Sauwelios is dead; long live Dionysus!

Well, so that’s where I disagree! I’m immediately reminded of WP 619:

“The victorious concept ‘force’, by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner world must be ascribed to it, which I designate as ‘will to power’, i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power [nach Bezeigung der Macht]; or as the employment and exercise [Verwendung, Ausübung] of power, as a creative drive, etc.”

And thereby, in turn, of Christoph Cox:

“On the face of it, will to power would seem to be the drive to acquire power; yet [Nietzsche asserts] that it essentially concerns the expenditure (‘discharge’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘overflow and squandering’) of power, ‘even to the point of absurdity’. […] If the fundamental condition of life is one of superabundance and exuberance rather than indigence and distress, power is not primarily something an organism wants or needs but something an organism is or has and must exercise.” (Cox, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, page 230.)

However, you and I may just disagree on what we call “will to power”. I say there’s something even more fundamental than what you call by that name, and of course by your own Word, “self-valuing”.

I totally agree with this.

Well, I can agree that they aren’t beings (in a sense). I don’t think the qualification “(un)successful” is accurate here, though. Any discharge is a successful discharge, otherwise it’s not a discharge… To be sure, you say they cannot be perceived, noted, felt, but I contend that they are the perception, the notion, the feeling, of discharge. They are Dissolvings into space, and space in my view is itself mind, consciousness…

Right. Thus I said: “The Big Bang is the absolute maximum accumulation of force discharging itself into space[.]” So, if it’s an accumulation, how did it accumulate? Well…

“It would appear that the World Soul returns eternally only by virtue of the fact that, in each cycle, the One gives Its gift absolutely, without hope of return. Every time the cycle of becoming reaches its endpoint, there is another gift, or more precisely, the return of the same gift. And each time it is only because the gift is pure and absolute that there can be the eternal contamination that is the coming to presence of a cosmos. This pure gift takes the form of a circle, but does so only inadvertently; only by giving a gift outside of the circle of exchange is the circle achieved.” (Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence, page 27.)

Love the name!

But here we see how you and I apply the term “will to power” to different things. I say the potential is already will-to-power—“potential-to-power”, we may say (reminiscent, of course, of JSS’s “potential-to-affect”: to affect is to exercise power upon, and nothing besides).

At this point I wish to address the beginnings of your post, which I skipped above:

Well, yes, but not necessarily into a being is what I’m saying. Or rather I think this is where the ontological difference is—transcended.

“It is interesting […] that Heidegger did not inquire into the aporetic temporal character of khôra [in Plato’s Sophist] but instead took a decidedly Parmenidean slant on its interpretation and related it to the khorismos or gap between Being and beings. In other words, instead of reading the strong indications in Plato that khôra is a material entity that lives eternally between Being and becoming, Heidegger de-realizes it as an existent being and reinvents it as a mere gap or notational spacing or interval[.]” (Lukacher, Time-Fetishes, page 21.)

Space, or the field(s) in which all beings are “kinks”, I understand as what Heidegger calls Being or the meaning (sense!) of Being (according to Indian philosophy, the mind too is a sense).

“Husserl teaches that every intuition—categorial or otherwise—is the fulfillment of an empty intention. Again: the determinate empty intention is ontologically, if not temporally, prior to all intuitive fulfillments. Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being is, therefore: what is the empty intention that is fulfilled in categorial intuition? Thomas Sheehan, in what must be one of the most important lines in the Heidegger literature, phrases the question of the meaning of Being as follows:
[size=95]What is the nature of the empty intention that can be ‘filled in’ by Being? Or: What is the relative absence from out of which Being is disclosed as presence?[/size]
Husserl’s categorial intuition is the referent of the word ‘Being’. Heidegger’s account of the empty intention fulfilled by categorial intuition is the meaning of Being.” (Greg Johnson, “Heidegger’s Question Beyond Being”, quoting Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Mind”.)

