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 Self-preservation or truth?

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PostSubject: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 1:31 pm

A high equivocation here by Nietzsche. I'll like to debate this fact with others who disagree.

Nietzsche hated one idea more than others: the idea of morality. Kant's primary thought is very simple: "moral" equals "reality" equals "truth". He set himself to the task of explicating that.

I wish N had done the same. N valorized self-preservation equals strength equals will to power (equals a/im-morality). He was raised as a Christ-ian so I understand his sentiment.

But he was wrong in his analysis precisely because he has well-founded psychological rationalities: N willed self-preservation outside of value, in order to construct a tool with which to valuate different means of living and dying. Only problem: speaking philosophically we must say that life and death are not values and have no value-as-such. N was sharp enough to sense this, thus he supplemented his tool with strength/power calculus, thereby secretly smuggling in the counter-principle of his own ideal qua tool-application. I think this contradiction ended up killing him.

The world is not a will to power. A will to power is a world, and only one among many others; the will to power is the theological drive of a will to power as world-ness. Theological as anti-rational need. Even religions use truth to try and win themselves into hearts and minds and histories. Religions are outgrowths of domains of truths in opposition to their own foundational truth-denial requirement, this requirement merely indicates the relative position and height they happen to occupy within the larger continuum of being, "Ontos".

N accepted death as resistance to death. Namely, only in terms of linear self-preservation "instincts". What kinds of lives are justified? This question escapes the event horizon of "survival". Survive is nested inside of kinds of lives, not the other way around.

Let's bring morality back into critical philosophical speculation. There is a good reason N could not achieve his idealized aim of revaluation; let's not repeat his error.


Last edited by Thrasymachus on Sun Jun 18, 2017 7:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 2:56 pm

Even though I disagree with an important aspect of your description of Nietzsche, I do think this is a valid project.

Nietzsche does not tie the will to power to the individual, rather he sees the individual as a hierarchy of wills, which is an artifice, but a necessary one, as the only alternative, the only objective reality, is chaos. He sees man as expandable, and sees man as seeing himself as expandable, as a vessel to carry forth this will to power, in the form of establishing great things, overcoming other wills and experiencing supremacy in aesthetics, for himself, and in health and culture, for his idealized posthumous friends, whom he entrusts with rearing the Superman, which is the value of his own life. He had no will to survive, only to survive long enough to do this work he knew he alone could embody.

Nevertheless precisely his own suffering and all too human inadequacy to his own set tasks does correlate with the thing that is lacking in the Will to Power ontology, as also Parodites has revealed; there is no moment of resolution, no reality that is worthy of itself as itself qua itself. I see this as self-valuing of course which brings back the will to power in the scope of the individual principle, rather than being only a haphazard blip in the monster of energy that is will to power in Nietzsche's eyes.

Note that he does not say that this world is a will to power - just that this is its quality, and that it is not a designated whole is implied by the term 'monster of energy';

the world is amoral, but that is precisely because each instance is bound to that phenomenon that becomes, under high scrutiny and cultivation and restriction, a morality.

Yes, let us search for the entry point in the selfvaluing analysis of the will to power doctrine for morality -
Nietzsche held simply master morality - i.e. the will for something greater
and slave morality - i.e. the will to preserve at all cost.

Still, the will to power wishes to preserve - what? A process. Can, or should this be abandoned?

Ancient morality takes the soul to be the lifespan; it prescribes what is good not in the moment, but in terms of the entire span of the seasons of an individual existence. Nietzsche was far too monadic for that, too explosive, too cataclismic.

But now: Peace unto that nation. Meaning: stability, an Agora, a Forum, a Temple - Time.
In war, there is no time, only absolute haste and endless patience. In peace, the seasons can unfold.
This too is will to power, and nothing besides - but a great deal within.

Check out this post I just came across while copying some stuff to ILP, this is very relevant to my position.

