New Moon Ashes

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49

December 22, 2012

50

Far Away

Mind is going in a million
places
Too far away for a single
presence
Lightning! Present! One voice is heard:
What is the next way to step?
WAR, my precious,
war for the living.
war for finding the places

Timón Echurroneo December 20, 2012

51

Life does suck – It is undeniable that this is the first principle of any analysis of the preexisting, of that which exists without action. If there is no struggle, living sucks. Do we really think that this hasn’t been an active pressure in the evolutionary development of our psyches?

Timón Echurroneo
December 19, 2012

52

That Safe Place in your Mind – El enemigo es ese, y contra él peleamos furiosamente. Por lo menos en lo que a lo que importa concierne.

Timón Echurroneo
December 19, 2012

53

Coliseo – La participación pública sólo se puede dar en formato coliseo. Debe haber reglas que indiquen quién puede hacer qué, cuándo y cómo. Así, cada quien puede traicionar al sistema de su propia manera y, eventualmente, rendírsele por completo. Es porque el formato coliseo establece puntos de referencia que le dan contexto jerárquico (jerárquico aquí en su amplio sentido que incluye las jerarquías abstractas, hasta de abstracciones) al proceso.

Tanto los espectadores como los participantes tienen claro cuáles son los elementos que no cambiarán pese a lo que se diga, normalmente establecidas, incluso, presuposiciones sub y semiconscientes respecto al resultado final por declararse (aunque éste no sea el resultado que importe).

Timón Echurroneo
December 19, 2012

(I couldn’t help myself… edited an accent that wasn’t properly added in the original).

54

Locura – ¿Qué es locura? Es las partes desheredadas de nuestro ser. Todo sistema tiene la necesidad de dar espacio a las partes desheredadas de sus sujetos, necesita poder ponerlas en cuarentena; más, es común usar elementos desheredados y el desheredo en sí dentro del funcionamiento de apego al sistema.

No es entonces un escape o alternativa pura, sino un experimentar de los residuos de la fábrica subjetivizante del sistema.

Timón Echurroneo
December 19, 2012

Wow there with the powerful psychoanalysis!

55

Historicismo de pensar en pequeño – No es Chávez, no es la oposición, no es el imperio transnaciona- no, bueno, sí es el imperio transnacional. Él es el mánager de lo que es verdaderamente enemigo de nosotros: la vejez y la estupidez. En sí, esas cosas son eventos naturales que no pasan de ser estorbos, lo vemos en los viejos estúpidos que nadie se toma en serio. Son las tradiciones, recuerdos de recuerdos de cómo recordar, las que inspiran a nuestra joven curiosidad con sus obscuridades lo suficiente como para complementar al condicionamiento clásico en la receta de cómo ser un viejo estúpido poderoso.

No nos engañemos: el racionalismo, todo lo que vino de la ilustración, también es tradición.

¿Argumento contra la tradición?

Timón Echurroneo
December 19, 2012

Damn, fuck, I went deep.

56

Pecar – ¿Por qué las iglesias necesitan tildar de “pecado” a todo lo que es grande y aventurezco? Es como si sólo el peso de algo igualmente grandioso lo pudiera aniquilar: el “mal,” que es poco más que “prohibido” con una cláusula de “mientras más preguntes, peor.” El miedo al mal es, tout simplement, el miedo al castigo. El juicio moral (por ejemplo) es estrictamente a posteriori.

Timón Echurroneo
December 19, 2012

Oh my Lord. I’m gonna translate this one.

i Sin[/i] - Why must churches brand as “sin” everything that is great and adventurous? It is as if only something equally great could annihilate it: “evil,” which is little more than “forbidden” with a clause of “the more you ask, the worst (it gets).” Fear of evil is, tout simplement, fear of punishment. The moral judgement (for example) is strictly a posteriori.

57

Hahaha, I hope promethean doesn’t read that last one.

58

Spunky as a pristine philosopher
Maybe an the age of Spanish philosophy is at hand.

59

an the age. I like that.

I mean, its not like there isn’t a bunch of shit to be done there.
Over there in the Spanish world.

60

Where they got them, roasted fishes, and donkeys on mountainsides with untold stories hidden in bean sacks, where they invented the potato.

61

There certainly is a bunch of shit to be done there.

62

63

Goddamnit that’s a cool gif.

64

Absolutely. It had to be fitting, nay?

Now swallow some air

I

  • Something must exist because “nothing” excludes the active impossibility of something.

  • All beings hold themselves as a standard for their interactions with all else. This holding as a standard is implicitly ‘self-valuing’.

  • The smallest self-valuing is able only to value in terms of itself negatively. It’s “valuing” is a deflection of which it is not.

II

  • As two different self-valuings deflect nothingness, two things are created:
  1. Space – the mutually deflected, mutual nothingess, rudimentary ‘value’
  2. Relativity / Power / Force / Causation / Affectance (Rational Metaphysics term) – the deflecting of positive not-selves.

  • Affectance is self-valuing-interaction.

  • A self-valuing is even in ‘a grain of noise’ - as soon as noise starts to affect other noise, there is differentiation, and this implies ‘thingness’ something is differentiated from something.

  • The fact of difference precludes absolute dissolution.

  • In the case of affectance, self-valuings value each other negatively in terms of their structural nature as deflectors, but they do behave similarly, and are thus perform similar actions. All deflect both nothingness, and each other.

  • What comes to exist like this is any geometrical form. The simplest form to imagine is the circle: all self-valuings deflect each other ‘to the side’, while simultaneously deflecting nothingess inward, where it is concentrated (pushed away from all directions) and outward, where it is pushed away in all directions, except to the center and to the side. Affectance fields are here circular, with the force distributed in the ‘border’. Inward it is ‘weak’.

III

  • Such organizations of nothingness-deflectings may emerge so as to come into contact with each other. Due to the quantity of affect of such organizations, the greater things that come into each others proximity are, the more different they are from each other, and the stronger they are deflected. But in some cases, the deflected negative existence of a ‘sphere of affect’ is so great that smaller spheres are drawn to deflect it as well, and ‘join the circle’, the affect-field. In that case, the affect field, a ‘form’, grows and is able to absorb even greater ‘others’.

  • The deflection of nothingness is the first priority. In the image of the deflection imprinted on itself, the self-valuing recognizes itself. This creates the terms of it’s self-valuing’ - its standard of value.

  • Such a standard can be recognized by other entities, and deflected (negatively valued) as well.

  • Once two co-deflecting self-valuings ‘come to terms’, they positively value each other in terms of their own self-valuing (their deflecting nothingess), but as negative. They repel each other while positively ‘recognizing’ the shared object of negative valuation.

  • This explains why when we value in terms of our self-valuing (when we really value), we ‘push’ - the greater the ‘fight’, the greater the resistance to nothingness. We seek to overpower, but first and foremost we seek to engage, that whichever ‘speaks to us’, is also inevitably that which has the power to absorb us.

  • Survival as a form depends on the capacity to translate that which is appropriated in the circle of affect in terms of the pre-existing form. ‘Selective forms’ remain, other forms are respectively dissolved or transformed into selective forms. Sometimes selective forms are overpowered by far greater, but far less selective forms.

IV

  • The more selective a form is in what it can ‘use’ in terms of deflecting nothingness, the more capable it is to resist change.

  • The more selective a form is, the more specific the terms by which it values, and the more specific its self-valuing.

  • Man is a supremely selective form. The more selective man is, the more we can speak of a ‘self’.

  • Becoming conscious of being as self-valuing means: establishing a finalized Being. It means to have defeated the chance of being transformed by the very nature of being (deflecting non-being) itself - it means successfully ‘imprinting being on becoming’.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

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Value Cosmology Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value Cosmology Value Cosmology Icon_minitimeThu Sep 19, 2019 5:29 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
“Why is there something and not rather nothing?”

We can dismantle this question by putting “nothing” in its proper place;

Something exists because nothing stands in its way.

ˆˆ
“nothing” is destroyed.
Thus existence stands proven.

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The God who is not Abstract Empty
PostSubject: The God who is not Abstract The God who is not Abstract Icon_minitimeWed Oct 23, 2019 9:58 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
God is a concept, but it was always considered abstract. Non-empirical. But how in the hell could god be anything other than the most empirical facts of life?
How in Hell indeed.

Christ is the transfiguration of the spirit and in as far as he went we are in his debt. But what remains is the descent of man into matter voluntarily. Nietzsche announced it, going down and will to power - but now, we are in the valley, where Nietzsche is true but no instrument - and we must go up. Ascend, not look down on man and laugh, and congregate with truth on mountaintops and distant shores, but ascend as truth.

These “we” are far and few, willing and aware, or maybe we are many! Who knows? Only on the rise does the rising-lording which is becoming know itself and thereby births itself as a being. Knowledge is power because knowledge is being - that which is not primarily discernible as flux. Illusion or Maya? No, the machinery of the universe. So in this machinery rises the figurehead, the mediator between power-as-such and want of power - this mediator is the will to power. The image, on account of which being comes out of its its hiding.

“Foundations” - suggestions, openings, angles “Foundations” - suggestions, openings, angles Icon_minitimeMon Feb 13, 2017 6:29 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Fixed Cross was wandering across the deserted morning forum, kicking up some gravel and acting like a child, at least in his movements. In his minds heart he was searching for a way to begin a conversation, with Thrasymachus, his who was bound to arrive soon, about that philosophers theory, which he had kept close to his chest for years. Fixed Cross now felt the desire to set the theory free from his friends mind, and allow it to swoop across the Earths skies to impress humans of all quarters.

Pondering for a way to tempt Thrasymachus to spill his guts, to show the back of his tongue, Fixed Cross then saw his friend enter the forum-floor, which was still wet with dew, of which hovered a film of half condensing, half evaporating above the polished rocks of the plateau. And as the men walked toward one another, a strange question dawned on Fixed Cross, of which he himself did not divine the meaning. As he finally shook his friends hand and greeted him, he asked him the following:

I wonder, if you look at the sky above us, infinitely rich with light, but dense also with dark particles that can steal the light for themselves and form black and cold formations, do you see anything to do with truth?

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

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“Foundations” - suggestions, openings, angles Empty
PostSubject: Re: “Foundations” - suggestions, openings, angles “Foundations” - suggestions, openings, angles Icon_minitimeSat Sep 16, 2017 12:02 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
I’ve come up with an initial name for my new philosophy: Tricore Tectonics. TT will be the name I use for now for this new philosophy that I begin developing in my recent book, until a better name is found. I agree the name isn’t ideal, I need something better. Recommendations are welcome.

Let’s combine VO, The Daemonic and TT into a new exoteric set of symbols-ideas that can serve as an outward conceptual system for others to understand. Parodites proposed this once, let’s do it. Fuck this society, it is dissolving around us under the new Marx-Jesus figure, so let’s at least try to birth something that can grip the decay and transform it anew once the current civilization finally breaks down.

Fundamental ideas in each philosophy:

TT: truth, power and fantasy-image as each irreducible and fundamental. These three living as cores which interact and together animate and create what is called life/subjectivity.

VO: value, self-valuing

Daemonic: excess, reification as anti-dialectics, real vs ideal, and the heroic-daemonic consciousness.

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Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Empty
PostSubject: Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Icon_minitimeWed Feb 15, 2012 3:47 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
On ILP, Jakob wrote:

Quote :
From Nietzsche’s notebooks:
Quote :
Und er wusste seine Tugend nicht zu überwinden.
Der Löwe in ihm zerriss das Kind in ihm: und endlich frass der Löwe sich selber.

Grausam war dieser Held und wild - -
Seht, ich lehre euch die Liebe zum Übermenschen.

      • lud er auf sich und zerbrach under der Last.
        The second part seems a context to the first, which reads:

“And he did not manage to overcome / conquer his virtue.
The lion in him tore up the child in him, and finally the lion devoured himself.”

A fascinating observation of one of the ways in which the chain of metamorphoses can be broken.
I’ve been pondering this since I read it, and haven’t fully grasped in a rational manner in which ways the lions virtue needs to be overcome to become a child.

Does anyone have experience with overcoming lion-like virtue, to become a self-propelling wheel of creative innocence? Or maybe there are examples, in literature, or other forms of drama, of someone who either suffers the same fate as this cruel hero?

"Inhuman was this hero, and wild - -
See, I teach you the love for the superman.

    • He took it on him and broke under the load."

Is there a causal link between the hero being cruel/inhuman, and his failure to carry the love for the Superman?
It’as possible I simply dont see the meaning.

Now in the great scheme of things that Zarathustra teaches, it is clear to me now that Nietzsche himself “falls under” the Lion category. After all, the
Lion says “I Will”, and Nietzsches ultimate reality consisted of his understanding of the world as will to power. As suggested, I think that Nietzsche, as a Lion, fell pray to his own “grausamkeit”, which is implicit in this view of the world as will to power and nothing besides.

How to transcend this cruelty, this ugliness, this denying of the subject in favor of an objective “monster of energy”? Not by denying the reality of the will to power surely. It could only be done by finding something deeper, truer, or at least as deep and true as the will to power, which at the same time supports, proves and affirms the will to power and delivers from the lack it imposes. And I have found this something, this thinking delivering from the limitations that the Lion imposes on himself by holding to his will so religiously, brutally – this thought is the thought that the fundamental fact of reality, by virtue of which one may will to power, is valuing – valuing as happiness, pleasure, lack, pain – recognition – and for this to exist, there must be a standard to which this value is measured. We can however no longer posit “things” at the root of action/affect – so what exists as a reference, the thing that is experienced as a self (a willing to power) must be at root a self-referential activity, which is not yet an affect. In Netwonean terms – the root of existence, as the purest ground of subjectivity, precedes causality. And no, it is not self-caused, nor is it an active prime-mover – it is only the logical condition on which (the logical notions of) motion and causation may exist.

Rather than “I will (to power)”, the Child says “I am”. This “I” is not a however a thing, an object – the Childs utterance “I am” it is not of the same category as “the child exists”. It refers to the activity of being, which the child has recognied in himself, as self-valuing. He has no standards anymore besides what his very being commands, no, what his being is – and so the spirit has arrived at the other end of the road, which began with the Camel, whose motto is “thou shalt”, whose conscious standard was not in himself but a commanding other. The camel could only know his self-valuing by recognizing its ( own ) superior (e.g. “Lord”, but not “the”, but his Lord) thereby having his self-valuing translated to him by an already further evolved spirit of his own type. Then came the Lion, who realized the necessity of breaking with this otherness. But by breaking with it, the Lion is without self, except for the will to break with otherness. This is the will to overcome, the will to power - the will to a self.

How does the Lion become the Child? By recognizing that this willing-to/over is also a willing-from. Not in the sense of away-from, but from-the-ground-of-x. As long as this “x” is understood as a lack, then the self is unseen. As soon as this feeling-of-lack is affirmed as itself a positive, a property of a positive existing, the real being is drawn out of darkness, and the child is born.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

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Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Icon_minitimeWed Feb 15, 2012 8:43 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
To realize the will to power, which is the world, nullifies your existence as a human subject. You no longer exist as anything more than an incarnation of the world soul, an instance of will to power. The concept itself of will-to-power is a single line long ontology intended to describe all of existence. “Water is wet” is an ontology, but it only describes one small facet of the world. “Will to power,” as an ontology of similar length but much wider scope, essentially means there is a potential that is continuously recycled without ever becoming actual. This potential force is what reality is, and there is no way to “actualize” or “unpack” this energy, as if the world itself were a continually climbing orgasm that cannot be consummated in any release of the built up force. “Will to power” as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized. Thus this ontology implies a world of pure appearance, with no underlying noumenon. There is nowhere for the will to go, so it wills unto power, which is to say, it continues to be precisely that, will, and “eternally proceeds within its own being,” to use Spinoza’s phrase.

But there are ways to maintain your sense of self, even realizing the concept of the world being the will to power. If you were to realize that you were the dream of some God, you would awaken, that is to say, cease to exist… Unless you had a peculiar art for keeping yourself asleep. Unless you began to dream yourself, by embracing yourself as a contributory poet to the overall divine dream. How would we do this, embrace ourselves as contributory wills to “power,” to the monster of energy that is called the world? That is the question that I see value-ontology dealing with. This new contributory self would no longer need to bear or fight, it would no longer be camel or lion, but child. This valuing of the self, of the contributory self, would give birth to both truth and appearance. The truth, that one is a mere instance in the world soul, and the appearance… that one truly exists, that one is a self. As you say "the far more useful idea that value (more precisely the act of valuing) gives rise to both appearance and truth. "

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Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Icon_minitimeFri Feb 17, 2012 5:37 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Parodites wrote:
“Will to power” as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized.
This is a breakthrough insight to me. Truly effective in justifying the move beyond Nietzsche.

Quote :
Thus this ontology implies a world of pure appearance, with no underlying noumenon. There is nowhere for the will to go, so it wills unto power, which is to say, it continues to be precisely that, will, and “eternally proceeds within its own being,” to use Spinoza’s phrase.
This underlying noumenon is of course not something that may be seen to exist from the perspective of (moving beyond) WtP, but rather something into which the perspective collapses once it realizes itself as appearance-to-itself, as appearance creating. True, conscious attainment of selfhood is attained from the awareness of what the will to power is, that is to say, on top of the wtp rather than underneath it, although it is a kind of collapsing-into.

Notions and realizations of selfhood without the WtP have been accomplished of course, but in philosophical terms we’ve had to first attain realization of the WtP, which means a rejection of selfhood in terms of the thing, the noumenon, an embrace of activity/affect as the true substance. But this recognition evolves, via this new thinking, into a truthful notion of the self, one that does not posit anything besides what inescapably is logically true.

Thus, overcoming first the Camel (carrying thing-ness, objectivity, one ones back, as superior to subjectivity) by becoming the Lion (realizing subjectivity as reality) and then overcoming the attachment to the appearance to subjectivity, letting go of the last “clinging” – shedding the fear that without actively willing the will to power (!) as the ultimate reality, it is weakened in oneself. The pride of the Lion is his cage. A beings strength is only unrestrained, natural, when he is not concerned with it. The will to power flows forth naturally from the Child as a contingency to its being, whereas the Lion is solely occupied with this will in order to attain his being – which, as you say, he never does.

Quote :
But there are ways to maintain your sense of self, even realizing the concept of the world being the will to power. If you were to realize that you were the dream of some God, you would awaken, that is to say, cease to exist… Unless you had a peculiar art for keeping yourself asleep. Unless you began to dream yourself, by embracing yourself as a contributory poet to the overall divine dream. How would we do this, embrace ourselves as contributory wills to “power,” to the monster of energy that is called the world? That is the question that I see value-ontology dealing with. This new contributory self would no longer need to bear or fight, it would no longer be camel or lion, but child. This valuing of the self, of the contributory self, would give birth to both truth and appearance. The truth, that one is a mere instance in the world soul, and the appearance… that one truly exists, that one is a self. As you say "the far more useful idea that value (more precisely the act of valuing) gives rise to both appearance and truth. "
Yes. And so the Child is itself a World, from which new appearances are born, from which new wills are born, the ground to new evolving worlds, the power of new camels to bear their future selves as burdens.

" The strong do what they can do and the weak accept what they have to accept. "

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Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Icon_minitimeFri Feb 17, 2012 9:30 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Fixed Cross wrote:
Parodites wrote:
“Will to power” as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized.
This is a breakthrough insight to me. Truly effective in justifying the move beyond Nietzsche.