Perhaps I should rephrase what I said in my OP as follows: ‘I contend that the sense of Being is what I called spacelight, which I will now call light-space.’ For light-space is not so much Being as it is world or nothing:

“While neither Heidegger nor Nishitani makes this connection explicit, a little reflection on the two texts from 1929 makes clear that ‘world’ in On the Essence of Ground and ‘nothing’ in What is Metaphysics? are equivalent. According to the former text, a being can only make sense to us if we have already projected a horizon of intelligibility in the form of a world; we can encounter a being only insofar as we have already gone beyond (‘transcended’) it to an empty horizon, against which it can appear as not-nothing—that is, as something.” (Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, translator’s note 8.25)

To be sure, though, Heidegger’s saying in Being and Time that Being “is” not itself a being already makes Being logically equivalent to nothing… Still, my thesis is basically that all beings project such a horizon of intelligibility, and thereby “give space”. Light-space is what gives beings their Being—the Geist which always makes beings more being wherever it rules.

Well, it’s a bit odd to put it like that: after all, “my being” means so much as “my entity”. It should rather be something like “the being that I am”. You are a being, that is to say you have Being; you don’t have a being, just as little as you are Being. I’m sorry if this seems like nitpicking, but that is the ontological difference. I’m quite captivated by what you’re saying, though—go on!

This is obviously powerful stuff. I think I’ve had the same kind of experience since I understood Light’ning as my being (first nature); though not as my Being (zeroth nature), which is Vajradhara.

“Heidegger’s [central philosophical] topic is shrouded in mystery, for that-which-gives each epoch in the history of Being is hidden by the very epoch that it makes possible. This mystery is built right into the dual meanings of Heidegger’s names for his topic.
The word ‘Lichtung’ [one of those names] refers both to Being (that which lights up beings) and also to the clearing that makes it possible for the light to illuminate beings—and the light attracts our attention to itself while leaving the clearing that makes it possible in darkness.” (Johnson, “Heidegger on Nietzsche, Metaphysics, and Nihilism”.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18qheVgPJac

We don’t actually disagree - I did not say will wo power wants to increase rather than that it wants to discharge. I said it wants not just to discharge, but also increase.
But as we agree below, increase happens by discharge.

And indeed I welcome this focus on the discharge/lighting aspect.

The thing is, we cant verify that with the same analytical certainty that we can verify self-valuings.
This is not tot say that it isn’t the case.
But Logick (glad you appreciate the name) is not an observation or statement of truth but a method of interpreting - it is itself a willing-to-power;
it is how power acquires more of itself- which is to say, how it discharges.

Let me be clear. My doctrine is:
The LIGHTNING and the EARTH.

The lightning loves the earth, the Earth is the love of the lighting - its reason for existing - its ground for discharge.

And in scientific terms, the lightning seeks out a target for its discharge that has at least the same (but opposed) value as itself.
I mean electrical value here; degree of potency, quantum of power.

However, indeed, the reason for discharge, more fundamentally than that it is enabled by a target, is the will to discharge.

This is elegant enough.
I could go on about how I think non-being becomes Being, how self-valuing logic enables the transition from the void into the lightning-giver, but that is not relevant here.

I never did posit a contradiction to this. It is the upon that I stress as necessary to the equation.
Discharge into the void is not possible, not for lightning, not for power. It needs ground. Napoleon needs France.

This is what I take to mean being true to the Earth. The Earth is the lightnings proper goal, destiny.

Yes, that is indeed where Heideggers “magic” lies.
He refutes pure materialism, which always implies substance dualism, and clears the path for a unified understanding.

Yes yes… now you will understand me even better, for if you will allow me a phrase:
Value increases in its absence. I.e. in lack of a valued value, its value is emphasized, the necessity of its being is emphasized.

This is how Logick encompasses the Gap.

Heidegger tries to stretch it too far, I think - he has to leave it open-ended and not make definitive conclusions. His best method relies on being tentative and open-ended, like al archaeologist brushing off dirt from ancient bones.
In a phrase, nothing can be logically equivalent to nothing.

I seem to agree with this light-space idea as far as I understand it now.

But I did not say “my being”.
I misunderstood Being, including my Being, therefore, I was at risk of losing Being and ceasing to be a being.

That sounds happy and healthy. In turn it reminds me of the Void I attained in Zen meditations, whereby “I” was dissolved, but as “I”, well, I came back from it, this I was charged with a brilliant and seemingly limitless energy.

Lghtning, its potential, is born from the Void - yet, how?
That question, dismissed by me above, still has the Logick as its answer.

The path between 0 and 1 - is that not precisely the problem Heidegger represents?

Ive got something -

it doesn’t want to accumulate, it merely does accumulate.

