Value ontology and the final metamorphosis of the spirit

On ILP, Jakob wrote:

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From Nietzsche's notebooks:

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Und er wusste seine Tugend nicht zu überwinden.
Der Löwe in ihm zerriss das Kind in ihm: und endlich frass der Löwe sich selber.

Grausam war dieser Held und wild - -
Seht, ich lehre euch die Liebe zum Übermenschen.
- - - lud er auf sich und zerbrach under der Last.

The second part seems a context to the first, which reads:

"And he did not manage to overcome / conquer his virtue.
The lion in him tore up the child in him, and finally the lion devoured himself."

A fascinating observation of one of the ways in which the chain of metamorphoses can be broken.
I've been pondering this since I read it, and haven't fully grasped in a rational manner in which ways the lions virtue needs to be overcome to become a child.

Does anyone have experience with overcoming lion-like virtue, to become a self-propelling wheel of creative innocence? Or maybe there are examples, in literature, or other forms of drama, of someone who either suffers the same fate as this cruel hero?

"Inhuman was this hero, and wild - -
See, I teach you the love for the superman.
- - He took it on him and broke under the load."

Is there a causal link between the hero being cruel/inhuman, and his failure to carry the love for the Superman?
It'as possible I simply dont see the meaning.

Now in the great scheme of things that Zarathustra teaches, it is clear to me now that Nietzsche himself "falls under" the Lion category. After all, the
Lion says "I Will", and Nietzsches ultimate reality consisted of his understanding of the world as will to power. As suggested, I think that Nietzsche, as a Lion, fell pray to his own "grausamkeit", which is implicit in this view of the world as will to power and nothing besides.

How to transcend this cruelty, this ugliness, this denying of the subject in favor of an objective "monster of energy"? Not by denying the reality of the will to power surely. It could only be done by finding something deeper, truer, or at least as deep and true as the will to power, which at the same time supports, proves and affirms the will to power and delivers from the lack it imposes. And I have found this something, this thinking delivering from the limitations that the Lion imposes on himself by holding to his will so religiously, brutally -- this thought is the thought that the fundamental fact of reality, by virtue of which one may will to power, is valuing -- valuing as happiness, pleasure, lack, pain -- recognition -- and for this to exist, there must be a standard to which this value is measured. We can however no longer posit "things" at the root of action/affect -- so what exists as a reference, the thing that is experienced as a self (a willing to power) must be at root a self-referential activity, which is not yet an affect. In Netwonean terms -- the root of existence, as the purest ground of subjectivity, precedes causality. And no, it is not self-caused, nor is it an active prime-mover -- it is only the logical condition on which (the logical notions of) motion and causation may exist.

Rather than "I will (to power)", the Child says "I am". This "I" is not a however a thing, an object -- the Childs utterance "I am" it is not of the same category as "the child exists". It refers to the activity of being, which the child has recognied in himself, as self-valuing. He has no standards anymore besides what his very being commands, no, what his being is -- and so the spirit has arrived at the other end of the road, which began with the Camel, whose motto is "thou shalt", whose conscious standard was not in himself but a commanding other. The camel could only know his self-valuing by recognizing its ( own ) superior (e.g. "Lord", but not "the", but his Lord) thereby having his self-valuing translated to him by an already further evolved spirit of his own type. Then came the Lion, who realized the necessity of breaking with this otherness. But by breaking with it, the Lion is without self, except for the will to break with otherness. This is the will to overcome, the will to power - the will to a self.

How does the Lion become the Child? By recognizing that this willing-to/over is also a willing-from. Not in the sense of away-from, but from-the-ground-of-x. As long as this "x" is understood as a lack, then the self is unseen. As soon as this feeling-of-lack is affirmed as itself a positive, a property of a positive existing, the real being is drawn out of darkness, and the child is born.

