The Nietzschean Cauldron

Selfishness is not just a state of mind, its who we are, we are "will to power".

Selfishness sounds like a bad word because of our history but we talking philosophy

Nietzsche said :

"Selfishness is this law from the perspective of feeling by which the closest things are the largest and heaviest while all those who are far decrease in size and weight."

Yeah, it is because of the negative connotations that I don't use the word "selfish" very often.

Sure, close and far are perspectives. It is easier to go after goals that are closer than those that are far away.

As has been said: A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

When you try to mimic Nietzsche, begin by appropriating his style. By far the most difficult part. If you manage that, you will already have changed into someone that has a grasp of his content. Style is an absolute expression of soul.

Myki has been banned for two months.
( none of us has the time to micromanage )

I thank you all for coming out and giving your best.

Well, I'm still here as far as I know. And Nietzsche's thoughts are with me.

There still are lots of opportunities for discussing Nietzsche's concepts. Let's just stay true to the man and his philosophy. Misquoting and taking sentences or phrases out of context should never be seen here.

You are absolutely right.

I had to be tough on Myki now since I showed such extraordinary lenience last time.

Sisyphus wrote:

Well, I'm still here as far as I know.  And Nietzsche's thoughts are with me.

There still are lots of opportunities for discussing Nietzsche's concepts.  Let's just stay true to the man and his philosophy.  Misquoting and taking sentences or phrases out of context should never be seen here.

It was a purely fabricated sentence, has nothing to do with Nietzsche or his idea of selfishness.

Masks - -
we all wear them. Some of us know the purpose better than others.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Sisyphus wrote:

Well, I'm still here as far as I know.  And Nietzsche's thoughts are with me.

There still are lots of opportunities for discussing Nietzsche's concepts.  Let's just stay true to the man and his philosophy.  Misquoting and taking sentences or phrases out of context should never be seen here.

Masks - -
we all wear them. Some of us know the purpose better than others.

I think that is one of the things Nietzsche was speaking out against. He was a truth seeker. He wanted to remove all the masks. And he for sure was a good observer of the reality of life.

Back when I was doing my initial reading of him I can't recall ever thinking that his use of "selfish" was a negative thing. It is just a simple fact. Based in the survival instinct.


The other day while out shopping I saw a Hispanic young lady wearing a t-shirt with a modified version of Nietzsche's "What does not destroy me, makes me stronger." I asked her if she knew the source of the saying and she said no so I told her. (She was with three other women so it couldn't be viewed as me hitting on her.)

All four of the women thought it was interesting, especially a Catholic wearing a saying from Nietzsche.



I have a small collection of Nietzsche quotes. Perhaps I will go through them, identify the source of the quotes and verify their accuracy and then periodically post one so that we can discuss the root concept of the quote.

We'll see.

Nietzsche knew women - at least he has an old lady tell him that in his fiction book. (My take: he knew women, and knew they were too dangerous for a man who is himself dynamite - thus he wrote only what he could to distance himself. He could not afford to not submlimate Eros - he was too much the end of the line of a 2000 year old process to simply ejaculate all that seed, banally put. A mans highest destiny is to become a seed. But to what fruit? This is the Nietzschean question that sustains the ambition to move beyond God.)




Women are irresistibly attracted to a man that plays by his own rules and makes it work, as this is what evolution does.
But womans more persistent instinct is to cultivate weaker men below them to serve as the State, to protect long term interest.
Woman as a group animal is quite fascist, lets the people fall in place like pieces of a bigger thing, unfree to themselves in an economy based on masculine weakness, creating a subdued state of affairs impossible to endure for warrior spirits, where as an individual she has to be pioneering, walk the edge of danger to be found by a warrior - the instinct here is to erect ones own City. Clan forming stands to civilization as salmon stands to a web of weeds.



I'd say that womans higher soul comes out when she is ovulating, the risk-taking element that is attracted to strong jaws and deep voices - display of capacity. The rest of the time she just wants to 'have fun' - which means to her to cultivate, namely herself, her house, carve her place out in the existing world and find it beautiful and please its leaders to rise to favored positions.

