The Hierarchies of Human Values

I am transferring a discussion I was engaging Sauwelios in on his Facebook page to here, as I can no longer guarantee my emotional stability without completely avoiding my former network there.

I will first post his OP and then my response to it.

Sauwelios wrote:

"Let us begin by noting certain facts about the society in which we grew up, facts which every youngster learns in the course of his early life. The first fact we must know is that people differ with respect to their social status. By status we mean such things as the amount of money a man earns, the kind of education he has had, or which he can afford for his children, the kind of house he lives in, and the part of the town in which he lives, his accent, the kind of people he mixes with, and so on and so forth. [...] In addition to status, which is an objective fact which can easily be ascertained with regard to any particular person, we have another concept which is much more subjective in character, but which is also of considerable importance in our analysis. That is the concept of social class. Whatever their objective status may be, people in the democratic countries tend to think of society as being grouped into various classes, and they tend to consider themselves as belonging to one or other of them. [...] While the concept of class is subjectively dependent on each individual's private opinions and beliefs, it does, in fact, have a strong factual relation to social status. The Av+ [status] group tends to think of itself as upper and upper-middle class; the Av group tends to think of itself as middle class; while the Av- group, and more particularly the very poor, tend to think of themselves as working class." (Hans Eysenck, _Sense and Nonsense in Psychology_ (1957), "Politics and Personality".)"]

Maslows Hierarchy of Needs

In principle, everyone in the West can be sure to have their physiological needs and their need for safety met. The other three categories define, in my view, the three natural classes of human beings (as identified by, e.g., Plato and Nietzsche):  3. Those for whom love/belonging is the highest good. Among drug users, this is the XTC crowd. 2. Those for whom esteem is the highest good. Among drug users, this is the coke and amfetamines crowd. 1. Those for whom self-actualization is the highest good. Among drug users, this is the psychedelics crowd.  "Love gives the greatest feeling of power. To grasp to what extent not man in general but a certain species of man speaks here. [...] Here is the happiness of the herd, the feeling of community in great and small things [...]. Being helpful and useful and caring for others continually arouses the feeling of power [here.]" (Nietzsche, _The Will to Power_, section 176, Kaufmann translation.)"]

Ive always disagreed with such pyramids. For example, I think that physiological needs are the most difficult to meet (the true issue of evolution, progress), and that this difficulty is cause of the most insidious problems like sociopathy, which I see as ruling Northern Europe almost entirely. when I look at pictures of Northern European cities, I see a species in severe decay, with nervous systems that don't really connect to the higher functions of the brain anymore - out of pure despair.

For a man, physiological needs can not be met in complacency, in the harmful "safety" of a European city - such cities destroy natural physiology, which is, I believe, the reason for "transgenderism", which is really nothing more than a mask for voluntary castration, the self-chosen end of a genetic line -- pure physiological failure.

I would argue that consumerism relies on the never-being-fulfilled of the physiological passion.

What you say reminds me of what Zarathustra tells the despisers of the body at the end of his speech of the same name:

"No longer can your Self do that which it desireth most:--create beyond itself. That is what it desireth most; that is all its fervour.
But it is now too late to do so:--so your Self wisheth to succumb, ye despisers of the body.
To succumb--so wisheth your Self; and therefore have ye become despisers of the body. For ye can no longer create beyond yourselves.
And therefore are ye now angry with life and with the earth. And unconscious envy is in the sidelong look of your contempt.
I go not your way, ye despisers of the body! Ye are no bridges for me to the Superman!
Thus spake Zarathustra." (Common translation.)

All the needs Maslow lists are individual needs, and it's only the highest kind of need, the need for self-actualization, that he essentially connects to self-transcendence. I think he is right in this, though I probably differ from him content-wise. But formally, I tend to agree.

The need for sex is an individual need. (Asexuals supposedly do not have this need, but you may rank these among transgenders and the like.) The pleasurability of sex has evolved because, other things being equal, individuals who want sex more tend to have more sex, and individuals who have more sex tend to have more offspring. The individual need have no awareness of this mechanism in order for it to work.

Moreover, it does not always work, because other things are sometimes very unequal. Take the example of bees. Worker bees do not procreate themselves. Genetically, they do not need to, for their "strategy" is much more successful: by working, fighting, and even dying for their sister the queen, their genes are much better represented in the next generation than if both they and their sister each just procreated modestly for themselves. And again, it's highly improbable that they are aware of this mechanism. The modern-scientific view, at any rate, is that such behavior was just selected, passively, because of its evolutionary success. Countless different kinds of behavior were weeded out, even though they were no more irrational.

Now I do think modern science, and (thereby) modernity in general, are relatively sociopathic. It seems almost impossible to be successful in the higher echelons of business and politics without being a sociopath. The Machiavellian (i.e., modern) political-philosophical strategy has been precisely to give free reign to such people, letting them curb themselves by appealing to their psychology in the form of public praise/blame and monetary reward/punishment ("ignominy and fines", as Bacon called the negatives). I say "relatively", by the way, because I suspect it was always somewhat like this. I think tyrants have always been sociopaths or psychopaths.

Also by the way, here are a couple of strong literary connections between sociopathy and psychopathy on the one hand, and cocaine use on the other. The contemporary view of Sherlock Holmes, as depicted in the BBC series Sherlock, is as a "high-functioning sociopath"; and Conan Doyle's original was a notorious cocaine user. My other example is American Psycho, which I surely don't need to explain. Trump, by the way, was Bateman's hero, and he's certainly moved in those circles for most of his life, though this doesn't mean he's a sociopath. As I said, it seems almost impossible to be successful in the higher echelons of business and politics without being a sociopath. But if Trump is a Caesar, as I believe you think, it's still true that there are tyrannical as well as royal Caesars.

Anyway... Modern science is sociopathic because it rejects the soul of Aristotelian science--the formal and final cause--, leaving only the body--the material and efficient cause. The way I understand (adopt) Maslow's hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is nothing else than the final cause of man--that which makes him human, truly human. Compared to normal, subhuman so-called humans, this is indeed the Superman. But this does not need to consist in, or even involve, physical procreation. Thus Nietzsche writes:

"O afternoon of my life! What did I not surrender that I might have one thing: this living plantation of my thoughts, and this dawn of my highest hope!
Companions did the creating one once seek, and children of his hope: and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he himself should first create them.
Thus am I in the midst of my work, to my children going, and from them returning: for the sake of his children must Zarathustra perfect himself.
For in one's heart one loveth only one's child and one's work; and where there is great love to oneself, then is it the sign of pregnancy: so have I found it." (Zarathustra, "Involuntary Bliss".)

As far as we know, most of the great philosophers did not physically, genetically procreate; but so much the more spiritually, memetically! In fact, I think what's genetically inherited, for example the brain, is only the environment in which memes may survive and flourish--memes being ultimately nothing else than electromagnetic activity such as occurs in the brain. (In this view the ouroboros I sport as my avatar image is as such not a meme; only insofar as it's perceived (seen, remembered, etc.) is it a meme.)

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At this point I lost the vibe I was writing this in (I was at work). I could think of more to add, but I think it's enough for now.

I largely agree. What I would note is that in consumerist western society it is very hard for a large segment of the male population to find sexual partners, and that this is largely due to the behaviour of woman in large populations, where they gravitate to wealth and material security, which is so superabundant in certain circles that it becomes hard for the lower echelons to acquire a mate. Since women more often than not gravitate toward money, and society evolves to economically exalt sociopaths, I would say it is n fact harder in western society for any people to get their physiological needs met than it is in say, the jungle of Africa or poor Favela towns in Brazil. Which of course is very much the West, but still.