Strangely coincidental of this, the other day I was thinking that will to power is always a will to power to, or for, or in terms of… that to speak of “the will to power” without regard to any of these is to speak nonsense, to say “God” and no more. Even supposedly “pure” will to power is still “will to power… to… [more] will to power”, supposedly escaping the problem of actualization(-al limitation and constraint) but of course failing to do so. What is really interesting then, bearing in mind that to speak of will to power is to speak of an in terms of, for, of – and that to abstract will to power to the highest power of abstraction is to reduce the meaning of the term, through asymptotic regression to the limit of absurdity – is that every for is also (and even more so!) a from. In order to actualize one must place oneself at the mercy of certain limits, be an abeyance the result of necessarily constrictive forces which narrow through an imposition of the existence of ‘negative’ domains, empty space, void/s. From the perspective of that which wills, and of its power/s, these voids do not, cannot exist. Such (relative) ontic and ontological ‘gaps’ are a price of delimitation.

Conceptually this meshes with what you discuss here, arriving at the same point through a slightly different path: that the will to power is insufficient to break these barrier into “reality”, to attend to a becoming-real – to creating. The metaphysical heart of the will to power is thus revealed. To totally avoid this metaphysical appeal one must speak only of wills to powers, and thus a new unifying principle becomes necessary to bind these together into a new synthesized, useful, comprehensive understanding. Clearly will to power itself is inadequate to act as such a unifying principle. This is where value ontology (as well as, among other things, Heidegger’s Da-sein) steps in, filling in the “unavoidable remainder” of gap-void inevitably left over from will to power’s becoming actual/being applied. Valu(ing) becomes the ‘verb’ by which predicate unites with subject, subject with predicate. Whereas the upper limit (as abstracted-reified will to power) approaches meaninglessness and unreality, we have found the beginnings of a “lower limit”, of which value ontology now acts as an early tracing.

“Be clever, Ariadne! …
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself? …
I am your labyrinth …”. -N

“Cause I’m just a man… flesh and venom.” -Cowboy Troy
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PostSubject: Re: Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Icon_minitimeFri Feb 17, 2012 11:36 am Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
This criticism of the will to power on ontological and psychological grounds demonstrates that the subject, the human subject, requires something beyond itself in order to establish the language necessary to realize a structure it can embody. Alone, the Nietzschean self cannot be actualized- it is not properly a self, rather a “selves.” To be actualized the self requires a limit, without it, it cannot be articulated. Kierkegaard says as much in declaring “despair” to be the fundamental nature of the human being, it is not a psychiatric ill that can be cured, it is human nature itself, the basic incompleteness of that nature, and can be relieved only by God, the limit. Systems of religion, philosophy, and metaphysics- systems which have provided limits of this kind, have concealed the real truth which is that it is the subject which is onto-logically primary, not what is limiting it, meaning that the act of value and creation by which the self is realized becomes disfigured, is seen as a moment of subordination, of being encapsulated by the limit. If this was not the case, then the creative act would continue indefinitely, the self would be perpetually “realized,” that is, created.

This “onto-logical primacy” of the subject which would allow that creative moment to persist, I have articulated with the concept of the daemonic.

This thread ties a lot of stuff together, you should put it in production.

A sik þau trûðu

Nisus ait, “Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?”

Have the gods set this ruling passion in my heart,
or does each man’s furious passion become his god?

  • Virgil.

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must
from time to time be present.-- Antonin Artaud
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Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit Icon_minitimeSat Sep 12, 2015 2:58 pm Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Delete this post View IP address of poster
Will to Power and nothing besides is exactly the same concept as Allmighty, Omnipresent Pure Love God.

Not something to be overcome, but an overcoming.

Like chaos. To regard chaos is absurd, but it is an answer to Universality.

In both cases, the overcoming slaps through a taste of truth that leaves no doubt.

This is the way of Will to Power, of Chaos, old forms are not discarded but digested, nay, used, overcome.

But why the focus on such madness? Much more did Nietzsche write about the superman. The question of the child and the superman: is this world ready for a lion, fully? The mistake was to think the metamorphosis required only an individual effort, a child would be bored as fuck in this age and die of loneliness.

“The superman has always happened as a happy mistake (usually a brutal, bloody one), but the project has not yet been undertaken to breed one, a family, a people.” Paraphrased, of course, parantheses mine.

Anyway, I think the OP was brilliantly on the right track: feeling of lack seen as a positive.

There’s a metamorphosis.
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“He did not manage to overcome his Virtue”: someoneisatthedoor.

Marxism is this selfdevouring Lionesque semiinstinct.

65

Since man has become aware of death and of himself and time, of being, and required Dasein, his actions have been commanded by whatever he imagined to be his possible futures. Dasein draws as the bridge concept along the banks of the pure flux the cultivating from the self-valuing into the world, its dharma, as it draws itself from its future.

The past has long been dead, war and genocide is just melancholy. Which in turn is always a symptom of a lack of imagination.

A bow to Schopenhauer is always justified.
A man one could never hail - noted.

"The particular follow-through of the entity after its identification of it

s world by drawing in experience, determines not the extent to which he will follow through that particular experience. His identity is reflected wholly of his ethics, his working, warring or simply waking - or on the other hand a wanting, worrying, wrecking ‘code’ - continuity of action, value-projection by anticipation. Here is the technical definition of ‘the power of faith’ - the gift of being allowed to project an infinity of value, by the declaring of love for an infinite bestowing virtue. "

Politics of the Anvil

We must implement a morality into the masses.
they must be hard enough to sustain the breeding of higher men
consistent enough.
We must find common values in healthy ‘races’.
I do not believe in the value of race-distinction in building culture - except where it comes to great numbers, great enough to carry stupidities as laws.

But then it’s simply tribes, or families or clans, not races.

Of course I do ‘believe’ in biological differences, and thus also in cognitive differences.

But quality is quite fairly shared among the races.
Positive racism has me speak this - Arabs are spirited, Chinamen are smart, Blacks are bold, Indjuns are deep, and white men are philosophical, or ‘problematic’. We have problematized human existence to the point of making it actually ‘human’ - and the left is our fault.

We, Greeks, have created the left.

Once, we intended something with it. I forget what.

kek no, but now we have it. It’s pasta. It’s text. It’s everywhere. It’s in the cokey, it’s in the street, it’s in the heart. The left is a means, or must be made so.

Am I hyperbolic?
But what other way to address the left.

A morality is already brewing. I know the ingredients. Names like Lela, Anastasia, - .
government of muses

just dropping some spiraling Ash seeds, some first motions.

Ontology

[i]existence
late 14c., “reality,” from O.Fr. existence, from M.L. existentia/exsistentia, from existentem/exsistentem (nom. existens/exsistens) “existent,” prp. of L. existere/exsistere “stand forth, appear,” and, as a secondary meaning, “exist, be;” from ex- “forth” (see ex-) + sistere “cause to stand”. (see assist).

  • online etymology dictionary
    [/i]

I have heard it often said in a Nietzschean context that ontology, as epistemology, is metaphysics, and therefore has no place in a Netzschean philosophy (by which is understood a world-affirming one), which must aim at describing particulars and dismiss the notion of universals. It seems to me that this would mean that the will-to-power, as a universal definition of being, must be disregarded by such Nietzscheans, as it is an ontology. But I consider the idea that ontology is the study of universals a mistake. At the root of this mistake is the idea that terms describing many, or even all perceivable particulars, are necessary universals, and thereby metaphysical. This error has to do with the idea of cosmic totality. The universe as a neatly limited collection of things, itself a thing. Whether we understand ‘thing’ as ‘object’, ‘force’, or even ‘subject’ as Nietzsche does, such a notion is not founded in observation and deduction, i.e. scientific method, but it is nothing but an assumption. The very notion of universals is dependent on the possibility of a definable totality.

The philosophy I am developing departs from the assumption that the universe is a neatly limited quantity, and necessarily a closed system. The law of conservation of energy may not apply to the universe (and there are indications that energy increases). More matter may come into existence. More matter may stand forth, appear. And I think that this is indeed what happens. It is possible that universe (as being) did not come into existence in its entirety, by Gods hand or by the Big Bang (effectively the same idea, a pushing back of the problem of origin behind an impressive display of power) but bit-by-bit, as matter began to stand forth / appear out of chaos, or no-thingness. This chaotic non-existence is thereby taken as the limit to existence – but, and herein lies the epistemic ground to this new philosophy, this limit is understood as the limit of our mind, and not pertaining to objectivity in any way.

Epistemology and ontology are ultimately the same study. The study of being is the same as the study of knowledge. When we study what exists, we must also study in what way we can know. To not understand this is to believe in the thing-in-itself. Such understanding necessitates either belief in God or the active abandonment of reason. Belief in God being the passive abandonment of reason. What we must do instead is to refine reason, beyond its crude delineations of binary logic. Nature gives us no reason to think that we must conceive of existence in terms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, of 1 and 0, which are mutually exclusive and cannot follow from each other. Such is an artifice that only applies to abstractions, not to life. Philosophy must leave behind this abstraction, and become as life. The strange logics of Heidegger are the beginnings of this process.

without-music
Ontology

Very good. Bataille might be useful on this point. Any system will produce its own excess; the pent-up energy must be spent. He locates such “spending” in historical phenomena like human sacrifice and seemingly trivial commonplaces like the sexual act. So much energy is squanderd in the sexual act; one must be abundant, overflowing beforehand. Such spending, I think, is the task of the artist: as sublimation. Of course, the obscene underbelly of every sublimation is a repression. And so the question must become: what is it that is being repressed in a spending of excess? Of course, Bataille meant this in the socio-economic sense. How noble an undertaking it would be to explode the barriers to his thought, to develop it on an ontological scale. I like the idea, I wonder how far one might take it.

In any case: I count myself among those Nietzscheans unwilling to give up ontology. You’ve spoken well on the reasons why.

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What we must do instead is to refine reason, beyond its crude delineations of binary logic.
Indeed, existence precedes logic, which is an emphatically human, all-too-human affair. To transgress it: ah, fresh air!

Defenders of the Earth
Ontology

. . .it is indeed possible to exist without the leap in question and still retain an act-ual grounding . . . Can there be a boundary, a limit around existence? How, if existence is “all there is”?

What is important to differentiate is that “is is” is not belief in “thing-in-itself”, since the is of is, isness as such, need not be thing-ness. You have described this point very well, I think. I would say that chaotic no-thingness is the best rendering of this I have seen. Indeed where you describe this on ILP as “flat time-space” we can conceptualize what is really going on here, and this sits perfectly with on the one hand the notion of isness and on the other hand the understanding that “nothingness”, as in “absolute nothing” is a fallacious and nonsensical concept.

All this amounts to the following: we can finally move on from philosophy’s misguided attempts to derive the is. We now, thanks to value-ontology, have a logico-conceptual framework with which to understand this situation. We have attained a ground, both a certain truth (somethingness) and a framework that allows us to construct upon this ground, and to construct in such a way that does not contradict, implicitly or otherwise, this grounding itself. We win the ability to move forward, to project FROM a solid point and into the FUTURE. Of course this projecting takes place with respect to valuation/s.

No more need to argue over epistemology vs ontology vs metaphysics vs thing-in-itself vs universality vs first-cause and all that nonsense. Whew, what a relief! Now, to me, the next step might be to attempt a conceptual synthetic analysis of logic and value, one in terms of the other. This would serve to provide a basic structure or dwelling-place that could serve as the foundation - attached solidly to the ground - of what can be built afterward. I think my enumeration on isometry and the soul is a sort of accidental first-step in this direction, the direction of erecting the first solid dwelling-place on being.

without-music
Ontology

A quick question, to get at the heart of this new idea: as I understand it (and I must make explicit that I intend to think this idea properly and vigorously when I am again in possession of free time; I sense the power in it, the newness), value-ontology is a contribution of primordiality to the will to power. That is: it grounds the will to power, which is itself a valuing – but what/who values? – in the subject who self-values. Such self-valuation is ubiquitous, to be sure, for it must be – otherwise whence come the play of forces that comprise our world? The question, then: are all forces grounded in a subject, are all “things” to be understood as subjectivities? Perhaps you (either of you, for I sense that aletheia has quite the grasp on this idea now) might say a few words on this…

Fixed Cross
Ontology

without-music wrote:
A quick question, to get at the heart of this new idea: as I understand it (and I must make explicit that I intend to think this idea properly and vigorously when I am again in possession of free time; I sense the power in it, the newness), value-ontology is a contribution of primordiality to the will to power. That is: it grounds the will to power, which is itself a valuing – but what/who values? – in the subject who self-values. Such self-valuation is ubiquitous, to be sure, for it must be – otherwise whence come the play of forces that comprise our world?
Precisely. The will to power definition, as much as it aspires to be the universal truth, is still a particular formulation. The formulation is imperfect, as it includes very ambiguous terms, “will” and “power” As Sauwelios has frequently and accurately noted, the will-to-power is not to be confused with merely the combination of these two terms. As Nietzsche writes, “will” as such is meaningless. It only makes sense combined when an object is attached to the term. In “to power”, Nietzsche found a universally applicable object to all wills. A small problem is that the word “power” needs to be stretched in its meaning to have this make sense. For instance, how can the experience of love be explained as power? And it must, for men yearn for this. The answer the Nietzschean will give is simple: we interpret this experience as the “feeling of power” You will see that Nietzsche confirms this, and that Nietzscheans build on this confirmation. “Love” has been interpreted in term of “will” “power” - but also “feeling”. And indeed that the will to power is described as an affect, including willing, power and the feeling of power, which is willing to more power, which is the basic feeling. Nietzsche has well defined an outward motion. “of what”? Absurd question.

Heidegger continued on this, most notably with his unfolding-mastering. He approached with this the subject-ness of the subjective, reaching for a definition of it as an apparatus of sorts. A technical definition. He reached into myth and complexities of the word “being” and “becoming”. He also gave examples of such unfolding, most famously perhaps his description of how culture emerges around the bridge, which is beautiful but in my eyes ultimately a failed attempt (as perhaps also the unfinished work Time and Being which I have not entirely read) to include the subjective into super perspective. A lot of art was needed to make this work. And as dense as his literature is, he is of course a phenomenal writer, as all philosophers are. This is perhaps even a (somewhat postmodern) definition of a philosopher - exceptionally interesting writer.

What Heidegger set out to do was to define the willing-to-power, to turn the noun into a verb. But with this he disrupted the formula, because wil-to-power is neither noun nor verb. It breaches the gap between the two, it explains exactly the relation between subject and object, so that neither are further necessary. It does so only in the terms will and power. The world had hereby been defined in one of its necessities. Heidegger apparently thought that this definition was not sufficient. Because it made of Heraclitean poetic insight a cold hard law. Heidegger sought to envision the inner dynamics of the will to power – which means the inner dynamics of the world. He did so in many ways, but he was (mostly) describing what happened as seen from the outside.

The inside is rather simple. In the consciousness of both N. and H the importance of grammar was deeply ingrained. H. tried to break it, condemned it, in the end accepted it, Nietzsche mastered it. But what they both did not do was to seek grammar in its origin – vocabulary.

What is the most important word? Where does grammar take root?
It is in this locus of origin that we find ourselves when we examine the term value.

I have simply drawn the conclusion of bringing willing to power down to valuing – after all, what is “a quantum of energy” but a “value”? And is this not “all that matters”?

What I am interested in is the consistency of a value. There I approach the subject, and the importance of value theory as a psychological means, in which I have said that it exceed will to power in its usefulness – in its value, in its empowering quality. Instead of defining the whole thing in terms, as the will to power does, and thereby limits, we break open the term “will” to “self”. A violation of Nietzschean law. Thereby do we at once define “power” in a much more detailed way, and far less cold. More is included in the definition. We see that what the will wants is more of itself. And what is this self, that it may be more? Something that can be measured against itself.

There’s the logic, I feel as if I approach it from the outside.

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The question, then: are all forces grounded in a subject, are all “things” to be understood as subjectivities? Perhaps you (either of you, for I sense that aletheia has quite the grasp on this idea now) might say a few words on this…
It is fortunate that you should ask this. Now I have a reason to bring up something that may be quite controversial. I 'v been meaning to bring up something related to the neutrino experiment. It might be, if we work from the theory that being as (such) - beings, entities is self-valuing / valuing in terms of self-value, which must be both logically and scientifically be understood as a mechanism (a form in time), that neutrino’s are in fact not engaged in this mechanism. I consider this suggestion legitimate because they are not observed, their existence is derived from assumptions.
They are “compounds” of properties detected after an observed particle, to which such properties were attributed, is been disintegrated.

What is observed to travel faster than light is a set of properties to be registered by a measuring system, involving a type of matter to which such properties apply, whereby they can be measured – valued in terms of established value.

Value might be faster than light. Value, existing only in terms of (different, differing, measuring against each other in terms of shared properties/valuing systems) self valuing(s).

Quote :
it is indeed possible to exist without the leap in question and still retain an act-ual grounding.
Whatever we experientially question, we can now much easier get to the core of the matter, understand our affects more directly, not through so much filters and layers of imagination. Not that we do not imagine – imagination becomes free from its protective and hypocritical tasks.

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Can there be a boundary, a limit around existence? How, if existence is “all there is”?
This is one of the haunting questions. It has perplexed many minds, and we are getting close to a solution, resolution, dissolution of this question. We “answer” it by demonstrating that it is simply a hesitance to see.

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Yes. What is important to differentiate is that “is is” is not belief in “thing-in-itself”, since the is of is, isness as such, need not be thing-ness. You have described this point very well, I think. I would say that chaotic no-thingness is the best rendering of this I have seen. Indeed where you describe this on ILP as “flat time-space” we can conceptualize what is really going on here, and this sits perfectly with on the one hand the notion of isness and on the other hand the understanding that “nothingness”, as in “absolute nothing” is a fallacious and nonsensical concept.
Indeed. It is also possible to imagine how spacetime is curved into “whirpools”, as the interference of being occurs.

Quote :
All this amounts to the following: we can finally move on from philosophy’s misguided attempts to derive the is. We now, thanks to value-ontology, have a logico-conceptual framework with which to understand this situation. We have attained a ground, both a certain truth (somethingness)
Yes indeed, the thought itself is a something-ness. A being-ness. It seems to itself, like perhaps all real thoughts, be a curving of an existential fabric.

Quote :
and a framework that allows us to construct upon this ground, and to construct in such a way that does not contradict, implicitly or otherwise, this grounding itself. We win the ability to move forward, to project FROM a solid point and into the FUTURE. Of course this projecting takes place with respect to valuation/s.
This future can no longer be an overcoming of specific threats (economic malaise, war, disease, climate change, meteors) but as an overcoming of the state of chaos in which mans political-social-moral mind is being un-made with every new commonly denominating “reality”-spectacle.

Where nature was blissfully unaware of the concept of value, it could not but comply. This blissful ignorance runs all the way through man until he invents a metaphysical form of value. Some will say it is morality, but more probably, money is the key issue. Where nature values otherness in terms of itself, man values himself in terms of money. “Good” may be merely a contingent concept to money-value, it may simply means “wealth-unto-me”. Abstract wealth, meaningless, a non-particular, a prospect.

Speculative investment is, in terms of being, the making-present of an unattainable future, making the present unattained by itself. There is no present, only a not attained future image. In this dispair man sinks into his lowest self-mockery, in order to feel in this cruelty anything of affirmation at all.

Quote :
No more need to argue over epistemology vs ontology vs metaphysics vs thing-in-itself vs universality vs first-cause and all that nonsense. Whew, what a relief! Now, to me, the next step might be to attempt a conceptual synthetic analysis of logic and value, one in terms of the other. This would serve to provide a basic structure or dwelling-place that could serve as the foundation - attached solidly to the ground - of what can be built afterward. I think my enumeration on isometry and the soul is a sort of accidental first-step in this direction, the direction of erecting the first solid dwelling-place on being.
This is the truth, this is our task. Building a dwelling by and in thinking.
I will not attempt now to address the idea of valuing-isometries directly (this is a task for which much must be brought into preparation, and here I will refer to without-musics post on excess, which I have yet to address - there I sense a terrain of substantiation) but I will say something on its generalities.

