Can the will to power become the next subjectivity ground?

The current subjectivity ground in the western world is a fusion of Christianity and Hegelian-Freudian-Marxism. Basically, the Bible + deconstruction postmodernism. Almost all thought in the west takes place somewhere upon this ground.

Maybe the Marxist element is only a transition method from Christianity to what will become the new subjectivity ground. I am wondering if the will to power is enough to create the new ground.

Let's divide the form from the content. In Christianity you have its form and its content, with form supported by content and coding and decoding information by accessing those contents. Those contents include not only actual Christian beliefs but also the bulk of ideas and values and experiences that have been derived from the 'actual Christian'. Science and literature are two huge areas within that actual Christian space. A person can subjectively function by accessing contents which they never know to be actually rooted down deeper in the Christian substance, because the salient tail end of the content-chain seems secular; if you were to follow that chain downward to its source, however, it would be discovered the Christian roots it comes from. One can study history, etymology, science, art, and find these connections.

Most obviously, will to power replaces the form of Christianity with a new form, a hyper-naturalized one. What contents does this will to power idea-form access as it operates a subjectivity? It still accesses the old contents for the most part.

A new paradigm will not occur until there are substantially new contents. A new "religion" would be needed, an entire mythological architecture embedded culturally-psychologically. Science and postmodernism are working to create these new contents. All that is needed is a new categorical tectonic, not an absolute break (since Christianity also did not create an absolute break with what came before it either, it simply created new categories that were then used as a new ground).

The forms are containers for contents, and the contents are containers for 'experiences', raw sensory and mental, direct subjectivity. Three layers here like Russian dolls: direct experience --> contents --> forms. Because the will to power aims for all three layers at once, it might be able to do what Christianity did and create a new categorical ground out of which a new subjective type can appear. Christianity created a complex system of ideas and experiences that breached all three layers, thus creating a new unification among all those levels thereby achieving a new category. Under Christianity, direct experience was wrapped in the new contents, and those contents were wrapped in the new forms, so that direct experience itself actually changed as a result of all this. Subjectivity moves up from experience to content to form and it also moves down from form to content to experience.

"Identity" is just the relative stability achieved within that tripartite arrangement, held together daemonically as uncollapsed dynamic tensions. How could will to power achieve what Christianity achieved?

Level of direct raw experience: desires and impulses felt as "expressions of force/power, quanta of motive; increase self-reference in the equations of negotiations; equalization of the objects of experience with oneself as all being willings to powers.

Level of contents: reinterpretation of beliefs, ideas, goals, in terms of "power relations" located upon oneself-as-value (as opposed to located historically-materially as Marxist postmodernism does); tiered self-valuing meta-relations guiding contents intimately and directly, all contents seen as microcosms of larger subject-object relations.

Level of form: overt adherence to the will to power as principle and ideology; dismissal of the divine and its replacement with the hyper-naturalization of Nietzsche when it comes to transcendence.


The problem is that there are not yet any mythological images and "gods" at work here. No lived entities as the liminal boundaries as Parodites says. New types of heroes and villains need to be found, and enter into collective (un)consciousness. These would just be the old archetypes remade in modern images. But they would very much need to be believed in. Warrior, coward, master, slave, intellectual genius, moral saint, petty criminal, evil nemesis, trickster, magi, neutral barterer in the marketplace, ...it seems like we need to fall back into black and white typology when it comes to how we think about ourselves and others and the roles we all inhabit. The founding of Christianity partitioned up the human world into black and white roles, so the dimensions of complexity and nuance were lost for a while as the archetypes took hold in their new modern (1200-2000 years ago) images. The modern world today requires the same fever of simplification to take hold, so the human reality can return to dominate as archetypal figures engaged in a holy battle for the sake of the new universalized god.

I think technology and the internet are helping to consolidate this process. Today we see rapid progress here as more and more people are thinking and labeling themselves and each other according to black and white terms along a more narrow Good vs Bad spectrum. If the will to power is to be the new universalized god, then this god will have to speak about every newly consolidated type, placing it in relation to the Good/Bad spectrum. Then when a critical mass of people align to a single viewpoint provided by this god, mass interpretations will take place and the new world 'religion' will tear apart the old world and its old religion (Christianity). Thus Marxist postmodern stuff is only a symptom of this process taking hold more firmly.

Artists now need to help figure the new modern images and personas/personalities in which the archetypes can coalesce as universalizable types; a return to moralism, such as we see with both the radical Left and the radical Right today. Those radical moralisms on both sides need to be brought together qua radical-moralizing and for that we need new "divine images", new archetypal Good and Bad objects. Perhaps it is impossible to know what forms this will take in the near future to unite radical moral Right and Left. The gods are still in the womb; and the will to power will need its own mystifying image, a single idea that can represent and express it in sufficient complexity. For Christ this was "Love". But all the modern social justice slogans have failed to establish themselves as a sufficient image of the new will to power God... one possible choice is Progress. Progress can include complexly both the progressivism of the Left and the capitalistic value-hierarchizing of the Right. Thus the notion of progress needs to be turned into a proper noun, Progress, and mystified behind orgies of surplus meaning and emotional/cognitive excess, to the point where the new God appears under the proper name of Progress and able to establish the new universalizing moral landscape on which identities, divination of the future, and meaning as such can stabilize the new Good vs Bad spectrum.

The God of Progress has taken hold more on the left so far than on the right, so we will need to focus on teaching the right how to understand Progress as what the Right already values and wants, in their own terms. Prayer can be replaced with "meditation" and with dialogue between people who speak of everything in terms of its relation to Progress. Thus when people speak about Progress they will be engaged in "praying" to the new God. Meditation will also need a new name, perhaps "reflection", a kind of sitting around and thinking; thought and quiet pleasurable leisure will need to be reimagined as "reflection for the sake of Progress".

"Most obviously, will to power replaces the form of Christianity with a new form, a hyper-naturalized one."

But not with a new form of Christianity but with a freedom to follow one's own intuition.

Christianity is not needed in order to exercise one's will to power.

Right, but willing to power means something different in every era, in every mode of subjectivity.

In any case all this is just a theory so far.

I'm open to other ideas as to what the new God will be. "Progress" is only my best guess so far. Another guess could be "Life".

Another interesting choice is of course Value. I think Self-Valuing is too complex and philosophical to act as the new God, but Value might work. Let's try it.

First layer (direct raw experience): My value, your value; felt emotional tension, instinct-desire; felt value as mobilized resistance to cognitive dissonance.

Second layer (content): All ideas, beliefs, and goals reimagined in terms of being values to and for; contents as asserted values beginning to be rank-ordered.

Third layer (form): Value Ontology replaces philosophy; all philosophies and political systems seen as self-valuings willing to power; a return to enlightened egoism and the destruction of all social justice ego-lessness.

Direct raw experience is "instinctive", content is "cognitive" and form is "psychological".


So three competing names for the new will to power God: Progress, Life, or Value. Why does Love work so well (it is the current, Christian, God)? Perhaps because it is deeply and immediately psychological, a personality condenser, and it works so well on all three layers.

Value (valuing) is an important concept.

I still don't know how to work with Fixed concepts though.

And yours may be even more complex.

Life, yes, but that's not enough for most people.


Quite some time ago I adopted the concept of useless/useful for myself in an attempt to reduce dualities in my life. It has worked pretty well. But then, I didn't have any needs to replace gods as for me there are none anyhow.