Fixed Cross wrote:
I propose that slave morality be understood as  consciousness disconnecting from the organisms self-valuing. A being can no longer rely, in its actions of acquisition of power, on what it is – it is forced to re-determine what it is in terms of the lack, the gap left by the removal of its self-valuation. Since a gap has no content, the identification is shifted to that which has caused the gap, the enemy. A moral slave determines itself in terms of what it hates, by positing itself as not-that. It posits, or attempts to posit, a self-value by establishing a sense of power over the entity that it blames for the loss of its self-value.

As it is still exerting its will to power, it still operates as an entity, a subject, so it is in fact still grounded in a self-valuing. What has been lost is the connection between self-valuing and consciousness. Consciousness has detached from nature, what results can be described as disintegration of value. As long as slave-morality persists, as the unconsciously self-valuing entity persists in its behavior of willing to power on the terms of another entity, as it tries to establish a conscious self-valuing as the negative of what it perceives as powerful (but evil), it operates directly against its natural, innate self-valuing, and this must result in decay.

I think that slave morality can not be inherited, that every new-born being has a master-morality, by which I mean that its consciousness is rooted in a self-valuing. (For example, the mother is valued in terms of the self, that is why we have the Freudian complex of interpreting the mother / parent as the self).

By the genetic passing-on and cultural / physical sustainment of forms of weakness / unhealth, it becomes more likely that a conscious being strays into slave-morality. If the being is both physically unhealthy and immersed in a culture where slave-morality is the norm, it is likely that it abandons its “child-like” master-morality and becomes a value-decaying, alike to its cultural environment. I think of the modern Islamic world, which morality is rooted in the rejection of the west (not to say that the west presently holds a master morality,  but it serves as the standard of hated enemy by rejecting of which the morality is largely defined). Breaking out of this cycle, “salvation” could only occur through impulses of a freshly, life affirming nature such as is operative in children.

It seems likely that the teachings of Jesus Christ (whether this is only a metaphorical figure or if he  really lived is not important) were aimed to remedy a similar condition operative in the Jews under Roman oppression – a re-establishment of self-valuing by taking on a infant-like perspective.  “Render unto Caesar what is his” – his value – have for yourself what is yours – your value: “divinity” –i.e. your self-valuing

Nietzsche had good reason to say that the last Christian died on the cross, because much of Christianity as a culture was a continuation of the self-denying/ignoring against which a “spiritual rebirth” was proposed a remedy. It continued to focus on the enemy, on Evil, even if it politically overcame all enemies, and succeeded so in including in this negativity-standard against which it set its efforts, the things that naturally sustain positive valuing – beauty, strength, pleasure, the ‘good things in life’.

It seems that ultimately such a reverse valuing must come to an end, as the acting consciousness of resentment erodes the unconscious self-valuing on wich it rests to such a point that it can no longer be sustained. Physical reserves are exhausted, the psychological driving force is no longer sustained sufficiently to act aggressively-destructively, the active anti-ethics are no longer possible, nihilism is the result. Depending on the circumstances in wich the organism finds itself, this may lead to, in natural, nurturing conditions of culture, a gradual recovery of natural, positive valuation, conscious self-valuation, master morality – in less favorable circumstances, death seems the only outcome.

Now the will to power is dependent on self-valuing (the standard-setting interpreted as the root/ground of the subject), so where self-valuing is sabotaged by consciousness, as is the case where slave-morality takes hold, will to power remains operative only until it exhausts its resources, it wills the entity to death. The energy is transferred to vital subjects / structures. In such a case the will to power is not aimed at power of the subject, but rather at a transferring of power from the subject. The subject wills himself

Can the will of an entity possessed of a slave morality still be called a will to power? Can it still be called a will? What is more, can we still speak an entity? I think that the answer is: only in as far as it is unconscious. And this makes it clear how (and that, which is a departure from Nietzsches “all is blood” dogma) we may begin to dispel slave-morality.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 3:34 pm

The Will To Power

Power over what?, one might ask.

Is not the answer: Power over one's self?

This recalls Beyond good and evil, does it not? That is, beyond the moral standards of others. We establish our own moral standards and maintain them with great flexibility.