Metaphorically, which in case of woman means more literally than literal:

When a woman is clad in red she is likely to be receptive to philosophy.


In blue or black, she'll wish to unreasonably dominate or be unreasonably dominated - misunderstanding between the sexes is instrumental to the prison called heaven.


All this is visible most starkly in the inner struggles of these two empires -
Rome, and the Arab civilization.
It is not impossible that we are facing the prospect of a war between these forces, in order to awaken their masculine sides.

Aside - The standard of the "arrow" rank which was at the low number of 50 has been reset a few days ago- since I initiated the Jupiter calendar, I am obliged to initiate cycles based on empirical, experiential, synthesis between theory and reality as it unfolds. The number is 113, based on the number you had when you had managed to discipline Myki a bit -- in as far as what was going on was perceptible from the outside. As I know very well that we all wear masks - and N said both to be terrible and unmasked, and to wear masks where it is the love of life that requires it.


‘…[T]his will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us….Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything….
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.’



It is good that Myki attained to this rank before he was banned - the absurdly proud bird on his signature, which testaments other peoples views of the people here very well, with the arrow on his chest - ᛏ
all this has a symbolic meaning for me, - more than anything I believe in the power of symbols. My thinking is only of the longest term, and of hte direct moment.



This site contains some mechanism, some visible, but the main one lies underneath, where philosophers are invited in a five pointed wheel - that cast about theme Time, and Being.


Seeds are small. Small is what they are required to be to be a seed. To grow large, one has to begin small. This is why I have planted myself invisibly on the internet, when all people around me planted smei grown trees they acquired from their society and thought it was their life.




It gets funnier an funnier now. Nietzsche would have been very cheerful at this point.
I have grown to a large tree with a forest of trees great and small around me now, and the people from my old world arent even visible to me anymore. Seeds are small so that they grow swiftly!

Ha. Science is always joyful.

Quote :

‘…[T]his will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us….Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything….
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.’

And even this description of N's is... a mask, an image; he has turned image-ness into a philosophical methodology, wherein the point is to forsake certain truth-approaches. Why forsake these ones and not others? He has no idea really, but he makes some talk about strength and will and joy at least.

I don't agree with his characterization that truth is wanting to see everything naked. To me this is just an image of truth, a deliberately unflattering one. I think Nietzsche fell in love with his own metaphorical capacity of language and writing, and this sort of took over his philosophizing side. Not always for the worse of course, but it really does limit him.

Truth is seeing the image, and loving the image, and seeing what is under the image, and through and into and as the image, and understanding the image and what lies beyond and beneath it, and accepting and knowing and loving the image and what the image masks, simultaneously and in the same way; truth encompasses everything, truth isn't this sort of bifurcated structure that Nietzsche imagines here. Granted he is talking about scientific naive truth-seeking, but that isn't even truth-seeking at all, and Nietzsche knows this. So why does he use the word "truth" here in this aphorism and others like it, rather than just talk about the scientific will to knowledge as he does in other places?

I think he likes to conflate things in metaphor and analogy, and this is very good because it is a sign of his powers of conception pushing into language, pushing the limits of language to contrast and juxtapose and re-write existing categories. However, despite how all that is good and useful as a model for aspiring philosophers, it doesn't really get too far "into" philosophy itself with these sort of statements as per the above quote.

In case you can't tell, lately I have been somewhat more skeptical of Nietzsche. I went back through Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil a little bit, I was really shocked by how uninteresting and not profound much of it was. But of course he is still among the best thinkers in the history of philosophy, and certain of his writings (e.g. Zarathustra) are better than others.

Capable wrote:

In case you can't tell, lately I have been somewhat more skeptical of Nietzsche. I went back through Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil a little bit, I was really shocked by how uninteresting and not profound much of it was. But of course he is still among the best thinkers in the history of philosophy, and certain of his writings (e.g. Zarathustra) are better than others.

It is not Nietzsche's fault that you now have a different perspective today than you had when you first read him.

I found that to be the case for me after I had read the Tao Te Ching and The Chuang Tzu.

As we evolve our perspectives change. For me Taoism filled in some empty places I found in reading Nietzsche. I still hold Nietzsche in high regard for allowing me to understand the importance of truth and the will to power.

