GENIUS FORUMS

Sapius: I can accept that as a justification for WhorlyWhelk's doubts, so long as there is consideration and not jealousy behind his words. No man should ever envy another: it's dumb masochism to wish to suffer as much as another person.

And it's not anger. I'm staring into your soooouuulll.... :)

Trevor Salyzyn wrote: And it's not anger. I'm staring into your soooouuulll.... :)

Haaaahahahhhaaaaa! That's a good one... but I don't have one!

Trevor,

If you don't want to participate in this thread you don't need to. I realize that you need to constantly assert your superiority over others to feel good but do it elsewhere; perhaps go make more threads about your website and your mental conditions in Worldly Matters.

As for truth I am indeed seeking it to an extent. I am thankful for David actually taking the time to present his views to someone below him rather than throw insults or ignore, something that most people aren't willing to do these days. Thus I hold David (and Kevin) in high regard even though I have come to disagree with them.

As for being contrary, isn't that what the point of a philosophy forum is? (Or is it to try and flatter and impress 'the adults' so one can imagine becoming an adult oneself?) Without debate there is really no point to me coming here. Hopefully both sides can learn something about the other or the content during a debate.

David,

WW: Note that he wanted a balance between Apollonian and Dionysian.

DQ: I dare say his goal was the abandonment of both.

My interpretation: The Dionysian is what we would do if we just acted out of the moment and intuitively. The Apollonian is using reason and values and acting accordingly and hence is more long term oriented.
If we did neither we wouldn't act at all, which is like Nirvana. To me this is the opposite of what Nietzsche wanted which was to affirm life. Life for him was Will to Power, and Nirvana seems like Will to Non-Power to me.

WW: I bet Nietzsche danced and laughed lots and enjoyed his life thoroughly and without abandoning philosophy.

DQ: He lived a very ascetic, disciplined life. Those who knew him laughed contemptuously at him because of his eccentric, solitary ways.

He sure has lots to say against asceticism, but against the wrong kind of asceticism. I think he was undergoing his ultimate task and suffering so that he would reach his highest greatness, which would make this an expression of his will to power. Remember that his Overhuman was someone that would continue to affect the future forever after he died.

So I think that if Nietzsche was alive today, he would take a very tack. He would be speaking against irrationality, hedonism and emotionalism just as strongly as he praised them back then. And he would praise reason and logic just as strongly as I do now. Because that's what his iconoclastic bent of mind would have compelled him to do.

In other words he wants to keep a balance.

WW: The second quote shows that Nietzsche doesn't assert that what is true for HIM is true for anyone else, his Perspectivism. Furthermore, truth for him is not a matter of deductive argument based on concepts and dictionaries. Recall that if a "truth" doesn't make him laugh it had might as well not be a truth -- truth is clearly a means for him, not an end and this statement that seems like a contradiction probably made him laugh immensely as he imagined all the people who would be arguing that it was a contradiction and missing the whole point.

DQ: If he was really like this, then I would have no respect to him. The way you paint him makes him sound like a low-grade hippy without a conscience.

The question is whether he values TRUTH highest or LIFE. I think he values LIFE first and wants to use truth in his life so his Will to Truth is part of his Will to Power. You think he values TRUTH first and that he really doesn't want anything else. You value TRUTH to the extent where you would negate life which is where I think he disagrees with you. Much of this stems from him realizing that everything is subjective, and he includes truth in this.

What do you make of Nietzsche's renouncing of politics, nationalism and war in later years, after he had split from Wagner, regarding these things as petty and small-minded?

These things may be petty but doesn't even the great require the small? I'm not sure where Nietzsche renounced war or politics. I remember lots of anti-nationalism but this was mainly an attack on what it turned into in the age. Remember that he held the ancient greeks in the highest regard.

I realize that you need to constantly assert your superiority over others to feel good but do it elsewhere

Are you not doing exactly what you accuse me of doing here?

Please don't project your weird fantasies onto me, or onto anyone else. It is your mind that needs superiority; I, on the other hand, have superiority, and want to get rid of it. By all means, if you have the strength to access the truth and thus match me in argument, great. Become a philosopher.

WhorlyWhelk wrote:

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:What to do with the countless times Nietzsche writes about truth being a 'cutting into life' and that being over-consciousness becomes 'disabling' in a world where unconscious lies are the main currency?

What do you think of Nietzsche's perspectivism? He clearly values truth but doesn't place it on the alter. He doesn't even believe that his truths are are necessarily true for others.

"There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths."
"There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth."

There can be made a difference between a perspective ( including 'facts' or 'things in themselves') and truth. The problem arises when the two get conflated. Nietzsche uses 'truth' almost everytime in the meaning of fact or thing and its inescapable relativism. The German term explains better: Wahrheit, which means literal "truthness" of more philological: whereness, thereness, often interpreted as existent in itself. Related to a-wareness, the creation of subject-object, something becoming present.

For more detail read this earlier post I made.

Growth and power are his [Nietzsche's] measuring sticks and suffering and happiness go hand in hand with both of them. Nietzsche wants to save humanity from becoming too rational. That's why he brings his Dionysus, his Anti-Christ, the intoxicated and irrational element that is required in life.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

But don't you find it strange coming from a man who was not intoxicated or irrational at all during his most productive writing years? He even considered coffee way too intoxicating.

Art, like all lies protect from the truth, it cushions us. Ignorance equals intoxication. Life, its power and energy itself has been described as intoxicating. To exist at all, the lies of birth and death already have come into play.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:

I realize that you need to constantly assert your superiority over others to feel good but do it elsewhere

Are you not doing exactly what you accuse me of doing here?

I am not constantly asserting my superiority over you and have no desire to. This is the first time I mentioned it even though I could see you were acting insecure and immature for a few months. Perhaps it is due to your mental situation, I won't judge.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Please don't project your weird fantasies onto me, or onto anyone else. It is your mind that needs superiority; I, on the other hand, have superiority, and want to get rid of it. By all means, if you have the strength to access the truth and thus match me in argument, great. Become a philosopher.

Using your superiority to insult and attack people for no good reason other than to assert it is a good way to "get rid of it", at least in other peoples' eyes.

Perhaps it is due to your mental situation, I won't judge.

You contradict yourself in this sentence, you fucking liar.

I won't tolerate arrogance.

Using your superiority to insult and attack people for no good reason other than to assert it is a good way to "get rid of it", at least in other peoples' eyes.

I am working with the sole intention of reducing your delusions, whether you appreciate it or not.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:

Perhaps it is due to your mental situation, I won't judge.

You contradict yourself in this sentence, you fucking liar.

Where in this sentence do I contradict myself? I speculated that your antics may be due to your mental condition.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:I won't tolerate arrogance.

Unless it is coming from you?

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:

Using your superiority to insult and attack people for no good reason other than to assert it is a good way to "get rid of it", at least in other peoples' eyes.

I am working with the sole intention of reducing your delusions, whether you appreciate it or not.

You have fixed my former delusion of yourself as a respectable person. Now you are no longer in the position to fix any more of my delusions so its time to move on.

WW,

Where in this sentence do I contradict myself? I speculated that your antics may be due to your mental condition.

You formed a judgement of me and then said you weren't going to form any judgements. (In the news: Osama bin Laden just did the same thing when he said, in only slightly different words, "there are two options to end this war: either we kill you all, or you all join our peaceful religion.")

More than that, and to drive a nail in the coffin (wherein rests both your insight and capacity for truthful thought), you formed a judgement about me being both mentally ill and insecure, neither of which is appropriate to philosophic debate -- since, even were either true, they would have absolutely nothing to do with the truth of my arguments. The term for this particular brand of irrelevant comment is "argumentum ad hominem", but I assume you already know that.

Unless it is coming from you?

If I am better than you at say, math, it is not arrogance to correct your mathematical mistakes. I see no reason why you would assume it any different with philosophy.

"An enlightened sage", in common vernacular, is not much more than "someone who is really good at philosophy."

I can, without any arrogance, call myself an enlightened sage.

You have fixed my former delusion of yourself as a respectable person. Now you are no longer in the position to fix any more of my delusions so its time to move on.

You have simply replaced one delusion with another. Perhaps you should take your own advice and take a break from philosophy. I don't see you making any headway on your current train of thought. A bath worked wonders for Archimedes.