It wants to discharge. And, does. But Being is itself alike the Great Health, which human beings do not in general entirely possess, it squanders itself and can afford that as a consciousness seated at the fountainhead, able to regenerate from precisely no-thing. By its proximity to the fountainhead it is compelled to regenerate and, because its regeneration from its depths is so forceful, it overtakes in its vitality that which never drops so far. A health which breathes like Brahma.

hail the void

Yes indeed self-valuing is a description of what happens, like a diagram of an engine, rather than a description of what “is”, like a speeding car.
The engine is what really happens. The speeding car is the description of what is seen, felt, experienced, what “is”.

A glance at an engine does not turn on a woman, but it does excite a man who sees what is implicit.
Will to power is implicit in the self-valuing logic, but not explicit.
And that is the problem. It is not a term of invocation, as will to power is. It is no literary genius, has no philological relevance. But Logick does.
However Logick does not refer to the mechanism itself, as it does to the understanding of that mechanism.
Which allows the circle to close; Logick is deliberate practice of will to power as such – is it then the Being of the philosophical being “will to power”…

Well, yes, that “upon” was kind of a giveaway (not intended!). But “affect” was JSS’s term, not mine. I say the “upon” is unnecessary: self-Light’ning into light-space is not so much discharge into the void as it is discharge into void: the self-Light’ning becomes light-space, never completely but more and more (approximating an asymptote). The discharge creates more void, or more precisely it is a Creating of more void (empty space, vacuum). Napoleon created more France, went up in the expansion of France! The Earth itself lightens into the Expanse.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQuTAPWJxNo[/youtube]

I don’t think Lukacher meant to say something positive about Heidegger here. My point, in any case, was that light-space is like Plato’s khōra, although I’d say it is and is not a material entity/an existent being. This is suggested to me by what Lukacher writes and cites a page or two earlier:

“The loosening of the Parmenidean knot began at least as early as Plato’s The Sophist with its idea of a hybrid kind of Being, the Being of nonbeing / the nonbeing of Being, a triton genos or third modality of Being that Plato calls an ‘intertwining’ or symplöke (Sophist 240c). Such anomalous states of Being mark the limits of knowledge and keep a space open for the unthought. […] This is what Plato says about the khôra touton, the receptacle of all becoming (49b): ‘A third kind [triton genos] is ever-existing Place [khôras] which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have birth, itself being apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning by the aid of non-sensation, barely an object of belief’(52b); ‘of a kind that is invisible and unshaped [amorphon], all-receptive, and in some most perplexing and most baffling way [aporétatá] partaking of the intelligible’ (51b). […] The khôra, as an eternally existing possibility of coming-to-presence, lies at the limits of philosophy as a kind of experimental speculation. […] Plato’s khôra seems to imply that the meterá kai hypodoche (mother and receptacle) of all that comes to presence is very much like a living being, who somehow survives the great year.” (op.cit., pp. 19-20.)

Aristotle’s “prime mover” as “thought thinking itself” (noesis noeseos), I now understand esoterically as the receptivity of receptivity (and indeed, Heidegger translates noein as vernehmen).

“That we must speak of two accounts of reason, the ancient and the modern, can be seen in the fact that for the ancients thought was at its height, not an action, but what they called a passion [i.e., passive]. Whatever the differences in what came to us from Jerusalem and from Athens, on this central point there was a commonness. The height for man was a passion. In modern language we might weakly describe this by saying that thought was finally a receptivity. We can see that this is not true of modern thought because its very form is the making of hypotheses and the testing by experiment, something intimately connected with the acts of our wills, the controlling of the world, the making of history.” (George Grant, “Time as History”.)

I first arrived at my insight into light-space by applying Strauss’s formula of willing the return of the world as will to power:

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

And recently, I put it like this:

‘Let your Will say: the world SHALL BE the will to power, and Nothing besides!’

This formulation marks the beginning of my conscious self-Light’ning.