C - youve always been skeptical of Ns status and the degree of his worth, that I remember, with a period of exception.
We dont read him in the same way.
I am honest when I say I dont grasp the meaning of the word Truth, when it does not connect to "about something".
I do understand truthfulness - this is me, what I strive for. But Ive never discerned "Truth". Unlike another philosopher I am indebted to, Aleister Crowley, who even wrote a bundle called Little Essays Toward Truth.

I do get what he means, but it is not for me. And I wonder if it is related your notion of it.

When I quote a philosopher it is because he says something better than I can say it. N will always speak to my very depths, VO is "just" the logic of the WtP, but up close. VO is fully Nietzsche's project, his posthumous friend created it out of pure dedication to the task N set, to explicate his beginnings into a full fledged philosophy of the future.

That is my one and only intellectual task in this life. And Im accomplishing it - with VO as well as my alliance with fundamentally different philosophers!

N alone is not enough for what N wanted. But he saw the thing that needs to be done. I am a philosophical warlord "first over the wall" - and my star is set.

That intro to GS is the highest non-Greek writing to my tastes. It outlines the entirety of the task of restoring health to mankind, as I see it.

Whats behind things, the truth about all things, I forged a formula for this. But it is not a naked formula - rather formulating in its terms means cutivating rather than stripping that which one analyzes.

Thus, VO can not be used by wretches....it is a selection mechanism, the most objective sort of thing in existence - a standard to standard-setters. That is as close to a Truth as such that I can recognize as philosophical -- it is after all fully explicated in life for me to witness.

This leads me to the following 'truth about truth':
Truth can never be both 'pure' and sufficient at the same time.

Truth is impure.

As I see it, truth is everything, therefore it is both pure and impure. Purity raised to the heights within itself becomes impure with respect to things other than itself, for example, and impurity is just another way to gain some (new) purities. Lies are just as needed as truths, lies tell truths and truths tell lies. The best lies (very good fiction novels) tell the best truths.

When we lie, we are required to lie in terms of something, and to make use of something for the purposes of falsification. A "pure and total falsification" would not make any sense, would relate to nothing at all and therefore be incapable of serving as a lie; when we speak truthfully, we are required to speak truth in terms of something other than this truth itself, namely to "lie" (apply) in terms of the truth which is to be spoken and for the sake of effecting some kind of translation, an effect, an influence. I see all of these as "daemonic polarities" because quite simply they are conceptual oppositions (reflecting very real and 'objective' substance oppositions) that cannot be synthetically collapsed into a totally dialectical resolution. They must remain apart. I am in awe of anythings that must remain apart from each other, that resist total synthesis. This is of course, what self-valuing also means and describes.

Truth itself I would distinguish from the idea of truth itself. The idea of truth itself is a high abstraction that works linguistically and conceptually to focus our energies and thoughts in the right direction, which here means toward more reality. Truth itself is just the adequate object of this idea of truth itself, and truth itself is just another way of saying "everything; whatever happens to exist in whatever way and to whatever extent, and why, and how, going across all space and time and everything other and in between and beyond". It is hard to give a dictionary definition of "everything", but the best way is probably to simply state that no-thing at all and of any type whatsoever is excluded from it.

The rational possibility of thinking this "truth itself" is what I would call the adequate object of the idea of truth itself. Of course the possibility is highly limited and finite for us finite human beings, even our Minds can only push so far in that direction... but effectively this is about embracing everything, a kind of "Eternal Return" without the moralizing and without the need to "affirm" any of it. Truth is just what it is, whatever happens to exist whether or not we or anything else happen to know this. The fact of something is independent of whether or not anyone or anything knows that fact. I could also therefore define truth as: the totality of all facts, but this would also include of course everything which is not first-order facts but also second-order, third-order, etc. etc... without end.

Example first order fact: "This such-and-such rock is here in such-and-such place and time."

Example second order fact: "While no beings or minds know or register the above fact of the rock's existence, it is nonetheless a fact that no beings or minds know or register the above fact of the rock's existence, and it is nonetheless a fact that the rock does exist."