WhorlyWhelk,

WW: Note that he wanted a balance between Apollonian and Dionysian.

DQ: I dare say his goal was the abandonment of both.

WW: My interpretation: The Dionysian is what we would do if we just acted out of the moment and intuitively. The Apollonian is using reason and values and acting accordingly and hence is more long term oriented.
If we did neither we wouldn't act at all, which is like Nirvana. To me this is the opposite of what Nietzsche wanted which was to affirm life. Life for him was Will to Power, and Nirvana seems like Will to Non-Power to me.

With respect, your understanding of Nirvana is currently very poor. This is not to slight your intelligence, as I think you have a pretty good brain. But you seem to be deriving your understanding of Nirvana from some very dubious sources.

I agree with Nietzsche that everything can be reduced to will to power. Things are always in competition with other things, whether they be acting in groups or alone. For example, you and I are currently engaged in a war of values. I am promoting the value of truth, while you are promoting something other than truth. As you say, this clash between competing forces is the stuff of life.

But on its own, the principle of the will to power doesn't provide us with a guide to action. It is simply a statement about how things are. It doesn't oppose or affirm a particular set of values - it doesn't oppose or affirm the value of truth, for example. We can see this in the way we are both engaging in the will to power, with me supporting the value of truth and you opposing it.

For me, the will to truth is the most concentrated and extreme expression of the will to power because it represents the conquering of ignorance, irrationality, and even life and death itself. By contrast, those who avoid becoming fully involved in truth are choosing to submit to the prison of their own ignorance and delusional thinking. In effect, they are in conflict with the will to power. They are stunting its full expression for the sake of wallowing in some emotional happiness.

WW: I bet Nietzsche danced and laughed lots and enjoyed his life thoroughly and without abandoning philosophy.

DQ: He lived a very ascetic, disciplined life. Those who knew him laughed contemptuously at him because of his eccentric, solitary ways.

WW: He sure has lots to say against asceticism, but against the wrong kind of asceticism. I think he was undergoing his ultimate task and suffering so that he would reach his highest greatness, which would make this an expression of his will to power. Remember that his Overhuman was someone that would continue to affect the future forever after he died.

Well, "forever" might be stretching it a bit, but I agree with what you say here.

DQ: So I think that if Nietzsche was alive today, he would take a very tack. He would be speaking against irrationality, hedonism and emotionalism just as strongly as he praised them back then. And he would praise reason and logic just as strongly as I do now. Because that's what his iconoclastic bent of mind would have compelled him to do.

WW: In other words he wants to keep a balance.

Here is what he thought of "balance":

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"--so asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

"We have discovered happiness"--say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

"Formerly all the world was insane,"--say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled--otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

"We have discovered happiness,"--say the last men, and blink thereby.--

- From the Prologue in Thus Spake Zarathustra

You write:

WW: The second quote shows that Nietzsche doesn't assert that what is true for HIM is true for anyone else, his Perspectivism. Furthermore, truth for him is not a matter of deductive argument based on concepts and dictionaries. Recall that if a "truth" doesn't make him laugh it had might as well not be a truth -- truth is clearly a means for him, not an end and this statement that seems like a contradiction probably made him laugh immensely as he imagined all the people who would be arguing that it was a contradiction and missing the whole point.

DQ: If he was really like this, then I would have no respect to him. The way you paint him makes him sound like a low-grade hippy without a conscience.

WW: The question is whether he values TRUTH highest or LIFE. I think he values LIFE first and wants to use truth in his life so his Will to Truth is part of his Will to Power. You think he values TRUTH first and that he really doesn't want anything else. You value TRUTH to the extent where you would negate life which is where I think he disagrees with you.

If one's life is real, then how could truth possibly deny it?

For me, truth is life. The two terms are interchangeable. Most people are dead because they block out life and take refuge in frozen fantasies instead.

Much of this stems from him realizing that everything is subjective, and he includes truth in this.

No, you're misunderstanding him here. It doesn't really mean anything to say that everything is subjective, because such a statement involves putting forth an objective truth. In effect, it's a nonsense statement.

It's obvious that our experiences are personal and subjective, in the sense that the exact forms of what we experience are unique to us. This is something which objectively true for all of us. To deny the reality of this objective truth is, to my mind, a form of close-mindedness and indicates a strong attachment to a dogmatic outlook. I think you're doing Nietzsche a great disservice in accusing of him of that.

DQ: What do you make of Nietzsche's renouncing of politics, nationalism and war in later years, after he had split from Wagner, regarding these things as petty and small-minded?

WW: These things may be petty but doesn't even the great require the small? I'm not sure where Nietzsche renounced war or politics. I remember lots of anti-nationalism but this was mainly an attack on what it turned into in the age. Remember that he held the ancient greeks in the highest regard.

Maybe early on he did, but I think he grew out of it - or at least he transcended it during the Zarathustra era. He was repulsed by Wagner's nationalism and made it plain in later life that his words had no connection to politics and the like. So there were at least some expressions of will to power that he had no interest in.

-

David,

I agree with Nietzsche that everything can be reduced to will to power. Things are always in competition with other things, whether they be acting in groups or alone. For example, you and I are currently engaged in a war of values. I am promoting the value of truth, while you are promoting something other than truth. As you say, this clash between competing forces is the stuff of life.

But on its own, the principle of the will to power doesn't provide us with a guide to action. It is simply a statement about how things are.

It seems to be a principle to judge based on. Decadence is decreased will to power. So if we examine different types or groups of people we can compare them. For example, read up on the life of Cesare Borgia who Nietzsche held in high regards and then compare to the average person these days. Cesare's life was one huge will to power whereas most people these days are just content and live petty, trivial lives. For another example, Nietzsche himself was sick and losing his eyesight and could barely read/write yet he persevered and wrote an array of amazing books; this was his expression of a will to power whereas he could have just opted out and saved himself a lot of trouble.

For me, the will to truth is the most concentrated and extreme expression of the will to power because it represents the conquering of ignorance, irrationality, and even life and death itself.

The fundamental problem here seems to be that life creates truth; truth cannot transcend life or 'conquer' life.

DQ: So I think that if Nietzsche was alive today, he would take a very tack. He would be speaking against irrationality, hedonism and emotionalism just as strongly as he praised them back then. And he would praise reason and logic just as strongly as I do now. Because that's what his iconoclastic bent of mind would have compelled him to do.

WW: In other words he wants to keep a balance.

DQ: Here is what he thought of "balance":

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"--so asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

"We have discovered happiness"--say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

"Formerly all the world was insane,"--say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled--otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

"We have discovered happiness,"--say the last men, and blink thereby.--

- From the Prologue in Thus Spake Zarathustra

I definitely agree with this quote which is basically against stagnation. I didn't mean balance in that way, just that Nietzsche himself would not truthfully promote pure reason or unreason. Curious: A world of sages like yourself would definitely qualify as the Last Men -- do you really want a world of sages or are you just being sneaky and trying to fuel the opposing forces in life?

WW: The question is whether he values TRUTH highest or LIFE. I think he values LIFE first and wants to use truth in his life so his Will to Truth is part of his Will to Power. You think he values TRUTH first and that he really doesn't want anything else. You value TRUTH to the extent where you would negate life which is where I think he disagrees with you.

DQ: If one's life is real, then how could truth possibly deny it? For me, truth is life. The two terms are interchangeable. Most people are dead because they block out life and take refuge in frozen fantasies instead.

How do we measure living vs death? I would say if they have no interaction with the rest of the world they are dead, and the less interaction one has the closer to dead he is. So I would say that average people are decently alive even though they play small roles because they have a weak will to power. The greater someone's will to power the more alive they are. So to detach from most things in life and just perfect the mind would appear close to dead to me. I'm not saying you are close to dead because you have an extra value which is to promote your philosophy. You do a decent job at this but it is still the living man preaching death in my eyes, which is the same charge Nietzsche laid against Jesus: (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow
death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too
early.
As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews,
together with the hatred of the good and just- the Hebrew Jesus:
then was he seized with the longing for death.
Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and
just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the
earth- and laughter also!
Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have
disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was
he to disavow!