We must build the outline for such a filling-in, which will happen collectively, essentially break the spell which the writer feels trapped by before his first empty page, which has taken hold of intellectual man as deconstructionism. Instead of the horrible question of postmodernism – the feeling of the killing of God – we now have the solemn task of acquiring a new symbology. After wading through mud, we may work again on marble. But this marble is of the mind.

This creating-into-time, a symbol should also be understood as a gesture. I propose that we seek for the isolmetries of gestures. I mean this in terms of industrial architecture, economic design, political ethos as well as real life movement, in terms of the forms-in-time, but the terms I have used just now must be deleted and their contents redistributed into a more value-specific periodic table of approaches to being. This may be our elements – our subjective “constants”.

It is beginning to dawn on me that the implementation of this thought means the abolishment of traditional abstractions, forms, or at least that these will become increasingly feeble compared to the experiential forms we now begin to attain to, proper to nature-as-such, in case of the philosopher, a thinking-as-such.

We must be examples, we philosophers – no more Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Kant, not only our ideas, our lives must be exemplary. Not in the least to ourselves. We are the idea.

One of the concepts this theory makes more plausible is that one can acquire power sooner by making power possible for others, than by taking it away from them. Taking away power - from another but on ones own terms - is revealed as extremely risky, if not tragically doomed. The only lasting power to be sure is to give. Caesar knew this well, when he gave Rome to Europe - he forgot it, when he tried to take Rome for himself.

without-music wrote:
Very good. Bataille might be useful on this point. Any system will produce its own excess; the pent-up energy must be spent. He locates such “spending” in historical phenomena like human sacrifice and seemingly trivial commonplaces like the sexual act. So much energy is squanderd in the sexual act; one must be abundant, overflowing beforehand. Such spending, I think, is the task of the artist: as sublimation. Of course, the obscene underbelly of every sublimation is a repression. And so the question must become: what is it that is being repressed in a spending of excess? Of course, Bataille meant this in the socio-economic sense. How noble an undertaking it would be to explode the barriers to his thought, to develop it on an ontological scale. I like the idea, I wonder how far one might take it.
We might either say that we’d develop such thought on an ontological scale, or that we bring this new notion of ontology that we have “down” to such an explicitly experiential level. It is in any case a promising prospect. I am not yet very familiar with this direction of thinking, somehow the phrase “jouissance” so often used by Lacan comes to my mind in this context, I do not know how accurate this is. So far I would interpret /frame this subject as “the identity of experience”. I sense that it will be a very lengthy and meaty study.

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Existence precedes logic, which is an emphatically human, all-too-human affair. To transgress it: ah, fresh air!
Yes – to be more precise: experience precedes logic. You have touched here on a very interesting domain. Perhaps you might recommend some specific literature?

without-music
Ontology

Quote :
Yes – to be more precise: experience precedes logic. You have touched here on a very interesting domain. Perhaps you might recommend some specific literature?
Much to be found in Nietzsche, surely, but as always: the project remains unfinished, not totally fleshed out. Of course, Nietzsche was writing to set forth a task that might be taken up by the “philosophers of the day after tomorrow.” I know Deleuze has something to say on the topic, but I haven’t yet read enough of him. This is an interest of mine, this “irrationalism” or a-rationalism, that I hope to be able to pursue more faithfully one day soon. I will be sure to post here when I get a chance to delve more deeply into this domain.

Fixed Cross
Ontology

  • After dwelling for some weeks on this question you ask - what is being repressed in the spending of excess? I started to see how a subject rejects most of his potential experience, and that this spending may be seen as the act of rejecting. It makes sense, human sacrifice - to project the excess of pathos on another being, outside, a representative of the excess.

What is being repressed? Perhaps no thing per se - man may feel oppressed when his nervous system and moral mind are being put under high pressure.

Where man evolves in the direction Parodites and I have discussed, toward different passions (not deeper and wider as I first said, but more precise, more deliberate, more ‘evil’ - but therein potentially far better, more wholesome than any of the ‘good’ we have known so far), it is conceivable that there is less and less excess, that man becomes capable of dealing with more and more of what he is, incorporating the energy he is structurally part of in terms of himself – because we have expanded on these terms. That is at least the aim.

Taking a wild guess: perhaps one type of surplus affect arises in man as the intellectual/moral organism becomes capable of identifying with more than the animal/sensory organism can identify with. It values in terms of itself now too much - its own scope of being, as it conceives of it, is maddening - in response the organism seeks to become blunt, indifferent. To not care - to not value. Too much ‘brotherly love’ - this may be the disease against which the numbing and dumbing down of mankind is a remedy.

Parodites
Ontology

Fixed Cross wrote:
Taking a wild guess: perhaps one type of surplus affect arises in man as the intellectual/moral organism becomes capable of identifying with more than the animal/sensory organism can identify with. It values in terms of itself now too much - its own scope of being, as it conceives of it, is maddening - in response the organism seeks to become blunt, indifferent. To not care - to not value. Too much ‘brotherly love’ - this may be the disease against which the numbing and dumbing down of mankind is a remedy.

Yes, I have suspected this played a role in Ancient Greek sexuality. Man imbues his most powerful desires and passions with intellectual and artistic meanings, to the point that exercising these things (like the sexual drive) no longer fully empties them of their vital force, and an inarticulate melancholy is left over as it were: the melancholy of the artist and the philosopher, or what we sometimes refer to as genius.

Defenders of the Earth
Ontology

Fixed Cross wrote:

  • After dwelling for some weeks on this question you ask - what is being repressed in the spending of excess? I started to see how a subject rejects most of his potential experience, and that this spending may be seen as the act of rejecting. It makes sense, human sacrifice - to project the excess of pathos on another being, outside, a representative of the excess.

What is being repressed? Perhaps no thing per se - man may feel oppressed when his nervous system and moral mind are being put under high pressure.

Where man evolves in the direction Parodites and I have discussed, toward different passions (not deeper and wider as I first said, but more precise, more deliberate, more ‘evil’ - but therein potentially far better, more wholesome than any of the ‘good’ we have known so far), it is conceivable that there is less and less excess, that man becomes capable of dealing with more and more of what he is, incorporating the energy he is structurally part of in terms of himself – because we have expanded on these terms. That is at least the aim.

Yes this must be true. Self-valuing organisms that are not highly self-differenced will not have well-defined channels through which “excess” (left-over potential for energy that is unable to become exhausted in a finite physiological or psychological operation) may flow. Thus extreme acts and movements are required, e.g. human sacrifice, sexual rituals, murderous lust and vengeance, war, religious self-denial and asceticism. What then is philosophy, is art and politics (in the traditional, Greek sense of the polis and demos) other than a new form of apportioning this excessiveness? Yet a form that also includes its own methodology within itself, is more recursive and direct, active, and thus powerful and exhaustive?

Strictly speaking every entity will both have a measure of its ability to concretize-exhaust within a finite operation a certain quantity of energetic potential, as well as a measure of total energetic potentiality within given circumstances and conditions; the latter will always necessarily be greater than the former, as the reverse is not the case and perfect equality among these two measurements seems unlikely, if not outright impossible. Measurement in the former case constitutes organic behavior, action (including feelings-impulses), measurement in the latter case constitutes a passive “reflection of the entity itself” as a whole, its sense of itself as a “collection of impulsivity”, as energy; the total or sum amount of force it is able to summon and give rise to at any given time (amd this will change from moment to moment). The relation of these two forms of measurement to each other constitutes “reason”, as logic and its derivative, language; relations between the actual-emergent effects-acts of the body-mind and the abstract ideas, values, perceptions and “inner world” of this body-mind (including therefore the memories of past experiences and the imagined-juxtaposed ideas of possible anticipated experiences) constitutes its “consciousness”, and it makes perfect sense that here a certain “identity” and self-hood would cohere.

As you say, there is less (chaotic, unmanaged) excess as the organism develops itself more accutely and precisely. This is because more and more excessiveness is utilized by the entity, incorporated by its structurality rather than merely being discharged. This is the growth of its consciousness, and where this is unable to take place within the entity’s body and mind it will be realized externally, as in the old forms of crude and brutal excessive discharge but in more refined, narrow and careful modes, as works of art and literature, as philosophies, and as enlightened sentiments and ideals.

Quote :
Taking a wild guess: perhaps one type of surplus affect arises in man as the intellectual/moral organism becomes capable of identifying with more than the animal/sensory organism can identify with. It values in terms of itself now too much - its own scope of being, as it conceives of it, is maddening - in response the organism seeks to become blunt, indifferent. To not care - to not value. Too much ‘brotherly love’ - this may be the disease against which the numbing and dumbing down of mankind is a remedy.

Yes, this would seem to be a form of compensatory valuation-negation or transfer of valuing-capacity from one orbit to another, to a new sphere where energy flows differently, where time operates differently, and where excess becomes less intense and more manageable. Yet since this is being done unconsciously, the methods used here are merely absorbed by the given culture-society in which a person finds himself, rather than self-made and self-realized. Thus this in fact turns people more and more into passive reflections of dominant social norms and modes, reducing the distance between their own self-valuing and those of others without actually deriving any benefit or additional “power” from this reduction. The reduction in distance here is the result merely of a passive “deflating” rather than an active movement. The consequences of this are not hard to imagine, indeed we see them all around us.

Parodites wrote:
Fixed Cross wrote:
Taking a wild guess: perhaps one type of surplus affect arises in man as the intellectual/moral organism becomes capable of identifying with more than the animal/sensory organism can identify with. It values in terms of itself now too much - its own scope of being, as it conceives of it, is maddening - in response the organism seeks to become blunt, indifferent. To not care - to not value. Too much ‘brotherly love’ - this may be the disease against which the numbing and dumbing down of mankind is a remedy.

Yes, I have suspected this played a role in Ancient Greek sexuality. Man imbues his most powerful desires and passions with intellectual and artistic meanings, to the point that exercising these things (like the sexual drive) no longer fully empties them of their vital force, and an inarticulate melancholy is left over as it were: the melancholy of the artist and the philosopher, or what we sometimes refer to as genius.

This makes sense. This melancholy as you call it then represents a second-order vitality which feeds the drives of genius, of artistic and philosophic production. Men who grow continue to replace one psychological or physiological expression for another, more refined one, while men who stagnate and do not grow continue to repeat the same time-worn methods leading only to continued discharge of left-over excess, that is essentially chaotic and waste. Men who grow self-direct their excessive quality into creative and productive avenues, as this befits their more differenced and active, aware nature (art, and philosophy), while men who do not grow merely repeat the same unconsciously-acquired methods whenever they feel themselves “frenzied” by this “surplus” (their inability to understand how they are feeling-reacting-acting), e.g. as self-destructive and childish emotional outbursts, hatreds and bigotries, physical violence and aggression, or projected inwardly in terms of psychological complexes, paranoias, delusions, religion and all ideological, small thinking.

Self-valuing precludes against any possibility of not self-valuing; it reflects the complete naturalizing idea, what WtP ought to have been. In short, it is not possible to go “deeper” (more toward the basic fundament) than self-valuing. Every new movement is necessarily one of either upward or outward-lateral growth. “God” has been found out and revealed to be a stage along the line of development in thought/consciousness toward this most basic fundament. Like any basic idea, any idea used as and assumed to be a given self-valuing gives cause to re-interpret everything in terms of its being secondary, derivative with respect to the fundamental ground.

WtP ontology is inferior to VO because WtP is not fundamental enough, not even “ontological” yet- WtP is a psychological-physical principle but says nothing about what is below-primary to its action, let alone about the kinds of powers or reasons why different powers “will” one thing and not another. WtP masks the human conscious dimension through a reductive metaphysic aimed at undermining all previous metaphysical postulates, and in this sense is useful but cannot truly free the human being into its own nature.

Self-valuing in contrast is the one idea that, like the assumed idea of god, unites the physical, psychological and “metaphysical” into one space, is a hard kernel that turned this way or that way reflects differently of reality. It is the one truly ontologically-possibilizing idea.

“Consciousness” always stems from lower-order organizings of multiple centers of self-valuings. Functionally speaking consciousness is the actual operations of any system said to be self-bound and self-referential to some degree, however that tends to obscure the more essential reality of consciousness: it is nothing more than the “greatest inner perspective” of such a system. Consciousness is what self-valuing “feels like” to itself, what it is able to feel like to itself given what it is and what its experiences are. A proper ontology must account for all of this.

Fixed Cross
Ontology

Capable wrote:
Self-valuing precludes against any possibility of not self-valuing; it reflects the complete naturalizing idea, what WtP ought to have been. In short, it is not possible to go “deeper” (more toward the basic fundament) than self-valuing. Every new movement is necessarily one of either upward or outward-lateral growth. “God” has been found out and revealed to be a stage along the line of development in thought/consciousness toward this most basic fundament. Like any basic idea, any idea used as and assumed to be a given self-valuing gives cause to re-interpret everything in terms of its being secondary, derivative with respect to the fundamental ground.

Perhaps we can review the idea of God from this perspective, because the idea is still troublesome, or not so much the idea itself as the emotional implications of it that have procreated and infiltrated every human thought about morality. The main problem was always the prescriptive nature of being, which it clearly has, and clearly relating to what man, each for himself, knows as ‘good’, as well as many other qualities, ‘sacrifice’ being an often occurring one – it was always known, intuited, by wise humans that ontology must touch on ethics to reach a profound judgment of what is - ethics being the kernel of conscious being, the form of being that can investigate itself – a judgment of being must always include the ethical principle in itself. But this was misunderstood to mean that it should command such a judgment - that the notion of being should pertain to the question of ethics in unifying way. Rather, the very first ethical principle that follows from this ontology is friction.

We see this in every practical consequence of attempts at unifying ethics; the result is always the exaltation of one element alone – friction, strife, breaking down enemies, being at war, standing for something - thus also against something. Ideologically, we find an understanding of this element (rather than enactment, which is pervasive throughout existence) in capitalism alone.

Our ontology can very well be interpreted as a justification of capitalism. Not at all however, of representative democracy. In fact it clarifies perfectly how such a system necessarily corrupts – in essence, the attainment of self-values is entrusted to other self-valuings. Ultimately all parliament, all law-shaping organs, will become obsolete. A perfectly regulated capitalism including the inalienable right to self-determination.

Crime law to meet ontological consistency; whoever infringes on a fundamental/sustenance level on another’s capacity to self-value forfeits protection of the law. The law will only respect those who respect it. Thus, if a person is found guilty of intentionally inflicting irreparable damage (criteria to be fleshed out), it will be legal to harm him. The revenge impulse can not be controlled and fully justified by the state; It must be treated as part of the human excess that falls outside of the law. Once someone violates self-valuing law, he ceases to be valued as a self-valuing. He can thus also not obtain contracts.

In this way a great network of outcasts will be created, which will have laws of its own, harsher laws, and which will remain under supervision as far as possible and desirable, primarily with the intent of studying that which comes out on top, and to learn from the methods employed. Criminals as resource - subject to the grinding wheels of pre-civilized self-valuing. Prisons already work in the same way, but we commit the first rate fallacy of setting these trained beasts of prey free - a structural law as long as long as we subject radical agents of death and entropy to the same standard of expected ‘betterment’ as small time crooks. An order like this can not be ruled by anyone besides the exceptionally deceitful and fundamentally lawless - it can never be ‘human’, can never reflect or ‘run on’ ethics.

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WtP ontology is inferior to VO because WtP is not fundamental enough, not even “ontological” yet- WtP is a psychological-physical principle but says nothing about what is below-primary to its action, let alone about the kinds of powers or reasons why different powers “will” one thing and not another. WtP masks the human conscious dimension through a reductive metaphysic aimed at undermining all previous metaphysical postulates, and in this sense is useful but cannot truly free the human being into its own nature.

Yes, WtP sets no criteria. Power can mean anything. Hence the term ‘slave morality’ to carpet cover everything that does not let itself be measured in terms of physical domination.

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Self-valuing in contrast is the one idea that, like the assumed idea of god, unites the physical, psychological and “metaphysical” into one space, is a hard kernel that turned this way or that way reflects differently of reality. It is the one truly ontologically-possibilizing idea.

“Consciousness” always stems from lower-order organizings of multiple centers of self-valuings. Functionally speaking consciousness is the actual operations of any system said to be self-bound and self-referential to some degree, however that tends to obscure the more essential reality of consciousness: it is nothing more than the “greatest inner perspective” of such a system. Consciousness is what self-valuing “feels like” to itself, what it is able to feel like to itself given what it is and what its experiences are. A proper ontology must account for all of this.

Properly considered, the above gives rise to an awareness of the enormous discomfort produced by the illusion of ‘free will’, which is identical to the idea that consciously valuing is choosing what one values.

As any human instinctively knows, values are only the very utmost necessity. But the intellect had never known a spinal chord, had never known the vigorous self-reliance of instinct. All ideas that described being accurately were sets of poetic references; hitherto poetry served as the bridge between the intellect and the instincts. Allegory as justification of law, both in morality and in physics. In this light we can appreciate the type of human that this ontology selects.

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Fixed Cross
The Identity of Experience

The science of being as a study in subjectivism, which has taken on fully logical form with valuator logic, is approached on a higher level of organization, of more detail, of more possibility for contradiction, in the terms devised by the psychoanalytical schools. I believe all psychoanalysis revolves around the mutual requirement of the terms identity and experience.

As humans, most of our time we spend in avoiding experiences. In our seeking-out of what we aim to experience, we are shifting and sneaking along the invisible walls facing us from every direction but the one we seek to disclose - the walled off area of “the real” is however constantly accessible, these walls can be broken down with the force of intent. The lack of this intent is precisely what makes us effective as prolonged identities, which leads finally in complex beings to what we can begin to call experience.

The identity of experience is experience accepted into the being as its being. The same mechanisms that cause experience, also perform a lot of activity going on that is not ‘owned’ by the organism. Freud goes into this as a repressed - suggesting that the identity of this experience is already ‘the name of the subject’, but actively kept away from its consciousness. I would propose that we address this differently - as ‘untranslated affect’, affect not yet interpreted in terms of the particular self-valuing.

Psychoanalysis is not the art of retrieving experiences to consciousness, but to identify physical affect as experience. This is always done after the fact, also when there is no ‘repression’, or what I would call simply an insufficient power to identify in terms of self - the delicate dove-like beauty of the self to itself facing very dangerous and compromising affect, “raw” affect, which can not be specified, categorized in ‘true terms’ as Spinoza has it - pleasure or joy (laetitia), pain or sorrow (tristitia)and desire (cupiditas) or appetite. *

A manipulation is needed to incorporate the experience, to give it an identity, to add this experience to the identity of the being, to value it on terms of the beings valuing. Psychoanalysis is such a manipulation. Another one, much faster and therefore more dangerous and potentially destructive is Occult “pathworking”. This is the business of setting up the conditions for translating raw affect into imagined sensory experience, by entering a state of lucid dreaming armed with the intention to disclose whatever formlessness is pressing on the walls of the being into apparitions, beings the being itself is able to face as itself - and proceeding to enter the dungeon of the unidentified with the clear aim of translating all that is into experience. And there are other manipulations.

In general, I would categorize all such manipulations as the Dionysian arts, to which possibility a systematic suspension of judgment is required, and the being comes into contact with its own boundaries - its walled-in-ness becomes its walled-ness, in other words, instead of the cells core, its membrane is the identity of experience. Such experience is not merely mortal but mortality itself.