Consumerism is perhaps a sociopathy stimulating economic model, and it certainly thrives on dissatisfied males, perhaps more even on dissatisfied females. Dissatisfied people simply tend to constantly want to consume stuff. For this and for other reasons I believe that western societies propagate the unsatisfied physiological state, and make sure that a good segment of the population is always in need.

But is it really so hard for a large segment of the male population to find sexual partners? There's also a hierarchy among the female population, and the sociopathic male elite will only accept the top of that hierarchy: "hardbodies", to speak with American Psycho. It's a question of standards: a male can always wait in a bar on Saturday evening, till it's getting late and all the pretty girls have already gone home with someone. (I don't know this from personal experience, but thanks to a certain cynic.) Also, there's prostitution, of course, not to mention sex without a partner: the whole porn and sex toy industry. Of course, the latter is not the same as a real female body, but I think that, as soon as it's no longer just about such a body (an object) but also about the soul or spirit or whatever (the subject), we no longer find ourselves in the physiology department but now in the love/belonging department (note by the way that there's no sharp distinction between the departments, and in between those two is the safety department: e.g., feeling safe, comfortable with someone).

As for the three upper departments, I think the love/belonging one is the highest with which the herd type is really familiar, and the esteem one the highest with which the "warrior" (serial killer) type is really familiar. As such, they do feature a form of transcendence, yet these forms don't really transcend the individual. In Platonic terms, the love/belonging (eros/epithymia) level tends to involve seeking personal immortality through one's offspring, but one's offspring is just a partial genetic and memetic image (nature and nurture) of oneself; likewise, the esteem (thymos) level tends to involve seeking personal immortality through fame, but what's famous is just a distorted memetic image of oneself. Only on the level of self-actualization (logos/nous) can real transcendence be achieved, for this is concerned not with immortality but with eternity.

It is curious to hear you say that, as I think you personally know quite a few males for whom this has been a serious problem.
And I know this cynic you relate of, he is to my eyes always been an utter fool, he has never really made a lot of sense to me.
I know from experience that it does not work the way he says. Everybody has to make quite a controlled effort to find a mate. That the cynic is himself a bottom feeder does not mean that every individual can lower himself to that standard, that he is physiologically able of deriving satisfaction from that. And masturbation is definitely not a substitute for a human body. I think even that homosexuality is result largely of not having the prospect of a satisfying partner of the other sex. The numbers for the US suggest that about 70 percent of people have had sex the past year, which is to say far less than that woud be sexually satisfied, as the sexual need is a permanent affair, and need to be satisfied at least weekly, I would say, to be considered in the range of satisfaction. I would thin the number of people who attain that ratio is far lower in the west than it is in the south. It is lowest in Japan, which even though hit is Far East it could be said to have become a pioneer in western standards, to be the most advanced country in western terms. That country is dying of its populations inability to find even the hope of physiological satisfaction.

I rather count physiological satisfaction as the final, the top of the pyramid, as it represents the main criterium that matters in evolution. Mate-selection is the game with the highest stakes, and the most dramatic rate of failure.

Procreation is of course not the same as having sex, but it obviously requires it, the two belong to the same "value-physics" - external selection, which is a very tricky and/or violent affair in most sexual species and perhaps most of all in mankind. I think the structural lack of satisfaction in western societies is the driving force of the modern economy. To want to watch porn, I would hold, one must already be unsatisfied. Especially if one watches it with a sexual partner, real physiological satisfaction appears to be very hard to attain.

By extension, Id suggest that the populations average power to be sexually satisfied is dependent on cultural vigour. In a declining culture, people are just horrid, and they make do with defining specimens. For example, I was calling to my embassy today, the voice of the automated menu was so degenerate, I had to hold the phone away from my ears as I made my way to a person. That person was endurable in this case, but I have found that in Holland it has been nearly impossible for me to find a woman of Dutch origin with who I would want to mate. I would say I met, in the last ten years of my being there, one girl that seemed psychologically fit enough, but she was 19 and the absolute top league and I wasn't doing too well at the time, living on my own attic above my cousin, having broken up with the very un-Dutch and very traditional and old fashioned, even Patrician K.

I know a to of people find partners. But I doubt that they are physiologically very satisfied. Our dear cynic certainly will never attain such satisfaction, given the standards he sets for himself, which are truly retarded, the standards of a spiritual leper.

I personally have enjoyed more the game of scaring the beautiful and amusing the most beautiful of the truly simple ones, thats a game that is always appreciated by the heart, and sometimes this resulted in an unexpected conquest. But it is only here, in the preserved wild of Quebec, that I find women truly agreeable as beings. And only here did I find complete physiological satisfaction coupled with belonging. The tongue - la langue - is to me the most physiological of things...

I just realized that I don't think any of these values are attainable without all of the others.

For safety one needs belonging, as otherwise one isn't sure to not be expelled and only esteem gives true safety. Esteem is dependent on a degree of self actualization, which is basically power.
One also needs the physiological, and one needs tone self-actualized to not be a slave or an idiot, which aren't safe thing to be.

One must be safe to be satisfied, safe at least in ones proper context of power; a general is safe in the military.

It will always be misleading to look at what the Dutch say of themselves.
They have ranked themselves in various surveys as the happiest on the planet.

But they have to say this, as they are so utterly desperate that to not rank themselves supreme in happiness (All you need is positivity-style) would mean a complete collapse. Think what would happen to our cynic if he would admit to himself the station at evolutionary life he is, all things considered.

One must be supremely dissatisfied to treat ones values the way he does - a state of dissatisfaction that Ive thankfully never had to endure. It means the absoute knowledge of never being able to satisfy ones true needs - only that would generate such a self-evident justification of an abusive personally that claims for itself the standard of happiness and peaceful cohabitation.

Arie is perhaps the only physiologically satisfied Dutchman Ive ever been sure to have encountered. Thats what I liked about him most. It was reflected perfectly in his cooking and joint-rolling - and in his visceral dislike of our cynic. It would be a bit weird to assume that intellect was what repulsed him, given that he invited me to live in his own house, and I don't think anyone but the cynic himself would suggest that the cynic ever outranked me intellectually by any measure.

I aways had to take it supremely easy on him. He take it supremely on himself, as his sexual game demonstrates, and which is reflected in his relief to be able to have a woman without having his genes spread.

He is a form of a great disease, for which islam ma be the only cure; decadent slavishness. Islam could take away the decadence, and cover up what doesn't really tolerate daylight anymore - which by and large is what once was the Netherlands.

Holland will, due to the natures of the like of our cynic and them managing manifest as a standard of wisdom and experience for better people, turn further and further into a slavish, intellect-less province of Germany. Only when this process is complete is there a chance for cultural revival - but within the Germanic, Continental spirit, where Northern Italy, Switzerland, Obedient France, Bayern and Austria will return our continent back to a new type of its former form, the holy Roman Empire of Pharma-Technocracy.

A scenario that seems hard to avoid, anyway.

The Netherlands can be summarized by its head of media: Matthijs van Nieuwenkerk, a completely feminine neurotic, aiming only ever to please, and to shriek his own being-pleased. He is the Jimmy Fallon of the Netherlands, but with us he must pass for a real man.