You see, Nietzsche calls Jesus "noble" yet he clearly believes he was misguided. Zarathustra spends much time reversing Jesus' teachings and improving them.

WW: Much of this stems from him realizing that everything is subjective, and he includes truth in this.

DQ: No, you're misunderstanding him here. It doesn't really mean anything to say that everything is subjective, because such a statement involves putting forth an objective truth. In effect, it's a nonsense statement.

It's obvious that our experiences are personal and subjective, in the sense that the exact forms of what we experience are unique to us. This is something which objectively true for all of us. To deny the reality of this objective truth is, to my mind, a form of close-mindedness and indicates a strong attachment to a dogmatic outlook. I think you're doing Nietzsche a great disservice in accusing of him of that.

I think this problem stems from your idea of "objective truth". Is there anything outside the subject? Some thing-in-itself? We need to abandon metaphysical concepts like "objective truth" and this false dilemma will disappear.

As for Nietzsche on Truth, what do you think of his unpublished essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.

WhorlyWhelk,

DQ: I agree with Nietzsche that everything can be reduced to will to power. Things are always in competition with other things, whether they be acting in groups or alone. For example, you and I are currently engaged in a war of values. I am promoting the value of truth, while you are promoting something other than truth. As you say, this clash between competing forces is the stuff of life.

But on its own, the principle of the will to power doesn't provide us with a guide to action. It is simply a statement about how things are.

WW: It seems to be a principle to judge based on. Decadence is decreased will to power. So if we examine different types or groups of people we can compare them. For example, read up on the life of Cesare Borgia who Nietzsche held in high regards and then compare to the average person these days. Cesare's life was one huge will to power whereas most people these days are just content and live petty, trivial lives. For another example, Nietzsche himself was sick and losing his eyesight and could barely read/write yet he persevered and wrote an array of amazing books; this was his expression of a will to power whereas he could have just opted out and saved himself a lot of trouble.

By this criteria, we could praise Hitler for not leading a comfortable, mediocre life. But for me at least, it isn't enough that a person simply rebels against conventional life and mediocrity. I prefer to discriminate between various forms of rebellion.

DQ: For me, the will to truth is the most concentrated and extreme expression of the will to power because it represents the conquering of ignorance, irrationality, and even life and death itself.

WW: The fundamental problem here seems to be that life creates truth; truth cannot transcend life or 'conquer' life.

It depends on what we mean by "life". I still don't know what you mean by it.

By "life and death", I mean the perspective that we exist as limited individuals, that we were born at some point in the past and that we will one day die in the future. A sage laughs at such a perspective because he knows that it is an illusion. He knows full well that he has never ever come into existence in the first place.

DQ: Here is what he thought of "balance":

Quote:
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"--so asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

"We have discovered happiness"--say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

"Formerly all the world was insane,"--say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled--otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

"We have discovered happiness,"--say the last men, and blink thereby.--

- From the Prologue in Thus Spake Zarathustra

WW: I definitely agree with this quote which is basically against stagnation. I didn't mean balance in that way, just that Nietzsche himself would not truthfully promote pure reason or unreason.

I maintain that he did promote pure reason, that it underpinned everything that he did. Even his attacks on pure reason were done out of pure reason.

Curious: A world of sages like yourself would definitely qualify as the Last Men -- do you really want a world of sages or are you just being sneaky and trying to fuel the opposing forces in life?

Do I value sanity or insanity .....?

A sane individual doesn't need to rely on the insanity of others to keep him amused. He is already high on reality itself.

WW: The question is whether he values TRUTH highest or LIFE. I think he values LIFE first and wants to use truth in his life so his Will to Truth is part of his Will to Power. You think he values TRUTH first and that he really doesn't want anything else. You value TRUTH to the extent where you would negate life which is where I think he disagrees with you.

DQ: If one's life is real, then how could truth possibly deny it? For me, truth is life. The two terms are interchangeable. Most people are dead because they block out life and take refuge in frozen fantasies instead.

WW: How do we measure living vs death? I would say if they have no interaction with the rest of the world they are dead, and the less interaction one has the closer to dead he is. So I would say that average people are decently alive even though they play small roles because they have a weak will to power. The greater someone's will to power the more alive they are.

I personally measure it in terms of consciousness. For example, I would consider Hitler to have been largely dead even though he pursued an extreme form of power. Despite his achievements, his mental focus was very superficial and narrow. He had no appreciation of the deeper undercurrents of life, and no awareness of the bigger picture. So in my view, it was a hollow life that he led.

So to detach from most things in life and just perfect the mind would appear close to dead to me.

From the perspective of one who is addicted to the pleasures of illusion, that is a perfectly understandable position to take. To those with ordinary, conventional consciousness, the philosophic life is indeed a kind of living death.

But I view this as drug-addict syndrome. If a heroin-addict were to accuse a drug-free person that his life was a living death, should we take him seriously or not?

I'm not saying you are close to dead because you have an extra value which is to promote your philosophy. You do a decent job at this but it is still the living man preaching death in my eyes, which is the same charge Nietzsche laid against Jesus: (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Quote:
"Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow
death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too
early.
As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews,
together with the hatred of the good and just- the Hebrew Jesus:
then was he seized with the longing for death.
Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and
just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the
earth- and laughter also!
Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have
disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was
he to disavow!"

You see, Nietzsche calls Jesus "noble" yet he clearly believes he was misguided. Zarathustra spends much time reversing Jesus' teachings and improving them.

It could be that Jesus viewed the legacy of his life as a confronting individual of wisdom to have been far more important than his leading a lengthy, less confronting physical existence and blending into the crowd. He might have concluded that choosing to be persecuted and put to death would have far greater impact on the world, in terms of promoting wisdom, than choosing to lead a quieter life. In other words, his conception of "life" may have been tied to wisdom, rather than to his extended physical existence as a conscious individual.

To put it in a nutshell, he may have simply had a different conception of "life" to you or Nietzsche.

WW: Much of this stems from him realizing that everything is subjective, and he includes truth in this.

DQ: No, you're misunderstanding him here. It doesn't really mean anything to say that everything is subjective, because such a statement involves putting forth an objective truth. In effect, it's a nonsense statement.

It's obvious that our experiences are personal and subjective, in the sense that the exact forms of what we experience are unique to us. This is something which objectively true for all of us. To deny the reality of this objective truth is, to my mind, a form of close-mindedness and indicates a strong attachment to a dogmatic outlook. I think you're doing Nietzsche a great disservice in accusing of him of that.

WW: I think this problem stems from your idea of "objective truth". Is there anything outside the subject? Some thing-in-itself? We need to abandon metaphysical concepts like "objective truth" and this false dilemma will disappear.

Affirming objective truth is not the same as affirming a thing-in-itself. I agree with Nietzsche that it is meaningless to talk about a "thing-in-itself", that it is a contradiction in terms and therefore cannot be a reality. That is to say, I recognize that it is objectively true that there cannot be a thing-in-itself.

As for Nietzsche on Truth, what do you think of his unpublished essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense:

Quote:
"The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors."

I think he may have kept this unpublished for a reason. One cannot equate pure truth with the "thing-in-itself" on the one hand, and then assert, as a pure truth, that relations are all there are. At least, not without entering into nonsense. He's making use of two different conceptions of "pure truth" in order to make his point.

"Pure truth" is simply a statement about the way things are. The affirmation that there is no such entity as a "thing-in-itself" is one such example. It is a statement about the way things are. It is possible that Nietzsche may have been confused on this issue, causing him to use terms inappropriately - which, for a thinker of his quality, would be unforgivable. Or it may be that he was in experimental mode and simply playing around with ideas. I do think it was a weakness on his part that he didn't resolve the issue properly and write clearly about it.

-

David Quinn wrote: "Pure truth" is simply a statement about the way things are. The affirmation that there is no such entity as a "thing-in-itself" is one such example. It is a statement about the way things are. It is possible that Nietzsche may have been confused on this issue, causing him to use terms inappropriately - which, for a thinker of his quality, would be unforgivable. Or it may be that he was in experimental mode and simply playing around with ideas. I do think it was a weakness on his part that he didn't resolve the issue properly and write clearly about it.