To realize the will to power, which is the world, nullifies your existence as a human subject. You no longer exist as anything more than an incarnation of the world soul, an instance of will to power. The concept itself of will-to-power is a single line long ontology intended to describe all of existence. "Water is wet" is an ontology, but it only describes one small facet of the world. "Will to power," as an ontology of similar length but much wider scope, essentially means there is a potential that is continuously recycled without ever becoming actual. This potential force is what reality is, and there is no way to "actualize" or "unpack" this energy, as if the world itself were a continually climbing orgasm that cannot be consummated in any release of the built up force. "Will to power" as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized. Thus this ontology implies a world of pure appearance, with no underlying noumenon. There is nowhere for the will to go, so it wills unto power, which is to say, it continues to be precisely that, will, and "eternally proceeds within its own being," to use Spinoza's phrase.


But there are ways to maintain your sense of self, even realizing the concept of the world being the will to power. If you were to realize that you were the dream of some God, you would awaken, that is to say, cease to exist... Unless you had a peculiar art for keeping yourself asleep. Unless you began to dream yourself, by embracing yourself as a contributory poet to the overall divine dream. How would we do this, embrace ourselves as contributory wills to "power," to the monster of energy that is called the world? That is the question that I see value-ontology dealing with. This new contributory self would no longer need to bear or fight, it would no longer be camel or lion, but child. This valuing of the self, of the contributory self, would give birth to both truth and appearance. The truth, that one is a mere instance in the world soul, and the appearance... that one truly exists, that one is a self. As you say "the far more useful idea that value (more precisely the act of valuing) gives rise to both appearance and truth. "

Parodites wrote:

"Will to power" as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized.

This is a breakthrough insight to me. Truly effective in justifying the move beyond Nietzsche.

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Thus this ontology implies a world of pure appearance, with no underlying noumenon. There is nowhere for the will to go, so it wills unto power, which is to say, it continues to be precisely that, will, and "eternally proceeds within its own being," to use Spinoza's phrase.

This underlying noumenon is of course not something that may be seen to exist from the perspective of (moving beyond) WtP, but rather something into which the perspective collapses once it realizes itself as appearance-to-itself, as appearance creating. True, conscious attainment of selfhood is attained from the awareness of what the will to power is, that is to say, on top of the wtp rather than underneath it, although it is a kind of collapsing-into.

Notions and realizations of selfhood without the WtP have been accomplished of course, but in philosophical terms we've had to first attain realization of the WtP, which means a rejection of selfhood in terms of the thing, the noumenon, an embrace of activity/affect as the true substance. But this recognition evolves, via this new thinking, into a truthful notion of the self, one that does not posit anything besides what inescapably is logically true.

Thus, overcoming first the Camel (carrying thing-ness, objectivity, one ones back, as superior to subjectivity) by becoming the Lion (realizing subjectivity as reality) and then overcoming the attachment to the appearance to subjectivity, letting go of the last "clinging" -- shedding the fear that without actively willing the will to power (!) as the ultimate reality, it is weakened in oneself. The pride of the Lion is his cage. A beings strength is only unrestrained, natural, when he is not concerned with it. The will to power flows forth naturally from the Child as a contingency to its being, whereas the Lion is solely occupied with this will in order to attain his being -- which, as you say, he never does.

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But there are ways to maintain your sense of self, even realizing the concept of the world being the will to power. If you were to realize that you were the dream of some God, you would awaken, that is to say, cease to exist... Unless you had a peculiar art for keeping yourself asleep. Unless you began to dream yourself, by embracing yourself as a contributory poet to the overall divine dream. How would we do this, embrace ourselves as contributory wills to "power," to the monster of energy that is called the world? That is the question that I see value-ontology dealing with. This new contributory self would no longer need to bear or fight, it would no longer be camel or lion, but child. This valuing of the self, of the contributory self, would give birth to both truth and appearance. The truth, that one is a mere instance in the world soul, and the appearance... that one truly exists, that one is a self. As you say "the far more useful idea that value (more precisely the act of valuing) gives rise to both appearance and truth. "

Yes. And so the Child is itself a World, from which new appearances are born, from which new wills are born, the ground to new evolving worlds, the power of new camels to bear their future selves as burdens.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Parodites wrote:

"Will to power" as a philosophical concept literally means an unrealizable force, a potential that is infinite not in extremity, dimension, or intensity, but by virtue of the fact that it cannot be made actual, it cannot be actualized.