I believe that this is what Nietzsche was pointing at for the Superman.

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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 3:52 pm

Sisyphus wrote:
The Will To Power

Power over what?, one might ask.

Is not the answer:  Power over one's self?

Yes, that is at once the purpose itself and the only means to ever have justified power over others.
N sees this inner power structure of disciplining ones forces to one another as a politics of drives.

Quote :
This recalls Beyond good and evil, does it not?  That is, beyond the moral standards of others.  We establish our own moral standards and maintain them with great flexibility.

I believe that this is what Nietzsche was pointing at for the Superman.

I take it to be the meaning of his pointing out to stay true to the Earth, so that one fine spring on Earth, the superman may be conceived as were it a strange new bird, a being entirely free of the wretchedness once dragging down each joy - the history from ape to man, or whatever preceded man in his current form, is filled with cannibalism and butchery and blunt stupidity that turns to violence whenever its nerves are triggered - this is what drove Nietzsche so sick, the awareness of this filthy history, and to will-and-imagine a type of life beyond that - the Uebermensch. The better-than-man, the above-man. The species that outranks man. In what? In joy, in relish, in capacity to endure truth and dance with it. Flexible! Yes.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 4:47 pm

Really quick while I take some time to think on all this, I agree N didn't believe in the individual or "ego" as a fundamental thing or category, I was just reading from WtP where he says exactly what you just said, that he thinks the individual is a collection of wills. I just don't see this as a useful or accurate description, though. Likewise I don't agree with N's further consequence of this idea, that reality is "chaos". Chaos cannot be fundamental quite simply because chaos is a relative term for the disorder of something ordered, chaos is a description and not an ontology. What is fundamental are "individuals" whether as quanta, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, minds, or societies. Individuals rope various lesser individuals together to make meta-individuals. It isn't that the individuality of a mind belies the individuality of the various ideas, experiences, and biological processes going on which this mind is. It is equally the case that those lesser things are individual as is the case that the mind they contribute to is individual.

But to me, the category of individuation is the logical fundament, and self-valuing captures this idea.

As I see it, morality means whatever are the actual conditions and requirements of individual things, taken in all possible scopes and contexts. Sometimes one scope or context will have conditions/requirements that contradict those of another scope or context, all roped within the same larger meta-individual. To me that's not a contradiction of morality or reason at all, but displays the depth and derivative nature of beings like ourselves. As I see it the will to power emerges as a consequence of this fact, of the fact that certain beings possess as a consequence of that which they are certain contradicting moral facts (the conditions and requirements of a brain cell might be in contradiction to those of a liver cell, for example (they compete for resources, they have different functions, etc.)) but this fact merely indicates that there is a meta-purview in effect such that both the brain cell and the liver cell are participatory in a higher individuality of which they are part. I think the same happens with our ideas, feelings, values and motivations.

So just as natural selection is a way for blind nature to manage to create the meta-purview higher individual in which contrasting lesser individuals are able to coexist, I see this same process as describing what humans are always doing with our moralities and philosophies.

I think that by reifying the will to power as fundamental N made the mistake of taking a derivative and secondary aspect, a consequence, as if it were fundamental and primary. It would sort of be like saying that natural selection is the fundamental law and logic of human minds, which would be false because while natural selection indeed played and plays a role the entirety of the mind cannot be reduced like that. I also don't think that the will to power is any kind of telos or "for its own sake", rather the will to power is the negotiation between already existing individual beings to the ends of establishing a possible tectonics between them such that those insividualities may persist as they are, in their own being, in the midst of their contradicting one another and without that contradiction tearing them apart.

But naturally of course it is the case that sometimes two or more individuals will be so different in their individualities that negotiation leads to the demise of some of those individuals. That is fine, that happens, but that isn't any kind of "overcoming" or "power lust" inherent to the process, it is simply a consequence of the fact that negotiation happened in that case not to be possible. A human does not negotiate with an ant. But N seemed to take this certain class of cases as the basis for will to power as such, which I think is wrong, and then he was forced to conclude that "chaos of wills" is the reality as such, which again I disagree with because it mistakes one kind of case for all cases and also because it presupposes that individuals are not fundamental qua individual, qua ontic category.