Looking at his whole work I'd say Nietzsche was aware of this 'absolute' truth conundrum. But like 'god', 'self', 'things', 'teaching' and 'law' he decided not to raise yet another set of truths. Just like he tried to avoid his ideas about Jews or state being used by antisemitism and the fever of German nationalism. Nietzsche often wrote about the need to hide, to avoid speaking too directly of certain things. For the simple reason that knowing the all-too-human delusional mind, it's not hard to see how a little truth can be way more dangerous than a state of blissful ignorance.

One only needs to look at the teachings of Jesus to see what can happen. Also someone who according to the Gospels spoke more directly outside the public ear. To no avail?

It's the problem of knowledge. In the outstanding On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense he clearly points to knowledge beyond the usual subjectiveness, in chapter I:

Nietzsche wrote:Only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency

How could man forget anything if there was no more absolute form knowledge of that kind in the first place? One could wonder if Nietzsche lost his ability to forget at the end of his life. Another approach in the same writing chapter 2 (iii):

Nietzsche wrote: There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

Intuition is another word that shouldn't be confused by the modern denigrative interpretation of it. It's the closest Nietzsche comes to describing knowledge or truth of the Absolute. The only way this can make sense is that Nietzsche was using Spinoza's pyramidally order of imagination, reason and intuition, and since Nietzsche was a great admirer of Spinoza, a 'kindred spirit', this is quite likely. In Spinoza's Ethics part II Proposition 42 for example (surrounding propositions are related too).

Spinoza wrote:It is the knowledge of the second [reason and knowledge] and third [intuitive science], and not that of the first kind [opinion or imagination], which teaches us to distinguish the true from the false.

This proposition is self-evident. For he who knows how to distinguish between the true and the false must have an adequate idea of the true and the false, that is to say, he must know the true and the false by the second of third kind of knowledge

.

Spinoza describes his "intuitive science" like this, in Scholium 2 from proposition 40.

This kind of knowing advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.

And this asks for definitions of 'adequate' and 'God', ad infinitum. See also the rest of Ethics. This is just an attempt to describe in a formal language what Nietzsche says that there 'exists no words for'. I think the language used on this forum, like the 'Absolute' and 'absolute truth' are other attempts in their own context. If they're successful one can only wonder but certainly they seem timely in their explicitness.

Hi, David:

By "life and death", I mean the perspective that we exist as limited individuals, that we were born at some point in the past and that we will one day die in the future.

Yes, well, I do find it odd to consider this as something on the order of objective truth. I mean, who can say that they have consciously experienced their birth in the past as well as their death in the future in order to qualify mortality as an objective truth. Yet, it is our somehow otherwise objective truths that prove to us this must be the case. That the experience of things in our everyday lives is common to us all and are a products of causality and must, therefore, have come into existence at some time in the past and will pass away at some time in the future. Thus, mortality attempts to assume the status of a posteriori knowledge only in this way--in the general experience and nature of thingness and objective truth…

A sage laughs at such a perspective because he knows that it is an illusion. He knows full well that he has never ever come into existence in the first place.

…when really, time and causality (as opposed to its objects) are a priori and absolute truths of existence and, thus, so is immortality. So too, then, do all objective truths become illusory. And, well, if you fall for them hook, line and sinker, you may consider yourself duly deluded--or, at least you would if you could, but it would be too late, by then! And that’s why a sage laughs.

What is power? I would say the ability to exert influence on others. Do you agree? So I would say developing the mind is only a means in regard to will to power, not an end. Having a better mind can give you more power in the future, but developing one's mind in itself does not count as will to power if you have no intent to exert any influence on others.

I think the only way we can judge will to power is in influence on others. Look at plants and animals for example. Trees want to grow as well as they can and steal the sunlight, moisture and nutrients from the other vegetation. Their will to power is essentially measured by their growth which is how well they contend with other vegetation. Animals want to hold the best territory and get their choice of healthy mates. Their will to power can be seen in competition and struggle with other animals.

For humans we have developed a conceptual mind and reason. Nietzsche created the concept of the 'sublimated' will to power which is the will to develop ourselves and our minds as well as the 'unsublimated' which is our direct power struggle with others. Hitler would be an example of the mainly 'unsublimated' will to power as opposed to Nietzsche who was much more the 'sublimated'. But in the end they are the same thing -- we cannot forget that the will to power is to POWER whether through direct competition or some other form, and the only difference is from what strengths the individual has.

Nietzsche respects Jesus to an extent because of his will to power. Nietzsche hence calls Jesus "noble" because he is not a decadent in the sense that he has a goal and immense will to power that even requires his sacrifice. However Nietzsche recognizes that Jesus' teaching is not fully developed. Jesus wants to show everyone the 'truth' (the meaningless of life) so that everyone will say "no" to life and follow him in repudiation of the finitudes. Jesus is basically the noble who appeals to the weak and the decadents. He is the will to power who teaches non-will to power. He is alive and teaching death.

Zarathustra fixes Jesus' mistakes and sayings throughout his book. In the end Zarathustra teaches the noble men who he finds to say "yes" to life instead of devaluing the finite which Jesus teaches. Zarathustra wants them to value something finite because that is how we overcome nihilism, one major goal of Nietzsche. Jesus is promoting nihilism by teaching to value nothing. I love this book largely for the same reason I presume Nietzsche did -- Zarathustra is basically him.

On a side note, remember that the last 1/4 of Zarathustra was written after Beyond Good and Evil. I don't think your claim that Nietzsche wrote one good book and then relapsed into some other state is valid considering he wrote another whole book in the midst of Zarathustra.

So Nietzsche's end goal is NOT truth but to embrace life. And if we read his unpublished essay, which I think is quite amazingly written, he explains how humans create concepts and what truth is. Truth is simply a tool for human survival -- nothing more, and it is not even always in favor of human survival in which case evolution will disfavor it. Nietzsche also attempts to account for the drive to pure truth in men, which is ultimately a form of decadence unless they use their understanding to the end of POWER, which Nietzsche does! But Nietzsche doesn't just say anything for power, he wants to promote a healthy society rather than decadence, which is where he differs from Jesus. Nietzsche hates decadence and thus wants to warn against it where Jesus promoted it, even though Jesus wasn't quite a decadent himself.

Perhaps you should define "absolute truth" or "objective truth" David. Do you mean that something is true for all humans at this time or that it is true for anyone at any time? In the first case it hardly seems like an objective truth to me.

Diebert,

DQ: "Pure truth" is simply a statement about the way things are. The affirmation that there is no such entity as a "thing-in-itself" is one such example. It is a statement about the way things are. It is possible that Nietzsche may have been confused on this issue, causing him to use terms inappropriately - which, for a thinker of his quality, would be unforgivable. Or it may be that he was in experimental mode and simply playing around with ideas. I do think it was a weakness on his part that he didn't resolve the issue properly and write clearly about it.

Diebert: Looking at his whole work I'd say Nietzsche was aware of this 'absolute' truth conundrum. But like 'god', 'self', 'things', 'teaching' and 'law' he decided not to raise yet another set of truths. Just like he tried to avoid his ideas about Jews or state being used by antisemitism and the fever of German nationalism. Nietzsche often wrote about the need to hide, to avoid speaking too directly of certain things. For the simple reason that knowing the all-too-human delusional mind, it's not hard to see how a little truth can be way more dangerous than a state of blissful ignorance.

I wonder how much of that was influenced by his craving to be known as a great iconoclast. Having openly prided himself on being this all-conquering iconoclast who was tearing everything down, he effectively muzzled himself from speaking about things more directly. It forced him into a corner, from which there was no escape.

It was only when he was so desperate that he no longer cared about his reputation in the world (i.e. during the Zarathusa era) that he managed to escape it to some degree. But even then, he had to hide his more direct speech behind a poetic-speaking fictional character. He couldn't allow himself to be any more open and direct because it would conflict with his status as a public iconoclast. His attachment to his own reputation put the brakes on.

Going back to your point, if it really was his intention to hide his meaning in clever, indirect language, so as to stop people from holding up a particular set of beliefs and religiously worshiping them, it didn't really work. For as we can see nowadays, people are constantly using Nietzsche to support their religious belief in postmodernism.