Lastly - the physiological satisfaction of my type is impossible in the Netherlands no tin the least because of the intense war that comes from the sexual competition - in me, the Dutch have always found a common enemy. This doesn't work very well on the sexual market, as it is far beyond being a "bad boy" - it is being an outcast. It seems in general that Western Europe isn't too favourable for me, I solicit only animal responses, which are in principle what you want form a woman, and how I got by, but it is impossible to relate to the society of people in general, as all men conspire behind my back, especially those calling themselves my friends, and among them, especially my family members.

But of all of them, I know not one who appears physiologically satisfied, as all of them were utterly and wholly neurotic. I appear neurotic because I am not too neurotic to deal with it. Our cynics personality is just a figment of a collective neurosis.

The degree to which the wealthy and sexually superabundantly provided with - "stars" - succumb to drug overdoses and suicides is indication enough that the west is physiologically structurally under satisfied.

If its ideals of satisfaction can't even find satisfaction... but the very fact that the one man in that crowd that definitely did find satisfaction and still does wrote down those very lines is also telling - it is honesty that leads to satisfaction. Not the dominant pretence of already being satisfied.

Look at a lion that hasn't eaten for a while.

Ive read and heard many accounts of one night stands wrought in cafes in Amsterdam, and they invariably amounted in the astonishing conclusion of disgust. And I can concur - the one time I truly "ended up" with someone - where I had been entirely passive - I was indeed disgusted afterwards. Thats the only manner in which sex ever disgusted me, it not being the result of my very deliberate choice of a female, and the resulting will to make a sacrifice, which is the true aphrodisiac of the soul that advances toward the comprehensive psyche, the physiology as an order, a microcosm.

Apollo is not simply a tyrant, he is The Artist Tyrant.
His son Da(r)w(i)n shed some light on the methods.

Real women are still common enough in America. Glad Canada is on that level too, or at least Quebec.

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It is curious to hear you say that, as I think you personally know quite a few males for whom this has been a serious problem.
And I know this cynic you relate of, he is to my eyes always been an utter fool, he has never really made a lot of sense to me.
I know from experience that it does not work the way he says. Everybody has to make quite a controlled effort to find a mate. That the cynic is himself a bottom feeder does not mean that every individual can lower himself to that standard, that he is physiologically able of deriving satisfaction from that.

I didn't mean to suggest that they can, but you wrote: "it is very hard for a large segment of the male population to find sexual partners, and that this is largely due to the behaviour of woman in large populations, where they gravitate to wealth and material security, which is so superabundant in certain circles that it becomes hard for the lower echelons to acquire a mate."

Sure, they gravitate to the rich and powerful, but the latter will repel most of them. So there are male and female hierarchies, based (simply put) on wealth and beauty, respectively, and only the most beautiful--according to the reigning standard of beauty, with which I've always only partly agreed (I value natural beauty infinitely higher than glitter, plastic surgery, etc.)--will gain access to the most wealthy. So both men and women will have to settle for someone of more or less the same status or lower, and if it's more or less the same it will be at least somewhat tricky, yes.

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I rather count physiological satisfaction as the final, the top of the pyramid, as it represents the main criterium that matters in evolution. Mate-selection is the game with the highest stakes, and the most dramatic rate of failure.

There's different levels of satisfaction, or there's a difference between needs and desires. Eating shabby food will fulfill the basic need for nutrition, but it probably won't satisfy you. Maslow's pyramid is about needs, not desires. I'm pretty sure we've discussed the difference in the past, though I don't remember the outcome. So here's a quote instead...

"Against the theory that the single individual has in view the advantage of the species, of his posterity, at the cost of his own advantage: that is only appearance.
The tremendous importance with which the individual takes the sexual instinct is not a consequence of its importance for the species: but procreation is the genuine achievement of the individual and consequently his highest interest, his highest expression of power (naturally not judged from consciousness, but from the center of the whole individuation)." (Nietzsche, Will to Power 680 whole, Kaufmann trans.)

The first sentence is in agreement with contemporary Darwinism. The second is not (sex has evolved to be considered so important in accordance with the mechanism I described above), but even if it's true, it's only about individual achievement. Nietzsche called, e.g., Schumann a German event and Goethe a European event; he himself may in that light be regarded as a planetary event. Procreation was not or would not have been their highest expression of power.

I can attest to the fact that one smokes (or drinks) usually because one lacks physiological and psychological security/wellbeing. The occasional times when I do have that security for a while I have no urge to smoke or drink. But reality always intrudes on heightened states, and I am thrown back into the need for cigarettes and drink. Others use hard drugs or cheap sex/porn as vices, but the need is always the same, I think.

Yes, human collective consciousness (math, history, politics, language, art, culture - anything that has come to be over many generations and is not physically embedded inn the genetic body) is a chemical experiment, and thrives on somewhat ill health - on a state of suspended satisfaction.

When I am in nature for a few days, I don't read a word except a runic one I carve in a tree, I don't have the urge to listen to music,let alone to read or watch a story - all I want to do is breathe, and walk. The furthest thing from my mind is drugs and sex is not as much of an urge as nature constantly provides with a lot of what we need sex for.

In this sense, I think that human culture is absolutely impossible without bad habits, drug-use and vice. It is all the result of our looking for something more than what is plentifully given and on an important level entirely sufficient.

We can not be "in humanity" -  concerned with the world -  without wine, tobacco, weed, opium, LSD, whatever. Anyone who does not ever use any of such means is always, always, aways going to be very superficial and thus deluded, a slave - or a savage.

I would never be able to trust someone who isn't familiar with drugs when it comes to politics, for example. That would be completely absurd to me - such people can be very noble but they are guaranteed to be naive when it comes to human nature.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Yes, human collective consciousness (math, history, politics, language, art, culture - anything that has come to be over many generations and is not physically embedded inn the genetic body) is a chemical experiment, and thrives on somewhat ill health - on a state of suspended satisfaction.

When I am in nature for a few days, I don't read a word except a runic one I carve in a tree, I don't have the urge to listen to music,let alone to read or watch a story - all I want to do is breathe, and walk. The furthest thing from my mind is drugs and sex is not as much of an urge as nature constantly provides with a lot of what we need sex for.

In this sense, I think that human culture is absolutely impossible without bad habits, drug-use and vice. It is all the result of our looking for something more than what is plentifully given and on an important level entirely sufficient.

We can not be "in humanity" -  concerned with the world -  without wine, tobacco, weed, opium, LSD, whatever. Anyone who does not ever use any of such means is always, always, aways going to be very superficial and thus deluded, a slave - or a savage.

I would never be able to trust someone who isn't familiar with drugs when it comes to politics, for example. That would be completely absurd to me - such people can be very noble but they are guaranteed to be naive when it comes to human nature.

Yes, I agree. These are really good insights.

Sauwelios wrote:

Quote :

It is curious to hear you say that, as I think you personally know quite a few males for whom this has been a serious problem.
And I know this cynic you relate of, he is to my eyes always been an utter fool, he has never really made a lot of sense to me.
I know from experience that it does not work the way he says. Everybody has to make quite a controlled effort to find a mate. That the cynic is himself a bottom feeder does not mean that every individual can lower himself to that standard, that he is physiologically able of deriving satisfaction from that.

I didn't mean to suggest that they can, but you wrote: "it is very hard for a large segment of the male population to find sexual partners, and that this is largely due to the behaviour of woman in large populations, where they gravitate to wealth and material security, which is so superabundant in certain circles that it becomes hard for the lower echelons to acquire a mate.

