metaphysician is someone who sincerely believes in his unconscious pro-jection of himself into all being, whereas the Nietzschean is aware of his “automorphism”, as I once called it; is aware that he’s no mere theorist, but a poet; that his worldview is no immaculate perception of a world that’s “out there”, but a pro-creation.

“…that his worldview is no immaculate perception of a world that’s “out there”, but a pro-creation.”

Hi Oliver. You sent me a PM over on btl, which I answered, but recieved no further reply. The subject you presented was good: is there a supreme will to power? If so, which one?

This was regarding a thread there in which I mentioned something key about will to power: the emptyness about it. By this, as I explained in my reply to your message, I meant precicely that there is no supreme anything. Will to power wills will to power, and this creates all hierarchies. I did admit that, of course, will to power implies verticality, hierarchy. But that #1 this isn’t what matters about it and #2 that verticality is the wrong term, because it is two dimensional.

You suggested that there is something you consider to be the supreme will to power.

Regarding the quote:

What is it that creates? The poet? This is at the bottom of the subject at hand. Because will to power is constantly creation. As I wrote before, things don’t exist until they matter.

For instance: is it the case only for the poet that he doesn’t percieve an immaculate world that’s out there but rather brings one into being?

“the idea of substance is not at all required for logic.”

What are the properties then? What goes for “tiger” goes for “whiskers,” “violent” and “four legged.” You can split properties appart all you want, but there will always be an assumed substance. If one could only split one’s way to the atom, the irreducible substance.

You pointed out before that you can even split sub-atomic particles. That this is a big problem for the idea of a unit.

I don’t think Nietzsche meant that logic logically needed this or that, I think he was explaining what it needed genealogically, what led to its existence.

Exactly.

In the will to power, one does not need to bear the burden of oneself, not really. One only bears partial burdens of oneself, here and there. And does a lot of outsourcing of this burden to other things. Indeed, WtP is in no small measure a means to the distribution of oneself across many disparate areas and experiences, for the purpose of lifting the burden of oneself ‘here and there’. A redirection, as catharsis and new focus.

Whereas with VO one must bear the absolute entirety of oneself, if one is to even be capable of approaching VO at all. You might be able to will yourself in entirety to power, to some power or another, but to truly value yourself in entirety is very different than that. It is not “utilitarian” and therefore gains access to all potential utilities, precisely because it adopts them to itself rather than allows itself to be adapted to them.

VO is internal, WtP is external expression. But VO is also externality.

And besides, self-valuing is already a deeper (more fundamental) concept than is will to power. Where do you think power-willing begins, from where do you think the standards for what constitutes power come? The self sets these terms; the very thing which is said to act according to these terms of will to power, is itself that which sets and indeed must set the very terms, a priori, for that very same acting-willing. “You” are an abstraction or other distillation of this process, which we simply call valuation for lack of a better term.

Really it is just supreme standard-setting, which requires a goal, and intimate awareness of an encounter; necessity, the hardest kind in existence. Much harder than gravity, or nuclear force.

But this is also sublimating subjectivity to its highest level, and most people are not too comfortable with that. They think this means forgoing something about the earthiness in themselves, when in reality it is ouroboros-like, you come around full circle much further along from where you began. But only when you have learned to create the earth in your own soul. VO can teach you how to do that, WtP cannot. But WtP can offer great reverence for the earthiness that already exists, and can offer channels of potential power-expression and regulation-constrainment for the sublimating-subjectivity I mentioned above, which is basically what philosophy already is.

I see VO and WtP as working together, it is not one against the other. I am very much a WtP-ist, and this does not refute or refuse or cancel my also being a VO-ist, rather it enhances it a thousand-fold.

Right, and thank you for your reply (belated, I know; at first I didn’t know what to answer and then I just forgot).

I was alluding to the will to the eternal recurrence. Strauss writes:

“Nature, the eternity of nature, owes its being to a postulation, to an act of the will to power on the part of the highest nature.” (Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”.)

About this highest nature, he says:

“His supremacy is shown by the fact that he solves the highest, the most difficult problem.” (ibid.)

That problem is the problem of the absence of nature, of there being only art (and law being art, not nature: not physis, but only nomos, “convention, custom, habit”). And about this solution, this act of the will to power, Strauss says:

“His [i.e., the philosopher-of-the-future’s] action constitutes the highest form of the most spiritual will to power and therewith the highest form of the will to power.” (ib. Cf. BGE 9 and WP 617.)