It is curious, but it seems that he didn't anticipate the onset of postmodernism and thus didn't realize that his writings would be used in the opposite way to the way he intended them. He didn't really do anything to stop this from happening.

In many ways, he was far too clever and too vain for his own good. His enormous vanity prevented him from employing his cleverness more effectively. He was closer to being a fox of truth, than a man of truth.

Nietzsche wrote: There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

Diebert: Intuition is another word that shouldn't be confused by the modern denigrative interpretation of it. It's the closest Nietzsche comes to describing knowledge or truth of the Absolute.

Yes, he is being a little more direct here, which is refreshing.

-

WhorlyWhelk,

What is power? I would say the ability to exert influence on others. Do you agree?

That is one form of will to power, but there are many others. For example, the power to conquer a fatal disease that one might have. The power to conquer boredom. The power to conquer ignorance. And so on.

So I would say developing the mind is only a means in regard to will to power, not an end. Having a better mind can give you more power in the future, but developing one's mind in itself does not count as will to power if you have no intent to exert any influence on others.

It sounds as though you find other people intimidating.

I think the only way we can judge will to power is in influence on others. Look at plants and animals for example. Trees want to grow as well as they can and steal the sunlight, moisture and nutrients from the other vegetation. Their will to power is essentially measured by their growth which is how well they contend with other vegetation. Animals want to hold the best territory and get their choice of healthy mates. Their will to power can be seen in competition and struggle with other animals.

For humans we have developed a conceptual mind and reason. Nietzsche created the concept of the 'sublimated' will to power which is the will to develop ourselves and our minds as well as the 'unsublimated' which is our direct power struggle with others. Hitler would be an example of the mainly 'unsublimated' will to power as opposed to Nietzsche who was much more the 'sublimated'. But in the end they are the same thing -- we cannot forget that the will to power is to POWER whether through direct competition or some other form, and the only difference is from what strengths the individual has.

It depends on what game you want to play, or indeed on whether you want to play any game at all.

Nietzsche respects Jesus to an extent because of his will to power. Nietzsche hence calls Jesus "noble" because he is not a decadent in the sense that he has a goal and immense will to power that even requires his sacrifice. However Nietzsche recognizes that Jesus' teaching is not fully developed. Jesus wants to show everyone the 'truth' (the meaningless of life) so that everyone will say "no" to life and follow him in repudiation of the finitudes. Jesus is basically the noble who appeals to the weak and the decadents. He is the will to power who teaches non-will to power. He is alive and teaching death.

Jesus's teachings are actually very lofty and full of life - indeed, far too lofty and powerful for someone like Nietzsche. The closest that Nietzsche ever came to Jesus was during the writing of Zarathustra, but it soon became evident that he couldn't hack it. He quickly ran away from this burning light and dived back into the realms of the ordinary philosopher.

Interestingly, this small brush with genuine wisdom seemed to unbalance him and was possibly the deciding factor that led to his eventual madness. His writings from that point on were always a bit manic in tone and became increasingly less coherent with each passing book.

Zarathustra fixes Jesus' mistakes and sayings throughout his book. In the end Zarathustra teaches the noble men who he finds to say "yes" to life instead of devaluing the finite which Jesus teaches. Zarathustra wants them to value something finite because that is how we overcome nihilism, one major goal of Nietzsche. Jesus is promoting nihilism by teaching to value nothing. I love this book largely for the same reason I presume Nietzsche did -- Zarathustra is basically him.

Jesus said "yes" to the reality of life, which includes the world of the finite. Nietzsche tried to say "yes" to the reality of life, but wasn't wise enough or strong enough to do it. He still had too many unresolved issues inside him; he was too emotionally attached to illusory things. His disparagement of Jesus was partly an attempt to salvage his own reputation, to cast himself in a better light, and partly to provoke people into thinking about Jesus differently.

On a side note, remember that the last 1/4 of Zarathustra was written after Beyond Good and Evil. I don't think your claim that Nietzsche wrote one good book and then relapsed into some other state is valid considering he wrote another whole book in the midst of Zarathustra.

Well, the last 1/4 is clearly the least inspired. The first half is by far the most potent and after that it begins to peter out.

So Nietzsche's end goal is NOT truth but to embrace life. And if we read his unpublished essay, which I think is quite amazingly written, he explains how humans create concepts and what truth is. Truth is simply a tool for human survival -- nothing more, and it is not even always in favor of human survival in which case evolution will disfavor it.

It may have started out that way, but this doesn't mean we aren't allowed to take it out of that context and value it for its own sake. We are not slaves to our evolutionary past. We have the power to break our genetic programming and do things that evolution never intended us to do.

I consider the breaking of our genetic programming to be a far greater act of will to power than remaining a slave to it. But for some strange reason, Nietzsche didn't think likewise. He was evidently content to remain a slave.

We have to remember that Darwin's theory of evolution was very new during Nietzsche's life and greatly influenced his thinking on the will to power. He seems to have accepted the Darwinian-inspired view that being a slave to genetic instinct is a natural and acceptable form of will to power. But nowadays, to my ears, such a view seems small-minded and dated.

In the end, Nietzsche still made the mistake of prescribing one particular conception and one particular value - namely, his own conception of life - that all people should religiously follow. He didn't allow for the fact that other people might have different conceptions and different values. He was still an absolutist - in the negative, deluded sense of the word - essentially no different to the people that he is criticized.

Nietzsche also attempts to account for the drive to pure truth in men, which is ultimately a form of decadence unless they use their understanding to the end of POWER, which Nietzsche does!

If one is looking for a static conceptual truth that denies the reality of life, then yes, I would consider this to be a form of decadence. However, if the goal is opening up one's being to the reality of life itself, then how can this be called decadence? Only a decadent man would call it decadence.

To speak and act against this great wisdom is itself a form of decadence, and unfortunately, Nietzsche was largely guilty of this. One can detect the decadence in Nietzsche in the bitterness of his writings, in his vanity, in his over-cleverness, in his inability to speak simply and directly, in his desire to hide.

Perhaps you should define "absolute truth" or "objective truth" David. Do you mean that something is true for all humans at this time or that it is true for anyone at any time? In the first case it hardly seems like an objective truth to me.

I consider something to be absolutely or objectively true if it is necessarily true in all possible worlds.

In other words, it isn't conditionally true - i.e. true in some circumstances, but not in others. Nor is it provisionally true - i.e. dependent upon the support of whatever empirical evidence is available. Nor is it relatively true - i.e. dependent upon how the human mind functions, or how we conceptually experience the world, or how our logic works, etc. Nor is it consensually true - i.e. dependent on how many people acknowledge or believe in it.

It is true in all instances of time and space, in all possible realms, in all subjective realities, without any exception at all.

-

David,

WW: What is power? I would say the ability to exert influence on others. Do you agree?

DQ: That is one form of will to power, but there are many others. For example, the power to conquer a fatal disease that one might have. The power to conquer boredom. The power to conquer ignorance. And so on.

Usually conquering boredom and ignorance is for some purpose that will result in a greater power. I don't believe that conquering them in themselves is will to power, perhaps will to non-boredom and will to knowledge.

WW: So I would say developing the mind is only a means in regard to will to power, not an end. Having a better mind can give you more power in the future, but developing one's mind in itself does not count as will to power if you have no intent to exert any influence on others.

DQ: It sounds as though you find other people intimidating.

Personally, not really. By influence I don't mean necessarily physical. Nietzsche for example exerted a great influence over many people including both of us without any violence. Note this isn't because he was 'moral' or anything.

DQ: It depends on what game you want to play, or indeed on whether you want to play any game at all.

The game is called life. Jesus and Buddha taught not to play. That is what Nietzsche calls denying life or saying "no" to life. If you don't have a strong will to power you are a decadent in Nietzsche's view.

DQ: Jesus's teachings are actually very lofty and full of life - indeed, far too lofty and powerful for someone like Nietzsche. The closest that Nietzsche ever came to Jesus was during the writing of Zarathustra, but it soon became evident that he couldn't hack it. He quickly ran away from this burning light and dived back into the realms of the ordinary philosopher.

Interestingly, this small brush with genuine wisdom seemed to unbalance him and was possibly the deciding factor that led to his eventual madness. His writings from that point on were always a bit manic in tone and became increasingly less coherent with each passing book.