All beings, all self-Valuings, project a horizon of lack in which their other-Valuings (that is to say those among the other self-Valuings between whom and themselves there is (to be) a relationship of—mutual—Valuing) can alone be disclosed as present! And those self-Light’nings whose Lightening is not reciprocated by other self-Lightenings (whom they make heavier and who in turn make them heavier) become space, i.e., light before it “lights”—upon!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzmMB8dTwGs[/youtube]

I think I misunderstood you here, then. I thought you’d meant to italicise “Being”, not “my”. Now I suppose you gave “Being” a capital because it was yours, which is a different reason from mine (and Krell’s). My Bad…

Yes, that sounds quite similar. Zeroth nature, Buddha-nature, śūnyatā, however, was quite the opposite of happy for me, and quite the opposite of mentally healthy—until I could from there value all saṅkhāras (I could imagine).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kc9co0psCs&t=448

No, I capitalized it as Being in general, rather than a particular being.
As in the Being of a being.

Why did you care?

As you know Plato is meaningless to me, and I consider Aristotle to be very weak as a thinker. I am not more interested in them than I was a year ago, rather, less.
Ive been reading Francis Bacon, by the way - he trashes Aristotelean philosophy very harshly (though politely and discretely), which was satisfying to read.

It occurs to me now, reading of your experience - the ER has always been ugly to me, and reading Zarathustra’s Seven Seals in German made me nauseous, I could clearly feel the inanity being imposed there -
now I think, was there still too much Plato in Nietzsche? Was the ER N’s way of trying to Idealize, to turn the world into an Idol? Did he perhaps not truly know himself to be lightning (even though he was), beyond debt to history, beyond time?

I do not value the wretched.

Clouds by analogy are history and what the lightning is beholden to if to anything -it is recommended to crack the lightning before the clouds get too dense -
Hail Nietzsche, son of the cloudgatherer Zeus, lord of fate.

Sokrates forsook the thundergod and replaced him with a god of doubt. An act so enormous that it is silly to look down on it. But it is not an act which can be heeded by one who worships the thunder. It can be understood as fateful, as genius, as evolution of the spirit, but it can not be loved as Zeus can be loved.

And love is the law. 93/93

But then you said you did not say “my being”. Anyway, I will put it this way now: Being is not Valuing; beings are Valuings (namely, self-Valuings through other-Valuings), but even more fundamentally they are Lightenings, and in fact Being itself is Lightening. (That is to say, existence, not persistence; persistence is only possible in Valuing.) Here’s how I put that thing about discharge leading to accumulation in terms of individuals recently (though it probably hardly applies to individuals; that was just the context in which I wrote it):

‘I think what came first was the impulse to give oneself up completely (“to not exist at all”), but often this inadvertently led to our getting something back in return, which in turn sustained us, so we could keep giving parts of us away, and as long as we got stuff back we remained in existence.’

You’re wrong about Plato and Aristotle—and about Bacon as well, whom surely you didn’t read esoterically, either. The reason why he bashed Aristotelianism is in my “Tutorial in Platonic Political Philosophy”:

“[…I]n the Middle Ages, Christian theology got almost inextricably tangled up with Aristotelian natural science. And when, after the high point of the Renaissance, philosophy was acutely endangered by religious zeal—religious wars, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galilei, the burning of Giordano Bruno—, then Machiavelli got the brilliant idea to use that entanglement against the Church. Yet the unworkability of Aristotelian natural science was only an assumption on the part of Machiavelli, and it wasn’t until Descartes that that science was vanquished by the scientific revolution made possible by the latter’s mathematised natural science. Enter Francis Bacon.”

Though I’ve recently come to call my tutorial a tutorial in esoteric political philosophy instead, there’s certainly a sense in which Nietzsche, Homer and Machiavelli etc. are Platonic (and Plato is Homeric, Nietzschean, and Machiavellian, etc.).

“As philosophy’s advocate Nietzsche ‘platonizes’; he practices an art of writing that beautifies his subject, enticing others to take it up as their own and discover in their turn the beauty of the seemingly ugly. And as philosophy’s advocate, Nietzsche relapses into Platonism, the teaching that the whole is lovable in itself.” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 117.)

According to Lampert, the ideal of eternal return is the beautification of the whole. Yet he also teaches that Nietzsche didn’t really believe in it! And indeed, where (in The Seven Seals) does Zarathustra impose it? All he says is this:

“Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity and for the marriage-ring of rings—the ring of the return?
Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!
For I love thee, O Eternity!”

