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.
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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.
Jakob:
Origins are not. There is no origin.
It is this that is hard to attain to. Genesis is not origin. It is already a thing. But being has genesis.
or·i·gin
ˈôrəjən/Submit
noun
1.
the point or place where something begins, arises, or is derived.
“a novel theory about the origin of oil”
synonyms: beginning, start, commencement, origination, genesis, birth, dawning, dawn, emergence, creation, birthplace, cradle;
genesis
noun [ U ] US /ˈdʒen·ə·səs/
the time when something came into existence; the beginning or origin:
the genesis of life on earth
Basically, I see both these words as having the same meaning.
What to you is already a thing? Genesis or origin? Insofar as both can be said to be “events” I suppose one can say that they are things being that they eventually cause the physical to happen.
You mean the concept that the Universe to you has no origin, genesis or beginning?
If it IS hard to attain to, to grasp, then why are you seemingly absolutist about your conclusion?
Do scientists in actuality know enough to be able to say that they know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is/was no origin or genesis to the Universe[s]? Might this just your subjective thinking, Pedro?
In the conventional picture of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang is the beginning of time. This is one of the greatest mysteries in science, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to work out how to make sense of the moment when, in that picture, the universe emerged from a point of infinite density and temperature—what’s known as the initial singularity. I’m exploring the idea that the singularity was not the beginning of time. In this new view, time didn’t have a beginning, and the Big Bang resulted from a collision of branes, sheetlike spaces that exist within a higher-dimensional reality. These collisions might happen repeatedly, creating an eternal, cyclic universe. We are now close to having the first mathematically and logically complete, consistent description of the passage of a universe through a singularity.
discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/13 … ing-or-end
That being the case, would it not stand to reason that there was some kind of an origin/genesis Somewhere?
True, time and these words are human constructs BUT his hypothesis suggests to me that there had to be a beginning although it suggests to him that there was not. Would we, could we, discount these branes within a higher-dimensional reality, as evidence toward some kind of a genesis?
Of course, I may be completely wrong here.
If there is no time outside of existence, then “what’s it all about Alfie” and what is it, Alfie?
I think that our puny brains as of yet (and perhaps never) do not have the capacity to KNOW either way. But wouldn’t it be nice.
Not of Being, in any case. There are many origins but they are all embedded into being.
But such genesis is no different from the being it… engenders.
Heidegger refers to this as “physis”, or “sprouting-commanding”, unfortunately translated.
Being is its own genesis. But when man is grounded in memories and wishes, he is not actually there. (Dasein is being-there)
Consider that not all understand the WtP as well as you do.
Consider that we might need your full disclosure. Synthesis of substances proves substance, proves it to exist as a function of its reacting with another substance.
The being that is inside the reacting is self-valuing. Willing.
HAHA. Faust preferred God exists therefore blah blah over blah blah therefore God exists. I suppose Leibniz combined the two.
Do you remember or even know Impenitent?
He was early to recommend Leibniz to me.
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I don’t mean to speak for Sauwelios.
But:
It is precisely because WtP left a question (to me) that I cracked it open into VO.
I did not find the WtP to logically follow from itself. I had to amend it by including all of experience into the notion. One way of saying what I did. I had to show how one quantum of WtP can touch another, in concrete, practical, scientific terms.
In “valuing”, all of the world is palpably and inevitably included. It is the touchstone to validify WtP operations.
It refers the WtP to itself by referring ourselves, through the WtP, to ourselves.
Mind.
The Abyss is the Mind.
When man finds himself standing before it, he is deciding whether or not he will dare to attain to full consciousness, including total honesty before his instincts. A prolonged trepidation here is what is what Kierkegaard lived through and named Sickness unto Death.
As Bill advised me way back
A definition of magic: the opposite of fear.
Thinking happens through relating concepts in ways that crack open these concepts so that the implications of their constructs flow out like Nektar.
What happens between concepts is the WtP. Even what happens between the Will to Power and the Will to Power!
Yes, that is precisely where I found the self valuing logic of being.
HAIL!
Hiedegger I will leave, out of hygene, well and alone.
I do notice that you use Being and being similarly to Oliver’s abyss and entity. So the questión remains, what brings these substantial things into existence. You say Being has no origin. Well nothing does. Things just are. But something makes them be. We call this moment when they come to be, genesis. Being has a genesis.