Interesting how your view of Nietzsche changes when before he was ranked up there with Buddha and Jesus. But seriously perhaps you should try and see from his perspective. What is the purpose of life? Being a Buddha is unnatural at the least, and this is a view that Nietzsche overcame, not something that he was ignorant of.

WW: Zarathustra fixes Jesus' mistakes and sayings throughout his book. In the end Zarathustra teaches the noble men who he finds to say "yes" to life instead of devaluing the finite which Jesus teaches. Zarathustra wants them to value something finite because that is how we overcome nihilism, one major goal of Nietzsche. Jesus is promoting nihilism by teaching to value nothing. I love this book largely for the same reason I presume Nietzsche did -- Zarathustra is basically him.

DQ: Jesus said "yes" to the reality of life, which includes the world of the finite. Nietzsche tried to say "yes" to the reality of life, but wasn't wise enough or strong enough to do it. He still had too many unresolved issues inside him; he was too emotionally attached to illusory things. His disparagement of Jesus was partly an attempt to salvage his own reputation, to cast himself in a better light, and partly to provoke people into thinking about Jesus differently.

Jesus said that you must deny yourself to follow him. This was very true.

WW: So Nietzsche's end goal is NOT truth but to embrace life. And if we read his unpublished essay, which I think is quite amazingly written, he explains how humans create concepts and what truth is. Truth is simply a tool for human survival -- nothing more, and it is not even always in favor of human survival in which case evolution will disfavor it.

DQ: It may have started out that way, but this doesn't mean we aren't allowed to take it out of that context and value it for its own sake. We are not slaves to our evolutionary past. We have the power to break our genetic programming and do things that evolution never intended us to do.

Oh sure. Our society could completely stagnate and there would be nothing right or wrong with it, but it would be unnatural in the sense that everything in nature can be described by the will to power. In the end valuing natural over unnatural is even a completely arbitrary judgment. In the face of this utter meaninglessness you want to take the route of non-suffering or 'truth'. I think that in light of understanding that the greatest suffering and overcoming is the greatest happiness I might be inclined to pick the route of the greatest suffering instead.

I'm not sure if it is really this simple. From my view you have taken a route of suffering but to promote non-suffering. This seems paradoxical to me.

I consider the breaking of our genetic programming to be a far greater act of will to power than remaining a slave to it. But for some strange reason, Nietzsche didn't think likewise. He was evidently content to remain a slave.

We have to remember that Darwin's theory of evolution was very new during Nietzsche's life and greatly influenced his thinking on the will to power. He seems to have accepted the Darwinian-inspired view that being a slave to genetic instinct is a natural and acceptable form of will to power. But nowadays, to my ears, such a view seems small-minded and dated.

We can never 'break our genetic programming'. We can overcome it but not by stagnating. Evolution occurs through competition and will to power.

In the end, Nietzsche still made the mistake of prescribing one particular conception and one particular value - namely, his own conception of life - that all people should religiously follow. He didn't allow for the fact that other people might have different conceptions and different values. He was still an absolutist - in the negative, deluded sense of the word - essentially no different to the people that he is criticized.

He chooses life rather than death, in a metaphoric sense. He is already aware that people make the opposite choice but it is against his personal values, and against his goal of overcoming nihilism rather than falling to it.

WW: Nietzsche also attempts to account for the drive to pure truth in men, which is ultimately a form of decadence unless they use their understanding to the end of POWER, which Nietzsche does!

DQ: If one is looking for a static conceptual truth that denies the reality of life, then yes, I would consider this to be a form of decadence. However, if the goal is opening up one's being to the reality of life itself, then how can this be called decadence? Only a decadent man would call it decadence.

Decadence is related to the idea of will to power among his many other "formulas of decadence" that I don't remember. Anything that leads to a decreased will to power is decadence in Nietzsche's view, whether it be absolute truth or absolute ignorance or whatever.

To speak and act against this great wisdom is itself a form of decadence, and unfortunately, Nietzsche was largely guilty of this. One can detect the decadence in Nietzsche in the bitterness of his writings, in his vanity, in his over-cleverness, in his inability to speak simply and directly, in his desire to hide.

Perhaps he didn't want to be easily found so that he would have a greater effect on people in the future. He succeeded in this respect.

WW: Perhaps you should define "absolute truth" or "objective truth" David. Do you mean that something is true for all humans at this time or that it is true for anyone at any time? In the first case it hardly seems like an objective truth to me.

DQ: I consider something to be absolutely or objectively true if it is necessarily true in all possible worlds.

In other words, it isn't conditionally true - i.e. true in some circumstances, but not in others. Nor is it provisionally true - i.e. dependent upon the support of whatever empirical evidence is available. Nor is it relatively true - i.e. dependent upon how the human mind functions, or how we conceptually experience the world, or how our logic works, etc. Nor is it consensually true - i.e. dependent on how many people acknowledge or believe in it.

This excludes any such objective truth. Every truth other than one inherent in definitions/concepts relies on empirical evidence. Every truth that is inherent in definitions/concepts relies on the mind that is viewing them. To go a step further with the first one, every empirical evidence relies on the forms created by our mind.

My statement "there is no absolute truth" is only a contradiction to human beings sharing the same concept as myself, one that I hope we will overcome in the near future. Outside the human mind there is no such thing as truth.

It is true in all instances of time and space, in all possible realms, in all subjective realities, without any exception at all.

thing-in-itself.

WhorlyWhelk wrote: My statement "there is no absolute truth" is only a contradiction to human beings sharing the same concept as myself, one that I hope we will overcome in the near future. Outside the human mind there is no such thing as truth.

Of course, because truth is a function of mind, just like describing. It's meaningless to speak of anything at all "outside the human mind" since there's nothing there to compare it with, only in theory, which lies too in the mind.

WhorlyWhelk wrote:

David Quinn wrote:It is true in all instances of time and space, in all possible realms, in all subjective realities, without any exception at all.

thing-in-itself.

Well no, because without any contrasting possibility (of not being true) there are no boundaries to this 'thing', hence it stops being a thing altogether.

David Quinn wrote: I wonder how much of that was influenced by his [Nietzsche's] craving to be known as a great iconoclast. Having openly prided himself on being this all-conquering iconoclast who was tearing everything down, he effectively muzzled himself from speaking about things more directly. It forced him into a corner, from which there was no escape.

It was his goal to tear everything down, so his attachment to the reception of his publications seems understandable. It's part and parcel of having such a lofty goal and working towards it with such energy. Non-attachment to the outcome can in certain circumstances (like illness) be just not sufficient to make it; a matter of physiology.

It was only when he was so desperate that he no longer cared about his reputation in the world (i.e. during the Zarathusa era) that he managed to escape it to some degree. But even then, he had to hide his more direct speech behind a poetic-speaking fictional character.

That choice of character is a message in itself, psychological as well as historical. But I know you prefer single-meaning communication which you call 'direct'. Sadly enough many aspects of life and existence cannot be captured very well this way. The poet does a better job but is effectively drunk, peering through a fog. The prophet, the original zenmaster and the sage are sober but their speech still sounds drunk and poetic, mystical, in the ears of the not-understanding audience. This is an artifact of language, not of wisdom or the sharpness of the wise mind.

He couldn't allow himself to be any more open and direct because it would conflict with his status as a public iconoclast. His attachment to his own reputation put the brakes on.

He viewed perhaps the having of a reputation as instrumental in reaching an audience. He had to find publishers and printers which is not the same as nowadays where every cook can get his voice heard if he screams loud enough and gathers some like-minded audience.

Going back to your point, if it really was his intention to hide his meaning in clever, indirect language, so as to stop people from holding up a particular set of beliefs and religiously worshiping them, it didn't really work. For as we can see nowadays, people are constantly using Nietzsche to support their religious belief in postmodernism.

I'm not sure if it's avoidable at all. But one could influence a bit the types of people that latch on to the teachings. It would be some kind of pre-selection. For example I'd rather deal with a person religiously attached to Nietzsche than someone attached to the Bible.

It is curious, but it seems that he didn't anticipate the onset of postmodernism and thus didn't realize that his writings would be used in the opposite way to the way he intended them. He didn't really do anything to stop this from happening.