Will write more later.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 6:01 pm

I have falsely credited N with that idea of reality as chaos -
rather simply a monster of energy -
he too realizes that there is no reason - in all the sense of the word, i.e. no meaning - without the principle of the individuality but he goes into this only in the Birth of Tragedy.
This is why that is still fundamental to my outlook on him.

In any case your criticisms 'cut wood' as we say in Dutch - it is because of the lack in the logic that I got to selfvaluing but the steps between the logics are only understandable in deep probing and pioneering, which alone will suffice to actually lay out the consequences of power<>value.

We could say that morality is a valuation with power.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 6:42 pm

N's thought definitely evolved a lot since BT. I'll have to go back and review it. At one point I remember thinking it was one of his best books, but it's been half a decade since I've looked at it.

What is the distinction between chaos and a monster of energy? I thought N did explicitly say that the world is a will to power. Maybe I'm mistaken on that; in any case I don't get hung up on individual words or phrases like that.

I want to respond to the quote you put in above, so I'll do that now.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 7:10 pm

Fixed Cross wrote:
I have falsely credited N with that idea of reality as chaos -
rather simply a monster of energy -
he too realizes that there is no reason - in all the sense of the word, i.e. no meaning - without the principle of the individuality but he goes into this only in the Birth of Tragedy.
This is why that is still fundamental to my outlook on him.

In any case your criticisms 'cut wood' as we say in Dutch - it is because of the lack in the logic that I got to selfvaluing but the steps between the logics are only understandable in deep probing and pioneering, which alone will suffice to actually lay out the consequences of power<>value.

We could say that morality is a valuation with power.

I wanted to say something about chaos but didn't have the mental capacity to do so.

Accepting that the universe establish reason and logic out of its initial chaos, I think we can say that Nietzsche foresaw reason and logic evolving out of what he saw as European chaos.

Well, a casual observations suggests that the Europeans haven't done very well with that one.

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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 7:19 pm

Fixed Cross wrote:
I propose that slave morality be understood as  consciousness disconnecting from the organisms self-valuing. A being can no longer rely, in its actions of acquisition of power, on what it is – it is forced to re-determine what it is in terms of the lack, the gap left by the removal of its self-valuation. Since a gap has no content, the identification is shifted to that which has caused the gap, the enemy. A moral slave determines itself in terms of what it hates, by positing itself as not-that. It posits, or attempts to posit, a self-value by establishing a sense of power over the entity that it blames for the loss of its self-value.

I never much cared for the distinctions of slave and master here, this is something that Hegel did and it seems Nietzsche borrowed from Hegel, although to admittedly different use. But I like the breakdown you provide here, the explanation of the 'slave' term as disconnection of consciousness from underlying self-value thereby redetermining itself in terms of lack. I want to try and see how this works.

A human organism is a self-valuing, and is naturally rooted in this manner. If the human consciousness becomes separated from those aspects of the human organism which derive from the self-valuing, such as overall healthful behavior or an upright sense of self-honesty for examples, then consciousness would become free from the constraints of self-valuing, namely it could begin to self-unvalue or self-nonvalue. To me these are what I would call immorality and amorality respectively.

The 'gap' here that opens up takes on the form of freedom-from, but as you say it has no content... hm, I think maybe there is a content in the gap, and this content is going to be whatever surfaces within said human organism when it becomes "free" from the constraints of its own self-valuing imperatives, namely all sort of banality and debauchery and self-destructive tendencies. We all have these tendencies within us, but the healthful side tends to win over time because quite simply if it did not then we would not still be here. So the slave becomes free to refute himself or at least to stop affirming himself qua being, as that sort of being which he is; this reminds me of your definition of prayer as projecting self into the void and experiencing the momentary uplift/release of burden of self as a consequence of this projection. The experience or feeling of lifting the burden is quite real, and in a sense the burden is "really" lifted in this way, but at what cost and for how long? An organism can quite simply not continue to survive and thrive without bearing the burden of itself.