And:

“Philosophy, we have heard, is the most spiritual will to power (aph. 9): the philosophers of the future must possess that will to a degree which was not even dreamed of by the philosophy of the past; they must possess that will in its absolute form.” (ib.)

In the lecture course on which this essay drew most, Strauss had said:

“We start again from the premise that reality is will to power, and there is no essential difference between men and brutes; there is no nature of man strictly speaking. Given this premise, the doctrine of eternal return, which means, subjectively, transformation of the will into acceptance, is the only way there can be knowledge, as acknowledging of what is, and it is the only way in which there can be nature; that is to say, that which is by itself and not by being willed or posited. But precisely because acceptance is transformed will, will survives in the acceptance, in the contemplation. Contemplation is creative.” (Lecture transcript of May 18, 1959. Cf. my first post here: BTL, “The Hierarchies of Human Values”, page 2.)

And:

“If the will of an individual human being, say of Nietzsche, is to be the origin of meaning and value, and that will manifestly has a cause, the only way out in order to save his position is to say that this will is the cause of itself: eternal return.” (ibid.)

That Picht passage is pertinent to this. The poet, the entity, is itself that in which he/it believes. What really creates is the abyss “beneath” all semblance of entities. And no, all entities are poets; not just “the poet”.

“[M]an must be a liar by nature, he must above all be an artist. And he is one: metaphysics, religion, morality, science–all of them only products of his will to art, to lie, to flight from ‘truth’, to negation of ‘truth’. This ability itself, thanks to which he violates reality by means of lies, this artistic ability of man par excellence–he has it in common with everything that is. He himself is after all a piece of reality, truth, nature: how should he not also be a piece of genius in lying!” (WP 853, Kaufmann trans.)

Is it, though… Isn’t freedom the sole sufficient reason of “sufficient reason”, as Heidegger has it? Here’s the suppressed (originally) final paragraph of Strauss’s “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero”:

“The utmost I can hope to have shown in taking issue with Kojève’s thesis regarding the relation of tyranny and wisdom is that Xenophon’s thesis regarding that grave subject is not only compatible with the idea of philosophy but required by it. This is very little. For the question arises immediately whether the idea of philosophy is not itself in need of legitimation. Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things. It presupposes then that there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History. It presupposes, in other words, that any ‘realm of freedom’ is not more than a dependent province within the ‘realm of necessity.’ It presupposes, in the words of Kojève, that ‘Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself.’ This presupposition is not self-evident. Kojève rejects it in favor of the view that ‘Being creates itself in the course of History,’ or that the highest being is Society and History, or that eternity is nothing but the totality of historical, i.e., finite time. On the basis of the classical presupposition, a radical distinction must be made between the conditions of understanding and the sources of understanding, between the conditions of the existence and perpetuation of philosophy (societies of a certain kind, and so on) and the sources of philosophic insight. On the basis of Kojève’s presupposition, that distinction loses its crucial significance: social change or fate affects being, if it is not identical with Being, and hence affects truth. On the basis of Kojève’s presuppositions, unqualified attachment to human concerns becomes the source of philosophic understanding: man must be absolutely at home on earth, he must be absolutely a citizen of the earth, if not a citizen of a part of the inhabitable earth. On the basis of the classical presupposition, philosophy requires a radical detachment from human concerns: man must not be absolutely at home on earth, he must be a citizen of the whole. In our discussion, the conflict between the two opposed basic presuppositions has barely been mentioned. But we have always been mindful of it. For we both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur [“were themselves obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others”, like the Nazi Heidegger] were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being.”

Fixed Cross sanctions these words.
Yes.
This Logos includes the possibility of the law of identity and its consequences, “the logic”.
It gives this possibility.
But, here it gets infinitely deeper at once, as we cross the abyss: it is precisely by contradicting the harmonious consistency of a normal logical producedure that it allows for such procedures.

Logic stands in contradiction to what it speaks of.
But because it stands in such stark, hard contradiction, causing such sharp angles and limits, it is successful to an extent in identifying as much as that there exists something of which it speaks.
VO speaks the things from themselves – in as far as there are “things” and “selves”. But these things won’t allow us to approach them except if we too speak from ourselves, or more simply: speak self-valuing.

This is how man attains thinghood, what we might interpret alongside the notions of metaphysical eternity.
And only then can he indulge in lineair, symmetrical logic and expect to arrive anywhere.