Not likely that he didn't anticipate, looking at his deep understanding of nihilism. He realized he couldn't stop this from happening and focused on the finer details instead, perhaps chasing away the weaker natures with some bombshells. There are hundreds of verses in his books that openly describe his tactic.

In many ways, he was far too clever and too vain for his own good. His enormous vanity prevented him from employing his cleverness more effectively. He was closer to being a fox of truth, than a man of truth.

The large impact he made for the case of wisdom is indisputable, even with all the wrong interpretations attached to it, even with the subjectivity or academic attachment that Nietzsche couldn't escape from.

And if one who aspires to teach does not first become like a fox, he'll remain a babbling sheep with no real goal or direction. He won't make any impact at all without first out-foxing his own mind and circumstance.

Diebert van Rhijn,

He viewed perhaps the having of a reputation as instrumental in reaching an audience. He had to find publishers and printers which is not the same as nowadays where every cook can get his voice heard if he screams loud enough and gathers some like-minded audience.

It was of his will to POWER not will to truth or will to spread wisdom or will to write books that everyone could understand.

WhorlyWhelk,

WW: What is power? I would say the ability to exert influence on others. Do you agree?

DQ: That is one form of will to power, but there are many others. For example, the power to conquer a fatal disease that one might have. The power to conquer boredom. The power to conquer ignorance. And so on.

WW: Usually conquering boredom and ignorance is for some purpose that will result in a greater power. I don't believe that conquering them in themselves is will to power, perhaps will to non-boredom and will to knowledge.

It is still the act of gaining power over these things. You are choosing to limit the will to power to one particular expression of it, and I believe the reason you are doing this is because because you have a vested interest in trying to separate the will to truth from the will to power.

In other words, truth is repulsing you and you are currently trying to find a way to justify not being involved with it.

That you are using Nietzsche to help in you this is disappointing - not with you as such, but with Nietzsche. I'm disappointed with Nietzsche that he made it too easy for people to abandon reason and truth prematurely. He didn't cover his tracks well enough.

Usually conquering boredom and ignorance is for some purpose that will result in a greater power.

More often than not, people attempt to overcome their boredom with trivial distractions, such a watching TV, taking drugs or going out to socialize. Their intention is to eliminate the boredom right away, with no real thought for anything else.

DQ: It depends on what game you want to play, or indeed on whether you want to play any game at all.

WW: The game is called life. Jesus and Buddha taught not to play. That is what Nietzsche calls denying life or saying "no" to life. If you don't have a strong will to power you are a decadent in Nietzsche's view.

On the contrary, Jesus and Buddha both played a particular game within life, just as Nietzsche did. And to repeat again, a person needs a very strong will to power if he wants to conquer ignorance and egotism. So your statements here are groundless.

Nietzsche knew that decadence is in the eye of the beholder. What one person thinks is decadent, another person thinks is life. So it would be irrational for Nietzsche to affirm, as some kind of absolute truth, that how a particular collection of people lived was decadent.

That's the problem with holding up Nietzsche's views as gospel truth. It immediately makes his views self-contradictory. The contradiction is removed, however, when you treat his views in the way they are meant to be treated - i.e. as iconoclastic statements, as correctives to certain delusions, as attempts to force people out of their habitual ways of thinking, etc.

That is why Nietzsche himself never put into practice any of the views he expressed. They weren't meant to be put into practice. They were simply correctives. Despite all his talk about will to power and being involved with life, he always remained an ascetic philosophic thinker in the service of truth, churning out correctives.

DQ: Jesus said "yes" to the reality of life, which includes the world of the finite. Nietzsche tried to say "yes" to the reality of life, but wasn't wise enough or strong enough to do it. He still had too many unresolved issues inside him; he was too emotionally attached to illusory things. His disparagement of Jesus was partly an attempt to salvage his own reputation, to cast himself in a better light, and partly to provoke people into thinking about Jesus differently.

WW: Jesus said that you must deny yourself to follow him. This was very true.

Deny your false self, yes. That is what living truthfully means.

WW: So Nietzsche's end goal is NOT truth but to embrace life. And if we read his unpublished essay, which I think is quite amazingly written, he explains how humans create concepts and what truth is. Truth is simply a tool for human survival -- nothing more, and it is not even always in favor of human survival in which case evolution will disfavor it.

DQ: It may have started out that way, but this doesn't mean we aren't allowed to take it out of that context and value it for its own sake. We are not slaves to our evolutionary past. We have the power to break our genetic programming and do things that evolution never intended us to do.

WW: Oh sure. Our society could completely stagnate and there would be nothing right or wrong with it, but it would be unnatural in the sense that everything in nature can be described by the will to power.

I'm not sure how intelligently freeing of ourselves from genetic programming equates to society stagnating.

I agree that everything in nature can be described as the will to power. One such example is the process of overcoming ignorance and delusion, which, being a part of nature, is a perfectly natural process.

In the end valuing natural over unnatural is even a completely arbitrary judgment. In the face of this utter meaninglessness you want to take the route of non-suffering or 'truth'. I think that in light of understanding that the greatest suffering and overcoming is the greatest happiness I might be inclined to pick the route of the greatest suffering instead.

If that is your inclination, then go for it. It all depends on what you want out of life.

I'm not sure if it is really this simple. From my view you have taken a route of suffering but to promote non-suffering. This seems paradoxical to me.

I don't really have non-suffering as a goal. My goal, rather, is simply to be truthful. Lack of suffering happens to be one of the many consequences of being truthful.

DQ: I consider the breaking of our genetic programming to be a far greater act of will to power than remaining a slave to it. But for some strange reason, Nietzsche didn't think likewise. He was evidently content to remain a slave.

We have to remember that Darwin's theory of evolution was very new during Nietzsche's life and greatly influenced his thinking on the will to power. He seems to have accepted the Darwinian-inspired view that being a slave to genetic instinct is a natural and acceptable form of will to power. But nowadays, to my ears, such a view seems small-minded and dated.

WW: We can never 'break our genetic programming'.

Even ordinary people are capable of breaking their programming - for example, by committing suicide, going on fasts, or refusing to have children. The more powerful and independent our minds are, the more we can extend this to every aspect of our programming.

We can overcome it but not by stagnating. Evolution occurs through competition and will to power.

Mental development and the breaking of our genetic programming is a form of evolution.

DQ: In the end, Nietzsche still made the mistake of prescribing one particular conception and one particular value - namely, his own conception of life - that all people should religiously follow. He didn't allow for the fact that other people might have different conceptions and different values. He was still an absolutist - in the negative, deluded sense of the word - essentially no different to the people that he is criticized.

WW: He chooses life rather than death, in a metaphoric sense. He is already aware that people make the opposite choice but it is against his personal values, and against his goal of overcoming nihilism rather than falling to it.

You are imbuing all these words - "life, "death", "nihilism", etc - with biased and limited meanings.

WW: Nietzsche also attempts to account for the drive to pure truth in men, which is ultimately a form of decadence unless they use their understanding to the end of POWER, which Nietzsche does!

DQ: If one is looking for a static conceptual truth that denies the reality of life, then yes, I would consider this to be a form of decadence. However, if the goal is opening up one's being to the reality of life itself, then how can this be called decadence? Only a decadent man would call it decadence.

WW: Decadence is related to the idea of will to power among his many other "formulas of decadence" that I don't remember. Anything that leads to a decreased will to power is decadence in Nietzsche's view, whether it be absolute truth or absolute ignorance or whatever.

Here also you are imbuing the term "will to power" with a biased and limited meaning. Likewise, Nietzsche's formula is essentially meaningless because it also rests on biased, limited conceptions that he has arbitrarily chosen.

DQ: To speak and act against this great wisdom is itself a form of decadence, and unfortunately, Nietzsche was largely guilty of this. One can detect the decadence in Nietzsche in the bitterness of his writings, in his vanity, in his over-cleverness, in his inability to speak simply and directly, in his desire to hide.

WW: Perhaps he didn't want to be easily found so that he would have a greater effect on people in the future. He succeeded in this respect.

He succeeded in becoming a poster-boy for the postmodernist movement, which is a fate worse than death. It has killed his thought completely.

Even you think he is a postmodernist. That is how misunderstood he has become.