  • wikipedia: Affect (Latin affectus or adfectus) is a concept used in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For Spinoza, as discussed in Parts Two and Three of his Ethics, affects are states of mind and body related to (but not exactly synonymous with) feelings and emotions, of which he says there are three primary kinds: Subsequent philosophical usage by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their translator Brian Massumi, while derived explicitly from Spinoza, tends to distinguish more sharply than Spinoza does between affect and what are conventionally called emotions. Affects are difficult to grasp and conceptualize because, as Spinoza says, “an affect or passion of the mind [animi pathema] is a confused idea” which is only perceived by the increase or decrease it causes in the body’s vital force.

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“When an inner process can not be integrated it is often projected outward. The notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void beneath our feet.”

Capable speaks here of unidentified affect, belonging to none of the three Spinozaean categories.
It appears logical that that raw affect, inner force which can not be identified in terms of the self-valuing, is projected (as a projectile) towards the Other - that which is explicitly unidentified – or quasi-identified as the Other - that which has no right to exist.

Rights are an extension of identification.

It is a reality that people(s) are simple not able to bestow rights on those with whom they can not identify. Human rights is an invention of genius, a great artifice, worthy of my respect, although I respect that they can be logically refuted. The principle offers an identification based on a purely aesthetic identification – the form of the human body, not its interior identity, i.e. the language it speaks/thinks, its ethics, its frame of action, its type.

A great assumption is made – that all those organisms which can be identified as of the same “species” - a term, not a reality of experience/identification, communication – are in fact “the same”. In reality however, man A is more alike to dog A than man A to man B, and this expresses itself in identification. What is shared in identity is experience. Such has historically been the foundation of culture - a shared frame of experience equals a shared identity predicates lawmaking, which is consensus and trust.

Back at psychoanalysis - retroactively one learns to trust the affect that is ‘repressed’… - to speak with the trauma in a common tongue, so that one can effectively agree that it exists. Agreement, this is what is created when a true Word appears. And this appearance is a physical act, a speaking.

Here has been a flaw in philosophy hitherto – being must be interpreted as given. But what, in such a case, does “given” mean? Certainly not the predicate of something else, which gives. At best, it gives itself. But to what? To what but to itself?
Does this make sense? Not much - what is more sensible is to say that I give it, as itself, to itself, which is what I amount to.

Arrangement of potentiality –
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.

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Defenders of the Earth
The Identity of Experience

Quote :
Does this make sense? Not much - what is more sensible is to say that I give it, as itself, to itself, which is what I amount to.

Identity, in a sense incorporatingness-as-such, a certain agglomeration of force/s-relations attaining in the being of this agglomeration [possible architecture: a/the most sufficiency of the widest necessity of its conditionality?] a ‘center of force’ or intertial gravity. This characteristic of the quality of the “degree of unification” serves to indicate the potency-vitality of identity, but not the being of it, which rather is the “root” incorporatingness that (emergently) attains and then reciprocally-reflexively begins to re-define and re-shape that from which it arose, begins to work on itself by taking into itself, changing as it changes.

“What I amount to” as “that I give it, as itself, to itself”: this formulation of identity (human - but also not only human?) as a phenomenon which is a giving of the very given itself, that by which given is given or known/asserted in its givenness. Are we only an “amounts to something” in the sense that we take, are able to take ourselves, this amounts to, as given, as a givenness-as-such which is also a givingness? Could this be why/how we give the given of the given/s around us, or at least construe otherness essentially (“correctly” or otherwise) under an image of a being-given?

We are philosophical beings, humans, all of us engaged with/in processes of cross-territorial re/interpretation and re/incorporation – integration and extagration. That by which this takes place (i.e. the “world”) might be said to be our being. This “takes place” itself might be said to be our identity. The being of this “takes place” itself might be said to be, perhaps, givenness-as-such. Or at least it is possible that thus far this is the only/best way for us to understand/conceptualize this being.

Quote :
Arrangement of potentiality –
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.

Being then as potentiality and thus that which conditions this potentiality as the being of this being. What is that by which this conditionality, abstracted from its embedded situatedness, is conditioned? We might understand this as givenness, as the very possibility for and of being from within being itself. This becomes feasible in the sense that this being reciprocally participates in its own existence-creating: through the simplest fact of its existence (as a being, as being) is another being or perhaps another “level of this already being” called also into existence, the existence of which hinges upon - and ONLY upon (?) - the simple fact of its “parent” “being’s” being existing. What might this reciprocality, reflexivity, relatedness-as-such (abstracted out from its embedded situatednesses) be understood as, other than as a givenness which is also then and therefore a givingness?

Here we come face-to-face with identity [id-entity], with the unifying “principle” (frame, ground) of experiencing (which also then serves as a principle of differentiation from within experience/s). Interesting how this identity itself has its own being, and yet this being is to some extent irrelevant from the perspective of that which is experientially forged through and by the existence of this identity! In this ‘to some extent irrelevant’ we see the function of givenness, being given. And in the relatedness of this being to (the being/s of) what it experiences - deeper more genuine contact, powerful consciousness, imagination, creation, envisioning, knowing - we can see how this relatedness/experiencing occurs more essentially as under a form of a givenness, of a giving of that which is already itself a being-given to/for/by itself alone (even if only “by us” is this realized/known or “made real”/attaining to a relevancy).

[Further questioning then: to what extent are the differences here, between the implications arising from either being itself as a being-given or those arising from a being-given as only a being of certain beings (us) which structurally attain certain configurations of relatednesses and embedded situatednesses, meaningful, relevant? What are the various utilities to positing either ex ante or ex post facto here? Maybe more importantly, can we yet effect a possible synthesis even here, on this now higher level? (Edit: answer: yes, through the use of value-ontology we seem able to formulate these principles and elements conceptually-logically).]

Edit: additionally, to give credit where it is due, this intriguing “When an inner process can not be integrated it is often projected outward. The notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void beneath our feet” is a line by Carl Jung, from his Flying Saucers, I believe.

§

Fixed Cross
The Identity of Experience

Capable wrote:
changing as it changes.
This principle is learned by Shamans. Death-rebirth, the consciousness of flux-depth-power, vortexes of identity around which a society gravitates. Shamans are the “black holes” of the galaxies in which men live - meaning “centers too intense to perceive”*. We circle around what we can not stare in the eye. The terrible in strength is what gives life its structure. (This is why America exists as it does, and why the power of the state must remain a terrifying and disruptive factor until all human life has organized itself around the core of the death-rebirth machinery, the magical power of the invisible center/)

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“What I amount to” as “that I give it, as itself, to itself”:
A Heideggerian giving, as opposed to serving a Platonic “given-ness”. Our things flow from us, we are centers of their revolving-existing - existing is revolving, losing meaning is collapsing into the source is disintegrating. A thing becomes junk, attribute to nothingness, when it loses its capacity to revolve by the “gravity” of value to the core.

Quote :
this formulation of identity (human - but also not only human?) as a phenomenon which is a giving of the very given itself, that by which given is given or known/asserted in its givenness. Are we only an “amounts to something” in the sense that we take, are able to take ourselves,
Interesting, yes I like this - we are given as soon as we are taken - and there is no one to take us but ourself. We can be taken by others but this means disintegration when it is not serving our own taking-our-givenness. Consuming being. This adds a ‘hedonistic’ aspect to the ethics that may follow from value ontology. That would help to make it accessible as therapy. Modern therapy is in part hedonistic, indulging. We consume our psyche.

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this amounts to, as given, as a givenness-as-such which is also a givingness? Could this be why/how we give the given of the given/s around us, or at least construe otherness essentially (“correctly” or otherwise) under an image of a being-given?
And so also a being-there-to-take.
This is how “good karma” can be seen - if one has a tendency to give, to ‘create the world’ if one “bestows”, the world attains a nature of being-to-take. That means that one is a master of ones fate. If one takes what happens to be given one steals it, and it transforms. This is why pure political initiatives get corrupted by followers, why politics only work to constructive aims where there are conspiracies, and never when there is dictatorship of the vote.

Quote :
We are philosophical beings, humans, all of us engaged with/in processes of cross-territorial re/interpretation and re/incorporation – integration and extagration. That by which this takes place (i.e. the “world”) might be said to be our being. This “takes place” itself might be said to be our identity. The being of this “takes place” itself might be said to be, perhaps, givenness-as-such. Or at least it is possible that thus far this is the only/best way for us to understand/conceptualize this being.
Can we identify this in corporeal terms? A universe of symbolism mapping given-ness, the world as a web of threats originating in subjects - a fabric of histories, with crossings of perspectives as wars and cultures – this “monster of energy” - yes, the dragon thou shalt is made of a great number of potential “I wills” and at root made possible by “I am”.
The transformation of the spirit of Zarathustrian man is a collapsing inward of the self-valuing. Courage is needed to move beyond the skin of the dragon and to embody its will. To become part of the dragons inner world means to dissolve the dragon in ones own world. To become invisible in ones workings, to become “deep” - to command, to become an enigma.

Quote :
Quote :
Arrangement of potentiality –
life is largely strategy, being is observingness, intelligence, rising to the occasion, seizing opportunity - it is not an objective fact - it is the bold activity of which only the very few are capable of embodying entirely. These are the agents of evolution - in every species these arise.

Being then as potentiality and thus that which conditions this potentiality as the being of this being. What is that by which this conditionality, abstracted from its embedded situatedness, is conditioned? We might understand this as givenness, as the very possibility for and of being from within being itself.
A not-yet-givenness, a potential, a void even - void as space.
In any form a givenness may arise around a void, like a castle is built around a room.
the “hearth” at the center of this room is that which has been called by the most loving and admiring names, which I will not utter, as they are not my words - - but this hearth is the completion of the given-ness of the room, the crown on the work of which the wall-building was the physical part and the room-conceiving the ‘philosophical’ part, the thinking-building serving ‘dwelling’, the being itself.

Men gather around fires. Words can also be fires, around which walls are built to contain the words in spaces where men dwell. Men will no be guided where no fires are made. Good philosophy is a torch. It creates the will-to-dwell, which is the will to think and build. Religion is a damp torch emitting only smoke, and the will to sleep. Myth has been a healthy torch in many cultures but we have moved beyond the possibility of myth - myth points to the past, (our) philosophy points to the future. For the rest they are in a sense the same; they make of man a given-to-take. They make man possible to himself, as man, as Dasein.

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This becomes feasible in the sense that this being reciprocally participates in its own existence-creating: through the simplest fact of its existence (as a being, as being) is another being or perhaps another “level of this already being” called also into existence, the existence of which hinges upon - and ONLY upon (?) - the simple fact of its “parent” “being’s” being existing. What might this reciprocality, reflexivity, relatedness-as-such (abstracted out from its embedded situatednesses) be understood as, other than as a givenness which is also then and therefore a givingness?
Intention. We can only recognize the ‘eternal parent’ of this givenness as something real, present in us. On this level we have to abandon the abstract and create ‘occult experience’ - knowledge beyond language, ‘it-ness’. We can approach this asymptotically, and become wiser and more powerful along this line and feel more justification, more certainty than one would ever imagine passible when certainty is understood as logical truth, instead of knowing by being.

“God” is the measure in which this certainty is recorded by ‘prophets’. The divinity can always grow, become greater, stand farther from the populace. It is never ‘already there’. It is the measure in which consciousness attains to its root, and this measure depends on the quality of the consciousness aside from its inward attaining as well as on the penetratingness of its inner gaze. So sacredness exists in two axes - worldly quality and the drive pertaining/attaining to what Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal. We can not formulate a definition, we can only point to the means to attain a greater depth of knowing/being. For this is the purpose, the telos - to enable, increase, potentiate -

Quote :
Here we come face-to-face with identity [id-entity], with the unifying “principle” (frame, ground) of experiencing (which also then serves as a principle of differentiation from within experience/s). Interesting how this identity itself has its own being, and yet this being is to some extent irrelevant from the perspective of that which is experientially forged through and by the existence of this identity! In this ‘to some extent irrelevant’ we see the function of givenness, being given. And in the relatedness of this being to (the being/s of) what it experiences - deeper more genuine contact, powerful consciousness, imagination, creation, envisioning, knowing - we can see how this relatedness/experiencing occurs more essentially as under a form of a givenness, of a giving of that which is already itself a being-given to/for/by itself alone (even if only “by us” is this realized/known or “made real”/attaining to a relevancy).
Whatever we identify as given, is separate from our identifying it. Only when the identifying becomes inseparable from the given-ness do we attain clarity. An overwhelming beauty is the result.

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Further questioning then: to what extent are the differences here, between the implications arising from either being itself as a being-given or those arising from a being-given as only a being of certain beings (us) which structurally attain certain configurations of relatednesses and embedded situatednesses, meaningful, relevant? What are the various utilities to positing either ex ante or ex post facto here? Maybe more importantly, can we yet effect a possible synthesis even here, on this now higher level? (Edit: answer: yes, through the use of value-ontology we seem able to formulate these principles and elements conceptually-logically).]
We can use it as a grid. This is the greatest problem here - what we have unearthed so far is still invisible to those who do not think as deeply, and will remain so wherever we do not fill it in with ‘flesh’ - which means, world-implication. The ‘key’ to this task I see now is that there is a great fulfillment in coupling concepts to their value-root, to their primordial emerging. It is not a ‘dry’ subject, but a feast of iconoclasm and archaic mythmaking, and when we see how the archaic myths are populated, by what sort of creatures, we can see the value that philosophizing will have to man when he truly sets to shape his world, when fires are ignited around which new thinking-dwelling emerges. We have built the walls, we need to ignite the fire. In this we do not stand separate, absent, but give ‘acte de présence’ as Lord - this is the only way in which culture grows: by example.

To give act-of-presence means to stand within given-ness as its signifier. It means to give the world to man anew. This can happen on every scale - for the philosopher it is different from a football-player, but the principle is the same. Philosophy is not simply labor, it is also identity. And to make identity felt one requires character, and let this be the very thing that the traditional conception of truth does not allow. All philosophers, in their proclamations about what is universal, have been poseurs, without knowing it they made statues of themselves, testaments to existence. But what type of existence did they testify to? It was, most of the time, rather hollow. No wonder that most of these philosophers were recluses and fools, that no exemplary philosopher has lived since the idea of Truth is Out There came to rule, by hands of Plato, the last thinker who was also a ruler.

*or: realities too significant to be identified.

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Defenders of the Earth
The Identity of Experience

Why is ‘raw affect’ dangerous? Because it is outside of the established power of identity, because it pushes one toward the walls (which in sum comprise one’s “outward” identity, the form of identity [but not its dynamism]). The affect is this dynamism, more precisely: this churning, moving raw affect is a flux giving-power because it is the source of the need for the walls of identity. These walls exist because they must exist, because they must wall off the affect, “translate” it. Science names this as instintuality and reduces it to the genes and to the common sociohistorical knowledge-base in which these genes express. But the affect is a power, the genes and the instinctuality forged only because the affect, the raw pathological psychial-cellular force of the organism('s various organic ‘centers’ and their mutual cooperation) has self-valued itself with respect to the limits around which this valuing has cohered (its environment/s) which are, in turn, not only multiple other valuings and self-valuings but also the product and effect of one’s own self-valuing activities. A massive, unfathomable world-sociality-causality emerges, Nietzsche’s devouring “monster of energy” which gives life (“spins off”, produces self-valuing ‘cores’, nexes of subjectivities) even as it devours life (dissolves these subjectivities). Man calls this moster of energy by the name of “nature”, an abstraction-reification of all “natural activity”, and science classifies this nature as the product of what it calls “inertia” and “entropy”.

Suspension of judgment is willingness to be walled-in. Organisms whose self-valuing apparatus’ do not more take into account their own walled-in-ness must value in a more linear fashion, and they tend toward more or less stable and repetitive channels of values-expres​sion(“behavior”). More complex organisms are those whose self-valuing apparatus begins to take into account more and more of their own conditionality, limitation, which is to say they enter into subtler relations with self and other. This is naturally “suspension of judgment”, a resistance to a tendency toward pre-fabricated (in the language of the existentialsits, inauthentic) ‘solutions’ (responses) to the ‘problems’ (situations) with which it is faced. Consistency here breeds organisms for efficiency, and what is lost in power of creativity must be compensated for elsewhere, most commonly in a shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time. Natural selection demands the ‘imbalance’ be made up for somewhere else, and we get the proliferation of various kinds of organisms: we get a range of organic form with various ratios of ‘suspension of judgment’ to ‘shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time’. Humans, being the known form of life highest on the one end of this scale, naturally balance this out by being the lowest on the other end.

Philosophy is the highest form of suspension of judgment which man has attained to, save perhaps some occult systems with which I am not familar. But these occult systems, powers of direct intention and calling forth the untranslated affect in the guise of potent symbols and beings, ought lend some of this power to philosophy, and philosophy some of it’s power to the occult. We might even suppose that identity reflects the philosophic side, while experience reflects the occult side: philosophy is the business of identifying experiences, the occult is the business of experiencing identities. Psychoanalysis then appears as philosophy trending toward the occult.

“We consume our psyche”, yes this is perfectly correct. With this in mind it is possible to conceive of human history in a positive sense of the progression of this both raw and effective consumption. Philosophy looks outward from within, the occult looks inward from without, but the ‘average man’ whom has neither philosophy nor the occult stands right in the middle, unbeknownst to him, straddling both spheres, which in truth are the eyes of two abysses. The world is shaped by how it is walled-in. Man is shaped by his world, and shapes it. In his agreements and disagreements man renders himself ineffective to the movement beyond the abyssal history of the (human) world, he is merely a negative presence in this hsitory, but may still retains an effectiveness in the natural world. In contrast, the philosopher or occultist neither agrees nor disagrees and is a proper “suspension of judgment”, thus effectuates himself with respect to world-history and becomes a positive element to and for it. In terms of effectiveness in the natural world, this remains to be seen and hinges upon the ‘gaps’ between the human-human, the human-animal and the animal-animal worlds, and how these gaps are to be encountered-translated.

The affect “is” the organism, if we are to speak of necessity; the translation of this affect, its functionality as reactivity and being walled-in “is” the organism if we are to speak of adequacy. All life is by definition an emergence from this necessity, and is adequate to itself (while it is alive, which is to say until its eventual demise, of course). But only man’s adequacy has become a necessity, or, phrased more precisely and in a positive sense: among all known life only man’s necessity is no longer adequate. Thus the shaman who has uncovered this ground first, by merely reacting to it, by attempting to draw the adequate back within the realm of the necessary; thus the philosopher, who has firstly translated this ground into a language and object-meaning, which is to say attempting to raise necessity up to the level of the adequate; thus the occultist, who seems most bent on closing the circle of identity and experience, of making the necessary fully adequate and the adequate entirely necessary. In these various modes the affect is encountered and (if it is allowed) re-shapes the organism-system which encouters it, producing disharmony. The form of this disharmony emerged as reason, logic being the form of language (measurement with appeal to quality) and of science (meaasurement with appeal to quantity). Logic gets us closest to the core of self-valuing, to the “natural laws” which constitute the agreements among subjects within a particular world; but the logic of identity-as-experience and of experience-as-identity, and of the various ways in which these interact, entwine, couple, merge and re-emerge, psychoanalysis and the occult being examples already mentioned here, gets us closest. “Pure” mathematics or logic lack the character which you spoke of, for the story must be a part of the knowledge which is to be ultimatedly digested by a self-valuing, living and specific subject, if indeed this knowledge is to be valuable, value-able. Philosophy has indeed made this error, it has not allowed itself to have enough suspension of judgment and it has lacked a positive language in which to develop and express its own nature. But with this fledgling language, of which value ontology is one example, and as you point out also the terms designated by psychoanalysis, we might point to a strange synthesis of the occult and the philosophic if we are to wonder at what form the continued self-disclosure of the human being will take in the future, which is to say what form man’s self-valuing appears to be trending toward.