So I might say that the production of the gap creates a release of the contents of "prayer", the feeling of loss of self-burden, and this is probably the addictive value of both religious belief and of leftist-'slave' psychology. The gap is repeated and valued simply because of the opiate-like feelings it produces in people ill prepared to handle the burden of themselves, which also means the burden of reality as such (since "selves" and individual organisms are simply little cut-out instances of reality as such).  

Quote :
As it is still exerting its will to power, it still operates as an entity, a subject, so it is in fact still grounded in a self-valuing. What has been lost is the connection between self-valuing and consciousness. Consciousness has detached from nature, what results can be described as disintegration of value. As long as slave-morality persists, as the unconsciously self-valuing entity persists in its behavior of willing to power on the terms of another entity, as it tries to establish a conscious self-valuing as the negative of what it perceives as powerful (but evil), it operates directly against its natural, innate self-valuing, and this must result in decay.

Yeah, these slave types cluster into mobs because they need to artificially simulate a self. Since no mob-entity can take the place of an individual self, the actual individual self of the mob members indeed begins to decay. And this decay will cause more pressure to maintain the prayer-void gap at all costs.

Quote :
I think that slave morality can not be inherited, that every new-born being has a master-morality, by which I mean that its consciousness is rooted in a self-valuing. (For example, the mother is valued in terms of the self, that is why we have the Freudian complex of interpreting the mother / parent as the self).

By the genetic passing-on and cultural / physical sustainment of forms of weakness / unhealth, it becomes more likely that a conscious being strays into slave-morality. If the being is both physically unhealthy and immersed in a culture where slave-morality is the norm, it is likely that it abandons its “child-like” master-morality and becomes a value-decaying, alike to its cultural environment. I think of the modern Islamic world, which morality is rooted in the rejection of the west (not to say that the west presently holds a master morality,  but it serves as the standard of hated enemy by rejecting of which the morality is largely defined). Breaking out of this cycle, “salvation” could only occur through impulses of a freshly, life affirming nature such as is operative in children.

I am in total agreement here. Culture, language and history are properly the means of expanding and explicating the natural 'master morality' that is present in children vis a vis naturally conscious entity (which is a bit of a vicious circle, since human children will never gain consciousness proper without induction into culture, language and history -- without these they stagnate as feral children, which has been shown in certain cases). But the vicious circle in no way belies the central importance of the act of acculturation nor of the ontic primacy of the category of the individual with respect to its necessity for acculturation. We are complex and environmentally dependent beings, which is not a detriment but rather a tremendous benefit that we are able to form ourselves up according to pre-existing swaths of "mental stuff" already made for us before we were even born. This "dependency" is precisely what allowed humanity to evolve what we call self-consciousness.

I value children much higher than adults, generally speaking. I really do mean that.

Quote :
It seems likely that the teachings of Jesus Christ (whether this is only a metaphorical figure or if he  really lived is not important) were aimed to remedy a similar condition operative in the Jews under Roman oppression – a re-establishment of self-valuing by taking on a infant-like perspective.  “Render unto Caesar what is his” – his value – have for yourself what is yours – your value: “divinity” –i.e. your self-valuing

Nietzsche had good reason to say that the last Christian died on the cross, because much of Christianity as a culture was a continuation of the self-denying/ignoring against which a “spiritual rebirth” was proposed a remedy. It continued to focus on the enemy, on Evil, even if it politically overcame all enemies, and succeeded so in including in this negativity-standard against which it set its efforts, the things that naturally sustain positive valuing – beauty, strength, pleasure, the ‘good things in life’.

It seems that ultimately such a reverse valuing must come to an end, as the acting consciousness of resentment erodes the unconscious self-valuing on wich it rests to such a point that it can no longer be sustained. Physical reserves are exhausted, the psychological driving force is no longer sustained sufficiently to act aggressively-destructively, the active anti-ethics are no longer possible, nihilism is the result. Depending on the circumstances in wich the organism finds itself, this may lead to, in natural, nurturing conditions of culture, a gradual recovery of natural, positive valuation, conscious self-valuation, master morality – in less favorable circumstances, death seems the only outcome.