WW: Perhaps you should define "absolute truth" or "objective truth" David. Do you mean that something is true for all humans at this time or that it is true for anyone at any time? In the first case it hardly seems like an objective truth to me.

DQ: I consider something to be absolutely or objectively true if it is necessarily true in all possible worlds.

In other words, it isn't conditionally true - i.e. true in some circumstances, but not in others. Nor is it provisionally true - i.e. dependent upon the support of whatever empirical evidence is available. Nor is it relatively true - i.e. dependent upon how the human mind functions, or how we conceptually experience the world, or how our logic works, etc. Nor is it consensually true - i.e. dependent on how many people acknowledge or believe in it.

WW: This excludes any such objective truth. Every truth other than one inherent in definitions/concepts relies on empirical evidence. Every truth that is inherent in definitions/concepts relies on the mind that is viewing them. To go a step further with the first one, every empirical evidence relies on the forms created by our mind.

My statement "there is no absolute truth" is only a contradiction to human beings sharing the same concept as myself, one that I hope we will overcome in the near future. Outside the human mind there is no such thing as truth.

Let's see how many "objective truths" I can discern in these two paragraphs:

#1. In all worlds, without exception, people can never become aware of what is objectively true.

#2. In all worlds, without exception, truths either rely on empirical evidence or are inherent in definitions/concepts.

#3. In all worlds, without exception, truths rely on the mind that is viewing them.

#4. In all worlds, without exception, empirical evidence relies on the forms created by the mind.

#5. In all worlds, without exception, truth cannot exist outside the human mind.

So in the space of two paragraphs, you have given us 5 viewpoints which you believe to be true for all possible worlds, without exception. You believe them to be inherently true of reality itself. That is, you believe them to absolutely true.

DQ: It is true in all instances of time and space, in all possible realms, in all subjective realities, without any exception at all.

WW: thing-in-itself.

Not at all. There are two seperate issues involved.

As Diebert pointed out, only Nature itself can qualify as the thing-in-itself, since by definition there can be nothing other than Nature. But by the same token, because there is nothing other than Nature, we can't really call it a "thing". In other words, the qualities which qualify Nature as a thing-in-itself are the very same qualities which also disqualify it.

-

David,

It is still the act of gaining power over these things. You are choosing to limit the will to power to one particular expression of it, and I believe the reason you are doing this is because because you have a vested interest in trying to separate the will to truth from the will to power.

In other words, truth is repulsing you and you are currently trying to find a way to justify not being involved with it.

Pure will to truth is replusing me because it gets you nowhere. In my head I am imagining human beings evolving up to present and then suddenly they all evolve a pure will to truth -- they die off or stagnate. I think will to truth is very useful for certain types of people (philosophers), but not in itself. And I don't agree that "truth" itself can lead to any of the conclusions that you have come to such as "we shall not have any emotion or passion".

That you are using Nietzsche to help in you this is disappointing - not with you as such, but with Nietzsche. I'm disappointed with Nietzsche that he made it too easy for people to abandon reason and truth prematurely. He didn't cover his tracks well enough.

Cover what tracks?

The Gay Science, 344 wrote:"Will to truth" -- that might be a concealed will to death.

WW: Usually conquering boredom and ignorance is for some purpose that will result in a greater power.

DQ: More often than not, people attempt to overcome their boredom with trivial distractions, such a watching TV, taking drugs or going out to socialize. Their intention is to eliminate the boredom right away, with no real thought for anything else.

I would call this putting off rather than conquering boredom. Someone with a strong will to power shouldn't be bored in the first place, but conquering boredom doesn't mean you have are expressing will to power, or at least not a strong one.

DQ: And to repeat again, a person needs a very strong will to power if he wants to conquer ignorance and egotism.

Wouldn't a will to knowledge or a will to non-egotism suffice for conquering these two? And keep in mind that to be powerful one doesn't need to be free of ignorance or free from egotism, in fact "selflessness" seems to be in direct conflict with will to power.

Nietzsche knew that decadence is in the eye of the beholder. What one person thinks is decadent, another person thinks is life. So it would be irrational for Nietzsche to affirm, as some kind of absolute truth, that how a particular collection of people lived was decadent.

Sure. The majority of people today hold a radically difference view of decadence. I am just arguing based on Nietzsche's definition of the term.

DQ: That is why Nietzsche himself never put into practice any of the views he expressed. They weren't meant to be put into practice. They were simply correctives. Despite all his talk about will to power and being involved with life, he always remained an ascetic philosophic thinker in the service of truth, churning out correctives.

Pfft. I think being near-blind and living in solitude for 10+ years to write what he did counts as an amazing will to power. He was definitely a bridge to his Overhuman. And he was a cheerful philosopher who was ascetic because he was so focused on one goal, his will to power, not because he denied any other goals (TGS 304, By doing we forego).

WW: Jesus said that you must deny yourself to follow him. This was very true.

DQ: Deny your false self, yes. That is what living truthfully means.

How about your true self? Your emotions and passions? Your goals and values? All must be denied to enter such a state of contentment and meaninglessness.

DQ: I agree that everything in nature can be described as the will to power. One such example is the process of overcoming ignorance and delusion, which, being a part of nature, is a perfectly natural process.

Only if it helps the species. Truth in itself can either help or hinder life, the will to power. If it hinders it will be evolutionarily disfavored. Natural selection doesn't value truth.

WW: I'm not sure if it is really this simple. From my view you have taken a route of suffering but to promote non-suffering. This seems paradoxical to me.

DQ: I don't really have non-suffering as a goal. My goal, rather, is simply to be truthful. Lack of suffering happens to be one of the many consequences of being truthful.

Why is your goal simply to be truthful? Do you not want to decieve anyone, yourself included? This is just another type of morality, and one that is hostile to life.

DQ: I consider the breaking of our genetic programming to be a far greater act of will to power than remaining a slave to it. But for some strange reason, Nietzsche didn't think likewise. He was evidently content to remain a slave.

We have to remember that Darwin's theory of evolution was very new during Nietzsche's life and greatly influenced his thinking on the will to power. He seems to have accepted the Darwinian-inspired view that being a slave to genetic instinct is a natural and acceptable form of will to power. But nowadays, to my ears, such a view seems small-minded and dated.

WW: We can never 'break our genetic programming'.

DQ: Even ordinary people are capable of breaking their programming - for example, by committing suicide, going on fasts, or refusing to have children. The more powerful and independent our minds are, the more we can extend this to every aspect of our programming.

We are programmed to be able to do this. Every truth we find we are programmed to be able to find and the natural conditions are in such a way that we can find it. There is no -self-, that is an illusion; we are our programming.

Here also you are imbuing the term "will to power" with a biased and limited meaning. Likewise, Nietzsche's formula is essentially meaningless because it also rests on biased, limited conceptions that he has arbitrarily chosen.

I am imbuing the terms with Nietzshe's meaning. If you disagree that is fine, but you denied that you disagreed in the first place.

DQ: Let's see how many "objective truths" I can discern in these two paragraphs:

#1. In all worlds, without exception, people can never become aware of what is objectively true.

#2. In all worlds, without exception, truths either rely on empirical evidence or are inherent in definitions/concepts.

#3. In all worlds, without exception, truths rely on the mind that is viewing them.

#4. In all worlds, without exception, empirical evidence relies on the forms created by the mind.

#5. In all worlds, without exception, truth cannot exist outside the human mind.

So in the space of two paragraphs, you have given us 5 viewpoints which you believe to be true for all possible worlds, without exception. You believe them to be inherently true of reality itself. That is, you believe them to absolutely true.

All of your 5 cases are metaphysical concepts. What "other worlds"? All other anthropomorphic worlds created in your mind that follow your conception of a "world". As for the five cases, I deny all these statements. I only claim they are true in the subject world that I, the perspective is living in. This world doesn't even exist outside me. Presumably since we most likely share similar perspectives you can affirm these statements to be true in the same way I can.

DQ: As Diebert pointed out, only Nature itself can qualify as the thing-in-itself, since by definition there can be nothing other than Nature. But by the same token, because there is nothing other than Nature, we can't really call it a "thing". In other words, the qualities which qualify Nature as a thing-in-itself are the very same qualities which also disqualify it.

[/quote]This is what was meant.