§

Fixed Cross
The Identity of Experience

Capable wrote:
Why is ‘raw affect’ dangerous? Because it is outside of the established power of identity, because it pushes one toward the walls (which in sum comprise one’s “outward” identity, the form of identity [but not its dynamism]). The affect is this dynamism, more precisely: this churning, moving raw affect is a flux giving-power because it is the source of the need for the walls of identity. These walls exist because they must exist, because they must wall off the affect, “translate” it. Science names this as instintuality and reduces it to the genes and to the common sociohistorical knowledge-base in which these genes express. But the affect is a power, the genes and the instinctuality forged only because the affect, the raw pathological psychial-cellular force of the organism('s various organic ‘centers’ and their mutual cooperation) has self-valued itself with respect to the limits around which this valuing has cohered (its environment/s) which are, in turn, not only multiple other valuings and self-valuings but also the product and effect of one’s own self-valuing activities. A massive, unfathomable world-sociality-causality emerges, Nietzsche’s devouring “monster of energy” which gives life (“spins off”, produces self-valuing ‘cores’, nexes of subjectivities) even as it devours life (dissolves these subjectivities). Man calls this moster of energy by the name of “nature”, an abstraction-reification of all “natural activity”, and science classifies this nature as the product of what it calls “inertia” and “entropy”.

Suspension of judgment is willingness to be walled-in. Organisms whose self-valuing apparatus’ do not more take into account their own walled-in-ness must value in a more linear fashion, and they tend toward more or less stable and repetitive channels of values-expres​sion(“behavior”). More complex organisms are those whose self-valuing apparatus begins to take into account more and more of their own conditionality, limitation, which is to say they enter into subtler relations with self and other. This is naturally “suspension of judgment”, a resistance to a tendency toward pre-fabricated (in the language of the existentialsits, inauthentic) ‘solutions’ (responses) to the ‘problems’ (situations) with which it is faced. Consistency here breeds organisms for efficiency, and what is lost in power of creativity must be compensated for elsewhere, most commonly in a shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time. Natural selection demands the ‘imbalance’ be made up for somewhere else, and we get the proliferation of various kinds of organisms: we get a range of organic form with various ratios of ‘suspension of judgment’ to ‘shorter and simpler generational-reproductive time’. Humans, being the known form of life highest on the one end of this scale, naturally balance this out by being the lowest on the other end.

This is a fitting context for the following excerpt from Nietzsche’s notebooks, or “The Will To Power”.

Quote :
984 (1884)

Greatness of soul is inseparable from greatness of spirit. For it involves independence; but in the absence of spiritual greatness, independence ought not to be allowed, it causes mischief, even through its desire to do good and practice “justice.” Small spirits must obey–hence cannot possess greatness.

II. Dionysus

1003 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

To him who has turned out well, who does my heart good, carved from wood that is hard, gentle, and fragrant–in whom even the nose takes pleasure–this book is dedicated.

He enjoys the taste of what is wholesome for him;

his pleasure in anything ceases when the bounds of the wholesome are crossed;

he divines the remedies for partial injuries; he has illnesses as great stimulants of his life;

he knows how to exploit ill chances;

he grows stronger through the accidents that threaten to destroy him;

he instinctively gathers from all that he sees, hears, experiences, what advances his main concern–he follows a principle of selection–he allows much to fall through;

he reacts with the slowness bred by a long caution and a deliberate pride–he tests a stimulus for its origin and its intentions, he does not submit;

he is always in his own company, whether he deals with books, men, or landscapes;

he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting.

1007 (Spring-Fall 1887)

To revalue values–what would that mean? All the spontaneous–new, future, stronger–movements must be there; but they still appear under false names and valuations and have not yet become conscious of themselves.

A courageous becoming-conscious and affirmation of what has been achieved–a liberation from the slovenly routine of old valuations that dishonor us in the best and strongest things we have achieved.

Capable wrote:
Philosophy is the highest form of suspension of judgment which man has attained to, save perhaps some occult systems with which I am not familar. But these occult systems, powers of direct intention and calling forth the untranslated affect in the guise of potent symbols and beings, ought lend some of this power to philosophy, and philosophy some of it’s power to the occult. We might even suppose that identity reflects the philosophic side, while experience reflects the occult side: philosophy is the business of identifying experiences, the occult is the business of experiencing identities. Psychoanalysis then appears as philosophy trending toward the occult.

Brilliant!
Regarding “philosophy as the highest form of suspension of judgment” - we might say that the philosopher is the one who has turned out best.

Quote :
“We consume our psyche”, yes this is perfectly correct. With this in mind it is possible to conceive of human history in a positive sense of the progression of this both raw and effective consumption. Philosophy looks outward from within, the occult looks inward from without, but the ‘average man’ whom has neither philosophy nor the occult stands right in the middle, unbeknownst to him, straddling both spheres, which in truth are the eyes of two abysses. The world is shaped by how it is walled-in. Man is shaped by his world, and shapes it. In his agreements and disagreements man renders himself ineffective to the movement beyond the abyssal history of the (human) world, he is merely a negative presence in this hsitory, but may still retains an effectiveness in the natural world. In contrast, the philosopher or occultist neither agrees nor disagrees and is a proper “suspension of judgment”, thus effectuates himself with respect to world-history and becomes a positive element to and for it. In terms of effectiveness in the natural world, this remains to be seen and hinges upon the ‘gaps’ between the human-human, the human-animal and the animal-animal worlds, and how these gaps are to be encountered-translated.

Indeed, to acquire effectiveness in the natural world from a self-created historical perspective/agency is precisely the task with which our type of philosopher is faced. After Plato, philosophers have accepted that their capacity as historical agents came with the price of being vulnerable natural entities, their influence and very sustenance was dependent on political rulers. But with our type, there has appeared a new scale to climb, something that has not existed since Plato made his stabs at politics. The natural human world has perhaps never been less naturally responsive to philosophy as it is now, politics are entirely separated from philosophy, meaning, teleology - so the philosopher must enforce his historical agency in the natural world. We are still at the very beginning of this undertaking. Thus from a disadvantage an impetus to advance is born: the philosopher must become the philosopher-king.

Regardless of whether or not we are capable of accomplishing/becoming this, that is the point to which the political and technological (natural) world has evolved. This is not to say that all philosophers have to ‘‘get out there’’ and enforce their will on other people, but they do have to organize in groups of which some fulfill this kind of ‘‘military’’ task. In this age of ripe nihilism, where there is no more worldly autority that is not deemed inferior to the mob by the mob, where there is no more ground for teleological reason (such grounds have always been in part superstitious and/or idolatory) this ground must be enforced by the type of human that is aware of the substance of such ground: our type.

It is of the utmost importance that we keep on visibly setting our type of thinking as a standard. Our philosophy must become regal not only in substance but in appearance - it must crown itself.

§

“Spirit” could, in spite and banishing of the deeply embedded confusion around and by that word, aptly be translated into “self-valuing”. By this I mean that it is breath, the necessity, the pulse of life that makes it ‘a life’ - a continuous self referent and thus radically limited - phenomenon. A spirit - a one who values his breath in reflection of his breath in - and around. And between in and out, there is a reflection, and upon that reflection, a valuing - experience is identified after the breathing in. To breathe out completely is to enable the experience of identity. That choice still must be made there, This choice is probably at the basis of all profound religious airs - *

After the final, exhausted ssssssssh, there is an expanding, a corner of our soul which is then identifiable - and this is where evolution takes place. Only those who find in their breaths limits the limit that is transcendible, grow upon their soil, their blood, to a new ‘word’ - a new moral code, a newly discovered form of courage.

Granted, we are not Gods, we can only reflect this metaphors perfection in a few breaths every month perhaps, some of us might attain it once or twice a week - but we can imagine how this, if we are more aware of those breaths in fellow men, hissing us by in the dark, faint shadows of suspected purpose - allows us to reflect, if ‘fortune Strikes!’, incidentally upon them, and cause - what?

Love is a danger to the soul, why to encounter it deliberately? As with all dangers to encounter it in will of it is to conquer a priori all who do not take this course. Napoleons first breath of Corsican air - his identity superimposed on that experience by time, parents, France - and powerful enemies on the warpath…

[[[[ *the Catholic, fully bathing in the identity, versus the protestant, ‘up to the next cycle, the next harvest, the next profit!’ Capitalism is made out of a lack of Catholicism…]]]]

§

The value of this observation I draw as follows:
The particular follow-through of the entity after its identification of its world by drawing in experience, determines not the extent to which he will follow through that particular experience. His identity is reflected wholly of his ethics, his working, warring or simply waking - or on the other hand a wanting, worrying, wrecking ‘code’ - continuity of action, value-projection by anticipation. Here is the technical definition of ‘the power of faith’ - the gift of being allowed to project an infinity of value, by the declaring of love for an infinite bestowing virtue.

The problem of religiously inclined people is not that God is dead (he always was ‘unchanging’), but no longer great enough. He’s not greatly dead, his deadness is puny.
We could change that only by creating a new one. And by God I simply mean the absence of self-inflicted restrictions, physiological moral conditioning, in trade for ones “soul” - ones highest and final love.

What a breath of fresh air if we stopped loving ‘humanity’ and selected a nature more lofty and less neurotic. Perhaps what we have called “soul” throughout the ages is in reality the same thing as “music” or “a great aesthetic idea” - The things for which certain humans live, for which these humans form a medium - perhaps what we call identity is merely our temporary and imperfect relation to something less conditioned by decay - the soul as something that has to find its way into the world through the vessel of flesh and blood.

§

(The Identity of Experience, 2011, Jakob Milikowski a.k.a. Fixed Cross)

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Theses on philosophical method. Empty
PostSubject: Theses on philosophical method. Theses on philosophical method. Icon_minitimeMon Apr 16, 2012 5:48 am
I want to summarize my philosophical method here and provide an example of it in action. I will do so with a series of theses.

In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends. … But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration.

  • Coleridge.

Theses on philosophical method.

Greece- early, pre-Platonic Greece found its reason in the structure of the cosmos and of nature themselves, this structure was the logos, which was reflected in human consciousness, and drawn inward through the activity of an unreflected egoic principle to form the first great philosophical ideas. Thus philosophy always begins in a passive state of reflection or wonder for the Greeks. This process constitutes “empirical reason.” Later there was proposed a transcendent, unknowable, divine order in distinction to the order of nature. The venture of this divine order corresponds with a structural incapacity in self-consciousness itself, to that unreflected, egoic principle, for in time it leads to an inseparable division in the subjective and empirical philosophical systems. Reason thereafter became the aim of resolving this problem, of extinguishing this unreflected principle by bringing it into reflected self-consciousness; its appointed task was in hypostasizing human experience and the content of subjectivity as absolute. To do this reason had to decompose the relations of the cosmic and natural orders, recomposing its object within the structure of subjectivity to realize its “idea.” This “idealism” finds its beginning in Plato, and constitutes the beginning stage of “transcendental reason.” The project of denaturalizing nature and man there also began. The drawing inward of nature is the principle of the former empirical reason, the projection of the human being, in the manner of Feuerbach, of the later.

Transcendental reason is marked by three major philosophical developments: in Eriugena human nature and the nature of the divinity are equated, in Schelling the inner lack or structural incapacity of self-consciousness is itself expressed to the divinity, and the unfathomable ground of the divine is discerned as non-entity and nothingness, God himself carrying this lack in potentia and man expressing it in actuality as evil, and in Kierkegaard the structure of the divine is itself collapsed, necessitating the leap of faith in order to sustain transcendental consciousness and religious experience. Nietzsche expresses the final development in empirical reason, the idea of the world itself is, in him, finally reflected in human consciousness as the will to power- man is at last “naturalized.” The full field of discourse between these two modes of reason must be discerned, so that the valuing subject beneath and behind all philosophy and morality can itself be discerned, for it seems to me that philosophy itself, constituted by a secret canon, forms a kind of plane in which the thinking subject takes form; a plane constituted by the relation between the empirical and transcendental spheres of self-consciousness.

As it stands, these two spheres of thought have been finally separated. Empirical reason has abandoned speculative philosophy and become impotent, materialist, and empty, while transcendental reason, by way of Kierkegaard, has been annihilated in the image of the hidden God and has hypostatized mystical experience as the ultimate philosophical category: the Gods of Greece became the God of Abraham, the antagonism constitutive of the self was grasped as an abyss and inner longing for something other, for something higher than the world. This dissolution of philosophy has had the consequence of completely dissolving man’s consciousness of the excess, of the unreflected principle beneath and within all thought.

From this knowledge the path to a revitalized philosophy can be discovered. Instead of beginning with identity, with ousia, with being and the question of being, as the first philosophers had done in Greece, a mistake which gave rise to the dissolution of philosophy into what I called empirical and transcendental reason, we should begin with the “excess,” that which cannot be absorbed dialectically. This leads to a reversal of the ontic and epistemic spheres. The excess does not signify noumenal reality, does not signify the ontic reality, the ousia or being which cannot be comprehended by thought, but rather does the excess signify the inexhaustible mental component of the human intellect which is constitutive of that intellect and of our consciousness. This component is given precedence, rather than the ontic. In other words, the epistemic subject comes before the ontic subject. Hiedigger’s project must then be abandoned, which relied on the primordiality and precedence of the ontic subject, dasein.

The capacity to differentiate and articulate the excess through conceptual oppositions I have named the daemonic. These conceptual oppositions are not exclusive, and are potentially infinite. Kierkegaard’s project must here be abandoned, which relied on the exhaustablity of the epistemic subject and the construction of several definite stages or conceptual oppositons and an either/or choice between them. That element of volition, of having to make a choice, a leap of faith, made the ontic subject once again the first order or primordial subject, as the will is a being and not an epistemic entity.

Identities, “beings,” are merely “remainders” of the excess. Contra Spinoza’s determinatio est negatio. All identification here becomes differentiation, of the excess. Thought cannot therefor be “totalized,” ie. constructed into an image of the world as a whole, ie. a system in the manner of Hegel or Spinoza himself. Schelling had a similar conception:

“There is an unfathomable basis of reality in things, the remaineder that cannot be contained, cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but remains in the depths. Out of that which lacks understand, true understanding is born.”

The dialectic which rests at the heart of Eriugena’s magnum opus, which he uses to construct a division of nature or periphyseon, recapitulates Dionysisus’s Christian version of the Proclean scheme of procession, return, and remaining (prohodos, epistrophe, mone.) According to that dialectic the super-essential cause of all things (God) moves through all things as immanent to them and stands beyond them as trascendent of them. As cause, the divine is all in all- and so addressed, metaphorically, by kataphatic theology; but as super-essential, the divine is nothing in the midst of everything (a Pascalian meditation, though here applied not only to man but to the divinity itself) and so is more properly addressed by negative or apophatic theology. This dialectic of immanence and trascendence is intended to express the basic foundation of incomprehesibility which underlies the divine and all forms of mystic knowledge.

In the book of Job, God attempted to vindicate himself by listing all of his creations and the breadth of the universe; mountains, seas, stars, animals, etc. For Eriugena God is always the God of Job who reveals himself in the whirlwind of created things and realizes himself both as many and as no one in and through this. The polyonymous anonymity and nothingness of the human reflects perfectly (because it reflects abyssally) the polyonymous anonymity of the divine insofar as both the human and god would realize themselves in and through the creation.
The basic idea here is that man approaches so closely the divine, that the two become indistinguishable; the polynomous nothingness of the human reflects, abyssally, that of God himself.

We see that this unabsorbable excess does not lie in the ontic dimension, as a question of being, but rather lies immanently within the thinking subject itself, constitutive of its very subjectivity. Schelling names this excess “Will,” in opposition to ousia or entity, being, nature.

“Will is primordial being, and all predicates apply to it alone- groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation, self creation. The old proposition is here once again in place: the original being is will, and will is not merely the beginning but also the content of the first emergent being.”

You see in this passage he is articulating a very similar logic of immanence-transcendence… “not merely the beginning but content of the first emergent being.”

Schelling continues: "Any philosophy which does not remain grounded in the negative but tries instead to reach what is positive immediately and without that negative foundation will inevitably die of spiritual impovershment. " This is also hinted at by Luther when he speaks of the power of God being even in the hand of a murderer. “The freedom with which the sinner operates and by which evil is perpetrated is still a divine power. Man has perverted the position of the potencies, and so god operates perversely in the perverse, he no longer acts as will but unwill.” This perverting quality at the basis of man’s freedom, this indwelling of the evil principle as the principle of negation, even in the profoundest desire to do right, I express in one of my own theological speculations: "By desiring something we have not fist completely emptied from out of our own heart, and repudiated from the dark and selfish principle within ourselves, which by its nature assimilates all things to itself, we destroy it. " This all points again and again to the knowledge that this evil principle indwells totally in human freedom, and engulfs even the most selfless desire to do good: it produces in those who have born its revelation what Hamann calls a “Holy Hypochondria.” In short, this evil principle, the principle of negation, of the unfreedom of the will, of material, etc. is rather a positive affirmation of human freedom, not a refutation of it.

Schelling goes on to construct his own division of nature on this scheme: from the primal will or groundlessness issues first, darkness, suffering, irrationality, evil; the whole material and created world of forces and chaos. He speaks of it in this passage “For it was the teaching of all peoples who counted time by nights that the night is the most primordial of things. But what is the essence of night, if not lack, need, and longing? For this night is the nature looking forward to the light, the night longing for it, eagre to receive it. Another image of that first nature, whose whole essence is desire and passion, appears in the consuming fire which so to speak is itself nothing, is in essence only a hunger drawing everything into itself.”

He goes on next to assert that the second “potency” as he calls it, or thing issued from out of the primordial ground, is light; that is, rationality, goodness, the other side of human freedom. His third potency he calls love, it is the realization of human freedom as including both this dark and light principle, evil and goodness; freedom as this double movement itself which is accomplished as love.

But compare Eriugena’s dialectic with this three-fold potency. I interpret these potencies with this dialectic; the darkness and evil of the suffering, material universe, as the principle of all negation, issues from the primordial ground (the super-essential cause) but the light, goodness, rationality of human subjectivity, and freedom- that element of positivity, returns to this primordial ground through the process of thought and philosophy, submerging itself within it, and finally we have mone or the remaining, what remains unincorporated into this dialectical process and cannot be annihilated in the primordial ground.

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie stood as a great testament to the depth of the transcendental mode of reason, but was never completely developed, owing to its insurmountable philosophical inadequacies. Yet the philosophical concept of the excess can find great material for its articulation in Schelling, as it can in Eriugena and Kierkegaard.

Identities can be rigidly defined without solidifying a single conceptual opposition, insofar as the logic of the daemonic is upheld, that is to say, insofar as precedence is granted to the epistemic rather than ontic subject, in line with the first thesis. This gives us the possibility of ontology without metaphysic, that is, a philosophy in which the epistemic subject is wholly developed through continuous differentiation of the excess, resulting in the production of identities (ontologies) which do not require any antithesis for their definition. They stand in and of themselves as identities and are pure affirmations rather than negations. In all philosophy to define, as Spinoza said, was to negate: to say that something was an angel meant it was not a man. But in my philosophy, identities are what is left over after the excess is differentiated within a conceptual opposition: they are ontic realities produced by the philosophical elaboration of the epistemic subject. In other words, and to use the simple example again, in my philosophy “angel” and “man” would both be self-sufficient realities and parts of a conceptual opposition within which the excess is differentiated. Once that excess is differentiated as one or the other, say a man, this leads to the breaking through to simply a new series of conceptual oppositions, perhaps man and beast, within which the excess is differentiated again. Because identities do not require negation in order to be defined, the ontology constructed with my method cannot devolve into metaphysics. The formula would here be antithesis-thesis-thesis, ie. conceptual opposition- differentiation- excess. This is obviously very different than a dialectic and the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. Here I am revising and appropriating things I gathered from Eriugena and Proclus:

" … Presentiments of a philosophical category which could represent these relations between real and ideal ego, along with this moral potency; which could represent a kind of relationship which stands beyond all dialectic, can be found for example in the Proclean scheme of procession, return, and remaining, of prohodos, epistrophe, and mone. This dialectic demonstrates that God, conceived of as the super-essential cause of all things, moves through all things as immanent to them and stands beyond them as transcendent of them. This dialectic of immanence and transcendence is intended to express the basic foundation of knowledge which cannot be grasped, that unincorporated concept which underlies the divine and all forms of mystic knowledge, of negative and apophatic theology. Moreover, this principle of the unincorporated object of thought reveals a structural relationship between the aspects of divine immanence and transcendence which it is the goal of the theologian to discover, (Eriguena made this the subject of his Periphyseon) insofar as God does not only reveal himself as something that acts upon the world, but also as something that acts within and through the world. "

Nietzsche’s project must here be abandoned, which used the ontic subject (the will) to break completely past the epistemic sphere.