I think this reveals an interesting daemonism here, the mutual antagonism between needing to be aware of one's enemies and needing to not be too aware of ones' enemies. It is the case that we cannot be ignorant of what opposes us, just as it is the case that we cannot be so aware of what opposes us that the fact of this opposition over-determines and ultimately stifles and weakens us. Since the "enemies" of a human being are often quite abstract, subtle, and difficult to concretely pin down (because they include things like ideas, as well as other people many of whom are not easily knowable to us or predictable much of the time) this daemonism becomes all the more difficult to work out in the practice of a human life, thus we struggle to establish dialectics between enemy-awareness and enemy-unawareness ("overcoming", innocence, healthful naivete or blatant disregard, both of which can be healthful in the right situations) yet such dialectics are impossible to codify into something lasting and concrete. Or rather I might say that the human self is to a large degree this never-ending and imperfect struggle to establish these dialectics. The dialectics are attempted to be established in the absence of either an overriding theoretical or overriding practical framework; the lack of an overriding theoretical framework is what lends the dialectics (various "ideas" and "sentiments" of ours with regard to enemy-awareness and enemy-unawareness) to being overly practical-pragmatic in nature, while the lack of an overriding practical framework is what lends the dialectics to being insufficient to negotiate our individual speech, actions, and intentions with the wider world around us -- namely there is a lot of friction between human beings.  

This friction probably pushes people away from dialectic-production proper and into accepting the dialectical formulas that others have already made for them, and made into a system in which we can participate passively; these systems (e.g. religions or political ideologies) have the advantage of being already set up to allow the excess of the self-as-friction (see above) to be siphoned off back into the system itself, as remainder affect (the irrationalities and stupid hatred or allegiances that religious and political people form, almost instinctively).

But what we should really be doing is use this friction as a means for identifying precisely where in Being it is the case that dialectics are both necessarily operating and operating insufficiently to the requisite ends of those operations themselves. This is what a philosopher would do, he would identify the friction points and attempt to recoup the excess and feed it back into the said dialectical system thus breaking that dialectic apart from within, freeing the particular excess to its underlying and latent excess-as-such qua daemonic antagonism between the imprecision with which human consciousness is able to image its friend and enemy relationships. This whole endeavor of imaging friend and enemy relationships is, I think, close to the basis of what morality actually means; we cannot know who our friends and enemies are until we know what we ourselves are, and what are our conditions and requirements for being this particular being which we are.  

Bringing this back to N, I agree that he saw Christianity through the lens of its "slavishness" as a mob-mentality of passive ideological alignment rather than as a courageous individual philosophical drive. But the fact that the individuality here is attributable to the philosophical, courageous rather than to the mob ideological, is perhaps due simply to the fact that no world and no society of philosophers yet exists. The philosopher is still necessarily an isolated individual, but this is only "necessarily" the case because the entropic pressure is always pushing cowardly passive beings together into mobs, thus by sheer numbers the mobs end up over-riding social value-spheres whereas individuals are pushed to the periphery.

But if it were possible to form a "Christian society", to continue the example of Christianity, then it might be possible for individuals to exist on par or even superior to mobs when it comes to societal influence. I think this is what happened in the west and especially with the American Constitution, and why the west is indeed the best.  

Quote :
Now the will to power is dependent on self-valuing (the standard-setting interpreted as the root/ground of the subject), so where self-valuing is sabotaged by consciousness, as is the case where slave-morality takes hold, will to power remains operative only until it exhausts its resources, it wills the entity to death. The energy is transferred to vital subjects / structures. In such a case the will to power is not aimed at power of the subject, but rather at a transferring of power from the subject. The subject wills himself

Yes and I see this as the self-consumption of the "consumer-slave" of today. Consumption as such is not at all bad, but it is a power that must be managed by a philosophical vision, by a self. Where self lacks, where consciousness rejects that self-valuing out of which and in terms of which it exists at all, there consumption becomes unchecked self-consumption because, just like prayer, it becomes impossible to stop jolting oneself with the "high" of one's own self-negation.