Sure, they gravitate to the rich and powerful, but the latter will repel most of them. So there are male and female hierarchies, based (simply put) on wealth and beauty, respectively, and only the most beautiful--according to the reigning standard of beauty, with which I've always only partly agreed (I value natural beauty infinitely higher than glitter, plastic surgery, etc.)--will gain access to the most wealthy. So both men and women will have to settle for someone of more or less the same status or lower, and if it's more or less the same it will be at least somewhat tricky, yes.

Thats not possible though, if one needs to gravitate to the same status or lower, the other needs to gravitate to the same or higher.

But the thing is that an increasingly small percentage of the male population "consumes" the majority of the young, normatively attractive female population, these days. Like with lions. Whereas it is not the case that an increasingly small percentage of the female population consumes or wants to consume such segments of the male population.

So the relations are very skewed, the "sexual market" is not equal for men and women.
This has a lot to do with the nature of power as it differs in men and women. A man can get rich overnight and get himself a harem of very desirable women, a woman can never get that much more attractive over night.  

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I rather count physiological satisfaction as the final, the top of the pyramid, as it represents the main criterium that matters in evolution. Mate-selection is the game with the highest stakes, and the most dramatic rate of failure.

There's different levels of satisfaction, or there's a difference between needs and desires. Eating shabby food will fulfill the basic need for nutrition, but it probably won't satisfy you. Maslow's pyramid is about needs, not desires. I'm pretty sure we've discussed the difference in the past, though I don't remember the outcome. So here's a quote instead...

Thats the problem with that pyramid, isn't it. There are only two real needs in there.
On top of that, in human beings, desires not infrequently trump needs, which is the cause of our complicated collective consciousness, our culture, which in no way is "necessary" and in no way provides us with necessities.

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"Against the theory that the single individual has in view the advantage of the species, of his posterity, at the cost of his own advantage: that is only appearance.
The tremendous importance with which the individual takes the sexual instinct is not a consequence of its importance for the species: but procreation is the genuine achievement of the individual and consequently his highest interest, his highest expression of power (naturally not judged from consciousness, but from the center of the whole individuation)." (Nietzsche, Will to Power 680 whole, Kaufmann trans.)

The first sentence is in agreement with contemporary Darwinism. The second is not (sex has evolved to be considered so important in accordance with the mechanism I described above), but even if it's true, it's only about individual achievement. Nietzsche called, e.g., Schumann a German event and Goethe a European event; he himself may in that light be regarded as a planetary event. Procreation was not or would not have been their highest expression of power.

This is a different subject, though. We are not here discussing what is the highest expression of power.

Maslow's pyramid was made in the spirit of an empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm in science. No real scientist like Newton or Einstein or Darwin would take it seriously. At best it is a guide, which can be said to be generally true more or less in certain limited contexts. But as Fixed points out, the bottom should really be on the top. The positivist idea that we can somehow draw a straight line from body needs to emotional needs to social needs to mental needs (or whatever) is embarrassingly naive.

From an old ILP post:

Fixed Cross wrote:

Faust wrote:

I think that the urge to screw should not be interpreted as an urge to preserve the species.

Correct. The causal logic of evolution-theory as actions (such as sex) leading to results (such as survival of the gene pool), is misinterpreted often as an active motivation operative in the species or organisms "will".

Animals don't do what they does to attain an evolutionary goal. If the tendencies of a species with a certain type of tendencies happen to result in procreation, obviously these the tendencies are what survives any continuation of this species. What has survived in general is not any species, but the tendency to engage in sexual activity.

More basically, what has survived is the type of organism to which sexual activity is pleasurable.

I'm sorry for stating the totally obvious, but it seemed to be lost in the teleological terminology so often mistakenly used to contextualize evolution and sexuality.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Sauwelios wrote:

Quote :

It is curious to hear you say that, as I think you personally know quite a few males for whom this has been a serious problem.
And I know this cynic you relate of, he is to my eyes always been an utter fool, he has never really made a lot of sense to me.
I know from experience that it does not work the way he says. Everybody has to make quite a controlled effort to find a mate. That the cynic is himself a bottom feeder does not mean that every individual can lower himself to that standard, that he is physiologically able of deriving satisfaction from that.

I didn't mean to suggest that they can, but you wrote: "it is very hard for a large segment of the male population to find sexual partners, and that this is largely due to the behaviour of woman in large populations, where they gravitate to wealth and material security, which is so superabundant in certain circles that it becomes hard for the lower echelons to acquire a mate.

Sure, they gravitate to the rich and powerful, but the latter will repel most of them. So there are male and female hierarchies, based (simply put) on wealth and beauty, respectively, and only the most beautiful--according to the reigning standard of beauty, with which I've always only partly agreed (I value natural beauty infinitely higher than glitter, plastic surgery, etc.)--will gain access to the most wealthy. So both men and women will have to settle for someone of more or less the same status or lower, and if it's more or less the same it will be at least somewhat tricky, yes.

Thats not possible though, if one needs to gravitate to the same status or lower, the other needs to gravitate to the same or higher.

True. I did realize that after posting my post, but I didn't change it, because I was also talking about status, not class. So yes, I should have left the "or lower" part from my argument, except that I was wrong in the first place. The only men and women who will have to settle for someone of more or less the same status are those whose prospective partners and themselves give a hoot about status to begin with!

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But the thing is that an increasingly small percentage of the male population "consumes" the majority of the young, normatively attractive female population, these days. Like with lions. Whereas it is not the case that an increasingly small percentage of the female population consumes or wants to consume such segments of the male population.

Sure, I never meant to suggest that it's a one-to-one equal distribution. But we're still only talking about young, normatively attractive females.

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So the relations are very skewed, the "sexual market" is not equal for men and women.
This has a lot to do with the nature of power as it differs in men and women. A man can get rich overnight and get himself a harem of very desirable women, a woman can never get that much more attractive over night.

Well, the nature of political power. As Zarathustra says:

"Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money--these impotent ones!
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness--as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne,--and ofttimes also the throne on filth." ("The New Idol", Common trans.)

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I rather count physiological satisfaction as the final, the top of the pyramid, as it represents the main criterium that matters in evolution. Mate-selection is the game with the highest stakes, and the most dramatic rate of failure.

There's different levels of satisfaction, or there's a difference between needs and desires. Eating shabby food will fulfill the basic need for nutrition, but it probably won't satisfy you. Maslow's pyramid is about needs, not desires. I'm pretty sure we've discussed the difference in the past, though I don't remember the outcome. So here's a quote instead...

Thats the problem with that pyramid, isn't it. There are only two real needs in there.

No, I disagree. They're all needs.

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On top of that, in human beings, desires not infrequently trump needs, which is the cause of our complicated collective consciousness, our culture, which in no way is "necessary" and in no way provides us with necessities.

True, desires may trump needs; but only needs that are higher on the pyramid. For example, the desire for more esteem may very well trump the need for self-actualization.

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"Against the theory that the single individual has in view the advantage of the species, of his posterity, at the cost of his own advantage: that is only appearance.
The tremendous importance with which the individual takes the sexual instinct is not a consequence of its importance for the species: but procreation is the genuine achievement of the individual and consequently his highest interest, his highest expression of power (naturally not judged from consciousness, but from the center of the whole individuation)." (Nietzsche, Will to Power 680 whole, Kaufmann trans.)

