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
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177148&start=100
[1] Nietzsche quote taken from "The Will to Power" section 693
[2, 3] Comments by Sauwelios
[4] Ruskin quote taken from http://triumphofcommons.com/main.php#16 ]

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.

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.

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.

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 unrealized anticipation of pleasure, of the self-good, by its very unrealizability, constitutes for us, time.

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.

[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.

[quote="Fixed Cross"]

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."

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?

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.