Quote :
Can the will of an entity possessed of a slave morality still be called a will to power? Can it still be called a will? What is more, can we still speak an entity? I think that the answer is: only in as far as it is unconscious. And this makes it clear how (and that, which is a departure from Nietzsches “all is blood” dogma) we may begin to dispel slave-morality.

This indicates why I have a problem with the concepts of the slave/master distinction and of the will to power. They are simply too metaphorical, too mythological, too image-like to be precise enough for me to make good use out of.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 18, 2017 7:34 pm

Fixed Cross wrote:
Nietzsche held simply master morality - i.e. the will for something greater
and slave morality - i.e. the will to preserve at all cost.

These are definitions that I can get behind. I am now going to re-think everything N said about the master and slave with these definitions in mind.

But part of this is going to be the following: what does "something greater" mean? I know what it means, but I do not know how to properly articulate this knowledge yet, even and especially to myself. This lack is exactly what I mean by claiming that we need to make morality possible to critical philosophical speculation.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeMon Jun 19, 2017 8:43 am

There is a different thought I want to explore here but I sense is connected to this discussion: what does it mean to think? There are two primary ways, we either think emotionally or cognitively. What's the difference?

Other than qualitative differences I want to focus on one way they are different: emotional thinking has a MUCH smaller scope of possible contents it can hold in itself, compared to cognitive thinking. People who think only emotionally (SJWs for example) have very small attention spans, they cannot process thoughts that are more complex and larger than a single idea. This is why they rely on slogans, talking points and ideology. The emotionalism of their virtue signaling and mob mentality is really just a side effect of how small their attention span and mental processing power are.

This doesn't mean emotional thinking is bad, of course, but taken by itself it has real limits. Later I'll try to connect this to this thread.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 4:04 pm

I want to post this video here, it addresses very directly the idea of self-valuing as self-overcoming; i.e. as a negation of self-preservation.



As for thinking: I've never been able to think without emoting, or to emote without doing so consistently, 'logically' per the signifying emotions.
This makes me somewhat hard to be around - when I feel something I'll keep feeling it until I 'logically' resolve it: Freud had no idea this is possible, but I believe Nietzsche was put together somewhat the same way.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 4:38 pm

I think I'm the same way, if my emotional thinking is in conflict with my logic or cognitive thinking then I have to resolve that.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 4:47 pm

That's a good video, a nice summary of VO. I agree that thinking changes only when values change. And often values change in response to new ideas, which we process in our thinking, therefore the circle is new thought -> resistance -> values change -> accept new thought.

That certainly happened with me in terms of politics and Trump. We have to overcome this natural resistance that is in the early stage of values-processing, but many people don't work through the resistance and merely take the cognitive dissonance as given, thus protecting their values from changing/evolving. That's good if the current values are good and the new values are worse, but bad if the current values are worse than the new values.

And the only way to know if the new values are better or worse than the current values is to put them against each other in thought. So it's just random chance for a person who doesn't thinks about their values whether or not their instinctive resistance is going to be net gain or loss for them.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 5:08 pm

Thanks. Glad it comes across, its probably the only video where I manage to make this point so clearly.

And at this point the word tolerance means the absence of valuing: accepting everything without discernment, let alone compassion.
The tolerance for 12 year olds transgendering is simply the absolute absence of love, respect, valuing for these children. It means they are complete trash to their parents and their society.

I would say we can pretty decently rank the quality of beings in terms of how specifically and consistently they value. It takes courage, which takes a strong heart, to value specifically, to really have taste and live by it. It takes a flabby near dead heart to accept such things as transgenderism without suffering some serious disgust and worry. I accept it only as something some people are apparently forced to do, but its not in anyway something not-sick, never something good.

I do understand that it removes all the evolutionary pressures, all the history from ones soul. It makes it possible to live as a pure hedonist, a leaf in the wind, a perfect blip of nihilism.