The first sentence is in agreement with contemporary Darwinism. The second is not (sex has evolved to be considered so important in accordance with the mechanism I described above), but even if it's true, it's only about individual achievement. Nietzsche called, e.g., Schumann a German event and Goethe a European event; he himself may in that light be regarded as a planetary event. Procreation was not or would not have been their highest expression of power.

This is a different subject, though. We are not here discussing what is the highest expression of power.

Well, if we suppose that one's highest expression of power gives one the highest feeling of power, it's very much what we're discussing. The highest satisfaction.

::

Thrasymachus wrote:

Maslow's pyramid was made in the spirit of an empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm in science. No real scientist like Newton or Einstein or Darwin would take it seriously.

Er, isn't Newtonian mechanics the epitome of empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit science? And Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice", i.e., it isn't classical mechanics. And Darwin, too, reduced evolution to mechanisms.

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At best it is a guide, which can be said to be generally true more or less in certain limited contexts. But as Fixed points out, the bottom should really be on the top.

Well, I don't agree with Fixed on that.

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The positivist idea that we can somehow draw a straight line from body needs to emotional needs to social needs to mental needs (or whatever) is embarrassingly naive.

Okay.

::

Here's something I wanted to say. Maslow considered all four needs below self-actualization mere "deficiency needs". This reminds me of the following:

"It is a common opinion that the human activity called philosophy is neither necessary nor useful, and the prevalence of this belief compels philosophy to justify itself. The justification often involves asking, first, about what is necessary and useful for man, and eventually about the nature of man himself. One way to approach the question 'What is man?' is to look at man's place in the world and speculate about the things that might distinguish men from other beings that one sees or imagines. The question comes down to this: Is man's reason or intelligence something different from the rest of the world of nature and from those other parts of man's being that he shares with the higher animals? Or is man's reason simply a more complex mental mechanism than those of other animals, merely an extension of, or an improvement on, animal faculties--one that serves to satisfy the same needs, desires, and passions that animals experience, but in a more efficient and perfect fashion? This question is inseparable from the question of what constitutes politics." (Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, page 16.)

On the next page, Mahdi formulates the second alternative as "the view that the proper aim of political life and of man himself is to gain greater efficiency in attaining ends that are not specifically human but are more elaborate versions of ends pursued by certain animals--pleasure, wealth, honor, and so forth." (op.cit, page 17.) I've always found that intriguing: do animals pursue wealth and honor?

Now I know both of you reject the kind of "humanism" to which Mahdi seems to point. But even if the traditional view of "animals" as opposed to "human beings" is wrong, in the sense that it does justice to neither "non-human animals" nor to "human beings", it may still be correct in a different sense. It may do justice to the difference between the many subhuman members of our species and the few veritably human ones. Mahdi also writes:

"Islamic philosophy shared the ancient view that man is a special kind of being; that his ability to reason--his power to know himself and the whole--is the activity that marks him as different from other animals; and that reasoning is therefore the ultimate purpose of his existence." (op.cit, page 16.)

That ancient view is the Aristotelian view. But compare the "power to know himself and the whole" to Being and Time:

"Dasein is an entity which, in its very being, comports itself understandingly towards that being. [...] The previous disclosure of that for which what we encounter within-the-world is subsequently freed, amounts to nothing else than understanding the world--that world towards which Dasein as an entity always comports itself."

The difference between the (sub)human and the (super)human may then be the difference between inauthentic and authentic Dasein. To be sure, though, Strauss writes:

"The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself and this in its turn is due to his lack of self, to his self-forgetting, the necessary consequence or cause of his objectivity; hence he is no longer 'nature' or 'natural'; he can only be 'genuine' or 'authentic.' Originally, one can say with some exaggeration, the natural and the genuine were the same (cf. Plato, Laws 642c 8-d 1 777d 5-6; Rousseau, Du Contrat Social I. 9 end and II. 7, third paragraph); Nietzsche prepares decisively the replacement of the natural by the authentic. That he does this and why he does this will perhaps become clear from the following consideration. He is concerned more immediately with the classical scholars and historians than with the natural scientists (cf. aph 209). Historical study had come to be closer to philosophy and therefore also a greater danger to it than natural science. This in turn was a consequence of what one may call the historicization of philosophy, the alleged realization that truth is a function of time (historical epoch) or that every philosophy belongs to a definite time and place (country). History takes the place of nature as a consequence of the fact that the natural--e.g. the natural gifts which enable a man to become a philosopher--is no longer understood as given but as the acquisition of former generations (aph. 213; cf. Dawn of Morning aph. 540)." (Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil".)

The genuine philosopher "must reinstate nature or assign limits to its conquest" (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 105). Nietzsche did so by teaching the eternal recurrence; Heidegger, by teaching our mortal dwelling with things. As I wrote near the end of my "Note on the First Chapter of Leo Strauss's Final Work":

"As in Heidegger's work, so in Nietzsche's the room for political philosophy is occupied by gods or the gods: Dionysus and Ariadne (cf. paragraph 15 of the central chapter)."

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Maslow's pyramid was made in the spirit of an empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm in science. No real scientist like Newton or Einstein or Darwin would take it seriously.

Er, isn't Newtonian mechanics the epitome of empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit science? And Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice", i.e., it isn't classical mechanics. And Darwin, too, reduced evolution to mechanisms.

I'm genuinely confused why you would equate "mechanism" with positivism and "empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm."

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At best it is a guide, which can be said to be generally true more or less in certain limited contexts. But as Fixed points out, the bottom should really be on the top.

Well, I don't agree with Fixed on that.


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The positivist idea that we can somehow draw a straight line from body needs to emotional needs to social needs to mental needs (or whatever) is embarrassingly naive.

Okay.

Okay.

Attempting to understand something in terms of underlying systems and mechanics does not automatically make one a positivist or a "materialist" (which is already a stupid and hopeless term). Logic does not preclude... logic.

Sauwelios wrote:

True. I did realize that after posting my post, but I didn't change it, because I was also talking about status, not class. So yes, I should have left the "or lower" part from my argument, except that I was wrong in the first place. The only men and women who will have to settle for someone of more or less the same status are those whose prospective partners and themselves give a hoot about status to begin with!

Sexual status would largely be defined as appeal, though - and everyone cares about that.

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But the thing is that an increasingly small percentage of the male population "consumes" the majority of the young, normatively attractive female population, these days. Like with lions. Whereas it is not the case that an increasingly small percentage of the female population consumes or wants to consume such segments of the male population.

Sure, I never meant to suggest that it's a one-to-one equal distribution. But we're still only talking about young, normatively attractive females.

Well, "only" is a bit out of place, as that is the center of the "market" - almost all masculine seductive resources, (powers, moneys, charms, etc) go into obtaining the favours of that group.

This is tired to my entrap point, that sex is not just a personal matter, it is what drives economies, and has driven them since time immemorial.

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So the relations are very skewed, the "sexual market" is not equal for men and women.
This has a lot to do with the nature of power as it differs in men and women. A man can get rich overnight and get himself a harem of very desirable women, a woman can never get that much more attractive over night.

Well, the nature of political power. As Zarathustra says:

"Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money--these impotent ones!
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness--as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne,--and ofttimes also the throne on filth." ("The New Idol", Common trans.)

Do you mean to equate monetary power to political power? I don't think they are the same thing.
I think ven that N here alludes to the same distinction as Frank Underwood does in season 1 of House of Cards.