The genesis of things is when they begin to matter. They don’t exist outside that.
See, you want to trace the substance that begat substance. I need only know when this started to matter. The big bang and alternate theories are only expansions of physics. But genesis, even of the world, is not physical.
That physics works when tested? Well, it is called will to power, not will to imagination. Again, that power exists doesn’t prove the unity or constancy of standards of power, because contradicting standards work and produce power. It is not power that produces power, but will to power. And will to power wills only will to power.
What goes for physics goes for logic. Will to power is not explained by logic, it is rather the other way around. Logic exists within genealogy.
My point exactly.
Fancy ways of agreeing with me don’t mean you form a challenge.
Up your game.
Don’t tell me what I “want” when all I can do is overflow.
I don’t have anything to prove.
I can just enjoy, like the Sun, those who bask in my glory.
Don’t you get it? Will and representation.
You just have to like it, unlike Schopie.
Hey Mitrapriest, do you think thats the case, that Shopenhauer basically understood the principle of will to power as the interpeter-usurper nature behind all appearances, but just dreaded it because he wasn’t sanguine enough?
I think thats very possible. Probably Nietzsche hid behind his contradiction to Wagner his real mirror-image. Schopenhauer needs perhaps to be appreciated to fully gain knowledge of VO. I must admit that reading Will and Imagination in 2003 was a feverish experience of power. Of a power too great to be health for me at that point. Perhaps it wasn’t even power, but the precise antithesis of it that Schopenhauer first built, as a context for the will to it to crystallize. I can’t truly be sure, as reading it was indeed a fever.
The transition from Kant to Schopenhauer is from the Thing to the Phenomenon.
In Kant, the Thing is Noumenal. In Schopenhauer the Noumenon is destroyed. But the thing survives, and, having shed its immortal coil, appears to Schopenhauer as a terribly flat screen of projection. Nietzsche realized the blissful eternal reality that exists in parallel to all thin appearances; the apparently existing will to such an image, which apparently possesses magical powers to pull off such a thing and have us live inside it.
This is how art mesmerizes, because it shows us the will of the artist. But that is for real art, Greek art, Roman art, and good films and cathedrals. Novels like the Lord of the Rings, too. It mesmerizes because it is superhuman to will something like that into existence. It defies all logic. Why would you need something like that? (War.) Only because the world is will and representation. But we can’t know that. So we opt to look at the story and disappear into it and drink in every aspect of life through its vessels. All of it is deep nothingness.
Our will for there not to be nothing mesmerizes us in the presence of artistic genius which is the power for there to be something.
Dionysos terrifies and shakes up the order of things but this chaos is only to distract us, intoxicate us so as to be able to endure the deeper presence, which is the non-being of identity, the fact that all belong to a giant consuming flame; the identity of experience is restored with Apollo.
But what I have deciphered through Apollo is what lies within Dionysos. What is the cause to the consuming flame. It is the very same hardness that Apollo manifests, to allow for the experience of the loss and gain of identity. Identity is nothing but a relatively stable flame. In stormy season, look for you identity in the flickering shadows on the wall. But at the core of identity is power, configuration, ability to demonstrate, to appear.
Phenomenon is the end goal. Theory traces the path toward it. Science tells its story. But the plot has thickened as of late.
Lets reroute this to the old philosophers too.
If Power is the Thing, then Power is the Good.
Power is will to power because being happens through time.
it needs to constantly establish what it is. Thus it perpetuates time, as it weaves a tapestry of it.
the future is power. Thus, the present is a tapestry of timelines begging for our attention. Wills to power are timelines.
Orlog is the war inside of genealogy. Different timelines colliding and birthing third ones, inside of which they compete. Nietzsche prescribes politics vis a vis such drives, he wishes for us to rank our drives, our ancestral gifts, all of them problems, and rank them so as for all problems together to form a solution. The solution is a unified will;
“Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. ‘Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans’—Pindar already knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death—our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? ‘I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,’ sighs modern man. This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No."
Ice is bark of rivers
and roof of the wave
and destruction of the doomed.
“Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds! We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum—abundance, tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, ‘resignation.’ In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark—for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”