This is a breakthrough insight to me. Truly effective in justifying the move beyond Nietzsche.

Strangely coincidental of this, the other day I was thinking that will to power is always a will to power to, or for, or in terms of... that to speak of "the will to power" without regard to any of these is to speak nonsense, to say "God" and no more. Even supposedly "pure" will to power is still "will to power... to... [more] will to power", supposedly escaping the problem of actualization(-al limitation and constraint) but of course failing to do so. What is really interesting then, bearing in mind that to speak of will to power is to speak of an in terms of, for, of -- and that to abstract will to power to the highest power of abstraction is to reduce the meaning of the term, through asymptotic regression to the limit of absurdity -- is that every for is also (and even more so!) a from. In order to actualize one must place oneself at the mercy of certain limits, be an abeyance the result of necessarily constrictive forces which narrow through an imposition of the existence of 'negative' domains, empty space, void/s. From the perspective of that which wills, and of its power/s, these voids do not, cannot exist. Such (relative) ontic and ontological 'gaps' are a price of delimitation.

Conceptually this meshes with what you discuss here, arriving at the same point through a slightly different path: that the will to power is insufficient to break these barrier into "reality", to attend to a becoming-real -- to creating. The metaphysical heart of the will to power is thus revealed. To totally avoid this metaphysical appeal one must speak only of wills to powers, and thus a new unifying principle becomes necessary to bind these together into a new synthesized, useful, comprehensive understanding. Clearly will to power itself is inadequate to act as such a unifying principle. This is where value ontology (as well as, among other things, Heidegger's Da-sein) steps in, filling in the "unavoidable remainder" of gap-void inevitably left over from will to power's becoming actual/being applied. Valu(ing) becomes the 'verb' by which predicate unites with subject, subject with predicate. Whereas the upper limit (as abstracted-reified will to power) approaches meaninglessness and unreality, we have found the beginnings of a "lower limit", of which value ontology now acts as an early tracing.

This criticism of the will to power on ontological and psychological grounds demonstrates that the subject, the human subject, requires something beyond itself in order to establish the language necessary to realize a structure it can embody. Alone, the Nietzschean self cannot be actualized- it is not properly a self, rather a "selves." To be actualized the self requires a limit, without it, it cannot be articulated. Kierkegaard says as much in declaring "despair" to be the fundamental nature of the human being, it is not a psychiatric ill that can be cured, it is human nature itself, the basic incompleteness of that nature, and can be relieved only by God, the limit. Systems of religion, philosophy, and metaphysics- systems which have provided limits of this kind, have concealed the real truth which is that it is the subject which is onto-logically primary, not what is limiting it, meaning that the act of value and creation by which the self is realized becomes disfigured, is seen as a moment of subordination, of being encapsulated by the limit. If this was not the case, then the creative act would continue indefinitely, the self would be perpetually "realized," that is, created.

This "onto-logical primacy" of the subject which would allow that creative moment to persist, I have articulated with the concept of the daemonic.



This thread ties a lot of stuff together, you should put it in production.

Will to Power and nothing besides is exactly the same concept as Allmighty, Omnipresent Pure Love God.

Not something to be overcome, but an overcoming.

Like chaos. To regard chaos is absurd, but it is an answer to Universality.

In both cases, the overcoming slaps through a taste of truth that leaves no doubt.

This is the way of Will to Power, of Chaos, old forms are not discarded but digested, nay, used, overcome.

But why the focus on such madness? Much more did Nietzsche write about the superman. The question of the child and the superman: is this world ready for a lion, fully? The mistake was to think the metamorphosis required only an individual effort, a child would be bored as fuck in this age and die of loneliness.

"The superman has always happened as a happy mistake (usually a brutal, bloody one), but the project has not yet been undertaken to breed one, a family, a people." Paraphrased, of course, parantheses mine.

Anyway, I think the OP was brilliantly on the right track: feeling of lack seen as a positive.

There's a metamorphosis.

"He did not manage to overcome his Virtue": someoneisatthedoor.

Marxism is this selfdevouring Lionesque semiinstinct.