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Thats the problem with that pyramid, isn't it. There are only two real needs in there.

No, I disagree. They're all needs.

That would mean one can't exist without them.  I strongly disagree.
I don't think self-realization, to begin with, can be called a need.

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True, desires may trump needs; but only needs that are higher on the pyramid. For example, the desire for more esteem may very well trump the need for self-actualization.

By now the system has been shown to be a random hodgepodge of terms. At least to be far too inefficient to be dealt with logically. It needs tone conditioned, amended, we need to debate what is a need and what is not - it is completely inexact. And intact things piss me off to no length if they make claims to being a system.

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This is a different subject, though. We are not here discussing what is the highest expression of power.

Well, if we suppose that one's highest expression of power gives one the highest feeling of power, it's very much what we're discussing. The highest satisfaction.

It is not what we have been discussing at all, which is whether or not we can identify with some exactitude and logical consistency satisfaction, need, desire, and power, in terms of such a neat pyramid and in terms of such neatly separated categories, which I must conclude has been proven to not be the case. This pyramid is a remarkably feeble pretence to order. Seeing as you, as its defender, have had to amend it to be able to keep discussing it.

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Thrasymachus wrote:

Maslow's pyramid was made in the spirit of an empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm in science. No real scientist like Newton or Einstein or Darwin would take it seriously.

Er, isn't Newtonian mechanics the epitome of empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit science? And Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice", i.e., it isn't classical mechanics. And Darwin, too, reduced evolution to mechanisms.

Ah - I misread this. This is in part true. Einstein ejected the implications of the uncertainty principle because they would not allow for the universe to be regarded as a Newtonean mechanism.

Goes does not play dice mean: there is no uncertainty in the mechanism of physics.
In short, he didn't have VO. He didn't see that the logic on both scales (QM and GR) is the same, though the manifestations form a dichotomy of sorts.

Having said this, obviously Newtonean mechanics apply completely and totally to this universe. I don't know why anyone would call them bullshit or reductionist. Newton certainly never reduced anything. He observed some exact certainties. That we can't apply Newton to what isn't technically matter does not make Newton reductionist.

f=m.a. Is that to be regarded reductionist bullshit now? Postmodernism is really aggressive.

Adding: I do not think there is a coherent system called "Darwinism". I think there is Darwin, who observed a sublime mechanism, but never reduced anything to mechanistic views at all. Im rereading the Origin of Species at the moment. Darwnism is the least Darwin-like thing there is. Just like most Nietzscheanism tends to be a bitter embarrassment to Nietzsche, as we see on ILP. There is Nietzsche, thats it.

(I am certain that VO is the proper continuation of his project of transvaluation toward the Earth and the superman, but this does not give me any claims to Nietzsche himself.)

I thank you sincerely for showing up here again at my request - what this exchange between the three of us has done though is demonstrate to me that I really need to stop this public philosophy - it doesn't attribute the proper value to any of our minds. If anything is reductive bullshit, it is the way we are having to reduce ourselves to make sense to each other now. Or quite as bad, reduce each other.

More pride. More power. More realism.
That is the new paradigm.

Darwin did not reduce evolution to mechanics. He discovered evolution. He posited a logic. Yeah, logic has a mechanistic aspect. Is now everything that has a mechanism a reductionist bullshit? This is going very far in the wrong direction, very fast.



We really need a lot more respect for thought. To begin with, that means no longer sharing it for free.

Fixed Cross wrote:

We really need a lot more respect for thought. To begin with, that means no longer sharing it for free.

Agreed.

As I start writing this, I haven't read anything since posting my last post.

I had this further thought. According to Spiral Dynamics, there have been six first-tier ages or stages, and only two second-tier ones. Likewise, according to Maslow, there are four deficiency needs and only one non-deficiency need. Now according to Spiral Dynamics, there will ultimately also be six second-tier ages or stages, which are the higher-tier equivalents of the six first-tier ones.* Perhaps then Maslow's "self-actualization" or "self-transcendence" really consists of the non-deficiency equivalents of the four deficiency needs!

* Something similar is the case in (Western) astrology, where the first six signs are something like the "I" or "Self" signs, whereas the other six are something like the "You" or "Other" signs.

Thrasymachus wrote:

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Maslow's pyramid was made in the spirit of an empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm in science. No real scientist like Newton or Einstein or Darwin would take it seriously.

Er, isn't Newtonian mechanics the epitome of empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit science? And Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice", i.e., it isn't classical mechanics. And Darwin, too, reduced evolution to mechanisms.

I'm genuinely confused why you would equate "mechanism" with positivism and "empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm."

Mechanism reduces everything to the mechanical parts (unities, particles--or even units, quanta) it posits as given to experience (empiria).

::

Thrasymachus wrote:

Attempting to understand something in terms of underlying systems and mechanics does not automatically make one a positivist or a "materialist" (which is already a stupid and hopeless term). Logic does not preclude... logic.

I agree, but then those systems and mechanics (logic) mustn't be understood in terms of givens, as all (modern) science does (it does not think, beyond them).

::

Fixed Cross wrote:

Sauwelios wrote:

True. I did realize that after posting my post, but I didn't change it, because I was also talking about status, not class. So yes, I should have left the "or lower" part from my argument, except that I was wrong in the first place. The only men and women who will have to settle for someone of more or less the same status are those whose prospective partners and themselves give a hoot about status to begin with!

Sexual status would largely be defined as appeal, though - and everyone cares about that.

Sure, but appeal to whom? Social status is status in the eyes of society at large. Sexual status, i.e., social status with regard to sex appeal, is then only about sex appeal to society at large; not to individuals whose self-classification is not in accordance with their social status. To be sure, as that passage from Eysenck says, "the Av group tends to think of itself as middle class" etc. I connect this to Heidegger's concept of falling into the They-self (what "they" say determines what one thinks).

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But the thing is that an increasingly small percentage of the male population "consumes" the majority of the young, normatively attractive female population, these days. Like with lions. Whereas it is not the case that an increasingly small percentage of the female population consumes or wants to consume such segments of the male population.

Sure, I never meant to suggest that it's a one-to-one equal distribution. But we're still only talking about young, normatively attractive females.

Well, "only" is a bit out of place, as that is the center of the "market" - almost all masculine seductive resources, (powers, moneys, charms, etc) go into obtaining the favours of that group.

This is tired to my entrap point, that sex is not just a personal matter, it is what drives economies, and has driven them since time immemorial.

I'm not contesting this, but for me the key word is "normatively" (see above). Now as I said before, I have always partly agreed with that norm, that standard of beauty or attractiveness. Recently however I've finally had the insight that such females can never be "mindmates" to a philosopher. Since childhood my main concern was with "love/belonging" in that respect (including sex, of course, but then the position of sex in Maslow's hierarchy is controversial, and indeed: can one be dying from lack of sex as one can be dying from hunger? I think not); now, I think it should rather be with "esteem".

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So the relations are very skewed, the "sexual market" is not equal for men and women.
This has a lot to do with the nature of power as it differs in men and women. A man can get rich overnight and get himself a harem of very desirable women, a woman can never get that much more attractive over night.

Well, the nature of political power. As Zarathustra says:

"Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money--these impotent ones!
See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.
Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness--as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne,--and ofttimes also the throne on filth." ("The New Idol", Common trans.)

Do you mean to equate monetary power to political power? I don't think they are the same thing.
I think ven that N here alludes to the same distinction as Frank Underwood does in season 1 of House of Cards.