By being consistent first with its quality of being a self-valuing, quantum of will to power, and thereby ridding itself from all sanctimonious and delusional claims, the mind sheds its main weaknesses, becomes consistent with itself (hell has to be survived) and successfully projects itself across time and traces its path. All this needs to be done simply in order to do something that isn’t completely botched with respect to the earth. So the mind, born orphan of atrophied instincts, finds a path which then becomes its ground, and this ground becomes its being, and the mind now is ready to identify itself. Its self, the experience of the “I” is the excess on top of this, the foam from which Aphrodite is born at every instance at your local coastline.

Here is why I often think of you as Nietzsches literary heir.

One less elegant and more extensive way of phrasing this: If life was not rewarding, there would to be any use to it. And all utility is dependent on life being useful to an end. This end is always power which is its own reward. Self-valuing is the rewarding state of power from which everything flows forth; integrity - including integers and mathematical purity.

“…a valuing of that very valuing.”

This elegantly explains the operation of will to power willing not power but will to power.

The problem I have is this. The valuing operation is static. There is already a completeness here, the valuing exists and for its own sake. Also, what it values must already exist. Where is the genesis?

Oliver wrote earlier that the poet brings the world into being, but that the creation, the genesis, is responsability of an underlying abyss that already exists and contains, if I underdtand, the substance of being sans entity. You can imagine my question: is the operation of entity then really just a sort of giving shape? Is there already a clay for the poet to make pottery of? But then, what is the genesis of that abysmal substance? Maybe a dishonest question, as I already stated that substance is a superstition.

Will to power, contrary to self-valuing, has no preexisting anythings. It is just willing to power, and if there is power in value then value can exist. But then, of course, power isn’t what will to power wills. Valuing would be one of an infinity of things that came to being through willing to power.

“Where do you think power-willing begins, from where do you think the standards for what constitutes power come?”

Tricky. And crucial. Power-willing isn’t quite right. It puts power first. As if it is power that willing acts on. But, and here is the kit of the problem, will acts on will to power. Power is a side-product. This is why it is so variable and multifarious. The only reason the world is so uniform, so constant in the types of power one finds (though not as constant as many think), the answer to Baudrillard’s reformulation of why is there something instead of nothing as why is there nothing instead of something, is precicely the superstition of a pre-existing power standard. God, physics, whatever. These do (we’ll, in God’s case did) exist. But as a by-product of will to power.

What continuity does exist, and we call that continuity genealogy, is due to the chain produced by will to power willing will to power.

That was a reference to my post on page 37 of this thread, where I quoted from an older post:

“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?” (http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2692205#p2692205)

The abyss is what, in that same post, I called the Nothing/Chaos/Ginnungagap. It may be what Heidegger called “Being”. It has no substance; there can be no substance without entity (subject).

Zoot, paraphrased:

God exists and he tells me what to think. Now, what did God say exactly? This, I don’t know.

I cringe when I see someone avoiding his own existence in a philosophical question.

ᛏ

Descartes.
“I think, therefore I am.”

Uh, yeah dude. You posit an “I” and conclude that therefore, this “I” exists.
Oh wow
how philosophical. Have some cufflinks.

But thats exactly what intellectuals will do. Not posit existence in the whole of the life, but in a couple of letters they’re taught.
No wonder this world is ruled by criminals.

Philosophy is either the primordial crime that sets the fundamental law, or it is frolicking in front of a mirror.

Now, what law have you set, Zoot?

Sure, that’s more or less what I do. But that doesn’t make the consequences any less the product of a particular political prejudice/leap embedded in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

It doesn’t make my dilemma go away. Why? Because, given another set of experiences, I might have leaped in the opposite direction. And, whatever direction I do leap [existentially], there are always going to be arguments able to persuade others not to.

We’re on the same page here. I agree. It’s just that, for me, nothing of what I note above really goes away. It’s not like any particular individual can think through the question “should I rob this bank?” and come up with a moral narrative that settles it. At best she can come to believe that her own narrative is the most reasonable. And then in a world of contingency, chance and change, her experiences, relationships, sources of information etc., evolve/devolve and she comes to think differently about it.

I’m still back to grappling with my own intellectual contraption: That in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that ends in oblivion, there is no way [philosophically or otherwise] to know how one ought to live.

Unless of course there is and I am just not privy to it here and now.