I used to be so tolerant. It gradually eroded as I witnessed in real life what all these conditions I tolerated went on the produce around them.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 5:33 pm

Yes, transgender for anyone under 18 years old should be absolutely illegal. Any adult who chooses to transgender is fine, that is their right to make that choice for themselves, but they do not have a right to force others to accept it or pretend it's normal. A man who wants to pretend to be a woman or a woman who wants to pretend to be a man... why does this happen? I don't completely know, but what I do know is that they are indeed pretending. And I'll be happy to say that to a trans person, while also making it clear I don't mind their personal choice but I'm not going to deny what I see as reality.

That's what I see as the real problem, this reality-denial. Each individual person, each self-valuing must and has a responsibility to declare reality to be whatever it seems to them to be, to the best of their abilities, and then we can debate and negotiate these different visions with each other. That's why free speech is so absolutely important. If a trans person could convince me they are really the other gender, which I don't think they could do but I'll assume it's possible, then I would accept this and be happy to acquiesce to their view of reality. But they aren't doing that, they are merely demanding it without tying to be convincing. So that is the deeper problem as I see it.

I would like to ask an honest trans person the following: Why do you believe you are really the other gender? What are your reasons and certainty of it? That could make for a very interesting discussion back and forth, but note that I've never even once seen this sort of discussion take place, in media or anywhere else.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 5:36 pm

Simply asking a trans person "why?" is considered a hate crime, lol.

As for tolerance, I see tolerance as a good virtue but only to a point. We should never tolerate 1) intolerance and 2) being forced to deny of our own well-argued world view. But we should tolerate that others will have different world views than we have. Just so long as this tolerance doesn't become either of those two self-destructive tendencies noted above.
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PostSubject: Re: Self-preservation or truth?    Self-preservation or truth?  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 21, 2017 7:31 pm

Where our approaches differ is mainly a matter of what we want or expect.

You have standards that you would like the whole or general tendency of humanity to attain to, whereas I no longer identify with the species in such a way; I wish only to create a subspecies, a group, a type, a tribe, a nation that will be able to uphold standards that I am in the process of disclosing for myself and for others, with myself and with others.

Let's take this redefinition of slavemorality as a prompt to take a looser stance to Nietzsche in general; apply the logics ('instincts' as he called them) but dont follow the applications.

In this light, read my 'favorite' passage - what I deem mos significant - from the Will to Power:

"From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a master race, the future "masters of the earth";--a new, tremendous aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millennia--a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon "man" himself. Enough: the time is coming when politics will have a different meaning." [WtP 960]

Let's take this less literally, but follow the logic/instinct.

What we have, in actual fact and undeniably, is a process of kneading European man into a pliant mass through 'education',
So he has this correct. What we do not have is a tremendous aristocracy - we only have elites aspiring to that title, as they do the work of kneading -
but they yet lack the standards, the wholesomeness, that guarantees a properly superior position with respect to this prepared clay, so as to justify this whole disgusting process at all. Only after biting off the head of that disgusting snake of disgust itself, which Zarathustra follows with a laughter 'like no man has ever laughed before' - is it even possible to make sense in any direction at all, sense out of the senseless mayhem of shredded valuing that humanity unfortunately continues to be. And Ive arrived through that cloven rock and partly disgusting path (like the end of the Shawshank Redemption) at the will to my own type. I dont want to even have much to do with humanity as a whole - I want to gather and amass people that 'rock', - essentially - people that are able to roll and not crumble, people that are in the world and produce its music; i want a tribe, I want to be the bridge to a truly higher man, meaning one born without the depravities of stupidity and value-loss, and also free of crippling sanctimony and conservatism for its own sake - I want to offer the new man to the sun and the sun to the new man by distinguishing this tribe of first valuing starkly with the mud that it is destined to entice into forms.

Rule by example:
I now only wish to carve out a castle from the rock we've surmounted.
art no longer for arts sake, only for the sake of the human born under open skies












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