I suppose then it's not even the nature of political power. Of what power is it, then?

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Thats the problem with that pyramid, isn't it. There are only two real needs in there.

No, I disagree. They're all needs.

That would mean one can't exist without them.  I strongly disagree.
I don't think self-realization, to begin with, can be called a need.

That's not what "need" means here;

"The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called 'deficiency needs' or 'd-needs': esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. If these 'deficiency needs' are not met--with the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) need--there may not be a physical indication, but the individual will feel anxious and tense." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#Hierarchy)

Only the physiological needs are needs in the sense you mean, and only insofar as not meeting them directly results in one's demise.

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True, desires may trump needs; but only needs that are higher on the pyramid. For example, the desire for more esteem may very well trump the need for self-actualization.

By now the system has been shown to be a random hodgepodge of terms. At least to be far too inefficient to be dealt with logically. It needs tone conditioned, amended, we need to debate what is a need and what is not - it is completely inexact. And intact things piss me off to no length if they make claims to being a system.

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This is a different subject, though. We are not here discussing what is the highest expression of power.

Well, if we suppose that one's highest expression of power gives one the highest feeling of power, it's very much what we're discussing. The highest satisfaction.

It is not what we have been discussing at all, which is whether or not we can identify with some exactitude and logical consistency satisfaction, need, desire, and power, in terms of such a neat pyramid and in terms of such neatly separated categories, which I must conclude has been proven to not be the case. This pyramid is a remarkably feeble pretence to order. Seeing as you, as its defender, have had to amend it to be able to keep discussing it.

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Thrasymachus wrote:

Maslow's pyramid was made in the spirit of an empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit paradigm in science. No real scientist like Newton or Einstein or Darwin would take it seriously.

Er, isn't Newtonian mechanics the epitome of empirical reductionist materialist non-philosophical bullshit science? And Einstein rejected quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice", i.e., it isn't classical mechanics. And Darwin, too, reduced evolution to mechanisms.

Ah - I misread this. This is in part true. Einstein ejected the implications of the uncertainty principle because they would not allow for the universe to be regarded as a Newtonean mechanism.

Goes does not play dice mean: there is no uncertainty in the mechanism of physics.
In short, he didn't have VO. He didn't see that the logic on both scales (QM and GR) is the same, though the manifestations form a dichotomy of sorts.

Having said this, obviously Newtonean mechanics apply completely and totally to this universe. I don't know why anyone would call them bullshit or reductionist. Newton certainly never reduced anything. He observed some exact certainties. That we can't apply Newton to what isn't technically matter does not make Newton reductionist.

f=m.a. Is that to be regarded reductionist bullshit now? Postmodernism is really aggressive.

Well, I did say "Newtonian" whereas pseudo-Thrasymachus said "Newton". And yeah, consider what I said about systems and mechanisms (logic) above.

f=m*a may not have been superseded, but p=m*v has: it turns out it's really (rather) p=γ*m*v. It's just that gamma is virtually 1 except at tremendous speeds.
γ*m is what's been called "relativistic mass".

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Adding: I do not think there is a coherent system called "Darwinism". I think there is Darwin, who observed a sublime mechanism, but never reduced anything to mechanistic views at all. Im rereading the Origin of Species at the moment. Darwnism is the least Darwin-like thing there is. Just like most Nietzscheanism tends to be a bitter embarrassment to Nietzsche, as we see on ILP. There is Nietzsche, thats it.

Well, I don't mean to be facetious, but Nietzsche is dead. What there is is the writings of Nietzsche and interpretations of those writings. My interpretation is most indebted to the interpretations found in Lampert's Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, which is in great part Lampert's interpretation of Strauss's interpretation of Nietzsche's interpretation of--being...

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(I am certain that VO is the proper continuation of his project of transvaluation toward the Earth and the superman, but this does not give me any claims to Nietzsche himself.)

I thank you sincerely for showing up here again at my request - what this exchange between the three of us has done though is demonstrate to me that I really need to stop this public philosophy - it doesn't attribute the proper value to any of our minds. If anything is reductive bullshit, it is the way we are having to reduce ourselves to make sense to each other now. Or quite as bad, reduce each other.

More pride. More power. More realism.
That is the new paradigm.

::

Thrasymachus wrote:

Fixed Cross wrote:

We really need a lot more respect for thought. To begin with, that means no longer sharing it for free.

Agreed.

But that is what the Sophists did. To demand money (or goods) for one's thoughts means that one presents one's thoughts as wise. "Receiving my thoughts will be good for you." Receiving a grant is different, for then one is enabled to spend more time and energy on the thinking that one already shared for free. I think it's unwise to present one's thoughts as wise. The less intelligent or developed may actually believe it and do the most foolish things on that basis. I will not teach my thoughts without teaching that they're at least on some level wishful.

"Unlike most thinkers of this century, [Heidegger] was clear that neither his country, nor her universities existed or have any right to exist apart from the resolve to have them. Consequently he despised any allegiance which assumed that its object exists independently of the will that it be. Self-assertion, the willing of its self, is the only existence moral or communal things can have. Heidegger, therefore, rejected Hitler's claim that Aryan superiority over Jews exists by nature apart from will or self-assertion. He traced Hitler's error to 'fishing in the murky waters of values and universals,' that is, to what Spinoza called superstition. For Hitler wanted his biologists to prove his racial theories scientifically.
Heidegger despised Hitler for this 'Platonic' enslavement to the common sense need for independently existing moral standards. The lesson of 1933 was responsible for Heidegger's liberal contempt for politics. It taught him that Hitler's enslavement to superstition was no exception, but the necessary hallmark of political or moral life." (Neumann, Liberalism (1991), "Illiberalism or Liberalism?")

"Being is Self-Valuing", as I put it in my Value Philosophy signature, means Being unconceals itself as self-valuings. But Being conceals its unconcealing, which means it may reveal itself differently at some point. Now Lampert writes:

"Nietzsche cannot and does not magically dispense with nature, transporting himself into some radical historicism that supposes it can solve the problem of nature by treating nature as a conceptual fiction. Nietzsche does not conquer nature conceptually, denying its sway and affirming the modern fiction of our radical power to make ourselves whatever we fancy. Nor does Nietzsche surrender to nature under another name, affirming the radical subjection of our minds to the shifting power of what is given, to Being, say." (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 104.)

The former temptation is what Heidegger came to fear most:

"The possibility that we might become mere resources, Heidegger explained in an interview in 1969, is an even more dangerous consequence of technology than weapons of mass destruction: 'I think about what is developing today under the name of biophysics. In the foreseeable future we would be in the position to make man in a certain way, i.e. to construct him purely in his organic being according to how we need him: as fit and unfit, clever and stupid' (Wisser, p. 36). For many, of course, the prospect of biological engineering is one of the great promises still to be realized in technology. For Heidegger, it would remove the last obstacle to completely reducing us to a resource. At the point that we can create ourselves in whatever way we see fit, there will no longer be room to acknowledge any constraints on us or any demands on us that we need to respect. We will no longer encounter anything which can provoke us to find new ways to be human." (Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger, final chapter.)

But the latter temptation, to conceive nature or Being as something that eludes even the greatest possible grasp of transhumanism, does not suffice. What we need is natures, plural, for example human nature. Provoked by this problem of nature, the will to the recurrence is the new, current way to be human, the way to be human in the Nietzschean age. It's a self-actualization, a peak, on the level of Homer, Plato, Machiavelli, and their peers. At least that's how I see it, and want to see it.