Example third order fact: "While it is a fact that no beings or  minds know or register the above fact of the rock's existence, it is nonetheless a fact that we human beings are able to talk about things like rocks for which no beings or minds know or register its existence."

Every order of facts necessarily produces an excessive dimension 'above' itself that ejects that level of facticity from itself, into something more "subjective" and categorically distant from the way in which facts within that particular order in question are facts; however, this kind of categorical distinction and ejecting of the more subjective impetus is, itself, just another order of facts. This is like set theory on steroids. So if you take every fact and every order of facts and "sum" them all together inclusively into one "thing", you would get what I think of as the meaning of "truth itself". And this even includes mutually exclusive and irreconcilable things, situations and facts, because for instance if you have two facts that cannot be reconciled to each other at all (a distinct possibility give VO logic) this is just another example of the ejection of the impetus within one order and its formation-ascension into another order, namely: "these two facts are absolutely irreconcilable to each other, but nonetheless it is still a fact that these two facts are absolutely irreconcilable to each other". Every fact has reasons, which just means that every fact is a fact of something and naturally incorporates the why and how of that "of something", which and according to the principle of sufficient reason (to which I subscribe) reasons are always the case (and these reasons are, also and in addition, part of their own order of facts too).

Also, a critical component of this idea of truth itself is that we never know anything like the totality of truth itself; our idea of truth itself is never going to be adequate to its object, and can only approach and model this adequacy in the ideal of the idea; we can only ever become "adequately adequate", at best. So being is naturally and necessarily radically open, and to close being only closes that being from truth itself, by introducing errors into its idea of truth itself.

Yes, I agree- but so does Nietzsche. The will to power is a logic that allows for precisely this, the inadequacy of things to each other - in fact, this inadequacy is what causes, or propels the will to power.
This is clearly Nietzsche's Truth - the WtP - and in as far as it is a "whole", it is a monster - of energy - i.e. not comprehensible.

We agree deeply on this necessity of error, and inadequacy.

In fact, yesterday before I fell asleep, all the thoughts of last night culminated in the goal of a world-of-error; or rather, a society that is shaped in such a way, designed in such a way, as to allow humans the greatest 'right to err' -
namely, one mans error, is the next mans lesson -
if we are are free to err, and if there is no existential punishment for erring (regardless the objective that signifies the error by not being attained) then humans are the most powerful, the freest, and no doubt the healthiest, and happiest.

Fixed Cross wrote:

I am honest when I say I dont grasp the meaning of the word Truth, when it does not connect to "about something".

I think it is very difficult or maybe even impossible to state "a truth". There are almost always exceptions.

I think that "truth" is the acknowledgement of "what is" without subjective valuation. I'm not suggesting that the truth need be accepted. This is because after the acknowledgement of the truth is we will naturally evaluate that truth to determine if it is acceptable. Then we have the challenge to decide what to do with it.

Fixed Cross wrote:

In fact, yesterday before I fell asleep, all the thoughts of last night culminated in the goal of a world-of-error; or rather, a society that is shaped in such a way, designed in such a way, as to allow humans the greatest 'right to err' -
namely, one mans error, is the next mans lesson -

Agree. At the Taoist forum I have in my signature block: "I reserve the right to be wrong."

Fixed Cross wrote:

Yes, I agree- but so does Nietzsche. The will to power is a logic that allows for precisely this, the inadequacy of things to each other - in fact, this inadequacy is what causes, or propels the will to power.
This is clearly Nietzsche's Truth - the WtP - and in as far as it is a "whole", it is a monster - of energy - i.e. not comprehensible.

We agree deeply on this necessity of error, and inadequacy.

In fact, yesterday before I fell asleep, all the thoughts of last night culminated in the goal of a world-of-error; or rather, a society that is shaped in such a way, designed in such a way, as to allow humans the greatest 'right to err' -
namely, one mans error, is the next mans lesson -
if we are are free to err, and if there is no existential punishment for erring (regardless the objective that signifies the error by not being attained) then humans are the most powerful, the freest, and no doubt the healthiest, and happiest.