I must say, what you write sounds quite unworthy to me: beyond debt to history, beyond time? As if it weren’t thanks to one’s history, memetic and genetic, that one is able to truly know oneself to be—but wait, Neumann does say:

“There is nothing inherently rigorous or mathematical in scientific method which, rightly understood as it rarely is, means nothing more than nihilist experience, any way (or method) of experiencing—whether it be that of a tiger, an infant or an Einstein. Science is the realization that reality is nothing but mere experience, methods of perceiving or thinking.” (Harry Neumann, Liberalism, page 3.)

And he says elsewhere that a caveman who had that realization knew all there is to know. But could a caveman, an infant, or even a tiger really sustain that realization? I doubt whether Neumann believed that, and I certainly don’t believe that.

“The pain par excellence is the pain that accompanies the cognition of the fearful truth, of the tornness of everything of which we say: it is, in the absolute negativity of the eternal flux and the mental penetration of the illusory character of the world. That is the genuinely human pain, for only man is capable of tearing apart the veil of Maya and mentally penetrating the illusory character of all existence. In the cognition of the tornness of existence, which forces him to rise above himself, does he become human. He brings himself to the pessimism of strength, he learns the Dionysian Yes-saying to the tragic fundamental character of existence.” (Picht, Nietzsche, page 299.)

I’ve cared because the saṅkhāras or saḿskáras are the opposite of śūnyatā and thereby happy and mentally healthy for me.

Agree to disagree!

Well that’s letting you off easy, boy.

For someone who has managed to misread one sentence of mine several times you are mighty haughty about your reading capabilities.
It seems that you see as ‘esoteric reading’ means nothing more than ‘reading what you want to read’.

Bacon writes off Aristotle and all Aristotelean thought, between the lines and without mentioning names, as the eunuch of the European spirit. I’m sure you didn’t even notice the passage. But it is there indisputably, not just ‘esoterically’.

My philosophic writing is denser than what you have learned to anticipate. If you do not understand a passage or think I am wrong, reread, reread, pause, drink some water, re-read.

Apparently my points largely overwhelm you. Fine. But don’t be cocky to me when you duck and dodge.

Im not stooping for Platonic frivolities ever again. I wondered if it should be better just brushing you off, but where’s the value in that.
Whatever there is of your own thought hidden deep between the riff-raff of quotations of so called philosophers, tends to be worthy of taking note of. Actually inspiring even from time to time.

But you and your goddamn fetish for quoting bad writers.

So, cloud-gathering is required for lightning release.

That, and Earth.

If it weren’t me, it wouldn’t be this important. If the truest accomplishment of philosophy was not the subject of such misunderstanding - such LACK OF DISCIPLINE in fact, then it would be absurd for me to make such a spectacle.

You bring two things back here;
a historical conception of philosophy and a deep rooted, extreme arrogance.
Both are valuable to me but I had to find the value. The value is not your understanding but your profound misunderstanding.

Youre deep enough to reach level reading that is actually wrong enough for me to want to attack it. This will to destroy your misconceptions and to punish the arrogance behind them has been motive for me since 2001 probably. I admit I have shaped my philosophy while battling you. But not your ideas - rather, your method.
Your dead are either beautiful or not, but your methods are always infuriating. As long as you know that, you can come very far.

Everyone can see you said “my being” and then said you didn’t say “my being”. Reminds me of a certain president…

Fact is you’re not just a bad reader but also a bad writer. I never claimed all the people I quoted were philosophers.

Try to at least convince yourself.

Back to your subject, from which you keep distracting -
you deny that lightning requires clouds and earth. In order to serve this denial you conjure a term, spacelight. You do not care to prove its existence either logically or empirically, but are content to believe in it so as not to believe that lighting requires earth.

Are you sure that you are to accuse me of lack of discipline?

The truth is that you refuse to take philosophy’s exotericism seriously because that would require an effort your usual lazy, drugged-out self simply couldn’t muster.

Again,

I haven’t used the word “lightning” in this thread at all…

The truest accomplishment of philosophy can never revolve around an “anu”. Thus self-Light’ning in light-space is not even a particle('s) becoming a quantum of space, but the relative un-Kinking of a wave of space. The whole is infinite, but its “parts” can never be infinitesimal. Unlike you, I’m not a jealous god; we Gods are legion, but you don’t belong to us. You are a Black Brother.

I see, it was just a little world-play!
No relevance to this world. As usual.

I now think self-lightening in light-space is a particle’s uncollapsing into one or more quanta of a wave of space as well as the relative unkinking of that wave.