Of even greater import than this ontology without metaphysic is the possibility of a morality without either ontology or metaphysic: ie. the philosophical and complete development/elaboration of the epistemic subject by fully following through the concept of the daemonic with reference to a concept I elaborate elsewhere, namely the transcendental good.

Phenomenology is and has always been essentially the elaboration of the relationship between the epistemic and ontic spheres, and psychology arose from it as basically the same thing but with greater emphasis on the ontic sphere, ie. greater emphasis on experience and volition. This is why Kierkegaard in my mind was the first great psychologist, not Nietzsche, since he wrote the first proper psychology by constructing the either/or which allowed the ontic subject, by way of the idea of choice, to take precedence over the epistemic subject. But my new morality would obviously be totally different from either of the two things.

The epistemic subject would be “completely developed philosophically” when the ontic and epistemic spheres of thought, the real and ideal ego, are equated. I write of that here:

" … Let us turn to modern philosophy for a moment, with the idea of the ‘unincorporated object of knowledge’ in mind. The philosophy of Kant assumes that it is possible to make use of the philosophical categories to proceed with successive syntheses of the ego and non-ego all the way up to some final synthesis, that between freedom and necessity, the moral will and amoral existence, so that the self may be at last grasped in its perfection and completeness, as a concrete and unified being in that act of will which the categorical imperative necessitates. This unity is called by Kant, transcendental apperception. In truth it is through the coextension of the ego and non-ego that the ‘self,’ as something more than a mere principle and abstraction, but rather as a living consciousness, lives: thought, which is the form of this reconciliation, cannot complete and finally unite them, unless it aims to annihilate itself. This ‘self,’ the true and living being of the ego, can appear to thought only as that concept in which ego and non-ego are grasped, not in their antithetic duality, nor in their synthetic union, but in a kind of structural relation exactly the opposite of the one implied by the Kantian apperception: it can appear to thought only as a disunion within the egoic consciousness which expresses itself, not through successive syntheses of its subjective content, as though the disunion were imposed upon the consciousness by some limitation of its power, but through successive divisions of this content into objective forms, as though the disunion lived from within the consciousness itself and through its own power, divisions which render the ego and non ego, freedom and necessity, infinite and finite in a structural relationship developed within the thousand-fold forms of the human experience, be these forms aesthetic, religious, historical, psychological, philosophical, sane, or insane. "

“… Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον, to speak with Athanasius. We cannot, in the manner of one of the old Greeks, name the world a cosmos and beauty until we have named our own soul a cosmos and beauty; to behold and grasp all the world in an idea we must first have come to know ourselves as one particular being and no other and have had everything good and evil rent from the trembling heart and held, not in time, which diffuses our being like colors from a ray of light, but in eternity, which concentrates it. Every man of genius has believed in the eternal, that belief is the very condition of his vitality and flourishing. Perhaps this belief serves as nothing more than an obscuration of the spirit, which man requires if he is to ascend into the highest possible regions of his genius; perhaps he must find all the earth wanting if, like Cassandra of Ilion, he is to utter things not fit for the earth, but it is always the same, and we become like that angel whose wings were set aflame when he reentered this world, if one can entertain the old Gnostic myth. We suffer upon turning back into ourselves, we suffer from the failure to seize upon that inner motion of the heart’s genius, which alone could move us to acknowledge the ideal as fate; the consequence of that strange lust which compels us to embrace obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty, but moreover to prefer this benighted world of the self over that law which strikes against the heart when love, fully matured, overcomes and inspires us to act with proud indifference against the hazards of our mortality. Dei virtutem dei sapientiam, [knowledge, for god, is a virtue] or if one may reverse the old theologian’s paradox: yes, and man’s sin; or, to reinterpret the account of Genesis, what flowered with the greatest sweetness in heaven is reaped with the most bitterness upon the earth.”

The most painful depth of daemonic existence must immediately thrust one into the heaven of heroic philosophy, and vice versa. Modern man has been prevented from attaining that depth of daemonic existence though, as a consequence of the radical divide between the languages of the empirical and transcendental, of experience and philosophy. Hence my new morality, which would aim to reinstate the continuity between these two languages, between the empirical and transcendental aspects of the self, would have as its goal the production of a new heroic philosophy, and new heroic philosophers, a new “mens heroica,” to use Bruno’s own term, or “heroic mind.”

To equate the epistemic and ontic spheres and the ideal and real ego would essentially mean to grasp the living and experienced self, the self as an identity, as merely a differentiation of the excess, an excess which would thereby be grasped as equally the self, albeit ideally. There is a final conceptual opposition between the real ego, the experienced self, and some other thing, in which the excess must be differentiated. It must be differentiated as either the self or this other thing. To differentiate it as the self would lead to what I just described, the equating of real and ideal ego, the exhaustion of one’s daemonism, the release of the self from time, etc. To differentiate the excess in this final opposition as that other thing, as not the self, would lead to the mystic experience and annihilation within the godhead- it would lead to the failure to completely develop the epistemic subject.

The Greeks thought of the self as an antagonism, a contradiction, between empirical reality, time, and desire, and on the other hand form, the eternal, etc. This contradiction is Eros, love. Eros can fall into matter, sensuality, and physical beauty, but it can also ascend the ladder of being and attain to philosophy. It thus constitutes an excess, which by its very nature cannot be absorbed in a dialectical synthesis. The Greeks made the self livable by exploding it into a series of conceptual oppositions, time and eternity, form and matter, etc. Each of these oppositions provided a vantage in which the self could orient itself within its own excess, each provided a ruling passion, a new pathos, a new mode of life, a particular kind of “subjectivity.”

The Judaeo-Christians had a whole new conception of the self. To them the contradiction which constituted the self signified not an excess, but a fundamental lack, an abyss. Why is man such a grotesque synthesis of conflicting powers, of the finite and the infinite? How is he even possible? It is because, all the way down, man is missing something. It is not the things of the earth he misses, for he is equally a temporal and earthly thing, nor the things of heaven, for he can indeed philosophize, practice justice, and achieve virtue… No, no, he is missing God. Thus they psychologically figured out a way to cohere the self. Kierkegaard is all about this, for him this “God” provides the self a leap of faith by which to cohere and bring into unity its despairing relation of the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite. He himself could not figure out how exactly the religious life, how God, cohered the two parts, but I have, and I just explained why it works psychologically. The reinterpretation of the excess as a lack allows the two parts to be cohered when they are brought into a unified longing and desire for this missing thing, “God.”

The problem is, the Christian answer to the self leads to mystical annihilation in the Godhead and the Greeks, having never realized the full extent of the logic of the daemonic, ie. transcendental goods, annihilated themselves in mystical union with the cosmos or in abstract exaltation above the universe, like Plato, exhausted demonically but without an idea in which to repose and take cognizance of that fact. Nietzsche himself ended in annihilation like a good Greek, a will to power annihilated in the Will to Power.

Each of the conceptual oppositions created daemonically constitute a different mode of life. The mode and its quality depends on the opposition, one example of a mode is the aesthetic mode of life. The number of these different modes of life that a particular individual can produce depends on the power of his daemonism. Not all individuals are capable of living the same modes of life or living the same number of modes. A transcendental good is an ideal that roots the individual in that opposition wherein his daemon comes to a rest, is exhausted. Most men are not rooted in this way, and so we have the daemonic frenzy, the repetition of the same modes of life, a kind of psychological stunting. Their self is fragmented in this way throughout the modes and they must continually re-orient themselves within the conceptual oppositions which it has created. Philosophy endows us with the concepts with which to exhaust our daemonic nature. A speculative ethics as a particular way of philosophizing would aid one in finding out the ideal by which to comprehend the final orientation of one’s daemonism, namely by comparing and clearly differentiating the different modes one has lived through, becoming more conscious of them. Hence I call it the transcendental good rather than transcendental ideal: it is realized through a valuation, a speculative ethic.

What we have inherited from nature is nothing but ruins. The bestial organization of our instincts has been replaced with a possible intellectual organization of experience, one of many conceivable ones. There can be no suffering beyond what is created through the conflict in man’s nature, a disorganization of that nature engendered by his clumsy dealing with things, and moreover with truth. For objective truth does not place itself in opposition to lived experience, nor is subjectivity the truth itself, as Kierkegaard had said: rather is the truth that which makes experience possible, insofar as lived experience, grasped philosophically, consists in a peculiar intellectual organization, in the differentiation of the excess, in the coherence of epistemic and ontic reality, for such an organization depends upon conceptions. Truth is the concept of concepts, the one concept which the philosophers lack, namely the concept of experience, the concept of the subject.

One must be led to a Socratic conclusion: there are no true human, psychological questions, but only philosophical ones.

With the summary of my methodology, now here is an example of the methodology in practice. To demonstrate it I will use a quote and a passage from my book.

What is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? – Coleridge.

And this section from my book:

Youth knows neither desolation or solitude, its progress having never been encouraged by mysteries the knowledge of which it alone possesses, but rather does it usher forth emboldening the heart instead of leaving it the sullen witness to life’s disappointments and tragedies; insatiable, it wants to discover what it is within a person that makes him noble, and what lies outside of itself which could bear in its tribe; unable to be contained, it ventures ever onward in the manner of the seas until it finds a surface which arrests it, rather this is a piece of art, a beauty of nature, or a human being, a surface which forces it to return back into the depths of itself, to take the measure of its own powers and to confront itself. Yet, we have sacrificed this continuity of life for pleasures which we deem purer and more exalted, we divide the years from one another to extract the beauty of youth which, during our childhood, was neither present or conscious to us but, solely through these operations of the intellect, had been produced and imposed upon it retroactively, a beauty now indemnified by the consciousness of having possessed and lost something unutterably sacred. What we call spiritual refinement, what we call aesthetic pleasure, is only an expression of the fact that things appear beautiful to us only through those necessary operations of the intellect which distance us from them, namely comparison, analysis, and anatomy. The world ceases to speak to the poet only when he ceases to speak to it, and though the first man Adam found contentment in giving to things their names, the way inward has been barred to us, wherein the name could have been found, and in being stirred with the life of things we vainly try to teach them to enunciate, to proclaim their being.

But the most potent intellectual distance is the one imposed by the operation of time. From the element of the transitory emerges beauty in its most significant form, which must nonetheless suggest to us its very opposite, the finality of death. In this balance Hofmannsthal realized the unity of the aesthetic and the ethical.

It is this thought of the finality of death which re-enters the inarticulate dream of youth or the memory of love which we bear within us, imbuing it also, in its seeming eternity, with the coloring of the mutable, so that we cannot speak its name, and cannot live commensurately with ourselves. We have within us what we are and might be, the image of beauty and of our happiness, of our good and of our law, but it is so transformed by this thought, that it cannot be easily discerned. How rarely can man say at once that he has lived, and that he will live. The finality of man and world nonetheless occupies an ethical dimension because it therefor compels us to attempt to realize the means by which we might recover this image and secure it against the influences of time, it compels us to brand every moment with its own fire, to follow upon each one as upon the thread which would allow us to unravel the tortured confusion of human joy and sorrow, and which would grant us, perhaps not satisfaction or happiness, but at least the quiet heart in which our many longings could finally be held still in their moment of distinction, and thereby grow quiet themselves, sober, cold, and sink down into the bottom of life, to that image within us which we vainly attempt to lend a name to.

We long to say “en de phaei kai olesson,” with Homer, but there is something that calls us back into the dawn’s light. No one would doubt the truth of what Leopardi spoke, when he said that even the most tragic art, which offers the image of life’s vanity with the greatest clarity, serves as a consolation. This is because such art gains its seductive force and beauty by making conscious to us some obscure vitality which longs to expend itself, but cannot be exhausted in the service of annihilation; this vital power, insofar as it is unconscious, the saint calls sin, through which he is at last led to heaven, the Buddhist calls desire, which gradually effaces his personality in order to grant him the vision of his Nirvana, and the philosopher calls ignorance, which leads him to knowledge. For this vitality can at first only compel a man to kindle his own hell within himself in which to dissolve the image of the world, as Amiel said, or consume him in the play of endless hopes and loves which lack any substance, by making him long to taste of life and passion merely for the sake of life and passion, an ambition which grants him only an illusory life and a kind of passion that can only end in dispirited regret. Love that has grown cold can indeed be revived, but regret cannot accomplish this; the saint can rediscover within himself the image of his God, but not through sin; the philosopher can attain to his ideal, but not through ignorance; the Buddhist can be free of himself, but not through desire. These things suggest to us only a life that has yet to be lived, and which cannot therefor be destroyed, and where great art makes us conscious of this life by taking into its service these destructive elements, as the element of time and mortality, sin and desire, ignorance and longing, it is unable to truly realize it.

We want to differentiate, understand through difference, the excess. (Meaning the unconceived, the unreflected component of any concept.) The concept whose excess which is to be differentiated is, as it is given in the Coleridge quote, love. Love as most poets and philosophers understand it is the desire for eternity, ie. joy wants deep, deep, the eternal.

We must first identify a conceptual opposition in which it can be reified negatively, as difference. Drawing from my passage, the first term would be not youth itself but the poeticized sense of youth, which is produced by the operation of time, and death, ( again not death itself, but the intuited thought of death) which is the final operation of time and annuls the sense of youth by the very means that it is produced. As my passage says, “renters the inarticulate dream of youth…”

The excess can be then differentiated as a species of hope, the “vital power” mentioned in the last paragraph of mine, as the passivity which underlies consciousness and engenders the human agency to decompose and recompose relations within the order of time. This vital power, the underlying passivity of consciousness, is the unreflected component of love. Now instead of speaking of love we can speak of this passivity, we can submit it to this same process, and so on. Identities can be solidified philosophically, as youth and death, while at the same time keeping the circle of thought opened, for we can reproduce the excess ad infinitum in new series of conceptual oppositions. In other words an ontology can be produced, a philosophy of identities and beings, while still freeing the epistemic subject and human agent[the knowing being, me and you] from the limitations of this ontology, so that it can be reified in terminology that is not ontological, materialist, reductionist. That means a non-ontological morality is possible and a non-metaphysical ontology is possible.

This method has the power to revitalize philosophy in its entirety, both the project of being, ontology, and the project of the good, morality, while at the same time sublimating them in a new pursuit, a new branch of philosophy, the daemonic philosophy which has as its goal the equating of real and ideal ego, the differentiation of the excess underlying the ego or self itself, the complete philosophical elaboration of the human subject, and claims as its domain the transcendental good, speculative ethics, etc. My new morality concerns the self’s relating to itself, but this philosophical method could be used to define a classical morality of the self’s relating to others, just as well. I would like it to be utilized for all three goals, ontology, classical morality, and speculative ethics/the defining of the transcendental good.

I’ll do what I can, but I cannot possibly rewrite the entire history of philosophy alone. That is why I must focus on the third goal there. But the great thing is that anyone can use this method… It is an actual pattern of thought, a thoughtform. The method itself is essentially an Anti-dialectic. I created it through examination of human psychology, which I identify as “daemonic” in nature. In my view all philosophy, by utilizing dialectics, has been in conflict with human nature and the way human consciousness itself operates, that is, daemonically. I had to create a way of thinking that was compatible with the logic of the daemonic. The self, exploded into a series of conceptional oppositions, must orient itself within them. Dialectics identifies the negative form of a conception and integrates them in a third term, supposedly a process that leads to the absolute but which really continually disorients the self: they are integrated in the third term through the mediation of the absolute within the antithetic relationship. The excess is no longer apprehended, in fact philosophers soon stopped realizing that there was in fact an unreflected, unconceived, component in every concept. The only way dialectics can work is by assuming that a concept contains what it is about, that the concept of love contains the experience of love, that there is no excess, there is no component of self-consciousness which exceeds the capacity of dialectic absorption into the absolute. Eriugena was vital to me in realizing this shortcoming of conventional philosophical reason and in seeing beyond it. As I write about him in my thread on Eriugena:

Eriugena shared a conception of God with Spinoza, God as a primordial substance with infinite attributes. For Eriugena this implied that anything that could be said about God was true, considered from different modes in which these attributes might be said to be or not be. The very fact that an idea can be clearly articulated indicates its truth. Again, only the individuating and decomposing force of the human intellect is responsible for see things in a negative designation, as non-entity, non-existence. Here we have the first glimmering of a speculative ethics. He says that the amount of interpretations of the bible is like the innumerable colors in a peacock’s tail, that knowledge is infinite, and he delights in this idea. This perspective also contains the richest conception of the the inner disunion within the self, the “inner wound” within it that divides it into an ego and non-ego, a particular individual personality and the world. Eriugena transfers this disuinion of individual existence to the divine substance itself, dividing that substance into natura, through the categories of being and non-being, analgous to the finite and infinite which express themselves through man’s inherent disuinion, constituting the four divisions of nature. Body and mind are not united, nor opposed, for him… bodily existence and passion is one mode of the infinte substance, thought is another, their relation expressing at first the metaxy within the individual between the finite and infinite, mortal and immortal soul, and then the one in which the substance is expressed as natura, as nobeing and being, perishable world and imperishable God.

… For Eriugena, a passion is the finite and mutable revelation of the eternal aspect of a thought, a thought is the infinite and immutable revelation of the finite aspect of a passion. That is his concept of theophany. Goodness consists in following through the series of theophanies to the final mode of being, in completely realizing the eternal thought in the passions and the finite passion in thought, in other words, it consists in philosophy.

For Eriugena, the Absolute is an immanent reality which gives rise to the agency of human thought but which cannot be contained by that thought. In every passion and concept there is then what I call an excess: philosophy consists in the clarification of ideas, in drawing from out of them that excess, an absolute which cannot be integrated in a dialectical system via mediation.

Imagine my surprise upon finding out that all philosophical thought has been destructive, in fact in contradiction with, the actual way in which the human consciousness operates.

A sik þau trûðu

68

Value ontology; the law of subjectivity

Nietzsche wrote:

If the innermost essence of being is will to power, if pleasure is every increase of power, displeasure every feeling of not being able to resist and dominate; may we not then posit pleasure and displeasure as cardinal facts? Is will possible without these two oscillations of Yes and No? But who feels pleasure?.. But who wants power?.. Absurd question, if the essence is itself power-will and consequently feelings of pleasure and displeasure! Nonetheless: opposites, obstacles are needed; therefore, relatively, encroaching units… [1]
I disagree that this is an absurd question, it is real and needs to be answered. The answer is “units”. But what is a unit?
The definition will to power relies on the conception of a unit. But we can not be satisfied with merely assuming that this “unit” of which the only definition is that it is part of something (“The” will to power, a monster no less, of energy.
I doubt that we should take “will to power” as a definition of the world, if we see that it requires us to imagine a monstrous creature, which incorporates every subtlety in the world.