::

In the meantime I've jogged and thought of two things I still want to address. The first is that the philosophers who opposed the Sophists did of course also make the less intelligent or developed--the natural victims of sophists--believe that they were wise and do the most foolish things on that basis. The difference was the difference between the short term and the long term. The way I see it, the Sophists had short-term bad influence whereas the Socratics had short-term good influence and long-term bad influence. The Platonic age was the aeon whose word, according to Crowley, was AIO (I just looked this up): the Logos, the Demiurge, the God of the philosophers. In this it was a continuation of the Homeric age. The Machiavellian and Nietzschean ages are the aeon whose word, according to Crowley, is Thelema, the Will.

At this moment I'm entertaining the thought that the Demiurge is what Heidegger criticized as the conception of Being (To Be) as one being (entity) among others, albeit the highest. In any case, the second thing I still wanted to address is VO's being a logic. I've basically been insisting that it be a "thelemic". The novelty of the Nietzschean age is, in my Lampertian reading, that the setting for philosophy has changed, under the influence of Christianity and the Enlightenment, so that it's no longer a viable strategy for political philosophy to pass off as truth what is "in truth" semblance. I'll conclude with a Picht quote (note that the phrase by Picht I was just thinking of reads "to pass off as Being what in truth is semblance"):

"The truth is not outside of creating, it is rather the carrying-out of creating itself. The truth is the composing [Dichten, "poetizing"] of truthful semblance. Since however the composer of this semblance is himself only a dream, only the mask which Dionysianly conjures the omnipresence of the horizon of the millennia, the composer becomes transparent to himself as the steward of the dream of history on which the whole past continues to compose. He is the dreamer who knows that he's dreaming, that he's being carried, led, formed, guided and composed by a power which eludes his own control. Hence 'Joyful Wisdom' 54 begins with the statement: 'How marvelously and newly and at the same time how horrifically and ironically do I feel disposed towards the entirety of existence with my cognition!' (V 2, 90) The marvel is the discovery that, through the inversion of the statement 'God is dead' and through the cognition of truthful semblance, the appearance of the world beams forth in a divine radiance. The new is the discovery of the future, the horrific is the shattering of the subjectivity of the subject, is the cognition that the subject is nothing else than the embodiment of past and future history, thus, as I've said, the mask in which the omnipresence of history is conjured in the creative moment. This discovery is horrific for this reason, that through it the principium individuationis [principle of individuation] shatters, that man becomes aware of the fact that his own existence, too, is only a dream, only semblance, only a designing-oneself in new possibility, only a hovering without support. The irony, finally, is in the fact that the man who has attained to the cognition of this truth is like a dreamer who knows that he's dreaming, like a creator who no longer creates unconsciously but sees through his own creating at the same time. In this way existence becomes perspectival in the dual sense that it's conscious of the historical limitedness of its own horizon and at the same time knows that, precisely through this limitedness, it provides and possesses insight into the contradictory structure of the Being of being as a whole. The dreamer who knows that he's dreaming is a symbol which sees through itself as a symbol." (Georg Picht, Nietzsche, page 319, my translation. The earlier phrase is from page 282.)

I've decided to go a little further after all. The first of the following two passages reminded me of the second:

"For Heidegger, by contrast, the primary worry about technology is not that we are becoming dependent on machines to supply us with the necessities of life, nor that machines hold more power to destroy life than the world has ever before seen. The real danger is that technology will deprive us of our essence as human beings: 'Human being is, according to its essence, compelled to always new experiments [on ways to be human]!' But in the technological world, 'the danger stands that man is completely delivered over to technology and one day will be made into a controlled machine' ('Aus Gesprächen mit einem buddhistischen Mönch', in Reden, p. 590)." (Wrathall, ibid.)

"For philosophy, Kant's knowledge that reason only has insight into what it itself brings forth in accordance with its design can, if finite reason is historical, only mean that thinking, in an ever-revolving change, makes its own designing of the design the object of its knowledge. If the knowledge however is to be true nonetheless, then absolute spirit must manifest itself in every finite form of reason. For a thinking which radically carries out the change of consciousness, the self-knowledge of reason in the act of its designing becomes a 'phenomenology of spirit', that is to say a doctrine of the forms in which the absolute essence of spirit appears as finite. Now Nietzsche carries out a change which puts into question even the fundamental presupposition of Hegel's: that the absolute in and for itself is already with us. Kant's doctrine 'that reason only has insight into what it itself brings forth in accordance with its design' is taken so radically that it now comes to light how reason itself has been brought forth in history by man, in accordance with his own design. The force which brings forth and determines both reason and the principle of identity that constitutes it bears the name 'the will to power'. Thinking, knowing and acting is now interpreted out of the historic carrying-out of designing, that is to say out of value-determination. Whereas in Kant the apriority of reason is condition of the possibility of designing, through the change carried out by Nietzsche the design becomes the condition of the possibility of reason. The model from which the essence of the design can be read, however, is still the experiment. Hence philosophy as a whole must now emerge as an attempt, for the attempt is the design of the open horizons for the future forms of thinking and acting. The attempt is the design of the possibilities of the future history of mankind. [...]
If the attempt is understood as the design of the future possibilities of historic existence [Dasein--Picht had just mentioned Heidegger], the experiment carried out here can no longer be interpreted as if the experimenter stood toward the experiment he conducts as an impartial observer. In this design he designs his own possibility. The carrying-out of his own life [or living--Leben] is the attempt. [...]
This is the total sublation [Aufhebung] of the traditional distinction between theory and practice. Since Nietzsche, every thinking is reactionary which does not venture to accomplish the entire life of him who thinks as an experiment of the knower, as a designing [Entwerfen, lit. "unthrowing oneself"] into the future possibilities of human history." (Picht, op.cit., page 72.)

Sorry for quoting at such length. Also, it wouldn't surprise me if this Picht stuff is precisely what VO teaches. I am still missing, in both Picht and VO, the connection between the will to power and the eternal recurrence I've found in Strauss, though.

As long as it is clear that Maslovs pyramid is not a logical system of any sort, neither relies on nor offers a method of science, but rather has the criteria and substance of a new age sort of model. "The individual will feel stress" ... heh. Its nicely evocative and associative, and you can draw it with rainbow colouring. It has (beyond the quoted marijuana prescription) no syntax to connect its terms though, which makes it logically null and void, as Im sure we can all agree.

Yes, at tremendous speeds, energy ceases to behave as mass, the mass disintegrates into force and even less "substantial" self-valuing; thus doesn't apply to Newtons laws about mass.

Note that Newton had no laws for light. He does not enter that equation, he does not construe gravity mathematically from another value, he rather uses it as a standard for his applied mathematics. He doesn't describe the quantum universe, but the Newtonean one - the one described by his three laws. This universe is the standard for all practical science, as well as for the sets of calculations that amount to the relativistic one, as well as the quantum one. We might say that Einstein was simply overambitious, and that GR does not apply necessary to the whole of the cosmos but simply to the universe of mathematical reference frames built from empirical data of astrophysics.

Like the Nietzschean universe is that which is described by the will to power.

You ask what kind of power money is -- I am not sure if that is not a sophism on your part, if it really has you puzzled, it is certainly an interesting question to ponder - as most lives surely revolve for a good deal around acquiring monetary power to obtain sustenance. What makes power different from money?

That is a question for the Federal Reserve.