True, but when we choose to live among others there are going to be “rules of behavior”. We may ultimately be at a loss to understand why we do what we do but there are clearly going to be dots to connect between that and the historical, cultural and experiental parameters of the actual lives that we live out in a particular world.

I just put my own “dasein, conflicting goods, political economy” spin on that. And then go out looking for folks able to convince me that I’m full of shit.

But nothing matters if you are not able to subsist from day to day. That’s why there are still literally millions upon millions of folks around the globe for whom subsistence is an actual precarious component of their lives. They don’t allot much time to delving into the things that we discuss here.

Right, and there must have been zillions of actual historical, cultural and experiential contexts in which the question of power had been raised. And then the folks who pick one or another philosopopher, political theorist, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist etc., in order tp pin down the most reasonable assessment.

Like there is one given the staggering complexities embedded in human interactions over the centuries. The mindboggling implications of intertwining genes and memes in order to explain any one particular choice.

Still, in any given human community, interactions will ever revolve around one or another “for all practical purpose” combination of might makes right, right makes might or moderation, negotiation and compromise.

What is this but one more “general description” of the “human condition” in which a bunch of words define and defend another bunch of words.

Is it true? Well, pick a particular context in which moral and political values come into conflict and let’s explore the implications of it “out in the world”. A world in which actual social, political and economic interactions unfold.

Existentially as it were.

“The abyss is what, in that same post, I called the Nothing/Chaos/Ginnungagap. It may be what Heidegger called “Being”. It has no substance; there can be no substance without entity (subject).”

Two things here. First, you admit you believe in substance (once entity is). Second, substance isn’t really palpable. That is why Nietzsche called it not strictly real. It is a supposition of existence of something that, strictly speaking, isn’t there. This nothing or abyss has substance, even if it is not a subjective experience, because it is posited as something that exists, for its own sake, and is a catalyst for genesis. Even though it isn’t really there.

Or, more simply, what gives entities substance? I can see, between your abyss and your entity subject substance, infinite explications, one after the other, each of the previous, without ever arriving at anything other than “because magic.” And if magic, why bother with the abyss?

Zoot Allures:

I… I respect what you are attempting too much. No reply. I might check your forum out.

Iambiguous

Nothing matters if you don’t subsist from day to day because you are dead.

If you do subsist, somehow, anyhow, you care about things other than assuring that subsistence. In the cases of most extreme precariousness, it may simply boil down to booze. In África, it is often football. And witchcraft. And innumerable other things.

You say genes and memes. Where do those come from? I don’t mean substance, which doesn’t exist. I mean, why are they? Why do I care?

Not true, for I had said: “What really creates is the abyss ‘beneath’ all semblance of entities.” Semblance of entities, ergo semblance of substance.

“Because magic” is just another way of saying “because some abyss”.

All of you seem to still believe in “God”. That is, all of you seem to have the misconception that being is a function of origin. In reality, origins are functions of being. Being cant have an origin. Origins also are.

The abyss, this unfathomable “magic” or whatever “from” which you see being as having to have emerged, is simply the consistency, “truthfulness” of being that you have, in the deep offer thoughts, not yet attained. This is why I say that most humans do not exist; they walk around as functions of ideas that don’t pertain to existence. They live as functions of non-existence. So they vote for Clinton and horrible shit like that.

See you gotta turn this around, humans.
You dont have the right or power to question existence.
You have the humble power to attain to it, to partake in it.

It is not your right to know the origin of all origins.
And yet I have offered you the power of that knowledge.

So what is my offering other than a challenge to become more than you are? And therefore most take offence. Understanding VO is work; effort; understanding it is tantamount to being the origin of existence itself.

Or more properly, being origin to existence without the little title words.

Who is to say the future didn’t come first? It is after all ahead of us.

“Semblance of entities, ergo semblance of substance.”

Ok. Semblance of what? What is it that these entities are semblances of?

Because, if you are saying that there is never substance but only the idea of substance, then it is just a made up thing, and the abyss nothing is some made up thing. What makes it up? I have an answer that doesn’t use made up substance to explain it: will to power.

“‘Because magic’ is just another way of saying ‘because some abyss’.”

Neither explains its own genesis. Will to power explains the genesis of both.

Or, another way. They are both imaginary, without a link to the real. Now, I have no problem with this. Leibniz’s answer was “because God,” and he wrote some damn fine philosophy. My problem is hierarchical. You claim Value Ontology stands at the base of will to power. But will to power explains VO without using imaginary solutions, without appealing to substance. Leaving nothing out.