It explains nothing. It only describes from a very great distance. Its positing of “encroaching units” is an unfortunate observation, inevitably made by the will to define a great All. It defined itself onto the world - and yet what it saw, the “Monster of energy” does not explain “unit”.

What is a unit? How can it be? I ask these questions as it is clear that in a world-image of flux this is not a given. What is the mechanism whereby a unit may exist in the face of flux? This is what my theory addresses.
Units are not explained by positing / observing them. We can only make a unit logically understandable in terms of its relating to other units. The “form” or “modus” of this relating is the will to power. But how do we understand the term relating itself? This is the subject of my theory.

What is relating? One value standing in proportion to another. This relating means that they exist in a shared value-system. This is how I use the term value.

By self-valuing I mean: by maintaining ones structural nature positing a value system, in which a relation may take place, in which otherness is to be dominated/subjected to as (in terms of) self. Relating without disintegrating requires firm value-positing. Willing to power demands firmness of self-value.

One either holds oneself as a fixed value, or disintegrates. In the latter case, there can be no willing to power.

Quote :
A self cannot value itself. [1]
I contend the contrary. 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.

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. There is no “chaos of sensations” or “chaos of wills” - these are self-contradicting phrases. This is where I see the contradiction in Nietzsches thought – on the one hand he states that all is a flux, on the other hand, to explain what this flux is (will to power), he had to posit units. To explain becoming at the root of all being, he has to posit being at the root of becoming.

We may then say that the order is: chaos-beings-flux. Flux is the highest order, for which beings are required. I am looking into the core of elementary beings/forces/wills. What enables them the persistence of their activity – their being? The fact that they can relate to whatever they are not, while maintaining a difference from what they are not. The fact that their relating includes them.

Quote :
[A] self that values is the same as a subject that wills, that experiences certain things as pleasurable (“valuable”) and others as displeasurable (“not valuable”—cf. WP 580). And in WP 1066, Nietzsche suggests that such selves or subjects have always existed: “a certain definite number of centers of force”. [2]
Willing is not an explanation of valuing, whereas valuing does explain how will is possible.
This is because value is a term bridging the gap between physics and metaphysics. Consider this for a moment. What does value mean? It conveys both the principles of information (which borders on the metaphysical (in the sense of beyond-physical)) and worth (which is physicality as subjectivity). My theory, when understood, makes metaphysics as separate from physics impossible, and logically grounds physicality in subjectivity.

A final example - the proposed apple. The apple values whatever is in the sap or light it receives in terms of itself. It does not value it in terms of a pear or cat. It will incorporate everything it can incorporate in accordance with its self-valuing, and reject everything it can not. It interprets in terms of itself, which means that it uses itself as the standard-value to all valuation/interpreting/overpowering. This consistent using-what-one-is as a standard to expand on, is what I mean by self-valuing.

Consistency is defined as activity. In this way, the revaluation of the static Platonic values is completed. Now, philosophers can finally permit their thinking to operating in the world as “politicians” – instead of to a rational metaphysics, we have to uphold to a standard of valor.

John Ruskin wrote:
“Valor, from valere, to be well or strong; –strong, life (if a man), or valiant; strong, for life (if a thing), or valuable. To be ‘valuable,’ therefore, is to ‘avail toward life.’ … For wealth, instead of depending merely on a ‘have,’ is thus seen to depend on a ‘can.’ … And what we reasoned of only as accumulation of material, is seen to demand also accumulation of capacity… Wealth is, therefore, ‘The Possession of the Valuable by the valiant.’” [3]
The valiant is real being. All that/who is/are not valiant, is not actually being, not to itself an actuality. It is understood then, why honor so often trumps the instinct for self-preservation.

[ this post has been modified from its original form at
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177148&start=100
[1] Nietzsche quote taken from “The Will to Power” section 693
[2, 3] Comments by Sauwelios

Fixed Cross

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PostSubject: Re: Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Icon_minitimeFri Dec 09, 2011 11:28 pm
Honor may perhaps be described as the capacity to be valued - as self valuing and as external value both.
Honoring the deepest commitment: honoring the bond between the valuing process and the identity of the valuer.
Honor toward exteriority is based on appearance first, then on interpretation -

towards interiority it is the very interpreting act, the taking-as-standard what is accumulated as this taking.
A person may keep his honor hidden, playing the game of other more ostentatious self-honorings, allowing himself ot be valued on their terms, allowing himself to be interpreted to the honor of those others.

Self-valuing must be clearly conceived of continuously to make this anything but moral suicide, to keep the capacity to primarily honor self value. When this is lost, it is hard to find back. Impossible, perhaps - unless it is re-established, by an active re-invention of the self, a reunification of the scattered terms in which the subjects values had been honored here and there in the terms of others.

In the case of family, most people choose to simply include them in their self-identity. This causes the deepest conflicts in man, the confusion of valuing in terms of self or valuing self in terms of progenitors. The mix of values remains largely unresolved, unless man ‘acts out’ - breaks the logic of the families value system. Establishing conscious self-valuing requires not to ‘kill the father and fuck the mother’ - a turning against, this is slave-morality. The jealousy of the father is nonsensical, as he too has been caused by another mans will - no person is responsible for his own birth. But what this person is once it is born, can be summarized as his responsibility toward himself for his own being. In this ‘pact’ which needs to be honored, the mechanism of self-valuing continues to take hold of that which properly exists.

Most of us do not exist.

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PostSubject: Re: Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Icon_minitimeSat Dec 10, 2011 10:20 pm
This has doubtless been said, but I wish to put it here, in writing, as clear and as brief as I can.

I think your theory both draws out the necessary consequence of Nietzsche’s will-to-power (that is, that “willing-to” is itself not a conscious operation; for how could it be, if it lies at the heart of all becoming) as well as serves as its ground (that is, that willing-to-power is always relational to, and preceded by, willing-to-self – or self-valuation–, always contingent upon it – and, of course, that neither of these are conscious operations, that they need not be conscious, that is). In this sense, with our ears perked to a Nietzschean ontology, value-ontology is a double-movement: an extending upward (a drawing-out), as well as a grounding. Taken alongside Nietzsche’s will-to-power, it – dare I say – completes the ontological project.

What I want to see, FC, is the forging of a new principle of temporality out of the ground of value-ontology as the basis for power-ontology (as I will call Nietzsche’s metaphysics). Of course, to re-think temporality is to re-think being, in Heideggerian terms. Much else follows from there. You and I spoke briefly on ILP of the notion of time as the outcome of a relation between active subjectivities.

Fixed Cross
Yes, we must define time as proper to being in its new form, that is to say valuings who have arranged their self-valuing as a process with a beginning and an end.

Our new time can not be anything other than a narrative time. The concept time as it has been used up until now has been interpreted as if it would always have a beginning and an end. In science we see that this is not the case - that minerals do not have ends like animals, but still we have seen it fit to project onto existence in general a finality, and a beginning, between which there is a process of aging, developing.

It is so far impossible for us to imagine a process of developing without an end. Nature must always reach a goal. In our pride, not without any ground, we have imagined ourselves as this goal. But as this logically is an attack on the process that has led up to us. Parodites observes that in this way reason attacks its own causal ground, it breaks the hegemony of the sediment of those billions of billions of of opportunistic inferences that we now call instinct. Rationality is a torch cast into the dove-house of our nature, its presence overrules the orientation of the fine, diligent instincts trained for millions of years.

Because it did not know what it was doing, the hand of rationality has been brute, it has most of the time dispersed the instincts, sent them running at war with each other. What is so disturbing about the intellect, why is it a flame or a sword, and not a bucket or a bar of soap? Because by virtue of its capacity to abstract, it has claimed for itself the concept of death. The first animal to know it is mortal may have been the Elephant - in any case man has defined himself by it. How precisely man is defined by his own knowledge of his own morality is impossible to do justice in a few words, suffice it to say here that he has even projected this quality on all of existence. He expects an end to it, and has sought a beginning.

This is the rough workings of the intellect, the half asleep dream-projecting. When it wakes up slightly, the intellect is able to infer that the principle of causality, which it has observed to apply to what is designated as existing, prohibits the causation of “everything” by “nothing”. The Big Bang theory is a logical futility, so is that of divine creation - such models, if they can be called that, are simply impressive objects projected at the space where things get too complicated. People always do this, as soon as they do not wish to seek any further, they create a ‘discovery’, ‘revelation’, ‘final truth’. The sense of accomplishment is the resolution of the evil sentiment of finality. To end and live this has so far been the ideal of mankind. Our notion of time has been one of fear. It is because we identify ourselves with what “is”, which is a form approaching non-being.

Where “the line of time” represents an iron tract along a downward slope upon which our lives and worlds are bound, time in the sense of self-valuing is an experimental medium, which may be ignored. Time is not relevant to what we are - it is a product of our evaluation of the others finality as part of our own being-here. Dasein is not moving toward an end, it is a perpetual coming into being in a particular modus - one that is, to apply 19th century terminology to a cosmic ethics, ‘pleasing to itself’. And this is how we are bound to be, even unto death - this is why death is not a violation of our being, except when we perish.

Ao as Heidegger saw the requirement for beings to die without perishing, we now see that the dread of dying is the perishing, and we can see that the neurotic or even psychotic behavior to secure our own existence against the “inevitable” - an idea which is never corresponding with the actual - fortifies the notion of identity as negated by time on which it is based.

The intellect is a murderous weapon as long as it lingers on the sentiments which gave rise to it - the shock of seeing what happens to another ‘same being’ as what is inevitable for one self - the confusion of the outer with the inner. The acting on this - the securing of the outer at the cost of the natural course of the inner, has been the story of morality and war/science, the fortification of identity and presence toward the ‘official world’. By this the fertility of time is undone, symbols are set as being, and behind these symbols the creators perish… the story has been told.

But this is all time is - fertility. All truly rational ends are harvests.

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PostSubject: Re: Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Icon_minitimeTue Dec 13, 2011 7:38 pm
It is interesting that Leopardi connected time with self-love/self-valuing.

“The living being loves itself without limit, and never ceases loving itself. Therefore, it never ceases desiring for itself the good, and desires the good without limits. The good, in essence, is none other than pleasure. However great and real this pleasure, it is always limited. As a result, no possible pleasure is proportionate and equal in measure to the love that the living being bears itself. Therefor, no pleasure can satisfy the living being.”

Parodites

Is time then, to follow Leopardi’s thought… only that thing which separates the self-loving, self-valuing being from its self? As we value and love ourselves we project in a third term, pleasure, a shadowy word, the fullness of our love; we cannot value ourselves directly, but only through this shadowy third term. This fact, that we cannot love and value ourselves directly, implicates us in the order of time, of elation and defeat, birth and death, and impotent struggle.
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Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Value ontology; the law of subjectivity Icon_minitimeTue Dec 13, 2011 11:22 pm

[quote]
Parodites wrote:
It is interesting that Leopardi connected time with self-love/self-valuing.

“The living being loves itself without limit, and never ceases loving itself. Therefore, it never ceases desiring for itself the good, and desires the good without limits. The good, in essence, is none other than pleasure. However great and real this pleasure, it is always limited. As a result, no possible pleasure is proportionate and equal in measure to the love that the living being bears itself. Therefor, no pleasure can satisfy the living being.”
This is a good rationalization of “why” time would exist, persist.

Quote :
This unrealized anticipation of pleasure, of the self-good, by its very unrealizability, constitutes for us, time.
I would attribute the unrealized to the reflexive, animal nature. In man it may be realized, in his giving shape to a work of art. There is the knowledge of the undying nature of a narrative in the poet who has created a character, we should take perhaps a little more seriously the idea that living forms can be created. Now that nature has become the material of the mind, can the mind not directly take control of nature? This is a radical idea and only possible due to my strong identification with the Himalayan sciences of internal force.

There are a number of ways to eternalize oneself, to gain access the knowledge of eternity - within one “line of time” several eternities may be experienced and unleashed on the world to be played out as religion for billions.
What is identity, to a creator but an obstruction? He is identifying the world, and his ego might perhaps play the part of a piano man, but his real self, which at this point is an integration of the empirical and the transcendent, an immediate mind - here the fully plastic nature of reality is felt, the fierceness of the pure principle of determined Dasein cuts like a knife through the butter of the cosmos.

Insight - this is the seed-action from which a time-span is born. Once back in the mortal world, the psychedelic demigod rides out the change as it unfolds and dances its path. This is the idea occult consciousness. What has so far been lacking is a culture.

Breakdown of order versus change: change is defined to occur within the confines of a self-value based value system, an integer perspective. A breakdown resets the terms to the surrounding powers bids. The Dionysian is not Dionysos himself, time is Dionysian and the God is the director of time, projector of a process which from within is the unexpected real, from without an iron logic.

Dionysos is not himself the enraptured, his is the enrapturing, the projector of a trajectory for disclosed being, a disclosure of time to a mortal. The artist God stands above time, gives shape to it. So does a director, who intertwines narratives as they play out through various interacting perspectives. We must produce a “middle ground of time”, oriented around which new passions arise, sentiments no longer of longing, and tragic loss and heroic savior of the status quo - but of having, logical gain and diligent constructor of the new heart of the universe.

Parodites

Quote :
Parodites wrote:
It is interesting that Leopardi connected time with self-love/self-valuing.

“The living being loves itself without limit, and never ceases loving itself. Therefore, it never ceases desiring for itself the good, and desires the good without limits. The good, in essence, is none other than pleasure. However great and real this pleasure, it is always limited. As a result, no possible pleasure is proportionate and equal in measure to the love that the living being bears itself. Therefor, no pleasure can satisfy the living being.”
This is a good rationalization of “why” time would exist, persist.

Quote :
This unrealized anticipation of pleasure, of the self-good, by its very unrealizability, constitutes for us, time.
I would attribute the unrealized to the reflexive, animal nature. In man it may be realized, in his giving shape to a work of art. There is the knowledge of the undying nature of a narrative in the poet who has created a character, we should take perhaps a little more seriously the idea that living forms can be created. Now that nature has become the material of the mind, can the mind not directly take control of nature? This is a radical idea and only possible due to my strong identification with the Himalayan sciences of internal force.

There are a number of ways to eternalize oneself, to gain access the knowledge of eternity - within one “line of time” several eternities may be experienced and unleashed on the world to be played out as religion for billions.
What is identity, to a creator but an obstruction? He is identifying the world, and his ego might perhaps play the part of a piano man, but his real self, which at this point is an integration of the empirical and the transcendent, an immediate mind - here the fully plastic nature of reality is felt, the fierceness of the pure principle of determined Dasein cuts like a knife through the butter of the cosmos.

Insight - this is the seed-action from which a time-span is born. Once back in the mortal world, the psychedelic demigod rides out the change as it unfolds and dances its path. This is the idea occult consciousness. What has so far been lacking is a culture.

Breakdown of order versus change: change is defined to occur within the confines of a self-value based value system, an integer perspective. A breakdown resets the terms to the surrounding powers bids. The Dionysian is not Dionysos himself, time is Dionysian and the God is the director of time, projector of a process which from within is the unexpected real, from without an iron logic.

Dionysos is not himself the enraptured, his is the enrapturing, the projector of a trajectory for disclosed being, a disclosure of time to a mortal. The artist God stands above time, gives shape to it. So does a director, who intertwines narratives as they play out through various interacting perspectives. We must produce a “middle ground of time”, oriented around which new passions arise, sentiments no longer of longing, and tragic loss and heroic savior of the status quo - but of having, logical gain and diligent constructor of the new heart of the universe.

Yes. Time is not only the destroyer, but also the liberator. I commented on Leopardi’s thought in one of my books:

"
Leopardi’s insight here is undeniable, insofar as he articulates that sense in which love and desire are anterior to all pleasure, but he is wrong in the sense that pleasure fails to live up to the image of the good, of the philosophical and moral ideas. The interminable character of our human love is what invests it with moral fecundity and power, rather than that impotent reflection upon the vision of the ideas and obedience to law in which our morality has, to the greater extent, consisted. The daemonic is a problematic conception, and to realize in it the richness of philosophical and moral vision is difficult without in this way also falling prey to those sufferings which Leopardi has spoken of.

We long to hold on to our identity in the face of all suffering, and the more profound our suffering becomes, so the more ardently do we hold on to this identity like Empedocles who, believing himself to be an immortal god, threw himself into the flames of mount Aetna to prove just that, and perished. In the life of the individual, however, this “Empedoclean” suffering must always lead to its contrary state, the suffering of a Faust, which compels a man to willingly seek after the full breadth of human experience, for both its pain and its pleasure, in the desire to be at last born anew. This later suffering characterizes the aesthetic life and, informed as it is by a hopeless desire, must plunge man yet again into Empedoclean suffering, the defiant suffering of the self against the truth and its own pain. This “frenzy,” to use the language of Bruno, is precisely the daemonic, the primal moral reality, for it is the individuating power which works, to one degree or another, upon all men, establishing their peculiar natures.

The daemonic institutes the rule of time, which all beings live under and in which they take shape, but which in this case becomes that power in which the individual elects to remain himself in the face of suffering, rather than transform himself. Man can here say with Ovid, nihil est nisi mortis imaga, for the image of his own death is answered by that of universal death. This moral power alone can bring into harmony those two most powerful notes which might alter the meaning of human life, that of man’s mortality and that of love, the one which compels man to to adopt the profoundest apprehension of his self, and the other which in the same breath makes him wish to be transformed in the image of his longing. A great sentence from the hand of an ancient Greek philosopher says that only he who possesses a glint of heaven in his eye can endure looking at the sun. But we cannot know that this glint is truly born of the heavens and a moral fecundity by looking at meager fires, but we must see if we can endure the sun, the idea, itself. Our love must not be meager, but noble."

Defenders of the Earth

It seems to me that this love requires a sufficiently grand, expansive object in order to find itself situated firmly within the “metaxological” world betwixt subject and object - we have different loves going on here. Self-valuing can be sustained through direct and powerful appeal to this world, but the self-objectifying subjectivity oriented outward must inevitably make use of world-images and exterior time/logic in order to remain solid enough to act as a suitable point of reference, measurement within the vast system of discursive indermedial points of self-referentiality.

No matter how powerful, able the conceiving bridging consciousness it cannot do away with “the world”, with the necessity for the image of those from within this world to which it binds itself to appear in the manner of its own world-exteriorized form devoid of any possibility for total self-valuing self-enclosure and dictation – naming. The terms escape, flee, else they could not function as terms proper.

The necessity of this object of divine love, highest love being what drives the immeasurably great longing and pain of separation within the breast of the noble man of genius, of the artist, of the poet-philosopher, we must focus on what Parodites has named a new possibility for ethics, a morality that situates man with respect to the transcendental representation of himself from within the confines of his own actual lived possibilities… to which I would add, for the future, the sense that all striving, grasping in terms of the possible, which is of course the proper purview of the sufficiently actual consciousness, is done so as an appealing to futurity, a thinking from within the forms of time that means more precisely an inscribing upon tomorrow, directly writing it, with strict literal meaning: entirely uniting present with future.

Is this love itself the tragedy, or have men of genius thus far failed to approach this love in a manner that lives up to, affirms their own standard, the conditions of their own being?

Fixed Cross
Acrux

Yes. Now that we have established the necessity in the law and the meaning - what we have is a philosophical science by a scientific approach to philosophy; a kind of techne of being.

What flows from every such science is method.
What is included in none of the previous sciences is the valuation of ethics.
In this case, the ethics is the root of the science.

What does this say about the methods that may be invented now? My thoughts on this are still vague and in the domain of “zen of action” and “creating time-forms”, I foresee an architecture - but I can not pinpoint the ways in which knowledge is going to be of use. The very concept of utility transforms before my eyes, becoming itself the object of creative interest.