Yes, but this insight of WtP is just the most basic insight of "advanced" philosophy, it doesnt actually begin to do the real work of discovering truths until it is applied in practice. The source of Nietzsche's power of aphorisms draws from his awareness of the "most basic insight", which most other philosophers miss, and he basically applies this insight in tandem with his deep readings of history and Greek and German traditions of thought to give rise to some very nice aphorisms, for example his polemics against Christianity and his iconoclasm generally.

But my contention is that, even this high level he is at, isn't yet truly philosophy. It is more like the cradle from which philosophy will eventually be born.. here is what I mean: true philosophy isn't about the basic insight of WtP, which most philosophers aren't even at yet, nor is true philosophy even about applying this basic insight in interesting ways as Nietzsche did; the true philosophy only takes place when a sufficient mass of philosophically significant substances have been accumulated and now begin to act as the content-substance of thought itself.

Remember my definition of consciousness that I offered to Myki: consciousness is itself, consciousness is equal to the activity of "being conscious of" that arises out of and as the very contents of consciousness itself. So in this light, I understand philosophy as the great historical struggle to accumulate enough contents of consciousness which contents are sufficient in both number and in their individual "character" and "depth" and "truth-perceiving" to give birth to a totally new kind of thinking. When a sufficient number of the contents of consciousness became conscious themselves we were given "self-consciousness", which doesnt mean that these contents are literally conscious (of the fact that they are contents) but simply means that these contents have over time become embedded with the structural logic of consciousness-emerging, with a kind of perspective-making capacity: each little content of this kind of consciousness is like a tornado, it automatically constructs a hierarchical dimensionalize perspective as soon as anything passes through or near it. Therefore the larger consciousness that emerges out of so many of these kinds of contents is going to possess a meta-perspective in many interesting ways, just like humans already have.

Nietzsche's great work was to keep adding to the pile of philosophically significant and interesting contents of consciousness, so that eventually a sufficient number and scope of these will be present to allow for a totally new kind of emergent consciousness to appear (consciousness is always "emergent"). But even with this great task of his, toward which he contributed very much, he is still largely unconscious, the contents he works on are still only being worked on "formally" and the deep changes wrought in the earth-substances of the philosophical-conscious are very much unguided and disorganized changes and somewhat scattered about randomly throughout the "universe of ideas" (the sphere of all thoughts and all potential thoughts).

What Parodites is doing is so profound because he is actually taking Nietzsche's mostly blind method and making it see, directing it upon something coherent with respect to the deeper task of organizing the philosophical-substantial contents of consciousness. This naturally yields all sort of new and even more significant and expansive insights, more probing journeys into that universe of ideas.

True philosophy, as I called it, will arrive once enough of the universe of ideas has been probed and traversed such that a consciousness as such emerges directly out of these new contents discovered during those journeys. We aren't there yet, and the universe of ideas is basically infinite and there is no telling when we will reach a sufficiency point, only that once it happens a kind of phase-transition in subjectivity will take place.

Back to student loans for a second, I want the "older" generations to know what they've done to us "younger" generations. I just looked up the tuition at the state college I originally went to for undergrad, in 8 years the cost of tuition has doubled. I took some continuing education classes at a different university a while ago, talking to the students doing their undergrad there at the time I realized most of them have so much debt it makes my own look like nothing. Cost of tuition at this other university, a private one, is literally a thousand dollars per credit hour. And no, it isn't some kind of Ivy League, just a private university. Contrast with where I got my undergrad, for me it was around $120 a credit hour and now it's around $250 just eight or so years later.

Utter madness. Why did the cost double like that? Because of price gouging due to the incentive structure. And can imagine paying $30,000 a year to get a nursing degree or whatever from a private university? These kids are going to be in for well over a thousand dollars a month in debt payments for the next 10+ years. Apparently I was "lucky" to go to school for "only" $120 a credit hour.

This shit should be fucking illegal.

But is what you are proposing not rather also politics - to raise a 'State' of Philosophy - ?

In any case a thing wherein science and politics conspire.

Parodites creates a paradigm separate of Nietzsche, he goes back even deeper, into the primate, and the neanderthal - this is unfathomable yet in its implication - but I agree that it is tremendous.

These loans are untenable. Slavery has already been abolished.

Tom Waits is philosophy