Surprisingly, when viewed from beyond good and evil, life, this monster of energy, is revealed at heart to embody the purest ethics. It is a testament to how terms come to be: extremes, opposites, designating the real. A poet is one who knows these terms, knows when and where to add the salt to establish a space between the ingredients. - such must be our approach to applied science - not the substances matters, but what is in between substances. The substances take care of themselves. That is the fundamental assumption. It will from now on only be about creating conditions. Determining directly is becoming useless, it has reached the limit of its usefulness and therefore the very method fails us!!

Could that not be the most ridiculous verification for quantum-mechanics: science no longer holds where it can no longer serve us, in the way we had intended from the outset.
It has outplayed its use, therefore it fails us!

A new means to science becomes synonymous with a new purpose for it. No longer to keep uncertainty away from definitions but to stimulate uncertainty towards knowledge.

Knowledge - depth.

Parodites

How can one have a concept of freedom when freedom itself, by its very nature, defies all conceptualization? That was one of Schelling’s big concerns, and we could ask a similar question: How can we value our selves when the self defies all value-conceptualization? That no idea is adequate to its ideatum, contra Spinoza; that no concept is adequate to its signified, is the major lesson in Schelling’s great essay on freedom, and in a similar way we might say that no value is adequate to the self. Schelling thus said that all things find their ground in “that within God which is not God himself,” and we can say that all values find their ground and origin in that “within the self which is not the self itself.” I have articulated this unreflected part of the self which is none the less constituent of it in my writing about man’s daemonic existence.

Nietzsche, too, recognized that no value was adequate and equal to the self which posited it, and that the Will to Power, this positing itself, then was the primary constituent of the self’s moral-philosophical reality. He refused to look for a new ground for values, allowed them to remain groundless, and did not recognize any more subtle logic at work in the self, namely the daemonic- the existence of an unreflected, unegoic principle which, in its dynamic interaction with the reflected principle, constituted the moral-philosophical reality of the individual.

This dynamic interaction is nothing less than what has here been called self-valuing, or what one could speak of as self-love. We can see the shallowest example of it when a woman loves her own beauty and body, the corporeal, unegoic, non-reflective part of her self, and thereby appropriates it to the higher order of the reflective self-consciousness, herself thereby rising into a higher order of daemonic reality.

But what are the deeper and the deepest unreflected aspects of the self, how can they be appropriated by the reflective self-consciousness: to what extent can we recognize in the unreflected aspect of the self the ground of our values, our self-love, our self-value? Such unreflected aspects are things like necessity against our apparent freedom, mortality against our eternal aspirations. As I formulate the questions in my own philosophical language: to what extent can the continuity between the empirical and transcendental egos be realized?

These questions are the theoretical objects of the new philosophy I see posed here and by myself, the only philosophy capable of re-grounding morality and human values.

Schelling held that it was inhibition, a limiting, that brings things into creation. The original source of all being, the ground of the Almighty, was infinite, but uncreated, only when something posed a limit to it could things come into existence, for the almighty was thereby forced by this limit to assume a peculiar structure which we know of as reality.

Goethe shows an equal point in his metamorphosis of plants: a plant grows through a series of expansive and contractive movements in distinction to animals for, while it must strive up for the sun, the plant must grope blindly in the dirt for moisture. The plant can grow indefinitely, but it only takes shape, becomes formulated, becomes an organism, because of the limit imposed on its progress through its need for water and light.

Without something to limit the development of the self it can never become structured. We should re-read the works of literature and philosophy through the lens of this metaphor, as if they were developing plants reaching up infinitely toward the sun and the horizon of meaning, but which nonetheless need the ground and its water; which expand and contract randomly, as the night changes to day, as it rains and as it dries up.

In other words, we should look for the unreflected aspect in every self-conscious moral and philosophical idea, and then play the reflected idea or principle upon the newly uncovered unreflected one.

The daemonic being becomes structured, individuated, through the interplay of these two principles within itself, the one limiting it, the other compelling it to expand. Holderlin described a similar situation with his concepts of the aorgic and organic, the spirit and the body, inconceivable nature and nature structured by human thought.

But this structure, in distinction to Holderlin’s concept of the self, is self-effacing. The frenzied existence of the daemonic, the interaction of the egoic and nonegoic principles, is continually effacing its own productions. This is why I borrowed the term “daemonic” from Bruno’s book “eroici frenzies” to describe my concept of the self: it is a self-effacing, frenzied existence. The final destruction of the self, the final renunciation of the self which Holderlin imagined was the apotheosis of tragedy cannot be accomplished through my philosophy: the height of daemonic existence leads to a dramatic reversal through the attaining of “eroici” or heroism, to use Bruno’s terms: what has been called here the act of self-valuing, self-loving, and what I have called the re-instantiation of the unreflected aspect of the self in reflected self-consciousness.

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Value Ontology and the Ground of human values. Empty
PostSubject: Re: Value Ontology and the Ground of human values. Value Ontology and the Ground of human values. Icon_minitimeSat Dec 17, 2011 4:54 pm
This philosophy then, I think, would attain the greatest power in not offering itself as something for cohering the self in the manner of old morality and philosophy, through prescriptive ideation, not as a tool for shaping one’s self and asserting particular values, but as an instrument for grounding the act of self-valuing, as an instrument for grounding the “daemon.” It would do this by fully articulating the middle-ground the daemon occupies, by realizing the continuous discourse between the empirical and transcendental within which man, as a daemonic being, continuously takes form and is continuously effaced.

A necessary step would be in realizing the extremity and depth of daemonic existence: mortality, death. Only from the standpoint of absolute loss, of death itself, can a true philosophy begin. Out of it is born the “mens heroica” or heroicism that will instantiate the discourse between the two spheres itself, constituting a being capable of self-value, capable of weathering the continuous frenzy of its existence as a daemonic being.

Such a philosophy is the great tragic poem, the voice of the not merely broken hero, but the hero defiant in its fate. It is the voice of the sufferer beyond the pangs of all loss and desire, beyond even mourning the death of God, no longer cognizant of any God, dead or living, the voice of identification with the universal tragedy and therefor alone capable of affirming itself as precisely the tragedy’s voice, as the recording spirit which passes over the waters and the earth. It is the voice belonging alone to that being that can love itself, for it is the being that alone knows itself, comprehends out of all the animals its daemonic nature, and is therefor also the voice belonging alone to that being that can love the world-- that world which is nothing less than the middle ground, the “middle shrine” as Sophocles named the earth, which is the dwelling place of the daemon, of the being that is born and dies, is created and is effaced, knows itself, and in the next breath knows nothing, is nothing, which perishes in its own glimpse and image of eternity.

From this standpoint of absolute death, which I paint as the origin of philosophy, my own philosophy was born. I described it to Capable in a PM once:

If you’re interested in my life, my experience, I can venture a word about it. I feel like speaking of it.

I cry often. I have cried much of this day. Not because of my pain, it rarely bothers me, not emotionally anyway. I saw a bug on the ground. And I cried. To speak with the poet Barbier, I see a thousand suns at work, reflected in the dew a’ top a blade of grass, upon their own dawns. Eternity speaks to me through every life I see, even an insect makes me cry. I’m crying right now. I’m not sad, I’m not happy either. It is… only the passing, temporary feelings, like sadness and happiness, that we can put into words. The enduring states of the soul, these we cannot speak of. No, we can say nothing of those, that fundamental tension invested to the structure of our passions, the real constituent of our life. But if I had to venture a metaphysical thesis with regard to this world, I could only compare it to one monstrous, bloody altar… all the world a great altar upon which every living thing must be sacrificed and is continually being sacrificed, to what? To the Gods, the Gods who should have been. Alfred de Vigny penned some lines of similar import, which I took as a quotation to begin Hamartia:

If it is true that in the sacred Garden of the Scriptures,
the Son of Man said what we see reported;
mute, blind and deaf to the cry of all creatures,
if Heaven abandons us like an aborted world,
the just will oppose disdain to this absence,
and will answer from now on with only cold silence
the eternal silence of the Divinity.

Thus it is this cold silence I find in things. I found it in that bug this morning. In all the greatest philosophy I also find it, every genius has, in the end, proudly resigned himself to this cold silence. I wish that the word “love” was loud enough to ring out through this silence, but it is not. I have been shouting it all my life. We, as human beings, can hear it as well as that bug can. Which is to say, not at all. I find a great solace in my understanding of the Greek perspective on nature:

“The ancients, especially in the case of the Greeks, found in nature a relief from their humanity, from the impulse toward knowledge, beauty, the true, and the good, which continually burdened them. These drives have grown cold for us, and it is in nature that we aim to reawaken them, as though by a kind of intoxicant. To be relieved of one’s humanity- what a noble pleasure! Perhaps man once went before his gods with the same longing in his heart.”

Out of that cold silence with which we return the silence of the divinity, philosophy learns to speak.

Defenders of the Earth

How can one have a concept of freedom when freedom itself, by its very nature, defies all conceptualization? That was one of Schelling’s big concerns, and we could ask a similar question: How can we value our selves when the self defies all value-conceptualization? That no idea is adequate to its ideatum, contra Spinoza; that no concept is adequate to its signified, is the major lesson in Schelling’s great essay on freedom, and in a similar way we might say that no value is adequate to the self. Schelling thus said that all things find their ground in “that within God which is not God himself,” and we can say that all values find their ground and origin in that “within the self which is not the self itself.” I have articulated this unreflected part of the self which is none the less constituent of it in my writing about man’s daemonic existence.

True, but how might a singular value or valuational capacity ever be adequate for/by the whole of one’s inner life, being? Uncountable valuations come together to form the substance of a single moment of consciousness, and if this were not problematic enough, the deep and vast summational history/mnemosyne of this consciousness stretches backward into darkness and obscurity, is largely unknowable because it cannot sufficiently be recalled back into the active moment of inter-relational sensation-consciousness from which it initially, in that now remote past moment, was given birth.

As long as we conceptualize the notion of freedom or valuation as the requirement for summational enclosure and capture we set ourselves up for failure. We can move from a perspective of overt, “ex ante” necessity into a perspective of a sufficiency that directly projects necessity where it looks - a sufficient necessity. I think the middle ground of the daemonic which you articulate provides a conceptual grounding-point from which such a shift in perspective can occur.

Quote :
Nietzsche, too, recognized that no value was adequate and equal to the self which posited it, and that the Will to Power, this positing itself, then was the primary constituent of the self’s moral-philosophical reality. He refused to look for a new ground for values, allowed them to remain groundless, and did not recognize any more subtle logic at work in the self, namely the daemonic- the existence of an unreflected, unegoic principle which, in its dynamic interaction with the reflected principle, constituted the moral-philosophical reality of the individual.

Indeed, the ground which Nietzsche failed to see, Nietzsche’s error, has now been identified.

Quote :

This dynamic interaction is nothing less than what has here been called self-valuing, or what one could speak of as self-love. We can see the shallowest example of it when a woman loves her own beauty and body, the corporeal, unegoic, non-reflective part of her self, and thereby appropriates it to the higher order of the reflective self-consciousness, herself thereby rising into a higher order of daemonic reality.

But what are the deeper and the deepest unreflected aspects of the self, how can they be appropriated by the reflective self-consciousness: to what extent can we recognize in the unreflected aspect of the self the ground of our values, our self-love, our self-value? Such unreflected aspects are things like necessity against our apparent freedom, mortality against our eternal aspirations. As I formulate the questions in my own philosophical language: to what extent can the continuity between the empirical and transcendental egos be realized?

We can, I think, recognize the ground of this “self-valuing” as most essential where it is least necessary with respect to the higher synthetic consciousness, the “middle ground” or sufficient interactivity. What you posit as the two spheres of thought I conceive slightly differently, and with respect to time, as the summational past leading up to the edge of the present moment, and the present moment itself, which itself also of course exists with respect to its past/s. The interactivity here being a co-relating of differing types of (terms of) experiencing, different inner spaces and realms from which sensation/s occur and to which sensation/s return. Thus I see self-valuing as a metaphor that encapsulates a broader understanding of the (inter)activity leading to the content/s and structure/s comprising the middle ground.

Thus the potentiality, the threshold for this middle ground would be to “value”, project-encounter, insert itself within and assert itself with respect to, its bordering sphere/s with respect to itself, to reinterpret-revalue its own otherness in terms of itself. Of course this, as far as we can tell, is not theoretically possible in completion, but can only be achieved with a partial success - the conditions of one’s consciousness being subject to an endlessly receding and eternally escaping past. Thus we arrive at the sufficiency of the duality of the spheres of consciousness, its division into separate if even mutually dependent parts, as the impossibility of total self-knowing combined with the necessity of mutually-dependent and co-conditional relationality across these spheres being the very necessity of consciousness itself. As long as it exists, it must exist as it is, in some manner or other, and can never not-be itself just as it can never be itself. This tragic possibility for consciousness seems escapable only to the extent that we successfully posit conceptual understandings by which the being-structure/s of this consciousness can be largely encountered-known, thus effecting the greatest and smoothest, most useful possible inter-connections across these spheres, and the largest possible middle ground.

So we might proclaim the aim of philosophy firstly to free the middle ground unto itself, and then to assist with the expansion of this middle ground with respect to that by and to which it is itself conditioned.

Quote :
These questions are the theoretical objects of the new philosophy I see posed here and by myself, the only philosophy capable of re-grounding morality and human values.

Yes, morality and values posited from within this sort of new ground and philosophy would be radically different from all previous moralities and values. The destruction of these previous being a sort of abstract metaphorical understanding for their sublimation, extraction and re-appropriation into a new potentiality, which is to say a re-grounding of what-was into a new what-is. In the absence/decontextualization of the sphere of past conditionality would open up the necessity for a re-orienting of present toward future, of actual toward a new potency and possibility seated less in past potentialities and more in yet-to-be potentiality-projectings, imaginings, vision.

Parodites wrote:
This philosophy then, I think, would attain the greatest power in not offering itself as something for cohering the self in the manner of old morality and philosophy, through prescriptive ideation, not as a tool for shaping one’s self and asserting particular values, but as an instrument for grounding the act of self-valuing, as an instrument for grounding the “daemon.” It would do this by fully articulating the middle-ground the daemon occupies, by realizing the continuous discourse between the empirical and transcendental within which man, as a daemonic being, continuously takes form and is continuously effaced.

Yes. We cannot continue to produce endless machinations of imposed positive contents, we must escape the positive for the negative, we must learn to think in terms of limitation and absence in order to begin to align our possibility of consciousness with the actual productive and sustaining conditions of this consciousness.

I wonder, is the continuous discourse fated to always be continuously given into form only to be continuously effaced later on? Do you not see a possibility for structural, organic/organizing growth of a logical-building from within the middle ground? This possibility for a “new kind of memory”, an active memory - a memory which never fades, is never forgotten - seems more potent with respect to the powers of past-conditions extraction into/within the present momentary conditionality than does the “traditional” memory that typically governs the mnemosyne of consciousness. To me, the daemonic seems only weakly articulated when presented as a continuous effacing, and more strongly articulated when presented as a continuous and constantly building/re-membering in which nothing is lost.

Quote :
A necessary step would be in realizing the extremity and depth of daemonic existence: mortality, death. Only from the standpoint of absolute loss, of death itself, can a true philosophy begin. Out of it is born the “mens heroica” or heroicism that will instantiate the discourse between the two spheres itself, constituting a being capable of self-value, capable of weathering the continuous frenzy of its existence as a daemonic being.

To be capable of self-value in the sense we mean, of the daemonic, one must certainly be aware of the limitations to which daemonic existence is subject, which includes the synthetic understanding of the limitations of both the “empirical” as well as of the “transcendental”. This of course includes awareness of death/mortality. As is included the subsequent knowledge of how this awareness plays upon the conditions of one’s past/s, which can be grasped with respect to what extent one has previously been a consciousness attaining to forms of indiscrete or indirect temporal conditioning/s of the various forms/modes of sensation. To climb out from underneath the corpse of the inevitability of mortality supposes one has already murdered this inevitability, including supplanting it with something different where it has been found to reside within a/the condition/s of one’s past contents/meaning. And of course in order to afford for this possibility in light of the eternally escaping mnemosyne one must have forged a sufficient quantity and quality of ‘middle ground’ between the spheres of consciousness in order to, where necessary, posit precisely and intentionally against this “vanishing remainder”.

Thus, a sort of spiraling of self-possibility: the progressive overcoming of conditons of limitation, of which mortality is one, leading to the possibility for the progressive further establishment and expansion of the middle ground from which progressive new overcomings of conditions of limitation become possible.

Quote :
Such a philosophy is the great tragic poem, the voice of the not merely broken hero, but the hero defiant in its fate. It is the voice of the sufferer beyond the pangs of all loss and desire, beyond even mourning the death of God, no longer cognizant of any God, dead or living, the voice of identification with the universal tragedy and therefor alone capable of affirming itself as precisely the tragedy’s voice, as the recording spirit which passes over the waters and the earth. It is the voice belonging alone to that being that can love itself, for it is the being that alone knows itself, comprehends out of all the animals its daemonic nature, and is therefor also the voice belonging alone to that being that can love the world-- that world which is nothing less than the middle ground, the “middle shrine” as Sophocles named the earth, which is the dwelling place of the daemon, of the being that is born and dies, is created and is effaced, knows itself, and in the next breath knows nothing, is nothing, which perishes in its own glimpse and image of eternity.

It stares fully into its own inevitable effacement and nonexistence, yes – the possibility for providing for a structure here in which being might reside able to “weather the storm”, as a “strong self-valuing” sufficiently “freed from mortality” as it continues more and more to “lose itself” within the furthest and most substantial, powerful projections upon the endless potentiality that is futurity with respect to the daemonic. Here we come close to what might be described as the possibility for philosophy with respect to the daemonic, which is of course a round-about way of conceiving of the possibility of the daemonic for itself, its most sufficient conditionality and essence. Whether the dual spheres of consciousness are able to survive the coming to be of this essential being is probably yet to be determined – it is hard for me to see that any significant amount of work or disclosure has been obtained in the face of this most remote possibility. We must first explicate the daemon, which requires explicating the spheres of consciousness, and then explicate philosophy with respect to the daemon, before we even become capable of sensing this more removed and essential terrain.

Parodites

"Yes. We cannot continue to produce endless machinations of imposed positive contents, we must escape the positive for the negative, we must learn to think in terms of limitation and absence in order to begin to align our possibility of consciousness with the actual productive and sustaining conditions of this consciousness. "

Yes.

The philosophical instinct that has been stifled, the voice of philosophy that has been silenced, turns inward and becomes guilt, becomes the negative form of reflection which ends up projecting the inadequacies that gave rise to this silence into the systems of cosmic, social, and natural relations. The benumbed conscience of the philosopher, in which the ideals of a society where at one time depicted as active and living presences, becomes the medium in which the forces of society materialize into some definite structure. Thus there are certain events that are so monstrous that, because they defy any theoretical conceptualization, the disparate and unconnected elements of the currently prevalent theories are reinscribed in a totality in order to compensate for the stifled philosophical impulse. For, in this way the appearance is given that the evil is external, an alien presence that has been debarred from entering into the sphere of society, rather than something engendered by forces at work in the given society itself. Events that communicate the philosophical and moral annihilation of particular ideals often accomplish the opposite, the rigidification of the social forces at work in a given time into a system in which the ideals are represented as a totality fundamentally incapable of recognizing any genuine problems. It is impossible for any theory of society as a whole to constitute an organic representation of social forces, namely the truth, since these forces themselves are disparate, unconnected, and violent. If there must be a concept of utopia it must serve as a spur to the philosophical instinct, as a horizon against which the ceaseless emergence of new intuitions of life and social forces may be grasped in their ephemerality, as so many moments in the conscience of man, in order to prevent their materialization into a totality.

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